I blame my older brother for being a writer. We shared a room together when we were growing up, and he used to bully me into making up stories about the cats in the street. Obviously, the more disgusting and rude the tale, the more successful it was. Characters included Swear Word Cat, Poo Poo Cat and Wee Wee Cat, each having their own catchphrase and trademark move.
I never really grew out of all of this and have been writing with various degrees of success and vulgarity ever since. Growing up where we did helped too. An estate that sat between scrap yard, Victorian viaduct and strange patches of woodland just behind houses. Where gangs of kids, told to get from under mom's feet, up to no good, taught each other the precision of banter and working-class wit, taught us about porn and fags and illicit worlds. We were tough and sharp and loyal in Stambermill. This has worked its way into my novel, as you'd expect. Set in Netherton and Dudley, my characters are the same type of gang - ostensibly filthy to many observers, but check those lenses again and look - our yeds am cut like Royal Brierley. I blame my brother for being a Weird Fiction writer too, or Slipstream or folk horror or whatever it is. He bullied me into watching and reading horror films and fiction far too early in my life. That’s probably on Dad too. That thrill-terror I got from Clive Barker, Wes Craven, John Carpenter and The Point Horror Book Series is, to use a Weird Fiction Metaphor, a parasitic worm that continues to act as a muse and homunculus - I am its lover and its feed. I never really grew out of all that. Much of my work has focused on abjection, the uncanny, sex and death, fear-fascination. Those Freudian Ambivalences. Those Lacanian and Kristevan residues. This is what my novel, Bella, has in its arsenal too - something that lingers, something that draws one in, something that might enlighten or engulf. In its creeping threshold position, we can't help but reach out to touch, to smell, to taste, even though we know we might be consumed. We mark the warning on the gates of the nether - All Hope Abandon Ye Who Enter Here. But we must enter; (whispers Jung) for only through filth will it will be found. You can buy Bella from Wild Pressed Books - http://www.wildpressedbooks.com/bella.html
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I think of myself as a landscape writer, so the inspiration for Bella started there - the strange landscape of my home, the Black Country. In Dudley and its surrounding areas there’s an unusual mix of rural and urban, domestic and wild, industrial, post-industrial and hyper-modern. It’s off-kilter, in-between, not-quite-one-thing-not-quite-another. And this weird geography makes the sense of place odd too - both old and new, ruined and re-purposed, safe and unsafe, familiar and unfamiliar, attractive and repulsive. For a writer, these grounds are rich, charged and irresistible - the liminal arena of transition, transformation and transgression. I see it as the fertiliser and seedbed for narrative, drama and poetry - especially Weird tales like Bella. In the tradition of Frankenstein being awestruck in the mountains or a Lovecraftian infinitesimal-infinite surfacing in the crack of a wall, Dudley holds a post-industrial sublime - A Black Country Gothic.
Writers like Joel Lane, Roy McFarlane, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Liz Berry and Meera Syall all share a fascination and preoccupation with this region, and use its peculiar culture, topography, dialect and spirit of place as symbolic and literal setting for their explorations of sex, identity, murder, mayhem, joy and terror. Characters in much of contemporary BC literature use the liminal landscape and its Gothic qualities as arenas for coming into being - often through transgressive routes. In Bella, I’m trying to play my own part in this uniquely Black Country literary tradition. All of the writers above, but especially Lane, have been huge inspirations to my poetics and vision. Speaking of cultural antecedents, Bella plays its part in another region specific literary tradition. The part-fact-part-fable mystery of Bella and the Wych-Elm; an unsolved murder of a woman whose remains were found in the hulk of tree. This story branches into witchcraft, satanism, Cold War espionage and domestic abuse in rhizomes that remain so enigmatic writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists continue to be pulled into her echoing orbit. As did I. Again, in great Gothic tradition, the narrative can only be understood by the slow unravelling of disparate elements. Bella’s secrets, set within the borderless Black Country are the limestone foundations of this love song to my home, its ghosts and its people. Bella is available from Wild Pressed Books http://www.wildpressedbooks.com/bella.html |
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