Ken Preston's Blog, page 7

Hey, it’s me

Dear Ken,

Hey, it’s me. No, I mean, it’s you.

All right, this is confusing I know, just hear me out.

This is me, Ken aged fifty-four, writing to you, Ken aged sixteen, to tell you a few things.

Yes, I know, all these years later and you’re still around. How cool is that?

And that’s the first thing I want to say to you.

It’s going to be okay.

Actually, it’s going to be more than okay, it’s going to be pretty damn good.

Unfortunately, you’ve got to get through some pretty heavy shit first.

I know, I know, I just told you everything’s going to be all right and then I hit you with the ‘pretty heavy shit’ thing. I’m sorry but, you know, forewarned is forearmed, etc, etc.

So, have you calmed down yet? Dug yourself out of that existential crisis?

Whatever you do, don’t throw away this letter and go pick up a Spider-Man comic, okay? You need to read this, and there will be plenty of time later to read that Spider-Man comic again. (And, by the way, I have to tell you there are a couple of incredible Spider-Man movies coming your way in the future, much better than that in it.)

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes the second point I want to make is this:

You’re going to come out of school next summer with only one qualification, and that’s in Art. Many years later you discover the fact that David Bowie also left school with one O Level (they’re called GCSE’s now) in Art, but you’re not Bowie and you’re going on a different career path I’m sorry to say.

Yep, one Art O Level and that’s it, I’m afraid. You’ve got another year after that at college retaking O Levels to get your English and your Maths at the very least.

Unless, and listen carefully, you put down the Spider-Man comics and actually do some revision when it comes around to exam time. Because I’m telling you this, oh younger self, your parents aren’t going to be checking up on how much work you’re doing. I mean, it’s kind of difficult to do that from the pub, isn’t it?

So it’s up to you.

Nobody else.

You.

What else? Oh yes.

*cough*

Girls.

I know, you’re not particularly interested at the moment, are you? But believe me, and honestly I can say this in all truthfulness as I have been there, you soon will be.

Look, all I want to say on this particular subject is, don’t stress about it too much.

At all, in fact.

It all works out great.

Ooh, one word of warning though. A couple of years from now, you’re going to wind up in a nightclub kissing Karen. Yes, that Karen. The one in your form at school who you hate and detest with every fibre of your being and who feels the same way about you. But don’t worry, you don’t start dating or anything. She already has a boyfriend when the two of you are giving each other mouth to mouth resuscitation. In fact, she’s sitting on his lap at the time.

Yeah, it’s a bit complicated.

Oh, and one more thing. In 1984 you move to Birmingham, and there’s this one day when you’re a bit lost in the city and this man asks if he can help you and offers to give you a lift in his car. Say no thank you, and walk away.

Walk away.

Look, there’s a ton of things you need to know, but it’s probably best if I let you discover them yourself. So, instead of dwelling on specifics, here’s a general list of advice.

When you’ve been sat in the pub with your mates all night and the bell rings for last orders, someone will always say, “Shall we have one more?”

Say no, okay? Just refuse. I’ve got to tell you, I’m still struggling with that one even now. But, no matter how tempting it is at the time, you will always regret it the following morning.
Say yes to the opportunities that will come your way. It doesn’t matter if they don’t work out, more opportunities will come along. Just don’t say no to them, say yes. Even if they are scary.

Actually, especially if they are scary.
Stop worrying about what everybody might be thinking of you, and just get on with being you. The truth of the matter is, most people won’t be thinking about you much anyway. They’re all too worried about what everybody else is thinking about them.
Think for yourself. Make up your own mind up about shit, and don’t let anybody else do it for you. There will be lots of people who will delight in attempting to make up your mind for you. Forget about them. You think for yourself.
By the way, the world doesn’t end. Yes, there will be moments where it will feel like it’s about to. But it doesn’t. Not happened yet, anyway.
Oh, and on the subject of the world ending, stop worrying about the coming of a second ice age. It ain’t gonna happen. Just the opposite in fact.
Don’t go cycling down dark country, winding lanes at night without any bicycle lights on. You will get hurt. Badly.
And don’t fall asleep on the last train home and miss your stop and then wake up when the driver is taking the train to be parked for the night. It’s embarrassing.
If, when you are living in the halls of residence in your first year at college, you decide one night when you need the toilet that you don’t need to bother putting any clothes on as the communal toilet is just opposite your room, don’t forget that the door to your room automatically shuts and locks, all right? And if you didn’t take your key . . .

Just, please, put some clothes on. That was more embarrassing than the train incident.

Well, it looks like we’re getting into specifics after all, so I think I’d better stop here.

Honestly though, stop worrying, it all turns out great.

After the heavy shit of course.

I can’t lie to you, it’s going to get pretty grim for a while.

But you’re going to do good.

Real good.

Love,

Ken

The post Hey, it’s me appeared first on Ken Preston.

Tickerpumper

“Not good for your old tickerpumper, now, is it, Mrs Stump?”

At the moment I typed those words I realised I had begun to understand a little more about the character of Corpse, a villain in my series of Joe Coffin novels. Not a huge amount you understand. Not enough to really understand what makes him tick.

Or even tickerpump.

But I understood more.

And this is a good thing. I need to have some understanding at least of what goes on in the hearts and minds of the people who populate my novels.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I had just opened up myself to a world of hurt.

I’d basically just made my job of writing the Joe Coffin books that much more difficult.

Right, before I go any further with this, let’s put that opening line into some context.

Stump and Corpse are a double act.

Not like Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, or Abbot and Costello or even Cagney and Lacey or Starsky and Hutch.

No, Stump and Corpse are more like Mr Wint and Mr Kidd.

Except weirder.

Much weirder.

Stump and Corpse began life as a pair of Victorian grave robbers in an abandoned novel of mine, Le Grandiose Michel Mysterieux. In that novel they were both men, but when I resurrected them for Joe Coffin I not only brought them from the past to the present I changed Stump from a man to a woman.

Not sure how he/she feels about that.

I hope I never find out.

You see, Stump and Corpse are probably two of the most unpleasant people I have discovered lurking in the recesses of my mind. And despite currently writing book four in the Joe Coffin series I have still only hinted at their utter despicability.

Mrs Stump, as Corpse refers to her, is named after her arm which ends in a stump. She wears an adapted mannequin’s hand in replacement of her real one, and it is rumoured that beneath the mannequin’s hand there is a sharp blade surgically attached to her arm. The problem is, if you have ever seen this blade that means you’re probably dead.

Mr Corpse, as Stump refers to her, is named after his general appearance. Skeletally thin, he wears one stained, threadbare, black suit. All the time. He was originally nicknamed the Undertaker, but then one day someone said he looked more like the undertaker’s corpse than the undertaker and the name stuck.

These two, they work for themselves. Pay them enough money and they will do a job for you. The amount they charge depends on the job you want doing. Stump has a tiny, battered notebook in which she keeps a handwritten list of rates for jobs.

What will they do for you?

Well, anything really.

Look after your cats while you go away on holiday?

Yes, they would. (But seriously, you wouldn’t want them to do this for you. Your cats would take one look at Stump and Corpse and then run. And you would never see them again.)

Check up on your nan and maybe keep her company for the afternoon?

Yes, of course. (But you wouldn’t want them to do this either. Much like your cats, you would probably never see your nan again either.)

What about torturing your neighbour into submission, the one who keeps you up all night with those stupidly loud parties they have?

Now, Stump and Corpse would LOVE to do that for you. (But again, you wouldn’t want them to do this either. Mainly because, you know, it’s wrong.)

So, yes, basically Stump and Corpse will do pretty much whatever you ask them to.

As long as the price is right.

But let’s get back to that opening line, and putting some context around it.

Stump and Corpse are meeting a client, with a holdall full of goods the client has asked for. I’m being purposefully vague here, to try and avoid spoilers.

Here’s the excerpt from Joe Coffin Season One, spoiler free.

She dropped the holdall in front of XXX’s feet. “You have the money.”

XXX produced a fat roll of notes, rubber banded together, and held it in front of Stump’s face. “Of course I’ve got the fucking money.”

Stump sighed again, as though the world, and everybody in it, was a perpetual disappointment to her. “You really ought to try and relax a little more, Mr XXXXX. All this tension will do your health no good at all.”

“Not good for your old tickerpumper, now, is it, Mrs Stump?”

And there you go, ‘tickerpumper’ is Corpse’s word for heart.

You probably realised that already.

But what’s this about making my job of writing the Joe Coffin books so much harder?

Well, I realised at this point that Corpse doesn’t speak like everybody else. He has his own made up words he uses. His own particular form of language. It’s still English, but Corpse’s own, mangled version of the English language.

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Here’s another example.

“Ooh, what a marvelicious eyeball lifterupper,” Corpse said.

Which basically means, “Oh, what a lovely surprise.”

Or this.

“She’s gettsing blabbermouthy, Mrs Stump,” Corpse said. “We should dismerove her blabbermouth muscle and sew her lipses together muchly.”

Actually, I’m not going to explain that one. You’ve probably worked it out already.

Corpse’s mangled version of the English language is, on the whole, just about understandable.

But writing it down, deciphering it, translating it from English to Corpse speak, this is what I mean when I say I made my job of writing the Joe Coffin books that much more difficult.

It would be far easier if he just spoke the Queen’s English like the rest of us.

But a lot less entertaining.

The post Tickerpumper appeared first on Ken Preston.

Sorcerer

It all started with Jaws.

Most things in my life start with Jaws.

That film is a cornerstone in my life, seeing it for the first time was a watershed moment.

I became obsessed with that film, watching it over and over. I also kind of became obsessed with the star of the film.

No, not the shark.

Roy Scheider, who played Chief Martin Brody.

There’s a whole separate post waiting to be written here about how Scheider really should have won the Oscar for best actor that year. He wasn’t even nominated, and the best actor Oscar went to Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

But like I said, that’s a separate post.

Looking back now, I think a large part of what happened with me is that I didn’t become obsessed with Scheider the actor, I became obsessed with the character he played.

Martin Brody was a father I could relate to in one way, and that was his working class background.

But in other, more important ways, I couldn’t.

For example he was a family man, around for his children and his wife.

I think Chief Martin Brody was the father I wanted, but didn’t have.

Anyway, that’s not what I came here to talk about today.

What I wanted to talk about is the 1977 film Sorcerer.

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Although it has achieved a certain positive reappraisal since its first release, Sorcerer was originally a critical and commercial disaster. Director William Friedkin claims that Sorcerer is the film he is most proud of, despite the fact that it almost finished his career off.

Of course I found out about Sorcerer because Roy Scheider was the star. I needed to see this film.

But, because it was regarded as such a turkey, it never got shown on television.

Scheider and Friedkin first worked together on The French Connection in 1971.

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You’ve probably seen it. A gritty New York set detective thriller, Friedkin employed European film making techniques to tell a very American story. Gene Hackman in the lead role won best actor at that year’s Oscars, and Roy Scheider was nominated for best supporting actor. The film also won best picture and Friedkin took away the best director win.

William Friedkin had been a risk for the studios, with only four features made before The French Connection, none of which had made much of an impression.

But now Friedkin was hot property and he moved straight onto his next film, The Exorcist.

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Now come on, you don’t really need me to tell you about The Exorcist, do you? Another smash hit for Friedkin, both commercially and critically it seemed this particular director could do no wrong.

Unfortunately, William Friedkin totally believed this too.

Friedkin had long wanted to to remake Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film The Wages of Fear.

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The plot centres on four desperate men on the run who are hiding in a South American village, and are offered the chance of freedom if they will agree to drive unstable nitroglycerin through storm ravaged jungles to put out an oil well fire. The film was shot on location, the actors performed most of their stunts and the danger was very, very real.

As filming dragged on the budget ballooned and Friedkin fell out with most of the crew and the cast. Although quite a few members of the production had to return home due to bouts of malaria and even gangrene, Friedkin’s volatile personality also meant that many more were sacked. Roy Scheider recalls telling Friedkin that the director had to stop firing people or there would only be the two of them left on the set.

Looking back on the making of the film in an interview many years later, Scheider also recalled, “I was rehearsing to stay alive… When we got to the Dominican Republic, I appreciated all that practice (driving the trucks) back in the States. Billy’s approach to Sorcerer ruled out rear-projection or trick photography. The actors, the vehicles and the terrain were too closely integrated into the composition of each shot. So what you see in the film is exactly what happened.  When I take a mountain road on two wheels, on a road with potholes the size of shell craters, that’s the way it was. No one but Billy Friedkin could have persuaded me to take the insane chances I did. But when it was over and I looked at the rough footage I knew it was worth it.”

Finally ready for a release, the film came out only a week or two before another little known, tiny movie called Star Wars.

Sorcerer bombed.

“We’re being fucking blown off the screen!” Sorcerer editor Bud Smith complained after going to a cinema and seeing the trailer for Star Wars follow Sorcerer’s grim, dark and downbeat trailer.

Well, I finally got to see Sorcerer for the very first time twenty years later at a showing at the British Film Institute. You know, you kids are lucky. You can pretty much watch or listen or read to whatever you want to by downloading or streaming it. Back in 1997 the internet was still in its infancy and even DVDs hadn’t yet made a big splash. Sorcerer was a film I had been aching to see for years, but never had the chance due to its largely negative reputation.

But now here was the BFI screening the film for a week and championing it’s reevaluation.

I hunted far and wide for a friend to come down to London with me and watch this little known classic of 70’s cinema but no one was game. Eventually my wife relented and said she would come.

That afternoon as I was trying my best not to leap around our living room with excitement we saw on the news that there was a storm headed the UK’s way and the police were advising that no one should risk traveling unless it was absolutely necessary.

My response to that was, yes, this is absolutely necessary!

Mrs Preston asked if she could take her Walkman with her in case she found the film boring, but I wouldn’t let her on the grounds that this was the British Film Institute not some flea pit cinema in Dudley.

We drove down to London in pouring rain and howling winds and really, that was quite appropriate considering the film we were about to see.

Sorcerer was everything I had hoped it would be.

Even Mrs Preston said she enjoyed it as we left the theatre for the drive back home.

(Some ten years later she admitted to me that, not wanting to hurt my feelings, she had lied and that actually she had hated every second. Understandable really when you consider that she regards Nuns on the Run as the greatest film ever made.)

Well, that was that, ambition achieved.

Except, I wanted to watch it again. One viewing only wasn’t going to do it for me.

As I said earlier, the DVD revolution was just around the corner. A couple of years later I found a DVD copy of Sorcerer but the quality wasn’t very good and the screen ratio was 4:3 (old fashioned TV shaped) rather than 16:9 (widescreen).

Still it was better than nothing.

Well folks, here we are, twenty-one years after that first viewing at the BFI, and forty-one years after it was first released and I now have a restored, widescreen, high definition blu-ray version. Like I said, you kids are lucky.

And so am I.

The film arrived this week, along with a brand new multi-region blu-ray player.

Have I watched it yet?

No, not yet.

I’m going to watch it soon, though.

And it’s going to be great.

After that I’ll be showing it to Thing One and Thing Two as part of their education in the history of cinema.

For more information on Sorcerer this is a great resource – https://sorcerer1977.wordpress.com

The post Sorcerer appeared first on Ken Preston.

Happy Endings

You’ll probably say I imagined it. After all, my job is to sit here and make things up.

You’ll probably say that’s part of the problem. That it was a dream, or a vivid hallucination or daydream. That I’m spending far too much time on my own, in my own head.

You’ll say I need to get out more.

In the real world.

But I’m telling you, you’re wrong.

Everything that I am about to recount here is the absolute truth.

Not one word of it is a lie.

So, this is what happened.

It was Thursday morning and I was sitting at my writing desk in the cellar. The words had been coming hard that morning, slow, like they didn’t want to be dragged out into the world. Like they were resisting me.

I hate it when that happens. Writing a novel or even a short story shouldn’t be that hard. Especially after all these years of writing and publishing.

I was staring at my blank computer screen, maybe my brow was furrowed in concentration or frustration, I don’t know, I can’t remember.

But I was staring hard.

I heard a noise. Sort of like a little cough, a tiny asthmatic wheeze.

I turned in my chair, expecting it to be one of the cats coughing up a fur ball, and saw a young lad standing at the bottom of the stairs into my cellar. He was thin and dressed in dirty rags. He had shoes on his feet but they were in pretty bad condition.

To be honest my first thought was to worry about the carpet. You see, this lad, he was filthy and I was worried he would tread dirt into the new carpet.

“My name’s Jim,” he said.

“That’s all very polite and everything, you telling me your name like that, but just how did you get in my house?” I said.

“I was already here,” Jim said. “I live here.”

I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of, ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ when I was interrupted by the sound of smashing glass from upstairs.

I pushed past young Jim, and boy did he pong, and ran upstairs.

A young woman, a girl really, was standing in my front room looking at the smashed glass of the window. She turned and looked at me.

“Hey, I’m Lee,” she said.

“I don’t care!” I snapped. “Did you smash my window?”

“No!” Lee said, drawing the word out into an insult. “It was a dinosaur! I think it might come back soon.”

Dinosaur? What the hell was she talking about?

Wait a minute, I thought. Is she supposed to be—

“Why’d you do it, Mister?”

I almost jumped out of my skin at the sound of his voice. I turned around and there was Jim, up from the cellar and standing in the doorway to my front room.

“Do what?” I said.

“Give me all this trouble,” he said. “Weren’t it enough that I were living rough on the streets already, and gettin the livin daylights beaten out of me by that Marchek Mulready? Did you have to go and get me involved with Caxton Tempest, and all those demons and black magic nutters?”

There it was then. This boy and girl, they were both characters out of my books.

Come to life.

“So, why’d you do it?” Jim said.

“Well, I, erm, thought it would be an adventure for you.”

“An adventure?” Jim shouted. “That bloody demon Murmur almost ate me and my brother!”

“At least you aren’t being chased by dinosaurs and a man with one arm and a really bad attitude.” That was Lee, still staring at the broken window pane, maybe waiting for the dinosaur to come back. “I haven’t seen Daniel in ages, I really miss him. Did you kill him?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Don’t worry, he’s safe. In fact I’m writing the second Planet of the Dinosaurs book now.”

“It’s taken you long enough,” Lee said, not looking at me.

“I know, I’m sorry. I’ve been, er, busy.”

“Busy!” Jim shouted. “How can it take you over ten years to write a sequel? Do you realise how long I have been hanging around at Mr Tempest’s house, waiting to find out what happens next? I could have been at university now, taking a media degree.”

“A media degree?” I snorted. “What use is one of those? And besides, Victorian street kids didn’t go to university.”

A tall, imposing man stepped into the room. He had to duck as he walked through the doorway.

“Don’t listen to him, young Jim Kerrigan,” he said, and placed a protective hand on Jim’s shoulder.

“Uh, erm, hello Mr Tempest,” I said. “What an honour it is to meet you.”

Hang on, I thought. None of these people are real, they’re just figments of my imagination.

“Right you lot,” I said. “I have had enough of this. Come on, out you go.”

I opened the front door and began ushering everybody out. I had work to do, I didn’t have time for this nonsense.

The problem was, I had to stop when I got to the front door as I was overcome with the stink of rotting fish and stagnant sea water. I turned away to see the others recoiling and putting their hands over their noses. Before I knew it I was gagging and coughing and trying to keep my dinner where it belonged, in my stomach.

A voice spoke, and it sounded like it had echoed up from the very bottom of the ocean.

It said, “I am your humble servant.”

Oh no, I thought, not the Mousqueton sea monster.

Mousqueton stood in my front doorway, his flesh grey and streaked with sores, his eyes round and black. Rivulets of dirty seawater ran from his ears and eyes, from his nose and mouth, and his hair clung to his scalp. The tattered servants uniform he still wore undulated softly, as though alive with sea creatures never seen by man, things that lived at the bottom of the ocean. Every time he took a step his feet made squelching, sucking sounds on the ground.

“No, no, no, you’re not coming in!” I shouted, but it was too late.

He squelched into the house leaving puddles of dirty seawater wriggling with nasty little creatures in his wake.

I turned to run and tripped over something. I scrambled up onto my knees and then my feet and only risked a swift look behind to see what I had tripped over once I was running again.

It was a cat, a black cat.

Now, I already have two black cats, but this wasn’t one of them. This was Lucifer, the demon Murmur’s cat.

And wherever Lucifer was . . .

Ah yes, there he was in the kitchen, his evil eyes twinkling with baleful pleasure. He held his hands in front of him and clicked his long, filthy fingernails together making a sound like a coffin full of bones being shaken about.

“Aaaahhhh,” he whispered. “At lasssst, you’re here. It’ssssss time.”

I clutched at my chest, it was thumping so hard I thought I might have a heart attack.

If I was lucky.

Otherwise it was a case of remaining perfectly lucid and conscious whilst Murmur sucked my eyeballs out of their sockets.

“Time for what?” I said, and wishing I hadn’t asked.

“Time for coffee, of coursssssse,” he whispered, turning around and indicating the coffee machine.

Right then something caught my eye in the garden.

Something that got my blood boiling and had me seeing red.

How could they?

I pushed past Murmur, disturbing a couple of cockroaches from his coat sleeves, and ran out of the back door.

“Oi! You two!” I shouted. “Stop that right now!”

Joe Coffin and Emma Wylde stopped kissing and turned to look at me.

“Ah shit, he found us,” Coffin said.

“Didn’t I tell you he would?” Emma said, and punched him on the chest. “You big gorilla!”

“How long has this been going on?” I said.

Coffin lowered his head and shuffled his feet around a bit on the grass. “A little while.”

“I don’t believe this,” I muttered.

“Hey, it’s not our fault!” Coffin said, looking up. “You’re the one who got us both fancying each other and then you went and tore us apart and keep shoving obstacles in the way of us ever getting together.”

“Yeah, that’s called telling a story, you big, dumb ape!” I shouted.

“But what about us?” said Lee. “I’ve been stuck in this world full of man eating dinosaurs for the last few years without a clue what’s going on, and poor Jim’s been chased by demons through the streets of Victorian London without any explanation.”

“And as for me,” Caxton Tempest said, “when am I going to get that back story you promised me? All these years I’ve been waiting and I still feel like nothing more than a . . . a cardboard cutout!”

Tempest started sobbing and Jim put his arm around him to comfort him.

“I am your humble servant,” Mousqueton said, although it sounded more like he gargled it to be honest.

A tiny crab fell out of his trouser leg and scuttled across the garden.

“All right, all right! I’m sorry!” I turned around in a circle so I could speak to everyone and held my hands in the air. “It’s not my fault! I’m so very busy. Don’t you understand?”

“No, you’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Jim said.

“You’re right, he doesn’t,” Coffin said.

“Understand what? Help me to understand.”

“The thing is,” Emma said, “we were all fine until you turned up and started screwing around with out lives. It’s only because of you that I’ve been chased by vampires, gone of my trolley and wound up in a loony bin, been chased around a house by a naked man waving a machete and locked in a cellar with a couple of psycho coppers.”

“Don’t forget what Gerry Gilligan did,” Coffin said.

Emma held up her hands. “No way, I’m not going there.”

“Hey, you know what?” I shouted. “It’s tough shit. I’m the writer here, the author. I created you lot, and it’s up to me what happens to you and nobody else.”

“Yeah?” Coffin said, bunching his hands into fists. “Well we’re gonna see about that.”

All of them, all these characters I created and loved as though they were my children, began advancing upon me.

“Get back!” I screamed. “Get back!”

And then the world grew dark as I fainted.

Now look, I know you don’t believe me, but it happened and I’m here back in my cellar, but I’m tied to my chair.

The others, all those figments of my imagination, are upstairs discussing me. I think they’re planning on making me write their stories the way they want them written. With a happy ending and crap like that.

Oh no, I can hear them now. They’re coming down the stairs.

If you’re reading this blog you’ve got to come and help me.

Please, hurry!

The post Happy Endings appeared first on Ken Preston.

A New Adventure

Something happened last week.

Something momentous.

Now world shatteringly momentous, you understand. Not something that will impact the world, or make a huge difference in lives.

But who knows? Maybe, like George Bailey, my actions will impact others without me realising.

Except, George Bailey gave up on following his dreams and stuck with a life in small town Bedford Falls, and that was how he changed lives for the better.

I’m headed off in the opposite direction.

I’m following my dreams.

So, last week, Friday afternoon at 2pm I walked out of the Medical Illustration Department, where I had worked for over seventeen years, for the final time.

Something is happening next week.

Monday morning I will rise as usual at 6am to write. And then I will rouse my two boys and they will have breakfast and I will keep them on schedule for getting out of the house and to school in time.

At about 8:45am the change will happen.

Instead of leaving the house for the commute to work I will continue writing.

I am now officially an author, dependent on my words to bring in enough money that I can provide for myself and my family.

It’s an exciting and scary thought.

Anyway, what this means for you, if you are a regular at this blog and if you read my books and other scribblings, is that there are going to be some changes around here. Not right away, maybe not for some months yet.

But changes there will be.

Good changes.

Exciting changes.

It’s gonna be fun.

 

BURT REYNOLDS

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I just had to say a word or two about Burt Reynolds, who we lost a couple of days ago.

Of course we all remember him for his comedy action roles, for that moustache, and for the fact he performed his own stunts way before it became cool to do so (I’m looking at you, Tom Cruise).

Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper, The Longest Yard, Cannonball Run, we loved them all.

Let’s not forget though, that Reynolds was a fine actor, much more than a talented stuntman and knockabout comedy actor.

Here is my list of favourite Burt Reynolds films you really should check out if you haven’t seen them before.

Shark

1969

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It’s not one of director Sam Fuller’s best films and it’s rough around the edges and obviously low budget, but it’s still worth a watch.

Deliverance

1972

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What a dream team these four actors make, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox. Riveting.

Boogie Nights

1997

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Burt Reynolds didn’t want to do this one and refused Paul Thomas Anderson six times before finally accepting the role of Jack Horner. He fought constantly with the director throughout the production and then distanced himself from it during its promotional tour.

He was still nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for his performance.

 

RIP Burt Reynolds 1936-2018

The post A New Adventure appeared first on Ken Preston.

Literary Fiction v Genre Fiction

David Mitchell is one of my favourite authors.

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Wait a minute, no, not THAT David Mitchell.

THIS one.

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Yes, I’ll admit, I laboured through sections of Cloud Atlas but I also laughed out loud during the comedy parts and clung to the edge of my seat through the thriller scenes. And when I read it a second time I didn’t have to struggle as much as the first time.

The Bone Clocks is another terrific book by Mitchell.

Both of them are big, ‘literary’ books playing with genre. ‘High art’ mixing with ‘low art’ you might say.

I know, I made a distinction there, in terms of literary quality. It’s not just me though.

Everybody does it.

As unfortunate as it is we can’t seem to help separating our pleasures into the ‘high’ and ‘low’ camps.
Especially our books.

And, whether we are in the high or low camp, we can’t help but be snooty about it. Those of us who love our genre books, be they horror, sci-fi, fantasy, crime, whatever, we love to stick our noses up at those high falutin’, high minded literary snobs. Then there are those of us who love to read Paul Auster’s latest book, or Kazuo Ishiguro, and would never, I repeat NEVER, think about lowering our standards so far as to pick up a Lee Child book.

And then along comes David Mitchell and blends the two literary forms into one.

Saying it that way makes him sound like a trailblazer for this sort of thing, which he isn’t. Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing have both written science fiction novels, and there are many other authors who are considered ‘literary’ but write in specific genres such as horror or fantasy.

Wait a minute, the lines between literary and genre are becoming very blurred here.

What we need is a checklist of definitions.

Here goes then—

Genre Fiction

Plot/Narrative driven
Formulaic
Provides entertainment
Happy/satisfying ending
Straightforward prose
Conventional life/current ideology
Linear narrative that stays in present
Wide range of readers
Easy/fast to write
Real life
Characters have quirks/clever dialogue
Focus on exterior life of character
Reader watches plot unfold
Accessible
Climax often big – shootout, love scene
Good writing

Literary Fiction

Character arc/Theme/Language driven
Not formulaic
Provides meaning and cultural value
Unhappy/unclear ending
Unique and fresh prose
Darker truths/challenging ideology
Non-linear narrative with flashbacks
Specific readers
Hard/long to write
Real life
Characters are fully fleshed out humans
Focus on interior life of character
Reader infers some of plot
Less accessible
Climax can be small – decision, realization
Good writing

I got this list by Googling, ‘Why is literary fiction better?’ and wound up here — http://jenniferellis.ca/genre-vs-literary-fiction/

It’s a nice list.

I like it.

Except . . .

Literary fiction is hard and takes a long time to write, but genre fiction is easy and written fast.

Well, don’t you think that someone can take a long time and work hard over writing a piece of fiction and it will still wind up stinking like a blocked toilet at a ten day long music festival?

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And why, please tell me, is writing genre fiction easy?

Surely the speed and ease or difficulty of the writing is more down to the author and her skillset and experience than it is down to choice of writing style?

Maybe I’m being picky.

Oh hang on, here’s another one . . .

In genre fiction the climax is often big and involves a shootout or a love scene, but in literary fiction the climax can be small, a decision or a realisation.

Climaxes don’t come much smaller than the single word uttered at the end of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, or more chilling and bleak. And we can go with the ‘literary’ unhappy/unclear ending here too, in this ‘genre’ book.

Poor Stephen King, he’s quite often under attack for the standard of his writing being popular. I don’t know how he puts up with it, although I suppose his immense riches and huge fanbase don’t hurt.

When it comes to distinguishing between genre and literary, high and low art, I’m fairly ignorant to be honest. I’m one of those simple people who likes to pick up a book if it looks interesting and read it.

And if I don’t enjoy it?

I’ll put it down and pick another one up.

Now don’t get me wrong here, that doesn’t mean to say I’m not prepared to stick with a book, to struggle with it and work at unpacking it.

But I will happily browse the Man Booker list of nominees as I will the bestseller charts.

I’m going to leave the final word to David Mitchell, Booker nominated author and 2015 winner of  the best novel trophy in the World Fantasy awards—

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

The post Literary Fiction v Genre Fiction appeared first on Ken Preston.

What is it with me and tortured white guys?

I blame Peter Parker. For me he is the original tortured white guy. Ever since our next door neighbour (friendly neighbourhood white guy) gave me a copy of the latest Spider-Man comic when I was about nine years old, I’ve been hooked on stories about tortured, guilt wracked white guys.

Poor Peter Parker, with his parents having gone and done the utterly selfish thing of dying when he was a youngster, he is brought up by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Bullied at school, lonely, nerdy, and skinny just like the kid who gets sand kicked in his face in the Charles Atlas adverts he finally gets a shot at making something of his life when he is bitten by a radioactive spider and receives its proportionate speed, strength and agility. But instead of using his powers for good, as the comic book script dictated in those days, he decides to make some cash instead and in the process gets his Uncle Ben killed.

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Enter the tortured white guy into my life.

Thing is, Peter Parker is only one in a long list of them.

So, what is it with tortured white guys? Why are they around and and why do we seem to need them so much?

Maybe it’s something to do with the white male holding the top position for so long. Yeah, we’re at the top of the tree, above women and then any other group you care to mention, identifiable through race, gender, sexual preference and identification, culture, religion. etc.

Did you know there is a disease known as ‘White extinction anxiety’? It’s partly what got, and keeps, Trump in power.

I don’t know, maybe we could extend that to ‘White male extinction anxiety’.

We’ve ruled the roost for so long it’s getting scary now that all those other groups are speaking up and saying, ‘Hey, who put you guys in power?’

Is it that simple?

I’m currently watching, and loving, The Punisher on Netflix.

Oh yeah, you want a tortured white guy? Frank Castle has it in spades for you. Ex-marine, out for revenge after the murder of his family, Frank dispenses rough justice to the bad guys, like permanently dispenses it. The Punisher is a great series, more than just bone crunching, blood splattering violence (of which it has plenty though). It is also very good at looking at the issues of violence and vigilantism. And yet, even while I am enjoying it, I can’t help but feel that the writers of this show are allowing us to have our cake and eat it. That we get to think around the edges of the issues of gun control and violence whilst also enjoying the spectacle.

Sure, the series has a feisty female Homeland agent who crosses paths with Castle and has her own story arc within the series but make no mistake, this is Frank Castle’s show and nobody else’s.

Us white guys, we’re still top of the tree.

You’d have thought we would be more enlightened by now, wouldn’t you?

And yet we are still arguing about pay differences based on gender, about sexual power in the workplace, and burka wearing women being compared to bank robbers.

Maybe that’s why we have tortured white guys. It doesn’t have to be about gender or race or culture, religion, sexuality or anything else that marks out an individual or a group as a minority, as different. Peter Parker fights the good fight because guilt compels him to do so. Frank Castle is the same.

The reasons don’t matter, because they are story elements, plot devices. But our heroes are a long way from Superman, who simply sees it as his destiny to protect people. Hang on, it’s been a long time since I last read a Superman comic, I would guess he’s changed by now. Created at a time when America was secure in its position as the most powerful nation of white guys in the world, I would guess that old Supes is a lot more angst ridden these days.

It’s true that fiction and art reflects and interprets the world we live in. That the more interesting work in the creative fields happens when we are going through times of unrest. Look at the boom in horror during the sixties and seventies which then disappeared in the eighties.

Well, horror has certainly made a comeback in the last few years, wouldn’t you say?

The Walking Dead is probably a perfect example of this. A threat to America that comes, not from the outside, but within. And this isn’t confined to America either. We all feel it.

It could be argued that the zombies of The Walking Dead represent the threat of the minority becoming the majority. Sure, The Walking Dead has its fair share of minority representation (although the main character is a tortured white guy) but isn’t what The Walking Dead represents similar to what Pat Buchanan is scared of? The ethnic and cultural mix of North America is becoming increasingly diverse and the Republican party’s right wing, white base of supporters is slowly withering away.

White extinction anxiety.

The tortured white guy is something I think about a lot. Especially in relation to my own creative work.

Joe Coffin is a tortured white guy. He wouldn’t say that, but then he’s in denial. Joe’s got some pretty heavy stuff going on in regards to his wife and son now being vampires, and he’s going to have to unpack that at some point. Not that Joe is a therapy kind of guy.

And yes, I have a feisty female reporter (don’t you just love feisty females?) in a support role.

But it’s still Joe’s show.

So here’s my problem.

I enjoy fiction which usually has at its centre a tortured white guy.

And I write a series of books with, at their centre, a tortured white guy.

Often I feel guilty about this.

Like, do we really need anymore tortured white guys as leading characters?

Does that make me a tortured white guy, too?

The post What is it with me and tortured white guys? appeared first on Ken Preston.

James Ferman and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Problem

In 1974 James Ferman, secretary of the British Board of Film Classification attended a British Film Institute screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At the film’s finish he is reputed to have said,

“It’s all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?”

Ferman would refuse to give the film a certificate for general cinema release for another twenty-four years.

Flash forward a few years to from 1974 to 1982 and a certain son of two factory workers (not in Manchester, but Rossendale, Lancashire which is close enough) borrowed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from his local video shop.

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He took the V2000 video tape home and, with trembling hands, inserted it into the video machine and sat and watched all those horrors that he had been hearing about for so long unfold whilst his parents (who worked in a factory remember) kept out of the way in the other room.

So, those factory workers from near Manchester refused to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but their son watched it.

And now, all these years later, he is the author of the Joe Coffin books.

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Hmm, I doubt there is a direct correlation between those two facts but I certainly suspect the one had an influence on the other.

What happened then, to that son of those two factory workers from near Manchester?

And why, although they worked in a slipper factory, did they only ever seem to make shoes?

I’m sorry to say this, but I have no answer to that second question, but here goes on the first.

I grew up with a love/hate relationship with horror films and books, I went to art college, worked in the NHS for many years (where I saw more dead bodies and guts and gore than most horror movie fans have) and now I am an author. And, by the way Mr Ferman, I also visited the BFI several times and subscribed for many years to their publication Sight and Sound.

In other words, nothing sinister happened to me, I’ve never had a desire to pick up a chainsaw and massacre anyone in Texas with it, and I’ve had a perfectly normal, innocuous life.

I wonder how many middle class cineastes can say the same?

So how did I manage to to view The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when it had been refused a certificate for general release at the cinema?

That videotape of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre I borrowed on the recommendation of the shop owner had no certificate. Theoretically anyone of any age could have borrowed it. The home video industry was so new that there was no legislation in place requiring distributors to submit videos for classification.

My friendly neighbourhood video shop owner also recommended I Spit On Your Grave, a rape revenge story starring Buster Keaton’s niece. Somehow, despite my love of horror, I never quite fancied watching that one and it still remains unseen on my part to this day. Then there was The Hills Have Eyes, which I didn’t get around to watching until many years later and then found it to be fairly tame, if unpleasant.

Anyway, I was there in the pre-certificate days and had a glimpse of some of the films that would offend Mary Whitehouse so much.

Ah yes, good old Mary Whitehouse, a devout Christian and moral campaigner, she was notorious for spending hours every day writing letters of objection about the filth that she perceived being transmitted into the nation’s homes. Even the venerable BBC came under her withering spotlight, with Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC, remarking that “she would have been at home in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.”

In an own goal of apocalyptic proportions it was Go Video, an independent video distributor of the day, who inadvertently lit the touch paper of moral indignancy and brought about the banning of seventy-two movies in the UK, some of them still banned today. In an attempt to drum up some publicity for their release of Rugerro Deodato’s 1980 movie Cannibal Holocaust, Go Video sent a copy of the film along with a faux letter of outrage to Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVLA).

Mary Whitehouse immediately  coined the term ‘Video Nasties’, and demanded action be taken to remove this filth from the shelves of video shops.

With the newspapers also clamouring for action to save our nation from being poisoned by the pernicious effects of video nasties, but no regulatory body in place to take action, it was left to the police to seize video copies of any film that they felt fell foul of the Obscene Publications Act (OPA). This could then lead the way for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to bring the film’s producers, distributors and retailers to court.

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But this approach just caused confusion and even more moral panic. Films began to be seized from the shelves in some parts of the country, whilst left alone in others. Greater Manchester Police Force was left embarrassed after its officers seized Dolly Parton musical The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, and Sam Fuller’s classic war movie The Big Red One in the belief that they were pornographic.

Ah yes, the 1980s. It was all very confusing back then, for many reasons.

Girls were (and still remain) a complete mystery to me.
Duran Duran were popular.
Margaret Thatcher kept being voted back as Prime Minister, despite the fact that everybody I knew hated her.

And films that you could not see at the cinema were available on video.

Alarmed at the random selection of titles being seized, and the inconsistency of seizures between local police areas the Video Retailer’s Association asked the DPP for guidance in what their members could stock and what to avoid.

In response the DPP produced a list of titles already being prosecuted or waiting to go to court, and it is this that became the notorious Video Nasties List.

Of course the DPP, and Mary Whitehouse, should have taken time to consider the ironclad law of unintended consequences. Once made public, the list of 72 titles that eventually formed the Video Nasties list became a handy catalogue of films to be sought out and watched by those eager to see what all the fuss was about.

Now we seemed to be in the opposite situation we had started from, and films you could see at the cinema were now banned on video.

Like the Lucio Fulci double bill I saw at the Electric in Birmingham. The Beyond, on the video nasty list but not prosecuted, was followed by The House by the Cemetery which had been prosecuted under the obscenity laws and banned on video.

I remember bunking off college one afternoon with a mate to go and watch The Evil Dead at the cinema. We both staggered out of the darkened cinema, blinking in the bright afternoon sunshine and not quite sure what we had just witnessed. Was it a horror movie? A comedy? Something else entirely?

Although being the poster boy for video nasties and making the list of films already prosecuted, or waiting to be,The Evil Dead was never actually banned.

We also bunked off college to see Tootsie, Blue Thunder, and a double bill of Mad Max 1 and 2 (although the cinema showed number 2 first for some reason).

What can I say? I loved films, and would watch pretty much anything I could get access to.

Meanwhile, back at the BBFC, James Ferman still had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre shaped problem. He, along with his predecessor Stephen Murphy, had already refused to issue a certificate for the film on the grounds that the extensive cuts needed to grant it a release would ruin it. You see, Ferman actually admired the film, and thought it skillful in the way in which it achieved its horror through an unsettling atmosphere rather than explicit gore.

But that made it impossible to cut.

Finally, in 1998, it was granted a local 18 certificate by Camden council and shown at a cinema only a few minutes’ walk from the BBFC offices. It was then given an 18 certificate release on DVD and video in 1999.

In these days of streaming video, and movies like Hostel and Saw, it seems ridiculous now that some of these films caused such an outrage and were so hard to see. But then that was part of their allure.

When it’s hard to get hold of something, sometimes that makes it even more desirable.

I don’t know, it was a funny old decade, the 1980s.

The post James Ferman and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Problem appeared first on Ken Preston.

How to Write a Horror Novel in 10 Easy Steps

All right, I’ll admit it, that’s a kind of click bait title. I just wanted to entice you onto my blog in the hope that you might like what you see and stick around for a while, maybe even fill in one of those pop-up forms and subscribe to my email list.

That way I will have you in my power and I can SELL stuff to you!!

Or maybe not.

Maybe I do actually have the ten-step formula needed to write horror.

Well, the only way you can find out, my friend, is to read on.

Here goes then –

How to Write a Horror Novel in 10 Easy Steps

 

1. Forget about finding a ten step formula.

Honestly, all those 10 step, 3 step, 1,582 step plans for getting shit done, they’re useless. Click bait. You have a problem, the title of the blog/book/magazine article promises a simple solution.

We all love instructions, don’t we? Except Ikea instructions. I hate those.

Instructions give us a step by step method to achieving something. You put this here and insert this there and you get that result.

A bit like sex.

Wait, what?

Anyway, moving on.

Instructions are great for putting a cabinet together, or cooking a chocolate cake, but when it comes to something as complicated as writing a full length novel?

Hmm, not so good.

Writing a novel is like herding cats.

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The cats in this case being the characters in your book. You’d think, given the fact that I invented them, conjured them from the depths of my own dark imagination, that they would do what I told them, right? Just like those cats who I feed and water and give shelter to every day. But no. The characters in your books will do what they damn well please, and bugger the consequences.

Also, writing a book takes a helluva long time, much more than just an afternoon spent surrounded by screws and bolts and shiny sheets of MDF, or handcuffs, KY Jelly and a bucket of vanilla flavoured body paint.

It can take months, or even years. And that’s a lot of time to spend thinking about how you’re not making any progress, and where the hell has that cat gone now, and wouldn’t it be easier to just give up now and go and rewatch another episode of The Punisher on Netflix?

Yeah, those 10 step plans for writing a novel, they may have their place, but at the end of the day you only need two things to write a book.

The ability to herd cats, and a take no shit, head down stubbornness to get that job done.

2. Writing a horror novel is like writing any kind of novel.

See above.

Wait, you want more?

Okay, so you need the ability to sit down at your desk every day, even if the thought of doing so fills you with horror. Like, you’d rather pluck your eyeballs out with dry spaghetti or wrestle a ravenous tiger in a lake packed with hungry piranha whilst Celine Dion belts out her greatest hits on the shore.

What else do you need?

I suppose you might need a story, or something approaching a story to begin with. At the very least you need a person in a situation and that person needs to get out of that situation.

Look, here is one of the best pieces of writing advice you will ever read:

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”

Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five. He knew a few things about writing books.

And really, some days that’s all you need.

Look at Stephen King’s Misery, for example. Paul Sheldon, author of the Misery Chastain books, is being held captive by his greatest fan, Annie Wilkes. The thing is, in his latest novel he has killed off his lead character Misery, but Annie wants him to bring her back. Or else bad things will happen to Paul.

By all accounts, Stephen King began writing his novel with nothing more than this idea in place. He wrote the book to find out for himself what actually happened at the end. And it didn’t finish the way he thought it would.

Herding cats again.

But what about creating a plan, an outline, a structure to write to?

Yes, you can go that way too, if you like. As there are roughly 2,629 ways of writing a novel it’s up to you to choose which one works best for you.

But while you’re doing that you really need to be thinking about something else, which leads us neatly on to —

3. You’ve got to care about the characters to care about what happens to them.

That doesn’t mean you have to make all your characters perfectly nice and lovely. In fact, that would make them boring. But we need to care about them, or identify with them, in some way. We need to have some kind of emotional response, otherwise what’s the point? We could be reading a manual on how to put together an Ikea cabinet whilst listening to Celine Dion.

Take Tom Mills for example, a character from my vampire/gangster thriller/horror book Joe Coffin Season One.

Now, he really is a piece of shit. Readers absolutely loathe Tom. And I mean, seriously hate him.

Why is that? Because, although he is a waste of space and does some terrible things, readers still kind of identify with him. There are reasons why he does what he does. They’re not good reasons, they don’t make his actions forgivable, but they make him a rounded person. They bring him alive.

And Joe Coffin, he is the hero of the novels but he’s not exactly a good guy either. But my readers love him. Especially the women.

We care about what happens to him and many of the other characters and that’s the rocket fuel that gets the reader from the beginning of the book to the end.

4. The only way to write a novel is to write a novel.
You can’t write a novel by watching episodes of Love Island.
You can’t write a novel by reading lots of novels (although that is an essential part of the process).
You can’t write a novel by reading lots of books on how to write a novel.
You can’t write a novel by thinking about writing a novel.
You can’t write a novel by telling everyone you are writing a novel.
You can’t write a novel by stalking people on FaceBook.
You can’t write a novel by researching all the crap you need to know about the shit that happens in your novel.
There’s only one way of writing a novel.
Guess what it is.
You have to sit down and write a novel.
5. You can’t make readers jump with sudden noises or movement, so how are you going to scare them?

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You’re not making a film, all right? You don’t have the luxury of jump cuts and big bangs and all the other tricks that film makers have up their sleeves.

You have words. Those funny little squiggles printed in lines on sheets of paper.

This makes your job more difficult and yet the rewards for when you succeed are potentially greater. A good book that sucks you into its world, makes the world around you disappear, is like no other experience ever.

Look, I love films. Horror, comedy, fantasy, drama, action and adventure, superhero movies, musicals, I love them all. Hell, I even travelled to New York once just to watch a film.

But a wonderful book that pulls you into its narrative, its world, and is populated with characters who become your friends?And while you can’t make a reader jump out of their seat in the same way that a film can, like that scene from Jaws, you can still surprise them and send them cold with dread or horror.

The very last line of Pet Semetary by Stephen King is a good example of this.

The Gypsy’s Curse by Harry Crews is another one.

Grab your reader by the scruff of their neck and drag them under.

They’ll thank you for it.

6. Don’t try to be original, you just end up being a smartass.

Look, do I really need to say anything more?

You want to be original?

Go to art school.

Teach yourself everything you can about the history of art, literature, music, the world.

Then rip the rulebook up and do something completely different.

The thing is, it takes a special kind of dedication to to something like that.

And it probably won’t get read by very many people.

And most of them will dismiss you as a smartass.

Most of us, we don’t like originality. We like the same old story, over and over again. Can you guess what it is?

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”

That’s right, we love that story. Your job is to find new ways of telling it, of involving your reader in that story so that no matter how much they dread knowing what comes next they just can’t stop reading. You want them sitting in bed long past the time they should have turned the lights out and gone to sleep, a sleep no doubt filled with nightmares. You want them thinking to themselves, just one more chapter, one more chapter.

You don’t get that by being original.

7. What do you want to do? Make them puke or stay awake all night clutching the bedspread, wide-eyed with fear?

Making them puke is easy.

Actually, it’s not as easy as it used to be.

But then neither is scaring them silly.

Although you definitely want to avoid falling into the trap of trying to be original, you still need to find new ways of scaring your reader. Of unsettling them.

I wish I could tell you how that works, but I am still trying to figure it out myself.

Again, it comes down to credible, emotionally resonant characters and a believable story.

Now look, when I say believable that doesn’t mean to say your story can’t be outlandish and utterly ridiculous. But whilst your reader is in your world, no matter how unbelievable that world is, your reader has to accept it. Be enthralled by it.

Be living in it.

That way you can get under their skin and start doing your magic.

Unsettle them. Creep them out.

When it works it’s the best feeling in the world.

8. Ensure that your reader is reading your book in a remote castle, preferably haunted, with creepy music playing and a ghoulish butler serving canapes of blood and flesh.

Of course this isn’t possible. That’s what cinemas are for. Turn the lights down so you forget where you are. Crank the volume up. Start rolling that projector.

The cinema controls the environment to maximise the effect.

You don’t have that luxury.

Your book might take place in a haunted castle on a dark and stormy night, but your reader may well be sat on a beach in the midday sun, eating ice cream and thinking about going for a dip in the sea.

Get those words down on the page, the right words in the right order, and you may well make them forget their surroundings, the sand and the sea, forget that ice cream and that idea about going for a swim. The temperature will plummet, the sunshine will dim, the laughter and chatter of kids playing in the sand will fade away, and all will be replaced by darkness and screams and the wet snap of bones crunching beneath the bloodied axe of that maniac wearing a Celine Dion mask.

It’s not easy, but it’s damn satisfying when it works.

9. Write the damn thing in your own blood.

Anyway, if all else fails write your damn horror book using your own blood on pages fashioned from the flesh of your victims.

Guaranteed bestseller.

10. Take no notice of blog posts titled How to Write a Horror Novel in 10 Easy Steps.

Sit down and do the work.

Ignore the rules, follow the rules, bend the rules, write your own rules.

Whatever.

Just write.

The post How to Write a Horror Novel in 10 Easy Steps appeared first on Ken Preston.

Guilty Pleasures #2: God Told Me To

For this week’s guilty pleasure in my back catalogue of ‘films I have watched but rarely mentioned in polite company,’ I’m going back to the 1970s again. But where Grizzly can bearely (geddit?) be defended as a decent film, God Told Me To does have its merits, not least an original script.

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Written and directed by New York filmmaker Larry Cohen, God Told Me To is a thriller, a horror, science fiction, a critique of fundamentalism, and a deep dive into one man’s conflicted Catholic soul. Shot on the streets of New York, the film stars , one of the best character actors of the 1970s, and starts with a bang as a lone sniper sitting on top of a water tower picks off random innocents with his high velocity rifle.

Despite the daft tumbles that some of these extras take as they hit the ground (you can see the desperate earnestness with which these actors took to their few seconds of fame, arms flailing and legs wobbling as they die on screen – you can practically hear them thinking ‘This could be my big break, got to give it my all!’), this opening sequence is unsettling. Life and death are random, it seems to be saying, and completely out of our control.

 

It could easily be you next.

 

The police mass at the base of the tower and a helicopter is soon hovering overhead. Detective Peter Nicholas (Lo Bianco) climbs the water tower to try and talk the gunman down, and find out why he shot all these innocent people.

“Can you tell me why you did this, Harold?” Detective Nicholas says.

“You promise you won’t tell anyone else?” Harold says.

“I can’t do that,” Detective Nicholas replies.

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway,” Harold says.

And then comes the killer line.

 

God told me to.

 

When I first caught this film on TV late one night, back in the 1980s, it was still less than ten years old and I was a teenager. That phrase didn’t particularly mean anything to me then. Now, some thirty-five years or so later and with more of that thing called life under my belt, it means a whole hell of a lot more.

When I think of the words God told me to, my mind immediately takes me back to my years as a Born Again Christian. I believed in an interventionist God, a God you could petition for change, either in the world at large (world peace anybody?) or in your personal life (Dear Lord, could you find me a girlfriend please?). Back in those days homosexuality could be cured, speaking in tongues was common, Christianity was the only correct religion and everybody else had it wrong, Jesus was coming back soon and the words ‘God told me to’ were uttered often and with conviction.

 

God told me to read this passage from the Bible.

I had a dream and God told me to speak it out to you all.

God told me to pray for you.

God told me to knock on your door and ask you to give your life to him.

God told me to shoot all those people.

 

Okay, so I never actually heard anyone say that last one.

That was a period in my life, church twice on Sundays, prayer meeting every Wednesday, when I knew, absolutely knew, that I was in the right place, amongst the right people, and doing the right thing.

It’s funny but the older I get the less sure I am that I’m right about anything.

Larry Cohen was good at subverting the normal, at taking a good long look beneath the veneer of our lives. There’s a case to make that with God Told Me To he was ahead of the game, predicting the mass shootings in America that seem to me to be happening tragically more often. Or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, because surely God must have told them to do that?

Or even the far right Christian political scene.

Cohen was examining many issues with this particular film, one of them being that those who say ‘God told me to’ are deluded at best and dangerous at the other extreme.

But wait, this is a 1970s exploitation, low budget horror movie, right? Can’t we get away from all this serious thinking shit and onto the juicy stuff?

After all, this is Larry Cohen, the man who made Q-The Winged Serpent, It’s Alive and The Stuff.

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Well, we could, but the problem is Larry Cohen liked his films to have a point, to have a meaning beyond the obvious. He loved to dress up his stories in horror and suspense and blood and guts, but there was always more going on. Always something for you to think about after the film had finished.

God Told Me To isn’t his best film. It has a terrific performance from Tony Lo Bianco, fantastic location shooting on the streets of New York city, and an unsettling vibe to it, like you get from Rosemary’s Baby.

The problem is it gradually descends into a confusing, ridiculous mess involving a glowing hippy, UFOs and an alien vagina.

Yes, I really did say the words alien vagina.

You get the sense that Larry Cohen was reaching for something, perhaps working through his own Catholic faith and beliefs, digging deep into his own murky soul for answers he was never going to find.

Unlike William Girdler, the director of Grizzly, Cohen wasn’t a schlock master out to make a buck by ripping off the latest blockbuster (although there is a case to made for Girdler aiming for more) but a serious film maker and thinker who loved working in the B-Movie genre and subverting it.

Take, It’s Alive for example. A newly born homicidal baby goes on a rampage killing people. It’s as though Cohen got to the end of Rosemary’s Baby and thought, Wait a minute! This is where the film should be starting, not finishing! And yet Cohen still managed to take this ridiculous concept and not only make it terrifying but also explored issues of fatherhood and unconditional love.

Or what about The Stuff? A horror satire on commercialism and addiction.

And then there is his TV creation, The Invaders, about aliens living secretly amongst us with only one man who knows that they are here and wanting to destroy us. The only way of identifying one of these aliens was by looking at their hands – they couldn’t bend their little fingers.

Here is Larry Cohen talking about what that meant to him.

 

The extended pinky used to be a symbol of effeminacy . . . you know, the effete [person] holding a glass of champagne with the pinky extended? When this show was done back in the ‘60s, the homosexual community was kind of a submerged, invisible community. People were living secret lives. I thought, here are these aliens living amongst society, keeping their true identities secret, their true selves secret, and this is funny because the pinky kind of symbolises homosexuality in some way, and nobody will get the gag, but I’ll put it in there anyway.

 

After catching God Told Me To for the very first time back when I was an innocent teen I doubt I saw it again until I was in my forties. By that time I was back to thinking for myself again after my curious journey through the depths of Born Again fundamentalism. The film had a whole new meaning for me then.

Yes it’s a ridiculous mess but it’s still worth seeking out and watching.

Besides, I only wrote this blog post because God told me to.

The post Guilty Pleasures #2: God Told Me To appeared first on Ken Preston.