by Clark, Simon
Blood and Grit 21
Simon Clark
BBR
For Janet
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Simon Clark: Nailed to the Genre – Foreword to the new edition by Andrew Darlington
Blood and Grit
Raising the Chill Factor – Foreword to the first edition by Andrew Darlington
Skinner Lane
Out From Under
Over Run
Bite Back
Revelling in Brick
Sex, Savagery and Blood, Blood, Blood
Extras
Twenty-One Years Later – Afterword by Simon Clark
… Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea …
21 Skinner Lane
About the Author
Copyright Page
Simon Clark: Nailed to the Genre
Foreword to the new edition by Andrew Darlington
Blood and Grit
You don’t want to be carrying the baggage of old men’s philosophies into the future. Invent your own. It looks like the end of the old world, but you can also consider it the birth of a new one …
King Blood
Twenty-one years is a long time in a life. It is no time at all in a genre that stretches back to the very origins of storytelling. But twenty-one years is a significant period in which a writer can pile up novels that establish his niche in that ongoing continuity.
There’s Thomas Hardy country. There’s Brontë country. There’s even James Herriot country. But Simon Clark country? It’s probably inevitable. Simon is a writer coming to a Nightmare Near You … soon! From the Vampyrrhic – to the Return Of The Triffid – he’s a writer who sees life through Blood-Tinted Spectacles. If Horror fiction is a game of Who Scares Wins, and if Death is a dark word, then Simon takes it DARKER and DEEPER than it’s ever been before! In his basement, monsters lurk. It began with the Daily Mirror calling him the ‘Merchant of Menace’. For Simon’s fiction has a terrible luminosity. He’s the visionary from Doncaster, with more than meets the single bloodshot eye. In his books stale prose or tired clichés are as rare as a sleaze-free politician in Westminster.
For me, it happened like this. 9:30am, Wednesday 13 March 1996. Forty-three-year-old Thomas Hamilton opens fire in Dunblane Primary. He slaughters sixteen. For one terrible moment, I think … it’s begun, it’s REALLY begun. The Generation War. The old devouring the young. This is Blood Crazy (1995). Later, the same reality-glitch occurs in a sketch on the Hale & Pace TV show (ITV, 6 August 1998, 9:30pm). The punter is in bed with the whore. He’s reading Blood Crazy. He’d rather read Simon Clark than have sex with the prostitute he’s already paid for! She shrugs ‘it’s your money’.
I read the first novel – Nailed by the Heart (1995) – through a non-stop nightmare coach journey from Yorkshire to Barcelona. The worst journey in the world. From Newport Pagnell Services down through Dover Eastern Docks, chevrons ticking away beneath the wheels, as Simon’s Stainforth family are arriving in remote Out-Butterwick, an imaginary extension of the Humberside coastline somewhere between Cleethorpes and the cold North Sea. Chris, a dropped-out City stockbroker has a plan for restoring the Manshead sea-fort ‘cut from a stone the colour of butter’, and transforming it into a hotel. There’s a dread inexorable quality to its unfolding, yet despite the tightness of plot indicators and embedded clues, the shocks – when they arrive – remain shocking. There’s no randomness, no looseness, every word, every incident is bone-hard necessary. He’s already writing with the skills and sureness of touch of a pro. As the Stainforth’s initially blast the hideous Saf Dar to a sticky mess of bloody shreds, what they fail to realize, but what the reader knows from what has gone before, is that soon they will regenerate. Yet when they do you share the characters’ despair and sense of shock. Then – by the time the signs are saying Arras and Reims, across the broad swirling Rhone at Lyon, Carcassonne, Perpignon, then Gerona and Figueras – you are prepared by the recurrent theme of ‘sacrifice as demonic transaction’ (hell, there’s even a character called Faust!) for what must accompany the novel’s climax. In retrospect it takes on its own inevitability that cancels out any other outcome, yet as it happens it surprises and startles.
I’d known Simon before then. In fact I published his first poem – about shooting out the stained-glass windows of the local church – in an underground arts magazine I co-ordinated. He returns the favour by quoting my poem ‘After the Raid’ in his short story ‘Dream the Real’ in Back Brain Recluse no. 10. I’ve a feeling I also figure in the Darlington House Spa Croft village sequence at the climax of Darker (1996).
Simon is tall. His head is ‘shaved to the bone’, although it wasn’t when we first met. He speaks quietly. He always has. It must make him difficult to interview, but only in the sense that he has a talent for turning questions around so that you find yourself talking about yourself, instead of extracting meaningful insight from him. Or else he detours the conversation into the secret history of the great William Hope Hodgson’s sojourn in Barnsley …
So what’s it like to look back over twenty-one years of novels? ‘It’s strange to realize that suddenly you’re no longer the “New Kid On The Block”! Life is oddly – weirdly – wonderful, occasionally marred by sudden bouts of poverty. And for a lad born in Wakefield, and a former employee of Doncaster Borough Council, it sometimes takes on a definite air of unreality. If I could travel back in time and tell a younger me – sat at a desk filling in forms – that all of this was going to happen, I reckon I’d have replied “Don’t be bloody stupid” …’ And how does he deal with the essentially solitary writing routine? ‘I think I’ve come through the pain barrier. It’s been a roller-coaster of a time. When Night of the Triffids (2001) was taking off I was doing loads of media stuff. Photographed by the press in London streets with my own entourage of publicity people from Hodder to hold my coat and ASDA carrier bag. Trips to Hollywood, Seattle, Dublin, London and the Edinburgh Book Festival where I saw Brian Aldiss across the room. I’d never met him before and didn’t even feel confident approaching the great man. But instead he waved at me and said “Simon, how’s the book doing?” Sometimes, in this business, you just get a tiny flavour of what it’s like to be a rock or movie star.’ A momentarily strange expression, ‘Shame that the money isn’t in the same league though!’
The first real sign of just how powerfully intense Simon’s fiction could be arrived with Blood and Grit (1990), this original collection of razor-edged short stories issued through BBR Books. ‘Consider this a threshold event,’ observed writer t. Winter-Damon perceptively, declaring that ‘one of the “New Wardens of the Asylum” had arrived. Published by a vigorously ambitious independent press based in Sheffield, the book came with atmospheric art by Dallas Goffin, and was rapidly followed by Simon’s expansion into the Waterstones and Ottakers Big-time, publishing a one-a-year sequence of novels so that by the time of King Blood (1997) – his fourth full-length novel – it was already so obvious it barely needed stating. To say that Simon Clark was the best novelist to emerge during the decade was already self-evident. The pattern of his novels thus far had been to alternate tight small-group hazard plots – Nailed by the Heart and Darker – in which nice loving families are menaced by the Saf Dar in the sea-fort, or pursued in their car by the Invisible Hammer, with novels of global apocalypse – Blood Crazy and King Blood – in which the disaster is total. In the latter it’s nothing short of the onslaught – not of an Ice Age, but a new Heat Age, a Fire Age, and the geothermal convulsions that this brings about. And with those first four novels Simon Clark was sending out a signal writ huge, and a challenge not only to the entire Horror genre, but to worlds beyond too. Setting the new benchmark. This
is the standard you’ve got to reach to even qualify. And it’s awesome.
‘Nailed was written on my old Amstrad 9512,’ he recalls. ‘I’ve still got that antique machine in the loft. God knows why, the thing probably won’t work anymore.’ And of course, its publication coincided with a New Wave of Horror Fiction. Er … no. ‘It caught the end of the Horror boom. The market was in such a chronic state that publishers were shedding their Horror writers as fast as they could. At one point I seemed to be – with the exception of James Herbert, and Stephen King of course – the only Horror writer in Britain with a publishing contract. But things can change. Incidentally, I went to a party held for Stephen King at the Royal College of Art, Kensington. He looked unfeasibly young and happy, and talked about his visit to a cricket match. I drank champagne until two in the morning. A few hours later I woke up and wished I hadn’t. In fact, I ambled round the British Museum where the Greek statues had developed the trick of moving all by themselves. Maybe someone had slipped a “mickey” into my glass … or maybe I just overindulged …?’
And Other Bloody Cuts …
I think of evil as being as intelligent as an earthquake or a famine that wipes out ten-thousand people. Evil is a blind, mindless force that drifts along until it happens across an opportunity to hurt you.
The Tower (2005)
Yet the fiction-cycle continues with Vampyrrhic (1998) and The Fall (1998), while short stories continued to appear in bewildering profusion. Salt Snake & Other Bloody Cuts (1998) is a collected short stories anthology from the American Indie Silver Salamander Press, gathering no less than twenty-five of those story-bites into 272 well-dressed pages, pretty much all of Simon’s previously scattered stuff – a radio play, a few poems, SFX book reviews and oddities excepted – from sources as diverse as Fear, Back Brain Recluse and Dark Dreams, an impressive percentage of which had gone on to grace various Best Of … anthologies (while ‘Goblin City Lights’ won the British Fantasy Award for best short story of 2001). With each of the pieces carried by the natural contemporary authenticity of the narrative and the validity of its emotional truth. What Martin Amis calls ‘voice-stories’. There is no pantheon of dark Lovecraftian gods. No Demonic rituals or Satanic incantations. Instead these are urban myths of phantom killer-cyclists and glimpses of moving corpses in crematorium ovens. Its new deities-of-choice include Jimi Hendrix – with an ageing Hippie Miss Faversham still waiting for the dead electric god to turn up for his rehab (‘Howls from a Blinding Curve’), or the haunting Bohemian romance of ‘Eyes Like a Ghost’ with its mysterious Nick Drake/Syd Barrett fragments.
Then, there we were in ‘Henry Boons’. A pleasingly low-ceilinged pub backing onto Wakefield Prison where Simon once did ‘one of my strangest gigs, giving a talk to fifteen men who had, between them, killed more than thirty people. Some of them had even devoured parts of their victims Lecter-style!’ And he’s here telling me how he was briefly staying in Cambridge. And of the strange tramp-like figure he noticed sitting on the bench outside his room. Was it Syd Barrett? It might well have been. For, like the fictional evil in his stories, when it comes, it comes through a kind of magical realism, often unexplained or inexplicable. Yet while the horror is horrible, it is also metaphorically beautiful in its precision. It arrives wrapped in parental love – as in ‘Lifting the Lid’, where the narrator-voice returns home to inform his parents that they are dead (while the stranger in his room hints that perhaps he, too, is dead). Or ‘Gerassimos Flamotas’ – set in Kefalonia, where a bitter bankrupt farmer ‘sells’ his mute daughter, only to rediscover her hideously reassembled into a surreal human collage – ‘the arms to the hips, the legs to the shoulders. It gave it the appearance of a four-legged spider. A big fat white spider, belly up on the pebble beach with a head jutting out from its stomach.’ But the real human horror lies in the guilt, remorse and self-recrimination when mute Rosa speaks, ‘Papa, I love you,’ and ‘he would hear those words for ever’.
Elsewhere, in the Salt Snake title story itself, tattooed bikers with names like Spuggy and Viper are just saved from caricature ‘Tom Thug’ nastiness by Clark’s narrative assurance, only to get their bizarre and largely unexplained come-uppance through the accumulating metaphor of a salt sea mist that gradually entombs them in ‘gouts of white’. As he’s transformed into ‘a large white blob’ resembling ‘an insect pupa’, the disturbed eighteen-year-old girl victim who also provides the story’s sexual catalyst momentarily reminds Viper of his own early childhood innocence. Perhaps the pupa symbolizes his rebirth into a new life-form? Perhaps not. Like ‘Acorn, a Bitter Substitute for Olives’ (‘be afraid, be very afraid, because in Wales no-one can hear you scream!’) it suggests more secrets than it reveals, leaving only the voice to carry its conviction. A voice that first convinces with throw-away haiku-precise profundities like ‘I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a house-proud parent’, then stuns with the chill poetry of a word circling in his head ‘like a new moon caught by the gravity of a cold and lonely planet’. Sometimes his narrator-voice glimpses a vision of paradise beyond death, but gets incinerated in his attempts to reach it (‘The Burning Doorway’). Then a brutal Reservoir Dogs scenario gets switched on its head by a hideous metamorphosis from cringing victim-drunk to man-eating monster (in ‘A Biter Bit’). For Simon Clark writes New Urban Mythologies hard where they need to be hard, but never less than accurate. He can do the ‘blood, the thing in the graveyard … yeah, yeah, the horror’ as visceral, as obscene and as nasty as the best of them. But there’s so much more to his fiction than just Blood and Grit. There’s poetry too. And there’s truth. In ‘Feed My Children’ a murdered woman at the bottom of a flooded quarry gives multiple birth to ‘tadpole babies’ that ‘haul themselves out of the water on their soft white bellies like crocodiles’ to feed, and to seek their bloodsucking revenge – on their sadistic bullying father.
But as we’re talking truth, what is the truth of Simon’s blurb-hyped writing connection with Irish Rock band U2, apart from a trip to Paris to see them in concert with a guesting BB King? ‘The U2 connection? Yes, I keep getting asked which U2 songs I wrote. But my only musical expertise is figuring out how to open the CD case and find the “on” button. What happened is, I wrote an article about music and its power to inspire creative writing, which the band bought and published in their magazine. Hence “U2 plc” or whatever the company is called did buy copyright of the piece, so I thought – well, I can honestly say I’ve written prose material for U2, so I might as well use it in my publicity!’
Return of the Triffids
This is what happens when human beings turn feral …
King Blood
Simon Clark was born in 1958. At school the Careers Advisor came around with a huge pile of application forms for the local coal mine. And Simon? He wanted to get into publishing. ‘I wanted to say “writer”,’ he explains, ‘because that’s all I ever really wanted to be. But saying “publishing” seemed like a more realistic option.’ And the poor guy was dumbfounded. He promised to investigate on Simon’s behalf. He came back two days later with a single sheet of hastily photocopied information. Now, check out the cover of Stranger (2002), his name is cover-mounted in a larger font than the book title. A signifier that he’s a ‘name’, a selling-point …
The limitation of Horror, as a genre, is that it must be horrible. It must evoke from a narrow range of responses. Unlike – say – SF, which can be a form of Horror, but can also be lots of other things too. In This Skin (2004) uses the Lovecraft ‘hole in the wall’ device, the Clark Ashton-Smith ‘City of the Singing Flame’ portal into otherness from the abandoned Luxor dancehall. Yet stepping through, not to sense-of-wonder or beauty, or even strangeness alone, they are all disallowed by a genre that necessitates it must be repellent too. There’s reference to black hole science and parallel dimensions, but there must be psycho-skinners monsterized by ‘The Place’, which also translates into Purgatory.
Yet Simon, perhaps more
than other contemporary practitioners, tests out the limits. Other writers have achieved greater prominence by emphasizing a single theme through repeated novels. An identity built through a persistence of vision. Yet each of Simon’s novels is stand-alone different. Vampyrrhic (1998) is conventionally vampiric only by title (although it did produce an equally unique sequel – Vampyrrhic Rites, 2003). While Judas Tree (1999) is a traditional ghost story only by the widest of definitions. Then there is Night of the Triffids which – so far – is the only work that links him into a wider continuum (unless you include The Dalek Factor (2004), Simon’s contribution to the Dr Who mythos). And then it comes through the device of borrowing from the John Wyndham canon. ‘It was a little bit strange stepping into Wyndham’s shoes,’ Simon explained to SFX (July 2001). ‘I didn’t want to slavishly imitate him, I wanted it to be a fusion of the kind of things I write and John Wyndham’s style. So what I did was get an audio version of the book and took the dog out and listened to that and read the same page over and over again. There’s a rhythm there, almost like a drumbeat. And I tried to tune in to that. It was difficult at first but it became easier the more it went on. It got to the point where it felt I had John Wyndham’s ghost peering over my shoulder. Working late at night, it could be quite eerie!’ He resumes to me now, ‘Yes, the Triffids gig had been a long slog contracts-wise …!’
Essentially an alternative history, envisioning the world as it would be ‘three decades after the fall of civilization’ – if the events of John Wyndham’s book had actually occurred, adopting a suitably 1950s-retro vocabulary when appropriate to describe ‘my lamentably sightless condition’. Here, Bill Masen’s original manuscript exists bound into ‘bright orange covers’ to mimic Wyndham’s Penguin edition. While the Triffid-infested New York that Masen’s son travels to is both racially segregated (escaping the 1960s Civil Rights movements) and advocates a form of radical eugenics as a means of reclaiming and repopulating the devastated world. There are stunningly inventive sequences. The Triffid-constructed floating island that Masen’s aircraft crash-lands into both recalls elements of C.S. Lewis’s floating Venusian islands, and the evolutionary vegetable-sentience of Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse. While the darkness that simultaneously envelopes the world – an external darkness to complement Wyndham’s ‘inner’ more personal imposition of global blindness – is one not distantly related to M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud or Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt. All – incidentally – SF and NOT Horror precedents. And if Simon’s narrative voice trades its earlier wire-drawn tautness for a more relaxed easy storytelling pacing then that’s an appropriate response to such precedents.