BLACK STATIC #42

by Andy Cox

  ‘Bury The Truth’ is the story of a young woman who believes she knows a grim truth about suicide, that there are terrible creatures waiting on the other side of death and ready to devour our souls, and yet she cannot resist the temptation of trying to reach them, to be one with her former lover Alex. There’s a bleakness and unnerving sense of foreboding to this story, with the knowledge that no matter how bad life becomes something even worse is waiting, as in Brian Hodges’ World of Hurt. We can feel for the protagonist and yet be scared by what she is capable of doing to herself and others, the emotional turmoil she creates through her need to know the truth.

  Ex-Para Bob is the operator of a tower crane in ‘Gettin’ High’. His life and marriage are starting to unravel causing him to see things, eyes that appear in the cabin of his crane and regard him, almost as if sitting in judgement. This novelette is one of the undoubted high points of the collection, rich in incidental detail and never less than convincing as Bob’s past is made manifest in his present, the terrible things he has seen and may have done during his time on active service. The strange events taking place become emblematic of the character’s state of mind, the way in which he is losing his grip on sanity, the story a compelling and absorbing read, one that triumphs over the more fanciful aspects of the plot simply through the sheer quality of the ideas and prose on offer. It is the perfect end to a powerful collection from a bright new talent whose day is only just beginning.

  You’ve stated elsewhere that you have always written, even as a child. Why do you think that was? What made you wish to express yourself in this particular way? And for a bonus point, what can you tell us about the “Flair Bear murders”?

  I guess the cliché of most writers saying that they’ve just always written has only become one because it’s true: most have. A worse one (though perhaps no less true either), is that writers were mostly born to write. Writing is the one thing that I know I can do. It brings me great joy, and I have always had an absolute confidence in it, rather than me. Presumably, those too, are the reasons why I wrote as a child.

  Mum says that I used to fill A4 pads with strange fantasy stories and convoluted whodunits. Just about the only survivor is a very surreal, pencil-written short called ‘Stupid Monkey chasing Scary Hanky’, which ends with the immortal line: “Monkey ha! – stupid Monkey – Scary Hanky is killing you Ha! Shadooy corner.” (I want to sic Shadooy, with the assumption I meant shadowy; it is a Scary hanky after all).

  At age twelve, I distinctly remember winning a short story contest, and being made to read aloud my tale of an evil mad scientist, who might or might not have been Frankenstein (twelve was apparently the peak age for creative writing in Scotland; from then on in, I was only required to critique everyone else’s). I also distinctly remember a gang of kids chasing me through the second year playground that lunchtime, before stealing my Ralka bag and chucking it over a high fence into a giant puddle of mud. Which was the first time I realised that not everyone did what I did, even though it felt as natural as breathing. I realise too how pretentious that sounds, but up until that point I genuinely hadn’t known, and for years afterwards – almost until my thirties – I kept my writing a secret, something only my family and closest friends knew about.

  I spent my teens plagiarising everything and anything that came into my orbit. Every film that I loved: Event Horizon, It, The Crow, Aliens. I recreated that scene where Ripley helplessly watches the marines’ headcam-footage as they run into an alien nest under the primary heat exchangers so faithfully that all I recall changing were their names. And every book that I loved: Rats, Misery, The Stand, Lord of the Rings, Day of the Triffids. The last resulted in a rambling masterpiece entitled Tigerflower, about – you’ve guessed it – flowers that were really tigers. And so on.

  I feel like I’m writing a very dull and self-indulgent autobiography now, so I’ll stop, bar the bonus question. I don’t want to know how you found out about the Flair Bears because I’m a bit scared of the answer, but it was basically a series of badly drawn graphic novels that I used to write for my sister: whodunits (featuring – of course – evil Care Bears), with very obvious “clues” hidden throughout: a button under a table, knife in the fridge etc. I have no idea at all what happened to them (the novels, not the Flair Bears), but every Christmas Lorna asks me to write her another one, and I pretend that I haven’t heard her.

  Q&A WITH CAROLE JOHNSTONE

  The title of your collection comes from Shakespeare, with a nod of the hat to Howard/Aickman. What does the phrase “the bright day is done” mean to you? Why did you feel it was appropriate?

  I hated trying to come up with a title for the collection. I had hopeless lists that were all a variation on pretty much the same done to death theme: dark paths, dark journeys, dark terrors, darkness. Ad infinitum. By the end of my deliberations, the only thing that I was sure of was that I didn’t want to have the word dark in it. So I cheated and used it without using it instead.

  I’ve never actually read the Howard/Aickman collection We Are For The Dark, but I have read a lot of Aickman’s later work, and feel some affinity to it. His writing was very character-driven; indeed, much of it was less about the supernatural or monstrous than being haunted, trapped, or persecuted by our own choices, weaknesses, desires.

  Similarly, the actual quote from Antony and Cleopatra – “The bright day is done, And we are for the dark” – might be about despair and suicidal defeat, but it’s also about empowerment, a clawing back of control. And ultimately again, paying for our choices, while also acknowledging the fact that we have them, we make them, they are our own. No matter what the subject or plot, these are themes that I come back to again and again in my writing, so I guess that’s why the title seemed so appropriate.

  It would also be a very big lie to say that I wasn’t trying to be a wee bit fancy, or that I didn’t hope any subconscious associations on the part of a potential reader might work in my favour.

  How do you feel your Scottish background has influenced your approach to genre fiction, if at all? Are you conscious of working in any Scottish tradition of the weird tale?

  A few years ago, I probably would have said not at all. Growing up, I read a lot of classic Scottish authors (mainly down to curriculum rather than choice): Burns of course, Scott, Stevenson, Carlyle, Arnot, MacCaig. So much of traditional Scottish fiction, regardless of whether it is set in Scotland or not, is fiercely heroic, the backdrop either wild and remote or gritty and overcrowded. But in all of the stories that I loved – Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, The Body Snatcher, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Master of Ballantrae, Tam O’Shanter – one thing that they all had in common was hugely flawed and often all too human characters. Who were still allowed to be heroes for all that – maybe even because of that.

  I’m not saying that this kind of storytelling is somehow unique to Scottish writers – nor indeed is the weird tale– but Scotland is a place full of ghosts and strange ritual; its real “heroes”– men like Bonny Prince Charlie, Robert the Bruce, and William Wallace (the latter was born in a town less than five miles from mine and is still very much celebrated) – were brave and flawed and always inevitably doomed. Yet it is also a country firmly rooted in both pragmatism and austerity. Its people are sentimental and loyal, but they’ll tolerate no shite. And, I suppose, it’s that rather than any kind of fictional tradition that has influenced my writing. Nowhere else have I experienced the same wealth of character and contradiction.

  Of all the Scottish writers that I’ve read, there are two who have influenced me above all others. I read a lot of John Buchan in my twenties. While he is better known for writing adventure novels like The Thirty-Nine Steps, he also wrote a great many short stories that I just loved, and I tried more than once to copy his tales of the strange and supernatural; of hidden menace only hinted at through wild, uncanny landscapes and empty, haunted mansions.

  And then there’s Iain Banks. Everyone, I’m sur
e – writer or not – remembers the first novel that blew them away. The Wasp Factory was mine. It was bizarre and unsettling, funny and moving, frustrating and shocking. I loved it. After reading it, I immediately – absolutely – decided that I wanted to become a writer, because I wanted to write something just as brilliant, just as memorable.

  No one else that I’ve ever read champions character like he did. He was the king of dialogue (and Scots dialect), and novels like The Bridge, The Crow Road, Complicity, and Whit are brim-full of brilliantly observed detail, irreverent humour (can you think of many better beginnings to a novel than “It was the day my grandmother exploded”?), and tragic, frightening, heart-warming consequence. Writing as Iain Banks, he wasn’t often considered to be a genre or weird fiction writer, but there was much that was gothic and fantastic in his fiction, and even more that was Scottish. Every time I write anything at all, I feel his influence acutely, and above all others’.

  You’ve said “Scotland has a wildness to it, a beautiful bleakness that I’ve never really encountered elsewhere”. ‘Dead Loss’ aside though, your stories have urban settings. Why do you prefer such scenarios for your fiction?

  Mainly because it’s easier. For me, there are more people, more possibilities in an urban setting. And more familiarity. I have only ever lived in towns or cities. In my experience, people live on top of each other in busy, nosey, noisy, cramped, and often ugly surroundings, and it is this which inspires much of my writing. People are always my principle subject.

  For writers like John Buchan, places rather than people led the plot, in his case the dangerous and often threatening wildernesses of the Highlands or Southern Africa. For him, and many writers like him, place was a character – sometimes the character. Aside from ‘Dead Loss’, I have occasionally written outside of an urban setting (‘The Pest House’ and Frenzy probably being the most notable), but you’re right, it’s not very often that I choose to.

  I love Glasgow, I loathe London, and I grew up in Lanarkshire, so the majority of my stories have been set in these places. Part of that, I’m sure, is laziness, but the rest of it is that desire to have the setting feel like another character. And for that I think you need authenticity. You need to know the place just as well as the characters living within it. If the setting is entirely imaginary then it can be whatever you want it to be, but if you’re writing about a real place, I genuinely believe that you need to know it. You need to know what it looks like, feels like, smells like, sounds like. I haven’t always abided by that rule, but I try to.

  I’ve had a good idea for a novel set in the rural south of France for a few years now, but I’ve visited the area only once and don’t feel like that’s anywhere near long enough to convincingly write about it. Of course, there is always the possibility that I’m hanging out for a six month sabbatical in Languedoc too. I’m certainly not the first writer who has dreamed of exchanging their writing room and its inspirational photos/postcards/pictures for a remote island or tropical savannah, a log cabin inside the Arctic Circle, a Mediterranean cliff top, a village cafe packed full of effervescent locals – while trying to write the novel.

  Though this answer is perhaps a flimsy defence, I do believe that it’s very difficult – certainly, it’s making what is already a hard job even harder – to create credible places and, perhaps more importantly, credible characters if you’ve never walked a mile in their shoes. Or at least in their town.

  Your background is scientific, and yet much of your fiction has a supernatural aspect to it. What significance does the supernatural have for you? Is it simply a convenient metaphor that allows you to tackle the human condition or something more than that?

  I have never experienced anything remotely supernatural, though it isn’t for want of trying. I’ve been to séances, stayed in haunted houses and hotels, talked to spiritualists and mediums, even tried hypnotic regression – and nothing. The older I get, the more important that nothing becomes.

  My background is principally in physics, which, of course, is very much seen as eschewing the idea of spirituality and the supernatural, though outside of the old Newtonian laws that isn’t true at all. Quantum mechanics imply that consciousness underlies all reality; that the material world is not locked inside mere cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of non-physical realities or observers – in other words (before everyone still reading this nods off), modern physics very much supports the idea that the soul exists, that an afterlife exists, even that an “infinite singularity” (read God) exists. But no one wants to read stories about quantum mechanics – not even physicists. What I am trying, very clumsily, to say is that I don’t believe that one precludes the other. If the human condition can influence the universe, then people are at the very heart of what it means to be supernatural. And to have free will.

  Most of what we would consider evil or malign has its roots in people too. Ghosts were once alive; monsters were and are created by people – in both the physical and allegorical sense – for the purpose of either domination or defence. I have used traditionally perceived monsters in stories like ‘Dead Loss’, ‘Scent’, ‘Sanctuary’, ‘Bury the Truth’, but more often than not, people are my monsters, whether they manifest as night-time stalkers, abusive fathers, vengeful children, frightened victims, fascist extremists, or the embittered abandoned.

  To use Aickman as an example again, I prefer to write about the kind of haunting that comes from within rather than without. From the idea that people are very much the victims of their own prejudices, choices, and beliefs. That their sense of terror, of alienation, of unease, of feeling trapped or persecuted or apart, stems from little more than their own skewed perception of reality and how they choose to react to it.

  So…to finally answer your question, I use the supernatural as a metaphor only in as much as we all do, mostly without even realising that we’re doing it. And at the heart of that, I think, is the fear – arguably the greatest fear of them all – that you are not important, neither memorable nor influential; that you will be easily forgotten and dismissed, exorcised with no effort at all.

  The blurb for your collection comes with the phrase “We are all of us afraid of death; it is the human condition.” And yet at least two of the stories in The Bright Day Is Done concern suicide. What is it about this particular theme that engages you creatively?

  Crikey, I’m beginning to feel as if I should be reclining on a shiny leather couch, sipping camomile tea and trying not to blame my parents for everything.

  It’s true that I’ve written about suicide a lot. I rarely invite it, but it still keeps turning up. I think suicide is, for many, a comforting if ephemeral option. At the very least, it is just that: an option. People are afraid of death, but is it death that we truly fear? Or is it, more likely, dying: the painful and undignified likelihood of it; the leaving behind of those that we love; the rail against change and the unknown? Death, after all, will either be something or nothing; few of us probably imagine that we are destined for Hell, assuming that we even believe it exists.

  I think for many people – and more certainly for many writers – it’s not death but life that boasts the deepest well of terrifying possibility. Writing about death is inevitable because it’s part and parcel of life – it is its biggest, most threatening cudgel too – but I think as a writer you are somewhat cursed with overthinking everything. My mind is always working, wondering. I never ever switch off. I never ever stop listening, watching, stealing, analysing, obsessing. I spent most of my twenties fixated with how I was going to die, and was very surprised (and mortified: I silenced an entire dinner party) to discover that not many other folk did – not in the same way anyway: not all the time, nor in such Technicolor detail. In fact, it seemed to me that most people thought of dying only in abstract, sometimes even when it was actually happening. Whereas for me, there has never been any such filter, no kindly off switch. I don’t think that’s wholly a bad thing.

  A friend of mine
killed himself in his late teens. He took a whole pile of drugs, tied a belt around his neck and hanged himself. He chose a very isolated place to do it because he didn’t want anyone to stop him and he didn’t want anyone who loved him to find him. He took enough drugs to fell a horse because he didn’t like pain and he didn’t like clarity. It wasn’t an accident, or a drug-addled mistake, or a moment of unplanned bad judgement, or any of the things that people tried to believe it was. Behind the smiles and the laughter and the recklessness, I think he had wanted to do it for a very long time. I’ve thought about him a lot over the years; I think of him mostly when I’m writing. Why did he do it? Why then? Why that brutal, lonely way? What was he thinking? What did it feel like? How did he find the courage? Because it would have taken a lot of that, no matter what anyone says.

  I am, by nature, pessimistic. Some days, I entirely buy into the Ligottian philosophy of existence: “We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering – slowly or quickly – as we draw near to death… We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” This, obviously, is a belief that is both depressing and full of creative opportunity.

  Many writers have described death as an escape from life; others, as an escape from the fear of death. I wrote ‘Bury the Truth’ out of a twisted curiosity as to how a person would choose to live their life if they knew for certain that what came after was infinitely worse. It’s a cruel story, but ultimately it’s just a question, a thought, a what if? Because writers often examine that which many people would prefer not to: why we are; what – if anything – we are for; how we might seek to subvert or cheat or face what is perceived to be inevitable. Suicide has to be part and parcel of that, because although it still remains a stubbornly taboo subject, few of us will live our lives having never considered it – even if only as that abstract option: “if I go doolally,” “if I become terminally ill,” “if I’m suffering unimaginable pain.”