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William Hope Hodgson and the Sea-Dogs

April 1, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

Today, the plus side of your village being dragged inexorably into the North Sea (for lurcher walkers, anyway), and the nautical horror of William Hope Hodgson. So, something for everyone, if everyone likes lurchers and Hope Hodgson. Which they should. We thought we’d post some fun stuff while we were editing our Michael Hutter weird art feature for the weekend, so here’s Stranger Seas Ten. They grow up so quickly, don’t they?

Lurchers at Sea

Lurchers like the sea. However, being the dark, dour children of Yorkshire that the greydog family are, instead of pleasant sun-trap beaches and palms, we have a coastline scoured by the icy North Sea and covered in sea frets (dense, cold mist from the sea).

You can choose between towering, lethal cliffs and long stretches of yesterday’s dining room being washed away as you speak. There’s a rather nice upside to the second option, though. Miles of empty sand, interrupted only by the occasional World War Two pill-box and someone’s collapsed outhouse (there’s more about this coast in whale-road, widow-maker).

Thus we oil the hovercraft and grind determinedly eastwards a few times a year to release the hounds. Between Flamborough Head and the mouth of the mighty Humber, basically all you have is this:

And then you add dogs – when the horses have gone, of course. Sea-going lurchers come in two varieties: alpha brain-boxes (eg. Chilli) who know what the sea is, and good-natured bumblers (eg. Django) who keep trying to drink it and then spit out salt. Do they swim, you ask? In fact can lurchers swim at all?

pups3a — it’s my pool. no. it’s my pool.

They usually don’t, but they usually can. They like water, when it’s doing what it’s told, and ours head for it without hesitation. Lurchers typically paddle, run and splash up to tummy level, whereas juggernauts like our old labrador plough straight in.

twigsea — the dog that ate the yorkshire coast

As a curious aside, Chilli has an incredible ability to find the wet stuff, which we’ve seen repeatedly. We were once on a long moors walk where Django became wobbly from the heat and had trouble going on. Our alpha wonder shot forward ahead of us, and in five minutes had found the only ditch/stream with water in it on the whole moor. A good dunking, and all was well. This is the very moment, in fact:

Every so often you do meet a swimming champion among lurchers, but we’ve never had one. Word on the street is that some saluki crosses have webbed feet (from all that swimming on sand as they pull down antelopes), and that they make good swimmers. But saluki crosses often don’t do what you ask them anyway, so you might never know.

What longdogs do is charge. Those miles of sand (and a 40mph velocity) mean that the loyal companion by your feet is suddenly somewhere near the next county, a tiny dot which might be anything, frankly. You might be going red in the face and whistling for a seal which dropped its sunglasses the day before. We’re fortunate in that our two run in huge circles, which means that they do pass by every so often. “Oh look, there are the… no, they’ve gone again.”

Chilli, who gets bored on the flat eventually, also delights in heading for rock-pools we can’t reach, or trying to climb the most dangerous, most crumbling bit of cliff she can find. Meanwhile, Django stands panting and drinks sea-water for the tenth time, having totally forgotten once more that he doesn’t like it.

seawater — if you drink that, you’ll be sorry…

A day by the sea with longdogs is, basically, a joy. But take your own fresh water supply, especially if you have a Django.

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Now, the next section is less lurchery. Before we interviewed nautical fantasy author Matt Willis a few weeks ago (see sea serpents, saltwater and ship’s biscuits), he mentioned coming across a talk given on William Hope Hodgson and maritime horror a couple of years ago. So we dug around for more details.

The paper in question was delivered by Dr Alexander Hay at the Sea Lines of Communication Conference Proceedings, Southampton, University of Southampton in 2014. The University said it was fine for us to use it, but could we link directly to the original paper held in their e-archives, so we’ve compromised. The paper covers Hope Hodgson’s nautical work and focusses especially on three pieces:

The Voice in the Night
The Ghost Pirates
The Haunted Jarvee

What we offer below is the first part of Dr Hay’s presentation – the introduction and themes, and his commentary on The Voice in the Night. A link to the rest is provided at the end.

The Maritime Horror Fiction of William Hope Hodgson – Archetypes and Nuance

By Alexander Hay PhD

The Sea represents many things, but one recurring subject is horror. Whether it is Ulysses driven insane by the song of the sirens as he is lashed to the main mast of his ship; Umibouzu, the sinister giant black figure that haunted Japanese fishermen and sailors; Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with its depictions of living death and doom; the shipwrecked mariners contemplating cannibalism and ‘otherness’ in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the sea has long been both source and setting for horror.

In this year alone, we have seen Godzilla return to the big screen from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, leaving devastation, metaphors and tsunamis in his wake, and all the while Great Cthulhu continues to sleep in the mathematically impossible city of R’lyeh at the bottom of the sea, until the day he surfaces once and for all and brings us to our doom – perhaps with a loud BLOOP as he rises…

This then is what I term ‘Maritime Horror’ a sub-genre which both maligns and celebrates the sea as horror or backdrop to horror. As I have mentioned, maritime horror already has a substantial canon and this will no doubt continue to grow for the sea continues to fascinate and frighten us in equal measure. However, this paper’s aim is to make a case for the pre-eminence of one writer in particular, William Hope Hodgson.

There are many reasons why we should revive interest in this author. As a pioneer of cosmic horror, as his novel The House on the Borderlands demonstrates, Hodgson’s influence was admitted by HP Lovecraft himself and so, through him, modern horror owes a great debt. He was and is one of many writers and artists whose death in World War One threatens their total obscurity. Perhaps then, in the centenary of this war, we should renew our interest in both him and other authors whose lives and careers ended far too soon on the Western Front.

Yet what is most significant about Hodgson, beyond his having written a great deal of maritime horror fiction, was that he was himself a former mariner, first becoming a sailor at age 14 before becoming disillusioned with life at sea and starting a career as a physical trainer and then an author after his 25th birthday. Prior to this, he had formal training as an apprentice and then a third mate while also developing an interest in naval photography.

Nonetheless, his passion for the sea was dimmed considerably by what he described as “a comfortless, weariful, and thankless life” while he himself was a volatile, even at times unpleasant individual, who encountered mixed fortunes throughout his life. For Hodgson, conflating his experiences with horror and the foreboding unknown took very little effort. Yet I would argue that this also gives Hodgson an insight and authority in regards to his subject matter that other authors lacked – for he really did obey the maxim that you should write about what you know.

Hodgson wrote many examples of Maritime Horror and nautical fiction – over fifty – but given the scope of this paper, we will look at three as way of an introduction. The first example of this approach, combining the realism of first-hand experience with the uncanny, was The Voice in the Night, first published in 1907 and, coincidentally, used as the basis for the lurid, subliminally sexual Japanese castaway horror film Matango in 1963. (Like Godzilla, a production by the Toho studios, who also made Ringu in 1998, yet another horror film with nautical roots.)

Here a mariner recounts how his ship, “becalmed in the Northern Pacific” was approached in the middle of the night by a strange figure in a rowing boat. The stranger refuses to be seen and instead pleads for food while, ominously, wishing to keep his distance from the narrator’s boat. Eventually, the ship sends food over to the rowing boat via a boathook and a float, and the stranger then recounts his tale.

It transpires that he and his fiancée were shipwrecked on a strange island riddled with fungus which infects and then eventually takes over its hosts. It has an unusual allure that compels its victims to eat or desire it, much like the fate that befalls the lotophagi in The Odyssey, victims of another corrupting force, spiritual as well as physical, and also encountered on an island in a seafaring narrative. The fiancée eats some of the fungus and becomes infected while the stranger is contaminated while fighting off what is left of another host, which tries to attack him.

Realising they are infected, they decide to quarantine themselves, eating only whatever untainted food they can find. It is implied that the infection has nonetheless almost completely consumed the fiancée and that the stranger is trying to keep what remains of her alive until such time that he too completely succumbs. Finally, the narrator catches a glimpse of the stranger rowing away in the early dawn light and is horrified to see his deformed fungoid form. No longer able to empathise with the stranger – a final tragedy and horror in the story – the narrator refers to him instead as “…the thing” as he heads towards his inevitable doom.

Here Hodgson combines three separate strands. On the one hand, he dwells upon body horror and the corruption of the flesh. This is a disruptive, invasive force not just on the body but on social norms of the day – the fiancée, expected by contemporary convention to remain chaste and pure, is the first to give into a depraved appetite for the fungus and is subsequently made to “promise on her knees” never to do it again, she herself admitting that “the desire for it had come suddenly, and that, until the moment of desire, she had experienced nothing towards it but the most extreme repulsion.”

This conservative narrative of fallen woman laid low by lust (whether it be for fungus or other more primal desires) is subverted, however, by the stranger’s own subsequent downfall, where he is “immediately filled with an inhuman desire. I turned and seized a mass of the fungus. Then more and — more. I was insatiable.”

Hodgson also alludes to the maritime connections between the sea and leprosy – like the fungus, a contagious disease which corrupts and rots the flesh. It is worth noting that six years before The Voice in the Night was published, the United States government founded a leprosarium on the island of Culion, where all lepers were to be quarantined and isolated. The sea, in fact, was a common way of separating society from the leprous ‘other’, the 1866 founding of the Moloka’i leper colony near Hawaii – still very much in use by 1907 – being yet another real life example of the Pacific ocean used to create a separation between the uninfected and the leprous, as well as the natives of the islands and the new ruling class of white settlers.

This in turn harked back to even older traditions, such as the ritualised sequestration of lepers during the Middle Ages, and where a common literary device was to have a sinful or impious character afflicted with leprosy as both punishment and means of salvation through the acceptance of divine authority. It is worth noting here that the stranger mentions God on a regular basis, either calling upon him to reward the narrator and his ship for its charity, or throwing himself and his fiancée onto the mercy of the divine – “God would do with us what was His will”, as the stranger says, perhaps with added poignancy given the plight that befalls both him and his fiancée.

The third strand, however, is the nautical element of the story. The stranger and his fiancée were abandoned on their demasted ship (the ominously named ‘Albatross’) by the crew and were forced to make an improvised raft which carries them not to salvation but their doom. It is implied that their lack of knowledge of the sea is partly the cause of their plight, though this is subverted at the end of the story by the narrator noting that the stranger was now almost indistinguishable from his grey rowing boat – “my eyes searched a moment vainly for the conjunction of hand and oar.”

By the end of the story, the stranger had, ironically, begun to learn the skills that he lacked at the start of the story, though this was now far too late for either him or his fiancée. Hodgson also implies that the original sin is not the couple giving into the ‘forbidden fruit’ of the fungus but their crew abandoning them and the duty of mariners to support one another in what is, after all, an environment that requires collaboration. Again, it is only belatedly that this duty is fulfilled by the narrator’s own ship, and it is too late. Here, we see the conventions and structures of seafaring life decayed and corrupted, like the bodies of the couple.

Instead, the stranger is transformed by his exposure to the sea, like a sailor, but is also undone by it, and doomed to become part of its dark mythology, something that emerges from its outer reaches and serves as a reminder of humanity’s inability to master it and, ultimately, nature. In many ways, then, The Voice in the Night is a nautical ghost story, with the added horror of the stranger being not quite dead yet – nor quite anything else.

And for Hope Hodgson enthusiasts, you can find the rest of this piece at:

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/369928/

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Right, we’re done for now. One of our Weird Art posts in a day or so, with that incredibly talented German artist Michael Hutter, so come back soon…

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Dr Who versus the Solarnauts

March 29, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

How many people remember hiding behind the furniture when Dr Who was on? For those folk, and for the brave young things of today, stay with us as we connect Dr Who, Star Trek, Hammer Horror, Basil Brush and the worst space helmet ever. Yes, our mid-week post is aimed at people who like weird sixties TV and movies.

The longdogs are busy disembowelling the living room. Django has one chair nearly down to the springs, and Chilli is pulling stuffing out of the sofa, so they won’t be joining us today.

Doctor-Who — the doctor of our childhood – but we still got measles

After interviewing Dan Starkey of Strax and Carnacki fame last time (the starkey stratagem), we had a Dr Who moment, and went back to some of the scary stuff we watched during childhood. And as we’ve already mentioned sofas (fabulous link, eh?), we’ll start with the hiding thing.

One particular moment of paralysing fear remains with me from the sixties – watching William Hartnell’s Dr Who. Even I was young back then. The curtains were drawn, and I was crouched at the back of the living room, peering over a cushion at the TV set, because an unseen creature had said something along the lines of “We are too hideous for you to gaze upon!”

My innocent little organs immediately supplied a surge of horror which I can still remember. And companion Vicki had screamed, because there were triangular partitions of cloudy glass surrounding her, and you could just see a pair of eyes through them…

At that age I tried to imagine what was “too hideous to gaze upon”, and did quite well. I was so scared that I didn’t even shout out that it should have been “too hideous upon which to gaze”. They weren’t that awful, of course, but it was a great build-up. In fact, they were Rills, like this fellow:

I survived, and in the intervening years, I’ve bought pints for people who looked worse than that. For the inner nerd, the story was Galaxy 4 (1965), a four parter in which the Doctor and his companions landed on an arid planet where they met the beautiful Drahvins and the hideous Rills. The Rills were friendly, compassionate explorers, and the Drahvins were clone warriors who got what was coming to them.

Glad that’s been sorted out after all these years.

And Dr Who leads us on to Peter Cushing. We tripped over an oddity at the weekend, and we love that sort of thing. You will, of course, know that Peter Cushing played Dr Who in the films Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks- Invasion Earth (1966).

A year later, he was Baron Frankenstein in the Hammer Horror film, Frankenstein Created Women (1967). A slight mood change in this version, as the film dwells more on psychology than surgery. Frankenstein re-models and re-animates the body of a disfigured young woman, Christina, with predictably unhappy results (Hammer fans may also want to check our recent feature spawn of the ripper: the true story)

Who else was in the film, you ask? Christina was played by Susan Denberg, who you may not know, as she did little acting. She was born Dietlinde Zechner in 1944, and was a Playboy Playmate the same year that Daleks – Invasion Earth came out. But lo and behold, one of her only other roles was in the episode of the original Star Trek series, Mudd’s Women, in which she played Magda Kovacs.

Frankenstein-Created-Woman-06 — “oh, baron, this is so sudden.”

That’s not much of an oddity, you say? Then we unveil for you – Derek Fowlds. Every greydogtales listener will immediately know him as the man who played second dandy in Frankenstein Created Women. As Johann, a young blade, he taunts the disfigured Christina – and pays the ultimate price when Christina is brought back by the Baron.

As Mr Derek in the Basil Brush show on UK TV, Fowlds was beloved of millions, who laughed to his antics as a bemused secretary to a pompous, self-important boss. No, hang on, that was Yes Minister. More importantly, in the same year as he starred in Frankenstein Created Woman, he made the pilot show for Solarnauts, which is our real oddity (at last).

This is a lovely piece of naff sixties TV which could only have been improved by the addition of some proper decimal places. For some reason Fowlds keeps saying things like “Three over six” and “Five over seven”, as if he’d been set some fractions to work out while he was reading the script. Nevertheless, it’s 25 minutes of pure sixties fun, including:

endless corridors marked with identical triangles, some of which paralyse you so that you can be put into a tube – yet they also work on the baddies, who don’t seem to know their own base;
handguns which ‘transitise’ their targets, which is like being paralysed but with more special effects;
a woman whose space helmet is thoughtfully shaped like a flapper girl’s hat to distinguish her from the jolly tough guys;
a super-villain who can do almost anything, except when the good guys are punching his goons and ruining his entire plan, when he stands around for a while picking his nose (or something).

vlcsnap-2012-07-06-01h01m16s14 — “not tonight, i have a helmet-ache.”

Fowlds plays the thrilling character Tempo, who with his companion Power takes on the might of Logik. They win, by the way. It’s complete rubbish, in an enjoyable sort of fashion (apart from the sexism), and we’re not hugely surprised that it didn’t get picked up.

It was, however, produced by Roberta Leigh, who had already made the superior SF marionette drama Space Patrol, another childhood favourite. The galasphere (spaceship) went round and round like a spinning top, so you could play Space Patrol at primary school and annoy the teachers. We only had one and a half teachers at the village school, but we did our best.

So we liked the puppets more, but as this is greydogtales, we’ll let you make up your own minds. First, Solarnauts:

And then Space Patrol.

It might have been worth mentioning that Thunderbirds also had solarnauts in it, in the episode Sun Probe, but that would have been going too far. And their solarnauts had ridiculously bushy eyebrows. At least Derek Fowlds had his facial hair under control.

So we’ll ignore that, and bid you adieu for now.

Next time: Some serious William Hope Hodgson. Or Torchwood and Roger Zelazny. We can’t decide. And there are more author and artist interviews in the pipeline…

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Doctor Who and the Detective – It’s the Starkey Stratagem!

March 27, 2016 greydogtales 4 Comments

The man who is Carnacki, inside the recording studio, being Dr Who’s Strax, weird fiction and more. Today we’re delighted to be joined by actor and great guy Dan Starkey in another exclusive greydogtales interview. Are we cool, or what? (Please DO NOT answer that question.)

Dan stands out for us, and for many of our listeners, because of his recent, superb audio performance as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. His is really the first proper rendition of the role as it was written, and we are not the only ones who have called his performance definitive.

He is, however, a man of many parts (some of them hidden under mounds of prosthetics) and we shall try to do justice to his range by probing away…

greydog: Dan, welcome to greydogtales. Given that you have a background in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies, a constant source of interest with us for mythic inspiration, we have to start with one crucial question. Why acting?

dan: Thank you for having me! Yes I did my undergraduate degree and MPhil in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic initially on a whim. I was going to do English Literature at university, but then I saw the subject in the Cambridge prospectus and it captured my attention, as it combined a lot of my other interests apart from “pure” literature, such as aspects of linguistics, history and archaeology.

In the end I realised that my interests ultimately lay more on the literary side of things, but I was very glad to have taken a more round about route in that realisation, acquiring a reading knowledge of four mediaeval languages in the process. I think I probably had at the back of my mind a self-image of some M R James type antiquarian, or slightly less energetic Indiana Jones substitute, but that’s only with the benefit of hindsight.

Certainly when I finished my degrees and returned to reading literature in my own language I was extraordinarily grateful at how relatively straightforward it was to appreciate! Old Irish, for example, is immeasurably more distant, aesthetically as well as linguistically. Acting was always something I did at school, and is the flipside to these rather monkish, hermetic parts of my character. I have had times – especially when I was contemplating becoming an academic which was an obvious career path having studied such an esoteric subject – when I’ve tried to ignore the “actor” side of my nature, but it honestly drives me nuts. I’ve learned to embrace my inner show-off, and thankfully it’s enabled me to pay my rent for most of the last ten years, so I’m doing something right…

greydog: We think you must be. We’ve been digging. You were nominated as Best Male Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards (Offies) in 2012. You’ve been involved in the Fitzrovia Radio Hour, classic radio plays of the 40’s and 50’s performed in front of a studio audience, and much other audio work. And of course, you had numerous appearances on Dr Who and Wizards Vs Aliens. Which do you prefer? Treading the boards, TV or audio?

dan: It’s great to have a mixture of things to do, though it seems inevitable that the grass on the other side is always greener: I’ll be doing a play, and I’ll think, wouldn’t it be nice to do some TV, or I’m doing a talking book and I feel the urge to get on stage and experience the crackle of live performance. As I’ve mentioned above, I think different media allow you to satiate different impulses you have as a performer, whether it’s the intimacy of an audio performance when it’s just you and the microphone, or the adrenaline rush of doing live theatre on stage in a thousand-seater auditorium.

On a purely mercenary level, it’s worth noting that the most fulfilling jobs aesthetically are not necessarily the best paid, whereas saying three words in a voice-over for a Skoda commercial – to pluck an example out of the air – could pay your rent for a few months, so being a bit “pick and mix” is a necessity!

greydog: We want to hear more about you, Carnacki and Hope Hodgson, but we feel we should address the Sontaran in the room. When we announced you were joining us, rather a lot of listeners went “Oooh, Strax. We love him!”. The character is enormously popular. Was your transition from multiple Sontarans to Strax himself by accident, or something you actively went for?

dan: I had no idea prior to getting the script for “A Good Man Goes to War”, the story in which Strax makes his debut, that I was going to have more than a token couple of lines in the background as another Sontaran, and in that story Strax did appear to die. He was a character who leapt off the page, as did Vastra and Jenny, and clearly they struck a chord with both the production team and the viewers. When you get given the opportunity to play such a fun character that people love, you’ve got to go with it!

greydog: We know that there are a lot of folk out there who are glad you did. We write weird fiction, but sadly, we’ve never come up with a female Silurian detective, married to a young Victorian woman, who is supported by a literal-minded alien warrior with nursing credentials. Is it fun to perform your role in the Paternoster gang, or just work?

dan: It’s both! I remember the first time I played a Sontaran, Commander Skorr, back in 2007. It was my first television part anyway, but after getting used to the surreality of wearing a rubber suit for the best part of fifteen hours a day, and having my head poked in fascination by David Tennant, I remember spending the best part of an entire day running around a warehouse, shooting soldiers with a zap gun and laughing insanely. At various points it did occur to me that I was actually getting paid to do it as well, and reeling in incredulity, although that might have been due to overheating in my foam latex mask. With Strax, I’m always very well served by the writing, and even if I’ve only one line in a scene, I know it’s likely to be a memorable one.

greydog: Let’s shift through time and space, avoiding the comment that Madam Vastra isn’t far from being an occult detective herself. Carnacki. Producer Scott Handcock spoke to us about the background to the audiobook a few weeks ago (see carnacki lives!). He said that you were immediately interested when you heard about the plan for Hope Hodgson’s tales. So you were already quite a fan?

dan: I had read a couple of the Carnacki stories, having been introduced to the character by his appearance among the 1910 grouping of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the various iterations of which are a marvellous primer for different types of weird and pulp fiction over the last century or so! I believe that the former Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel had referenced Carnacki in some of the Doctor Who spin-off literature of the 90s, so I had been aware of him for a while.

Reading the stories a bit closer, in preparation for performing them, gave me a deeper appreciation for the character and he’s quite fun in that he’s a balance of the bluff and vulnerable. He affects his listeners in that he lets them into his thought processes, the shame and terror, as well as his rational, methodical attitude to the supernatural – or ab-natural as he dubs it. I love all the references to stories we haven’t seen as well. I’m always a sucker for a bit of world-building…

greydog: As editor/publisher and media enthusiast James Bojiacuk recently said, “(Starkey) is able to take Hodgson’s thin characterization and – with nothing more than acting and emphasis – make Carnacki a compelling, full character. It’s exceptional.” How did you manage to bring such life to the role?

dan: I’m delighted with how well it’s all gone down. I hope it doesn’t sound glib, but I used the techniques I always utilise in these occasions: I read the text closely and use my imagination! I think the feeling of the period is evoked very clearly in the writing, and that is very helpful in locating the voices for me. Carnacki’s obviously an Edwardian gent judging by his diction, and I think that rather being an impediment, the rather florid language in some passages gives you more to chew on and play with, than a bit of bland neutral prose would. The supporting characters are also quite boldly drawn, especially in the case of the Irish characters in The House in the Laurels, being written in an almost phonetic Edwardian stage Irish, so that really necessitates you go for it in terms of characterisation, as something half-hearted just wouldn’t make sense of the text at all!

a typical recording studio last week (courtesy effectrode) — a typical modern recording studio last week (courtesy effectrode)

greydog: For the uninformed, like ourselves, what’s it like when you get into the recording studio? Serene and solitary, or surrounded by tutting sound engineers and producers looking at their watches? Hard chair and a gun to your head, or a comfy sofa and a pot of tea?

dan: It depends on the nature of the recording. For Carnacki, as it’s a solo read for the most part, it was just me in the booth with Scott outside giving notes over a microphone and Neil Gardner – who runs the studio – at his sound-desk, making sure all the technical details are ok. I’ve done audiobooks with just Neil though, so it can be an oddly intimate business, talking to yourself for eight hours or so on the trot. It’s also quite a darkened little room and especially after lunch, I sometimes take a power-nap in between chapters to keep myself fresh. I’m very good at napping, which I learnt how to do on touring theatre. With a full cast audio drama, of the type I’ve done for BBC Radio and Big Finish Productions, it’s much more convivial, with a green room and studio full of other actors to interact with.

On that note it was lovely to see Joe Kloska again – who plays Dodgson – who I first met and worked with many moons ago when we were both recent drama school graduates. I’ve met very few actors who don’t enjoy doing radio. It’s quick and fun, and whilst you’ve got to be on your toes, it does allow you to play a wider range of parts than you might do on screen or stage, as the main criterion is how you sound as opposed to what you look like. I always find it hilarious when I’m playing some 6’10” heavy on the radio, as in reality I’m only 6’7”…

greydog: And outside of Hope Hodgson, are you an enthusiast of other period authors and classic supernatural or strange tales?

dan: I try to read widely, and I’ve certainly got a taste for the weird amongst other literary flavours. Lovecraft scared the hell out of me when I was about fourteen and I’ve returned to him many times since, as I did to M R James, who I also love. I’ve dabbled in Poe and recently enjoyed The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers. There are a lot of modern writers who are riffing off the “weird” tradition I enjoy, like China Mieville, or Ian (M) Banks, and there are a lot of intrusions of weird subject matter into “literary” fiction, such as Thomas Pynchon, or Will Self.

I recently finished a Hilary Mantel novel from 2005 – before she had such massive success in historical fiction with Wolf Hall and its successors – called Beyond Black, which is a semi-satirical novel about mediumship. It provides an interesting perspective on similar subject matter that Carnacki deals with, transposed into an acutely contemporary setting; it was a nicely mundane and down-at-heel counterpoint to Hodgson’s somewhat more gentlemanly Edwardian vision of the spirit-world.

greydog: Yet another book for our ‘to read’ list. With six Carnacki tales under your belt, what would be your next choice audio role? Are there any other notable characters who you would really like to play?

dan: I’d definitely like to do the remaining Carnacki tales. The Hog in particular is fantastic. Outside that, I’d love to do some of the writers I’ve mentioned above, although I imagine that Lovecraft’s prose would provide even more tongue-twisters than Hope Hodgson’s…

greydog: We may nag Scott Handcock and Big Finish about The Hog at some point, in case they forget. Finally, any acting plans or news for 2016 that you can share with us?

d8eaec_2a34eea8d35d42e186-000 — the london improvathon

dan: I should be taking part in the 50-Hour London Improvathon at the end of April, which this year is set on the Orient Express (details at: http://www.improvathon.co.uk) There’ll also be the second series of a Children’s BBC comedy programme I was involved in last year, called Class Dismissed which will film in the summer. Apart from those there’s nothing too definite in the diary. In my job I expect the unexpected, like Carnacki!

greydog: Thanks very much for taking the time out to contribute to greydogtales, Dan, and we wish you every success in the future.

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Don’t forget that you can hear Dan as Carnacki by picking up the new audio collection from Big Finish. Click the image at the top of the right-hand sidebar for more details. Five hours of occult detective goodness!

If you’re feeling Dr Who-ish, you can see Dan being made up as Strax here:

And you can get even another Dan Starkey audio fix by having a listen to Jago, Litefoot and Strax:

“The worlds of classic and new Doctor Who combine, as one of the favourite associates of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors – the Sontaran Strax – encounters Jago & Litefoot – the Victorian friends of the Fourth Doctor.”

ycb4rkrg37dtrjndgsve jago, litefoot and strax – amazon

Next time on greydogtales: Weather anomalies in Namibia. Or the knitting pattern for a life-size model of David Tennant. A lurcher in a space helmet. We really don’t know. But we will try to keep it weird…

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Cthulhu for Girls

March 25, 2016 greydogtales 1 Comment

or Where Next for Lovecraftian Fiction? In which my writing, H P Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, women and other strange phenomena crash into each other, and everyone goes home in tears. Or something like that. Never give a man his own website, he’ll only spoil things. Even worse, I’m on my own today. Editor-in-chief is at the gym; technical support crew and longdogs are otherwise engaged, and Twiglet, for some reason, is chewing a box of three-inch screws.

I therefore head to the trenches without tactical support. Obviously I have no actual answer to the “where next” question. This really ought to be a drunken panel at a convention hosted by a cool Jamaican woman in an armoured exoskeleton with her own cattle-prod. That would be more fun. Much of my own work is Edwardian period occult, and owes more to William Hope Hodgson and J B Priestley than it does to H P Lovecraft. But I do have a few thoughts. Oh dear…

In the past few months since the Great Re-Emergence, I’ve been monitoring anthology calls fairly keenly. After all, I might have a story on an old gum wrapper which could be swiftly adapted to current needs. You know the drill. Cross out “Kevin the Plumber”, replace with “crazed scholar” and add more eldritch bits. There’s nothing worse than a shoggoth stuck in your Non-Euclidean u-bend.

During this time I’ve seen calls for LGBT Cthulhu, Inclusive Cthulhu, Turn HPL on His Head, Post-Lovecraft Weird, Historical Mythos and a number of others. Which is fine. And I’ve read many interviews with contemporary authors (even conducted a few), interviews which considered different aspects of writing in or beyond this area, such as:

representation of women as protagonists and significant antagonists in Lovecraftian works;
countering the bleed of racism from HPL’s personal views into his fiction;
the need to re-explore his basic tropes and themes in non-Mythosian ways;
the abandonment of Lovecraftian themes altogether as having served its time, or being restrictive as a framework for modern weird fiction.

I was pondering on this lot when I accidentally came across a couple of pieces which interested me. I’m not going to comment on them as such, but I do think that both are useful to the discussion.

barracks-1203202_960_720 — the house where all lovecraft’s female protagonists live – uh oh, it’s empty…

Sean Eaton writes a blog called The R’Lyeh Tribune, which is invariably worth a browse (see link at end). He recently interviewed Ross Smeltzer, author of The Mark of the Shadow Grove, a collection published in January 2016. I haven’t read the collection yet, but the interview dwells considerably on the influence of Lovecraft. In particular I noted Smeltzer’s comment:

“In each of the novellas in The Mark of the Shadow Grove I wanted to tell stories in the weird and Lovecraftian mold that also included compelling characters, particularly female characters. Their absence in so much classic horror fiction—and their virtual nonexistence in Lovecraft’s canon—speaks to the truncated perspective of many weird fiction writers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Lovecraft ignored women in his fiction because his understanding of who could constitute a protagonist in a story was limited to bookish white men like himself.

“I wanted to incorporate women into a Lovecraftian framework and to do so in a way that upset gendered representations of femininity. I strove for ambiguity. I don’t think I wholly succeeded, but it’s an artistic agenda I plan on pursuing further.”

The very same day (honestly, not one of my usual lies) I found a book down the back of a shelf, a book about which I’d completely forgotten. It was Douglas E Winter’s 1985 collection of interviews with horror authors, Faces of Fear. It contained an interview with Ramsey Campbell, in which the Great Man said:

“What appealed to me about Lovecraft was that sense of enormous cosmic awe… It certainly worked for me then – not so much now, I’m afraid, although I do still like Lovecraft; I find him fascinating for various reasons.”

He then went on to add, concerning his own collection of Lovecraftian fiction, Cold Print (also 1985):

“I was attempting, very clumsily, to get at that sense of awe. But at the same time, it was also very much a means of not dealing with my own fears. It was actually a means of writing about quite different things, and probably rather comforting in some way, being able to achieve something that had nothing directly, personally, psychologically, to do with me… Only when I became impatient with the Lovecraftian structure… did I begin to get on to dealing with things that were a good deal more personal.

“Lovecraft is the most widely imitated American horror writer; M R James is the most imitated British writer; Hitchcock is the most imitated director. The reason is precisely that their technique is part of their surface – you can actually see their technique. It is in the foreground of their stories, to the extent that you can actually see it working and take it as a model.

“So Lovecraft was very much about the style being literally appropriate to the material, but I felt that there were other ways of doing it.”

Of course, Ramsey Campbell was speaking thirty years ago, and I can’t pretend to know what his views would be now, but I like what he says – excepting the suggestion that Cold Print is clumsy in any way. I still love that collection. The rest of his interview is well worth reading, by the way, as are those of the other contributors.

I wanted to present these two fragments for anyone who might have missed them, but naturally I have my own opinions. In fact, I have opinions like Twiglet has dandruff, impossible to eradicate and going all over the place.

I grew up steeped in Lovecraft, forty years ago, and given the weight of all those tentacles at the back of my mind, there is no way I can ignore HPL’s influence. So I did get tempted recently into writing a few Mythos stories. Having done so, I have no excuse for keeping silent, so what was my take?

Of least importance, my first move was with the Sandra’s First Pony series. These stories are Mythos in their roots but very non-Lovecraftian in structure and tone. Enid Blyton and the Chalet School, with a touch of folk-horror and a lot of ill-judged humour. The main protagonists are a cheerful schoolgirl with a shotgun and a violent, slightly psychotic talking pony. Sandra and Mr Bubbles do at least challenge HPL’s short-sighted stereotypes, and if there’s any agenda it’s a feminist one, so I feel reasonably good about that.

But they are only for fun, and I’ve written two serious stories in the last few months. The first, Messages*, is a deeply Mythos tale in which the protagonists are a mother and her daughter, operating beyond normal constraints and barriers. They’re sane, they’re not stereotypical cold-hearted killers or anything like that, and the tale isn’t about sex. It’s about parenting, belief and responsibility. You may or may not enjoy it, but the point was to move forward in a way which might be Mythos but new as well.

The other one is With the Dark and the Storm, which is doing the rounds at the moment, a story seen from the point of view of a small Igbo village in British colonial Africa. I worried about this one, because you don’t counter racism by having old white Yorkshiremen writing about indigenous African beliefs. At the same time, I wanted to see if a good story could be told from a viewpoint other than that of Lovecraft, Edgar Wallace and other writers of the time. The structure itself is quite traditional, the angle not. If that works, or if I should even have tried it, we shall see.

And I can understand why writers such as Ted E Grau (see a voice from the nameless dark ) and others, having contributed powerfully to the Mythos field, seek to move forward rather than dig the same fields over again and again. I sort of feel the same way myself, and yet I constantly get tempted to play among the roots.

So I thought that it might be a good idea to read Dreams from the Witch House – Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror**, and that’s my current bedside book. This collection (edited by Lynne Jamneck) contains some cracking women writers of today, and maybe they might help me decide. Will something new still grow in this strange, slightly tainted soil?

I’ll leave that with you, while I go look up the price of ammunition for a Hopkins and Allen .32 in 1908. Boys, eh?

####

Whilst we’re on – or off – Cthulhu’s dad, it seemed appropriate to mention a work-in-progress by writer and editor Sam Gafford, who has graced these airwaves a number of times. Normally we touch base with him over William Hope Hodgson, but Sam kindly sent us some artwork by Jason Eckhardt, and we wanted to show it off.

He and Jason are in the process of producing a biographical graphic novel called Some Notes on a Non-Entity: The Life of H P Lovecraft. The title is from an essay by Lovecraft which formed part of Arkham House’s second HPL publication, Beyond the Walls of Sleep, 1943.

This collection is mostly minor pieces, and Some Notes was later released by Arkham in a limited edition (500 copies) twenty years later in 1963. The essay’s most recent outing was in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy; Autobiography & Miscellany edited by S. T. Joshi (2006)

It’s hoped that the graphic novel will be out by the end of 2016. If you want to keep up with progress, you can wander over to the Facebook page, where more artwork and commentary are added as the great work continues.

some notes on a non-entity facebook page

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*Messages, by me, will be available in Martian Migraine’s new anthology Cthulhusattva, coming 23 May 2016.

**Dreams from the Witch House will be available on Kindle from 12 April 2016 (we were fortunate to get a bundled special offer copy), and we may yet say more about that one.

The full article for Lovecraft, Diversity, and the Occult: An Interview with Ross Smeltzer, can be found here:

the r’lyeh tribune

Out of space, rather than outer space. Keep your wireless set on, because in a couple of days we have our super brilliant Easter special, an interview with actor Dan Starkey, the new audio Carnacki (and also, for Dr Who fans, Strax the Sontaran, of course)…

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Lurchers at Sea

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