Not strange seas, not strangest seas, but Stranger Seas. Yes, our Nautical Weird Theme leaves port, sailing cheerfully towards the Iceberg of Exhaustion over the next five or six weeks. What’s on board this wondrous vessel? Let us give you a taste, before we get short of really bad sea-based similes and metaphors, like a sailor who’s run out of tar for his jolly jacks:

• Brand new interviews with authors such as Steve Vernon, Ray Cluley, Matt Willis and Cameron Trost.
• Classic supernatural fiction set on and under the briny – ghost ships and things which come through the porthole.
• Dagon and his denizens of the Deep, for the H P Lovecraft folk, plus graphic Phoenician-0n-Phoenician action as they complain about their god being nicked.
• Lurchers for Beginners all at sea (or pretty damned wet, anyway).
• Sea-faring fantasy novels.
• Sea monsters! We have to have them. And sea-peoples. Not everyone with a tail is a monster.
• Writer on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson, the master of the maritime, returns.
• And maybe even aquatic superhero comics – Prince Namor and Aquaman dry out together in a seedy Arizona clinic?

If we get desperate, we’ll add pictures of fish who look stupid. We have no pride, as you learned long ago. If you are oceanophobic, there will be non-wet articles in between these, by the way.

More launch-time adventures at the end of the week, but for now we go straight to Steve Vernon, Nova Scotian and author of, amongst other things, the Sea Tales series of strange  stories. Here’s the man himself to tell you all about it…

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Steve, and thanks for joining us. Let’s start with what brought us together, our nautical horror theme, Stranger Seas. We saw you as an ideal guest for this theme – despite your wide range, you’ve returned to maritime myth and horror many times. Is this because of your personal roots in Nova Scotia, or did something else draw you in this direction?

steve: About forty years ago I came to Nova Scotia to visit my mother. I fell in love with the ocean and I have stayed here ever since. I’ve hitchhiked right across this country and stood in the Pacific Ocean, but my heart has always belonged here in Nova Scotia – here by the strong deep water of the Atlantic Ocean.

greydog: Do you sail, scuba or anything like that?

steve: Nope. I am a land-lubber. All of my sailing and deep-sea adventures take place in the imagination.

greydog: That is the safest, and driest, way. Tell us a little about the mythic side of our theme, and your 2006 book Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Nova Scotia. These are traditional ghostly legends which you collected, and in some cases re-told, is that right?

steve: I’ve been writing short fiction for about thirty-five years. In 2004 I attended the VERY first “Pitch the Publisher” event at Halifax’s annual Word On The Street festival. Pitch the Publisher is a little bit like Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank in that a group of want-to-be authors stand up and pitch a novel submission to a trio of local publishers. That first year over thirty books were pitched and Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories From Nova Scotia was the ONLY book to actually be published. Each of the stories in the book are tales that I have taken from Nova Scotia folklore. I painstakingly tracked them down in the archives and in the pages of old newspapers and I wrote them with a strong storyteller voice.

greydog: And because we are grey-dog-tales, after all, what was the Black Dog of Antigonish Harbour?

steve: The Black Dog of Antigonish Harbour is also known as Old Shug or Old Shuck. He is a legend that spans all the way back to the highlands of Scotland. The Black Dog is said to be able to foretell death. When you see the Black Dog you know without a trace of doubt that there is going to be a death in your family. The Black Dog is basically a tone-deaf banshee in dog tags.

greydog: We’ll add him to our list of spectral hounds. A couple of years later you wrote Maritime Monsters, for younger children, and then a Young Adult book Sinking Deeper. What interested you in writing for younger audiences?

steve: For many years I have worked as a Writer in the School, thanks to a local program backed by our local Writers Federation. As a Writer in the School I go to schools all over the Maritimes and I teach the kids about storytelling and the art of writing. I got tired of younger kids asking me if I had written anything for them to read – so I decided to write Maritime Monsters – a children’s picture book with fifteen individual short stories and fifteen wicked-cool kid-friendly illustrations. After that, as you say, came the young adult novel Sinking Deeper: My Questionable (sometimes heroic) Decision to Invent a Sea Monster.

greydog: But you moved on to create maritime myths of your own with your Sea Tales series, far darker and more adult in nature. Some of these are quite brutal, not always in the sense of gore but in facing aspects of life and death without a comfy get-out clause. Was this an intentional move for the series?

steve: You have to realize that when I started writing back in the mid-80’s I wrote an awful lot of short horror stories for such magazines as Cemetery Dance, The Horror Show, Flesh & Blood, as well as horror anthologies such as Karl Edward Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror and the Hot Blood series – so I have been writing dark adult horror stories for a lot more years than I wrote for children. So Sea Tales wasn’t REALLY all that out of the ordinary for me.

greydog: One Sea Tales story stands out both for its emotive nature and its viewpoint – I Know Why the Waters of the Sea Taste of Salt. A young kamikaze pilot of mixed-Chinese/Japanese descent flies into the hell of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. It’s a striking, sympathetic and very original tale which we would recommend. Where on earth did this come from?

steve: My imagination is a gigantic stew pot that I have been chopping up bits of meat and vegetables for every year that I have walked upon this earth. A story like I Know Why… is just a bit of strange meat that I stirred up out of the deepest end of the stew pot. I’d say that the roots of the story lie in an early fascination of mine with World War II in general and the Pacific island campaigns in specific. There was also a touch of an article that I read a very long time ago in a Fine Woodworking magazine that dealt with the carving of netsuke. A writer is like a crazy quilt maker – somebody who gathers up scraps of rags and creates beautiful blankets from these scraps and rags.

greydog: Will you be continuing with Sea Tales, or is that a ‘chapter’ in your career that’s largely done with?

steve: Oh I have no doubt that like the tide I will continue to return to the sea. In fact the latest novel I just completed is entitled Kelpie Dreams, involving a mermaid, a kelpie, a Sea Hag and a two hundred year old ghost. I don’t think I am ever going to get over my fascination with the ocean. You have to remember, after all, that our blood is basically nothing more than sea water.

greydog: Let’s escape the briny. As we said earlier you have a wide range, and you’re quite prolific. We get the feeling that you admire the pulp writers of old who could turn out a story in almost any genre, an age of slamming the typewriter keyboard as long as the bourbon held out. Is that true?

steve: Well, aside from the bourbon part you have got it dead right. Unfortunately bourbon always gives me heartburn as well as making me kind of cranky. I am more of a dark beer kind of a fellow – and I never drink anything stronger than good black coffee while I am writing. But there is nothing that I like better than sitting in my writing cave banging out a good old fashioned story.

greydog: We were interested in the Tatterdemon trilogy, all three of which are now available to buy in a single volume (see sidebar on right). Is this series inspired by actual legend, given that in the books the roots of Tatterdemon go back to the 17th century, or did you conjure this one up out of the air?

steve: Tatterdemon has to be one of my favorite novels – and definitely my best selling independent novel. I wrote the novel thinking about Stephen King’s Salems Lot. I have always loved using small towns as a setting for my horror novels. I grew up in a small town, way up in the Northern Ontario attic, about twenty miles north of Sudbury. I have always been fascinated by the isolation you can find in certain small towns. The scarecrows of Tatterdemon are definitely my own invention – although I sewed it strands of voodoo and the paranormal all through it.

greydog: Is there any aspect of horror that you’d like to write but haven’t got round to, any secret authorial dream that you’ve still to fulfil?

steve: I have got the makings of a Nova Scotia zombie novel that has been kicking around my workspace for an awfully time now. One of these days I am going to have to sit down and write it out.

greydog: Sounds fun. Finally, we like to keep in touch with anyone who appears on greydogtales to see what happens next, so what can we expect to see from you in 2016?

steve: As I mentioned, I have just completed a novel that I am intending will be the first in a series of at least three books, entitled Kelpie Dreams. It is a kind of a paranormal action-packed shoot-em-up-supernatural romance novel written for folks who truly hate reading romance. I have submitted that book to the Kindle Scout publishing program and over the month of February I will be actively campaigning and seeking out Kindle Scout nominations to hopefully get that book selected by Kindle Scout. I really feel that if I can get Kelpie Dreams picked up by Kindle Scout and get the weight of the mighty Amazon promotional team behind it that I will raise my indie author profile in a way that helps a lot more people find out what a truly mind-warping experience a Steve Vernon novel can actually be.

greydog: Many thanks again, Steve Vernon.

As it would be churlish to have Steve here and not support his Kindle Scout campaign, here’s the link where you can back him:

kelpie dreams kindle scout bid

You can find out lots more about his writing at his site here:

steve vernon – yours in storytelling

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As we’re heading back into William Hope Hodgson territory later on, this would also be a good time to remind listeners of Sam Gafford‘s great site on Hodgson. We say this because greydogtales is a compendium of weird things but an authority on none. Sam is the most dedicated scholar and collector of Hodgsoniana we’ve ever encountered, and there’s loads of interesting stuff there. Go browse.

william hope hodgson

And don’t forget that the new Carnacki audio from Big Finish should now be available. Six of Hodgson’s original stories, lovingly and faithfully rendered for your ears in a high quality production:

carnacki on audio

That’s it for today, we fear. Back to hauling longdogs and writing for a living. More greydogtales on Friday, if we remember where we put the fishing spears…