Tag Archives: interviews

Michael Hutter Interviewed: Carcosa and Beyond

April 3, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

We are great enthusiasts of weird, surreal and magical art here, as all our loyal listeners know. We have no disloyal listeners, as they were given a free tour of Mrs Gumworthy’s Meat Pie Factory, and unaccountably disappeared around that time.

So it’s our great pleasure to welcome German surreal artist Michael Hutter to the site, especially as his range of stunning illustrations includes the Carcosa cycle, a theme which crosses into so many works of strange fiction.

Before we interview him, we should say a little about Carcosa itself, Pre-eminent among the authors who have written of this haunted city are the Father of Carcosa, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?), the Master of the Yellow Sign Robert W Chambers (1865- 1933), and of course H P Lovecraft and his inheritors.

(The question-mark by Bierce’s date of death is due to his disappearance, with a last supposed letter dated December 1913. There is still no satisfactory explanation of when – or indeed where – Bierce died.)

If there is a beginning to our trail today, then it lies in An Inhabitant of Carcosa. This story by Bierce was first published in the San Francisco Newsletter in 1886, and then included as part of his collection Can Such Things Be in1887. It’s a short piece, and appears at first to be about a man who awakens from sickness to find himself in an unfamiliar landscape. You’ll have to read the story to grasp what else might be implied. It can be found online – one link which usually work is here:

an inhabitant of carcosa

Alternatively you can listen to an audio version:

The narrator in the above version is Otis Jiry.

Robert W Chambers built on An Inhabitant in his stories of the Yellow Sign, collectively known as The King in Yellow. He used and re-interpreted some of Bierce’s names, and his stories refer to a play, similarly called The King in Yellow, which says more about Carcosa itself.

Reading this forbidden play brings new insights into the universe, as well as despair or utter madness. People have said the same of greydogtales, mind you.

Where Bierce placed the city of Carcosa in the apparent past, in Chambers it is to be found on the shores of Lake Hali in the Hyades, either far from our own planet or in a dimension/universe apart from ours.

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

—“Cassilda’s Song” in The King in Yellow Act 1, Scene 2

Some think that Bierce was drawing on an imaginative view of the French medieval city of Carcassonne, which was called in Latin Carcaso. Sadly, although we’ve been to Narbonne, and slept in a public park in Perpignan (the gendarmerie were not amused), we’ve never been to the great walled city itself.

800px-Nadaud_BNF_Gallica — gustav nadaud, bnf france

There have even been suggestions that Bierce knew of a song/poem by Gustav Nadaud (1820 – 1893), Carcassonne. This seems questionable, as the nearest date we’ve found so far for Nadaud’s piece is 1887, the year after An Inhabitant was published. However, it is possible that the work was in circulation before that. Carcassonne the poem is about a man who will never see that ‘fabled’ city, and is quite interesting in itself in that it evokes a sense of how strange and wonderful the city is.

‘They tell me every day is there
Not more or less than Sunday gay:
In shining robes and garments fair
The people walk upon their way.
One gazes there on castle walls
As grand as those of Babylon,
A bishop and two generals!
I do not know fair Carcassonne,
I do not know fair Carcassonne!’

Check out the full poem by Nadaud if you like to pursue these threads – it’s easily found online.

Many gifted contemporary writers have continued exploring Carcosa and related concepts, but there are too many to mention here. Joe Pulver Sr alone has contributed numerous stories and poems to this area, and there have been some excellent anthologies in recent years. We might try and pick up on a few if we do a dedicated King in Yellow post at some point.

####

And so to our guest Michael Hutter. Despite telling us that he doesn’t talk well about himself or his work (and the fact that our German is very rusty), he was still kind enough to participate in an interview for greydogtales – and to send us loads of artwork to accompany the interview. We feel somewhat honoured that he was willing to take the time, and have tried to illustrate the post with as many of his works as we could.

Michael Hutter is a German painter, illustrator and author who studied at the University of Applied Sciences in Koln under Professor Marx, a painter himself who produced a number of challenging expressionist works. Michael has had many solo exhibitions in the last thirty years, in addition to providing illustrations for fantasy books, heavy metal albums and other media, and once said of his paintings:

“In my opinion truth is somehow an illusion anyway. I mix that with my obsession, passions, desires and fears and choke what happens in the abyss of my personality back on the surface.”

Let’s get down to our interview.

greydog: Michael, thank you so much for joining us. We, and many of our visitors, are enormous fans of your art. Do you have a central vision for your work, a set of principles, or is it a more unconscious process?

michael: I try to follow the logic of dreams, it’s an unconscious process.

greydog: Much of your art is presented as a number of themes – Inkubi, Carcosa, Games in Purgatory und so weiter. Do you work intensively on a particular theme or concept for some time, or do you collect together pieces with common aspects later on?

michael: One idea or “story” usually has several aspects. I try to find them all and tell it to an end. This is how the work-groups develop. Sometimes I realise during working on it, that it is a series, on other occasions I know it from the beginning. Sometimes I start with the idea of a story and develop the pictures from there, sometimes it is the other way round: I start with one (or a few) picture ideas and realise during painting or drawing that there is a connection, sometimes a story, sometimes just a feeling. You see, it’s a bit complicated…

greydog: We’re not experts, but we see obvious echoes of Hieronymus Bosch, the Surrealists, Tarot art and even non-European elements. Are there particular artists from the past who you feel influence you?

michael: I think influence is overrated. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And those giants have been influenced themselves by others who have been before them and so on. Of course Bosch is important to me, but so are many others. If I want to do justice to all, the list would grow much too long (and quite boring as well). The interesting thing about an artist is not where he is coming from, but what he or she might add to the evolution of art.

greydog: Yes, a fair point. Your work is described variously as surreal, magical and visionary. Do you feel part of the Visionary Art movement, as promoted by Laurence Caruana?

michael: I feel part of the evolution of art, but not to any smaller group or sect.

greydog: A number of artists (and aspiring artists) read greydogtales. Could you tell us something about the main techniques you use?

michael: I prefer traditional techniques like oil, tempera or watercolour. I do my ink drawings with a dipping pen and my graphic works are mostly etchings.

Most of my oil paintings are done in a very precise three layer technique, the “Carcosa” cycle is an exception: the pictures are painted in one layer – fast and quite “impressionistic”.

greydog: We’re not very familiar with contemporary German art. Is there much interest in your work in your home country, or do you look more to the international scene?

michael: I’m not very familiar with contemporary German art either. It seems that the official art scene is quite hostile against fantastic art in my country. I’m much more interested in the international scene, and thanks to the web I have good opportunities to show my works in all parts of the world that have free access to the internet.

greydog: This is the first time we’ve seen your photographic work. The Ancestors Gallery and Inkubi and Sukkubi present disturbing and distorted views of humanity. Is this a period from your past, or do you still produce these kind of pieces?

michael: Hmm, it’s rather a period from the past. I really like these photoshop works, they were very inspiring to me and had a big influence on my painting and drawing, but in the end I really prefer the unique character of traditional works. And I prefer the haptic surface, the brushstrokes or the feeling of fine lines that you can feel with your fingertips to what comes out of an inkjet printer.

greydog: We are also great admirers of Santiago Caruso from Argentina, whose pictures share certain aspects of surrealism with some of your own. Are you familiar with him?

michael: I saw some of his works on the internet and liked them a lot.

greydog: Your Carcosa illustrations are absolutely superb. We know many enthusiasts of writers like Robert W Chambers and Ambrose Bierce – do you read much early and weird fiction yourself?

michael: No doubt, weird fiction has a big influence on my work, I have always read a lot. I think I was about sixteen when I discovered Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and it hit me like an epiphany. Literature (specially if it deals with the strange and uncommon) still has a very big influence on me.

Again my “list of influences” would be too long and boring for this short interview. But to mention a few – of course the classic writers like Poe, Lovecraft, Chambers, Smith and so on. Very important is the Bible (maybe the cruellest book I have ever read), the fairy tales of the Grimms, Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast”, also I’m a great admirer of Thomas Ligotti… and now I’m so unjust to stop this list.

greydog: And finally, do you have a major direction or project for the year to come?

michael: Doing the paintings, especially the altarpiece for a huge cathedral, sculpting a city of eerie doll-houses, transforming the Book of Genesis into a Lovecraftian graphic novel… there are lots of ideas but the trouble is, that life is not long enough to do everything that I’d like to do…

Currently I’m finishing a project that occupied me for over two years: “The Kranzedan” a cycle of (very) short stories, drawings and oil paintings. I’m trying to put this material together as a book, still not knowing how and where to publish it.

greydog: Many thanks for joining us – we look forward to your new works, and we hope that The Kranzedan will emerge soon.

Another of Michael’s earlier projects was Melchior Grun, five ballads told and drawn by him, tales of a wandering medieval minstrel, Melchior Viridis. With baroque illustrations to accompany the text, Melchior travels areas, “which had never before seen a Christian”, and is confronted with the sins of the flesh and malicious contemporaries. This was a limited edition which is no longer available as far as we know.

[UPDATE: Michael has just informed us that some copies of Melchior are still available directly from him. Contact him via his website, given later below.]

You can obtain copies of the following, but only as a German language e-book. Die Dämonenbraut (The Demon Bride) is written as a fragment of the memoirs of Richard Upton Pickman. H P Lovecraft fans will recognise the name from Lovecraft’s 1926 story Pickman’s Model about an artist who creates horrifying images and is banned from his Boston circles.

d7a825d4bd44c27cb897c7f05bf6ca76 Die Damonenbraut at Amazon UK

And Michael Hutter’s website is at:

http://www.octopusartis.com/

Thank you as well, dear listeners, for joining us. In the next week or so, we really mean to get that Torchwood and Zelazny post together, and we have a great interview with occult detective author, Warhammer scribe and writing-machine, Joshua M Reynolds!

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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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Sea Serpents, Saltwater and Ship’s Biscuits

March 11, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

The voyage so far: Matt Willis, author of Daedalus and the Deep, has been ushered into the presence of the commander of HMS Longdog. The commander, who has outlived five ship’s surgeons and is quite insane, assumes that Mr Willis is the sailing master and insists on taking the ship closer to the rocks, despite a lee shore…

A quick note for recent visitors

As we have a number of new listeners aboard, we should explain that greydogtales is the highest-rated website dedicated to lurchers, weird fiction and art in the world! Clearly, no-one else was deranged enough to attempt such a thing. But we do have a large following of enthusiasts from Australia to Argentina, Los Angeles to Leamington Spa. So you are part of history now, at least.

Lurchers and longdogs crop up here on a regular basis, but in between you will find regular features and interviews covering weird modern fiction, classic supernatural tales and fantastic art. Plus occult detectives, cool comics, strange audio links and so on. And occasionally we talk about the commander’s own writing.

Dog-oriented people who consider themselves adventurous may also wish to check out the starring role of Bottles the Lurcher in one of our exciting free Sandra’s First Pony stories. It’s not that frightening, it’s just not normal, so we did warn you. Click here if you dare: something annoying this way comes

Interview with Matt Willis

Time to get cracking. Matt Willis’s exciting nautical fantasy, Daedalus and the Deep, is our excuse today, and he has kindly joined us to talk about his work. This is, in a way, a Part One, because we also have a new article from him, The Sea Serpent Paradox, coming up in a couple of days. Here’s the interview first, to set the scene…

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Matt. Of all our contributors to Stranger Seas so far, you are probably the most qualified so far to talk about the theme in real life. Maybe you could set the scene by saying a bit about your maritime background.

matt: Hello! I come from a small village near the sea in Essex, a few miles from Harwich, which is a very old sea port on the East Coast. My grandparents’ house looked down on the port and I used to spend hours watching the ships coming and going. Later I joined the Sea Scouts there and sailed racing dinghies in the bay, having a lot of fun and not much success.

greydog: Does your familiarity with the sea make nautical fantasy and horror have less impact, or do you still get that shiver down the spine?

matt: I don’t know about less impact – perhaps more if anything, as if you’ve lived near the sea and spent some time on it, you get a sense of how eerie and scary it can be. I remember sailing on a completely fog-bound estuary, suddenly realising I had very little sense of which direction the shore was in. The only sounds were the lap of the waves and a dredger scooping out the channel. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a dredger but they make the most unearthly moaning, screeching sound.

It put me in mind of the Ray Bradbury story ‘The Fog Horn’, where an ancient sea beast is awakened by a lighthouse foghorn, which is a very atmospheric and tense tale. It’s a cliché that the sea has moods, but it’s true. Even when it’s calm, there’s a latent power there, and who knows what’s over the horizon? That ‘blank’ can really feed the imagination, and not always in a healthy way.

greydog: We mentioned The Foghorn in our post on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms not long ago (seven things that shaped a childhood). Now, we thoroughly enjoyed Daedalus and Deep, your first novel. It’s an unusual book. Enthusiasts of C S Forester and Patrick O’Brian could read it purely as a rousing naval adventure. Given the level of detail, this must have taken a lot of research into historical procedures.

matt: Thank you! It was very much written as a ‘straight’ nautical historical novel, and I approached it in exactly the same way I would have done without any fantastical elements. I’ve read some fantasy novels with nautical elements, and for me they didn’t necessarily satisfy the sea-dog in me. Readers of nautical fiction are notoriously hard to please, and I wanted that audience to be able to read my book without wincing. It did take a fair bit of research, but this period, the Navy and sailing ships generally have always fascinated me so I had a fair bit of basic knowledge to start with, which helped a lot. Much of it was book research, but I also made sure to visit some contemporary preserved ships, just to get a feel for the environment. I did want it to be readable for people who weren’t hardcore Forester/O’Brian fans as well though, and I hope it works as a story for those readers too.

greydog: But Daedalus is also a fantasy novel, which takes the less-travelled route of combining the fantastical with the real British navy of the time. What brought up the idea of combining the two genres?

matt: I started with the story, which was the ‘real’ sea serpent sighting reported by Daedalus in 1848. That rather dictated the way the book turned out, rather than deciding that I wanted to write a book that combined historical-fiction and fantasy elements. That said, I probably could have made it less ‘crossover’ by not giving the sea serpent a POV in the book. I couldn’t resist that though, and the first ‘voice’ that came to me in the writing was that of the sea serpent.

greydog: And the sea serpent is a major element of the book, which is as much as we can say without giving too much away. As the tale progresses, a number of texts are referred to by the ship’s officers. Are these all genuine references, or a mixture of history and your own creations?

matt: Most of the tales and research that the crew uncovers are based on real stories. When I was researching the sea serpent aspects, it surprised me how closely some of the historical sightings matched the description given by HMS Daedalus’ officers, so I decided to make that an element of the book. One thing that cropped up when I was looking into the real history was that reports of sea serpent sightings fell dramatically when steam power started to supplant sail.

greydog: We also liked the feel of a navy on the edge of change, with the advent of new technologies, and your own thesis concerned science and the late 19th/early 20th century novel. Have you ever considered going full-tilt at this and writing nautical steam-punk?

matt: I’d love to do something like that. I’m a bit of a fan of China Miéville’s ‘Bas-Lag’ novels which have a wonderful steampunk feel, particularly The Scar, which is heavily nautical. I don’t know how I’d get into that world, but one day a story might present itself to me that suits that kind of treatment. A friend of mine, William Angelo, is writing a wonderful piece at the moment, set in an alternative Edwardian world where a lot of 20th century scientific advances were made some time earlier, following a nationalist revolution. His world-building is amazing, and very inspirational. I’m also tempted by diesel-punk, as I love zeppelins – there’s a big affiliation between airships and navies as well, and development of rigid airships tended to be driven by naval requirements rather than land-based armies. Maybe a sort of alternative late 19th century war at sea and in the air… Watch this space, I suppose!

greydog: That sounds a damned fine idea. You have a number of irons in the galley fire, including your novel, short stories, naval air history and motorsport journalism. Which is closest to your heart?

matt: Non-fiction writing is ruled by my head, fiction by my heart. I love writing non-fiction history, but fiction allows me to actually imagine myself into those times. I’ve been writing a book about the P-51 Mustang for several years, and still haven’t finished it, but that inspired an historical novel about an attack pilot and a war correspondent in Italy in 1943. When my heart takes over, it’s fiction all the way, but the different forms of writing aren’t completely divorced. They use similar muscles.

greydog: Tell us something about the collection A Seeming Glass, and the Random Writers. We’d not come across them before.

matt: The Random Writers are exactly like The Avengers, and I’m very much in the Thor role. Actually, we’re more like a bunch of people who find creating weird and wonderful fictional worlds preferable to real life, and we encourage each other. Originally the group was set up through the Writers’ Workshop ‘Word Cloud’ by J A Ironside, mainly for like-minded writers to share ideas, critique each other’s work and generally for moral support. A couple of years ago now I noticed that several short stories people had brought to the group had similar themes and suggested we do an anthology. That idea was seized upon, and the first anthology, A Seeming Glass, came out in 2014. The idea behind that was to take a familiar story and do something unfamiliar with it. We enjoyed doing it, and it seemed to go down pretty well, so we did a second one, Something Rich And Strange: The Past Is Prologue, and that came out just before Christmas. The theme of the second one was ‘what happened after The End?’ in existing stories.

greydog: We always like to find out what authors read in their own field. Which fantasy, weird and/or nautical writers do you most admire?

matt: In fantasy, I particularly love Joe Abercrombie and Jen Williams at the moment. Both are very different writers but manage to produce well-paced fantasy that’s convincing and gritty, but can be humorous and make you smile too. I love everything Stephen Baxter does, and I’d have to say the way he can blend historical fiction seamlessly with SF/F is a big inspiration to my own writing. In nautical circles, Alaric Bond’s Fighting Sail series is my favourite current work – Alaric takes a slightly different approach to the traditional one, by having a range of voices in each of his novels from people from lower deck to Captain, and sometimes on both sides too. I’m also a long-time fan of Richard Woodman, who lives near where I grew up and has written many fantastic nautical novels. He’s very well known in the area, but deserves to be placed alongside the greats of the genre in my view.

greydog: We know Woodman’s work – there are indeed some very good novels by him. So, to the future – we believe that you have plans for a follow-up to Daedalus. Are you taking characters from the first book forward, or will you be heading in an entirely new direction?

matt: I do have plans for a sequel to Daedalus, which is all somewhat stalled because of some issues that I won’t go into here. The idea was to take some of the characters from that book forward a few years later, with a similar treatment of real but weird and unexplained events. However, that might now not happen for various reasons. I am thinking of going back to that world in a different way, however, possibly with a radically different approach.

greydog: Finally, as you’re our only interviewee ever to write about aviation, we’re going to end completely off-topic and mention the English Electric Lightning. With its striking profile and astonishing climb rate, this was the iconic plane of our youth – posters in comics annuals, a print on the wall at home, etc. Any views?

matt: I agree – the Lightning was everything a fighter should be. Power, presence and charisma. It’s one of my eternal regrets that I never saw one display. Around the time I started going to airshows, I probably could just have caught one before they retired, but I was far too interested in WW2 warbirds at the time. There are a couple at Bruntingthorpe that do fast taxi runs with the afterburners lit, so that might be a consolation one of these days. There was just something so unique about it. Ah well. I did see a Buccaneer display at Duxford, and the Vulcan at Southend back in 1990 – and spent much of the last eight years chasing the Vulcan round the country. I keep hoping one of the countries that still operates MiG 21s will bring one to the UK, as that would at least be the Lightning’s on-paper adversary and contemporary.

Images of the English Electric Lightning, supplied by BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI). — English Electric Lightning, supplied by BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI).

greydog: Thank you very much, Matt Willis.

Amazon author page: matthew willis

Website: http://airandseastories.com

Twitter: @navalairhistory, @Random_Lands

Facebook: www.facebook.com/daedalusandthedeep

A link to pick up Daedalus and the Deep can be found on the right-hand side bar. As we mentioned above, Matt has gone beyond the call of duty and also written an excellent article on the subject of sea serpents for greydogtales, so call back soon.

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On an unrelated topic, we featured the fun anthology Spawn of the Ripper not long ago (spawn of the ripper: the true story), and crept warily through some of the classic horror films which inspired the collection. We can now add that according to Rick Leider, one of the authors, his story Nightwork was inspired by the earlier film The Ghoul (1933), starring Boris Karloff and Cedric Hardwicke.

In accordance with our trivia obsession, we should point out that you must always keep an eye on the vicar in films like this. Here the vicar is played by none other than Sir Ralph Richardson. This was Richardson’s first credited film role, and is rather fitting. His mother was a devout Roman Catholic and wanted him to enter the priesthood. As a teenager, Richardson was sent to a Xavieran college for trainee priests, but ran away to become an actor. Well, eventually. Three years later, Richardson would work with Cedric Hardwicke again in Things to Come, the wonderful Korda adaptation of the H G Wells story.

We’re done. Remember , stay on this wavelength, and Do Not Go Outside – except to walk the lurcher…

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Strangers Seas: Cameron Trost & The Brisbane Factor

March 4, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

Interested in horror from Down Under? We’re still swimming across Stranger Seas, and today we have really gone the distance – to Brisbane, Australia, in fact. We’re delighted to be joined by Cameron Trost, horror writer and publisher, and we’ve added some moody sea art by Sebastian Cabrol and another appropriate Reiko Murakami.

Odds and sods of news first. The old greydog himself, known affectionately as John Linwood Grant to the Inland Revenue, now has half a dozen new stories being published this year, including dark Edwardiana, a Sherlock Holmes novella, a contemporary ogre tale and a Lovecraftian horror. More news will appear here if we remember. We should start a blog. Oh, hang on…

And we’re upping our lurcher and longdog content soon (but not at the expense of the weird), hopefully with another UK rescue feature, plus Lurchers for Beginners 6 (or 7?) and some other stuff. Speaking of which, the lovely Jenny Kirk, who we met through the lurcher world, sent us this picture of Sheffield, which we just had to share:

Our links have been expanded and updated, including a new one for writer, editor, Hope Hodgson expert and regular contributor here, Sam Gafford. He has a freshly-minted, shiny author’s website which you can find at: sam gafford, author. Pop along and marvel at Sams’ industriousness, buy his books and so on. That way he may do more contributions for us.

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Now, we did have a Stranger Seas interview here somewhere, under one of the longdogs. Here we go…

Cameron Trost

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Cameron. As you know, we’re currently majoring in nautical horror, so your anthology Lighthouses naturally caught our attention while we were trawling. As greydog’s father was a lighthouse keeper, we had to look closer. What inspired this particular idea?

cameron: The theme for the anthology is the chicken, and Black Beacon Books is the egg. When I founded my small press back in 2013, I wanted an original and mysterious name. I played around with a few ideas and liked the imagery of a black beacon perched atop a mountain or braving raging seas. I think it represents the tales I wanted; welcoming lights or urgent warnings in the dark. The idea for an anthology of dark tales about lighthouses and beacons resulted. There aren’t many lighthouse anthologies out there, and none with the dark atmosphere of this one. The potential for gripping and atmospheric tales was too great to ignore, and, as it turns out, the contributors delivered exactly what I wanted.

greydog: What would you say are the attractions of the sea for horror and weird fiction writers?

cameron: The isolation. The danger. The unknown depths full of mystery. What strange creatures lurk below the waves? What secrets are held in the hull of that abandoned ship? Does the sea cave of that desert island hide horrors and delights beyond reckoning? A talented horror or weird fiction writer can make the local supermarket a place of terror, and that can be really disturbing, but the sea more readily lends itself to exciting and intriguing plots, evocative settings, and memorable characters. Your father was a lighthouse keeper, so I think you know what I mean. I bet he was a bit of a character and had some tales to tell.

demons of the sea-08 — demons of the sea, cabrol

greydog: Yes, he really was a great story-teller, an eccentric man who loved being out on the rock lighthouses. where the imagination went wild. We were never sure how much to believe! How about you? Are you a landlubber or a high seas drifter?

cameron: I was born and grew up in Brisbane, a river city. It is on Moreton Bay (and there are legends of Portuguese treasure still waiting to be found) but I spent most of my childhood in the city itself. In his younger days, my father was a launch master on the Great Barrier Reef and a salvager in Moreton Bay, but the longest I’ve ever spent on a boat was a ferry trip from Melbourne to Tasmania, which is about ten hours. I love forests, which tend to be lacking on the high seas, but I like hiking along coastal paths and swimming in the surf. So, in answer to your question, I guess I’m a landlubber whose ideal environment would be a forest near the coast with paths leading past a lighthouse on a cliff. Steps are being taken to move the family to such a place.

greydog: Sounds ideal. Hoffman’s Creeper and Other Disturbing Tales is the first collection of your short stories. Is there common ground between the stories in there, or do you prefer diversity and different angles?

cameron: They are all tales of suspense and mostly have twists at the end. That’s the kind of story I like to read and it’s what I like to write too. Although every tale is different from the others, they are all suspenseful and disturbing. Many readers have complimented me on my ability to create an unexpected twist, and I think I do that by ensuring that my fiction is original (a quality that most readers don’t appreciate – just look at how annoyingly predictable most popular books and films are) and that I use the subtle art of misdirection effectively. In terms of character, there probably isn’t a lot of diversity (I find myself writing about heterosexual white people) but I like to examine the difference between working-class folk and the filthy rich. As for setting, the reader is taken from Brisbane to the Scottish Highlands, and from the French Pyrenees to the Australian desert. Despite any difference in setting, however, these tales are generally quite similar in that I try to write about people just like you, in towns just like yours, and then I do something to freak you out.

greydog: Now we want to go and check what that noise was. Tell us something about the themes you’re exploring in your forthcoming work. We’ve heard talk of novellas.

cameron: Let Darkness Take Hold, which is in Hoffman’s Creeper and Other Disturbing Tales, could either be considered a long short story or a short novella. Apart from that, I’ve completed the umpteenth draft of a novel manuscript, and I’m in the process of writing a series of novellas about a private investigator, of which I’ve finished the first draft of two of the mysteries and am working on the third. Early days yet, but I’m very excited about this investigator and the puzzles he sets out to solve.

greydog: You founded Black Beacon Books in 2013. Earlier this year we talked to Neil Baker, of April Moon Books in Canada, about the trials and tribulations of running a small/micro press (see once in an april moon). Have you found it a stressful process?

cameron: I haven’t found it stressful, mostly because I’ve been careful with money and realistic with deadlines. I recognise that Black Beacon Books is not (at this stage, at least) a business, but rather a project. What I have found disappointing is the lack of support. My writers work very hard on their stories and I edit their work painstakingly. A huge amount of time and effort goes into producing a publication. Don’t get me wrong, I have received encouragement and support, for which I am eternally grateful, but more is needed.

In particular, it’s really hard to convince people to actually buy books. That’s the biggest challenge. I’m not a marketing expert and I don’t have the means to pay for advertising (which is why I love interviews and reviews – thank you). ‘Trust me, this is a great book. It’s way better than 90% of what’s out there.’ That’s what I want to tell people, but that just doesn’t work. I think the key for Black Beacon Books is to take it slow, focus on quality over quantity, and appreciate every individual sale, review, and compliment. As our reputation grows, so will our readership and support base… right?

greydog: We’ll certainly do our part, and keep our tendrils crossed for you. Neil said similar things about the whole marketing problem for small presses. You’re also heavily involved in the Australian Horror Writers Association. Is there a thriving membership in Australia?

cameron: It is a wonderful association with around two hundred members. Australia is a vast country, but we keep in touch online. We also meet up sometimes. I am the coordinator of the Queensland community and there is a monthly pub session in Brisbane which is hosted by Stacey Larner, an AHWA member. We occasionally have free tickets for horror film opening nights too. We even had a game of lawn bowls together a while back. If anybody is interested in joining the AHWA, they should get in touch with me. One last thing, we are running our horror fiction competition right now and entry is open to everybody: ahwa story competition

greydog: In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep is an anthology of Australian horror from AHWA members. Do you see any differences in Australian horror, as opposed to that from other countries?

cameron: Definitely. In terms of language, we use British English but have our own colloquialisms and sayings, like ‘mad as a cut snake’. This is the first and most obvious difference. Of course, setting is the big difference. We live in an ancient land which is full of strange animals and eerie landscapes. Our days can we sweltering and bright, our nights dark and mysterious. We suffer droughts but also have some of the world’s most impressive thunderstorms and cyclones. There is no doubt about it, the Aussie landscape, and seascape, of course, is ideal for horror tales. The potential for weirdness and spookiness is infinite. There are numerous Australian horror anthologies and magazines out there, from Terror Australis (1993) to In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep. Going even further back in time, we have a rich colonial tradition of gothic and ghost fiction including the legendary Barbara Baynton.

greydog: We know it’s unfair to single people out sometimes, but who do you think we should watch out for in terms of Australian writers who work in this genre?

cameron: We have so much talent here, and there are so many different kinds of horror being written. It is difficult to single any one person out, but I have recently become a fan of Joseph Ashley-Smith. I admit, he was actually born in England, but he is one of ours now. j ashley smith

greydog: A name to check out. Now, we have absolutely no knowledge of Brisbane (most of our Australian friends are in Melbourne). Maybe you could give us a quick word-picture of the place while you’re here?

cameron: Brisbane is the third city of Australia with a population of about two million. It has changed a lot since I was a kid. It has long had a reputation as an overgrown country town, but it is definitely a big city now… almost too big, in my view. The best thing about Brisbane is the subtropical climate and the parks; we have plenty of gorgeous trees inhabited by birds of all different kinds, and the world’s biggest bats. It’s not a cultural capital (like Melbourne) and it’s probably bloody boring if you’re used to a metropolis like London or New York, but it’s a liveable city and close to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world… no, not those ones, I’m keeping the really beautiful ones a secret. There is some great mountain and forest hiking too.

A little history? Brisbane is young. It was founded as a penal colony in 1824, and people now buy souvenirs and eat ice cream in Queen Street, on the very spot where convicts used to be whipped until their backs bled. What about the treatment of the indigenous population? Well, there are at least seven streets in Brisbane called Boundary Street, so I’ll let you ponder the significance of that. But our dark past aside, it’s a beautiful city, and I love to feature it in my stories.

building-690854_960_720 — a lighthouse, just waiting for you…

greydog: And what else are you planning for 2016 – more Black Beacon books, more short stories? You mentioned a novel earlier.

cameron: As a full-time English teacher and a father of two young boys, time is a scarce resource, but I’ll try to get some more writing done. At the moment, Black Beacon Books is accepting submissions from local writers for an anthology of dark tales set in Brisbane, and hopefully that will be released in 2017. Later this year, I’ll probably announce a submissions window for another anthology, open to everybody. As for my own writing, I’d like to finish my next short story collection and polish my novel this year. I’d also like to find a publisher for the first novella in my mystery series. The short story is my preferred form, and I feel that it allows me to demonstrate my abilities as a wordsmith and tell a tale more effectively than the novel. I read far more short fiction than novels and admire my favourite writers for their short stories; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Ruth Rendell, Roald Dahl, Patricia Highsmith, to name a few. That said, it would be great to get the novel out there in 2016 or 2017. I’ve worked hard on it and am proud of it, and I think the popularity of the longer form will lure more readers my way.

greydog: Many thanks for joining us, and good fortune with your projects.

cameron: Thank you for your interest and support.

You can find out more about Cameron and Black Beacon through the following links:

cameron trost
black beacon books

And the great Ginger Nuts of Horror are also talking to Cameron here: cameron trost interview pt 1