Revisiting my influences: WEIRD SCIENCE

 

The first science fiction I ever encountered was Fireball XL5, one of the early Gerry Anderson productions. I was only about four years old, but I was hooked immediately on spaceships and adventure in the stars.

I grew up during the exciting part of the space race, staying up nights to watch space-walks then moon missions, eyes wide in wonder as Armstrong made his small step.

At the same time Gerry Anderson had continued to thrill me, with Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. The Americans joined in, with Lost in Space then, as color TV reached Scotland, Star Trek hit me full between the eyes.

And then there's Quatermass. Always Quatermass. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT in particular did much to mould my experience in the genre with its glorious melding of science, horror and horrific science. 

Also at the same time, my reading was gathering pace. I'd started on comics early with Batman and Superman. As the '60s drew to a close, Marvel started to take over my reading habits more, and I made forays into reading novels; Clarke and Asimov at first, and most of the Golden-Age works.

By the early Seventies I had graduated to the so-called New Wave, Moorcock, Ellison, Delaney and Zelazny dominating my reading, and they led me on to reading, then writing horror.

Those who know me know that I was once, almost, a scientist. 

Even from an early age it was what I wanted to do. Actually, I wanted to be a spaceman ( the fastest man alive ), but when I started into the studying in the ’70s, I found myself drawn towards biology and chemistry more than to maths and physics. I’ve retained a life-long love of all things pertaining to outer space, but when it came to time to choose a path beyond school, I went with the Biological Sciences and graduated in Botany from Glasgow University, and even made a stab at some real science for a couple of years before I was caught in the IT trap in the early ’80s. and ended up a corporate wage-slave in the City of London.

And there the science ended, for a while.

But in 2007 I escaped the world of corporate IT, came to Newfoundland, and science crept in again, this time in my writing. Scientists began to show up in the likes of THE CREEPING KELP, NIGHT OF THE WENDIGO, THE DUNFIELD TERROR, THE PLASM, FUNGOID and my Professor Challenger pastiches. There have also been a burgeoning number of short stories.

The scientists been getting even louder still recently. Weird Science concepts have been creeping on to my S-Squad series at regular intervals, and I've just delivered a scifi / horror crossover novella, A MURMURATION OF OPAS, to Weird House Press. There will be more.

In my work you’ll find mad scientists, bad scientists, and mad, bad scientists.

This is who I am.

This is what I do.

Revisiting my influences: GLASGOW

I’ve been talking these past few posts about influences. Place has always been a big one for me, and the first and one of the largest was where I spent a lot of time up to the age of 23.

When I was a lad, back in the early 1960s, we lived in a town 20 miles south of Glasgow, and it was an adventure to the big city when I went with my family on shopping trips. Back then the city was a Victorian giant going slowly to seed.
It is often said that the British Empire was built in Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde. Back when I was young, the shipyards were still going strong, and the city centre itself still held on to some of its past glories.

It was a warren of tall sandstone buildings and narrow streets, with Edwardian trams still running through them. The big stores still had pneumatic delivery systems for billing, every man wore a hat, collar and tie, and steam trains ran into grand vaulted railway stations filled with smoke.

Our family trips up early on were by steam train from a station that was to be shut in the Beeching purge of the early Sixties, but my memory of the tunnel and walkway up to the platform and the sight of the train chuffing into the station billowing smoke is still clear and bright. So too are my my memories of Glasgow itself: taking the old rickety trams along Argyll Street, marveling at the pneumatic tube system in Frasers, X-raying my feet in the shoe shops and getting myself lost among a press of bodies and road traffic unheard of in the small town we’d come up from.

Glasgow became a city of firsts for me; first trip to the theatre, first bookshop, first record shop, first rock concert, first chinese meal, first curry, first pint of real ale, first place I lived after leaving home, first place where I spent time unemployed, first job after my degree, first place I sang in front of an audience with a guitar in my hand and many more.

All long in the past now of course; I left Glasgow in 1981 and never lived there again. But I’ve passed through many times and spent months on end working there in the early parts of this century, The city has changed a lot over the years.
But its heart is still the same, and the old city still sleeps there, slumbering, waiting for the stars to be right again.

The main outcome from my time in the dear green place has been my Midnight Eye books.My series character, Glasgow PI Derek Adams, is a Bogart and Chandler fan, and it is the movies and Americana of the '40s that I find a lot of my inspiration for him, rather than in the modern procedural.

The old city can be found in the places where Derek walks, in bars untouched by time, in the closes of tenement buildings that carry the memories of past glories, and in the voices of older men and women who travel through the modernity unseen, impervious to its charms.

Derek Adams, The Midnight Eye, knows the ways of the old city. And, if truth be told, he prefers them to the new.

Revisiting my influences: LONDON

I went to London to seek my fortune back in early 1982. My relationship with the Old Lady proved to be a love affair that I still carry with me even though it lasted less than ten years.

For the first few months I was living and working outside the main city while making forays into the museums, cinemas and pubs of the city center at weekends. But the love only came after I started working in the old city itself. I got a job in a converted warehouse in Devonshire Square near Liverpool Street Railway Station. My desk looked out over Petticoat Lane Market, my lunchtime wanderings took me to the curry cafes of Brick Lane and the bars of Whitechapel in the footsteps of the Ripper. I was supporting computer systems down in the financial sector, and my wanderings down there took me to Bank and Monument, to indoor markets and gorgeous old pubs, to tiny churches and cemeteries hidden away in courtyards, and across the river, to Borough Market and even older pubs, like The George and The Market Porter. If you’re after a true whiff of old London, there’s few finer places to seek it.

A few years later we moved office to Farringdon Road and more old markets, Guardian journalists in the pubs and forays into the area between there and Euston. Then we settled in High Holborn which for me meant Skoob Bookshop, the British Museum and yes, more pubs, in the Victorian splendor of The Princess Louise, the high gothic weirdness of The City of Yorke and many more, including forays down to Fleet Street for some Dickensian musings in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and the Strand for The George and the Coal Hole under The Savoy for some slices of theatrical history, and many other bars, too numerous to mention or too lost to memory in alcoholic poisoning of the brain cells.

For a while London got into my soul. I got able to find my way around from just about anywhere inside the M25, I lived south of the river in Bromley, Beckenham and Ladywell, where I discovered that the flat I’d bought didn’t just have a bogeyman in the stairwell, but that the Old Lady’s Well bubbled up in the cellar, to my eventual enormous financial cost, But at least I got to know the similarly drunken patrons of a variety of night buses after concerts or drinking sessions during my time there.

London is indeed a fine old city. Almost, but not quite, the equal of Edinburgh or Glasgow in my heart. My real love for it came from not just the place, but from the people I met there. I met many Londoners, but I also met people from all over the UK, people from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Poland, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Greece, Turkey and many other far flung spots. I made great friends and a lot of them are still friends today, more than 35 years on. We spent many happy hours in those aforementioned old bars, telling each other stories. They heard mine, and I heard theirs, and the telling of them bound, and binds us in friendship all across the globe to this day. That’s been better than any fortune to me over the years.

Towards the end of my time in the Old Lady, I met my wife there too, in another of the old bars, and our courtship was spent over beer, film and theatre around Covent Garden and in the West End.

We got married in May 1981, left London and I returned to Scotland but some of the Old Lady came with me, in my friends and, eventually, in my own writing. When I started to drift into writing Victoriana, it was London that called loudest to me, from Baker Street and Cheyne Walk, from Bank to Embankment and yes, from bar to bar.

I’ve written many tales based in the old city, for Carnacki, Challenger, Holmes and a variety of characters of my own. The most recent visits are in my Inspector Lestrade collection from Weird House Press, THE BLACK TEMPLE AND OTHER STORIES.

There will be more.

Revisiting my influences: Nigel Kneale's THE STONE TAPE

 

Christmas, 1972, and I’m a month shy of my 15th birthday. Mum and dad are out at a dance and my gran is with me. My wee sister has gone to bed, so there’s just the two of us. My gran loves horror movies, and BBC 2 have one on. We know nothing about it except that it’s new, a first showing, and that it was written by the man who created Quatermass. We’ve both already seen Quatermass and the Pit, so we settle down, with the lights dimmed, to watch THE STONE TAPE.

Ninety minutes later, my life has changed forever.

THE STONE TAPE is a strange beast. The sets are wonky, the acting, especially by the male lead, gets very shouty and histrionic, there’s an annoying comedy subplot about washing machines of all things, and nowadays the tech on show, especially the computers, looks antique and clunky.

And yet…

Remember, this was before Stephen King, before Jaws, before The Exorcist movie. The real boom time for scares had yet to come, and I’d been getting my horror kicks from the likes of Dennis Wheatley. His rich folks in their country houses didn’t really resonate with the council estate me at all. But THE STONE TAPE hit me immediately with its modernity, and spoke to the parts of me that wanted to be a scientist, but also wanted something more.

At the end of that first watch of it, I felt like I’d been through one of those faulty washing machines. It’s the first time I remember being absolutely terrified by something I’d seen on television. Sure, there had been scares before, in nightmares brought on by my early voracious reading habits, of goblins and riddles in the dark, the mad monk who sometimes appeared at the foot of my bed, in the early watch of Snow White where the wicked queen really crept me out, and in the transformation scene in, of all things, Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor where I had to leave the cinema. But that Christmas night, I was nearly fifteen, and I thought I’d left all those childhood scares behind. But I was wrong. Very wrong.

THE STONE TAPE remains to this day one of the landmarks of supernatural television. The IMDB entry does little to give away just what makes it tick.

“A research team from an electronics company move into an old Victorian house to start work on finding a new recording medium. When team member Jill Greeley witnesses a ghost, team director Peter Brock decides not only to analyse the apparition, which he believes is a psychic impression trapped in a stone wall (dubbed a “stone tape”), but to exorcise it too – with terrifying results…”

It sounds hokey put like that, but Kneale’s way of layering a good idea with real people, involving not just the scientists but the regulars in the local pub, the vicar, and the telling of stories of the history of the house gives it depth and puts flesh on its bones, building the plot in much the same way as the stones themselves have maintained and built the story of the house.

I mentioned the acting earlier. Yes, the lead male is a shouty sod, and gets annoying on repeated viewings, but Jane Asher’s vulnerability works perfectly for her role, Ian Cuthbertson acts as a solid anchor for sensible types to try to hold on to, and there’s even a young James Cosmo lurking around in the background.

The soundtrack too deserves a special mention, providing screams and screeches, thuds, knocks and whispers that serve to throw even seemingly innocuous scenes slightly off balance, ensuring the viewer never gets time to settle.

It might have been Christmas, but this is no cosy ghost story.

As layers of personal relationships are stripped away at the same time as the house’s memory reveals itself, Kneale skillfully intertwines the modern and the past and the denoument, when it comes, is all the more shocking for it.

The last scene stayed with me all night after the first viewing, and after the holidays when we got back to school, I discovered that all my pals had seen it too, and had been just as affected as I had. We spent many an hour talking about it, and it led a couple of us directly into experimenting for ourselves with sonic mood altering tapes, with ouija boards, and with reading everything we could find about the Stone Tape theory.

It gave me a love of investigating old stones that persists to this day, and led me down pathways I hadn’t previously walked, into mysticism, Tarot, Magick and Astral Projection and many diverse subjects that have since molded not just my modes of thought, but my way of writing stories.

It’s all Nigel Kneale’s fault. It’s all THE STONE TAPE’s fault.

In the end, and the reason it affects me so strongly, is that it’s all about the stories we tell each other to get through life, and how stories from even the most distant past can survive, and resonate, through lifetimes, through the works of humanity, and break through into the present unasked for and unexpected, often at the worst possible moments. It’s a Lovecraftian sensibility that turns up frequently in Kneale’s work, a motif that defines his work for me as both thought provoking, and genuinely scary.

The idea of walls and building holding memories, and perhaps something more than that, perhaps some form of consciousness, has also recurred in my own writing, most recently in the ongoing SIGILS AND TOTEMS mythos I’ve been developing. Looking back at them much of my writing I can see Nigel Kneale’s legacy down there at the root, the seed from which so much of my life since 1972 has grown.

Terror is a rarely used word these days, but it’s one Nigel Kneale knew plenty about. He knew where it lurks, and how to evoke it.

Much like bringing an old story out of cold stone.

Time for a rewatch.

ABOMINABLE - the wee story that made it big

The wee story that could.

I've sold a lot of short stories over the years, over a hundred of them at professional rates, but ABOMINABLE has all of of those beaten into a cocked hat.

Back when I was just starting out in the early '90s, story submission was a matter of laying in enormous supplies of printer paper, ink ribbons, brown envelopes, stamps, International Reply Coupons, and spending many hours queuing in cold North of Scotland Post Offices,  sending out subs for which I might, or might not get a reply.

I was mostly subbing to small press mags back then that only paid in copies of their side-stapled, photocopied productions.

Towards the end of the 90's things were improving. Email came along, and my expenses were cut accordingly. The quality of markets was improving fast too, fuelled by the desktop publishing movement. And, wonder of wonders, I actually started making money from my stories.

I didn't get my first full pro-rate sale until 2005, but that seemed to open a floodgate and my career, and my payments from it, grew in leaps and bounds.

But still, a good payday for a short story, even in the pro markets, was a couple of hundred quid, maybe four hundred if I got lucky.

ABOMINABLE changed all that. It was published as a chapbook right at the start of the Kindle boom, and piggy-backed on my early work there that was selling like hotcakes. ABOMINABLE sold over 8000 e-copies at 0.99c each back in the day, earning me three thousand bucks in the process. 

It's still on sale today as part of my Chapbook Collection, still selling although at vastly reduced numbers.

I've sold another sixty of so pro rate stories to the genre markets since then, but nothing over six hundred bucks for any one of them.  

Be nice to hit that sweet spot again.

GET IT HERE

Where I got the idea for my Scottish Sword and Sorcery

 

Anyone for a bit of high magic, swordfighting and a taste of what Scotland was like before perfect teeth, nice hair and clean kilts became the order of the day in OUTLANDER?

Over the years I've written many stories set in my native country, in particular in the Watchers series. That series was written over twenty years ago now, and ever since I'd been itching to write some more historical fantasy set in Scotland.

I've tried my hand at several works of fantasy over the years, and they almost always come out the same way -- pulpy, with swords, sorcery, monsters and bloody battles to the fore. It's the way I roll.

I may start with good intentions, of writing high fantasy with political intrigue and courtly goings on but, as in the Watchers series or my Vikings vs Yeti book, Berserker, my inner barbarian muscles to the fore, says bugger this for a lark, and starts hacking.

The blame for my enthusiasm can be laid squarely at several doors.

There's Conan, of course, and Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon and the whole pantheon of Eternal Champions; there's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Solomon Kane, Jon Shannow, the princes of Amber and the shades of a thousand more by the likes of Poul Anderson, A E Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H Rider Haggard and many others.

I toyed with several ideas for a new Scottish work, but it took the death of two of my favorite writers to give me a kick. David Gemmell's muscular swordplay and Robert Holdstock's grip on mythic archetypes and the importance of history mixed in my head and gave me a sword-for-hire in 16th Century Scotland.

The late 1590s were a time of turmoil. Scotland was on the verge of many changes that would shape its future, from religious reformation, to the union of the crowns with England. But in many ways the country was still rooted in its medieval past, and fear of witches and demons was still a large part of everyday life. 

My Scottish sorcerer and swordsman, AUGUSTUS SETON lives in Stirling and is, usually, in the service of the King, fighting the good fight against the dark things of the world in between the drinking and wenching. Seton confronts demons, both internal and external, as he wanders on the fringes of history.

There are twelve stories in all so far. Back when I started writing them they were always meant to run as a series of chapbooks, and I'm pleased to now return them to my original vision for them. They are also currently in production as audiobooks.

Seton will return.

GET THEM HERE

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? : THE AULD MITHER

A reissue of an old favorite. The Auld Mither grew initially from a short story I co-wrote with Graeme Hurry, The Blue Hag, but it always felt worthy of a longer look. Here it is rebranded in a new edition.

It was started way back in the late '90s, when I lived in Aberdeenshire up in the North East of Scotland, and is set there, in a remote deer farm, where old traditions die hard, and The Auld Mither, a crone-like hag with razor sharp bones for fingers, is killing off the proponents of a new abattoir.

This one always felt to me like a Hammer Horror, with too red blood and too raucous screams. At least that's the way it ran in my head. Hopefully it'll run like that for you too.

At one time I had hopes of selling this as a movie, it was optioned, and I wrote a screenplay but that hope was quashed when the production company folded. But maybe someday I'll get to see it, with plucky Scots policemen, lonely manor houses, old crones at the crossroads and a pint of heavy in an old rural Highland bar.

It's a dream I have.

THE AULD MITHER is out now in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and a brand new audiobook wonderfully narrated by A.D. Milne who found the perfect accent for it.

The Auld Mither is a chilling tale of auld world clashing with the new world, with an interesting monster, and a great sense of storytelling it only serves to cement Meikle's reputation as Scotland's best horror writer. - GINGER NUTS OF HORROR

GET IT HERE