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.

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

The Seton Family

The Seton family have been a recurring motif in my work almost since the beginning.

The first one, Alexander, turned up in my Watchers vampire trilogy as an alchemist working on the philosopher's stone and the mysteries of immortality. (That original mention was based on a real historical figure who was purportedly the first man to succeed in an alchemical quest and achieve immortality. Port Seton on the outskirts of Edinburgh is named after him)

Since then other Alexanders. who may or may not be the same man, have turned up in The Concordances of the Red Serpent thriller, several of the S-Squad books and several of my Sherlock Holmes works. Then there's Augustus, another Seton, a swordsman and warlock in 16th C Scotland for who I've written a dozen short stories. There's another Seton in present day Glasgow, meeting the Midnight Eye in the Farside novellete.

Their fates are all interlinked with the book, The Concordances of the Red Serpent, a Scottish alchemical work of great antiquity and dubious origin.

Which brings me to Faster Than The Hound. John is a young Seton, grifting on the streets of L.A., aware of small magics but not of his greater destiny. He finds some of it, and another family member, in the course of a hunt for a leather halter, the finding of which drags John deep into his family mythology and deep into The Concordances as mythological Scotland surfaces on the streets of the city.

It's a bit of a departure for me, this one,being more fantastical than is my normal wont, but I had a lot of fun with it, and I think it shows.

Seton has a hellhound on his tail, and he will have to travel far to avoid it, further than he has ever travelled before.

P.S. I stole the title from a favorite song on the Horslips album, The Tain. Don't tell anybody.

ON AMAZON

OTHER STORES

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? : THE CREEPING KELP

I love the feel of hardcovers, always have since I was a boy. I still have an early Twentieth Century edition of Treasure Island that just -feels- like a book. That's something you don't get with ebooks

I've always loved being published in print. I've had numerous stories in anthologies, and my earlier novels are also available in POD paperbacks -- I drool over the shelf on the bookcase. That's why this was so important to me -- my first novel in hardcover.

As for what's inside the covers.... It's kelp. It creeps. :-)

It's a homage to several things. There's more than a touch of Lovecraft obviously, given that I've appropriated the Shoggoths, but there's also a lot of John Whyndham in there. I wanted to do a big-scale, Britain-in-peril novel for a while. The title came to me one day and I knew immediately that there was a story to be told there. There's also a bit of QUATERMASS in there too -- the old "British scientists screw up" genre has been with me for a long time and it's also something else I've always wanted to do. Here it is.

I started my fandom of the disaster genre young and at first it was from a Science Fiction perspective. The British ones from the '50s and 60's got my attention, in particular John Wyndham's DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and THE KRAKEN WAKES. Them, and A CANTICLE FOR LIEBOWITZ were my earliest introductions to the form. After that came tales of cosmic disaster, mainly Lieber's THE WANDERER and Niven and Pournelle's LUCIFER'S HAMMER. My interest was further piqued by Terry Nation's TV show THE SURVIVORS, and Stephen King's THE STAND, the first to being real horror to the genre IMHO. But my favorite in the genre is by Robert Macammon. His SWAN SONG is a roller coaster blockbuster which eschew's King's religious trappings for non-stop action and gritty realism mixed with a slug of the supernatural. My kind of tale.

I grew up on a West of Scotland council estate in a town where you were either unemployed or working in the steelworks, and sometimes both. Many of the townspeople led hard, miserable lifes of quiet, and sometimes not so quiet desperation. My Granddad was housebound, and a voracious reader. I got the habit from him, and through him I discovered the Pan Books of Horror and Lovecraft, but I also discovered westerns, science fiction, war novels and the likes of Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Alistair MacLean, Dennis Wheatley, Nigel Tranter, Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov. When you mix all that together with DC Comics, Tarzan, Gerry Anderson and Dr Who then, later on, Hammer and Universal movies on the BBC, you can see how the pulp became embedded in my psyche.

If I had to describe my writing style in five words, it would be these: Entertaining, pulpy, fast-paced, old-school fun. The kick-ass cover Wayne Miller did echoes all those sentiments. Order it now, or I'll send the Shoggoths round.

GET IT HERE

If you are like me and grew up on those glorious nature run amok movies you will absolutely love The Creeping Kelp and I highly recommend it. - Famous Monsters of Filmland

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? : CRUSTACEANS

Big beasties fascinate me.

Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche. I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?

On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.

Then there's Guy N Smith, who the book is dedicated to. Guy's killer crabs are remorseless, relentless and the kind of killing machine you can't help but love.

All those things were going round in my head when I first sat down to write the short novel Crustaceans.

As I started I only knew one or two things -- that there would be whales involved somewhere, and that the Crabs would be in the tunnels and sewers under the city. After some fascinating research into the history of excavations and tunneling I made a start.

I worked out a full ecological profile and lifecycle for my "beasts" but most of that went by the board as the plot took over. It went quickly, and I found myself enjoying it immensely. It runs in my head like a movie, and I'd love to see it on the big screen one day, or as a comic book. That's how I think of it -- big, brash and bloody.

It's definitely horror, but it's also Science-fiction, in a very 1950's B-Movie kind of way, a creature-feature if you like. It runs in my head like one of those lurid early technicolor monster movies, and readers will have fun thinking of it that way themselves.

Back to Guy N Smith again. This book began life as a possible collaboration with Guy which, for several reasons, didn't pan out. But the Crabs are all his, and without his original books, this one would never exist. (Indeed there are a few allusions in the book to the originals, a wee homage on my part.) 

He's sadly missed.

GET IT HERE

If you are a monster kid like I am you will absolutely love "Crustaceans", if you are not a monster kid reading "Crustaceans" will probably turn you into one, either way read "Crustaceans" it will probably be the most fun you ever had reading a book and I give it my highest recommendation. -- FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND

For high-octane, over-the-top crustacean carnage, with some of the biggest killer crabs we’ve encountered to date, you really can’t go wrong. It’s so pulpy and gruesome that you’ll find yourself mesmerised by the pandemonium and slaughter, as the mayhem erupts all around you. A homage worthy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the original series. - DLS Reviews

At bottom, it’s a fun book, written to show the reader a good time and nothing more than that, on which level it succeeds admirably well. I thoroughly enjoyed its pulp(ish) pleasures. --   BLACK STATIC #31

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? : BELOW

I've had a thing about caves and dark places since I was young.

Some of it stems directly from THE HOBBIT and the goblins under the mountains; I can still remember the nightmare that first reading gave me at age 9, of red eyes in the dark, creeping closer.

Round about that same time my pals and I used to share wild stories about possible caves around and under our home town. I also remember being convinced there was a cave somewhere up in the hills from us that had a bear skeleton in it, and that I only had to find it to also find the treasure it had been guarding.

Some of my family spent time as miners back then too, and I'd hear stories of theirs, and my imagination filled in the rest.

Fast forward a few years, and I was on a trip to Orkney visiting the neolithic stones, villages and chambers. I'm in a chambered tomb looking outward at the sun trying to line up a photie. Somebody taps me on the shoulder and says, 'excuse me.' I already know there couldn't be anybody there. I'd just come from the main chamber and it was empty. Turning round was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And of course, there was nobody there. I drank a few Highland Parks that night.

A few years later I had a similar experience, in Carnac in Brittany this time, and I got some of the same feeling in the catacombs under Medina in Malta.

On that same Malta trip I also had a magical cave experience, an underwater one scubadiving through a wee cave system with the fishes.

I've never been to any really big, deep caverns. It's something that's on my bucket list, but then again, what if the lights go out and I'm there alone in the dark? The wee boy who'd just read The Hobbit is still here somewhere inside me, and he's the one who'd be terrified the most.

As well as that, big beasties fascinate me.

Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche. I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?

On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.

Add into that a lifelong interest in Ray Harryhausen movies, and a love of reading about Lost Worlds, mix it all together, and here it is. You'll find plenty of beasties in this three book series.

A treasure hunt into the deepest cave system in Europe takes a turn for the worst.

Now rather than treasure it is survival that is at the forefront of the spelunkers' thoughts. But their attempt to escape out of the dark deep places is thwarted.

Men are not at home in the depths. But there are things that are, pale terrifying things.

Huge things.

Things red in tooth and claw.

To escape them they'll have to go deeper.

BELOW.

GET THEM HERE

 

Where do you get your ideas? : RAMSKULL

A lot of my work, long and short form, has been set in Scotland, and much of it uses the history and folklore. There's just something about the misty landscapes and old buildings that speaks straight to my soul. Bloody Celts. We get all sentimental at the least wee thing.

I grew up on the West Coast of Scotland in an environment where the supernatural was almost commonplace.

My grannie certainly had a touch of the sight, always knowing when someone in the family was in trouble. There are numerous stories told of family members meeting other, long dead, family in their dreams, and I myself have had more than a few encounters with dead family, plus meetings with what I can only class as residents of faerie. I have had several precognitive dreams, one of which saved me from a potentially fatal car crash.

I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as weird shit. I've spent far too much time surfing and reading Fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.

I've also been influenced by many Scottish writers. Stevenson in particular is a big influence. He is a master of plotting, and of putting innocents into situations far out of their usual comfort zones while still maintaining a grounding in their previous, calmer, reality. His way with a loveable rogue in Treasure Island and Kidnapped in particular is also a big influence. Other Scottish writers who have influenced me include Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Iain Banks and, more in my youth than now, Alistair MacLean and Nigel Tranter. From them I learned how to use the scope of both the Scottish landscape and its history while still keeping the characters alive.

Some more of the inspiration comes from the countryside, the history and weather. All those lonely hillsides, stone circles, ancient buildings and fog are ripe for stories to be creeping about in.

Then there's all the fighting. A country that's seemingly been at war with either somebody else or with itself for most of its existence can't help but be filled with stories of love and loss, heroism and betrayal.

The fact that we've always been England's scruffy wee brother, and have been slightly resentful of the fact for centuries adds another layer, the wee chip on the shoulder and the need to prove yourself is always a good place from which to start an adventure.

Added to that that we're a melting pot of Lowlander's, Highlanders, Islanders, Scandanavians, Picts, Irish, Dutch, English, Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese and everybody else who has made their way to the greatest wee country in the world, all with their own stories to tell and to make.

And when it's raining and dreich, what better than to sit by a fire with a stiff drink and tell some stories?

RAMSKULL is a return home for me after a few years writing Newfoundland based stories, and it's a back-to-my-roots thing that runs in my head like a Hammer Horror, with blood so red it almost glows, screams so high they tear the top of your head off, and stoic rural workers doing what needs to be done against a terrible peril rearing up out of the past.

Another one I think should be a movie. But then I would, wouldn't I?

GET IT HERE

Where do you get your ideas? ELDREN

I'm definitely a classicist when it comes to vampires. Mine are mostly evil blood-sucking bastards with bad breath and little clothes sense. To them teenage girls are food, not objects of desire.

That said, I have sometimes strayed from the lone vamp as predator meme. In my Watchers series for instance, I have a whole army of kilted Highland vampires facing organised bands of slayers.

And in that same series I explored the idea of vampires being a product of an alchemical experiment gone wrong, one of the paths on the Great Journey that is not often taken.

But I rarely stray far. It's the blood-urge, the need for food, that inspires me to write about vampires, and I can't see that changing. Gothic lounging and moaning about your condition in life (or undeath) is all well and good, but it bores me to tears, both in fiction and on film, and I find myself shouting: Bite something for god's sake!

The protagonist of Eldren: The Book of the Dark, Jim Kerr has no supernatural gifts, and he's no hero, at least not at first. He's a man who lost a family to vampires, and has been unhinged in the process. Normal people find him more frightening than any threat of a vampire, purely because he's more visible: to them he's a wide-eyed psychopath with a crossbow and pockets full of garlic.

Jim's journey to personal redemption is one of the main themes of the book. To fulfill his goal, he may have to descend to the level of his quarry. The questions that poses, and how he handles them, provide much of the tension for the book's climax.

I hope I never get accused of over-romanticizing the vampire myth. I work hard at keeping my books grounded in a harsh reality, where bad things happen to good people. Plus there's the fact that Eldren takes place in a working-class town in the West of Scotland. It's hard to over-romanticize people's existence in a place where unemployment is rife and life is hard enough to start with without blood-sucking fiends getting in the way.

In fact, for some of the townspeople, vampirisation is a step up the social scale, allowing them free rein to some base urges that had been bubbling just beneath the surface.

Eldren: The Book of the Dark is out now in paperback, ebook and audio editions.

GET IT HERE

Where do you get your ideas? : NIGHT OF THE WENDIGO

Since I moved from Scotland to Newfoundland I've developed a love/hate relationship with cold weather. Part of me finds it fascinatingly beautiful, and I'm often in awe of the force and majesty of the winter storms that sweep this island from January till April. But another part of me pines for warm, sultry days in the sun.

Back in the winter of 2007/8, a particularly harsh one in these parts, I started to have a germ of a story idea. At that stage I only knew I wanted to do an "ancient evil comes back for revenge" tale, and I wanted to trash a big city in print. (This was before I wrote CRUSTACEANS, and I hadn't tried anything on this scale before.) That it would involve weather extremes was a no-brainer, given that, at the time I had the idea, we had three feet of snow on the ground here.

I started with no real plan beyond an opening scene where archaeologists uncover an old boat on a cargo dock in Manhattan. Pretty quickly a cast of characters started to squabble for my attention; cops, forensic teams, other archaeologists and a conspiracy nut. Somehow they all fitted in to the same story, and I had to step back for a while to outline a plot.

The characters never stopped squabbling, but the main character, the winter storm itself, rode roughshod over them, and it was the force of the storm that drove the story forward in my head.

It runs in my mind like any number of big dumb disaster movies, with its theme of chaos and destruction coming to modern Manhattan, with antecedents in the Emmerlich and Devlin blockbusters 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and even Godzilla.

I'd love to be able to sit down with my popcorn and beer and watch it for myself on a big screen. It's a dream I have.

GET IT HERE

Where do you get your ideas? : ISLAND LIFE

All my work starts with an image, like a photograph. It arrives in my head, then starts to run like a movie, and the story builds from there. Sometimes the image is from the end of a story, and I have to run it backwards, but everything is done visually at the start. 

A while back, I came across a lighthouse on an island.

Over thirty years ago, I was on Lundy Island for a mate's 30th Birthday. We had a great time in the wee local bar, appeared on Channel 4 who were there at the time with us pretending, stiffly, to be locals, and stayed in a converted lighthouse set next to a burial ground and a neolithic chambered tomb. Much fun was had negotiating a piss off the top of the lighthouse while drunk after midnight, and dealing with the wailing banshee that lived in the stairwell.

I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as weird shit. I've spent far too much time surfing and reading Fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.

I lined up the photograph to have standing stones in the foreground and the lighthouse in the background. Then I started to wonder who would live in the lighthouse and what was under the standing stones, and a story began to run. That turned, eventually and more than ten years later, into my first novel, "Island Life" and, as a bonus, the publisher agreed to my picture of the lighthouse being used on the cover, so it went full circle.

I love monsters....especially black and white ones with the zips showing. Treat this novel like a fifties monster flick and you'll have a great time with it.

The book was out of print for many years, but is now available again in print, ebook and audiobook from Gryphonwood Press.

GET IT HERE

Where do you get your ideas? : THE INVASION

THE INVASION reached no 2 in both Kindle SF and Kindle Horror and has sold over 20,000 copies.

I nearly didn't bother writing it.

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.

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.

I more or less stopped reading Science Fiction round about then, but I never stopped watching, especially after Star Wars gave the visual genre a huge push forward. I re-discovered the '50s classics after the advent of the VCR and quickly built a huge collection of movies, many of which I still watch avidly.

Which brings me, in a long winded manner, to The Invasion. Invasions, and the resulting carnage, have always loomed big in my favorites of the genre, through War of the Worlds, Earth vs Flying Saucers, the original V series and even the spectacular failure of Independence Day. Neil Jackson asked me if I was interested in writing a four-part serial, and laid out a basic timeline. I ran with it, and soon discovered that I had a story to tell.

To regresss slightly, another part of my early reading, and the one that united my Science Fiction reading with my horror reading, was the works of H P Lovecraft. I realised that the Invasion in my story would have Lovecraftian antecedents, in that it would come from space, and be completely uncaring of the doings of the human race. My training as a biologist also made me realise that aliens should be -really- alien, not just simulcra of pre-existing terrestrial forms. Once I had that in my mind, it didn't take much to come up with a "color out of space" that would engulf the planet.

Most Invasion movies concentrate on the doings in big cities, and with the involvement of the full force of the military. I wanted to focus more on what it would mean for the people. Living as I am in Canada, in a remote Eastern corner, I was able to draw on local knowledge and home in on people already used to surviving in extreme conditions. I just upped the ante.

An interest in conspiracy theories and post-apocalypse survivalists also gave me one of the main characters, and the early parts of the story are a news report from the bunker where he has retreated to ride out whatever is coming. So come with me, to a winter storm in the Maritimes, where a strange green snow is starting to fall.

Where do you get your ideas?: THE VALLEY

The origins of "The Valley" are pretty simple to trace. In Fortean circles there have been attempts to find a picture that many claim to have seen, yet no-one has been able to find. This fabled photograph is said to show a group of Civil-War era men standing in a row wearing big grins. Spreadeagled on the ground in front of them is the body of a huge bird, a being that could only come from pre-history. In some accounts this bird is a giant eagle, in others it is even stranger, a leathery, paper thin Pterosaur.

Whatever the case, that image was the thing in my mind, and I had a "What if..." moment, wondering what would happen if cowboys came across a Lost World. From that single thought, the initial concept of The Valley was born.

There's a long tradition of Lost World tales, both in movies and fiction. Over the years I've devoured as many as I can find, from Conan Doyle through Haggard, from Tarzan in Pellucidar to Doug McLure in the Land that Time Forgot. Many of these tales involve dinosaurs, but I wanted something different.

For a while I didn't know exactly what "creatures" I needed, but that all changed as soon as the setting clicked. Back in 2005 I had the good fortune to holiday in the Rockies. It was while scanning through photographs of that trip that the thought of the high mountain valley came to me, and when Neil Jackson told me about Montana and the Big Hole Valley, I knew I'd found my spot.

And the pictures of the ice and snow from my trip also gave me the era from which I would draw my creatures -- the last Ice Age. I now knew that my protagonists would be heading into a Lost Valley where relic animals lived, and that these creatures would be hairy and large. I had an image of a herd of mammoths by a partially-frozen lake, and that was the image that drove me on in the early concepts.

Now I needed some protagonists. I knew in advance I wanted to write a "western" and some research led me to set the story in the 1860s, when something of a mini-goldrush was happening in Montana. The characters grew on me quickly. I wasn't too surprised at that -- my early childhood was steeped in Westerns. I have my Granddad to thank for days watching Wagon Train, Rawhide, Bonanza and Gunsmoke, then later on, The Virginian and The High Chapparal. He also introduced me to Louis L'Amour and others as I devoured his collection of Western paperbacks.

As I started the Valley I already knew that I was going to have six men thrown into peril, and that they'd be almost evenly split between white and black hats. Several of them surprised me as the story went on, but from the start they had a "depth" that reassured me that the story would go to all the right places.

I got them to the mining camp, and the start of the aforesaid perils. Then my muse threw a spanner in the works. I've been a Ray Harryhausen fan most of my life, and the creature that now came to mind was a Harryhausen special, one that I could "see" in my mind's eye, scuttling and "snipping". Unfortunately it didn't exist in the Ice Age, but at a time much longer ago. But I wanted it, so in it went. I won't give the plot away here, but suffice to say I managed to fit it in -- I managed to fit a lot of them in. And as a result the rest of the story immediately fell into place, almost as if I was channeling a new Harryhausen movie.

I wrote the whole thing in less than ten days, my brain thinking about little else the whole time. It's one of the most fun experiences I've ever had writing, and I hope it shows in the final product. Even now, years after finishing it, I still find myself thinking about the Valley, and the creatures that inhabit it. I even wrote a sequel, of sorts, in my Professor Challenger collection, where the Prof journeys to the same valley some fifty years later. And somewhere, the story still continues. One day I might go back to find out what happened next.

Where do you get your ideas? : FUNGOID

In this one you'll find a chunk of Newfoundland, a fireman, some nasty rain, a bit of real science, a lot of unreal science, some Canadians, many cigarettes, some trucks, boats and planes, and plenty of spores, mushrooms and rot.

For fans of John Wyndham, William Hope Hodgson and H P Lovecraft, here’s a wee homage to a lot of the things I’ve loved since childhood.

Something a lot of people don’t know about me: I used to be a botanist. And no, it doesn’t mean I know about gardening. For my honors thesis I studied how much archaeological information could be gleaned from analyzing pollen grains in the strata of peat bogs in Central Scotland, I spent a year after graduating cataloging the plant fossil collection in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and I had an abortive attempt at doing a PhD in the causes of rot in apples as they ripen.

I also learned quite a lot about fungi. The pollen analysis stuff hasn’t made it into a story of mine yet, but the fungi have – there’s something insidious about the creeping of mycelium, something obscene in the flesh of the caps, something scary in the fact that they spend so much time in the dark, just sitting there… growing.

I started to get a germ (or should that be spore ) of an idea a few years back of a fungal takeover of the planet, and I tried it out in a piece of flash fiction that I sold to NATURE FUTURES ( you can read that one–> here. ) It was the one image I had in mind, of a dark sky and vast, endless fields of high fruiting bodies. The image wouldn’t leave me, and it came back in another story, THE KEW GROWTHS, in my Challenger collection where the Prof has to tackle a giant fungal menace threatening London.

That story was fun – but the image I had in my head was still for something a lot darker – something insidious, obscene and scary.

Then another, accompanying, image came – a man in a HAZMAT suit, with nothing inside that was remotely human, just creeping filaments and bursting spores.

The story begins with spore-filled rain over Newfoundland. I’ve trashed my new homeland in this book. Sorry.

Where do you get your ideas? : THE GREEN AND THE BLACK

It’s a question all writers have heard. And in the case of my book, The Green and The Black, I didn’t fully realize where it had come from while I was writing it. A chunk of it takes place in a Newfoundland hospital. It was only on reading it back during editing that I realized how much of a recent personal experience had seeped in to the writing.

Back on Easter Saturday of 2017, my wife and I got out of bed, and she said she wasn’t feeling great. By the time we got out of the bedroom and along the landing she was teetering, and I reached her just as she fell at my feet.

She wasn’t breathing, and her eyes had gone glassy, like the dead blue eyes of a china doll. I really thought I’d lost her.

I got her rolled over and thumped her on the chest, twice, while screaming in her face. That did the trick, and her eyes fluttered, took on life and she was back, at least some of the way, although she was still not able to respond to me and couldn’t focus.

I phoned 911, an ambulance came after what seemed like an age, and some big burly chaps carted her off to our local ER, about 10 miles away. I followed, still shaking like a leaf, in the car.

To cut a long story short, and condense hours of worry into a few words, she had pulmonary embolisms in both lungs. The docs told me that 1 in 3 people who get them like that just die straight off, so we were lucky, in a way.

There followed two weeks of visiting her as she lay in a recovery ward. She was fully back and awake after a few hours, but the recovery was long as they fed her oxygen and blood thinners to try to get her lungs functioning somewhere near normal,

So that’s the background. The thing that seeped into my book wasn’t my wife’s illness though, it was the quiet professionalism, good cheer, and humanity of the medical and nursing staff, all of them heroes in my eyes.

As I read through my edits I saw that I’d captured some of that stoic quiet, and some of the atmosphere of how hospital staff go about immersing patients in an environment designed to make them calm, and give them time to heal.

There’s not much calm in the final book, but that’s not the hospital staff’s fault. The Green and the Black is something they have never seen before, something old that gets inside folks, and festers, thickens and grows.

Obviously, again, the disease in the book echoes in some ways the clots in Sue’s lungs, and again I didn’t see that until the edits. But my subconscious obviously knew what it was doing.

There was a nurse in that local hospital who sang ditties to herself as she went about her business. That too resurfaced in the book and again in a more sinister fashion, with an old children’s song I used as a recurring motif every time the supernatural made an entrance.

Other things in the mix came from my childhood. It was originally going to be about Kobolds, the goblinesque things that knock in coal mines.

Goblins in the deep places have haunted my dreams since a first read of THE HOBBIT, way back in 1968, and I’ve long wanted to do a modern times novel with them at the center of things. I started one a while back, but that fizzled out and ended up as a story in Dark Melodies. And similarly, when I got to the point for the reveal, there was something else behind the curtain.

The wee folk who turn up drinking and singing in the mines and the camp are close cousins to goblins of course, but give off the appearance of being something more jolly, at first glance at least.

I dredged these ones up out of some old Scottish tales originally, of people being trapped in fairyland after overindulging in booze and song and dance at the wee folks’ party.

And then things took an even darker turn, when I realized what song it was they were always singing in my story. I have my auld grannie to thank for all the snippets of folk songs, lullabyes, show tunes and hymns that provide me with regular earworms.

The dolls of stick, leaf and branch that became a motif throughout likewise came from old stories from home. Originally, they were going to be scarecrows, with goblins inside, but they too took another turn, when I realized the wood and leaf was still alive, still capable of taking root, and growing.

Some of my family did spells as coal miners, back in the auld country, and their tales too found their way in into the mix, of friendship and bonds, of dark places and sudden deaths.

Mix all of that in with some of my botany and archaeology experience and you can see that THE GREEN AND THE BLACK came from a soup of influences.

It's one of my favorite things I've written.

GET IT HERE

Shall We Talk About the Black Bird?

The black bird has been with me for a long time – 50 years and more now.

I think I first saw The Maltese Falcon in around 1965.

My granddad was a big Bogart fan, and I remember long Sunday afternoons spent sitting at his feet watching movies on the tiny black and white TV that was the norm back in the UK in the early Sixties. Back then everything was Britain was still in black and white – the Beatles were about to change all that, but Bogey would stay eternally gray and eternally Sam Spade for me. Even at that early age there was something about the snappy dialogue and the larger than life character that spoke to me.

I saw the film several times before I got round to reading the book – aged around 12 so about 1970. In much the same way as the film had, the book also spoke to me, touched something in me – the stuff that dreams are made of if you like.

When I started writing for myself, back in school, my voice was heavily influenced by teenage longings – I hadn’t learned enough of the ways of the world to be confident and sparse, I wanted to be flowery and intense and intellectual.

University, then ten years of being a corporate drone quickly drummed that nonsense out of me. I developed cynicism and from that my own voice started to emerge, enough to ensure I could cope with being an adult but not yet enough to turn me into a writer.

The booze did that. Booze and nightmares and a new wife that understood me better than I did myself.

The booze is part and parcel of being brought up in a working class environment in the West of Scotland. Beer came easy to me in my late teens, a love affair I still have to this day. Whisky I had to work a little harder at, but I persevered and developed a taste for single malts that means my habit is largely curtailed by the expense. It doesn’t mean I don’t get the thirst though.

The nightmare? I’ve been having it off and on since I was a boy. It’s of a bird – a huge, black, bird. The stuff that dreams are made of.

In the nightmare I’m on the edge of a high sea cliff. I feel the wind on my face, taste salt spray, smell cut grass and flowers. I feel like if I could just give myself to the wind I could fly. Then it comes, from blue, snow covered mountains way to the north, a black speck at first, getting bigger fast. Before I know it it is on me, enfolding me in feathers. It lowers its head, almost like a dragon, and puts its beak near my ear. It whispers.

I had the dream many times, and always woke up at this point.

Then, in 1991, I heard what it said.

“Will we talk about the black bird?”

The next morning, for the first time since 1976, I wrote a story. It wasn’t a very good story, but something had been woken up, and the day after that I wrote another, a wee ghost story. It didn’t have a black bird in it, but it did have some jazz, and a sultry broad, a murder and some dancing. When that one made me 100 pounds in a ghost story competition, I was on my way.

The bird comes back and whispers to me every couple of years – I’ve come to think of it as my spirit guide. Although it terrifies me, it also reassures me in a weird kind of way. As long as it’s around, I’ll still be a writer and not just a drunk with weird ideas he can’t express.

One of the bird’s recent appearances was a few years back, and the next morning I had an idea that fused my own history, my favorite movie and my bad habits into one coherent whole – BROKEN SIGIL is the most personal thing I’ve ever written. It’s also among my favorites of all my works.

Will we talk about the black bird?