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: 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 40 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 1991, 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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Where do you get your ideas? : ISLAND LIFE

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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.

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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.

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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.

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