Strachan McQuade (Deceased) Interviews Adam Nevill
Adam Nevill first came to my attention when a friend pointed
out that both Nevill and I had set horror novels in the Scottish town of St
Andrews, and then took great pleasure in letting me know Nevill’s ‘Banquet
for the Damned’ was far better than my 'Garden of Remembrance'. Ouch. Naturally I had to check out
the competition and sadly had to agree. On a more positive note ‘Banquet for
the Damned’ signalled the emergence of a writer who has since breathed new life
into the stagnant and moribund Horror genre. Nevill’s stories are genuinely disturbing affairs and have a nasty habit
of finding their way into the dark cracks of the subconscious where they take root
and undermine a normally cheery disposition with micro-fissures of anxiety, gnawing
dread, deep-unease, and in severe cases; sporadic bed wetting. But if you want
to read proper horror fiction undiluted with cheesy romance, bad jokes,
loveable (but doomed) family pets, mad scientists, giant radioactive insects, or
even any glimmer of hope that you might make it through the book mentally
unscathed – Adam Nevill is your man.
His latest novel, ‘No One Gets Out Alive’, is guaranteed to
give your nervous system a good kicking, and if you ever look at polythene
sheeting the same way ever again you’re either devoid of any human empathy or
perhaps one of those weirdos who find shrink-wrapping sexually alluring.
As usual the Reverend Strachan McQuade has been dispatched to have a chat with Mr Nevill.
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| Adam Nevill |
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| Strachan McQuade R.I.P. |
McQuade: Welcome to Dead Man
Talking and this episode sees us squatting, well sitting actually, in a
derelict council flat rank with damp running down the graffiti strewn walls,
and all manner of rodent and insect life scurrying about outside the small
circle of light from my paraffin lamp. The flat smells strongly of urine, excrement,
rotting plaster, and mildew. So why
here, you ask. Two reasons really. Firstly, this element of squalor provides a
perfect metaphor for the background static that often seeps through the novels
of our guest, Adam Nevill. Secondly, our budget won’t run to a nice tearoom
with proper tablecloths and chintzy curtains which I was hoping for. Ahem…
actually come to think of it, there’s a third reason…
Nevill: Thanks for having me, Dead Man Talking, and welcome to my home. I'm so
pleased that you seem right at home. Oh, I wouldn't sit there. Not there. No,
no, no. The others wouldn't like it.
They could come back at any time, and they'll know that you touched their
things. And then, of course, they'll have your scent ...
McQuade: By Jove! The only thing I smell of is pipe tobacco and
kippers. Anyway, Nevill, hope you’re well and don’t have silverfish in your
pockets. Let’s start with an easy question – I have a theory that computer mouse
mats tend to reflect the personality of the owner. Mine for instance is tartan
with a superimposed picture of Stanley Baxter. I imagine your mouse mat to have
a many-tentacled Lovecraftian monster gripping a bleeding corpse between its slavering
jaws. Am I even close?
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| Not Adam Nevill's mouse mat |
Nevill: Mouse mat? My mouse mat is one of my note pads right now and has been
for about half a year. I actually have no interest in pens, paper, computers, or
any equipment as such. Equipment seems to be the least important thing about
writing, but it isn't always and I have often paid the price for this attitude by
using old and infernally slow computers that have nearly lost entire works and
given me a stroke through frustration.
So my ideal mouse mat would just be functional and effective and make
that mouse glide and not do that sticking thing, when you pick it up and shout
"cunt" and shake it ... and then you have lost the thread of whatever
it was you were writing. The current one does that all the time - the sticking
- and it is a miracle that the mouse has not been smashed against the wall, or
yanked out of the back of the computer, thereby damaging the computer, as most
of its predecessors have been.
McQuade: By Jove! No need to flip
your lid. Just as well I never asked what you think about Windows 8 (scrunches up
paper and tosses over shoulder). Now, in
your novel ‘House of Small Shadows’ there was a great deal of technical detail
regarding the art of Victorian taxidermy. If I killed one those greasy
big rats nibbling away at that pile of mouldering newspapers over in the
corner, could you, without the aid of a manual, rip its guts out and transform
the bleeding carcass into a delightful pipe-smoking rodent leaning nonchalantly
on a garden gate?
Nevill: No, and nor would I try. I did a lot of research into taxidermy and it
was stomach turning. Also, M H Mason was a master preserver of animals and
could set up a rat in sixteen hours, but most Victorian amateurs decimated this
country's hedgerows in a holocaust of animal hunting and trapping so that they
could make ghastly preserved creations that mostly fell to pieces or were
destroyed in the sixties. Little has
survived and all of those animals died cruelly and needlessly.
McQuade: (hastily stuffs a three-headed gerbil back into pocket and
mutters) Damn, I spent ages making that too.
Nevill: Incidentally, I once lived in a neighbourhood that suffered a
mouse epidemic when a huge shopping mall was built nearby, so we had to use
professional exterminators who left the animals rotting under our floorboards
in great number and- the smell was mephitic. The rodents came back too, and the
only way I could protect us was to seal the house was by finding each and every
hole and crack and slit and filling it with foam that set like cement; the mice were actually getting inside where the
radiator pipes came through the floor boards. When I realised this and filled
the holes, I never saw nor heard another mouse in that house. But I had allowed
exterminators to kill them in their scores and I still feel guilty. Had I
gotten off my ass and worked this out (I found out about what to do from an
RSPCA site), instead of just calling the landlord, no mice need have died and
we wouldn't have lived with that appalling stench for months . . . Afraid I can't stand cruelty to animals or
children, which distils into the horror in that novel, I'd say.
McQuade: I hope you feel much
better getting all that guilt and angst off your chest, but do please remember
this is an interview and not a free therapy session. Now… Oh, hang on, we have an unwanted visitor. An old homeless women standing in the doorway eavesdropping on our
conversation. Get lost you manky-arsed old besom! And no, before you ask, I
haven’t got ten pence for a cup of tea. Ha! That’s seen her off. I hate these
Friends-without-social-security-benefits relationships. Funnily enough, your
books are frequently populated by the dregs of society. The lost tribe of the
marginalised and alienated, who through drugs, drink, mental illness or just
plain old back luck have slipped through the cracks in the system. Is this a
deliberate attempt to raise awareness of those at the bottom of the social
pecking order? Or is it because you know they give your decent, law-abiding,
monthly-salaried, book-buying public the heebie-jeebies?
Nevill: That's a good question for me to think about. As a reader and
a writer I know that I've always favoured stories about outsiders and misfits,
the marginalised, and probably identify with them more than I identify with the
successful. From a writing point of view they're often far more interesting
characters too, with interesting, arresting and often appalling histories,
which are immediately dramatic in fiction; they also inhabit worlds, and exist
in situations, that are compromised by personality disorders, poverty,
victimisation. In and by itself that creates drama and jeopardy before you even
begin writing the story. I've come to Ruth Rendell's fiction very late in the
day, but that seems to have been her approach too, which is odd because I
always received a kind of Midsummer Murders twee English crime vibe whenever I
heard her name, but the books I have read are anything but twee.
Uncompromising and extreme characters in the arts and radical sun
cultures, and where those things sometimes meet, have always fascinated me and
attracted me as a writer, even if the subjects are utterly misguided; hence the
expressionist fascist painters, occult mystics, cult leaders, black metal Aryan
folklorists, priests who have lost their faith and turned to necromancy, that
inhabit my stories. In this year's book
I have focussed on a vigilante and organised criminals. There have been no
princesses or billionaires, spies or knights, in my books (yet).
McQuade: I think you’re missing a trick by omitting robot killer spiders.
Oh, so sorry, you weren’t finished talking, were you?
Nevill: I think only No One Gets Out Alive explores social
issues more overtly through a character's experience, though there is no
polemic which I find off-putting as a reader. As in other books, poverty and
loneliness are major subjects and themes of mine. In a time of excessive
economic inequality (2% of the population now posses 91% of the wealth) how
could I not write about the horror of being at the bottom? I made the situation
even worse by imagining a young, vulnerable woman in a terrible dilemma in
which exploitation, domestic violence, rape and murder are very real daily
concerns. Though young men are most
often the victims of violence, it seems calculably worse if you are a woman
subjected to the same, not least because of the risk of violation. So maybe
here, I have tried to imagine and to draw attention to the terrors of being
young, broke, female and nearly homeless.
McQuade: (Looks pointedly at his watch and rolls his eyes)
Nevill: I was also once poor, but by design, in my younger more foolish
years, but it had a major impact on me and it's not something I can just chalk
up as experience and move on from. But I had the means and advantages and
connections to get out, most in that situation don't; the young less so now than
ever before in my lifetime. The rules to a game they never designed have been
changed around them - opportunities are much reduced and the future looks grim. But when you're poor you think differently,
you lose confidence, morale, your will is replaced by a sense of futility, you
are susceptible to making poorer decisions than those you might already have
made, because your judgement is impaired by desperation. You become resentful, bitter, hostile. Poverty
is a living horror with few good outcomes, and poverty can happen to anyone
through a change of circumstances that you may have no control over. So more than anything, when I turn to a
subject like that, and one that I have some insight into, it has to feel
authentic to me. I don't daydream about success and glamour, I tend to daydream
about terrible descents into ruin and poverty or victimhood; it might be one of
the reasons I write horror.
McQuade: Your first published horror
novel, ‘Banquet for the Damned’, was set in St Andrews where I honeymooned with
my late wife in a leaky caravan with a plastic bucket as a toilet. Just my
rotten luck to catch gastroenteritis that weekend. Any reason why, as a
Brummie, you chose to set your novel in the Kingdom of Fife? Personally I
wouldn’t return there if they offered me a free pair of garish golfing trousers
and a life-time supply of pastel-coloured Pringle jumpers.
Neville: I took
a masters degree in creative writing from 1997 to 1998 at the university of St
Andrews. And I went up there with the idea of writing an homage to M R James
and the Gothic, Victorian, and Edwardian writers of the supernatural that I
admired, and I had a few ideas for a story too: a forgotten counter-culture
book that someone tried to turn into a concept album within an
apprentice/mentor relationship. The ideas were mostly vague, but when I drove
into St Andrews for the first time, one week before term started, I knew that I
had found a location for the story and would set it at the university. As I
progressed with the book, the town itself became a character and a
representation of the medieval sinister, the eeriness of the British landscape,
and of the hideousness in much of our social history - for me the town was
perfect. The town just became a vehicle for the book and actually suggested as
many ideas to me as I suggested to it.
McQuade: I’m told you once wrote
erotic novels. Are we talking about bodice-rippers abounding with thrusting
manhoods and damply yearning gussets? Or was it something worse? Like erm…
involving horses, jodhpurs and small stepladders? I myself once wrote
clerical-based erotic fiction for our parish magazine ‘The Steeple’ which I
always thought to be a more than adequate phallic metaphor at the best of
times. In fact the members of the Womens’ Guild in my parish were often
referred to as Steeple-Chasers on account of the way they… sorry, drifting away
from the subject here. Have I asked you a question yet? Oh, right. Erotic
fiction. So was it proper stories or just sordid ghost-written fantasies for
the letters page of Men Only?
Nevill: No stepladders were exploited in my books, But I wrote nine explicitly
sexual erotica novels for an imprint published by W H Allen, and then Virgin
Books, that were published between 1998 and 2006, and they were mainly sold in
Waterstones and W H Smiths on the High Street. And I wrote them for many
reasons. Mainly because, although already committed to writing, these were novels
that I could strike from my imagination without much research, and that I could
also use to cut my teeth with the craft of writing when I was starting out. They
were great practice; they had to be between 70 and 80K words in length and have
lots of sex in them, as well as a story - there were strict guidelines. And in
each one I tried different narrative techniques; I even wrote one in the second
person and based it on the Greek tragedies (I have no idea what readers
thought); there was a vampire trilogy in there too, though more Poppy Z Brite
than Stephanie Myer, and I even tried science fiction, and crime noir inspired
by Daniel Woodrell. I had fun, but I took them very seriously too, cared about
them as I do everything I write, and subjected them to the same criteria of
quality control that I still use today.
They actually kept me going for years until my horror began to appear in print
(for horror I had to wait a long time for publishing to change), but my success
with erotica kept my morale high and informed me that I could get published
traditionally and that I wasn't wasting my time.
I wrote Banquet' and most of Apartment 16 at the same time I wrote
the erotica. My first erotica novel sold about fifteen thousand copies too, and
was reprinted three times, and I hadn't told anyone that I'd written it! At
that time I remember one of my parents warning me about the impossibility of
becoming a successful writer and I couldn't tell them that I was off to a
flying start. It paid off my student
debts and covered my tuition fees. So it was also a good second income and I
had achieved my aim of becoming a professional writer. My editor at Virgin had
also imagined that I was a man in my fifties, but I was in my late twenties at
the time he'd said that. Another female reviewer was certain that I was a
woman. I was flattered by both endorsements of voice and I was quite a young
writer at the time. Another writer I know, who was once a bookseller on the
Charing Cross Road, told me a few years
ago that he remembered that when my second novel came out, that they had piled
it up around the tills because it was so popular. I never knew at the time.
McQuade: Any writers in particular that helped shape your literary
approach to erotic fiction? Personally I found Barbara Cartland’s novel ‘The
Love Pirate’ the perfect primer for my own efforts at penning a hot-action big pants
bedroom scene.
Nevill: My primary influence in erotica was Anais Nin. I read her
fiction around the age of thirteen and that's how I actually became acquainted
with the facts of life. There was no sex education in my school. But I had been
schooled in sex by Henry Miller's lover, Anais Nin, the greatest eroticist of
all, and through her stories; a woman who wrote bespoke fantasies for gentlemen
that were also great works of fiction. I loved her writing and her stories
broadened my horizons dramatically, and also made me want to have a go at the
genre when I was older.
McQuade: And to think I was once reprimanded
by my church elders for suggesting a ‘Parishioners Wives’ section in ‘The
Steeple’. One last question. Most writers I’m acquainted with suffer from a
mild manifestation of OCD. I myself am often compelled to count all the sharp
knives in the cutlery drawer. Do you have any similar quirks?
Nevill: No, fortunately. But I smoked continually when writing for years and
now vape with an electronic cigarette continuously, and that may have some
equivalency with O.C.D.
McQuade: Well, many thanks for your
time and trouble. By Jove! That horrible homeless woman has returned and
heading straight for us. Why is she opening her coat? No, love put them away, we’re
not interested. Well, Nevill might be. Hang about, is that bagpipes she’s showing us? Oh hell, those aren’t bagpipes! Quick, Neville, make a run for it.
It’s a Lovecraftian many-tentacled monster wanting to grip our bleeding corpses
in its slavering jaws.
Nevill: I told you not to touch her things. She'll hold me responsible.
McQuade: Better you than me. Run
you fool, before she…. Oh, that looked painful. Never saw anyone bitten in half
before. I'd get that seen to if I were you.
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