Ginger Nuts interview

For all of you desperate to read my interview that I did last year over at Ginger Nuts of Horror the website has moved so there's a new link to follow if you want to revel in my words of wisdom.

Demons & Devilry Review

Excellent review of Demons & Devilry over at Ginger Nuts of Horror. "Demons & Devilry is a brilliant anthology, one which manages to perfectly balance stories of a lighter tone with more dark and heavy tones."

Well done John Llewellyn Probert, Thana Niveau, Peter Mark May and David Williamson. And me.

The Impossibility Dissection

My story The Impossibility Dissection appears in Strange Aeons 12. I know The Impossibility Dissection sounds like an episode of The Big Bang Theory but it's actually cosmic horror with a dash of black humour. 

Astrologica: Stories of the Zodiac

I've a story in Astrologica: Stories of the Zodiac from Alchemy Press. Other contributors include Joel Lane, Ralph Robert Moore and Storm Constantine.

I discuss my story, Star-crossed, in this interview, in which I am incredibly witty and charming and only offend a major religion once.

That About Covers It

When Peter Mark May asked me to edit Demons & Devilry for Hersham Horror the one thing I was confident about getting right was the cover. I have a soft spot for the old painted covers that used to grace pulp paperbacks and felt that a sleazy mix of sex and danger would be the just the thing for a book of tales of black magic that followed in the footsteps of Dennis Wheatley. Even better, my friend Bob Covington -- a British Fantasy Award winning artist -- is a Dennis Wheatley fan. He would know just the kind of thing I was looking for.

"A pentagram; a menacing figure (either in robes or with a bare torso and a goat's head) waving a sacrificial dagger about; and an altar with a girl sprawled across it, preferably with her dress torn open," said Bob as soon as I told him what the book was about. "Leave it to me."

The problem was that the more I thought about it the more I thought that this wasn't quite the right approach. Yes, I wanted the artwork to invoke those old style covers by being dark and scary and sleazy but I didn't want it to be exploitative. It needed to be dark, decadent, depraved and diabolical -- but in a tasteful way.

That posed a problem. Should I ask Bob to go for the style of Bruce Timm's pin-up work, where the cartoonish line  lends the cheesecake an air of innocence? Or should the picture be rendered realistically but offering equal opportunity titillation, with as much male flesh on display as female flesh? I was leaning towards the second approach but that caused more problems. To generate the full-on sleaze effect the cover girl would probably need to be showing her nipples, anything else would seem coy in this context. This would be difficult justify -- this isn't the '70s, nowadays female readers (and a lot of male ones) won't stand for female nudity on a book cover. And even if we could get away with it how would we do the male equivalent? A naked male torso isn't anywhere near as taboo as a female one. To be on the same level of titillation we would probably have to show male buttocks and that led to problems with the composition -- in order to get a clear view of both the female and the male character who loomed over her and show off his buns of steel we would probably end up with a pose where it looked like he was raping her. That went waaaaaay over the line of good taste. I tried figuring out ways to work a mirror into the composition so that both characters' goodies were on display via their reflections but that just led to cluttered and incomprehensible layouts. I was tying myself up in knots trying to come up with a solution (getting tied up in knots was also on my list of things I wasn't sure if we should include on the cover.)  But as frustrating as all this was ultimately we ended up with an even bigger problem.

Bob was struck down with a  frozen shoulder. He could barely move his arm, let alone draw.

As the deadline drew nearer Bob's shoulder began to heal but he still wasn't up to full fighting strength. After discussing it with him we both decided it was more important for him to heal properly than to hinder his recovery by dashing off a book cover.

Time for Plan B.

Mark West had supplied all the covers for the previous Hersham Horror books and now it was to him I turned to help get the cover completed. Mark shares my love of painted covers -- which is why he was happy for Bob to be the original choice of cover artist for Demons & Devilry -- but his chosen medium is Photoshop so I shifted gears in terms of what I wanted for the cover. Instead of a scene of a Black Mass I now felt the best course was to go for a minimalist cover with just the title, the authors' names and one, maybe two, occult symbols.

Mark, however, knew that the reason I initially wanted Bob for the project was because of my desire for a sleazy cover. So he told me he had a photo that not only walked the line between sleazy and tasteful but which also fitted in neatly with the black magic theme. Unfortunately Mark hadn't looked at the photo in a while and when he emailed it to me he sheepishly admitted that it was much more explicit than he remembered. This proved to be something of an understatement. The photo was of a naked woman in the famous Christine Keeler pose, but instead of a chair covering her nether regions she had a goat skull. "Sorry, mate," I said. "We can't use this. Not only can you see her nipples but it looks like she's got a goat skull vagina."

Mark conceded the point. He had tried to use a sleazy cover for Anatomy of Death, the anthology that he had edited Hersham Horror, but had been shot down by his test audience who found the image sexist, so he knew how sensitive people can be about these things. Still, he struggled gamely on, trying to find a way of getting Demons & Devilry that old school feel without offending anyone.

And then we got some unexpected help.

By a strange coincidence the day we were spitballing ideas for the cover I received an advertisement in my Facebook feed, one of those random suggestions that don't come from any your friends but which just pop up unexpectedly even though they have nothing to do with anything you are interested in, and will serve no useful purpose whatsoever.

Except this one did.

It was an ad for bikinis emblazoned with pentagrams. Suddenly we had a way to make the cover sleazily Satanic but without resorting to offensive nudity. Granted, a photo of a woman in a bikini would still offend some people but compared to the goat skull vagina it felt positively prudish.

Mark came up with his own version of Satanic swimwear and Photoshopped it onto a picture of a female model. Somehow it didn't quite work. Instead of looking sexy the picture came across as sad and desperate.

But Mark wasn't beaten yet. Switching tack he found a tasteful drawing of a nude woman being confronted by a menacing phantasm and worked it into a cover design. But although Mark did a good job I didn't feel that the artwork really popped out the way I wanted it to, socking the reader in the eye.

It was then, trying to save Mark the trouble of trawling through the entire Internet for days on end trying to find something suitable yet copyright free, that my sleep deprived brain came up with the worst idea I have ever had.

I would try to draw a cover image myself.

Every once in a while, when I have decent photo reference, and the stars are in alignment, I can produce pictures where the subject matter can be identified in as few as five guesses. In my fatigued state I reasoned that if I could manage to fulfil that criteria this time then the reduction in the picture's size to fit it onto the book cover would hide the many flaws in my draftsmanship. And so, with the blind optimism of someone who has forgotten that they can't actually draw, I set out to cobble together a picture.

Flipping through The BFI Companion to Horror I found a picture of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs and Tippi Hedren in The Birds and fitted them together with an occult symbol cribbed from Arthur Edward Waite's The Wordsworth Book of Spells. I didn't capture a very good likeness of either actor but that was the point, I wasn't trying for portraits, I was just using them for reference to create my own characters. So the fact that my picture of Tippi Hedren looked like a bleach blonde Amy Winehouse was actually a good thing.

As for all that pesky perspective stuff and background detail I would just get round that by having the occult symbol fill the background and cover everything else in black ink -- kind of Mike Mignola's Hellboy meets Frank Milller's Sin City. Unfortunately I didn't have any proper drawing materials so the solid black inks came out looking scratchy and indecisive. Plus, as I've already mentioned, there was the minor matter of my not actually being able to draw. Halfway through the picture I came to my senses, realised it was awful beyond belief, and asked Mark to go back to the minimalist cover with an occult symbol.

I was offline for 24 hours or so at my day job and when I next corresponded with Mark I found that he had come up with a cover based on an occult symbol we had stumbled across on the Internet. Also, Peter Mark May had joined the discussion and said he felt the cover should be a striking shade of red to catch the reader's eye in a suitably devilish fashion. We all agreed that with this new design we were finally on the right track. A few minor niggles -- mainly about the title font -- were ironed out and suddenly we had a book cover on our hands. Thanking the others for their hard work I looked forward to finally getting some rest.

Then I realised I still hadn't finished writing my story for the anthology ...

Devilish Ditties

Some little rhymes about the stories in Demons & Devilry.

The Abhorrent Man by Peter Mark May

The man is dubbed abhorrent.
And his title is not without warrant.
They ask: "Is he scary?'
I reply: "Opinions vary.
"But he made me empty my bowels in a torrent."

Little Devils by Thana Niveau

These kids really are little devils,
With pranks, teasing and revels.
But they get such a fright,
From a horrible sight.
It's terrifying on so many levels.

The Devil in the Details by John Llewellyn Probert

The devil is in the details:
Lots of scares, or else tedium prevails.
Some tales of black mass
Need a kick up the ass.
But not with one of JLP's tales.

The Scryer by David Williamson

The hero of 'The Scryer'
Is lazy; a cheat and a liar.
He could try to work,
But he'd much rather shirk.
He wouldn't move if his arse caught fire.

Guardian Devil by Stuart Young

Despite the odd spell, ritual and hex
This story is all violence, cursing and sex.
But it's not easy
Being this sleazy.
No wonder pulp writers end up nervous wrecks.

Demons & Devilry

Somehow I've ended up doing something I thought I would never ever do -- I've edited a book. Blame Peter Mark May, he caught me at a weak moment and I agreed to edit an anthology for him before I realised what I was doing. The book is available now if you want to see how much of a hash I've made of it.

Demons & Devilry, the fourth anthology in the Hersham Horror PenAnth range, brings you five chilling tales of diabolism and black magic. With their twisted roots buried deep in the works of Dennis Wheatley, these stories reach out to embrace even darker, more horrifying, territory. Tremble with fear and wonder at the depraved imaginings of Peter Mark May, Thana Niveau, John Llewellyn Probert, David Williamson and Stuart Young.

The Abhorrent Man by Peter Mark May -- An ancient evil awakens in 1920s Tunisia.

Little Devils by Thana Niveau -- A group of mischievous schoolchildren encounter something whose wickedness far surpasses their own.

The Devil in the Details by John Lllwellyn Probert -- The race is on to find a suitable victim for a blood sacrifice.

The Scryer by David Williamson -- An unexpected inheritance leads to mysterious visions.

Guardian Devil by Stuart Young -- Will a journey through the Qabalistic Tree of Life bring enlightenment or damnation?

Lovecraftian Legacy

Part 2 of my Sparking Neurones column on Lovecraftian fiction. This time round Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber, Neil Gaiman and others. It also includes snazzy artwork by Bob Covington and Frank E Schoonover.

Spare Parts review

Review of Spare Parts from Philip K Dick Award-winning novelist Simon Morden.

Stuart Young’s Spare Parts dwell on the fantastic which grows from the ordinary: if this wasn’t genre, posh reviewers in mainstream magazines would call it magical realism. Young serves up six stories -atmospherically illustrated by Bob Covington and Dave Bezzina – on the theme of love and loss, and the quiet desperation of ordinary lives suddenly transformed by accidental magic.

"Boxes" is about memory: Peter is ditched by girlfriend Elaine for a newer model, and all he’s left with are his memories. An experimental drug leaves him with total recall, but being able to remember everything he’s ever seen or said or done has a catastrophic effect on his sanity. "Midnight in a Perfect World" is a classic story of destructive co-dependency, made possible by a mantelpiece clock that is able to keep a relationship new and exciting, just so long as the hands on the face are set right. "Spirits of Darkness and Light" is a ghost story – a dead Royal Flying Corps pilot appears to a colleague, asking him to finish what he started. But just what is the ghost’s mission? When the life expectancy of a new pilot is measured in minutes, taking deliberate risks is the kiss of death. "Swamp Gator Blues", "Face at the Window" and the title story "Spare Parts" complete the collection – not quite as strong as the other three, but still fine stories in their own right. Perhaps Young has yet to find his own unique voice, but his range and depth of storytelling is already well crafted.

The Mask Behind the Face competition

Chris Teague has just informed me of this competition over at the Pendragon Press site:

Ten copies of Stuart Young's The Mask Behind the Face up for grabs if you can answer the following question: who wrote the introduction to this collection?
First ten folk to join the Pendragon mailing list by this Friday and confirm their answer via email to chris at pendragonpress dot net will receive a copy – unfortunately, I'll have to invoice folk from overseas postage costs.

The  book was short-listed for a British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and the title story won Best Novella.

Lovecraft

In the latest instalment of Sparking Neurones I talk about H.P. Lovecraft. I am very respectful and do not take the mickey at all.

Spare Parts 2003 interview

Just as a reminder that Spare Parts is now available as an eBook here's an interview with me and 2000AD scribe Alec Worley from when the original paperback version came out.

ALEC WORLEY: Are there any background details about yourself that you want to fill the readers in on?

STUART YOUNG: You mean apart from the fact that I’m incredibly witty and handsome? Oh -- you only want honest answers. Fair enough.

I’ve had over fifty stories published in various books and magazines including Roadworks, Darkness Rising, Kimota, and Nasty Piece of Work. My monthly comics column, Words and Pictures, runs at www.thealienonline.net  I work in a mental health community home. And I live in Essex which is the finest county in the whole of England. Oh yeah, honest answers only. Sorry.

AW: You had a story published in The Mammoth Book of Future Cops. How did it feel to appear in a mass market paperback?

SY: I was convinced the whole thing was a huge mistake, that I’d somehow been sent someone else’s acceptance letter. Took seeing the book in Borders and Waterstones to convince me otherwise. But somehow what gave me the biggest buzz was when I unexpectedly stumbled across a copy whilst browsing in my local library. Total shock. But in a good way.

AW: How did your collection of horror stories, Spare Parts, come about?

SY: That was all part of a carefully orchestrated pitching campaign. Basically I waited until John B. Ford was drunk and then said, “I’ve got some stories to show you.” By the time he’d sobered up it was too late, he’d already accepted them.

Rainfall Books didn’t have any submission guidelines so I ended up giving him far too many stories and he whittled it down to his favourites. These turned out to be all the stories centring around death and doomed love. This despite the fact that John has always struck me as a very cheery person whenever I’ve met him. Just goes to show what a two-faced, duplicitous wretch he really is.

Um, John isn’t going to get to read this is he?

AW: You have an eBook of fantasy stories coming out in 2004 called Shards of Dreams. Why did you choose to branch out into fantasy instead of doing more horror?

SY: Well, when I saw that Double Dragon published both fantasy and horror I was spoilt for choice because I had enough stories to fill a collection in either genre. But as people aren’t that aware of my fantasy stuff and Spare Parts was already full of horror stories I thought it would be nice to showcase my fantasy work.

Besides, some of the stories in Shards of Dreams are quite dark. People getting broken, physically and mentally.  Although others are comedies. It’s a bit of a mix.

AW: Does working at a mental home help in writing tales of horror and madness?

SY: Not too often. I don’t base stories on things in the clients’ casenotes or anything. Partly out of client confidentiality, partly because it’s not as though I work in a challenging behaviour unit where the staff constantly deal with knife-wielding psychopaths and the like. The home where I work is very settled and the clients are really nice people.

AW: So what sort of research do you do then?

SY: It depends. Sometimes I fake it, just blag my way through a story. Other times I force myself to actually do a bit of work. For example, the stories in Spare Parts all had varying degrees of research to them.

‘Face at the Window’ started off as a 500 word writing exercise so initially I didn’t bother doing any research into Alzheimer’s but once it morphed into something that might be worth submitting I got a book out of my local library and jotted down some notes just to make it sound like I knew what I was talking about.

With ‘Swamp ‘Gator Blues’ I was kind of stuck for research. This was in the mid-90s, before I got the Internet, so I had real trouble finding stuff that could help me out. The original inspiration was Southern Comfort but that was set in the 70s and I needed something more contemporary. So I read possibly the most boring travel book ever written so I could glean all the information it had on Louisiana. And I read novels by James Lee Burke and Daniel Woodrell because they had bayou settings and Cajun heroes. I even watched Jean Claude Van Damme’s Hard Target for the bayou scenes. *shudders at the memory* Now THAT’s devotion above and beyond the call of duty.

Other times the research is already done and I’m just waiting for a story to use it in. With ‘Spirits of and Darkness and Light’ I already knew a fair bit about WWI fighter pilots because I used to be a big Biggles fan. I also liked the Martin Falconer books by John Harris. (The story actually contains a few nods to both these series.) Consequently as a kid I read up quite a bit on fighter pilots, mainly from WWI and WWII, so years later when I wrote this story I only needed to check the odd fact here and there.

‘Spare Parts’ was inspired by an experiment I read about in New Scientist. The trick with the table is genuine although obviously I play around with the possibilities for the sake of the story.

‘Boxes’ came about from a combination of my childhood obsession with Sherlock Holmes stories and my more recent interest in the workings of the human mind; in this case memory and perception. Books like Rita Carter’s Mapping the Mind were a great help.

‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ probably looks like the story with the least research in the collection but the concept only occurred to me after I went through a phase of reading popular science books, trying to learn about quantum physics and the structure of Time. But it comes across more as inspiration than research -- I don’t actually talk about superpositions and overlapping timelines. I just use metaphors for them within the story.

AW: Do you have a particular method you follow when you write?

SY: I sacrifice a small child to the gods of the creative muse. Usually works out at three stories per sacrifice.

No, normally I try to get the writing done either as soon as I get up or as soon as I get back from work depending on what shift I’m working. My notes are normally written up in the form of a mindmap with a beat by beat plot outline on the back of the sheet. But sometimes I just improvise, depending on what mood I’m in. Most of my writing is done at my computer, which I know you find totally freakish, but I normally only write longhand if the PC is busted or my eyes are tired from staring at the screen for too long.

I tend to procrastinate like crazy when I’m supposed to write. Suddenly I want to read my email, my snail mail, my story notes, the labels on tin cans; anything I can think of to stop myself writing. But usually I’m okay once I convince myself to actually sit down and start writing.

But I keep a small child on standby just in case.

AW: Do you have a specific aim in mind when you sit down to write a story?

SY: As far as I’m concerned the most important thing is to entertain the reader. If they’re not enjoying the story then why the hell should they read it? But there’s different ways of entertaining people. Some people like to laugh, some people like to cry, some people like to be frightened. So I try to cover different things -- comedy, tragedy, romance, adventure, horror etc -- in different stories. And I’m always pleased when I can mix a few of these different approaches into the same story. It gives the tale that little bit of texture, something for the reader to chew on. After all, life isn’t stuck in only one emotional state so I don’t see why stories should be.

And if I can write something that makes the reader think then that’s an added bonus.

AW: Are there any major Influences on your writing style?

SY: I’m always discovering new influences or rediscovering old ones.  For instance I recently started reading John Connolly’s novels and I think they’re great. They’ve helped crystallise my thinking in terms of some the stuff I was already doing in my writing whilst simultaneously giving me ideas about new things to try.

Other prose influences include James Ellroy, Joe R. Lansdale, Greg Egan, Douglas Adams, Stephen Hunter, Alfred Bester, Andrew Vachss, Robert Bloch, and Michael Moorcock. Basically writers who can keep a story moving with clear, uncluttered prose. And who have either a sense of humour or a gripping story to tell. Preferably both.

I’ve learnt a lot from various comic book authors especially people like Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Garth Ennis, Chris Claremont, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Brian Michael Bendis. And then there’s Alan Moore who’s such a complex writer; I’ve been reading his stuff since I was 15 but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve figured out how to apply his techniques to my own writing. I had to read a lot of stuff by Gaiman and Morrison, who were both heavily influenced by Moore, and pick out various tricks that they employed and then use that as a bridge to help me understand the mechanics of Moore’s writing.

In films you’ve got Die Hard, El Dorado, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Films are a little like comics in that I can quite happily rewatch the story several times.  I’ll pick up stuff about dialogue and plot structure just by osmosis. And then when I actually start paying attention it’s, “Wow! So that’s how the writer gets that effect at that point in the story!” One of the best films I know for learning story structure is A Bug’s Life, the plot unfolds with clockwork precision. Plus it’s laugh out loud funny. There’s probably loads more, Hitchcock for a start, but like I say a lot of it comes through by osmosis so it doesn’t always register on a conscious level.

Then from TV Only Fools and Horses and Porridge. They know how to juxtapose humour and poignancy brilliantly, luring you into a sad story and then hitting you with a gag that makes you split your sides. Or they do the reverse, firing off jokes in all directions and then suddenly poleaxing you with something so sad that you can’t help but get a lump in your throat. As for Buffy, Angel, and Smallville -- I know some people hate these sort of programmes but I love ‘em. And The Simpsons and Futurama have a wonderful madcap energy, there’s always something happening -- I’ve tried to recreate that effect in some of my more humorous stories but I’m not in the same league.

AW: You’ve been praised for your realistic characterisation. Would you say that is the most important aspect of your stories?

SY: I don’t know if it’s the most important aspect but it’s definitely high up on the list. If the reader’s going to spend the entire story reading about a character then they need something about that character with which they can sympathise, or at least empathise. But ideally plot and dialogue should be just as strong as characterisation. Each element affects the others e.g. if you decide the protagonist of a story is incredibly brave then the plot and dialogue are probably going to be vastly different than if they’re a total coward.

AW: You play around with typography and fonts in some of your stories. What inspired this particular trait?

SY:  Um, I can point towards certain influences but I’m a little hazy on exactly when I came across them, or in what order. Some of it came from -- I don’t know if this is the correct term -- shape poems. You know, where the words are laid out across the page to take on the shape of the subject of the poem.

But a lot of it came from comic book style lettering where sound effects are drawn in such a way to suggest volume and movement. For example the sound effect for a car might be VRROOMMM to suggest speed, acceleration, volume, and the direction the car is travelling in. Or different characters might have different fonts for their dialogue to suggest varying tones or accents.

Also, Michael Moorcock and Alfred Bester used various typographical effects. And the effect I use in ‘Boxes’ is an idea that I nicked from a Nicholas Royle story, although the way it works within the context of his story and mine is totally different.

I’m trying not to overuse the typography. It’s always tempting to show off with it, do it just for the sake of it. But I don’t want to be known as “that writer who always uses the funny fonts.”

AW: I know you’re a big comics fan and have written some strips yourself. Could you tell us a little about them?

SY: I did a couple of strips with Bob Covington who won the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Artist in 1999. I always get really jealous when I look at Bob’s art because he draws so well but I can’t draw at all. Those strips both appeared in Legend.

I’ve written some gag strips for Dave Bezzina but we haven’t decided who to pitch them to yet. Again, Dave is a superb artist. He and Bob both did a great job of illustrating Spare Parts.

I’ve done various strips for SF Revolution Comics. With those I usually try to vary the genres. A WWI ghost story, a piece of cyber-erotica, a 2000AD-ish black comedy, some reality-warping SF/Horror. I also wrote an apocalyptic comedy-drama called ‘Dead Light’ for Fusion from Engine Comics. And I’ve written a two issue Samurai fantasy story called Seppuku also from Engine Comics.

AW: What projects are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished a novella. It probably falls under the heading of religious/philosophical horror but don’t let that put you off, it’s a really fun read, honest! There’s a how-to-write-comics book that I was invited to write a tiny section of, basically just a very brief summary of my experiences writing comics. The book hasn’t been finalised yet though so I don’t know when it’s out or even what it’ll be called. And I’m catching up with my comics column and reviews and interviews and stuff. After that, I don’t know, maybe another novella or even a novel.

AW: Any last thoughts you want to leave us with?

SY: BUY MY BOOKS! No, I should probably say something profound and uplifting.  Um ... ah, sod it. BUY MY BOOKS!

The Next Big Thing Part 2

Adrian Chamberlin, Matt Cardin, Simon Morden and Paul Edwards may or not be doing the Next Big thing today. All depends how busy they are. And how desperate they are for free publicity.

The Next Big Thing

This week I’m taking part in The Next Big Thing series of networked author blog interviews. I’ve been tagged by CaroleJohnstone and next week I’ll be revealing who I tagged in to do the next round of interviews.

1) What is the working title of your next book?

Reflections in the Mind’s Eye.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

It was a carefully planned project to produce a range of stories all linked thematically by their examinations of reality and human consciousness. Or to put it another way, I had a bunch of short stories lying about the place and lumped them all together in a collection.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

SF/fantasy/horror/crime; all mixed up in the same stories like a literary bouillabaisse. Bookstores will have no idea where to stock it – they’ll have to put a few pages in one section of the shop and a few pages in another and at least a few pages locked away in the basement so they don’t scare away the customers.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

While I was writing the novelette that makes up the bulk of the book I had a vague idea of the protagonist being a Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis type – handsome and athletic in their prime, but a bit more craggy and creaky nowadays. I wasn’t thinking of their action roles so much as their performances in Signs or The Sixth Sense where they’re in Look-I’m-extending-my-range-(but-still-hoping-to-score-a-box-office-hit) mode.

I also think that Mila Kunis should play one of my characters. Doesn’t matter which one, just so long as I get to canoodle with her on the casting couch.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A desperate attempt to allow me to shag Mila Kunis.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’ll be published by Pendragon Press, an independent publisher owned by Christopher Teague.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The stories were all written separately over the course of several years as individual projects. The earliest was written in 2001, the most recent in 2010.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

By some crazy coincidence it shares qualities with all my other books – hallucinations, disillusionment, dysfunctional relationships and all that other fun stuff.  Damaged minds, damaged souls, damaged realities; that seems to be my literary territory.

As for books by other authors, well, that’s just a minefield, isn’t it? If I compare myself to some literary heavyweight like Shakespeare or Dickens then I come across an egotistical moron. And even if I aim for someone a bit lower down the scale whoever I pick will get all upset -- “Oh God, my books are being compared to the ones by that hack Stuart Young! My reputation’s ruined!” This is the kind of thing that can lead to cease and desist letters.

Anyway, at the risk of provoking future legal action there’s probably some sort of resemblance between Reflections and Greg Egan’s Axiomatic collection, which contains beautiful, emotionally charged stories about the nature of consciousness and reality. Although my grasp of science is nowhere near as good as Egan’s. He writes hard SF but my SF is much softer; my SF is so soft it could be used to stuff pillows, if it was any softer it would be practically liquid. There’s also Michael Marshall Smith’s What You Make It with its mixture of tenderness, biting humour and world-weariness. And although I didn’t really read much Charles L Grant until after Reflections was already finished I like to think there’s some similarity in the prose style, as well as the use of characterisation and quiet horror. (NB The horror in Reflections is fairly quiet but some of the SF is in THX surround sound and is viewed in HD, 3-D and even fiddle-de-dee.)

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The title story came about due to reading John Horgan’s non-fiction book The Undiscovered Mind, which featured some scary stuff about brain surgery.

With ‘Crashes’, which appeared in the Catastrophia anthology from PS Publishing, I tried to write something very silly but refrain from turning it into a comedy, instead keeping it dramatically satisfying. To the reader the events of the story are completely absurd but to the characters they’re happening to the events are terrifying, which will hopefully communicate itself back to the reader and the resulting cognitive dissonance will somehow be hugely entertaining. Or at least more entertaining than the pretentious twaddle of those last couple of sentences. I’d been reading some Harlan Ellison stories and he really didn’t seem to care whether the tone in his stories was consistent throughout so I thought I’d have a crack at that. Grant Morrison was also an influence on that story, partly through inspiring one of the key images, and partly through the fact that his comics, although arch and amusing and often filled with preposterous situations, never quite make the transition from drama to comedy.

With ‘Heartache’, which originally appeared in The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, I was trying to write something in the Jim Thompson/Andrew Vachss/Frank Miller noir mould, but with an SF twist. I was particularly interested in exploring the kind of femme fatale Miller tends to feature in Sin City and see if I could add some motivation and psychological depth.

I’m drawing a blank on what exactly inspired the other stories offhand, but I’m sure that whatever the different inspirations were they would make for wonderfully amusing anecdotes.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

Each copy comes with a fifty pound note attached to the front cover, courtesy of the publisher.

That thudding sound you just heard was Christopher Teague’s jaw hitting the ground.

Men in Tights: To Cap it All Off

The latest instalment of Sparking Neurones is also the final instalment of the Men in Tights series. I discuss artificial intelligence, the pros and cons of patriotism, the dynamics of heroism, the nature of the soul, and the role of personal belief in religion. All based around a discussion of Captain America's costume.

Tennant's Extra

As Stumar Press have released Spare Parts as an ebook here's Peter Tennant's review of the original paperback edition from Rainfall Books. He says some very nice things, including this comment: "Young’s writing is never less than rewarding, while at his best he is thought provoking and capable of genuinely moving the reader."

Men in Tights 3: Curse of the Miniskirt

The latest instalment of Sparking Neurones covers psychedelics, ancient curses and nanotech shamanism in The Avengers. But the real draw is the crappy miniskirt costume Hawkeye wore for a few issues back in the '70s.

Avengers Assemble

"Too much talking." "Dull action scenes." "Too many characters." Just some of the complaints I've heard levelled against Avengers Assemble. Seeing as how I loved the film I thought some sort of response was called for. Because there aren't enough comments about the film on the internet already.

Avengers Assemble had a lot going on, and a lot of characters, but that was the whole point of the film: getting to see all those heroes together in the same story. Yes, the film has flaws: it takes time to get all the characters in place; some of the characters don't get much to do; Thor's backstory is hand-waved away, with only one or two lines of dialogue to explain how it is even possible for him to be back on Earth. But these problems were inherent of the nature of the project. No one's ever attempted something like this before; taking four existing film franchises and joining their characters and storylines all together in one film while simultaneously blending all the separate genres from those franchises and adding in some more -- science fiction, fantasy, war movie, spy thriller. The logistics of this film were a nightmare; it could -- it should -- have all gone horribly wrong. The fact that it didn't is a testament to the skill of all the people who worked on the film.

Maybe not everything worked in the film, but even the bits that seemed underwhelming were there for a purpose, elegant solutions to impossible problems of too many characters and not enough screen-time. Hawkeye doesn't have enough time to develop as a character? Tie his character arc in with Black Widow's so that everything she goes through reflects back to Hawkeye, fleshing out his character even when he isn't on-screen. Not enough time for Loki to outline his dastardly plan and give Black Widow a character-defining moment? Make her response to his plan her character-defining moment. No one likes Tony Stark and Pepper Potts any more after Iron Man 2? Use a five minute scene to make them sexy and likeable again, while simultaneously setting up the major themes of the story. The entire screenplay is full of smart solutions to similar problems. Obviously some of them work better than others but Joss Whedon does a better job of making the film coherent and exciting than anyone had a right to expect.

Just imagine if someone else had tackled the project. James Cameron -- the film would have gone on for 3 1/2 hours and Black Widow would have been a wimp for the first half of the film before one of the male characters taught her how to be independent. George Lucas -- the dialogue would embarrass the writers of porn films, there would be "comical" sidekicks, the plot would have holes big enough to fly a Death star through. Steven Spielberg -- one of the heroes would have father/son issues, cute kids would be shoehorned into the script and for every cool scene there would be another one filled with toe-curling sentimentality. Or how about Michael Bay? Or Stephen Sommers?

We were never going to get a perfect Avengers film. Maybe we should settle for what we got: a very good one.

Fear and Wonder: The Spare Parts interview

As Spare Parts has been reissued as an ebook by Stumar Press I've dug up this interview from when the original Rainfall paperback was published. The interview is conducted by British Fantasy Award winning editor Pam Creais.

Pam Creais: Which writers did you enjoy most as a youngster?

Stuart Young: My favourites were Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Biggles by Captain W.E. Johns. Dr Who novelizations (especially the Terrance Dicks ones; he also wrote several SF, horror, and detective novels that I loved). The Willard Price Adventure series. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. John Harris’s Martin Falconer series. And The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

And then there were the comics like Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, X-Men, and Justice League International.

PC: When did you first start writing yourself?

SY: I can’t remember exactly. There were writing assignments in school that never felt like assignments because they were just fun to do. I remember doing an illustrated Mr Men story when I was about six. And a few years later one of my friends was a huge Dr Who fan, he had all the novelizations and he got me into reading them. He used to try writing his own ones and I followed suit. So I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But in terms of actually submitting stuff that would’ve been, I don’t know, 1995, or something like that.

PC: How did you become aware of the small press and what was your first accepted story?

SY: I read somewhere that the small press was the place to try out your work before moving onto the big leagues. Of course then I had the problem that most small press magazines were horror and I knew pretty much zero about the genre so I had to slog my way through a bunch of novels and short stories that I absolutely hated before I found anything which fired that little spark of recognition -- “Hey, this is the kind if stuff I want to do!” Then I went through a period where I just collected rejection slips for about nine months. I was thinking, “Women have given birth quicker than this!” Eventually I wrote ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’ in a single afternoon and sold it to Nasty Piece of Work on my first submission.

PC: Do you think the small press is beneficial to aspiring writers?

SY: It can be. If it works well you get Honourable Mentions and agents see your work and approach you about writing novels and you use it as a springboard to professional work. But if it doesn’t work well then no one actually reads your stories. At all. In that case it becomes a vicious circle; the publisher needs the readers so they can afford marketing to make the magazine more visible to the readers, but the readers don’t buy the magazine because they’ve never heard of it, so the publisher sells less copies and has less money to spend on promoting it.

Of course the small press can be a valuable way to hone your talents as a writer before tackling the bigger publishers. Although even then there are problems. Some authors write very specific types of fiction which only appeal to the real aficionados of that particular genre. So all the die-hard fans of, I don’t know, supernatural mysteries solved by Bavarian cheese-makers, buy the writer’s stuff and tell them they’re a genius but when they step outside that circle into the wider realms of publishing no one wants to read their work.

But obviously not everyone can expect to get Stephen King type sales. So even if you don’t hit the big time the progression through the different levels of the small press (magazines, paperbacks, hardbacks) means that you’re reaching the widest audience that’s possible for you. 

Wow, that almost sounds like I know what I’m talking about, doesn’t it?

PC: How did your first collection of stories, Spare Parts, come about?

SY: I had a whole bunch of old horror short stories lying around. Plus I had a couple of new ones that were too long for most magazines’ guidelines. So I put them together and showed them to John B. Ford at Rainfall Books. John said he couldn’t use all the stories because there were just too many of them so he picked out the ones he liked the best.

I was a little disappointed because a lot of good stories didn’t make the final cut. But the collection probably has more of a sense of identity this way as all the stories John chose are about love and death. Which means I just took all my characters and put them through the wringer. Make them fearful, make them break down before the dark wonders of the universe. That’s a pretty good goal to aim for in horror fiction; fear and wonder.

PC: Which writers in the small press scene do you most admire?

SY: To be honest I’ve got behind on my reading in the small press. Names that spring to mind are Mark Samuels and Matt Cardin who both write very atmospheric philosophical horror. And I really admire the way Tim Lebbon has used his success in the small press as a springboard to working with bigger publishers. Gary Spencer Millidge writes a great comic called Strangehaven which is this very English, very eccentric story about an idyllic village that’s populated by Freemasons, South American shamans, and extraterrestrials. It’s kind of a gentler version of The League of Gentlemen, but Millidge did it first. And Paul Grist did a great crime comic called Kane but I’m not sure if he’s still doing it because he’s doing Jack Staff for Image these days.

PC: Is it equally gratifying to get a story published in an e-zine as it is a hard copy publication?

SY: It depends. There’s pros and cons to both approaches. When I had a story in The Mammoth Book of Future Cops I was jumping up and down because it’s a mass market paperback, people can get hold of it anywhere. But then my local bookshops didn’t stock it. On the other hand the local libraries had multiple copies. Whereas if something goes online it’s there for anyone to read.

I’ve got an eBook of fantasy stories, called Shards of Dreams, coming out soon so I’m curious to see what sort of business that does. In theory it’ll be easy for people to get hold of because they can just click on the web site. But they won’t actually have the book in their hand to let them flick through it and decide if it’s the kind of thing they might want to buy. Hopefully they will buy it because it’s got quite a good cross-section of my stories. There’s funny stuff, scary stuff, adventure stuff. And my definition of fantasy is pretty broad so it’s more like rocketships and flying cities and sentient universes than goblins and elves. Which is not to say goblins and elves can’t be fun but I know they’re the reason some people run away screaming when presented with fantasy books.

PC: Have you considered writing a novel, and, if so, what genre would you choose to write in?

SY: The longest prose piece I’ve completed to date is a novella of religious/philosophical horror. Still waiting to see if anyone publishes that.

I’ve got some ideas for novels. Most of them would probably be described as horror. Although one would definitely be SF and another would be fantasy or maybe science fantasy.

It’s just a question of which ones actually get written.

PC: Do you think that generally the market for horror/fantasy fiction is on the wane in Great

Britain?

SY: Apart from stocking a few British authors like Simon Clark most UK bookshops’ idea of horror is to sell US horror authors. And even then you either need to have a franchise like Buffy or Anita Blake or else be Stephen King who is a franchise in himself.

I’ve lost track of modern adult fantasy authors but kids’ fantasy seems to be going great guns. Their books look much more fun and tend to be written as series rather serials. So even if you don’t complete the series at least you know the book you’re reading at the time will have a complete story.

PC: Is it difficult to come up with new ideas in the area of fantastic fiction: surely everything has been said and done nowadays?

SY: Good point. But that’s true of pretty much every area of life. We all still have the same basic goals as our ancestors: survive as long as you can in as much comfort as you can. But whereas for them that meant sitting in a cave, thinking about the best way to get food for your family whilst daubing a picture of a deer on the wall, for us it means sitting in a house, worrying about the mortgage whilst the TV tells us what products to buy. Meanwhile wars are still raging, politics is still as dishonest as ever. Even modern physics like superstring theory can draw parallels with ancient religious beliefs like Kabbalah. Sometimes it seems that the aim in any endeavour is not so much to create something new as to refine what has gone before.

But that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are holes in that argument that you could drive a truck through.

So if I can drag myself back to answering your original question: I’m not a real scholar of fantastic fiction or weird fiction or whatever you want to call it. Some stuff sticks in my head and some stuff doesn’t. I just write stories and hope I’m not ripping anyone off too badly.

PC: Does your interest in the comic/graphic novel medium influence your story writing?

SY: Definitely. I soaked up a lot of stuff about drama and conflict from Stan Lee and Chris Claremont. Characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men always struggled to do the right thing even though that would usually end up making things worse for them.

And in terms of story structure I found comics very helpful. Comics only have so many pages per issue, and so many panels per page, and you can only fit so many words in per panel. So everything -- plot, dialogue, description -- needs to be as tightly written as possible. Although sloppy writing obviously isn’t encouraged in prose the mechanics of writing aren’t always stressed to the same degree, people often get caught up in the idea of metaphors and similies and they forget about stuff like scene structure and tight plotting. To a certain extent if you’re worrying about the economy of words and story structure in prose then it’s a question of aesthetics, whereas in comics it’s a question of necessity.

Even in a comic like Seppuku, the miniseries I’ve written for Engine Comics, where I had fifty-two pages to play with, I had to keep shaving the lines down so that they’d fit. Every panel felt like, “Okay, I’ve got to explain this character’s motivation whilst simultaneously moving the plot forward and outlining a fundamental Zen concept. And I’ve got to do it in less than ten words.”

PC: If someone gave you unlimited cash to make the genre film of your dreams, what novel or story would you like to see make the transition from the page to the big screen, and why?

SY: Oh God, there’s so many books and comics I’d like to see made into films. Um, I’ll say Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Even though Hollywood would totally screw it up.

Men in Tights 2: The Revenge

To celebrate the latest instalment of Sparking Neurones delving into the psychological and spiritual aspects of Spider-Man I've rewritten the lyrics to the Spider-Man theme:

 Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Does whatever a spider can. 
Climbing walls, fighting crime. Like spiders do all the time. 
Look out, here comes the Spider-Man. 

 All his powers, could be mystic. The idea makes fanboys go ballistic. 
Can he rise from the dead? Didn't he used to be wed? 
Hey, there! There goes the Spider-Man. 

Why is his life so tragic? Maybe the spider's his totem? 
Could it be to do with magic? And has he got a super-powered scrotum? 

 Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Friendly neighbourhood, Spider-Man.
 His webbed mask lends him power. Stops him being a wallflower. 
Look out, here comes the Spider-Man. 

Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Friendly neighbourhood, Spider-Man.
His webbed mask lends him power. Stops him being a wallflower. 
Read about him in this column. I wonder why he moves like Gollum? 
You'll love the Spider-Man!

The Teeming Brain head honcho Matt Cardin suggested a Lovecraftian version of the song which led me to mangle the lyrics even more:

Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Does whatever a spider can. 
If he drops his underwear. You'll get a pretty big scare. 
Look out, here comes the Spider-Man. 

Is it a penis or a tentacle? They look almost identical. 
His willy's from another dimension. And also an SF convention. 
Hey, there! There goes the Spider-Man. 

I think you will find, his naughty bits look like Azathoth. 
How did this idiot god go blind? It wasn't through reading Isaac Asimov. 

Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Friendly neighbourhood, Spider-Man. 
His haunter of the darkness, is wrinklier than Agatha Harkness. 
Look out, here comes the Spider-Man. 

Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Friendly neighbourhood, Spider-Man. 
His haunter of the darkness, is wrinklier than Agatha Harkness. 
It also looks kinda like Cthulhu. His fave from Star Trek is Mr Sulu. 
Nerdy old Spiderman!