Amazon.co.uk:
Tell us how you came to write the The Night of the
Triffids
and tell us a bit about the story.
Simon Clark:
It was a strange set of coincidences. An express train I was
travelling on collided with a bird, which stopped the two hundred-ton machine
dead. In the same carriage someone was reading
The Day of the
Triffids. Now this was something Wyndham would have relished:
that a tiny bird can smash a huge piece of technology to a standstill. Many of
his books deal with the fragility of civilisation. And as I sat there waiting
for repairs I found myself thinking about Wyndham's classic triffids book. I
remembered reading it for the first time and recalled my sheer dismay when I
realised it was going to end at such an interesting moment with the triffids
still in control. That's when I thought: why don't I continue the story?
Luckily my agent was friendly with the Wyndham estate agent; they talked
through my idea and to cut a long story short I found myself writing The Night of
the Triffids
, which not only fascinated me but also became a genuine labour of
love
Amazon.co.uk:
Were you nervous about continuing such a well-loved classic of
the genre?
Clark:
The enormity of what I was doing struck me when I visited the
Wyndham archive at the University of Liverpool Library just as I was writing
the opening chapters of my book. In my hands I held Wyndham's original
typescript of The Day of the Triffids
. That's when a shiver ran up
my spine and I said to myself, 'Simon, you've got to put everything into this
one. You've got to make this your best book yet.' I think my audience will be a
complete mixture: people who've read my work and might not have read Wyndham,
as well as Wyndham's fans; therefore, I'm being evangelical about The
Day of the Triffids
at the moment. I'm saying go back to the original
and read it--or even re-read it--because if you read the original in your
teens you'll find new layers of meaning and enjoyment if you go back to it.
Amazon.co.uk:
The thought of a giant man-eating plant is not really so
terrifying anymore. How did you ensure the triffids remained scary 50 years
later?
Clark:
The idea of a frightening plant now is a GM plant that might wreck
the world's ecology (incidentally Canadian scientists have caused alarm by
naming their genetically modified flax a "Triffid"). But there is something
sinister about Wyndham's killer triffid. The beauty of his creation is that it
was a passive bovine plant that was cultivated for its oils, and gardeners kept
specimens in their suburban garden; however, by a twist of fate that led to
humankind's blinding this slow, shuffling plant became his Nemesis. In a
nutshell, I think a triffid is a metaphor for some artificial creation of
humankind's that at first appears to be safe then becomes very dangerous, which
then conjures up the spectres of nuclear power, global warming, even foodstuffs
that have been irradiated or produced from animals pumped with whole cocktails
of drugs.
Amazon.co.uk:
What are your thoughts on the jacket for the book? It captures a
real 1950s B Movie feel, but was that the image you wanted to project?
Clark:
The cover suits the book perfectly. I love the retro sci-fi poster
feel and the nod to the classic magazines such as Astounding
. In the novel itself
I wanted to evoke a world in the 1950s where rock and roll, space travel and
the Internet never happened. The story begins on the Isle of Wight where the
survivors do their best to forget that Britain and the rest of the world lies
in ruins beneath a hundred billion triffids plants. They continue as if the
British Empire exists. They listen to Noel Coward and Arthur Askey records and
have tea dances. Schoolmasters still insist on teaching the classics even
though they are of no earthly use to the 30 or so thousand people that have
found refuge there. So yes, the image of the monstrous triffid plant capturing
a victim in front of the quiet English church does evoke the flavour of the
book.
Amazon.co.uk:
Let's talk about your earlier books. The book most horror readers
probably associate with you is Blood Crazy
. Can you talk a bit
about that work and how you feel it stands up now against some of your more
recent novels?
Clark:
When I wrote Blood Crazy
I was still an unpublished
author and it found its way to the editor through the slush pile. By that time
the bills were piling up. I had to take a bank loan to buy food and clothes for
the children. With that sense of desperation I wrote a book where teenagers and
children faced desperate times when their parents and every adult became
murderously insane. The book seemed to erupt out of me as I wrote it fuelled by
nothing but biscuits and coffee and a sense that I was sitting on a financial
time bomb. Just this year it was published by Leisure in the US and the
response to it there has been fantastic. It climbed to the top of Amazon.co.uk's
horror charts beating King, Koontz and Barker and earned comparisons with
Matheson's
I Am
Legend; something I'm enormously proud of. An American reader
described it as being "out of the box". I had to read the letter twice to make
sure that was a compliment! I think it stands up well against more my recent
novels, and when I re-read pages it surprises me how it still crackles with a
frenetic energy all of its own. Perhaps what I find slightly unnerving is
wondering if I could ever recapture that high-energy style if I were to write a
sequel.
Amazon.co.uk: King Blood
, Nailed by the Heart
and
Blood Crazy
touched on very similar themes of isolation and
being cut off from civilisation; the family in Nailed by the
Heart
trapped in a sea fort, the kids in Blood Crazy
trapped in an isolated hotel. Where does that theme come from and what are you
trying to say?
Clark:
I think there's real power in a story that cuts people off from
the ordinary world. Of course, it's a staple of great drama from
Odysseus
to Robinson Crusoe
to
Alien
to Blair Witch
. When we're removed from a
safe environment and plunged into one full of dangers then we're on our own. It
brings out the best and the worst in us. We must act in extreme ways, even
become heroes to survive. Also I like exploring the idea of what we consider to
be safe and comfortable becoming the monster. In Blood Crazy
the
parents become monsters. In King Blood
the Earth becomes the
monster as it inexplicably heats up, baking the surface soils and evaporating
lakes and oceans to create a dangerous environment that could destroy you at
any moment. In The Fall
time becomes, in a sense the monster,
catapulting a group of people back at first minutes, then years then
decades.
Amazon.co.uk:
Another strong theme is that of the family. Again the kids in
Blood Crazy
form their own sort of family, which is just as
loving as the family in Nailed by the Heart
. Does this help you
make the characters more lovable and therefore more easily able to place in
real danger?
Clark:
I do set out to make the reader care about my characters, even
though they're often fallible. And if I care about the character I think I will
write a better story. Having said that, I always place them in situations of
extreme danger where they might be seriously hurt, but that makes the story
more real for me rather than having an all action hero who can emerge from a
bomb blast unscathed. My characters bleed, weep, make mistakes. In
Nailed by the Heart
, the character of the young boy was based
squarely on my then three-year-old son, so there was a ready-made emotional
link with the character. All I had to ask myself to get my imagination into
over-drive were questions like: 'If I found myself under siege in a remote
seafort how would I save my son?'
Amazon.co.uk: Blood Crazy
seems to me as though it must have been
something of a risk, given that the central characters are all children and
teenagers, yet you write them very well. Did that worry you at all when writing
the book?
Clark:
No. I was fighting for financial survival at the time, and in
that highly pressured state I think I managed to open a gateway directly back
into a store of teenage memories. What helped as well was that I wasn't writing
the book to order for a publisher. I told myself: "I'm writing this book for me
and I'm going to write it just how I want." I could afford to take huge risks
with the story because I had nothing to lose. Fortunately, a brilliant editor
by the name of Nick Austin, who's worked with many science fiction greats, saw
it and plucked it from the slush pile. He could have published it as science
fiction but because Nailed by the Heart
would be my first
published book (and it's definitely supernatural horror) he rightly decided
that Blood Crazy
should follow suit.
Amazon.co.uk:
Your novels are very gory in places, but not excessively so. Does
horror need blood to be called horror?
Clark:
No. I think many horror writers fall into a trap of trying to
gross out the reader by heaping the grue and the gore high, but that often
alienates if it's over-done. Some of the finest horror writers don't shed so
much as a drop of blood.
Algernon
Blackwood,
Shirley
Jackson,
Arthur
Machen and even
Dylan
Thomas (not strictly a horror writer of course) can frighten just
with the power of their words when they evoke an eerie house or lonely river
bank. They could write in such a hypnotic way that they reach into the mind and
manipulate emotions without us even being fully aware of it. Partly as a homage
to Jackson and Blackwood I wrote
Judas
Tree, a novel set on an isolated Greek island. I set out to
write a frightening horror story without spilling a single drop of blood.
People have praised the scenes I intended to be chilling, so I'm reassured that
I did do something right.
Amazon.co.uk:
You're picking up quite a reputation in the States, surprising
only in that your books are so very English in tone and feel. Why do you think
this is?
Clark:
To be honest, I don't know. My first American sale was a short
story set in Scarborough with plenty of Yorkshire dialect and apparently it was
received with great enthusiasm, although I do wonder what a Texan reader might
have made of "There's summatt in thi eee" ("There's something in your eye"--
but I didn't have to translate, did I!). Blood Crazy
is set in
Doncaster. My next novel Darkness Demands
(paperback July, 2001)
was commissioned by the New York publisher Leisure. People are flabbergasted I
set it in a little Yorkshire village not America. But Bentley Little amongst
others in the States have given the hardcover release rave reviews. Perhaps
it's because I believe the story and characters are so important in a book. And
if you get it right the appeal becomes universal, just as we can still enjoy
the story of a Greek hero battling Medusa.
Amazon.co.uk:
Horror is apparently dead in the UK but we have plenty of
excellent writers. Why are people are always ready to slam that final nail in
horror's coffin and what's your take on the UK horror field?
Clark:
Horror has gone through a bad patch both sides of the Atlantic but
it is re-emerging. Horror seemed to get a bad reputation during the big horror
boom of around 10 years ago when publishers vied to produce the most lurid,
schlocky cover and a lot of poor horror fiction appeared that should have been
shredded at birth. In retrospect we might one day see why many people wanted to
bury horror--a pre-millennial thing? Too many terrible things happening in
the real world? I don't know. But I've always maintained that reading fictional
horror is cathartic. One reader wrote to me saying that he'd gone through a
rough 12 months, he was unhappy with life in general but after reading
Nailed by the Heart
he said "For the last two days I've gone
round with a smile on my face." Hopefully, he didn't think the book was
hilarious but that it somehow hoovered up some of his anxieties and made his
mood less dark. Horror is returning though, and there is new talent out there
who will be huge names in the next five years.
Amazon.co.uk:
Finally, if you could write a sequel to any other book, what would
you choose and what would happen?
Clark:
To be outrageous it should be the Bible but I think someone's
beaten me to it. Seriously though, I've thought of writing a sequel, or prequel
maybe, to William Hope Hodgson's colossal
masterwork The Nightland
. I'd have to be crazy to do that. Hardly anyone knows
it and it was a financial and critical flop in Hodgson's lifetime. But then I
like taking risks with my writing. When I find it's no longer challenging and
exciting maybe it's time to switch off the computer… forever. Of course
then, who knows, someone might come along wanting to write a sequel to one of
my books? Now that would be a strange experience…
Amazon Home
