by Mark Sieber

ou sometimes here the term born writer being thrown around. In many cases it's definitely true, but it seems like a hoary cliché in many more. Having known Steve Savile for a few years now, as a writer and a friend, I believe that he is a living embodiment of that title. Steve seems as comfortable with word as others might be walking on their feet or shoving food into their mouths.

Born in October 1969 (which makes him a palindrome at age 33), Steve entered this world in Newcastle, England. Newcastle is a bleak industrial place with a strong shipbuilding and coal-mining heritage. His formal education includes a BA in Political Science and an MA in Islamic Studies. Steve Savile left his native England and is now an expatriate living in Stockholm, Sweden, where he teaches college English.

His publishing history boasts of one full-length novel, Secret Life of Colors, a chapbook called Icarus Descending and a collection of his acclaimed short stories entitled Similar Monsters. More recently, Steve Savile has been contracted to expand his Secret Life of Colors novel and include more stories with its central character in an omnibus edition called tHe LaSt AnGeL. A graphic novel adapted from one of his best short stories, The Fragrance of You, is in the works. However, the most exciting and important thing that has happened to Steve's career is his recent coup as a winner of the prodigious Writer's of the Future Award, for his brilliant story, Bury My Heart at the Garrick. Steve was gracious enough to answer a few questions for Really Scary…

Really Scary: Steve, thanks for taking the time for us…

Steve Savile: An honest pleasure, Mark, so let's roll our sleeves up and dance, shall we?

RS: It seems to me that literature has been an enormous part of your life for just about ever. Have you always wanted to be a writer?

SS: I can actually remember very vividly the first moment I decided - I don't know if I am odd, but writing really was a conscious decision in my life, not just a banana peel that I slipped on - that I wanted to write. I was sixteen, just out of school, finished with my 'O' Levels and contemplating the really scary 'what happens next?' part of my life.

I was lucky in that I had a wonderful English teacher, PJ Knock, who ignited a real passion for the written word in me, and regularly told me that I had what it takes if I ever wanted to forget about sports and flexing my teen muscles and get down to the serious business of writing. PJ introduced me to more than just the classics that your average English teacher inflicts upon his pupils. He was a wonderful man who took the time to talk about characters, elements of style and structuring of plots, about what made Dickens and Jerome K. Jerome so wonderful, about warmth and wit in writing, about the dangers of animating the inanimate, attention to detail and continuity. He took the time to show clips from war films where in the background you could see VW Beetles driving along the cliffs in the distance, and read scenes where heroes escaped wild chases by leaping from windows where the author had simply forgotten that the action was taking place on the fourth floor. Like I said, I was like. PJ was a wonderful teacher.

Add to that the fact that my father had a habit of finding books on the train that he thought I might like, including Fritz Leiber's Nights Black Agents and The Two Towers within a few weeks and I was devouring Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke on a daily basis, it was only natural that I would start to think: "Hmmm…" because for every Asimov or Zelazny you have to wade through the quagmire of sub-standard drek that muddies the way.

Anyway, long story not so much shorter, I was traveling from Newcastle down to London where my father was living, and needing something to get me through the eight hour coach journey, I raided the local library and found a copy of David Eddings' The Enchanter's Endgame, missed the fact that it was book five in a series, and devoured it on the long journey. I got off the bus knowing that I wanted to write. I wanted my stories to effect people and *this* was the kind of stuff I wanted to write. Epic. Dazzling. Magical. Heroic.

I proceeded to borrow my aunt's typewriter - an old Imperial that looked like something out of Naked Lunch - and hammered out the first two chapters of an epic fantasy novel that weekend. It wasn't good. It's sitting in 'The Drawer of Things That World Will Never See' right now, festering. I followed it with a bizarre comic story that earned the stinging rejection: "We don't need another Pratchett!" If anything that just served to spur me on. I was writing for myself - I'd never heard of the Small Press and the idea that people would actually pay to read something I had written still hadn't occurred to me. I made plans to go to college to study business and journalism and kept on with my dirty little secret, locking myself in my room at night and writing…

RS: What are your earliest memories of reading?

SS: I think it goes back to my father again, who used to make up these wild stories for me and my friends whilst performing magic for us - he had a wonderful trick with an old police helmet that he used to make things appear and disappear that kept us all captivated. It was all part of that innocence that is so, so important to the fostering of a vivid imagination. My grandfather was great as well, he used to do card tricks and tell improbable stories of bank robberies to go along with them. At school I was always an impatient reader - I used to skip ahead in the books because I wanted to get to the end and see what happened. Even did that once whilst reading aloud for my teacher in third or forth grade, missing out about 11 pages in a single turn of the page. She noticed and made me go back and read all of the books I had already read, just in case I had skipped stuff, which of course I had.

Serious reading didn't really begin until I was twelve. My teacher read us The Hobbit at school. It was a magical way to discover that amazing book. The scene where the trolls are planning to eat the dwarves and Gandalf keeps them talking all night until they turn to stone come sunrise is one that I will never forget. The Hobbit was also the first time I experienced grief through a book when Thorin Oakenshield dies. I cried like an idiot. I had never felt anything even close to it.

I begged my parents to give me The Lord of The Rings for Christmas. I started reading The Fellowship of The Ring on Christmas morning, ignoring all of the expensive presents, including my first computer and one of those total control racing games in favour of Middle Earth. I didn't say a word to anyone for three days solid until I had read all three books. It was a truly amazing way to fall in love with reading, and at that stage, with eyes so wide and ready to be filled with wonder everything I sampled tasted so good.

I remember well my first taste of horror, Stephen King's Pet Sematary, read by torchlight beneath the bedcovers. It was a truly terrifying experience. I am not sure anything since has managed to engender even a tenth of that feeling of unease. King is easy to knock, but the truth is he is only ever competing with himself with each successive novel, everything else pretty much pales in comparison. He really is the grand master of the fantastic.

RS: Have you always been attracted to the fantastic?

SS: I think so. As a child I was always fascinated by Uri Geller. I used to sit on my windowsill trying to make grape seeds shoot and my mother still has a drawer full of bent and twisted cutlery. As far as reading and writing goes, it is difficult to really remember. I know I was strongly influenced by Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker, Stephen Donaldson, Fritz Leiber and JRR Tolkien, more so than any conventional horror writer - I love writers like Jonathan Carroll, Brad Denton and William Browning Spencer who have this wonderfully warped way of looking at the world. I love the fact that things might not be as mundane as they appear. Isn't it far more interesting to look at the world just slightly off-kilter than thinking that everything is as mundane as it appears to be?

RS: Film has certainly had a staggering influence in our culture for the last 100 years. How greatly do you feel that it has affected your fiction?

SS: Directly, without film I doubt very much that there would not be a genre out there called horror. I think we would be lucky because publishers wouldn't be striving to pigeonhole young writers into easily definable categories like fantasy, horror, science fiction, speculative fiction, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, magical realism, it would all be together as it used to be under the auspices of the literature of the fantastic. Tales of imagination. Writers like Carroll, Ligotti, Calvino, Singer, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, Chabon and Gaiman would all be right there next to each other in the bookstores instead of scattered throughout misleading subgenres. Indirectly, I have a very visual (cinematic) way of layering the plots in my work, thinking in terms of scenes and atmosphere far more than many writers. In one of the first reviews of Secret Life of Colours on the old Masters of Terror website the reviewer commented that David Fincher would be the perfect director to bring the book to life, I would tend to agree. Fincher has a wonderfully dark and grainy style which would suit Gabriel Rush down to the ground.

Of course, this is all talking about past projects. Currently I am about halfway through a mainstream/crime novel, parallellines, which is constructed very much in a cinematic style reminiscent of Altman's Short Cuts or PT Anderson's gorgeous Magnolia, with nary a hint of the fantastic or the magical, but with plenty of dark absurdity to it.

RS: Obviously, Jonathan Carroll and Fritz Lieber have been literary mentors to you. Are there any other writers who have been influential to you?

SS: Mort Castle has played a strong part in my development, guiding me, encouraging me and telling me honestly when I get it right and more importantly when I get it wrong. Writers I have always admired include Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Michael Moorcock, Roddy Doyle, Douglas Coupland, Chet Williamson, Tim Powers, Jay McKinnery and Paul Auster - these are all must buy writers for me. Every time they have a new release I am first in the queue at the bookstore. The new writers that really inspire me right now would have to be Glen David Gold (everybody simply HAS to go read Carter The Great, a wonderful, wonderful debut novel), Alice Sebold (Lovely Bones is simply beautiful, haunting and elegiac and challenging and captivating - and she just happens to be Glen David Gold's wife), Zadie Smith (What can I say, White Teeth, hell of a book, genuinely brilliant) and Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is by far and away the best book I have read in the last ten years).

Genrewise I am finding it more and more difficult to get excited by new writers. Brian Hopkins is someone I intend to read a lot more of. I've recently finished These I Know By Heart (Vox 13) and from the very first word Hopkins is dealing up wonders and beauty in equal measure. There aren't many others though. To be honest I find myself failing to finish more and more horror novels because the writers simply don't know how to write and instead fall back on garish special effects and heaps of thud and blunder.

RS: For better or worse, the Internet has made a monumental impact upon publishing. Do you think this is a good thing?

SS: God no. Erm, did I say that out loud? I'm a Luddite at heart. The internet has done a lot of great things for my career, without it I would never have met John Pelan and ended up co-editing two collections of Fritz Leiber's work (Black Gondolier & Other Stories and Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions, published by Midnight House) which was a dream come true. Equally I would never have met David Nordhaus and had the joy of seeing Secret Life of Colours published in the US. But - have you noticed there is always a 'but'? - the technology of the Internet makes it too easy for the trolls to roam around anonymously posting malicious stuff on message boards. People seem to forget about simple things like common decency and libel laws. I see good people being maligned simply because they had the nerve to disagree with a self-styled Pied Piper of Horror. I used to let this stuff upset me but I find myself steering further and further away from the online communities and simply doing what I ought to have done from the very beginning, writing. The amount of energy that gets wasted in pointless discussion on message boards, all of this "My book is bigger than your book" stuff is really inane and is nothing more than blatant self-promotion that turns me off. I rather enjoy the old days when the writers were more of a mystery. Sure it is nice to hang out in cyberspace with likeminded souls, but I miss the simplicity of the old days.

It has certainly made 'publishing' easy - in so much as any idiot with a copy of Dreamweaver or Pagemaker can cobble together a non-paying ezine and call themselves a publisher, which doesn't help anyone in the long run. There has to be a quality threshold and the painful truth is that the Internet is full of junk masquerading as literature.

RS: What do you think about Print On Demand publishing?

SS: POD as a technology is fine (despite the annoying fact that the cover stock tends to be too thin and curls too easily), POD Publishers on the other hand have the to make minimal investments to get a book into print, taking negligible risks - the name of the game is lots of writers on the list, paying no advances, rejecting as few writers as possible and relying upon accepted writers to peddle their wares. The publishers don't need to sell more than a handful of copies to break even. It is the kind of business that is obviously going to attract people without a strong editorial history because the actual editing is negligible beyond reading the manuscript and looking for spelling mistakes - and only the most glaringly obvious of those. That said, done properly, print on demand has a lot to offer the ambitious writer and some of the publishers really do have the right ambitions.

RS: Could you state your feelings about the current state of horror fiction?

SS: Tough one, Mark. Tough one. Obviously this is leading question. There is no market for horror fiction in the UK. In the US you have Leisure and Pinnacle but to be honest I've not been impressed by the quality of the Pinnacle books I've seen. They seem to be distinctly void of originality - with the obvious exception of Scott Nicholson's Red Church - and rather Leisure being the saviour of the horror genre I wonder if it isn't getting in to a position of dictating what is and isn't good horror simply because it is the *only* market? The small press scene is pretty strong, Cemetery Dance and Subterranean put out incredible books, and over in the UK PS Publishing have a great catalogue of titles but frankly the prices of these small press books make book buying prohibitive to the average reader. Novellas trading at thirty and forty bucks is simply immoral.

I am looking forward to the day when Tor, Daw, Del Ray, Bantam, Harper Collins, Random House, Headline, Orion and Macmillan start publishing quality massmarket paperbacks at a good price but that won't come until the writers stop being satisfied with duplicating the old zombie/vampire/werewolf/serial killer/haunting trash that they saw as kids in the Hammer Horror movies and really start to delve into their own subconscious's and producing horrors unique to them, start challenging themselves and stretching themselves. There are good writers out there, an upturn in the genre's fortunes will come. To go back to your comments about the internet, it has made it easy for writers to become complacent and turned them into salesmen rather than craftsmen. Now it is a case where making noise, banging your own drum, has become the norm instead of the exception, and he who bangs loudest becomes most important. The thing people seem to forget is that readers aren't stupid and readers won't keep coming back if the stuff you're writing isn't good enough. Quality is the key.

I also find it vaguely off-putting that books I spent a lot of money on picking up the small press edition appear a year or so later in the massmarket, this is especially true of anthologies. Some might look at it in a positive light but I can't help feeling slightly cheated. That said, I am delighted that Ash Tree have issued a collection of Chet Williamson's short stories and sincerely hope a massmarket publisher picks it up. Chet is a writer's writer, rather like Charles Beaumont was. You can't help read his words and be envious of his supreme talent.

RS: DarkTales did a beautiful edition of Secret Life of Colors and I know that you enjoyed working with them. Yet, the sales of the book were unsatisfying. Evidently, all of their sales weren't very good because they closed their doors earlier this year. Would you care to speculate on that?

SS: Secret Life was really a victim of being released too early in their publishing schedule, long before the guys had gotten distribution sorted out. All that said, it did sell out its original print run. By the time real interest in DarkTales titles began to surface, Secret Life was already an *old* book so the bricks and mortar stores were less than eager to stock it, and pricewise it never stood a chance in my native England retailing at fifteen pounds for a paperback. That was outrageous really, considering the fact that it was a little over 60,000 words in length and had what the DT guys lovingly referred to as a "glob of snot" on the cover. I was pretty happy with the reviews that the book picked up but very disappointed by the lack of promotion in general it received. That was one of the primary reasons behind the new book, The Last Angel, through Catalyst. Gabriel is an interesting hero and I think his story will interest fans of horror, fantasy and crime fiction. Indeed, for a while when Bookface was in its prime Secret Life was actually the #1 read on its bestseller list, up there with the likes of Grisham and Ludlam, and I received a lot of emails from people who said the same thing: "They wouldn't normally read horror but..." and invariably they were nice enough to say it was one of the most original things they had read, moving, shocking, but not at all what they expected from a 'horror' novel. I liked that. That for me is what it is all about, connecting with the reader, giving them something of value for their time, surprising them, entertaining them, making them think and taking those thoughts down avenues they would not usually go.

Running an independent publisher is a full time job and the rewards are minimal, in all honesty. Something like DarkTales took an exceptional amount of courage, unlike your average POD publisher they actually printed upfront a large number of copies, normally around 250 at a time I believe, and marketed them. Of course, they were hit by bookstores and distributors not paying their bills. I have a lot of time for the guys at DT, they had the right idea and so very nearly made it work.

RS: It seems like every week we hear about promising new writers in the field of horror. A lot of that may be hype. Can you name any new writers that excite you?

SS: To be honest I am finding it harder and harder to get excited by 'new' writers these days as a lot of it has become about self-promotion rather than simply writing good stories. Michael Laimo is a good writer and a great guy, Brian Hopkins (though I don't think he really counts as a new writer) is class from top to bottom, excellent writer really producing worthwhile work, Conrad Williams is getting better and better (Nearly People, his PS Publishing novella is a must read), and probably Greg Gifune. I get dreadfully bored with all of the *amazing* blurbs I am reading these days that keep saying things like: "The hottest new voice in horror" Not so long ago a good blurb used to mean something, and from some writers it still does but the trend for hyperbole to boost your friends (or even yourself) has become a little tiresome. Face it, if everything was so good it would be flying off the shelves, New York would be lining up to make massmarkets out of it and cash in on that sudden glut of talent. Publishing is a business. Business is invariably about exploiting assets. Writers and their wares are very definable assets, if they were that *hot* the accountants couldn't afford not to exploit them. The great thing about the guys I've listed above isn't just that they are good writers; it is that they are gentlemen who understand that to be a writer involves good writing not talking about how good your writing is.

RS: What differences do you observe between British publishing and American publishing?

SS: A large part of it is ambition I think - in the UK I honestly think there is more of a feeling of community and a more genuine feeling of working together for success. There are a number of very talented young writers in the UK that are virtually unknown on mainland USA - I am thinking of Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Jason Gould, and Christopher Kenworthy who seem to have been around forever and are genuinely exciting writers but are virtually unheard of outside of the UK because they don't waste their time jumping up and down and shouting: "Look at me! Look at me!"

Of course residing as I do in the grim north of snowy Scandinavia I am very much an outsider looking in on both communities these days.

RS: You've told me that you are working on a love story. This may come as a shock to some readers. Could you elaborate on that?

SS: It is true. What can I say? I am the kind of writer my agent hates. I don't keep turning out the same story over and over, I want to explore, I want to push myself into creating genuine Art, so that sometime when I am long gone my words will linger and perhaps still have the power to effect someone who chances across a dusty book in an even dustier bookstore. The love story is very much in its infancy, but I have a loose outline mapped out along with some character notes. I won't really get into the meat of it until I have finished parallellines (probably around Christmas time this year), but I am very excited about it. The opening scene takes place on a bridge in Prague where a old man finds a painting of himself and his now dead wife for sale, the painting is of a scene from thirty years before and he never knew the painting existed - the artist had taken a random photo of people in love because he wanted to remember the day himself - the day he learned he was going to be a father. I'm not really in a position to give a lot more than that away, but yeah, I confess, a love story. Non-supernatural, non-nasty love story. I guess I am going soft in my old age.

RS: Where do you see Steve Savile, The Writer, in five years?

SS: To be honest, friend to friend, I don't know. I can't see myself *not* writing but I have reevaluated a lot of stuff in my life over the last few years, especially after my illness, and I have realized that my definition of success is probably very different to other people's. I don't crave the attention anymore. I don't feel the desperate need to have one hundred emails in my inbox to prove I am a writer anymore. I want to write the stories that are inside me. I don't sit and imagine what markets they might be for anymore. I write for me and I am a pretty tough audience. What I can promise is that you won't read the same story twice. I mean here we are talking about a mainstream crime/lit novel in one breath and a love story in another. I'm nothing if not unpredictable. To be honest though, I can't see me editing anything else for a long time. I've done it now, with Redbrick Eden and the Leiber books. It would be difficult to top the feelings that those books represent, besides I want to write more and editing leeches away time like nothing else. Right at the top you mention the graphic novel of Fragrance of You - at the moment I am talking with the artist about a potential series or interlinked novels roaming in theme from the Knight's Templar to Da Vinci into the wars in Eastern Europe going on right now. I just like to write and see where those stories lead. Maybe five years from now we'll be talking about my latest balls out horror novel, who knows?

RS: From our many talks, I know that Science Fiction is very dear to you. Do you still read in the genre? Or is your heart still true to the "Golden Age" of SF, as mine is?

SS: I can't read modern SF, it is all jargon and hard science. I adore the Golden Age stuff. My bookshelves a overloaded with Sturgeon, Leiber, Asimov, Clarke, Damon Knight, John Brunner, RA Lafferty, Hal Clement, Cordwainer Smith, Bradbury, Ellison, all old school writers who really wrote good stories. I mentioned Charles Beaumont earlier, as I am sure you know Charles died tragically young, but even in his short stay Beaumont wrote some amazing stories. I love rereading Beaumont's stuff. Have you noticed writers always talk about their stuff? Not their books or their stories, their stuff.

RS: This Writer's of the Future award…. it's obviously the biggest thing that's happened for your career thus far. How do you think this will affect your future?

SS: Winning the award was an amazing thing, as far as writing goes it is by far and away the biggest thing that has happened to me so far, prize aside, getting to workshop with Tim Powers for a week will be an amazing experience. I can see doors that were once closed opening already. I have been asked to adapt a novella into a radio play, have had a couple of massmarket anthology invitations into what look to be pretty major projects for 2003. The secret is building on it. It is one thing to be a writer of the future but quite another to be a writer of the NOW. In April 2003 I've got a new book coming out with Catalyst, The Last Angel, which is the definitive Gabriel Rush book. I've toyed with doing a second Gabriel Rush novel but to be honest I don't want to return to his life for another year of mine - instead we are offering a revised and improved version of Secret Life of Colours complete with new alternative ending, a novella and a couple of short stories featuring Gabriel and a huge authors commentary on the genesis of the character, the mythology of the world Gabriel inhabits and the many metamorphoses the story went through from cradle to the grave. This is something I have always wanted to see happen, the DarkTales edition was lovely but didn't get seen by anywhere near enough people. It sold out its original print-run pretty quickly and when they offered the chance for a reprint I turned it down because there were a number of things I wanted to put right, including a number of missing chapters and a cover which did anything but help sell the book. This time out I've got an amazingly homo-erotic illustration from Robert Sammelin (who did Tim Lebbon's Nature of the Balance cover) which is part Jesus, part angel part demon and so suggestive of suffering and pain it is almost unbearable. I absolutely adore the cover. It absolutely radiates beauty and controversy and it steers away from the usual genre traps.