With the Doctor

I thought I'd post this pic from the making of 'Doctor Who: Hornets' Nest' - the series of five linked audiobooks I've got coming out from September onwards...

Northern Gothic

I'm just back from a busy and nostalgic trip to Lancaster, where they were holding the International Gothic Association conference. I listened to some great papers given on Alan Moore, William Beckford and Batman. I caught up with some old friends and made some new ones. On the last night I gave a reading along with Daragh Carville and Jo Baker. It was a good trip, and a brilliantly run conference. The final night there was a disco in a bar and the playlist was a weirdly accurate recreation of every disco in every Lancaster Uni bar twenty one years ago, when I first arrived on that campus.

The whole Goth theme had me pondering a bit over how I've ended up writing what I've been calling Comic-Gothic-Mysteries in the form of the Brenda and Effie books, and which Catherine Spooner much more succinctly described as 'Northern Gothic.' I made a kind of list in my head of the Gothic influences as they came to me in order:

When I was five I subscribed to Marvel UK's weekly, 'Dracula Lives!' Gene Colan's smoky pencils gave me nightmares, to the extent that my parents stopped the mag being delivered.

About the same time there was Doctor Who as produced by Philip Hinchcliffe, script edited by Robert Holmes and played by Tom Baker - during their famous mid-Seventies Gothic period - when they played with images and tropes nicked from Hammer films and other spooky classics.

In the Eighties there were all those late night Channel 4 double bills of the Universal Horror movies - the ones where the Mummy met the Frankenstein Monster and the Werewolf's Bride and Dracula's daughter. Team-ups I always loved.

Later I read the original novels. I remember waiting in Newton Aycliffe's Doctors' surgery for my mam and being completely absorbed in a library hardback of Frankenstein. I reread Dracula as comfort reading, my first few stormy nights as a student away from home on that Lancaster campus.

It was at Lancaster that I was introduced to contemporary Gothic novels - especially Angela Carter's work.

Putting it all together like that, what I realise I liked about the genre is the fact that it isn't dead. All the examples I liked were ones that proved that there was still fun to be had with those old stories. People were rewriting them, turning them inside out, having adventures with them - and creating team-ups. I also liked the fact that the characters could step out of the original texts and wander into other stories at will: guest-starring in each others' tales.

So that's what I was thinking about at the conference. Also, this theme that has been dogging me since watching Torchwood: Children of Earth. I'm seeing the theme everywhere - that of the hero having to turn into a monster in order to save the world. I'm still mulling that one over.

I looked back through my notes from various lectures and talks over the few days in Lancaster. I take reams of notes all the time, of course, in a mildly obsessive way. I was picking through what I'd noted down from Marina Warner's opening talk about Beckford. She was telling the tale of his unpublished stories - the 'Episodes' missing from his novel Vathek - and how they lay undisturbed in a couple of trunks for six decades after his death. My note of this fascinating fact ran as follows: 'Two large chests mysteriously untouched for sixty years.'

Going Live

This is v exciting... after weeks and weeks of planning - the website's here at last!

Thanks to Stuart Douglas for sorting it out all out and lending his expertise.

This is the place I'll be posting news about upcoming new books and stories of mine. Also, about readings and events I'll be at. I'll also probably be gossiping and arguing the toss about stuff.

I reckon I'll be writing about the writing process too... and also about what I'm reading and thinking about.

Anyway - it's summer now - and I'm inbetween teaching terms. I'm getting on with the writing of Brenda and Effie Book 5... and waiting for a whole load of things coming out in the autumn. I'll be 40 in the autumn... and I'm celebrating with a whole mad load of new releases.

So... ask me anything! Within reason! I love those websites where authors interact with their readers and a whole conversation keeps going. It'd be great to have that here.