Tangled Web UK Interview
Jay Russell Interviews Kim Newman
Kim Newman is sui generis. That's not a movie trailer line ("Samuel L. Jackson *is* Shaft"), but a simple, irrefutable statement of fact. It's tempting to call Newman a jack-of-all-trades, but it would be damning with faint praise because he manages to master everything he does. He is a top-flight novelist, an exceptional short story writer, an insightful and engaging critic, a mass media bon vivant...and an amazingly nice guy to boot.
Newman is probably best known as a horror writer, but as the following interview suggests, that label is not entirely appropriate nor does it do his work justice.
To date, the Newman oeuvre includes eight novels under his own name (the best of which,
Anno Dracula, is the most important vampire novel of the last twenty years), eight more as "Jack Yeovil," two short story collections, and four volumes about movies.
The man is a writing machine, but the end product is anything but workmanlike. The third book in the "Anno Dracula" saga,
Dracula Cha Cha Cha has just been published in the UK by Simon & Schuster (it's called Judgment Of Tears in the US), along with the collection Seven Stars, a remarkable romp set in the world(s) of Newman's various supernatural sleuths. Both volumes are typical of Newman at his best. Forthcoming work includes a new novel called An English Ghost Story, and
Unforgivable Stories, another collection. Film reviews by Newman can be found on a regular basis in Empire and Sight & Sound, and his most recent book on film is Cat People, published by the BFI.
Your body of work constitutes one of the most interesting excursions into genre play of any writer I can think of.
Do you think of yourself as a genre writer? If so, of what genre?
Having started out simultaneously as a critic and a fiction writer, I split my personality so that Kim the critic spends his time looking at films and books and slotting them into a complex web of genres and sub-genres while Kim the Writer tries to come up with work that either fits all over the map or doesn't fit in at all. Certainly, I've written novels and stories that are mainstream horror, science fiction or whatever, but most recently I've been interested in doing stories that go to other places. I rarely write horror that's just supposed to be scary, for instance. If I'm anything, I'm a satirist -- I just use terror as well as humour to reflect the real world back at a reader who might not want to look too closely at it. I understand the plight of book-stackers in shops, but I also delight in how difficult Life's Lottery, say, is to place in a section.
Are genre categories useful or obstructive to you? Do they serve writers, readers or publishers? (Or none of the above?)
Genre categories are interesting from the point of view of writing. I've just written a novel squarely in its genre, entitled An English Ghost Story. I like the way that tells you what to expect, but also hints that you'll get an overview of a whole field.
Industrially, genre serves as a way publishers can aim books at sections of the market. However, the days when any old horror, s-f or mystery story would sell a certain number of copies to a certain number of devotees who bought everything are long gone, which is a bad thing for a certain number of good writers whose books were embraced by fans simply because they were in a given genre no matter how difficult they might be, but they were always outnumbered by the hacks who just churned out product to meet and glut the shelves. I trust those people are happy doing something else now. They probably did a great disservice to popular fiction.
I've found that genre fiction gets particularly short shrift in the UK in terms of reviewing, legitimacy, acceptability, etc., especially relative to the US. Do you think there are differences in attitudes toward genre writing in the UK and US? How about differences *in* genre writing in the two countries?
Maybe I have a privileged position because I feel that I usually get pretty good coverage from genre and mainstream press in this country -- this may be because I do a lot of journalism and broadcasting and so the editors of books pages or programs tend to have heard of me and are thus more likely to pull my books off the pile. It could also be that my ambiguous relationship with genre, especially with something like Life's Lottery, means I get more coverage than other, perhaps equally deserving writers.
Then again, as a critic, The Independent has assigned me to review Magnus Mills, Michael Moorcock, Jonathan Carroll, Poppy Brite, Stephen King, Nick Royle and Jon Grimwood in the last year or so: the spread of names, some mainstreamy and some cultish, suggests that lit editors are prepared to consider genre or genre-ish material. That may be rough on, say, James Herbert. I don't know the US scene as well, but it doesn't seem that different -- with the exception that American fan presses are more likely to push aggressively for godawful writers and whine that, say, Edward Lee, should be treated like Bret Easton Ellis.
What is your assessment of the current state of horror fiction, both aesthetically and commercially?
Pretty ropey, but I think it always has been. There are a lot of good writers about, and a lot more mediocre or bad ones. Every time someone tries to declare a movement, it just seems like an excuse for a bunch of bottom-feeders to cluster around and try to get in on a limited amount of action. Certainly, we have some truly great writers who remain vastly undervalued -- Ramsey Campbell springs to mind -- and a thin percentage of lesser lights who have their (passing) moment of surprising success, but Dennis Wheatley was the world's biggest horror writer for ages and he's out-of-print and all-but-forgotten these days.
The Anno Dracula books are ostensibly vampire novels, but they have little in common with the dreadful plethora of vampire fiction that has 
dominated horror publishing over the past decade.
What is your take on the ascendancy of the vampire as horror icon?
It's probably down to a conjunction of Anne Rice's books and the goth fashion/music scene. There are more vampire novels than ever around now, but far fewer 
vampire movies being made than in the early 70s. In my books, I've been rooting through all the possible meanings and relevances of the myth to the culture.
What makes vampires interesting is what makes them popular, that they have so many different shades of interpretation, that they can stand in for so many real-world phenomena that the metaphor will always be useful. That and the fact that they are, like it or not, the sexiest of the classic monsters, mixing the physicality of the werewolf and the etheriality of the ghost.
What do you think is the relationship between filmic and literary horror? Is there any reason to expect there to be crossover between the two audiences?
There is a certain crossover, and I think the recent boom in teen/twentysomething horror movies may have been fuelled by the young adult horror craze of a few years earlier, with the audiences for Scream (too young to have seen Halloween on its original release) being slightly grown-up Christopher Pike fans. If only because publishers take notice of what's selling in other media, there will be a blip of effort on behalf of horror. Someone good, like Douglas Clegg, stands to benefit.
Seven Stars brings together many of the characters you've employed in different books and stories. (Indeed, the book provides a "Who's Who" at the end, for the uninitiated.) Seven Stars is a delightful and engaging tour de force, but having worked with these characters for so long, do you worry about overplaying your hand? It's easy to think of writers who've written one book too many in the same series; when is it time to move on?
To me, Seven Stars was a bit of an indulgence, tying up many areas of my fictional universe, but I had to bring in Moorcockian parallel worlds to get away with it. I've certainly concluded a few series (the Where The Bodies Are Buried stories and the USSA cycle, with Eugene Byrne), and some others haven't had that much play. The Anno Dracula cycle will probably stand at four books for the moment. I do have other series, cycles and themes perking, though. Eugene and I have written the first of a projected six-book collaboration, The Matter Of Britain.
Of all the detectives you employ in Seven Stars, my favourite is Richard Jeperson, despite the fact that I don't actually know the material he's spun from all that well. For all his surface silliness - and the fact that Austin Powers now makes him *seem* less original (though you were there first) - I feel a real depth to his character and situation. Is there perhaps just a little bit more of you in Jeperson than in some of the other detectives?
If anything, Jeperson is less real to me than the other characters, because he's conceived as a fictional fictional character, in a particular style -- my original idea was Jason King crossed with Doctor Strange -- but he is a 'fun' character, and I hope to do more with him. He is also one of my first characters, since I started writing stories about him when I was at school (all lost, mercifully).
Since Tangled Web is primarily devoted to crime fiction, let me ask which crime writers do you most respect and enjoy?
James Ellroy, Stanley Ellin, Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Thomas Harris, John Dickson Carr, Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett.
Lastly, which book of yours do you think best represents your sensibility and what it is you want to say and do in fiction?
Tough call. Probably The Quorum, because it has so much in it that's close to my life. I want to tell stories that engage and move people, but also make readers think about their own life and times (most explicitly in Life's Lottery).
Interview by Jay Russell
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