DARK MATTERS:

AN INTERVIEW WITH TERRY LAMSLEY

Terry Lamsley was born in the South of England in 1941. A late bloomer, he did not begin publishing his fiction until the early nineties, with the collection Under The Crust, the title story of which won him the World Fantasy Award in 1994 for Best Novella. An auspicious start to a career that would see him grabbing the attention of such luminaries as Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Jones and the late Karl Edward Wagner in a remarkably short space of time.   In 1997, he won the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award for his collection Conference With The Dead. His fiction has appeared in Best New Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Dark Terrors, Subterranean Gallery, Taps & Sighs and the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror Ninth and Twelfth annual editions, to name but a few.

KPB: Terry, despite being one of the most acclaimed voices in the dark fiction genre, you all but vanished off the map a few years ago. Would you cite personal or professional reasons for this?

Sometime during the winter 2001/2 I stopped writing. There wasn’t a moment when I made a decision to give it up. I just drifted out of the habit of trying to produce a few hundred words of fiction every day. I think I had worn myself out and a sensible voice inside me was telling me to take a break Throughout the 1990’s and beyond I’d held down a difficult day job working with seriously disturbed adolescents and their often dysfunctional families, working over sixty hours a week, while at the same time writing stories in the early morning and late at night. Because I was having some success with writing I felt encouraged to carry on with that and managed to maintain a routine that enabled me to deal with the stresses of the situation, or so I thought. But it couldn’t last. My private life had been breaking up for some years and, as I saw it then, my general prospects for the future were not golden. At about the same time the place I worked at was run down and closed for the usual financial reasons. I was redeployed, found myself working different hours, and my routine got slowly blown away. I tried to keep the writing going but began to get tired of having to sit down in front of a screen and make things up. Soon I’d stopped producing anything and for a while it felt good. One thing less to worry about. Then, about a year ago, the opening sentences of a story crawled into my head and wouldn’t go away, so I started writing again. Coincidentally, when I was about ten thousand words into the story that I knew was going to be long, Peter Crowther contacted me and asked if I was interested in producing a twenty-five thousand word novella. I was able to show him what I’d done so far at once, he liked it and – well – there you go. It seems I’m back on that map.

KPB: You also relocated to Amsterdam. Was there a particular reason you chose the Netherlands as a place to call home?

A couple of years ago when my partner, Renata, and I decided to live together we had to choose between Holland and the UK. Renata, who is Dutch, had lived and worked in England for some time before and she was not inclined to do so again. Understandably. So I went over to take a look at Amsterdam. When I got there it took about four or five hours for me to decide it was time to say farewell to England. I’ve had no regrets about that at all. I have to go over to England two or three times a year to see friends and family but I always get a good feeling when the plane touches down in Schiphol Airport again.

KPB: I was delighted to hear you’ve started writing again and I’m far from alone in my jubilation. Is this return to the genre for good?

It feels that way at the moment but of course the decision, one way or another, is not mine alone. As with any writer the markets for my work could dry up at any time, or I might lose the knack of getting my stories across to readers of the genre and fall out of favour, as I’ve seen happen to others. If that sounds like the observation of an insecure man to you, then you’ve guessed my secret. Also, I am not one of those art for art’s sake aesthetes who think that writing is a sacred duty that has its own nebulous rewards. The activity only makes sense at all if the work gets published. If that stopped happening for me almost certainly I would stop writing and get on with something else I like doing, like counting clouds or sitting on a terrace with a drink, watching the world go by.

KPB: How has immersion in Dutch culture influenced your work?

Not a lot, as far as I can tell. I visit the art galleries and listen to music at the Concertgebouw and hang about in the bookshops, but I do that sort of thing wherever I go. That’s not the point of this town. You have to understand that Amsterdam is a fabulously cosmopolitan place and is in many ways quite unlike the rest of the Nederlands, much of which is as dull and smug as most of rural England. There are hundreds of thousands of people here from every part of the world, in this comparatively small city, and they are all making their mark. Every race and creed is well represented. It’s the ultimate cultural mix. Also a very large proportion of the population is under thirty. In spite of the persistence of the beautiful and historic buildings alongside the canals and in the Jordaan, for instance, Amsterdam is a consciously modern city and, to me, it even has a feel of the future about it. And there is the famous Amsterdam toleration of all kinds of eccentric activities and behavior and even outright lunacy that has created a culture of its own. Now that is a culture that has influenced me, but I couldn’t describe to you exactly how. The best way to experience its effects is to take a stroll through the Vondelpark or up and down Leidsestraat on a sunny day in summer. It’s the closest most of us will ever get to visiting another planet. A more benign and cranky one.

KPB: What do you think of the current state of the horror market? Are we heading for a boom or a repeat of the implosion of the 1980’s?

As far as I can tell (and I am out of touch with the mainstream of dark fantasy publishing events) though sales of genre titles from the mega publishers are reportedly dead on the carpet the quality of dark fantasy published by the small press is generally high and must be selling well or there wouldn’t be so much SP activity. There is not as much clumsy stuff written by people with no love or understanding of the genre about as there was twenty years ago, during the ‘boom’. And who would want the 80’s back? Arrrgh, no, I couldn’t stand it.

Although the small presses seem to be booming I have detected no indications that we are about to witness a great revival. It’s an old complaint but a lot of the classic books that influenced me and most other horror writers are hard to find, out of print, or only available to well-off collectors in small and expensive reprints, so people today attracted to writing horror, unless they spend a lot of time in the libraries, are going to come from a background of TV, the movies, comic books and a small handful of big selling, capable but not so subtle and sometimes fatally influential, writers. (I name no names.) This may turn out to be a good thing but I doubt it.

KPB: In your period of non-writing, did you spend much time reading? If so, what were your titles of preference?

I always have read too much. I can’t stop. Sometimes I think I should seek a medical opinion about my book collecting. One of my many manias. As with most readers, I suppose, there are certain writers whose work has stayed with me through the years, and who’s example, at all times, I gain strength from. In horror the writers that mean most to me are Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, Robert Aickman, Fritz Leiber and Ramsey Campbell. No surprises there. I could give you a list of thirty or forty other ancient and modern writers in the genre I reread, but I don’t want to get tedious on you. Dark fantasy has only ever been a small but significant part of my reading just as it is only part of the whole of world literature. I have an insatiable curiosity and am addicted to finding out what other writers have written at all times in all places about anything.

Okay, so I haven’t really answered your question.

As it happens I was rereading a lot of Paul Bowles during the months when I wasn’t writing. No one can create an atmosphere of unease and get the bowels moving as skillfully and with such economy as he does. A great American writer who, I’m told, is little read or respected in his own country. I would recommend his fiction to anyone interested in horror. For all I know his work might be out of print too.

At about the same time, on a trip to Edinburgh, I had the good luck to find three volumes of Ivan Turgenev’s stories in a 19^th century edition of translations by Constance Garnett. His major novels are always available but I had never come across any of the stories in these books. He and Chekhov are to me the meat and drink of the Russian authors.

Like a lot of people, I admire and enjoy Ian Rankin’s later Inspector Rebus novels. His THE FALLS went down well during my lay-off.

KPB: What can we hope to see from you in the future?

I‘ve just completed a 15,000 word novella, ‘Sick House Hospitality’ but don’t know what will become of that yet. The novella I mentioned in my answer to your first question, ‘So Long Gerry’, will appear in FOURBODINGS   (yes – FOUR) from PS Publishing sometime soon. Reprints of my stories will be in Steve Jones’s THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW TERROR and TAVERNS OF THE DEAD from Cemetery Dance Publications and in other anthologies. I’ve got two new tales well underway at the moment, have made a start at a third, and hope to have enough stories for a fourth collection within the next year or so.

KPB: Thanks for your time, Terry!

This interview originally appeared in Subterranean Press Newsletter