Interview - Author Simon Clark

An accomplished writer and novelist with scores of accolades under his belt, author Simon Clark has his sizable following due to the catalog of work he's produced over his career working on plenty of popular properties or his original work. Now, in honor of his participation in the upcoming release of 'Return of the Blood-Feeders' in the "Creatures of the Night" collection, I talk with him about his early interest in writing, his process with stories, and the novella itself.

Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, when did you get into horror in general?

Simon Clark: Thank you for the questions. Horror interested me from a very early age. From the age of three, I was interested in film, TV, and comics that involved monsters and robots. And though that sounds like they’d be Sci-Fi there were always that horror element there. People being chased by monsters or attacked by robots – those were the situations that electrified me. Then, by the time I was eleven, I was reading a lot of ghost stories – that interest continued into my teens when I began reading adult horror, whether it be classic tales by Arthur Machen and Shirley Jackson or contemporary writers in the form of James Herbert and Stephen King.

Me: Were you into genre films growing up? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?

SC: Yes, absolutely, I was into genre films. It might seem bizarre but here in the UK, when I was young, the BBC would broadcast movies around five o’clock specifically for children. The thing is, they’d cut them into twenty-minute segments to make a TV series out of them and show them daily. One such film was On the Beach, which was definitely NOT a children’s film, and which I saw when I was five years old. Of course, it features the aftermath of a nuclear war where everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is dead, and a radiation cloud is drifting south to Australia where it will eventually kill everyone there. The film gave me nightmares, but I was hooked. When I was twelve, a local TV station began screening the Hammer Horror films, so I fell in love with the Frankenstein and Dracula films. The Hammer version of The Mummy was a favorite, too. Soon after that, I watched the Universal Frankenstein and Dracula classics, which I kept re-watching and loved more and more with every viewing. Karloff and Lugosi are terrific. Bride of Frankenstein is a phenomenal production. Later, I watched Jaws, which totally fulfilled the monster criteria for me.

Me: Who were some of your favorite writers growing up? Do you try to take influences from their style with your own voice in your work?

SC: When I first got into adult horror, I was reading the Pan Book of Horror and Fontana Ghost Stories series. I must admit, back then, it didn’t matter to me who those writers were. What was important to me, was the extravaganza of horror that ignited my imagination and excitement. Later, I began to identify individual writers who really delivered the goods, which would make me want to return to their work. These included Arthur Machen, Stephen King, and James Herbert. When I was twelve, I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and really enjoyed it despite the antique style. I lent the book to a friend at school. On the way home we happened upon people trying to put out a grassfire that was engulfing the hillside. We joined in to put out the flames. Me stamping on them, my friend apparently using his hand to extinguish the burning grass. I shouted to him. “You’ll burn your hand putting out the fire like that!” He held up my Frankenstein novel and shouted back, “It’s okay, I’m using this!” The book survived without so much as a single scorch mark. In fact, it's right here in front of me. I don’t deliberately take on the style of other writers, though I know I must have absorbed the style of lots of writers, which has then fermented away in my head to brew my own style of horror.

Me: What was the starting point of becoming a writer? Were you always into writing growing up?

SC: I’d been making up stories since I could talk. I think the seed of being a writer was always there, germinating from a very early age. One evening, when I was thirteen or so, I was out in a field, playing with the dog and I suddenly thought to myself ‘I want to become a writer’. Ever since that moment, it was my ambition. I started to try and write stories for publication when I was sixteen. All were rejected!

Me: What is your writing process? How do you stay focused on writing?

SC: That’s a good question. The writing process for me begins with a ‘what if’ idea. For example, what if the gods of the Vikings created a vampire army to attack modern human beings? That became the starting point for my novel Vampyrrhic. I start with that ‘what if’ idea, which then triggers other ideas that feed into the original idea. Then all the ideas suddenly seem to fuse together and (it can happen in a flash) then I know that I’ve got a viable concept for a story or a novel. Once I get that flash of inspiration I sit down and start writing. How do I stay focused? It must be down to habit now. For a long time, I’ve switched on the computer in the morning and then worked office hours. I aim to write at least 3000 words a day. If I hit that 3000 mark, I can switch off the computer at the end of the day and feel satisfied.

Me: How did you settle on the plot for your novel “Return of the Blood-Feeders?”

SC: Kevin Kennedy approached me on behalf of Crystal Lake Entertainment about writing a novella, which would later become part of the three-novella book, Creatures of the Night. When it was agreed that the theme of the book would be vampires, I realized that I should return to the town of Leppington that I’d dreamed up for my novel Vampyrrhic. Because the setting seemed so real in my head as soon as I put the new lead character Karl, a loner and a drifter, into the fictional Station Hotel then the plot blossomed quickly in my imagination. I suspect that deep down in my subconscious the plot had been forming for a while. It’s too glib and too trite to say the story wrote itself; however, in this case, the plot came together quickly, and I found myself typing faster and faster to keep up with the story that was flowing through my head.

Me: Was there any special significance to making the setup take place in your Vampyrrhic series of stories? How much prep-work went into adding the traits of the creatures into this type of story?

SC: There was no significance in the sense that it was an anniversary of the publication of one of the Vampyrrhic novels. If anything, I had an instinctive drive, or even compulsion, to return to the world of Vampyrrhic. Vampyrrhic seems to be one of those novels that really gets a hold on readers. The thing is, it really did get a hold on me. I’ve written several spinoff novels and stories that draw on Vampyrrhic. The creatures in the story are based on the ones I created for Vampyrrhic. Some of the ‘vampires’ are long-dead Viking warriors; others are their more recent recruits. Helsvir, the huge vampire monster, was inspired by reading a legend about monstrous creatures auto-generating from piles of corpses left on Viking battlefields. The notion of a monster formed from a conglomeration of corpses was absolutely something I had to use in a novel! And the monster I came up with, called Helsvir, returns in ‘Return of the Blood-Feeders’, which is my contribution to Creatures of the Night.

Me: Was there any part of your real self injected into the other human characters?

SC: That’s a very good question – a thought-provoking one, too, because I suspect I do put part of my self into the characters, but I do it without realizing it. It’s only usually when I re-read a book or story years later that I realize that aspects of my character have become part of the fictional character in my story. I guess you would find some of my character traits in certain characters in Vampyrrhic and in the ‘Blood-Feeders’ novella. Perhaps I’m trying, at times, to expunge what I might think of as negative qualities in myself in the crucible of fictional horror.

Me: What was the most surprising thing about the arc of the story that emerged as you were writing it?

SC: I do like to write a good, blazingly powerful action scene in horror, but what I found myself doing in Blood-Feeders was weaving a note of eeriness around the novella’s arc that imbues the entire story with a distinct atmosphere of uncanny energy. And the ‘Blood-Feeder’s’ arc, for me, appears to extend beyond the last page, perhaps it’s hinting to me that I should continue the story of the monstrous Helsvir.

Me: Once it was finally written, what was the process for having it published?

SC: Fortunately, I’d already been invited to write the novella so it was a case of writing it, then sending it to the editor, then for it go through the editorial process, and for the cover art to be created by the very talented Ben Baldwin. After that, Crystal Lake Entertainment put the Creatures of the Night into production and produced the beautiful volume that’s on sale now.

Me: How do you do to keep your creative energy flowing?

SC: Even after all these years, I get a tremendous buzz out of writing stories. When my writing is going well it’s exhilarating and fulfilling, and I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted to – not that I’d ever want to stop writing.

Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!

SC: Thank you for asking me to take part in the interview. I’ve enjoyed it and it’s always good to think about what I do and how I do it. What’s next? Recently, I’ve continued my Blood Crazy series of novels, which have been issued by Darkness Visible Publishing. Blood Crazy has been one of my most popular novels. It deals with the aftermath of an apocalyptic event where everyone over the age of nineteen becomes murderously insane, and children and teenagers are forced to fight for survival. My next novel will be Protos. This is the novelization of a movie I scripted in collaboration with Brian Avenet-Bradley, and which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Protos is Sci-Fi/Horror and, like ‘Return of the Blood-Feeders’, features plenty of action horror and mysterious and utterly dangerous events. Thank you for reading this, and I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the subject I love – horror!