More about Morbid Tales

As you may know, Tartarus Press re-released Morbid Tales as a paperback earlier this month. In the post I have just linked to, I mused upon that collection's place in my life from a kind of biographical point of view. I'd like to write a little more about the collection. I'm not going to 'review' it – still not going to review it – because, apart from anything else, my opinion of my own work goes up and down all the time. For instance, after being reasonably satisfied upon re-reading some of the stories, I then re-read another – one I've sometimes heard described as one of my best – and found it to be unbearably dreadful. I won't say which one. On such occasions, all I can do is think, "I'll make up for it by writing better stories in the future", and hope that other people don't view the work in question as dimly as I do.

Anyway, this time I want to look a little at the genesis of each story. I hope this will be of interest regardless of the merits of the tales themselves – it is to me.

The Mermaid

This is a very early piece. That is, early on in my development after I got to the stage where I was writing things with the old beginning-middle-end (before that I'd largely been writing things with beginnings, middles, but no end, which simply petered out, and before that, I wrote things that did end, but I was in my teens and younger and those things are beyond salvaging). Everything of mine that has been published was, I think I'm right in saying, written since 1996, when I entered Durham University. I spent the second year (1997/98) in Japan, and I must either have written this story there, or soon after my return, I think. I really don't remember much about writing it apart from the fact that it is an early one. There was 'The Legacy', and then (if I remember aright) there was 'The Psychopomps' and then there was 'The Mermaid'. I think I wrote 'The Psychopomps' in Japan, or after Japan, and 'The Mermaid' was definitely after that. Robert Smith once said, comparing himself favourably to Morrissey, "At least I have two songs, 'Faith' and 'Love Cats'." I am sure that at some point (a long time ago now), I thought, "At least I have two stories, 'The Psychopomps' and 'The Mermaid'." 'The Psychopomps', of course, represents my penchant for all that is majestically grey and bleakly Gothic; 'The Mermaid' represents more my fondness for the colourful, and what I am forced to call 'the erotic'. Even early on, I was really trying to make progress and move into different areas with each story, though this may not be apparent to the reader, I suppose. But for me, 'The Mermaid' was a very different vista to the two Gothic tales I'd just penned, and I was glad of it – glad to have opened up a new vista.

Influences? M. John Harrison, Takahashi Rumiko, various naughty Taschen books, etc.

Cousin X

I think I'm right in saying that I had not read The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (by Mishima Yukio) at the time that I wrote this, but even if I had, the whole story is based on the plot of a short narrative poem I'd written much earlier. In the poem, the narrative, as I recall, ended with the incident that is similar to a certain incident in the Mishima novel. Why Cousin X? For the life of me, I don't know. It's just something that came to me, that I had to refer to the main character as 'Cousin X' throughout. This and the preceding story both rely heavily on remembered Devon scenery.

Influences? I don't remember anything specific, but perhaps Mishima.

Far-Off Things

Now, the curious thing is, it is sometimes the lesser stories you remember most about. This, by most accounts I've heard, and by my own estimation, is a lesser story. In fact, I was surprised it made the collection when other stories I rated more highly didn't. The story is based on an actual folk tale that I was familiar with in childhood from one of those Peter Haining books, if memory (again) serves. Very early on in my writing development, I knew that I had to tackle the difficult question of plot. And this was a difficult question for me. One of the things I did, to tackle this, when I was sixteen and at A-level college, was to re-write the folk tale from the Peter Haining book with lots of flowery language. (I thought this kind of thing would give me an understanding of structure.) That first version was about two pages long, and got printed in the college magazine. I remember some girl (I'm not going to go into the background, as it's too long) telling me that if she could write like that she'd never be depressed. I used words like "eidolons" in it and stuff like that. Later I cut the story down to about fifty words and translated it into Japanese. For whatever reason, it seemed to be a story I liked playing about with. Later again, in Taiwan (at the age of 28 or 29), perhaps because I'd been asked to submit something to an anthology, I thought of re-working it yet again. And so I did. I think I was asked to cut the wordcount, and I cut it a couple of times. But it's the longest version that ended up in Morbid Tales.

Influences? Peter Haining must get some credit. Also, for the final version, Mishima.

A Lake

Almost always, this is referred to incorrectly as 'The Lake'. Before I'd read Mishima in the original, I read his collection Death in Midsummer in English. The opening words are, "A. Beach". I thought, "Why is there a full stop after 'A'? How is that rendered in Japanese?" And this was repeated throughout – the full stop after the 'A'. I thought it was some kind of deliberate play with punctuation to give a sinister, deadening effect. Much, much later, I realised it just meant that the 'A' stood for the name of the beach, which began with 'A'. Anyway, I wanted that sinister, deadening effect in something I wrote, and I was thinking of that when I began taking notes for 'A Lake'.

'A Lake' is a typical horror story, pretty much. That's what I wanted to write. I wanted to 'do Stephen King'. It's also pretty Lovecraftian, at a time when I could get into being Lovecraftian. Ligotti? Probably. William Hope Hodgson? Probably. Incidentally, there was a lake like this, just as I describe, with the dead fish on the shore, in Japan. I took notes. I also used bits and pieces I'd heard about other lakes in Japan, in which countless numbers of people had committed suicide.

Influences? I've already named them. Can't think of any others.

The Two-Timer

I do remember how this happened. I was at university and a friend of mine there (the friend who introduced me to the work of Dazai Osamu) proposed we both write a story on the same theme, which was someone with the ability to stop time. So we did. This one was my response to the challenge. The fact is, though, that I'd always wanted to write a story on that theme. I remember that years before this I'd read a sniffy review of some novel that went, "A man discovers the secret of stopping time… and uses it to put his hand up women's skirts." That sounded to me like an utterly fantastic idea for a novel. So, this was me, in a minor way, and late (as always) getting in on that idea. It's my, "I wish I'd written that… Oh, I just have now" story. I haven't read that other novel, though. You know the one I mean, though, right?

The Tattooist

And I remember this. I was in Japan. It wasn't so long after my other early stories, such as 'The Psychopomps', etc. I was wandering the campus grounds of Gunma University. I had some imagery for a story… a tattoo… a knife… a boy… How did it all fit together? In the space of one hour, the whole thing came to me. I went over it and over it in my head making sure everything was in place. That was it – I had it. I had the whole thing. I could write plots! Not only that, this story was moving away from traditional horror and even fantasy tropes like the mermaid, and into something that seemed much more simply me. I was very pleased. I had – I felt – made a breakthrough. It hardly ever happens like that.

Ageless

I'm not one hundred per cent sure, but I think I wrote this in Devon, during summer holidays, while I was still at uni… or maybe not. Maybe it came a bit later. Anyway, I do know that I wanted to write something short, because all my stories were too long, and the magazines I knew didn't accept stories of over five thousand words, which all my stories were. On top of that, everyone was – still is – always saying about how you need to cut down all the time, whittle, hack, reduce, etc. etc. So, I thought I'd better learn to write stuff that was short. I think that the image came to me of a chess game, and of wanting to lose, and I thought I could write a reasonable vignette, with something like a twist to it, and this was the result.

Autumn Colours

It's a bit scary to me how little I remember about writing some of these stories. I don't know when I wrote this except that the very earliest it could have been would be 1998. I'm guessing it was more like 2000, possibly even 2002/2003. Now I think of it, it could be one of the latest pieces in the collection. The latest, perhaps. I suppose I had the idea of doing a very Japanese thing and writing something that had a lovely quiet melancholy with something nasty and twisted at the end. And that was pretty much how I was feeling in those days, anyway, not that anyone cared or noticed. Perhaps it doesn't need saying, but the locations are modelled on Durham University. Thomas Ligotti said he liked the title.

Influences? Mishima Yukio. Higuchi Ichiyo. Dazai Osamu. Probably Ligotti, too, by this time, I think.

Basically, all the stories in this collection were written either in the nineties, or drawing so heavily on memories of my life in the twentieth century, that they really should be considered as being set in the nineties at the latest – the pre-internet world. This also holds true for the work in Rule Dementia! and for "Remember You're a One-Ball!". I think I kind of started to catch up with the 21st century in Shrike. It was always problematical to me how I could possibly write an aesthetically pleasing story with computers and stuff in it, as, to me, they had entirely ruined the world aesthetically. But I think I'm getting to grips with it now.

I'm not sure really what to think about Morbid Tales now except that, like so many other things, it has become a fact of my history. I could have made particular, from the infinite vastness of my imagination – or so I would like to think – almost anything else. But it turned out to be this. I have a notion that it's only by navigating the seas of readership (can a ship – readership – be a sea?) that I can really get a firm idea of whether I'm any good at writing… but then again, even if I'm not, I probably won't stop. But… God, I hope that I can find the time and the energy and the mental resources to make use of what I've hopefully learned so that in the next ten or twenty years, before I go senile or I'm eaten by specially trained baboons that hunt down those with 'irrational' genes, I may, in fact, write a huge shitload of work that justifies the idea that I chose to manifest specifically this out of infinite imaginative potential. Help me, if you feel like it.

Addendum: I'm beginning to get the feeling that 'The Mermaid' might have been the second thing I wrote in my post-1996 phase of finishing my stories. That is, the story straight after 'The Legacy', in which case, it may have come before Japan. If I had my manuscripts here, I could tell by the dates.