When one of my favourite writers interviews another one of my favourite writers, it is a red letter day. Well, it's Monday, actually, as I type this, which is another good reason to look at literary things of interest. Over at the Swan River Press blog Steve Duffy, the Welsh Stephen King (or possibly the Cymric Peter Straub) interviews Lynda E. Rucker, like Steve a recent winner of the Shirley Jackson award and all-round weird fiction luminary. Lynda's new collection features prominently, of course, and it's well worth a read. As you might expect, influences loom large...
LER: We weren't fortunate enough to grow up with the Ghost Stories for Christmas in America, of course, and in fact I think most Americans had never heard of them until the last decade or two. The I ever learned about them was when I saw “The Signalman”, about twelve or fourteen years ago. I'm sure the grass is always greener and all that but I'm increasingly convinced that British children in the 1970s got much cooler programming than we did over in America.
SD: On the other hand, you could stay up late and watch Kolchak, so there's that.
It's worth pointing out, as an addendum to what we were saying earlier, that while M.R. James is often claimed for the “cosy” school nowadays, there aren’t many lines that send a shudder through me like the description of poor old Paxton at the end of “A Warning To The Curious”: “His mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits. I only glanced once at his face.”
LER: Oh yes! Not to mention the awful creature in “The Mezzotint” that appears to be making away with a baby in its ghoulish grasp.
1 comment:
And surely worst of all the face made of crumpled bed linen (though the fate of those hunted by Count Magnus was also pretty awful). I really shouldn't have read M R James when I was eleven.........
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