www.morpheustales.com novel since my teens, and whenever I read one nowadays I will tend to think that it would have worked better as a few short stories. I think that this is specific to horror as fear has a shorter life expectancy than a long story. For example, read If This Is A Man by Primo Levi or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and you’ll see how the sensation of fear is made almost mundane (admittedly this in itself is horrific) by over-sustaining the source (concentration camps and gulags, respectively in these cases). Fear, horror, and shock all need to be captured in the briefest of moments if they are to have maximum impact, so they are best delivered in a short blast, like the songs of John Zorn’s Naked City, or the brief sensation of being followed at night before you turn to find nobody there. But to continue the musical comparison, a horror novel for me is like ELP or YES trying to cover Last Caress by The Misfits; it is a bit ridiculous. So, to clarify, I would rate short horror stories over long ones. But beyond the genre, however, I would say that I have no preference.
anything other than write. I didn’t manage a story a week, but I did write a lot of stories and most of those collected in The Function Room date back to this period. That period of hyper-productivity has since reached a natural end, and I now aim to produce a story every two months or so, but I learned an awful lot during that year. What scares you? Fear to me is most associated with my childhood when I worried about nuclear attacks, or when a hooded ghoul used to chase me down my Gran’s hallway every weekend, or when I contemplated death as I urinated blood-coloured pee after gorging on beetroot. But these days, as an adult, I sleep soundly whatever I might have read in bed or watched on TV. H. P. Lovecraft said that the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. It seems to me that there ought to be some truth in this, but it makes a paradox of the question. What makes a good story? I think I’m unusual as a reader in that I care little for plot or character. What I am really interested in is ideas and an interesting use of language. I recognise the need for a plot as, like stage direction, it gets characters from one place to the next, but when stories have a clear sequential plot like a Hollywood movie, I really don’t like it and I
Do you have any advice for new writers? Some advice that worked for me comes from Ray Bradbury. He said that one should begin a life of writing by taking a year producing “a hell of a lot of short stories.” I did this last year when I was living by myself and was too short of cash to do 13