www.morpheustales.com Franz Kafka. Alongside authors like these I began to find that a lot of horror seemed tame and polite. I remember loving D. M. Mitchell’s diverse Lovecraft tribute The Starry Wisdom published by Creation Books, but this horror anthology was an exception as most that I read at this time seemed to wash over me like elevator music. What I really wanted then, and what I still want now, is to read horror that is challenging, strange, and sometimes even controversial, like the varied horror stories within the pages of The Starry Wisdom. And so at some point I suppose I must have decided to write my own.
Matt Leyshon Interview Your new collection The Function Room: The Kollection is coming out soon. How did that come about? Most of the stories in The Function Room: The Kollection were written in a damp flat above a butcher’s shop in Blackpool, overlooking Layton cemetery. Melting snow leaked through the ceiling and there was ice on the inside of the windows. The drone of the butcher’s refrigeration unit below was incessant and I would wake up each morning beneath a chilly fog of morning breath to the sound of the butcher hacking up wet bits of lung onto his chopping board. I couldn’t keep the cats on me long enough in the evenings to keep the cold at bay and so I wrote to keep myself warm.
How did you go about first getting your work published? Well, the editor of The Alien Has Landed was called Ariel, and he was my manager and drinking buddy at the time, so getting my reviews published was easy, and getting them published in Blood From ‘Stones was easier still as I was the editor. And nowadays, whilst my stories get their fair share of rejection slips from editors, I still never really struggle to get my fiction into print; my first ever short story was called “Transmission” and you can find it in The Spinetinglers Anthology 2008. It was about electronic voice phenomena and was inspired by Manchester and Joy Division and a book called Breakthrough by Konstantin Raudive. I think that there was probably a lot wrong with that story, but the fact that it got published encouraged me to persevere.
What inspired you to start writing? I started to write seriously in the nineteen nineties when I was in my twenties, but I was producing non-fiction rather than stories. I worked for a major book retailer in Salisbury and then Manchester and was surrounded by books that I wanted to read but could not afford. The Manchester store published its own magazine called The Alien Has Landed and I learned that the way to get the books that I wanted for free from the publisher was to write reviews. I then ended up editing and producing a horror review magazine of my own called Blood From ‘Stones. Although I had enjoyed reading horror books ever since getting The Usborne Book of Witches from my infant school book club, I began to find that I was overindulging in horror. My solution was to return to my old favourites from outside of the genre, writers like William S. Burroughs, Isidore Lucien Ducasse, and
Your story “The Function published in Morpheus Tales about the story and how published. I discovered “The Function 8
Room” was #16. Tell us you got it Room” half