Blood and Grit 21

by Clark, Simon

  Yet in many ways Simon has now simply outgrown genre restrictions. In Blood Crazy and King Blood the essential supernatural elements are already minimal. They are labelled Horror, and are marketed as such. When I pose the question, he shrugs. ‘When your first novel is marketed as Horror, your subsequent novels will be marketed as Horror as well, regardless of their content.’ A reflective pause. ‘So Triffids was a strange trip – becoming a SF writer for a year – come to think of it, that 2001 timing seems impeccable, if accidental. But my own field is Horror. Although – has anyone noticed that the streams of Horror and SF are actually beginning to converge again? Dean Koontz is describing himself as an SF writer!’ But already the scope is epic. The novels Blood Crazy and King Blood share a descent into tribal survival. In the latter there’s ritual impalement and cannibalism. But there’s the internal politics of refugee groups too, and the one sane man attempting morality in a world uptilted into savagery. Night of the Triffids merely comes as the logical outcome of that process. Both earlier plot concepts – the genetic evolutionary trigger igniting generational conflict, causing the old to literally devour their children, and the geological heating of the planet’s molten core causing worldwide volcanic disruption with attendant tidal waves and eruptions of toxic gases – are ideas that would fit seamlessly into SF’s ‘School of (un)Cosy Disaster’ cycle. Both are themes that John Wyndham or early J.G. Ballard (circa The Drowned World or The Wind from Nowhere) would kill for. ‘It may sometimes be difficult to define the roles for a class of literature, but they exist,’ asserts Wyndham himself, ‘and it is – outstandingly – their observance or non-observance that makes a book good or bad within its class’ (Science Fantasy no. 7, March 1954).

  Perhaps. But The Fall features fifty ‘accidental time-travellers’ who have ‘come adrift in time. Slipping further and further back into history. First by a day. From Tuesday to Monday. Then by a week – then into 1978 … and an air-raid in Summer 1946’. Until a mid-novel shift of emphasis. Locked into 1865 the plot begins to revolve around the protagonists’ conflict with ‘the Bluebeards’, and their relationship with the time-dwelling Liminals rather than continuing their time-shifts, or resolving the significance of the Black Stone in the amphitheatre. Why not continue the time-falling back into prehistory? ‘It might have been interesting to pursue that,’ he concedes. ‘But that would have made it enormous. It was essential to keep it within limits. I had to draw the line around the 120,000-word point.’ Again it is Horror. But with strong SF overtones. In Barrington J. Bayley’s novel Collision with Chronos time also runs backwards. While elements of classic SF – like Poul Anderson’s Legion of Time – also seem to be present. The terminology could just as easily be techno-heavy with Science Fictional ‘dislocations to the time-stream’, ‘temporal anomalies’ or ‘rewritings to the reality-code’. While the Horror element is relegated to the lovingly detailed eviscerations and descriptions of rotting corpses. That is also a continuity, in King Blood there’s a stunningly macabre sequence set in St Lawrence’s Parish Church graveyard where the ‘build-up of subterranean heat was detonating the gases produced by the putrefying bodies’ so that graves literally begin exploding, showering everything in the immediate vicinity with flame-grilled entrails and parboiled body parts. It’s a passage as unique and as convincingly nasty as anything in the long history of Horror Fiction! While in The Fall, Lee – like South Park’s Kenny – is frequently and hideously killed in grotesque detail.

  In many ways genre trappings have become almost a distraction. Because Simon is determinedly staking it all out as his exclusive territory. All the cultural reference points are to KFC, Buzz Lightyear, Jarvis Cocker, Robocop Masks, Chewbacca, nostalgia for McBurgers, and Ren & Stimpy. In King Blood there’s an impossibly attractive teenage hero who starts out stacking shelves in the local Supermart while dreaming of being a Rock star. Evidence of a wry appraisal, perhaps, of whichever-the-hell demographic group reads these books anyway? And there’s his charismatic video-jock brother from Seattle who’s called – wait for it, (Stephen) John Kennedy (!!!). It’s a perfection even the expletives can’t dent, in fact they even humanize further. There’s uninhibited sex at closely spaced intervals, first with the Older More Experienced seductress, then with the school sweetheart. Then there’s the necessity of regular gore. The cleanly attractive late-teens early-twenties central character is a Clark regular. Is this a deliberate appraisal of how he sees his target market? Like Robyn and Noel the runaway lovers of In This Skin (2004).

  But the action and pace is always relentless. His control of narrative tension is now so honed that he has you leaping ahead of yourself in urgency to find out what exactly is the terrible doom that’s counting down for Caroline, or whether Rick has really killed his brother, and what the Grey Men are all about. While each separate incident is well wrought and impeccably worked out. The escape from the cannibal tribe which is engineered by igniting methane in a ruptured North Sea gas pipeline. Or the meticulously described sequence trapped in the submerged Rolls-Royce at the bottom of the New Venice Lake of flooded London. Even the final secret of King Blood’s Grey Men (which I shan’t divulge), which in lesser hands could have proved anticlimactic, Clark uses to generate even more horrific levels of menace. Moving inexorably through to the mystical near-visionary climax with its intimations of absolution-through-sacrifice, couched in prose of near-transcendental power shot through with the kind of symbolism that gets to you on a deep and profoundly primal level. It’s not often a novel leaves genuine after-images of nightmare. King Blood does. Forty-eight hours after I first read the final words, I was still regurgitating vividly troubling images from its pages that not even the strangely compelling last few chapters could erase.

  Simon Clark country is made up of Yorkshire. A Yorkshire which he torments, disfigures and destroys in a variety of horrific ways. And it all happens in an almost unrecognizably beautiful Yorkshire, in which rabbits and pheasants lurk, no shopping trolleys ever mar its rivers, and lay-bys are free of bin-liners of household refuse, condoms and delicate brown trails of unspooled cassette tape. Darkness Demands (2001) locates writer John Newton in fictional Yorkshire village Skelbrooke, until Stranger (2002) moves Greg Valdiva decisively away to Sullivan in New Mexico, and In This Skin (2004) to Downtown Chicago with a determined lurch into Americanisms. There’s no such thing as bad Simon Clark. Some of his books are better than others. That’s all. London Under Midnight (2006) is even better than most. That makes it very good indeed. It marks a shift of setting – from Simon Clark country, his original Yorkshire weirdscapes, through that brief American slasher-excursion – to London. A London of Brick Lane multiculturalism, a female mayor, intrusive paparazzi, Levantine fast-food gyros, moral relativism and fundamentalist illogic. A wired city of CCTV-connected web-cams, where a ‘forlorn’ chorus of ring-tones chime beside the bodies of the dead. A palimpsest London where the shades of Charles Dickens and Jack the Ripper still lurk, and the dark currents of Old Father Thames form an artery that threads the city, and flows as it did through ancient Londinium. Then there’s the question ‘what manner of life lurked in that flow?’ Simon Clark has a thing about water, the dark swirls and eddies that quicken its depths. Going back to the elemental tide-borne forces in ‘… Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea …’, the short story that formed one of his earliest successes, through the fathoms-deep sea-dwellers that menace the final chapters of Vampyrrhic Rites. His London is a graffiti-scrawled city. Some of this ‘unlawful art’ is already legendary – Banksy, ‘Clapton is god’. Only now there’s a spray-can plague of new graffiti – very specific graffiti sprayed repetitively by an artist with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, warning ‘VAMPIRE SHARKZ: THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU’. Is it a code? A new Indie band? A block party? Ben Ashton is tasked with finding out, just around the time he re-encounters his secret love, April Connor. And a guy called Trajan who moved in on her after Ben’s indecision had led to him losing her. The London they traverse is a g
lobal city gravitationally drawing weirdness into itself. With African ritual sacrifice and witchcraft snatched direct from the rolling news, and given a new twist through the ancestor-wise Elmo Kigoma. Then there’s eco-change mutations that have induced a form of aquatic vampirism to ‘evolve into a new life-form’ in the Thames, the ‘miracle’ of New-Life to which blood-lust cannibalism is a narcotic high, a gluttony of exhilarating bliss. Because this is Simon Clark, the form of vampirism he portrays is unlike anything else you’ve ever read, or viewed, before. He never deals in recycling comfortable retro-shocks. And he creates living breathing – and sometimes dead and still-breathing – characters to counter them. These are real bodies really being killed by real predators. You care about what happens to them. There are some other knowing nudges from his earlier short fiction, the unsettling vision of a transparent graveyard with suspended visible coffins from the Tales from Tartarus story ‘Portrait of a Girl in a Graveyard’, and even the phrase ‘A Biter Bit’ which he once used to title a tale for Fear magazine. Simon’s highly readable prose and clearly defined characters combine to form ideal market-targeted fiction, while the extremism lies in its explicit flesh-munching Horror-content, there’s few risks taken with dangerous experimental writing, or difficult construction. Nothing is allowed to impede its smooth narrative drive towards the final confrontation on the Thames-island.

  There’s no such thing as a bad Simon Clark book. He’s the brightest Sparkler of Albion. And he’s grown. Firmer, more confident, more assured now than when we first encountered each other. So what next? The novel Darker was vaguely expanded from concepts seeded in the Blood and Grit short story ‘Bite Back’. Hence it’s reasonable to suppose those ideas must have been germinating over a period of years. So does he consciously work with the basic plot-lines for the next two or three novels already sketched out in his head? ‘No. Not usually. Generally I work on one project at a time. But I do consider that any time not spent writing is a distraction. I get itchy fingers when I’ve been unable to get myself locked into the keyboard for any appreciable length of time. I get desperate to get my face jammed to the computer screen, writing away like a lunatic as a host of deadlines come loping over the horizon. Otherwise, I suffer withdrawal symptoms from lack of work!’ A reflective pause. ‘My old School Teachers wouldn’t believe I’m the same person …!’

  And I remember a contribution he made to the Dreamberry Wine fanzine some years ago. Another tale that perhaps is due for novel-length expansion. How did it go? Just for the hell of it, here’s the World’s Shortest-ever Zombie Story:

  I LIVE. I DIE. I LIVE AGAIN … SORT OF.

  Twenty-one years is a long time in a life. It is no time at all in a genre that stretches back to the very origins of storytelling. But twenty-one years is a significant period in which a writer can pile up novels that establish his niche in that ongoing continuity. This book marks the first twenty-year arc of Simon Clark’s fiction. And it’s apparent that the future of the genre is safe in his hands.

  Blood and Grit

  Raising the Chill Factor

  Foreword to the first edition by Andrew Darlington

  These are stories not yet told …

  Blood and spit? Blood and guts? No – BLOOD AND GRIT!

  Whatever-the-hell, it’s a weirdorama, a demon’s feast of horrification, it’s welcome to the Terrordrome WRIT LARGE.

  Simon Clark is a wild terrorist act, a stunning word-shifter of brain-crunching mind-melting prose.

  I first read Simon Clark in an anarchist magazine. He was perpetrating a poem about shooting out church stained-glass windows with an airgun – a poem that immediately recommended him to me both politically and spiritually. Since then I’ve read a lot of him. His ‘The Gravedigger’s Tale’ (Fear, January 1989) is exquisitely absurdly macabre; followed by ‘The Biter Bit’ (October 1989), which suspends your natural disbelief and incredulity through its sheer compulsive power.

  He then crossed the Atlantic to infect DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror #14 with ‘… Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea …’, racked up beside Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Tanith Lee and Clive Barker … and more. His work graces Works, Stygian Dreamhouse, The Edge, Back Brain Recluse, Ludd’s Mill among others … there’s even a 30-minute Horror movie, The Drowned Man, awaiting final editing.

  If the inputs are Arthur Machen, Jimi Hendrix and the films of Boris Karloff, then the output is wholly Simon Clark.

  Take radio.

  Simon is a Yorkshire writer.

  ‘Six Men With Fire’, his story for Radio 4 (sandwiched between Gardeners’ Question Time and Daily Service), recast grimy Northern cliché into shiny new mesmerism, and remains the best-realized art to come out of the Great Pit Dispute. ‘Unlike writing SF and Horror, where you have to dig the raw material from your conscious and subconscious, the raw material of Yorkshire realism is lying there just waiting to be picked up. There’s no real need to invent. All you need is to shape it into a story,’ says Simon.

  Yet by grounding his horror in recognizably local landscapes he can draw even the most fantastical weirdorama into the commonplace. ‘… Beside the Seaside …’ is a cold dread travelogue of Scarborough (‘the grey voice of my Protestant ancestry rings down the ages to disapprove of seaside frivolity and casual sex with hominoid sea creatures …’). In the American paperback edition the story carries explanatory translations of its dialect usage. In ‘The Biter Bit’, ‘floodlights shone on the winding gear and buildings of a coal mine next to which a black slagheap rose up into the night sky like some weird mountain built from the same stuff as hell’. Yorkshire grit becomes a symbiotic accomplice to Clark’s grisly horrification.

  … And now this. These stories not yet told.

  * * *

  Here, Simon microwaves the chill-factor, doing to ghoulish Lit what cyberpunk did to SF. His is a splatterprose in which voices change shape, the Skinner keeps peeled faces hung like tatty old masks, eyes are cemented over, there are cellars full of corpses, and teeth that clatter like an engine in an old Lada … stuff to give Clive Barker’s dreams bad trips.

  Here is a coven of six further tales to take you through six deranged terrorscapes, that detonate brain-cells like chain reaction napalm in incendiary conceptual acrobatics. Here be where the mutants dwell across the prose dimension-warp. Slash those veins – they bleed ice, lava, blood, grit. Here be plots that expand irresistibly in your head and irradiate terror. Here be lost continents beyond the black event horizon – yet still here, now, in Yorkshire. Tales to molest your imagination with fright aforethought. Stories to wrap your brain around, stories that connect in directly to the nervous system.

  ‘Skinner Lane’ – is this an obscene case of child abuse or fool-baiting? How did Skinner Lane really acquire its name? Who – or what – is the Skinner? This is one step beyond Bradbury Country, where something even wickeder this way comes.

  ‘Out From Under’ is uniquely and mysteriously macabre, more so because of the mundanity of its setting and Northern dialect infusions. Uniquely Clarkian.

  ‘Over Run’ is a much more evil dead than George Romero ever dreamed into nightmare.

  ‘Bite Back’, the shadow over Sheffield, words running with the accelerator spot-welded to the floor, but as quietly insidious as a monk in brothel-creepers.

  ‘Revelling in Brick’, strangely strange, Paris symbolism, magical metamorphosis, Quasimodo and the time-warp dwarf.

  And ‘Sex, Savagery and Blood, Blood, Blood’ is black horror in a letter purloined from the darker side of Poe.

  Simon Clark scares me; he scares me because he’s so damn good. Because he’s so accessible. Because he writes with such addictive grabability.

  This book drips ice, lava, blood, grit, and much much more …

  Welcome to the Terrordrome.

  Do read Simon Clark.

  Skinner Lane

  ‘Kenny, what on earth’s happened!’

  His sister, arms tightly folded, stood framed by the st
one doorway of Thorne Manor. She watched him struggle up the long curve of the drive, weighed down by the bag of potatoes.

  ‘Kenny.’ His sister’s voice was changing shape. Angry. ‘For Godsake what have you done … well?’

  Kenny had been running so they wouldn’t catch him. He lowered the bag and sucked in enough air to speak. ‘I–I’ve been to the shop, S–Sue.’

  ‘I know where you’ve been. It’s what you’ve done in between that’s the mystery. Just look at your shoes … and that hole in your T-shirt! It’s ruined.’