Horror Tree Q&A: Kim Newman: Anno Yuletide and the Modern Gothic

By Paul StJohn Mackintosh

 

Kim Newman is an award-winning writer, critic, journalist and broadcaster who lives in London. He has won many awards, including the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Prix Ozone, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and James Herbert Awards. Horror Tree readers will probably know him best for his Anno Dracula vampiric alternative history series, but he has written many other horror and speculative fiction novels and short stories, as well as numerous non-fiction books on popular culture, film, and television.

 

Kim has just released A Christmas Ghost Story, all about horror fans’ second favourite holiday – Christmas. “A nightmarish tale of a haunted Christmas set deep in the British countryside,” A Christmas Ghost Story looks to be a dark and sinister subversion of seasonal tropes. We thought this would be a good occasion to contact Kim and see where this work fits into his substantial oeuvre, and his sensibility.

PSM:  You established an early significant presence in prize-winning horror non-fiction and analysis. Do you think this broad knowledge of the genre has helped you develop your fiction?

 

KIM: I’ve always written fiction and non-fiction in parallel – I think the two disciplines inform each other in my work … and the process goes both ways.  In some ways it’s as simple as the old ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ question – writers get ideas from whatever they happen to be thinking about.  Arthur C Clarke thought a lot about satellites and space exploration so he had a lot of story ideas spun off from that – and I spend a lot of time thinking about movies, television and books and get a lot of story ideas from that … not just from the stories in movies, television and books (though that’s obvious) but from the milieu of filmmaking, television production and writing and publishing.  My parents were crafts people – pottery and sculpture – and I grew up around creative people, so I’m interested in people in the arts and media and that feeds a lot into my fiction.  

 

PSM: Clearly A Christmas Ghost Story covers very different territory from Anno Dracula, or even the Diogenes Club series. Could you talk a little about the differences and the continuities between this book and your previous work?

 

KIM: I don’t worry too much about continuities among my various interlinked stories, even within series like the Anno Dracula books.  I’d always privilege the story I’m writing right now which you’re reading right now over anything in the backlist.  A Christmas Ghost Story does have some connection with my novels An English Ghost Story, The Quorum and Life’s Lottery (even the earlier Jago) in that they’re all set or visit a very small part of Somerset, the county where I grew up (though I was born in London) … around my version of a tiny village called Sutton Mallet (you can find the real place on maps).  The central characters and their situation are original to this work, though not necessarily one-use only.  Some very peripheral characters do recur from earlier stories, though not necessarily in the same roles they had there – and you don’t need to have read anything else to understand fully what’s going on (I try for that even in series books).  It’s a reasonably contemporary setting – though a bit pre-pandemic – and I’d not done that for a while.  It’s also set in a world where supernatural events aren’t so commonplace everyone knows about them – which is the case with some other things I’ve written (I suppose that broadly fits into the category of fantasy).

 

PSM:  Would you prefer to continue developing series? Or do you plan to write more standalone works in future?

 

KIM: My work in progress (a novel called Model Actress Whatever) is, if not a standalone, something new … but while working on it, I’ve created a dozen characters and situations which could be further explored.  That tends to be the way of it.  I had a concern, especially with the Anno Dracula series, that I was putting off readers who’d prefer not to have five books worth of homework to do before they got to anything – it’s hard to get across that the series isn’t like, say, Lord of the Rings, with one long story broken up into seperate books with a strict reading order, even though I did try to make sure that new readers could pick up any of the novels and start there.  I’ve several long-backburnered ideas for picking up from earlier books of mine – sometimes, it’s just the literary impulse of thinking of that friend you’ve lost touch with and wondering what they’re doing these days … I get back into the mindset of a viewpoint character from an earlier book and have ideas about how they got on after that story finished.  I’ve already had a very vague idea for several possible pick-up-years-later stories with Angie and Rust, the mother and son protagonists of A Christmas Ghost Story.

 

PSM:  Many would characterize you as a British writer. Do you think this is a particularly strong element in your work, and if so, how does it manifest?

 

KIM: I was talking this weekend with a friend in Ireland, and she said that it was very much a concern with all Irish creatives – culturally and practically – about how Irish their work was.  Ireland is much more supportive than the UK of its creators, but along with that comes a kind of state/cultural cabal requirement that they explore Irishness in their work.  I imagine it’s much the same for other, similar countries – but Britishness is not something I ever have to think about or feel obliged to deal with … though several of my books count as state of the nation addresses (particularly Anno Dracula, An English Ghost Story and The Quorum) and it’s a theme which turns up in much of my fiction (Something More Than Night is set in America but about two people who – with qualifications – self-identify as British) and I will probably never get away from.  In Model Actress Whatever, I’m exploring an American form (the superhero story) in terms of British popular culture so I’m more aware of specific British bits of language and thinking.  

 

PSM:  Given the strong genre flavour (both as horror and within horror) of much of your writing, can you share your perspective on how genre works, and how you handle it?

 

KIM: Genre is a qualified promise – the creator pledges to give the reader/viewer a number of elements absolutely obligatory for any given genre – a murder being solved, cowboy hats and six-guns, spooky stuff happening to frightened people – but not necessarily in the way they might immediately expect.  Indeed, I think if you provide something too generic you lose people – or at least lose people who want more than just the bases covered.  I have worked in a lot of genres, and I particularly like cross-genre or mixed-genre stories … for instance, Anno Dracula is a historical horror science fiction political satire police procedural romance literary extrapolation kung fu vampire novel– I even get a bit of western in there.  I quite often think I’d like to experiment with a genre – the choose your own adventure book, the ghost story, whodunit, school story, superhero – and then feed it through my own set of interests, maybe even my own critical take on a genre and its fundamental assumptions.

 

PSM:  Do you feel there’s a distinction between horror as genre entertainment – the Gothic, perhaps – and horror which simply looks to unsettle and disturb? If so, where might the distinction be?

 

KIM: Horror, like most genres, is a wide spectrum – from ripping yarn to philosophical tract.  I doubt if many horror novels fit neatly into just one mode.  I prefer to blur distinctions than make them.  I’m a bridge-builder not a wall-maker, though I recognise that as a critic I have a tendency to put other people’s works in boxes I tend not to want my own stories to be confined by.  Sometimes, it’s best not to ask too many questions or the magic trick doesn’t work anymore.

 

PSM:  Where do you feel the current generation of new weird writers fit in relation to their horror-writing predecessors? Is there any real differentiation? Or is it simply the same tradition under different labels?

 

KIM: I’m woefully behind on my reading but I don’t get a sense of any great change in the genre – except maybe in its packaging and publishing.  Certainly, that’s the case with horror film – I am much more up to date on where that’s going.

 

PSM:  Could you give your view on the place of Christmas in British culture, and in British traditions of folklore and the supernatural? Is it the one place left in everyday British life still touched by the numinous?

 

KIM: Christmas is big in Britain and in the Newman family, which informs a lot of A Christmas Ghost Story.  Thanks to Charles Dickens and MR James – and later the BBC, first on radio then on television – Christmas and ghost stories have been put together … which may have as much to do with the long nights and the cold weather (or school holidays) as any Christian or pagan survival elements in Christmas.