Chris Priestley
About Author
Chris Priestley was born in Hull, and has lived in Wales and Gibraltar. As a nine-year-old, he won a prize in a story-writing competition, which first gave him the idea of writing for a living.
He studied at Manchester Polytechnic and went on to be a political cartoonist, publishing his illustrations in The Times, The Independent, The Observer, The Economist and other newspapers.
In 2000, he started writing his own works and published a children's book called Dog Magic. In 2004, his Death and the Arrow was shortlisted for Edgar Award; in 2006, Redwulf's Curse won the Lancashire Fantastic Book Award. He has published 13 books so far.
His latest books are the creepy Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth and Dead of Winter, as well as Mr Creecher, based on the story of Frankenstein. These are all published by Bloomsbury.
Ever since he was a teenager he says he has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like 'Strange Tales' and 'House of Mystery', watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury.
Interview
THE DEAD MEN STOOD TOGETHER
BLOOMSBURY
SEPTEMBER 2013
Chris Priestly, a master of suspense and gothic tales, takes his inspiration for his new novel, The Dead Men Stood Together, from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While Priestly's tale is firmly rooted in the poem, it also stands on its own, as a chilling tale about guilt and consequences.
Here, the author tells ReadingZone more about the creation of The Dead Men Stood Together.
Q: Your earlier novel, Mr Creecher, revisits the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Why did you choose to use another established classic, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), as the inspiration for your new book?
A: In the last few years I have been looking at the books that made a profound impression on me when I was young. I don't necessarily mean books that made me become a writer, but books that helped to shape (or confirm) the way I looked at the world. More and more, I think it was the books (art, films, television) I encountered when I was young that have had the most effect on my work - and continue to do so. I have obviously read and seen many wonderful things since, but I always seem return to those works.
Q: When did you first come across the poem?
A: I first experienced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a poem read to me at school, aged about nine. I don't think I had heard anything so strange before - except maybe for Greek Myths, which I also loved as a boy. It was one of a set of long lyrical poems I remember from by childhood - like Horatius at the Bridge, The Raven, The Lady of Shallot.
Q: Are there other texts or poetry that you would like to work with?
A: I have just completed a book linked to A Christmas Carol. The manuscript has only just gone in so I can't really say very much about it. In Dickens' story, The Ghost of Christmas Presence introduces two ragged children to Scrooge, calling them Ignorance and Want. I try and imagine their story.
Q: What do you enjoy about working with an existing text and what are the challenges?
A: I really enjoy entering a space created by someone else. My ghost stories in the Tales of Terror series effectively did the same thing - they used the props and costumes of traditional English ghost stories. I can see that some see that notion as very contrived. I can only say it feels very natural to me. If it felt forced I wouldn't do it. The main challenge is to do justice to the source material. It keeps me on my toes. I don't want to be haunted by the ghosts of Coleridge or Dickens.
Q: How closely in The Dead Men Stood Together do you follow the poem?
A: The launching point for my story is the line in Coleridge's poem - 'The body of my brother's son stood by me, knee to knee'. I imagine a story for that nephew and so my book examines a time before the poem starts and it goes on beyond it. Writing in prose rather than poetry did demand that I fleshed things out a bit.
Q: You also develop the other characters, the pilot's boy and the hermit, and I wondered if you could tell us what they bring to your story? Were you tempted to introduce any new characters?
A: I simply went along with my instincts on those characters and just wrote what felt natural. At no point in writing the book did I feel like I was forcing characters to go in any particular direction.
The only new character I introduce is that of the boy's mother in the early section, although I obviously give life to individual crew members when Coleridge does not. I wanted to look at the story and the mariner in more detail and shifting the viewpoint from him to the boy, allowed me to question his version of events. Is he a reliable narrator?
Q: How hard was it to answer that key question in the poem - why the Ancient Mariner shot the albatross - when Coleridge's poem is so ambiguous?
A: I'm not sure I do answer that. I'm not sure Coleridge does either. It is part of the dream-like resonance of the poem that it defies easy explanation.
The poem can be read as a kind of defence of nature - an early eco-hym - but I'm not sure it allows itself to be contained in that way. The randomness of the mariner's act feels more like the killing in Camus' The Outsider. Coleridge does not explain the killing. I give the mariner an opportunity to try and justify the killing, but it cannot really be justified.
Just as I wanted to take Mary Shelley's theme of whether monsters are born or created in Mister Creecher, with The Dead Men Stood Together I wanted to explore the idea that is implicit in the poem, that everything is connected and one senseless act can have huge consequences. One moment of madness can be disastrous. We tell our children that everything will be OK, but it is part of growing out of childhood that we understand that not everything can be fixed.
Q: Were there any dramatic moments from the poem that you found hard to tackle, such as the 'voices in the air' or the ship sinking at the end?
A: The voices in air section is not my favourite part of the poem, it's true. But it is there and I was determined that I would not edit the poem. As with Frankenstein and Mister Creecher, I was happy to add material - to go sideways from the source, if you like - but not to take away anything I did not feel worked. It's not for me to start editing Mary Shelley or Coleridge. I just had to ask myself how I could make it work for me.
Q: How different is the experience of reading the Ancient Mariner as text rather than as a poem?
A: Very different, I hope - otherwise there was little point in the exercise. But I am not improving on the poem. My book is not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for people who don't like poetry. I want to send my readers back to the material that inspired me. I want readers of my Tales of Terror stories to read Poe and M R James and Saki. I want readers of Mister Creecher to read Frankenstein. And I would want anyone who read The Dead Men Stood Together to seek out The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Writing the story in prose allows for a different way of telling the story, but it will always be Coleridge's story. I am retelling a myth - a myth created by a brilliant poet.
Q: How does your working day go?
I wish I could trot out some unchanging routine here, but the fact is, I seem unable to work like that. I have a desk top at home and a studio across town in Cambridge and I split my work between the two. I don't have wi-fi for instance, at my studio, so I tend to do anything requiring internet access at home. I was trained as an artist so I also use my studio to paint and I am trying to get back into illustrating - something I did for 20 years before I ever published any written work.
My writing day tends to reflect my son's school day and so always goes a bit haywire during the holidays. Ideally, I start work at about nine and work through until about five or six. But writers are always on call. My brain has no notion of a working day - I go to sleep thinking about my books and I wake up thinking about them.
Q: What are you writing now?
A: I have just delivered my book about A Christmas Carol. That comes out next autumn. I am writing other things and furiously planning and plotting in notebooks - but none that I feel ready to share at the moment.
My main hope is to produce something in the not too distant future that showcases the fact that I draw and paint. I would do a graphic novel tomorrow if it weren't for the fact that I don't think they are really valued in this country. But I certainly want to do something where the images are more than just politely illustrating the text. I'm thinking of Edward Gorey where the pictures and the text are equally important (and equally good).
Q: What are your top two writing tips?
A: I am against writing tips in general because they are usually thinly veiled justifications for one particular writer's own habits and foibles.
If I was giving tips to teenagers I would say plan your book in advance and edit, edit, edit. But I know many writers who do not plan their books at all. I only offer it as a tip for young people because I know how many of them get frustrated with their writing and give up. A plan can give you a destination to work towards (a destination you can always change along the way, if a better one occurs to you).
Another bit of advice would be to try and finish what you start. Avoiding finishing stories just means that you will never learn how to take a story all the way to its conclusion and see the shape of it. I like to get to the end and then play about with it once I can see the shape it takes. Does it need that introduction? Does the ending work? A novel is a marathon and you need to cross the line to know that you can. Thats three tips from someone who doesn't like them.
Q: What kind of books do you enjoy reading and what do you do to relax?
A: I read less now that I write, sadly. I find it harder to empty my head and let another writer take over the driving. I start looking out of the window and getting distracted by my own thoughts.
I seldom read other teen fiction - not because there isn't a lot of great stuff out there, but because I would find it distracting. I read a lot of non-fiction and always have - history and art history - both as research and because I just find history fascinating. If I hadn't spent so much time looking out of the window at school I might have become a historian.
MISTER CREECHER
October 2011
Published by Bloomsbury
Mister Creecher is a dark and moving tale from Chris Priestley about a street urchin, Billy, and Mister Creecher, a terrifying, monstrous giant of a man. They make an uneasy alliance and together, set off on the trail of Victor Frankenstein.
This is Chris Priestly's first historical fiction novel and is based on his fascination for the story of Frankenstein, first penned by the teenage Mary Shelley during the seventeenth century.
Priestley says, "I have always been fascinated by the Frankenstein novel and the various movies versions of the book.
"I saw the film with Boris Karloff in my teens and really liked it, but hadn't yet read the novel. When I did read it I was completely blown away by the fact that it was not like the film at all. The creature in the novel is arguably the most articulate character in it.
"Certain books and films seem to stick in your imagination and I found myself returning to it. I felt I could revisit the story now because of my writing output and because the age group I am writing for is older. I felt more able to take it on now and give it some depth.
"I have an obsession with this era and I was already immersed in it before deciding to write this book, but I did a bit more research.
"It's set in the Regency period in 1818; Jane Austen had died the year before. So it's the time of the Romantics and all the different ideas emerging at that time, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and lots of political turmoil.
"Mister Creecher is set in the year that the novel was published. The novel is informed by the period of the time and is as accurate as I could make it.
"I've read Frankenstein a few times so I know it pretty well and I was pretty confident that there was nothing in it that would derail the central notion of my book - there are just three pages in Shelley's book that give a short description of what happens during the period Mister Creecher covers - 'we went to London, stayed a few months, and then went to Oxford' - and I felt at liberty to look at what London was like at that time.
"I was interested in getting Mary and Shelley to appear in my novel, they were living in Great Russell St for a while, which is not far from the British Museum. The British Museum had at that time just got hold of a statue, Ozymandias, which presents nice ideas once I got going, and there were lots of other things that fell naturally into place once I began writing.
"I wrote a novel The Dead of Winter after Tales of Terror which gave me a taste for longer novels but writing a psychological thriller was quite hard after writing short stories.
"If you write a short story, one idea can carry it but it's harder to get a sense of suspense in a longer novel. Mister Creecher moves around so there is a journey and you already get a sense of a story moving towards a destination.
"When I write short stories, I have a definite destination but with a novel, it's more character-based, I give them more elbow-room to go where they want to go. That's why I hate writing synopsis of books, I want to give the story room to go elsewhere than where I had planned, to do something better.
"It sounds clichd but once the character starts to live in the book you realise they wouldn't do something you'd planned for them, they do something else.
"I knew that this book wouldn't end well, but I wasn't sure where it would end. There's a twist at the end that I had not planned and it makes the ending very dark.
"I recently joined a discussion where I argued for there being more funny and life-affirming books for teenage boys because they get a lot of grim material but I wouldn't argue that that is all there should be. You could also argue that books for adults should be nicely resolved.
"I think we should be wary of making the mistake that literature for young people should have a purpose, over and above the purpose of literature which is to make you understand the world, to walk around in someone else's shoes for a while, but don't expect to come away with a number of boxes ticked. That's not how adults or anyone reads.
"I know there's a problem with all the dystopian future stories being published now and to some extent I can see the point; if you keep saying 'all possible futures are difficult' there's a danger of bringing adult world weariness to young people.
"But a huge amount of literature - Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights - are dark but they are not about terrible people, it's just about this kind of reality. But that won't be the only kind of literature you read as a teenager or later in life.
"In fiction for younger people there is a pressure for people to be likeable and I don't agree with that, they just need to be convincing. We don't have that expectation in an adult novel and that can be what is fascinating about a character; what they do next."
