DAVID A. RILEY:
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Trevor Kennedy speaks
with a man who has dedicated a large chunk of his life so far to the genre,
especially within the UK weird fiction scene - author and publisher, David A. Riley.
Trevor Kennedy: Hello, David. I have nothing but the greatest
respect for yourself, your body of work and your dedication to the British
fantasy, horror and science fiction publishing scene over the last few decades.
But where did it all begin for you? Have you always had an interest in weird
fiction, since your earlier days at Accrington Grammar School, or possibly even
before?
David A. Riley: It all started while I was a pupil at Accrington
Grammar School, initially with a friend, who was keen on writing stories, and
we decided to have a go. I was the only one to keep at it, though. Later,
another friend introduced me to the works of H. P. Lovecraft. It was just after
this I came across a battered paperback edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cry Horror! on a second-hand bookstall
on the local market.
To start with, in my complete naivety, I started
sending handwritten stories to van Thal’s
Pan Book of Horror Stories, which seemed the easiest market to use. Of
course, I got nowhere till I started to use a typewriter. It was in my final
year at school, when I was seventeen, that I finally finished what would prove
to be my first professional sale, The
Lurkers in the Abyss. I received my acceptance letter one week after finishing
school.
TK: You were one of the guys at the centre of the fresh, upcoming UK
fantasy/horror scene in the early 1970s, which included the foundation of the
much esteemed British Fantasy Society. It must have been quite an exciting time
for various reasons, but what are your own memories of the period?
DR: Very vivid still. They were exciting times. Dave Sutton had just
started his literary horror fanzine Shadow,
to which I started to contribute reviews and the occasional article and
even some artwork (I won’t mention the poems!) I first met Dave face to face
after several years of correspondence at what was our very first convention,
the notorious 1970 Eastercon in London. It was shortly after this that I was
offered the job of art editor for Shadow,
which was how I first met Jim Pitts and Nick Caffrey, both of whom who live in
nearby Blackburn. They turned up one day out of the blue on my doorstep, Jim
with a handful of illustrations he wanted to submit to Shadow.
Shadow really was a catalyst
for a lot of developments at this time. It brought Dave into contact with
Sphere Books, who hired him to edit the Sphere
Books of Horror and the Supernatural, which ran to two volumes. It also
brought together the main people who helped form the British Fantasy Society,
the brainchild of Keith Walker. Originally named The British Weird Fantasy
Society, I was member number four. We held our first AGM at the next SF
Eastercon, where the name was changed to the British Fantasy Society. I did the
covers for the first two issues of Dark
Horizons, the society’s journal, then edited by Rosemary Pardoe. Some time
later, along with Jim Pitts, I took over the editorship of The BFS Bulletin, for the first time having it printed using
lithograph. The next step was the creation of Fantasycon, which of course is
still going. The first was a one-day event held in The Imperial Hotel in
Birmingham. We had no idea how many people would attend. In the end nearly
twice as many turned up as we needed to make it a success. The following year
saw our second, this time a more ambitious two-day convention. I was program
organiser and it was my job to invite our first guest of honour, who happened
to be Robert Aickman. Never having heard of us, he was a little hesitant at
first, but in the end proved to be a great Guest of Honour.
TK: Looking at your personal work, which includes the collections His
Own Mad Demons, The Lurkers in the Abyss and Other Tales of Terror
and Their Cramped Dark World, and the novels The Return, Goblin
Mire and Moloch’s Children, could you tell us a bit more about each
of these please and which is your own favourite?
DR: It’s a difficult question. Of the short story collections, I suppose The Lurkers in the Abyss is my
favourite, if only because it’s the most substantial at 277 pages as opposed to
only 180 pages in the others. It was also the one that took the longest to get
published, going through two publishers who both went bust before it could be
brought out, until Dave Sutton took it on. By that stage, after waiting for
quite a few years, I had even begun to wonder whether it would ever appear!
Oddly enough, both the other collections were brought out by Hazardous Press,
which has since also gone under, which is why I decided to republish them under
my own imprint.
Of the novels I must admit to having an especial love
for The Return, which was published
by Blood Bound Books, who I found a great company to deal with. It is also my
most Lovecraftian novel and is set in my favourite fictional place, Edgebottom,
with its cursed area of Grudge End, a place I have used in quite a few stories.
Someone described the book as Cthulhu meets Get Carter, and I did enjoy writing
a Mythos novel in a crime noir style. Goblin
Mire is my only fantasy novel – and one of my very few fantasy stories. In
it I tried to make the goblins more heroic role, while not understating their
dark, barbaric natures, like some kind of ugly Cimmerians. My other novel, Moloch’s Children, was an attempt at
doing a sort of cross between Dennis Wheatley, H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James.
I leave it for others to decide just how successful that was!
There is a fourth novel, but this I decided to publish
under the pseudonym of Andrew Jennings. It’s a bit of a crime thriller and a horror
story, and has a serial killer, espionage, and vampirism. This one’s called Into the Dark.
TK: Having read some of your work - which I very much enjoyed - I found
that while the influences from the likes of Lovecraft and M.R. James are
perhaps apparent, your own unique, grim style shines through. Do you think that
is a fair point and which other works inspire your writing?
DR: When I first started writing I was heavily influenced by H. P.
Lovecraft – which was by no means unique at the time! But I don’t think his
style – which he himself used to perfection, I would add – really suited me and
it was not long before I think a voice of my own started to come to the fore,
though I do think influences like Lovecraft and James are still there, mainly
in the background, but there are others too, possibly a bit of every writer I
have ever read and admired. Which is again by no means unique. I think all
writers are influenced by those they particularly admire. It’s inevitable.
Writers I would like to think have influenced me for good or ill include Franz
Kafka, Robert Bloch, Ian Rankin, Ramsey Campbell, John Connolly, Kingsley Amis,
and far too many to name them all. I have probably forgotten a few I should
have included anyway.
TK: In your opinion, what makes a good horror/fantasy story?
DR: Atmosphere, characters with whom the reader can empathise (though not
necessarily because you like them), credibility, and a solid punch at the end
in the case of horror and sometimes fantasy too, though I don’t think the punch
is necessarily as important there, just a satisfactory ending. I am not a great
fan of stories that are vague and leave you wondering what the hell just
happened. Perhaps I’m old fashioned but I like a beginning, a middle, and an
end that at least marginally makes sense. I don’t like stories that are
pretentiously experimental and absolutely hate second person singular,
especially in the present tense. Anything that gets in the way of the reader
getting into the story makes it a poor story in my opinion.
TK: You have also edited the British Fantasy Society’s bulletin
publication Prism, and your own Beyond magazine in the 1990s.
Publishing these days is so much easier with the advent of the internet and
self-publishing websites, but what were some of the difficulties you faced back
then, especially with Beyond, despite the big genre names attached to
it?
DR: Beyond was an overly
ambitious project. I had just been made redundant by British Aerospace, where I
had worked for twenty years, and given a generous redundancy payment. I used
this to finance what I hoped would be a High Street magazine, available in W.
H. Smiths, John Menzies, etc., and even in any newsagents that wished to stock
it. I managed to get a major distributor to take it on, and both Smiths and
Menzies agreed to distribute it through their warehouses. The initial print run
was 12,000 copies, sent out sale or return. It was only by the time the third
issue had already been printed and sent out that the returns figures showed far
too few copies had been sold in order to keep the magazine going. The first
issue sold about 6,000 copies but returns were still coming through. Some of
the figures from Smiths and John Menzies were plainly ridiculous, with far too
many of them sending in returns of 120 copies when they had only ever received
100, which on paper at least meant that I apparently owed them! Returns is a
strange misnomer, since nothing is ever actually returned. What it means is that unsold copies are allegedly dumped
in a skip and no proof of just how many were ever sold would be given, just a
cursory glance at the shelves to estimate how many copies remained before
destruction. This realisation came too late to save Beyond and the third issue was the final one, money all gone. It
was a salutary lesson.
On the other hand, while it lasted, it was a great
experience, and I got to know some really wonderful people. One of the most
helpful was John Brunner who phoned me up after the first issue went out to
tell me that what I needed was a big name in science fiction to lift the
magazine. The big name, of course, was his. And he went on to send me a couple
of stories, one of which I published. The second, unfortunately, would have
been in the 4th issue. By then, though, John had already died. The
last time I saw him was at a Preston SF meeting when he told me he had another
story for me which he would hand over at the World Science Fiction Convention
in Glasgow, which we were both attending at the end of the week. I arrived on
Saturday, but John died the day before.
Beyond had a bit of a bad
record for deaths. One of the writers I most strongly wanted for the first
issue was Karl Edward Wagner. The story he sent me, Gremlin, was in that issue, illustrated by Dave Carson, though Karl
himself was already dead by the time the magazine was published. In the second
issue we featured a lengthy interview with Roger Zelazny. He too died before
the magazine came out. I’m not sure we would have attracted many more
well-known writers even if the magazine had continued if “the curse of Beyond” had leaked out!
Prism came a few years later.
I really enjoyed doing this, especially as the print bill was paid for by the
BFS! It was especially enjoyable at the beginning, when it was an individual
publication and I had complete control over designing it for the printer. I did
three issues before the BFS, as a cost-cutting exercise, decided to merge all
the society’s publication into what would be known as The Journal. With this I lost any control over design and, to be
honest, I didn’t really care for the way it was laid out. I hung on for another
four issues, but the fun had gone by then and I resigned editorship of it.
TK: What is your view on the relatively new culture of self-publishing? Do
you reckon it is becoming more respected and do you think one day it may even
take over completely? On a personal level, like most things, I suppose, it has
its ups and downs. I love the creative freedom and control it gives me, but it
can be really hard work promoting your own stuff and dealing with the admin
side of things.
DR: Self-publishing is a fascinating development. At one time it was
heavily frowned upon, especially by organisations like the Horror Writers
Association, of which I was a member for quite a few years. In fact, I was one
of the trustees for it at one time. Nowadays, though, even the HWA has accepted
it as legitimate and no longer looks on it as “vanity publishing”.
The small presses or independent presses are also an
important development, especially as major publishers are fewer in number than
they used to be, and horror especially is not particularly popular amongst
them, probably because, other than a very small handful of names, like Stephen
King, it doesn’t make enough money for them. If not for the independent presses
very little horror would be published today. On the other hand, there are so
many of them, and so many writers working in the genre today, that readers are
swamped. And there is an awful lot of bad stuff out there, poorly edited,
sloppily proofread and just as shoddily typeset and designed. So, along with
the pluses, there are a lot of negatives to go along with this development.
Hopefully quality will eventually shine through, but it is a tough business.
And promoting the books you publish is equally hard. If you’re not heard of,
you’re ignored, and no one will buy your books. A lot these days depends on the
writers themselves, who must strive to help promote their books and not leave
it to the publishers to do all the work for them. That’s sometimes a hard thing
to get across. But even the big publishers expect this from their authors
today. It’s not something isolated to the small press.
TK: These days, along with your wife Linden, you run Parallel Universe
Publications. How are things going with that and what have been some of the
highlights so far?
DR: Parallel Universe Publications originally saw light when we published Beyond. After that died, so did the
imprint until a friend of mine, Craig Herbertson told me he had been let down
by a publisher over his collection The
Heaven Maker and Other Gruesome Tales, for which he had already booked a
launch in Scotland. This came not long after I had done Prism and I was still enthusiastic about doing something new, so I,
maybe crazily, offered to do the book for him. His brother was footing the bill
and wanted 100 copies in about two months’ time. Even though I had never done
anything like this before – a two-hundred-and-fifty-page hardcover book - I
made a stab at it. Incredibly, I managed to get it done and delivered to him
with a few day’s grace. It wasn’t perfect – I have revised the book since – but
it served its purpose at the time – and gave me the incentive a few years later
to embark on publishing more books, mainly in paperback. The first of these was
a collection of stories by Charles Black, who had already made a name for
himself with his wonderful Black Books of
Horror. The book in question was Black
Ceremonies, with an incredible cover by the Scottish artist Paul Alexander
Mudie, who did all the covers for the eleven volumes of Black Books. Since then I have brought out thirty books, mainly in
paperback and as ebooks, but also a small handful of hardbacks as well,
including our most ambitious project, The
Fantastical Art of Jim Pitts, which took quite a while to put together and
for which I had to invest pretty heavily in some new software for my computer –
in fact, I had to invest in a new, much more powerful computer too to handle
the graphics.
TK: What are Parallel Universe Publications currently working on and what
does the company have planned for the future?
DR: After an initial flurry of bringing out about ten books per year, we
have slowed down a bit. This year so far we just have two projects. The first
is a charity anthology for the homeless, Kitchen
Sink Gothic 2. The second is to reprint in paperback and ebook format
Johnny Mains’ debut novel, A Distasteful
Horror Story, which he published under his own Noose & Gibbet imprint a
short while ago as a limited-edition hardback. This is an amazing book, full of
some very dark, very violent satire on the horror genre, its writers and fans
and is something I think only Johnny Mains could have written.
TK: Have Parallel Universe ever crossed outside of weird fiction and if
not, would they ever?
DR: We did do the Jim Pitts art book, though of course that was mainly
fantasy and horror. We also published a collection of poetry by the New Zealand
poet Benjamin Blake, again sticking to the weird genre. I haven’t thought about
venturing out into any other genres, though I would like to see more science
fiction. So far we only have one out-and-out fantasy novel, my own Goblin Mire, and I wouldn’t mind doing
more in that vein.
TK: I believe you have also done a spot of acting over the years, with the
Oswaldtwistle Players and the St. Mary’s Pantomime Group. Did you enjoy
treading the boards and do you still do it from time-to-time?
DR: Not with the St. Mary’s Pantomime Group. I was just the secretary (and
later chairman as well). I got into that through our daughter, Cassandra,
taking part in some of the pantomimes as a youngster (all the actors in them
have to be eighteen or younger). My wife, Linden, was in charge of costumes.
With the Oswaldtwistle Players I did a couple of productions. I appeared as a
drunken millionaire in Macbeth Did It
and I had a couple of parts in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I enjoyed both productions but
haven’t been tempted much since. Our daughter created her own acting academy
for youngsters after graduating at Mountview in London and regularly stages
shows at the local theatre. For the past few years she’s been doing two each
summer, one for her younger pupils and one for her seniors, including Les Miserables, West Side Story and Rent.
My wife helps out with the costumes and we both help during the productions
front of house, so that pretty much caters for any time spent in the theatrical
side of things. The local theatre is only across the road from us and I must
admit that over the years we’ve spent a lot of time there. It’s almost a second
home.
TK: Returning to your own personal writing career, what do you have planned
for the future?
DR: I haven’t done much writing recently, having concentrated most of my
time on publishing, et cetera, but I do have a number of writing projects I
want to finish, including a couple of novels I have done substantial amounts of
work on and several short stories. I’m working on a story at the moment about
some demoniacal clog dancers, one of the toughest stories I have ever tried to
complete to my satisfaction, but I’ll get there in the end!
TK: David, as always, it has been a great pleasure speaking with you and I
personally will be keeping an eye out for your future works.
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