Conversation with the Bookless: Kate Horsley

You can read the full introduction to the series here. In short The Conversations with the Bookless series is designed to raise the profile of and increase the exposure of some of the emerging writers we knew were out there.

In this installment we talk to Kate Horsley

After the jump check out the full interview.

Do you ever walk up to your Mom and say ‘what is noir?’ then run away?

I do and I always have. When I was little, she replied by reading me noir lite in the form of Struwwelpeter, the nineteenth century prequel to the Nightmare on Elm Street series. When I was in my teens, she grew nostalgic about using old issues of Dime Detective as outhouse toilet paper during her Minnesota childhood. She rediscovered Jim Thompson and David Goodis and began writing about them on Crimeculture and in print. Eventually I had to ask her to stop quoting Chandler at me when I stayed out late… and taking potshots at neighbours with her Walther PPK. These days I ring the doorbell twice for that James M. Cain effect, then run away laughing before she can answer. I think that’s actually more noir.

Where are you, right now, as you’re writing these answers?

I’m in Lancashire, UK, the depths of the Northern English countryside. Wordsworth, Coleridge and a number of the Romantic poets took class A drugs and went insane here. The village I live in began as a mental health experiment in the Sixties. The government wanted to see whether the severely disturbed could live more peacefully amongst sheep and they also wanted to save money on meds. According to local legend there are rudimentary cameras concealed in trees and hunting hides, from which experimental psychologists watch us all the time. The original subjects are still here and more arrive continually. Like me. It’s Bentham’s panopticon meets Shutter Island.

Who are your influences and what is your unlikeliest influence?

I started out loving old-style chick lit – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison. But growing up with brothers, I also enjoyed a steady diet of 2000 AD, Frank Miller, schlock horror and beat-em-up video games, not to mention geological layers of Razzle Magazine. I think my writing is an unholy fusion of those early interests – schlock meets Brontë meets softcore porn. My unlikeliest influence is probably Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Once the idea of Victorian post-mortem photography is in your head, it really stays there.

Why do you write?

It’s how I get my kicks! What other crazily pleasurable, indulgent activity can you do without paying for materials or props? And I mean, do by yourself, all alone…I’m digging myself deeper. It’s whisky o’clock here and I’m just getting started…erm…I really love writing. Plus, a lot of weird or bad or wonderful things happen to you in life for no real reason and writing is a way of giving your experiences a context, making the haphazard meaningful.

What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?

Mainly, I write historical fiction, whether it’s poetry or short stories or the novel-in-progress. My main worry is how to make it interesting and at the same time paint a fairly realistic picture of another time period from a believable perspective. If you do a lot of research first, then sometimes you get so involved in details that it takes over from the plot. And if you don’t do any research…well, then you sound like a goon. I’ve talked a lot about these issues with my agent, the infinitely wise, kind and patient Allan Guthrie (who manages to be both incredibly generous with his time and busy writing all those amazing novels…he must not sleep). He told me that historical fiction needs a lot of layering and atmospheric richness to make up for the inevitable constraints on plot and that I should sleep less, write more, read more and do all three simultaneously. In return for which, I’m about to send him a large number of pages.

When did you start writing and what prompted you to do so?

Five years ago. Like a lot of people, I imagine, I began writing as a means of escape from another career. I was in Boston doing my PhD in Medieval English literature, teaching Chaucer and Beowulf to undergrads who were either utterly turned off or weirdly turned on by phrases like men ne cunnon hwyder helrunan hwyrftum scriþað. The climactic moment of each year was a vast conference in Kalamazoo, MI where thousands of medievalists congregated to bore each other, many celebrating the opportunity for cosplay. If you think Trekkies are sad, imagine me dressed up in my sackcloth leper’s costume crying unclene, unclene! and sounding a wooden clapper. Because I did do that. And the very last time I pasted fake sores on my cheeks, I thought about how I could be at home writing. And it seemed like this madly decadent, unutterably pleasurable forbidden fruit. So I bit into that apple of Sodom and I’m still biting.

What do you most value in the fiction you love?

I love the way different people put words together differently, whether it’s in hardboiled dialogue or languorous description or good old-fashioned swearing. I read a lot of poetry – Grace Nichols, Charles Bukowski, e.e. cummings, Graham Mort – for sheer lexical pleasure. Something like Nabokov’s Lolita has the same effect, as well as being a damn good detective story. In novels I’ve read recently – Allan Guthrie’s Slammer, Sean Cregan’s The Levels, Steve Mosby’s Still Bleeding, Anthony Neil Smith’s Hogdoggin’, Duane Swierczynski’s The Blonde and Charlie Stella’s Johnny Porno – the thing I fell in love with most was the wild, mad originality. That and the fact that once I’d picked them up, I couldn’t put them down.

How would you describe your style?

It ranges from the demotic, sex-drenched and foul-mouthed if I’m writing something with a contemporary feel, to the gothic and descriptive if it’s historical fiction.

Where can readers check out some of your work?

You can see little snippets from different projects on katehorsley.co.uk. I’m also trying to keep up to date with the creative non-fiction on my blog. If I don’t, Charlie Stella gives me a swift kick up the arse via email and tells me to stop slacking…it’s a major incentive to get down to work. There’s a story of mine online (published under the pen name Kate Beauford) in the crime issue of Storyglossia edited by Anthony Neil Smith. It’s about reappear in Maxim Jakubowski’s Mammoth Book of Best British Crime, 2010.

What are you working on now?

My two main projects are a novel, The Anatomy Show, and a collection of poems, Sleep Museum. I finished the latter over Christmas and I’m currently sending it out to independent presses and competitions, both as individual poems and as a book. It has quite a few crime-story-poems in it as well as characters from history, so there’s thematic overlap between that and the novel. The Anatomy Show is gothic crime fiction set in Edinburgh in 1828 and its protagonist is Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Like Dan Simmons’ Drood, my novel takes a literary figure and twists bits of their biography around to make ordinary life into a brooding murder mystery.

How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

I’ve been working on the novel a while and I hope to have it finished by July, at which point I’ll give it to Al Guthrie and let him work his magic. I’ve already had some advance interest from publishers, which adds a nice sense of pressure. Basically, I need to drink more coffee and sleep a little less.

Kate Horsely is a writer. She has had short stories published in Storyglossia and Momaya Press and her story ‘Star’s Jar’ has been chosen for inclusion in the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime, due out February 2010. She is currently writing her first novel, a nineteenth-century gothic thriller called The Anatomy Show. She is represented by Allan Guthrie at Jenny Brown Associates.

She did her PhD in English Literature at Harvard and lectured there for a year before returning to the UK. She has taught English and Creative Writing in the US, the UK, and at a small school in Uganda. Now she teaches at Lancaster University for the Departments of English & Creative Writing and Continuing Education.

Brian Lindenmuth

Brian is the non-fiction editor of Spinetingler magazine and one of the fiction editors of Snubnose Press. In addition to Spinetingler his work has appeared in Crimespree magazine and at BSC Review, Galleycat and the Mulholland Books website. He also heads the Spinetingler Award committee.

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