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Gone Fishin' With John Langan
404 Plays1 year ago
Ahoy ahoy! When the Beanstalker and I were drawing up our wish list for guests on the podcast, there was one name that @Phyrebrat was adamant that we try and get. That was the American author John Langan, who joins us for this episode. John is one of the masters of modern horror and whose seminal book The Fisherman, an exploration of guilt, diaspora history, and weird cosmic horror, won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award.
So we finally got hold of John and he joins us this month to celebrate the UK launch of The Fisherman (a full 7 years after its original publication!), and we talk all things horror. We discuss the book, of course, and the trends in horror, both modern and throughout the ages. We touch on Lovecraft, King, and some of the other heavyweights of the genre, but also the modern writers who form the "Brat Pack" of contemporary horror such as Paul Tremblay, Laird Barron, and our Chronscast friend Alison Littlewood.
John's a big-hearted bear of a man with a huge, barrelsome laugh, and he was great fun to talk with - we hope you enjoy the episode!
This episode features the first half of our talk with John, with the second half to follow in a couple of weeks.
Elsewhere, @The Judge casts her line far and wide and reels in a juicy talk about fish and fishing, and your perpetually inept hosts of Mars Radio 14 discover that the core essence of reality itself is magic. Or logic. Or a really big fish.
Index:
[0:00:00 - 1:05:51] - John Langan interview
[1:05:52 - 1:10:52] - Skit
[1:10:53 - 1:31:06] - The Judge's Corner
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Crohn's Cast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I am Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean. Today we have a very special guest.
Guest Introduction: John Langen
00:00:28
Speaker
When Dan and I discussed setting up the podcast two years ago, one of my conditions was that we try to get today's guest on.
00:00:34
Speaker
I discovered John Langen when I was sent a copy of his book, The Fisherman, from a publisher. It's a rewarding, heartbreaking, exciting, and terrifying read that I've read once a year along with The Elementals. Since then, I've picked up all his work that's available in the UK. And as far as this genre fan's concerned, he's up on top place with Thomas Legoti as my favorite author. And I'm gushing. We'll get used to it. Today, we won't be focusing on one particular book. He might be all talked out when it comes to The Fisherman, which has just had its UK release.
00:01:02
Speaker
But he has many novellas and short stories, which I hope pop up in our chats today. So welcome, John. Thank you so much for having me and for such a gracious introduction, which I am absolutely sure there is no way I can live up to. So if I could speak to the audience directly, I'd like to advise you to lower your expectations and everything will be fine.
00:01:23
Speaker
It's almost as though it doesn't really matter because only beans expectations matter this episode. So I'm sure you'll exceed everything.
Exploration of Science Fiction and Fantasy
00:01:31
Speaker
No, no, I would advise him especially to lower his expectations. No, I mean, we've done quite a lot of science fiction and fantasy episodes. And I'm not really into I mean, I know there's crossovers in genres, but I'm not really into fantasy. And a lot of the time I'm just silent on podcasts.
00:01:47
Speaker
Well, we do have a co-host, Pete, now who sort of steps in when we do more of the fantasy stuff. I mean, yeah, I can see why you say Bean might be disappointed because there is the possibility that he might stumble onto things like Robert Hee Howard and Fritz Leiber and things like that. But we'll try not to. At least we won't start off with that. Well, I've just reread Smoke Ghost mentioning Fritz Leiber. It's my favorite Fritz Leiber. So I was, you know, when you're a little bit too tired to read a new
00:02:17
Speaker
a new story or something, you just go to your comfort. And it's on my Kindle, so I had to read a smoke ghost as well. It's a terrific story. Yeah, it's a really good story. I mean, honestly, I'm going to have trouble keeping a train of thought because there are so many things that I want to talk about.
The Current Golden Age of Horror
00:02:37
Speaker
I think to keep it general to start off with though, I think at the moment we seem to be, for quite a while now, we've been in this sort of golden age of horror and weird fiction.
00:02:51
Speaker
And I wondered if you had any, I think as well, writers of that genre are so supportive of each other and helping people up the ladders and all those kinds of things. So aside from that, what do you think might be the reason? Why is it just a typical cycle? Why is it that horror and weird fiction have become so important recently?
00:03:17
Speaker
I agree with the observation. I think that there are more great writers at work right now that may be at any point in the field's history, certainly, I think, than in its recent history. You can't throw a rock without hitting a great horror writer these days.
00:03:41
Speaker
And there are, I mean, I think to myself, I could just start making lists of names, but maybe we'll hold off that for just a second. I think the more general phenomenon owes itself to a couple of different things. I think that some of it is just the sort of age that a number of us
00:04:07
Speaker
are roughly the same age, myself, Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay, Gary McMahon, Adam Neville, Olivia Llewellyn, Nadia Balkan, Alison Littlewood. We're all in that late 40s, early 50s while Nadia's younger, but we're all in that sort of
00:04:24
Speaker
roughly the same age. I think we all started writing late 90s, early aughts.
Influences on Horror Writers
00:04:31
Speaker
We were all raised to a certain extent on Stephen King, on Peter Stroud, on James Herbert, on Ramsey Campbell, and a lot of other writers that we associate with the 70s and the 80s, and also on a lot of
00:04:51
Speaker
horror media horror film I think especially we all
00:04:57
Speaker
We all grew up with The Exorcist, with The Shining, with these films that, in many cases, in those two cases, you know, had a tremendous amount of sort of artistic or whoever you want to call that cache as well as horror fan, you know, sort of cult cache. So we all grew up with those things. And we all brought, that was where our,
00:05:23
Speaker
I don't know. That was where our literary aspirations took us. I think very few people write horror, as it were, by choice. You know, I'm going to make a million dollars and write a horror story, you know? Except for Thomas Legati, of course, who's notorious for that. But... Legati's down at the racetrack. But I think that we...
Impact of Publishing Models on Horror
00:05:53
Speaker
we just all when we started writing that was what we were drawn to and I think that we were we benefited from the small press also from what you've seen over the last 20 years it is a really profound growth in the in the small press in part facilitated by the the internet the the the explosion of the internet of print on the the the
00:06:17
Speaker
improvement of print-on-demand technology, I think that, and now, you know, online publishing as well venues such as, you know, Nightmare Magazine or The Dark or something like that, these places where, and actually, even before that, when I was starting out, Sci Fiction was, that was the holy grail. They were
00:06:37
Speaker
not to be crass, but they were paying 25 was a 25 cents a word, I think, or some with some obscene amount of money for which is, of course, what everybody should be getting paid, but that's another story anyway. And I think at that point for us, and, you know, maybe unfairly,
00:06:58
Speaker
speaking for a generation of writers. And, you know, maybe that's a little presumptuous of me. But I feel that what we had at that point was we had the examples of King and Stroud and Campbell, in particular, these writers who had been, they had a solid established body of work
00:07:21
Speaker
And you could look at that and you could see all the different possibilities available to you as a writer of weird fiction, of horror fiction. I mean, you had you had Legati also throughout, you know, publishing in very small presses throughout the 80s. And then and then coming on more in the 90s, there were a couple of Caroline Graff editions of his books that made him more accessible. And I think that with Legati,
00:07:51
Speaker
you know, what you could be impressed with with Legati was that the sort of insane integrity of what he was doing that Legati took. He took what he was doing with utter seriousness. He had no, no qualifications. No, I know this isn't really literary. No, this was
00:08:12
Speaker
uh, just, just absolutely what he was, he was supposed to be doing. And I think that that was, if, if not, um, in terms of actual content matter, but in terms of attitude, that was, that was tremendously inspiring.
Thomas Legati's Influence in Horror
00:08:27
Speaker
Um, and look, I mean, Ramsey Campbell has done the same thing. So I mean, it's, it's not to say, Oh, it was only legati, but I think Ramsey at least has had
00:08:37
Speaker
at different points in his career, you know, a certain amount of publishing success, you know, relative to Legati, say, Legati was just doing it, he was just doing it to do it. And it didn't matter what he was.
00:08:52
Speaker
what, you know, what amount of money he was making, or whatever, he was just, he was just following this, this kind of career, this, this, not career, following this sort of North Star of his of his particular dark imagination, maybe I should say a dark star, but how would you follow a dark star?
00:09:10
Speaker
So I think that that was also in there.
Community and Solidarity in Horror
00:09:17
Speaker
And what you've seen, I think, is that the horror community has certainly in my
00:09:25
Speaker
experience of it, you know, which is, you know, 20 plus years now, has been very, very warm and very opening, and has become more so over time, which is really heartening, I have to be honest, because it could, it could go the other way, you know, it, but by and large, it's, and some of that, I think, has to do with, I can remember going to a ReaderCon, which was a local convention in Massachusetts,
00:09:53
Speaker
And there was this small group of horror writers there. Sort of the science fiction and fantasy writers were all arguing with each other about which is the best genre. And they were like, well, at least we're not like the horror weirdos in the corner, sort of drooling and slobbering. And so there was this kind of sense of solidarity that like even within the genre, we weren't even the redheaded stepchild. I mean, we were, I don't know what, the thing that was kept locked up in the shed.
00:10:23
Speaker
Waitley, coming from the Waitley family. Exactly. Grandpa Waitley. So we did feel that sense of we're all in this together. And there have certainly been blow ups in the horror community. It's a community that's inevitable that this is going to happen.
00:10:48
Speaker
But I think that there was certainly in the US, and I have that sense in the UK, that feeling of a kind of genre solidarity or something like that. I think probably the bigger divide at first was between US and UK and US and Canadian. I think that that is gradually closing. I think that there's a lot more
00:11:18
Speaker
transatlantic communication, I guess you would say. I used to teach a class called the transatlantic Gothic, and that was one of the things we looked at was sort of 19th and 20th century examples of Gothic tropes flowing back and forth across the ocean. And I think that that's going on, except it's going on now literally at light speed, you know, back and forth across the internet.
Comparison of Horror Booms
00:11:44
Speaker
And I think that
00:11:46
Speaker
I don't think you're ever going to see a horror boom quite like what we saw in the 80s, you know, where ridiculous amounts of money. It was the mainstream thing, wasn't it? Yeah. And just it was it was it was commerce. You know, it was, oh, my God. Well, we're a million dollars here, a million dollars there. You know, that's that's not going to happen. I don't think. When Bean and I started Crohn's cast, the fantasy science fiction and horror podcast, we were flying by the seat of our pants.
Zencastr and Podcasting Benefits
00:12:15
Speaker
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00:12:33
Speaker
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00:12:48
Speaker
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00:13:08
Speaker
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00:13:31
Speaker
I want you to have the same easy experiences I do for all my podcasting and content needs. It's time to share your story. In some ways, the most 80s thing that I remember, I was talking with constant reader podcast host Richard Chapman.
Stephen King's 'Christine' and Adaptations
00:13:52
Speaker
We were talking about Christine. And this is my favorite story about the horror market.
00:13:57
Speaker
of the 80s is that King sold the movie rights before he'd actually published the novel. Do you know the funny thing is I was just on another podcast. It's a podcast which looks at the horror films of different years. The film I chose to talk about was Christine because that was the book for me. Christine was the book. I read that my first year of high school and boom,
00:14:25
Speaker
That was what made me a horror writer. I read that probably about 14, 15. That is the book. When you're that age, it's fast cars, sex, rock and roll music, and death. That's the package. I mean, the thing about Christine, not to go off on too much of a tangent, but the thing about that book is that I was reading it as a freshman in high school who felt
00:14:55
Speaker
emotionally on the same page as Arnie Cunningham, even though I recognized that it was an exaggeration. I recognized that my own experience was not quite as extreme as his was.
00:15:07
Speaker
But anyway, the point is, yeah, the movie was released within eight to 10 months of the book's publication. And so it was obvious that they were filming it before the book came out. And- Yeah, which is just crazy. And he sold it for megabucks as well. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he ended up having to pay a lot for the rights to use the song lyrics in the book.
00:15:31
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, he paid tens of thousands of out of his own pocket as I remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he was like, but what's fascinating in a way about him doing that was that there were that many songs for him to quote from that the automobile was such a part of especially American rock and roll music.
00:15:49
Speaker
Um, that, that he could just run through all those songs and just kind of pillage them, you know, just, I mean, cause you think, Oh yeah, the beach boys or whatever, little deuce coop or something like that. And no, no, no, that's just the tip of the iceberg. It just goes on and on and on and on. And you've got that really nice change. Load of things.
00:16:10
Speaker
Sorry, I think I might be behind you. I was just saying about the score. You've got all those tracks which, you know, going from Boney Maroney into John Carpenter's fantastic score. It's an amazing, you know, what you're listening to when you're watching Christine is conveys what you get in the book in a way that you can't do in prose just from the use of music, you know.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I was thinking about with that, because with Carpenter's movies, I feel like you have to be aware of the score. Because you know that Carpenter himself is composing the score a lot of the time. And what's so fascinating is I had just, this past summer, I had just shown my younger son, Carpenter's, the thing.
00:17:00
Speaker
So we watched it, he loved it, thank God. But we're listening to the music and that's heavy synthesizers. But then when you get to Christine, a lot of the music is this kind of like big organ sort of operatic kind of thing. And I honestly wondered to myself, did Carpenter choose that himself? Did the studio choose that? Because it works, I think, tremendously well with the film and with the emotion of the film.
00:17:29
Speaker
But I was like, man, that is so different from the rest of what I associate with Carpenter, which is that kind of synth-heavy kind of stuff. Yeah. But there are wonderful visuals in that movie. There were things I wish Carpenter had had maybe more of a budget to do. I think- Well, he treated it just as a job.
00:17:54
Speaker
as far as I recall it wasn't a passion project the studio roped him in to do it and so yeah it was a funny film yeah I don't think he was
00:18:05
Speaker
where he must have been invested to a certain degree because a lot of the budget went on the car because there were so few Plymouth furies left. I remember in the eighties readings, it was Starburst or Gorzone or Fangoria, one of those magazines that used to come out once a month. And it was, you know, I don't know. I can't remember. I was too young. Yeah. Who it was interviewing or whatever. But they were saying it was so expensive to buy these cars, whether they were a wreck or whether they were in quite good condition. They were like, oh, there's three in the country. There's three in the states.
00:18:36
Speaker
You know, and that's funny because he picked the, he picked that car because it was so ubiquitous. It was, it was, it was just a, he said a kind of nothing kind of car. No, of course the name, the fury, right? I mean, that obviously has a lot of, you know, uh, intentionally or unintentionally, you know, that he, he picked, he picked the right name of, of car, uh, for that, for that narrative. But it's just funny to think that, that there's this point in time where Carpenter makes this movie.
00:19:04
Speaker
Um, because the thing has bombed because, you know, the thing gets terrible reviews and people say, Oh, who would, you know, he's such a hack, you know, and, and this is when this guy is, is, is, is in the middle of this great period of filmmaking, you know, starting with assault on precinct 13 and, and going through Halloween and the fog. And, you know, he, he's just.
00:19:28
Speaker
um producing as great a body of work as any American filmmaker and yet at the time they're just like oh John you know can you do this Stephen King thing because uh you know you're not cutting it it's it's it's just sort of astonishing and maybe for artists maybe this should be hopeful I guess you know like like now we look at the thing and everybody but everybody agrees that it's one of the great horror movies of the of the last century and um
00:19:56
Speaker
And yet at the time...
Symbolism in Horror
00:19:57
Speaker
Well, we can swing that back to what you were saying about Thomas Legotti, you know, following a dark star. And I guess you follow a dark star if everything else is light. That's the way that he would probably see it. Yeah, he would. That's like left hand of darkness, isn't it? Anyway, forget that. But it's the same, if you're following your own, if you're plowing your own furrow,
00:20:20
Speaker
marching to the beat of your own drum. In some respect that's like the artistic ideal isn't it? You're carving the way that you want to do it and most of the time most of us who've written something or produced something you have to compromise at some point along the chain because you're
00:20:36
Speaker
dealing with a professional process, there are industrial realities, there are commercial considerations, and all of this. And Thomas Lagot, he's like, like you said, his stuff is so unique. It's sort of outside, it sits a little bit outside of that family tree of horror that you were talking about. You know, you could take a pencil and run a line through Poe and M.R. James and then Lovecraft and then Howard and Leibert and then King and da-da-da-da-da-da. But he kind of sits outside of that. He
00:21:04
Speaker
I think I might be wrong in this. I might be wrong, but I think he's certainly one of the only living writers to have his work published as a penguin classic. Yes. Yeah. As far as I know, he's among that select few. Yeah. Okay. So there is a select few, but yeah, he's a very strange character. He's Legati.
00:21:25
Speaker
You mentioned Alison Littlewood as well. We had her on talking about M.R. James as well. Oh yeah, she's terrific. She's great. I want to say she has a new collection of stories coming out from Black Shuck Books, I think. Yeah, she mentioned it and now that's terrible because I can't remember the name. Well, it's Christmas you made that interview, wasn't it? It was Christmas, yeah, when we spoke with her.
00:21:47
Speaker
But yeah, no, there's, and she's somebody else, you know, there's just, there's such a, there's such a wealth of talent now. And I think that one of, I think that Black Shock's a good example of that, that there are all of these smaller presses, you know, Undertow, Word Horde, P.S., who are doing the good work and who are helping to keep things
00:22:11
Speaker
in print to bring things to print, to keep things in print, Valancourt is bringing all kinds of things back to print. And I think all of that is creating a sort of a different, you know, the particular environment of this time, which is different from the 80s. You know, in the 80s, you could certainly find a lot of things in the bookstore, but a lot of what you went looking for, you had to find in the used bookstore, or get a special order or something like that from.
00:22:41
Speaker
Now, it's a lot easier to find an electronic edition of something if the print edition is too expensive. If you're not interested in a collector's edition, you just want to read whatever the writer wrote. That has, fortunately, to my mind, become easier to do. It's still not 100%. There are still things that are difficult to track down.
00:23:06
Speaker
So I think that moving ahead, I'm kind of optimistic. I mean, my agent's a little nervous. She's like, how long is this horror thing going to last? I heard once one of my editors said that they thought that, you know, horror does well when everything is just a mess. Well, if that's the case.
00:23:30
Speaker
My my future secure, you know Everybody is Knows that we have to help each other because the people are meant to be helping us aren't helping us anymore and you know talking about films You know in this heyday of horror or this golden age of horror we seem to be in at the moment I don't
00:23:55
Speaker
I mean, I'm quite, I see films and literature, you know, the same, but separate in terms of how, how the public engages with them, because teenagers and a bank holiday will go and see any kind of horror film or whatever, and it's great. And it wasn't until things like The Lighthouse or Midsomer and all the A24 films and all the slightly more thoughtful horrors have started to get, you know, the better reviews in The Telegraph or The Independence or The New York Post or whatever.
00:24:24
Speaker
New York Post, New York Times, Washington Post. All of them, the New York Post, New York Times. Okay. And whereas what I've noticed is within literature, there seems to be a boom and people who are writing or maybe it's just, I mean,
00:24:43
Speaker
I mean, to bring up Twitter, it's a shame because Twitter has just died a death for me. I just curated such a good list for my Twitter account. And now it's just unusable. And I think part of it is it democratized a certain amount of the publishing and writing industry. So we were able to deal with each other. So for example, Ellen Dattlow did an AMA a year ago or so on Reddit.
00:25:08
Speaker
And it was incredibly helpful for me. I mean, I was just, I just moaned because I said I, not moaned, but I was, I wanted to know about short stories and novellas and stuff because I struggled with word count and I, they're too long to be short stories or too short to be novellas. And this is after proper edits and stuff. And I said, is there a, I was talking about whether there's a market and she said, yeah, just carry on. And then I heard you on the, was it talking scared podcast or another one? And you were talking about,
00:25:37
Speaker
submit from the top down. And I think the internet and globalization, all the stuff that's happened over the last 20 odd years, have made it so much easier to become a writer. But it's also made it so much more difficult in terms of volume slush readers having to get through a billion instead of a million or whatever, you know what I mean?
00:26:02
Speaker
adjust it and the general quality is probably better as well yeah submissions well i don't know i mean i i'm sure there's a load of crud out there as well but but it just seems general submission because of that proliferation of knowledge and information that's out and community but it just seems to be the rising tide is raising all the ships it seems to be focused towards horror though instead of
00:26:26
Speaker
other genre of fiction, like there's always been a support for fantasy. But it just seems to be a lot, you know, I've moaned over the last 10 years on Quons. Oh, I'm the only one that likes horror and nobody talks about horror but me and it's changed. It's changing. I mean, I don't, I know there's still massive science fiction and fantasy fans and stuff and there's crossover and all that kind of stuff. But I do feel myself with
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, I've told you this, Dan, you know, I feel a lot more around my tribe these days than I used to even two years ago, you know, and the book we're talking about, like, when did the fishermen come out? I think I read in 2016, 2017. So it was 2016. It was published. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, that's quite a long time ago. And I noticed then horror was getting a more. A bigger. You know, slice of the pie, as it were.
00:27:18
Speaker
So sorry, Dan, Ant has finished that thought. What were you saying? I can't remember. It doesn't matter. I was thinking about the golden age question again. The idea that things are going wrong, I think that works to a certain extent because horror works very well when it's operating at a cosmic level and there's a whole scale collapse that's going on, but equally,
00:27:47
Speaker
it tends to work at its best when it distills that narrative down into something that's happening to the individual. We could talk about the fishermen just as an example of that, because there's something that's vast and potentially apocalyptic out there just beyond the beach, the shoreline, which the fishermen is anchoring to the shore, but it's distilled down into the very personal narrative of the two characters of Abe and Dan.
00:28:16
Speaker
And I don't think one works without the other. So even when you have disaster movies, whether it's 2012 or Tower Inferno or whatever it is, Poseidon Adventure, or Deep Impact, that's another good one actually. The narrative is vast and unknowable, but it's distilled through individual characters and their traumas and their individual decisions as well.
00:28:41
Speaker
It may be as banal a thing as it's just, you know, cycles of fashion and horror is in because it's in, because I don't think the themes are any different. There's always an apocalypse on the horizon. You could always make a case for something is out there and it's going to get you. That's what Tade, when we had Tade Thompson on,
00:29:04
Speaker
I don't know if you've read any of his stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Palpable Threats in Horror Narratives
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You should read his book, Jackdaw. Oh, God. The most phenomenal. But he was saying that horror operates. One of the we don't say there are rules, but he said one of the conventions that makes horror tick is that there has to be some sort of palpable physical threat or at least some sense of a physical threat. So something is out.
00:29:31
Speaker
to get you, something is out to cause you danger.
00:29:37
Speaker
That's always there. You can always make a case that there's something out in the background, whether it's political, whether it's environmental, whether it's aliens, whatever. There's something that can physically drag you down. And it's just a sort of ham-fisted segue. But this is why water works so well as a theme running through harem. Maybe we should start talking about the water as the theme
00:30:03
Speaker
certainly in your writing definitely is there and yours definitely both of you because
00:30:12
Speaker
there's the sense of the underworld. If we go way back to the story of Jonah, he goes down and he's gobbled up by the whale. So even when things are going really, really wrong for Jonah, there's something that's even below the bottom of the sea, and that's the belly of the whale. So he has to go deep into the underworld in order to be revivified and spat back out onto land. And all of these things, like Jaws and the things that you were mentioning, John, earlier, so the Meg,
00:30:41
Speaker
deep blue sea, the shark narrative, the whale, the moby dick. There's always something out there, the Leviathan, that is going to drag you down and take you not just into the water, but into the underworld. Yeah, I think that's the sea man.
00:31:01
Speaker
I've told this story so many times and yet it still remains for me just a touchstone. Maybe 10 years ago, my wife and I took our son to stay with some friends on Cape Cod. We went to a beach, lovely, lovely beach. The tide was out when we were there. What that meant was that the
00:31:24
Speaker
the water was maybe about waist deep for a quarter mile, half a mile, something like that. And so I'm just wading out into the water and I'm enjoying myself. And I can hear the beach getting
00:31:41
Speaker
voices getting further and further away. And at a certain point, this school of large fish, sea bass, I think about three feet long, each, they zoomed past me and it was sort of startling, but I was also like, oh, cool, look at them, they're so beautiful, you know. But then I was like, wait, why are they here? What's chasing them, you know?
00:32:05
Speaker
And, you know, I turn around and I'm trying to make my way back to shore, but of course you can't because the ocean is, you know, you can't go fast, you can't run. And that's the thing about the ocean, right, is that it turns so quickly. And I mean, there's a sort of tidal image there, I guess, or a tidal metaphor at work there, but it just, it can turn so quickly.
00:32:32
Speaker
from pleasant and lovely to oh my god, you know, there's the shark fin in the water or something like that. And I think that the so much of the life that we associate with the with the sea is
00:32:48
Speaker
it's different in these profound kinds of ways. I mean, it's one of the reasons I think we're all obsessed with things like whales and dolphins and such, because they're mammals, they're seals. It's something that we can relate to. Whereas a shark? Poor sharks. I mean, I gather that some species of shark can behave almost like dogs.
00:33:11
Speaker
um or something more along those lines but just the way that thing looks with all the teeth and the dead eyes and all this even my description dead eyes you know um it it just it and let alone an octopus i mean so i i think that um
00:33:26
Speaker
I think that there's something about that life that just feels on some kind of visceral level so different. And I know that there are plenty of people who would say, no, I love octopi. I love I love sharks. That's that's terrific. You know, like, like, but I'm just for me personally.
00:33:41
Speaker
And I think the thought of being in an environment in which you cannot really survive for very long. There's nobody who's going to go relocate to the sea. Even if you live underwater, it has to be in this very carefully constructed environment that will allow you to survive. The environment itself will just kill you like space.
00:34:10
Speaker
Right, right. Exactly. The environment is so hostile that there's no way. I think the thing with a shark as well is its sheer antiquity. You know, it's around, it predated many of the dinosaurs. It's still around. It will probably be hanging around long after we've shuffled off as well. Yeah, but I'm hearing a bit boring. What sharks? Yeah, like compared to even the Meg. Well, yeah. I'm just thinking comparing Jaws, for example, and this is I know Jaws is sacrosanct and I love the film.
00:34:40
Speaker
But comparing Jaws to the Leviathan in The Fisherman. Oh, by the way, listeners, sorry, we're doing spoilers. You know, I read The Fisherman. Yeah, read The Fisherman before you listen to what we've just said. I, in my mind, I was seeing this sort of, do you know what Dunkleosteus is or Coelacanth kind of
00:35:05
Speaker
fish, historic fish, you know, and that's what I remember when I was a child, we in the UK, I don't know if we had them in the state, if you have them in the States, but we have this collection of books for ladybird books, and they were all everything from fairy tales to how the plane works, or, you know, I've seen them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And there was I had one and it was dinosaurs. And it had a picture of this fishing called Don Cleosteus. And it was a huge fish.
00:35:29
Speaker
with this armored face, with these weird almost, not fangs as teeth, but almost like bone that came, and it would just terrified me as a child. Really, when you have those memories that stay as almost cellular trauma from something you've read as a kid. And when I read The Fisherman, that was what I was seeing, was this unimaginable, without sounding too Lovecraftian, unimaginable,
00:35:57
Speaker
massive fish. I didn't think too much in terms of say a shark or trying to think of another. It's funny when I was reading that scene where you encounter the Leviathan for the first time bobbing out there on the horizon, it's good writing. It's great writing because it's almost like my mind didn't want to identify it.
00:36:24
Speaker
It wanted, my mind wanted for it to remain so vast that it actually was uncategorizable. And then it remained. The thing that I always, when I read Moby Dick at university, and I've read Moby Dick a few times since then, it's one of my favorites. I always interpreted that the whale is obviously, the symbol is the whale and the whale is the symbol. And what does it mean? What does the symbol represent? I always interpreted Moby Dick as a blank canvas.
00:36:51
Speaker
Just a vast sheet of nothingness. And you can project under it whatever your own phobias, neuroses, psychosis, traumas, obsessions, which is what Ahab does. He projects everything that is wrong and rotten within himself onto the whale. And the leviathan in fishermen is like that.
00:37:14
Speaker
more than it's too big for just one person it's like a black canvas that the entire community and its history is all projected on from the the grief of the two
00:37:27
Speaker
the two protagonists, Abe and Dan, just as a quick break, see Abe and Dan, they're widowers, they've lost their families, and they bond over their grief, but also a shared passion for fishing, and they go to their Catskills, that's how it pronounced, Catskills in upstate New York, and they hear about a river called Dutchman's Creek, which flows out of the local reservoir. Is it the Ashatok?
00:37:54
Speaker
Ashokan reservoir, which promises good fishing, but they find more than they bargained for, obviously. And that's what I found that the Leviathan is this vast blank canvas, almost like a black hole. You know, it sucks everything in, sucks all the trauma and the history of the
Immigrant Stories in Horror
00:38:14
Speaker
of the community, not just of the two men. I'm going to go back to something you said earlier about this constant switcheroo, this Gothic exchange that happens between the United States and Canada as well, and the UK. And in New England particularly, there are so many towns that retain old English fishing towns and fishing city's names. So there's a Truro, there's a Plymouth.
00:38:43
Speaker
There are a few bristles as one in Massachusetts there's one in Maryland, I think, and the center section of the fishermen, which is so dependent on the immigrant story.
00:38:58
Speaker
reinforcing that fact that the fish itself is sucking all of the history from the old world so that even though they've escaped the old world physically everything all of the history is dragged along with it the magic the grief the desperation and it's all represented in this malevolent fish because the fish can always drag you under that's what it represents
00:39:22
Speaker
That's really brilliant.
Intertextuality in Writing
00:39:25
Speaker
That makes me sound much, much smarter than I think I am. Look, we've spoken to a lot of writers and we've come to the conclusion that most writers know what they're going on about. They put it together.
00:39:43
Speaker
I feel that my writing is smarter than I am. You know, like, like, like, like, like, so there were there were times when that there were times when I will reread something I wrote. And I'll think, Oh, my God, look at that. There's that word in the very beginning. Oh, that's so you know, that that's so suggestive vis-a-vis what comes after and, and I have no memory, no conscious memory of having done that.
00:40:06
Speaker
but it's there, you know, and so I do believe, and it's not, it sounds all sort of mystical, and I don't really mean it to sound that way, but I think that you sort of train your creative consciousness or unconsciousness or whatever that liminal state is. I think you train it in certain ways through the writing that you do, through the reading that you do, through the kind of thinking that you do.
00:40:32
Speaker
so that those kinds of, you can call them happy accidents, or it's just that you're maybe not aware that you're doing that because what you're thinking about, what seems to be foremost in your mind is, you know, I gotta get this done by 11 o'clock because I have to go do something.
00:40:50
Speaker
but you're just below the surface, your brain is like, that's great. That's terrific. In the meantime, let's keep putting this thing together. Well, Bean always says that it's like, when it's going right, and you know when it's going right, because it's just flow, it's just you're just in that state. And he calls it the download. So it's like you put the antenna on your head and you just, it's just beaming down through your head and on onto the page. And I think you can train yourself to do that. And the way you do it is by obviously writing is
00:41:18
Speaker
the more you do, the better you get. But also the reading. So the more widely that you're read, the more likely that you're able to pick on these, like you said, these subconscious things that are in you. They're in you. You don't know that they're in you, but then they pour out on the page. A quote I sometimes would go back to is, um, Omberto Echo, he wrote an essay called the intertextuality of texts. I mention this all the time.
00:41:43
Speaker
And it's the gist of it was that every text that's ever been written is always referencing every other text that's ever been written. And I thought, well, first time I read that thought to nonsense. And then the more I thought about it, I thought, wow, that's brilliant, because it's true, because the conduit is the right the writer and the reader. Yes. And because of the writer and the reader, you can make an infinite amount of associations between anything. It's like hyperlinks. You know, you're just hyperlinking every book that's ever been created.
00:42:12
Speaker
some of it consciously and some of it unconsciously. It's brilliant. Yeah, Ian Barster has that image of all the writers who have ever written all writing in the same room at the same time. And yes, as a
00:42:28
Speaker
literary, trained literary critic, that there's a part of me that says, no, no, no, no, come on, there's chronology, all this kind of stuff, you know, this person came before that person. And yet, it does often seem that way. It does often seem, you know, Borges has the
00:42:47
Speaker
Oh, what a story slash essay where he talks about the way that the influence can sometimes seem to flow backwards so that you're reading, you know, Stephen King and you're like, my God, it's amazing how much of Stephen King there is an HP Lovecraft or something like that. You know, that you it almost seems as if that that tide flows out the other the other way and then flows and then maybe flows back in again.
00:43:13
Speaker
And I think for the reader, that doesn't necessarily need to be policed. It's not to say, can you necessarily
00:43:30
Speaker
always support that argument in some, I don't know what, academic conference context, but I don't know that that's that important. Does it work for you? Does it help to enrich the text that you're reading? Does it help to, yeah, to enrich your own experience of the text, then good. I read, there was an article in Guardian,
00:43:54
Speaker
week or two ago, and I forget who it was, it might have been Zoe Williams, and she made the observation that when she first watched Citizen Kane, her first thought was, oh, this is a lot like that Rosebud episode of The Simpsons.
00:44:13
Speaker
That's it. That's exactly, that's exactly how it works. Always up for a good Simpsons reference. There were this far too much of the Simpson, like where like German could be is just the Simpsons. Yeah, it's not, it's not die-bart die, it's a thee-bart. Right, exactly. No one German could possibly do anything evil. Well, I'm going to step back from this conversation because I don't think I've ever seen any Simpsons. I know. Not even the Treehouse of Terror.
00:44:43
Speaker
No, and everybody tells me I would love them, but I just... The shinnings, yeah. Yes. And also... I just sued. But just so I can join back in the conversation, I wanted to come back. I got cut off, by the way, so I don't know. Okay, then. That's okay, then. Carry on. Just all be a bit more serious about horror, please. Sorry. I am.
00:45:06
Speaker
No, I, um, I've lost my point now. It was something to do with, oh yes, the transatlantic Lincoln, and then also reading outside of your, your wheelhouse. If I'm struggling with my writing, well, not if I'm struggling with my writing, but if I'm about to start a new story, whether it's a flash fiction piece or a short or whatever, my go-to are people like Ian Forster or the, you know, my favorite classical authors. And that takes me out of this sort of horror, horror, horror thing. And you start to see,
00:45:36
Speaker
about life and existential stuff, which I think horror deals with so much more effectively. And I think that happens a lot more now
Middle-aged Perspectives in Horror Writing
00:45:44
Speaker
than used to. I said, I'm a horror fan. I'm just going to read horror. I'm high fantasy. It's just high fantasy sci-fi. Just, you know, Arthur C. Parker has them all. I think that's partly the people that you talk with as well. The people in our writing group, we bounce off each other with different things. We all roughly like the same sort of genre stuff, but then we all wildly diverge in our own
00:46:04
Speaker
in our own way. And then we bring that to everybody else. So, you know, that doesn't surprise me. Well, I am the glue that holds us together, aren't I? Despite your lack of Simpsons knowledge. Horror is the glue for every genre. Yes, I do watch Family Guy and those kind of stuff. I've just never seen any Simpsons. It's too late. It's too late. It is actually the one guest I wanted to impress.
00:46:32
Speaker
Your classical writers would appreciate the irony. No, I think, yeah, I suppose I would come back to or expand on this.
00:46:50
Speaker
What am I trying to say? I would take us back for a second to the writers of the last 20 odd years, who are now, you know, we're all in middle age, I suppose. One of the things I think that
00:47:05
Speaker
many of us have in common is that we were doing what actually what I think King and Straub and Campbell were doing, which is to say, you know, they were taking the material quite often of Lovecraft, but Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, what have you.
00:47:22
Speaker
And then they were kind of smashing that into, you know, you think about Campbell and you think about, okay, so there's obviously he talks about how profound an effect Lovecraft had on him. But then he also talks about how profound an effect reading Nabokov and Graham Greene had on him. And a lot of the wordplay that you find in Campbell's stories, that's right out of Nabokov and the sort of seedy environments that he loves to write about right out of, right out of Graham Greene.
00:47:50
Speaker
And in King's case, you had, you know, sort of Lovecraft and Richard Matheson smacking up against American naturalism, people like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, or a crime writer like John D. McDonald. And in Straub's case, you had
00:48:06
Speaker
Lovecraft, but also Walter de la Mer and M.R. James, Henry James, coming up against the other Henry James, as it were, you know, there's the turn of the screw Henry James, and then there's what Maisie knew Henry James, and also Iris Murdoch and people like that. And so you got these kinds of cross pollinations and grafting and all sorts of other agricultural terms.
00:48:33
Speaker
And I think that a lot of the writers that I'm friendly with, anyway, wound up doing something similar so that a writer like Laird Barron is on the one hand firmly entrenched in a kind of pulp tradition that includes Lovecraft, that includes Robert Howard, that includes Rogers Elasti. But he's also entrenched in a tradition that includes Cormac McCarthy and Dan Sean.
00:48:59
Speaker
and uh some of my North Tremblay is yeah absolutely absolutely and and and that's the thing right is that you know like like any of these writers I feel like you you can look at them and you can um you can say oh well yes I recognize um in in Paul Tremblay's case okay he's read you know there's a lot of Stephen King in there but then there's also a lot of stuff that comes from a lot of contemporary um South American writers that
00:49:25
Speaker
big fan of Roberto Bologna, a big fan of Harukai Murakami. And so I think that that's something else that has happened more and more and more. As you said, it's not just
00:49:42
Speaker
I love Stephen King, so I'm going to, that's all I'm going to read and that's all I'm going to write. And if that's your thing, that's totally fine. I'm not judging that. You may be able to create something great that way. I feel, though, that you increase your chances of writing something more interesting for yourself as well as a writer.
00:50:03
Speaker
you know, let alone for your reader, when you can take those different things and bring them into into conversation. It's the point of intersection that makes things interesting. And and all of these right? Yes, they all have their own points of intersections. And if you can, if you can combine that with something else, then that's where that's where you're not so you're not just producing a facsimile of something that's exactly you're the one who creates
00:50:30
Speaker
you see a connection that nobody else has made, and you can use that into something new. I feel like we're all as human beings. I sort of think that's what we all are, where all the intersections of all these different things that come together in this particular unique body, and boom, that's us. And I suppose a more practical example of this for somebody who's like, how do I do that? What are you even talking about?
00:50:59
Speaker
Kelly Link likes to talk about how when she's watching a movie or a TV show and maybe it's starting to drag a little bit. She looks at the characters and she thinks, which one of these is a vampire?
00:51:12
Speaker
And then that becomes this little game that she plays with herself. And I think about that, you know, like, like, are you watching the Brady Bunch say, you know, classic of American television or EastEnders or something, right? And you're like, which one of these people is a vampire, you know, and how to like, what is their secret life like outside of the confines of of the this particular narrative that that we're seeing them in?
00:51:35
Speaker
And right there, so many fascinating writing prompts and writing ideas sound ridiculous. They just sound like, well, that's just silly. It's like, that's just a joke. But if you stop for a second and you think, well, what if I took that joke seriously or at least allowed that joke to blossom?
00:51:54
Speaker
And oh, okay. So I think that the cab driver was actually the vampire. We only see him every now and again. What is he up to? Then that opens up a whole world in which it's the Brady Bunch, and it's that world, but it's also this world in which there's a vampire driving a cab or whatever, Southern California.
00:52:19
Speaker
You mentioned your contemporaries, Blair Barron, Paul Tremblay, Alison, etc etc. And you said that, more or less, you're all of an age with one another, you're all in that sort of
00:52:34
Speaker
mid-40s to mid-50s age bracket. Do you think that horror relies on having had a little bit of experience, let's say, of doing life and having experienced maybe some trauma, some ups and downs and understanding that, yeah, there are things in the world that can get you, but also there are ways of making it through? I think that
00:53:00
Speaker
writing in general benefits from age. The writer John Scalzi a few years ago wrote what was for me this marvelous blog post on his whatever site where he said that you know if you look at the breakdown the numbers and you'll find that most writers don't publish their first novel until they're in their 40s or 50s
00:53:26
Speaker
that the romantic, and I mean that, I guess, with a capital R myth of the youthful, you know, Keats, who writes a whole bunch of great poems and then drops dead. Or Keats and Shelley and even Coleridge, who kind of burns out in his youth. And that's the knock on Wordsworth, right? Is that although he publishes the, he brings the prelude.
00:53:54
Speaker
Yeah, well the thing with Lovecraft is Lovecraft dies. He's 47 when he dies.
Realities of Success in Writing
00:54:03
Speaker
He died in the sort of the cliche penury
00:54:10
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. The starving artist. You know, the romantic starving artist, which, you know, there's nothing if you read about Lovecraft's life, there's nothing romantic. No, no, he dies of stomach cancer from which seems to be an agonizing death from a lifelong poor diet brought on by, yeah, by Robert. But I think that that many people
00:54:35
Speaker
many people look at the youthful success, the myth of the youthful success. And it's not 100% a myth because there are people like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Keats who have youthful success, who have tremendous youthful success. And of course, we look at that and we're like, oh my God, I'm not youthful anymore. How am I going to do that? But the fact is that
00:54:59
Speaker
those people who had that success were often in very specific situations financially and socially and what have you that allowed them to have that success. I think that
00:55:14
Speaker
these days, it's much more likely that you're going to need a job. You're going to, you know, you might you might want to get an education. You need a job. Maybe you want to have family. All of those things are going to take up decades of your of your life if you're if you're
00:55:34
Speaker
I mean if you're if you're going to be a, to my mind a decent responsible partner and parents and whatever you know, you have to be available for your family you can't just be like all right you're five now good I'm done, you have to, you know, you have to remain available to them.
00:55:50
Speaker
And the same thing if you want your relationship with your partner to continue, you have to remain in constant communication, constant dialogue with them. So all of those things mean that you could be, you could look up as it were in your 40. That's fine.
00:56:09
Speaker
That's not, you know, the one thing I think, the one benefit I think you get to being older is you learn the kind of value of persistence. I think if there's a danger to when you're young, a trap you can fall into when you're young, it's sort of impatience. It's that feeling, oh, my God, I haven't written a novel. I'm such a failure. Everybody hates me. And I think that when you
00:56:38
Speaker
when you reach you know you get to be even in your 30s you start to realize that's not exactly true let me just let me just try let me let me just try to do what I can do and I think that
00:56:53
Speaker
I think that that, so for anybody who, man, for anybody who's young, that's great. That's terrific. You know, you got a lot ahead of you. Give it a shot. Don't give up for anybody who's, who's middle-aged or even older in Penelope Fitzgerald. Doesn't publish her first novel till she's under six.
00:57:11
Speaker
Yeah, and she still wins the Booker Prize, you know, she still publishes, I can't remember what it is, like a dozen or 15 books or something like that. So I don't think that it's ever, I don't think there's ever a too late point. Probably someone in the audience right now was like, hang on a second. Oh yes, there's some exception you can think of. Okay, that's great. But for most people, no, you just keep adding.
00:57:38
Speaker
And you keep getting better. I think so. I really do. When I started writing, I was terrified, but I really made the effort. I was terrified that I would run out of ideas. I would read an interview with someone like Neil Gaiman. He would say, you know, I will never live long enough to write down all the ideas I have to write stories.
00:58:00
Speaker
And I would think, oh my God, how does he do that? And what I realized is that the more I wrote, the more I found I could write. Now, I don't know if that, I think that's true for a lot of writers, maybe even the majority of writers. I don't know. I've actually never made a survey that way. But I've just found it for myself that writing begets writing.
00:58:24
Speaker
and that writing, it begets ideas for writing. This is Jumping the Gun. I know we were going to talk about this in the second half of the show too, but I'll just say that there's a marvelous book by Kate Wilhelm called Storyteller.
00:58:39
Speaker
She was a science fiction and mystery writer from the latter half of the 20th century. And this is a book that, speaking of Kelly Link, that Small Beer Press put out. And the book is a mix of memoir and sort of writing exercises. She was married, Kate Woolham, to Damon Knight, who created the Clarion Workshop.
00:59:01
Speaker
And one of the things that maybe the one of the most profound lessons I feel like took from that was her comparison of your kind of creativity to a little dog. Your little dog brings you a treat or brings you a toy, brings you a toy to play with. And you have one of two choices, right? You can either play with the, you can play with the dog or you can say, get out of here.
00:59:27
Speaker
And eventually, if you keep that up, the dog will not come to you anymore. The dog will learn the lesson. All right, just leave that alone in my hands. Your creativity is like that too.
00:59:39
Speaker
If every time your creativity brings you an idea, your first thought is, no, that's a terrible idea. No, I could never do that, which is very much how I was when I was young. You know, that's stupid. Now, come on. You immediately feel overwhelmed and defeated and whatever. Eventually your creativity is like, okay, lesson learned. I'm not going to, I'm not going to work that way.
01:00:02
Speaker
if your creativity brings you the idea of the vampire taxi driver and you're like, well, I don't know. I don't. It seems kind of silly, but but but OK, how could we do that? How could we play with that? You may not write that story, but what you're training your your kind of creativity to do is to bring you ideas is hey, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter how how silly it is. Oh, there's an octopus who's who's bench pressing four hundred pounds and he's you know, he's part of the circus and you know.
01:00:31
Speaker
Okay, that's kind of odd. Let's see what we can do with that. Which is why short stories are such a great way of improving your chops when you're starting out. I think so. I mean, I also think there were
01:00:47
Speaker
I know myself, I felt that like, oh, move from, I mean, I was always, when I started, I've always written long. And the first stories I started writing when I really decided to embrace horror writing in my early 30s were novelettes, were that too long for a short story, not long enough to be a novella. These days, if you write a novella, you get a shot at getting that published in any number of novella lines.
01:01:12
Speaker
And obviously, short stories, there's a number of markets for them. Novelettes are a tricky business. But I certainly had the idea that I would, you know, that the shorter things I was writing were preparation for the novels to come. And there is some truth to that. But I also think
01:01:35
Speaker
There are ways in which you can do things in a short story. It would be difficult to get away with in a novel. The late Ian Banks did some crazy, you know, especially in his science fiction stuff, you know, he would write. It was the use of weapons where he's got two plots. One is going forward, one is going backward, and they meet at the end of the book.
01:01:54
Speaker
I would love to be able to write something like that. I think that's crazy. But I have a hard time imagining doing it as a novel. I could maybe, I feel like I could see that as a novel letter, you know, maybe a novel. But yeah, I think that it's all
01:02:11
Speaker
It's all good. All writing is good. You may not, I mean, you have to finish something. But if you start something and you're like, you know, I just I don't know what to do with this, put it away. It's totally come back to it. That has happened to me more times than than.
01:02:26
Speaker
um that I can count really where I've I've hit the I wrote the beginning of something put it aside and then years later came back to it and I was like oh okay I know where this goes now sometimes your mind I I do think like that's where the the way your subconscious works or your unconscious whatever
01:02:43
Speaker
I do think it's this thing of levels where things are constantly getting passed up and down. The little beginning to something that I wrote a while ago, that's hanging around somewhere in the middle and the fornits are working. Stephen King has that term for the little guys in your subconscious. The fornits are down there and they're working at it and they're trying some stuff out. Maybe it's like Homer Simpson to finish on a Simpsons.
01:03:11
Speaker
When you learn something new, it pushes something else. Maybe it's your demon. Well, the four nits to me all look like they all look like the minions and the minion movies, you know, they're all like blowing things up and they're all talking this little gibberish language. But yeah, no, I think that
01:03:32
Speaker
I think that you have to be forgiving of yourself as a writer. I feel that there's, and I know that sounds awfully like touchy-feely squishy, but I think that the
01:03:46
Speaker
the notion that as writers, we kill your darlings and we have to be really harsh to each other. And if you give me a story to read, I better make sure that I just tear the guts out of it. No, I mean, sometimes, yeah, sometimes you have to say, look, I don't think this is working.
01:04:06
Speaker
you know, it's, it's much as I love Simpsons fan fiction, this is not working, you know, that's fine. Like, I think you can do that. But I also think that that we just we don't do each other any favors by tearing each other apart. I think that there were ways to offer, you can certainly be honest in your in your response. What we found is that
01:04:31
Speaker
is when you're in a community, you quickly, or maybe not quickly, maybe it's actually, it could be a long and drawn out affair with a bit of difficulty, but you find the readers who suit you and will give you the proper honest feedback. And they'll tell you when you're on the right track and they'll tell you that's not working. That doesn't feel like it works for you rather than we've, we know a few people who will just trash everything.
01:04:58
Speaker
And we know a few people will say, everything is wonderful, which is not very useful either, even as nice as it is to hear. So if you find the right person, the right group of people that you can talk with honestly, that's when you've got the sweet spot and you can retain, you can talk about things in the right way and improve. Anyway, it's super encouraging. A lot of people that we have listening to the show,
01:05:28
Speaker
messages and say this is all very depressing hearing about how difficult it is and say yeah it's difficult but that's very encouraging you know keep at it we like that so i think we'll figure it out right i think that's a good note on which to end the first half of the show we've gone well over the hour mark because we've been rabbiting away excellent uh let's take a break thank you john for joining us uh we'll take a few minutes and join you a little bit later on in the show
01:05:54
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Mars Radio 14, the third best radio station on the Martian Space Force Broadcasting Spectrum. My name is Captain Half-Mouth Curtin and I've been joined in the studio by Lieutenant Bungalow who has just got back from a survey of outer space and
01:06:17
Speaker
or so he tells me, has found the essence of reality behind the magic of life.
Martian Radio Parody
01:06:24
Speaker
Is that right, Bungle? Yes, it is, F. Milk Curtain. Right. Absolutely. Good. Yes.
01:06:32
Speaker
Very good. Let me tell you. Okay. Right. I just said that. I know you did have belt card, and it's true. I did find the core essence of life. Which was? Ooh. Many, many things. Ooh. Many, many diverse, very things. Well, I mean, you know,
01:07:00
Speaker
No, no, that's, it's just one thing actually. Right. Indeed half milk cotton. Right indeed. Give me strength. What is the thing you found? The thing that underpins existence? Magic. Magic? It took a trip around the universe to discover the magic behind life is magic. Well yes.
01:07:30
Speaker
Well, I mean, and no. By the nine Triangulas of Banglaan, I'd get more sense out of an asteroid. Yes and no. Just pick one. Yes. Of course. Well, I mean, no. Wait. Well, there's no magic on Earth, so no. What do you mean there is no magic on Earth? What do they use? Logic.
01:07:55
Speaker
logic exactly not this again can you give me an example of logic just so any of the folks tuning in won't have wasted their time completely sure of course an example of logic
01:08:10
Speaker
Have milk cart, listen this, you own a fronged Neptuneian barracuda. Of course I do. You know I do. All senior officers in the Martian Space Force are presented with a fronged Neptuneian barracuda by the headbongerlon in acknowledgement of their importance.
01:08:30
Speaker
I have had mine for 82 planetary cycles! Yeah, so it follows that you must be a very wise Martian to have become a captain in the Martian Space Force and have earned a fronged, Neptunian barracuda. Uh, do you keep it in the tank of water, half milk cart? No, I keep it in the shed halfway up Olympus Mons! Of course I keep it in the tank! It's a fish! An enormous sea creature over 19 oblong cumatons in length!
01:08:58
Speaker
Where else do you think I'd have it? I mean, it's not in the studio with us now, is it? Nope, nope, it is not half milk cart. So, with you being a very wise Martian, and a captain, a captain in the Martian Space Force, with an enormous fish, and an enormous tank of water, well, you must be a wealthy Martian. Yes?
01:09:27
Speaker
A very wise Martian and a wealthy captain in the Martian Space Force with an enormous fish and an enormous tank of water on good wages. You must have a good job. Yes. And I'd say as a very wise Martian and a captain in the Martian Space Force with an enormous fish and an enormous tank of water on good wages. With a good job. Now I'd say
01:09:57
Speaker
you'll probably work for a big, important organization. An organization like the Martian Space Force. In fact, I'd say you definitely work for the Martian Space Force and are probably an important person in that force. Probably an officer. In fact, using logic, I can say with absolute certainty that you are a captain.
01:10:28
Speaker
In the Martian Space Force! TAR! Right, bungalow. Thanks for that. Do you mind if I try? Try what happened, milk cart? Using logic. Yeah, of course I have milk cart. Right, then let me ask you this, Lieutenant Bungalow. Do you own a fronged Neptuneian barracuda? No. Then bungalow, you are an idiot.
Fishing Laws and History in England
01:10:53
Speaker
Hello and welcome again to The Judge's Corner with me, Damaris Brown. Usually in these talks I discuss legal matters which we writers need to know about or which we could use in our stories. But occasionally I simply witter on about a subject with legal connotations which is in the news or is relevant to the specific Crohn's cast. This month is one of the latter.
01:11:17
Speaker
Since the conversation with John Langan is about his novel The Fisherman, what better time to look at the law relating to fishing? Though, spoiler alert, I'm talking mainly about England, not fishing in the waters of upstate New York. And while there's plenty of natural history, there's absolutely no supernatural horror.
01:11:39
Speaker
Fish were important throughout medieval Europe, not least because the Catholic Church required people to refrain from eating meat on fast days, not limited to Fridays and the 40 days of Lent.
01:11:51
Speaker
Estimates vary, but altogether the prohibition covered between one-third and one-half of the year, when meat was forbidden but fish was not. Though towards the end of the Middle Ages, fish pretty much included anything that lived in or on water, including barnacle geese, which were thought to hatch from barnacles, so there's a certain logic to that, as well as puffins and beavers, which, doubtless much to your surprise, weren't believed to be barnacle related.
01:12:22
Speaker
The importance of fishing in England is shown as early as the Doomsday Book of 1086, as well as detailing farms, mills, livestock, slaves and so on, all with their value. It also lists hundreds of fisheries, mostly freshwater, but also a number on tidal rivers and estuaries, including the Thames.
01:12:42
Speaker
More intriguingly, one location in York is said to have been a fish processing plant. Though I've not been able to find the entry myself to verify the detail, but since there must have been numerous places around the country where fish such as herring would have been dried, salted, pickled or smoked, it's possible this York venue was on a semi-industrial scale.
01:13:07
Speaker
Even before doomsday, in the 10th century laws of Wales, there's implicit recognition of fishing's value in one law. If a person spread a net upon his river or upon the sea, and geese or other animals get entangled in the net, become wounded and die from it, the owner of the net is not to pay any compensation for any one of them.
01:13:31
Speaker
If a beast or any other animal get entangled in the net, break it and make its escape, the owner of the net must be indemnified for the injury because he had a right to spread his net.
01:13:44
Speaker
So, the fishman's net is clearly considered more important and valuable than someone else's beast. And this is a time when a goose was valued at a penny, a gander double that, with other livestock much more. Even a good mouse-killing cat was valued at fourpence. Welsh laws also dealt with agreements and liabilities over fishing.
01:14:08
Speaker
Whoever wishes to go a fishing and start a fish and pursue him, and in the pursuit the fish enter another person's net, the law has enacted that the first is entitled to him. If persons be fishing, and whilst engaged in it, others come to catch fish with them, and desire a share of the fish, they have a right to a share, unless the fish be up on the rod or the hooks. If they be thus fixed, they can demand nothing.
01:14:38
Speaker
though that, unless proviso of the last rule, seems to carry an exception in the case of salmon, one of the three so-called common hunts under the hunting laws.
01:14:50
Speaker
Salmon is called a common hunt because when they are taken in a net or with a fish spear or in any other manner, if any person whatever come up before they are divided, he is entitled to an equal share of them with the person who caught them if it be in common water.
01:15:10
Speaker
I've not found a definition of common water, but this clause implies a difference between fishing on, say, a major river on the one hand, and a watercourse on someone's land on the other. Certainly this divide between waters held in common and those separately owned was recognised in England in the post conquest period,
01:15:28
Speaker
though just as common use of land increasingly gave way to private property rights, so ownership by individuals superseded the common of fishery shared rights in freshwater rivers, though tidal waters which belonged to the crown remained largely open to all.
01:15:48
Speaker
Various methods of catching fish were used throughout the medieval period, but the most visible in legal documents are the wicker fish traps, which are referenced in charters from the 8th century. Then, around 1180, a new, far more substantial trap appears, and in 1215 this type is specifically raised in Magna Carta, where Clause 33 states,
01:16:11
Speaker
All fish weirs are in future to be entirely removed from the Thames and the Medway and throughout the whole of England except on the sea coast.
01:16:22
Speaker
We tend to think of Magna Carta as a reaction to the oppressive tyranny of King John, but it's hardly likely that he and his henchmen have been loading English rivers with fishwears for their own personal advantage, thereby upsetting the barons. Rather, these larger, heavier traps were impediments to navigation and therefore to riverborne commerce, and the clause was probably added at the behest of London merchants who wanted a freely navigable Thames.
01:16:50
Speaker
But the weirs were undoubtedly also a problem elsewhere, hence the prohibition being extended across the whole country. The exemption of coastal fish weirs likely rises from the fact that they were less of a hindrance to boats and trade.
01:17:05
Speaker
Magna Carta attaches no penalty to the continued use or construction of river weirs, and it's unlikely to have proved very effective. Certainly this wasn't the first attempt to control the weirs, nor indeed their predecessors. Pre-conquest, Edward the Confessor had ordered the destruction of fisheries blocking the flow of the Thames.
01:17:26
Speaker
In 1197, John's predecessor, Richard I, had granted London a charter ordering the removal of all fish weirs on the river, when they were described as detrimental to the whole realm. And two years later, John repeated the charter, extending the ban to the Medway, with a hefty £10 penalty for anyone constructing a new weir.
01:17:49
Speaker
A few years after that, the Archbishop of Canterbury excommunicated those responsible for the fish weirs, a serious penalty for the devout. Yet evidently the problems persisted. Since in 1237, an order was made for some 30 weirs to be removed and their owners to be arrested. And over 150 years later, in 1393, the mayor and alderman of London were once again petitioning the king about the construction of weirs and other engines.
01:18:20
Speaker
is perhaps likely that the Thames and Medway weirs were initially installed or at least encouraged by the city's fish sellers who had formed a guild by the 1150s. Their importance was recognised in 1272 when the guild was formally incorporated as the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, one of the first of the great 12 livery companies in London.
01:18:44
Speaker
Regulations applied by the company referred to mullets, whitings, sprats, mackerel, rays, congers, dorries, turbot, gabs, whelks, porpoises, oysters, salmon, cod, haddock, herrings, eels, mussels, and sturgeon, many of which may well have been caught in the Thames itself, though sturgeon was rare and reserved for the monarch.
01:19:07
Speaker
The issue of the whiz is an early example of fishing, despite its importance in feeding a growing population, coming into conflict with other interests. That conflict between two competing goals wasn't the last. And in fact, the whiz themselves were a problem not merely for river trade routes.
01:19:26
Speaker
The 1393 petition about the weirs on the Thames and Medway referred to the overfishing of fry and destruction of fish stocks, and a similar complaint in 1402 was that the weirs were destroying the young fryer fish, presumably because any gaps were too small, with the result that fish become wasted and thus given to swine to eat, contrary to the pleasure of God and a great damage to the king and his people.
01:19:55
Speaker
Overfishing and depletion of stocks wasn't only an English problem though. Sicily had to bring in fishing regulations in 1231, and in 1289, Philip IV of France, fominated against the evil of fishers, who had left the rivers empty, thereby increasing prices and creating public hardship, and he brought in the first fishery ordinances.
01:20:20
Speaker
More French legislation followed into the 14th century, requiring next to have larger meshes to ensure young fish could escape, forming the basis for continued lawmaking over the next several centuries.
01:20:34
Speaker
In England too, efforts continued to try to protect young fish, including in 1533 an act against killing of young spawn or fry of eels and salmon, with a close season for elvers, young eels, from February to July. Close seasons for both young and adult salmon had been enacted in England some 250 years before that,
01:21:00
Speaker
with the 1285 Salmon Preservation Act, which was itself 250 years later than a similar enactment protecting salmon in Scotland. Under the 1285 law, penalties for a first offence included the destruction of nets, for a second three months in prison, and for a third offence, as their trespass increases, so shall the punishment, though I can't discover what that actually entailed.
01:21:30
Speaker
Whatever the penalties set out in the Henrician 1533 Act, they didn't seem to work. Since nearly 25 years later, in 1558, the first year of Elizabeth's reign, another statute was enacted for the preservation of spawn and fry of fish because, once more, young eel and salmon, and this time also pike, were being caught in quantity.
01:21:56
Speaker
insomuch that in diverse places they feed swine and dogs with the fry and spawn of fish and otherwise, lamentable and horrible to be reported, destroy the same to the great hindrance and decay of the Commonwealth. Among other provisions, this act imposed size limits on certain fish, so for instance, no pike under 10 inches could be taken or trout under 8 inches.
01:22:23
Speaker
Elizabeth's Chief Minister, Sir William Cecil, was behind this enactment, as well as a far more controversial clause in the 1563 Navigation Act, the compulsory eating of fish on Wednesdays, what became known as political Lent. From a committed Protestant in the midst of the Elizabethan religious settlement, this seems at first sight a strangely Popish requirement.
01:22:49
Speaker
But it was devised for very practical reasons. The need to build up the English Navy. The decay of the fleet arising, Cecil believed, from a declining fishing through lower demand, even though the Catholic fish days hadn't been formally abolished. As a result, the act specifically required sea fish to be eaten on the Wednesdays, not freshwater fish.
01:23:14
Speaker
Cecil's laws might have helped our navy, but once again the fish preservation measures proved less successful. A combination of ignorance, want, greed and insufficient enforcement meant further legislation was required in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reign of George III alone, generating 17 enactments relating to fish and fisheries,
01:23:37
Speaker
including yet another attempt specifically to protect young fish in 1760 with an act for the better preservation of the spawn, brood and fry of fish and for preventing the sale of small and unsisable fish and fish out of season.
Industrial Revolution's Impact on Fisheries
01:23:55
Speaker
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution and a burgeoning population, inland fisheries came under even greater threat. An 1825 report on salmon fisheries prepared by a parliamentary select committee heard evidence that salmon were still being destroyed in great numbers despite attempts to preserve stocks.
01:24:14
Speaker
By now, industrial pollution was taking its toll on the rivers. Evidence heard by a commission investigating London's water supply in 1827 pointed the blame at the gas industry for a catastrophic decline in the Thames fishery. Some in catches that used to be 10,000 a year had disappeared completely.
01:24:34
Speaker
From the middle of the 19th century, there was yet another blizzard of legislation to try to protect fish, including the 1877 Fisheries Dynamite Act. Yep, they needed an act to prohibit the use of dynamite or other explosives for the purpose of catching or destroying fish in public fisheries. But while worthy in themselves,
01:24:59
Speaker
Measures promulgated for conservation purposes also created disputes, sometimes even public unrest. With the 1873 Salmon Fisheries Act leading to what has been called the Victorian Elver Wars, as the close season laid down for catching eels or the fry of eels meant the virtual end of legal Elver fishing.
01:25:22
Speaker
Between 1874 and 1876, dozens of men in Gloucestershire were convicted, some sentenced to fines of ten shillings, virtually a labourer's weekly wage, with court costs much the same, some even suffering 14 days hard labour. These were men employed at Gloucester docks, who'd been laid off for the season, and for whom overfishing meant survival, both food and much-needed income. In the end,
01:25:50
Speaker
Public sympathy and intervention by politicians brought about a change in the law allowing for a limited period of Elva fishing. As ever, a compromise had to be reached between the needs of the fishermen and of the fish, a balancing act which continues to this day. Fishing for sport as opposed to need or for income
01:26:12
Speaker
has been around since at least the middle ages. Nowadays, to fish with rod and line on inland waterways requires a licence plus permission from the fishing rights owner. Originally, the person who owned land along a river or watercourse had the virtually untrammeled right to fish in their section up to the midpoint of the waterway.
01:26:32
Speaker
But fishing rights can be valuable and many have been sold or leased, for instance to fishing clubs, so they're now completely separate from the riparian property and can be formally registered. In England though, regulations still maintain a distinction between tidal and non-tidal waters and also between freshwater fish and sea fish.
01:26:55
Speaker
Poaching a fish from private land has been a crime since at least 1539, with the Henrician act that fishing in any several pond or moat with intent to steal fish out of the same is felony. And under Elizabeth, he carried a punishment of up to three months in prison. But matters appeared so grave by 1765 that poachers then faced being punished by transportation to the colonies for seven years.
01:27:25
Speaker
Poaching remains illegal. Nowadays under the 1968 Theft Act which states that an offence is committed when a person unlawfully takes or destroys or attempts to take or destroy any fish in water which is private property or in which there is any private right of fishery.
01:27:45
Speaker
But while ordinary theft requires an intention to permanently deprive the owner of the stolen property, that isn't necessary in the case of fish. A 1964 decision expressly confirmed that taking does not include an element of asportation.
01:28:05
Speaker
that is physically removing or carrying something away, it means to lay hands upon, to grasp, to seize or to capture. So using a keep net or engaging in catch and release fishing would still be an offence, as we're just sitting there hoping to catch a fish since that comes under the attempt clause. Interestingly enough, before the wording of the Act was changed in 2009,
01:28:32
Speaker
Nighttime poaching received a higher penalty than fish theft in the day, up to three months in prison for a second offence.
01:28:42
Speaker
Although most legislation prior to the 20th century related to inland waterways, sea fishing cropped up from time to time. In the late 13th century, Edward I tried to protect the Conga eel around the Channel Islands by requiring the more abundant mackerel to be caught instead. And in 1605, under James I and VI, Parliament passed an act for the better preservation of sea fish.
01:29:08
Speaker
Then in 1714 we have the gloriously named act for the better preventing fresh fish taken by foreigners being imported into this kingdom and for the preservation of the fry fish and for the giving leave to import lobsters and turbots in foreign bottoms and for the better preservation of salmon within several rivers in that part of this kingdom called England.
01:29:33
Speaker
which, as that long title indicates, mixed preservation of inland stocks with the problem of impertinent foreigners taking British fish in British waters and then having the damnable cheek to sell them back to us.
01:29:47
Speaker
This wasn't the first occasion that English noses were put out of joint by foreign fishermen. In the late 14th century, the number of foreigners, particularly Spanish, fishing in the island's Atlantic fisheries caused alarm, which continued through the early 15th century. And in 1465, they were required to obtain licenses with taxes imposed on their boats.
01:30:09
Speaker
Dutch herringbuses, markedly more successful than their English counterparts, also caused consternation in the 16th century, with William Cecil thinking it intolerable to allow the herrings and other sea fish taken upon our coast to be brought and sold by strangers into the ports of the realm. Not only civic pride was at stake, but public finances,
01:30:34
Speaker
In 1652, it was said that there was paid to the state for custom of herring and other saltfish above £300,000 in one year. Such fishing spats have continued since, as we've seen in recent years, not least the Cod Wars from 1958 to 1976 and the current ruckions following Brexit and exactly who can fish in our national waters.
01:31:04
Speaker
All in all, it's very much a fishy business.
Podcast Hosts and Future Teasers
01:31:15
Speaker
You've been listening to the first half of our conversation with John Langan, brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean. Additional content was provided by Brian Sexton, Jay Stalepin, and Tamaris Brown. Join us next time for the continuation of our conversation with John, where we'll be discussing more about modern horror, we'll be getting an update on Willard Barron, and continuing our conversation about The Fisherman.