“Where do you get your ideas from?” This simple question, destined to send so many authors running for cover, is only eclipsed by: “Who are your influences?” I can understand the concern and dismay that some feel when faced with these enquiries. After all, the rather dull reality is that years of absorbing ideas and influences from a multitude of sources, from books to movies to articles to creepy conversations with strangers in darkened bars (although, this latter one may just be me), simply result in some strange ideas occurring to writers. The real trick is shaping into these ideas into something that will entertain people.
When it comes to my own influences, I have already spoken of my admiration and love for the works of James Herbert. However, it is equally true that there has been another James of some notable literary stature that has somehow wormed its way into my writing. I came to the writings of M.R. James quite late in life. The (shameful) truth is that I grew up on a thousand other authors so obviously inspired by his work that when I finally sat down and read James’s hugely influential output for myself, it was like putting on a pair of familiar mittens. Well, a pair of mittens that hides a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it …
The thing that struck me the most, however, as I worked my way through that collection of supposedly cosy ghost stories, was how dark and disturbing they were. Much has been made of the undercurrents that exist in James’s work, the autobiographical immediacy of A Vignette (a story is set in the home that M.R. James grew up in – Livermere Rectory in Suffolk), the homoerotic subtext of Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (as author Ramsey Campbell put it: “The man brings upon himself nocturnal restlessness and ultimately an erection of the bedclothes by putting something long and thin and dirty … into his mouth.”), but it was the more troubling undertones of the story Lost Hearts that cut to the quick for me. On the surface, this might seem a straight-forward story of a man determined to prolong his mortal life by using the freshly removed heart of a child in a gruesome black magic ritual. But scratch away the shiny Victorian veneer and a shocking underbelly of murder and sexual abuse is soon revealed. Or is it just me?
When I embarked upon writing my book Amongst Demons (the first book in The Covenant series, Amongst Demons is a dark, ghostly thriller of supernatural retribution), it was M. R. James, and not James Herbert, that was foremost in my mind. In fact, when subsequently summing up my intentions with the novel in various interviews, I have described Amongst Demons as a conscious take on M. R. James, a contemporary reworking of his approach with the more disconcerting undercurrents laid bare. As well as using Amongst Demons to peel back the surface of M.R James’s writing, I have also sought to explore his ability to convey an atmosphere dripping in the malignant repugnancy of something emerging from the darkness, something that can only be hinted at, something too terrifying to consider. Whether I have actually achieved this is, of course for others to decide. But there can be no denying that M.R. James’s influence is not only there in every word I have written but will continue to be so forever more, especially if my latest book (the second in The Covenant series) We Hide in the Shadows is anything to go by!
