‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .’
There are stories you build, and there are stories you construct, then there are stories that you hack out of rock, removing all the things that are not the story.
I wanted to edit an anthology of stories which were cracking good reads with, perhaps, a fantasy or SF edge, but mostly that simply kept people turning the pages. Al Sarrantonio became my coeditor on the project. We called the book Stories, which might have been a good title for it, before Google. It was not enough to edit the book. I had to write a story for it.
I have visited many peculiar places in the world, places that can hold your mind and your soul tightly and will not let them go. Some of those places are exotic and unusual, some are mundane. The strangest of all of them, at least for me, is the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. I know I am not alone in this. There are people who discover Skye and will not leave, and even for those of us who do leave, the misty island haunts us and holds us in its own way. It is where I am happiest and where I am most alone.
Otta F. Swire wrote books about the Hebrides and about Skye in particular, and she filled her books with strange and arcane knowledge. (Did you know May the third was the day that the devil was cast out of heaven, and thus the day on which it is unpardonable to commit a crime? I learned that in her book on the myths of the Hebrides.) And in one of her books, she mentioned the cave in the Black Cuillins where you could go, if you were brave, and get gold, with no cost, but each visit you paid to the cave would make you more evil, would eat your soul.
And that cave, and its promise, began to haunt me.
I took several true stories (or stories that are said to be true, which is almost the same thing) and gave them to two men, set them in a world that was almost, but not quite, ours, and told a story of revenge and of travel, of desire for gold and of secrets. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette (Stories won for Best Anthology) and the Locus Award for Best Novelette, and I was very proud of it, my story.
Before it was published, I was set to appear on the stage of the Sydney Opera House and was asked if I could do something with Australian string quartet FourPlay (they are the rock band of string quartets, an amazing, versatile bunch with a cult following): perhaps something with art that could be projected onto the stage.
I thought about ‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .’: it would take about seventy minutes to read. I wondered what would happen if a string quartet created a moody and glorious soundtrack while I told the story, as if it were a movie. And what if Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, he who drew Alan Moore’s From Hell, writer and artist of Alec, my favourite comic, created illustrations for this most Scottish of my stories and projected them above me while I read?
I was scared, going out onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House, but the experience was amazing: the story was received with a standing ovation, and we followed it with an interview (artist Eddie Campbell was the interviewer) and a poem, also with FourPlay.
Six months later, we performed it again, with more paintings by Eddie, in Hobart, Tasmania, in front of three thousand people, in a huge shed at a festival, and again, they loved it.
Now we had a problem. The only people who had ever seen the show were in Australia. It seemed unfair, somehow. We needed an excuse to travel, to bring the FourPlay string quartet across the world (pop-culture-literate and brilliant musicians, they are: I fell in love with their version of the Doctor Who theme before I ever knew them). Fortunately, Eddie Campbell had taken his paintings, and done many more, and then laid out the text into something halfway between an illustrated story and a graphic novel, and HarperCollins were publishing it in the U.S. and Headline publishing it in the UK.
We went on tour, FourPlay and Eddie and me, to San Francisco, to New York, to London and to Edinburgh. We got a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall, and it doesn’t get much better than that.
And still I wonder how much of the story I wrote, and how much was simply waiting there for me, like the grey rocks that sit like bones on the low hills of Skye.
My Last Landlady
This was written for a publication of the World Horror Convention. That year, it was in Brighton. Brighton these days is a bustling, arty, go-ahead, exciting seaside metropolis. When I was a boy, though, we would go to Brighton out of season, and it was dreary and cold and murderous.
Obviously, this story is set in that long-gone Brighton and not the current one. You have nothing to be scared of if you stay in a bed-and-breakfast there now.
Adventure Story
I was asked to write this story by Ira Glass for his This American Life radio show. He liked it, but his producers didn’t, so I wrote them an op-ed instead, about how ‘adventures are all very well in their place, but there is a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain’, and this story went on to be published in McSweeney’s Quarterly.
I had been thinking a lot about death, and the way that when people die they take their stories with them. It’s a sort of companion piece to my novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I think, at least in that respect.
Orange
Jonathan Strahan is a nice man and a good editor. He lives in Perth, Western Australia. I have a bad habit of breaking his heart by writing something for an anthology he is editing and then taking it away. I always try and mend his broken heart by writing something else, though. This is one of those something elses.
The way a story is told is as important as the story being told, although the way that the story is told is usually a little less obvious than it is here. I had a story in my head, but it wasn’t until I thought of the questionnaire format that it all fell into place. I wrote the story in airports and on the plane to Australia, where I was going to be attending the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and read it a day or so after I had landed to an audience of many people and to my pale and scary goddaughter, Hayley Campbell, whose grumblings about orange tan smears on the fridge might have inspired the story in the first place.
A Calendar of Tales
This was one of the oddest and most pleasant things I’ve done in the last few years.
When I was young, I would read Harlan Ellison’s short-story collections with delight. I loved the stories, and I loved his accounts of how the stories had come to be written just as much. I learned many things from Harlan, but the thing that I took away from his introductions that made the most impact was just the idea that the way that you wrote the stories was, you did the work. You showed up, and you did it.
And that never seemed more clear or obvious than when Harlan would explain that he had written such and such a short story in a bookshop window, or live on air on the radio, or in a similar situation. That people had suggested titles or words. He was demonstrating to the world that writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic. Somewhere, a writer was sitting down and writing. I loved the idea of trying to write in a shop window.
But, I thought, the world had changed. You could now have a shop window that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to press their faces to the glass and watch.
BlackBerry came to me and asked if I would be willing to do a social media project, anything I wanted, and seemed perfectly happy when I suggested that I’d like to write ‘A Calendar of Tales’, each story spinning off a reply to a tweet about the months of the year – questions like ‘Why is January dangerous?’ ‘What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen in July?’ (Someone named @mendozacarla replied, ‘An Igloo made of books,’ and I knew what my story would be.) ‘Who would you like to see again in December?’
I asked the questions, got tens of thousands of replies, and chose twelve.
I wrote the twelve stories (March was the first, December the last), then invited people to make their own art based on the stories. Five short films were made about the process, and the whole thing was blogged, tweeted, and put out into the world, for free, on the Web. It was a joy to make stories in public. Harlan Ellison isn’t a big fan of things like Twitter, but I phoned him when the project was over, and I told him it was his fault and that I hoped it would inspire someone who had been following it, as much as his bookshop window tales had inspired me.
(My most grateful thanks to @zyblonius, @TheAstralGypsy, @MorgueHumor, @_NikkiLS_, @StarlingV, @DKSakar, @mendozacarla, @gabiottasnest, @TheGhostRegion, @elainelowe, @MeiLinMiranda, and @Geminitm for their inspirational tweets.)