Category: Blog

I’m asked a lot of questions about genre, mainly about how I would classify my own writing, and whether I actively decided to straddle several genres or I’m intentionally genre-nonspecific.

My stories are a sort of mish-mash of true crime and horror, written in the style of a podcast. My apologies go out to the booksellers and libraries who have to place them somewhere…

To be honest, as a writer, I never really give genre much thought. Genre for me is simply a sign in a bookshop or library, pointing me usually into a basement or obscure corner where I can find my favourite types of books. (That’s not me parading as some kind of literary hipster – it’s the fact that horror, my favourite genre, is always shoved onto the end of a shelf, or else inexplicably made part of sci-fi/fantasy, as if those books might taint all the lovely hardback fiction written by wholesome celebrities, sitting in bright piles at the front of the shop.)

I think I’ve always liked reading books that defy genre. Not as a rule though – I never actively search out such books. It’s just that I’ve always felt that books that so ardently adhere to a single genre are therefore constrained by it, and as a reader, I want to be surprised.

This is by no means a slight on anyone writing genre fiction, but I suspect that if I go into the crime section of a bookshop or a library, I’m unlikely to find a cryptid. Perhaps that says more about me than about genre.

I’m going to give a few of examples of genre-defiant books that have helped shape me into the writer I am today. In other words, the blame lies at the feet of the following authors.

 

Patrick McCabe – The Butcher Boy (1992)

Patrick McCabe is one of the authors whose work galvanised me to write. His books are usually found in general fiction as there’s no clear place for them anywhere else. He writes like a deranged Roddy Doyle: rich, Irish stream-of-consciousness prose that sucks you into the dark corners of damaged minds in small towns.

The Butcher Boyis set in small-town Ireland in the sixties and details the inner workings of Francie Brady, a young boy whose sanity is crumbling as quickly as his home life. I don’t want to say too much more about the plot as you should read it, then try and classify it yourself.

What on earth is this book? Is it crime? Not really, but also sort of. The atmosphere is thick, the setting bleak. McCabe is often (and horribly lazily) classed as ‘Irish fiction’, which I suppose he is, but there’s a hell of a lot more to his books than that.

 

Antti Tuomainen – The Man Who Died (2016)

Who said that crime couldn’t be funny? I don’t think anyone actually did, but even so, the effortless blend of humour, crime and oddness makes this one a square peg in the grizzled-detective-with-an-alcohol-problem-shaped hole. Swap the bottle of whisky and the one that got away for a dying, Finnish mushroom entrepreneur, and you already have a stand-out protagonist. That’s before this story’s even started. Reading this book is a little like watching a Cohen brothers’ film. You’re not quite sure exactly how to classify what you’ve just experienced, but you love it and you want more.

 

Lauren Beukes – Broken Monsters (2014)

First, a caveat: Lauren Beukes is one of my all-time literary heroes. Everything she writes is amazing. This book was the first of hers I picked up and is a cornerstone for me in terms of influence. A serial killer, possession, Reddit threads; written from the points of view of two characters: a detective and her teenage daughter – maybe this should be crime, but is it really? A purist looking for a cosy whodunit wouldn’t have much fun here.

Broken Monstershas a large enough fantasy element, and I guess enough horror, to be classed as such. The defiant spirit that Lauren Beukes’ work invokes felt almost like permission for me to begin exploring new ways to construct a narrative.

 

Janice Hallett – The Appeal (2021)

This book, while perhaps not as genre-defiant as the others, is nonetheless a significant step towards a new way of telling crime stories. If we think of what a crime novel is at its base level – a story that we, as readers, are drawn into as we try and deduce who committed a crime and why – this book seems to be exactly that. But it takes a beautifully original form.

Rather than a novel in the traditional sense, this book is a dossier about a murder. What we read is correspondence – emails, texts and letters – and from that we have to deduce whether the imprisoned person is guilty or innocent.

But this is no gimmick. The way Hallett constructs voice and character is nothing short of phenomenal. The real kicker, though, is the occasional break when two law students, given this same dossier by their boss, discuss their own theories.

I was utterly consumed and could think of little else while reading The Appeal.

 

Mark Z Danielewski – House of Leaves (2000)

This a suburban, Lovecraftian, non-Euclidean narrative that envelopes you completely. On the surface it’s about a troubled tattooist who discovers academic-style notes in the apartment of a dead man. These notes concern a family who move to a new house and find a room that leads seemingly to nowhere.

This book does not simply exist; it lives. This book is a journey into madness and you’re going with it. But what is it?

Pages upon pages of fake academic references; single words to a page, or else constructed graphologically in a loop, or at an oblique angle; endless footnotes. It’s like a PHD thesis written by Azathoth.

There are thousands of active book groups still discussing and trying to dissect this story. I read it every year or so and it still troubles me. When I finish it, I need to start again, I need to be lost in the labyrinth of this book.

If ‘fake-academic, non-Euclidean, graphological insanity’ is the only way we can classify this one and a new sub-section of the scifi/fantasy shelf must therefore be constructed, I’m in.

 

Andrew Michael Hurley – The Loney (2015)

Just like the best kind of folk-horror films, such as The Wicker Manor The VVitch, the scares in this novel are not overt; they creep in like a draught and are all too real, like a distant memory we thought we had. Quiet rituals, such as burning marzipan, stand toe to toe with entrenched faith, and the slow-burn poetry holds the story in a strange otherland that is neither completely real nor really a dream.

Does this make it horror? It’s been described as ‘gothic’, and that might be as far as anyone can go when trying to fit it into a genre. We start with a dead body in the lonely bay of Coldbarrow in the North-West. This is a haunted place. This is a truly haunted story; the narrator being haunted by the past, by the memories of what happened to his mute brother, Hanny. We swing between the present and the past, Hurley’s eldritch poetry drawing us along as it describes the narrator’s ritualistic devotion to his memories, his pious mother and her cult-like companions, and the journey to the shrine above the ‘wild and useless length’ of coast known as ‘The Loney’ to cure Hanny of his affliction.

This is more of a mood than a story. But when the mood is so expertly crafted, it’s a pleasure to wallow.

 

18^thNovember marks the start of World Antimicrobial Awareness Week. Health workers, scientists and global institutions like the World Health Organisation will be doing their best to increase awareness of global antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and urging policy makers to take swift and firm action to avoid the ongoing emergence and spread of drug-resistant infections.

I have similar calls for action in my novel, The Waiting Rooms, in the decades leading up to the antibiotic crisis. Calls that, despite the very real evidence of an impending disaster, fall on deaf ears. As one of my characters, Mary, says: ‘It’s like watching a plane crash, in slow motion.’

Of course, the misery that coronavirus has inflicted on so many people over the past year has highlighted the cataclysmic impacts of health emergencies, that even our advanced technologies and sophisticated minds cannot overcome. And those impacts will continue, long after the virus has gone. Which gives me hope that governments worldwide may be a little more receptive to calls for action on other health emergencies, like AMR, as opposed to focusing on the next short-term vote-winner or burying their respective heads in the sand.

Because we do need action. Now.

As I have said in previous blogs, the coronavirus pandemic is unfortunately accelerating the rise of antimicrobial resistance. The huge volumes of antibiotics and other drugs being prescribed to treat primary and secondary infections in COVID-19 patients are giving bacteria and viruses the opportunity to develop resistance, spread further and leach into our waste water systems, rivers and oceans.

What’s more, the disruption to health services caused by the pandemic, and delays in the diagnosis and treatment of other infectious diseases are allowing those diseases to spread too, including that age-old foe that triggers a pandemic in my novel: Tuberculosis.

Before COVID-19, over 4,000 people were dying from TB every day. According to new estimates published in the European Respiratory Journal, that number could rise significantly if there is substantial health care disruption and social distancing measures aren’t adequate. Models predict between 100,000 and 200,000 additional TB deaths over the next five years in India, China and South Africa alone, undoing the good work that has been painstakingly achieved to stem the growth of this increasingly drug-resistant disease.

TB has always been an opportunist, taking advantage of compromised immune systems, and natural disasters since the Ancient Egyptians. As Mary says, in The Waiting Rooms: ‘Let’s face it, anything that can flourish for three million years must be pretty adept at survival.’

Current thinking is that having pulmonary TB does not make you more likely to contract COVID-19, but if you do fall ill, the severity of the infection is likely to be worse because of existing damage in the lungs. And if your treatment for TB is disrupted, especially if it’s a drug-resistant strain, then the predicted outcomes are not good.

I appreciate this isn’t very cheery. But then, if you have read The Waiting Rooms, you wouldn’t expect it to be. After all, the realm I inhabit is dystopian thrillers. But at least this one hasn’t happened. Yet.

By illustrating the very real horrors of a world where antibiotics no longer work, the hard choices inflicted on society when infections run rampant, and showing just how easily that could happen, I am hoping that, in its own small way, The Waiting Rooms will contribute to awareness about antimicrobial resistance, and may even nudge a few of those actions further along. Because this story needs to remain fictional. We’ve got more than enough dystopia to cope with in our lives.

Eve Smith is author of The Waiting Rooms.

OoooOooooh, it’s that time of year. Witches. Warlocks. Wizards. Wizened old hags. Ghost. Ghouls. Maybe goblins? To be fair, this sounds like first thing in a morning at my house, but yes, Halloween is upon us. I never thought I’d write a ghost story. But I did. Last year. And this year I Am Dust hit the shelves. But what are my favourite spooky reads? Do I enjoy being scared? Well, yes I do. But only if I’m not alone in the house. If my husband is away, I won’t even think about a scary book, let alone open one. So, here are my top five spooky, scary reads…

Matt Wesolowski – Hydra

I made the abject mistake of reading this while staying alone in an apartment for the night. I kept trying to put down this dark and chilling book, but I couldn’t; I was dragged kicking and screaming into a world of deadly forbidden ‘games’, online trolls, and these mysterious black-eyed kids, whose presence seems to extend far beyond the delusions of a murderess. If these children come knocking on your door, you mustn’t let them in. So when someone knocked on the apartment door at midnight, and there was no-one there, I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

The Shining – Stephen King

I also made the mistake of reading this one alone, back when I was fifteen. My family were away and I was hooked. But then I had to sleep with the light on for weeks. It was the weird woman in the hotel room. It was the menacing sense of claustrophobia at the Overlook Hotel where Jack and his family are isolated one long winter, and where a man previously butchered his entire family. It was the description of a slow descent into madness. This one is a classic.

Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin

I got this one for Christmas when I was a thirteen. What a dark child I must have been. It was part of an anthology of three well-known horror stories. Anyway, I devoured it under the covers with a torch when I was supposed to be sleeping. In the book Rosemary and her husband Guy move into a historic, Gothic building in New York. The neighbours are odd to say the least. It turns out they are devil worshippers. And they want someone to give birth to a living, breathing Satan. You can well imagine the rest. Somehow, I still wanted kids when I grew up….

The Chalk Man – CJ Tudor

This was Tudor’s debut – and what a debut it was. There’s a real feeling of nostalgia in this one. It’s old school, proper chills and thrills horror. Main character Ed receives a stick of chalk  and a drawing of a figure, in the post one day, and is dragged back in time, to a body, to the Chalk Man. I had learned my lesson well with this one and read it with my husband very close to me. I might still have needed the lights on though.

The Entity by Frank De Felitta

This is the super-scary tale of a young single mum, Carlotta, who is violated in her bed each night by a spectral rapist. It sounds pretty sordid but it’s cleverly written, smart, tense, and it’s more about when no one believes you – the true horror of that. In many ways, it’s a great and terrifying metaphor for when real-life assault victims aren’t believed. This is particularly disturbing because it’s inspired by real-life events. It’s an occult classic and will satisfy anyone who enjoys the paranormal.