Writers Reading - Steve Savile

Hagelrat
Writers Reading is a new slot for 2010 where I beg authors to send me pictures of their bookshelves so we can all browse their reading choices. It satisfies my nosiness and triggers all my bookshelf envy so clearly it has to continue. It was going to be monthly but so far everyone has been really willing to join in so I am going to step it up to, well ... more.

Anyway victim number two is practically a regular here at Un:Bound Steve Savile, and I love this room!
Five Books, Five Reasons

Steven Savile


Weaveworld, Clive Barker

Not sure what I can say about this book. It was the first time I was truly and utterly captivated by a made-up world. Curiously, I couldn’t start the book for the longest time, or rather I couldn’t get past the pigeons but my friend Stephen Morgan told me I should give it one more try, and on journey in to University for a night ‘on the lash’ as the lads liked to say, I had an hour to kill, and an hour was just long enough to get past the pigeons and into the magnificent imagination of Barker. If you were to ask me for the first book that made me think ‘I want to do this’ this is the book I’d say. By the time I closed the final page I knew I wanted to write stories. Up until that point I had been dead set on being a political journalist. Funny how things work out.

The Wizards and the Warriors, Hugh Cook

It was summer 1987, my folks were away on a two week vacation and I was home alone, age 17. What was a boy to do apart from immerse himself in the fattest book he could find in the local newsagent in Prudhoe. It was a diet of Coke, Walls Vienetta and Greggs pasties washed down by my first experience of a fantasy world since Lord of the Rings. There was something wonderfully different about Cook’s novel. It was one of those landmark life moments... I watched the cricket, read the book, watched the cricket, read the book. It was huge, and Morgan Grenfel Hearst was one of the first bad boy characters I really fell in love with, while Elkor Alish was one of the first heroes I wanted to emulate. As to the book, well I made not love it the most of all the books I have loved, but I have certainly loved it longest. When I heard a few years back that Hugh had passed away after a second bout of brain cancer, robbed of his ability to communicate in his last days, I cried. I mean properly cried. And the next day I wrote a letter to his sister about everything that Hugh meant to be as an author, and as a friend in words.


Sleeping In Flame, Jonathan Carroll

I’m not sure when I first read this, probably the early 90s. I fell in love with the Wayne Anderson cover on the paperback, then sitting up through the night to finish the book, I fell in love with Jonathan Carroll’s odd, touching, off-beat way of looking at the world, and the little glimpses of magic he found in the every day. Carroll’s one of the few writers I’ve stayed with as I’ve grown older. We’ve got a ritual him and me, only he doesn’t know about it. I buy the book the day it comes out, take the day off work, tuck up comfortably on the couch or in my armchair, and shut out the world to disappear into his story. If Weaveworld was my mistress, Sleeping in Flame and all of those other wonderful quirky novels of JC were my muse.


Blind Instinct, Robert W. Walker

Okay this is all about page 227 through to page 229 for the rather colourful appearance of one Dot and Carry, DC, or Steve Savile as he’s known to his friends. Back in 1998 I wrote a story, Painting Blue Murders, that won an online competition that had a stack of prizes, books, signed manuscripts, the works. One of those prizes was a walk on in Rob Walker’s Instinct series. I won, and for my pains Rob turned me into a one-legged drunken lecherous copper’s nark... he signed it to me with the rather charming inscription of ‘please don’t sue me...’ The best part of the prize though wasn’t the walk-on, it was the enduring friendship that has come along with it, and the fact that a decade on from that little walk-on Rob and I are now collaborating on a novel. Funny how things work out.

And last, but by no means least,

Goodlow’s Ghost, TM Wright

I’ve picked this one because of the story attached to it as well, not the story inside the book - however I am a fan of the novel itself... so, here goes. 1997, Spring, I emigrated. What that translates to is 1997 Spring I sold all of my books, about 3,000 of them, to a little secondhand stall in the Grainger Market in Newcastle, Robinsons. I got about thirteen hundred quid for the lot, hardcovers, trade paperbacks and mass markets. It hurt to sell them, but I’d done the maths and shipping was going to run me several thousand pounds, so it just wasn’t feasible. So the owner came and basically loaded his estate car full, just throwing them all inside - and I do mean throwing them. Fast forward through time, 2007, I am back in Newcastle visiting my folks I wandered into Robinsons, just because... I mean, I am a bookaholic, what else am I going to do on a miserable rainy Saturday afternoon in Newcastle? I glance the shelves thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if one of my old books was still there, a decade later...’ And there’s this copy of Goodlow’s Ghost by TM Wright (who, coincidentally had become a good friend about a year earlier thanks to the joys of the interwebby). I remembered selling a copy of GG, and figured, just for shits and giggles, I’d lift it down and have a little browse down memory lane. I ran my finger over the spine, then thumbed through the yellowed pages, and there, around the three-quarters of the way mark was a photo of a bunch of long haired heavy metal loving reprobates out in the Mayfair (the Newcastle rock club of my inebriated youth), slap bang in the middle of the picture were Gary, Simon, and yours truly. I remembered the night, and gradually I remembered the photo and I remembered using it as a bookmark about a decade earlier when I’d been looking around for something to mark my place with (you can’t bend a corner, you know, it’s just not done). This was my book, the only survivor from my collection that I’d sold a decade earlier to buy myself a new life. I bought it for a second time and brought it home with me to Stockholm. I mean, how could I not?