Writers Reading | Paul Kane

Writers Reading is a feature where we ask writers to let us have a poke around their bookshelves and share something of their reading tastes with us. It's been a fun and fascinating feature so far and looks set to continue that way.

This weeks guest is Paul Kane an East Midlands based Horror and Dark Fantasy writer. He recently contributed a pieace on the importance of place in writing for Everybody's Reading which looked at his take on the Robin Hood legend. We will be hearing again from Paul on Un:Bound over the next week or so as he has very kindly let Un:Bound post a short story. There will also be a review in the very near future. Paul also has another book coming out about now! More on that later. First of all though Paul on his favourite books.

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It’s not until someone asks you to list your favourite books, or novels that have had a particular impact on you, that you realise how hard it is to actually narrow this down. I’ve been collecting and reading books all my life, and the amount I’ve amassed is scary – especially when put together with my wife Marie’s collection. I could list dozens upon dozens, hundreds that have had an effect, and that have influenced me as a person and writer. But, as I’ve only got room for five here, I’ll do my best to choose wisely. Though don’t be surprised if I cheat a little ;-)

Clive Barker’s Books of Blood

First cheat. I was recently asked to take part in Horror Re-animated’s ‘Book I’d Like to be Buried With’, and seeing as I chose Clive Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart for reasons that should be apparent if you read the piece here (http://www.horrorreanimated.com/2010/07/05/paul-kane-the-book-i-would-like-to-be-buried-with/#more-1619 ) that leaves the option open for me to pick that other favourite tome of Clive’s... or should I say tomes. Yes, cheat number two: I’m going for the entire six volumes of Books of Blood, as collected by Stealth Press in a very nice hardback edition. At the risk of repeating myself about the impact Clive’s work had on me as a teenager, this collection turned things around and made me realise just what could be done with the horror genre. You could make people laugh (in tales like ‘The Yattering and Jack’) make them think (in stories like ‘Human Remains’), make them question their very humanity (‘The Skins of the Fathers’) or sanity (definitely in ‘Age of Desire’). You could also put your own spin on stories from the past, as Clive did with ‘New Murders in the Rue Morgue’, something I followed suit with for the anthology Return of the Raven (a modern take on Poe’s ‘Red Death’ in ‘Masques’ – yes, I love the classics too, including Lovecraft, M.R. James, Machen, Blackwood, Dickens... sorry, cheating again). And you could create your own mythologies, because the seeds for the Hellraiser saga were most definitely planted in ‘The Inhuman Condition’. Simply put, eighteen stories: one big inspiration.

Dune

For me Frank Herbert’s Dune is a massively important book. I first read it during my ‘absorb everything genre-related’ period which began when I was about nine or ten and finished... well, it hasn’t yet really. I was just blown away by the scope of the story, which included its very own glossary at the back! This was a totally immersive depiction of the future and I was in there, with the sandworms and ‘thopters, with all the different Houses and the Fremen. Most importantly, I was captivated by the story of this young man – Paul Atreides – who, like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, had this destiny to be a kind of superhuman. It’s the story of an underdog who comes good, an outsider who not only wins round people that don’t understand him and can’t relate to his background, but also goes on to lead them. To me, it’s at least as influential as Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Asimov’s Foundation series – another couple of faves (cheat!).


The Rats

I’ve long been an admirer of James Herbert, and his work. What James did with The Rats was take a tired horror genre and create something fresh within it that was copied again and again – something he’s still doing to this day. The Rats was probably the first horror book I ever read, and I loved it! The terrifying notion of these giant killer rats plaguing London made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It still does, frankly. When recently it was reported that giant rats the size of dogs had actually been found I said to myself: James was right all along! There was also the sense that when you were reading The Rats you were doing something forbidden. To be fair, I probably was – reading gore and sex scenes at such a tender age – but boy was it a ride. I can’t mention The Rats, though, without including Lair and Domain; in fact I might as well include all three books as one choice, really (cheat, cheat!). Oh, and it wasn’t long after this that I read The Shining, which had a similar impact on me but for different reasons, so I could have picked that one just as easily... (oooh, cheating cheater)

Smoke and Mirrors

Another big cheat in the form of a collection – but for my money Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors is one of the finest genre collections ever written. It’s definitely up there with Christopher Fowler’s wonderful Flesh Wounds, Simon Clark’s Salt Snake and Other Bloody Cuts, Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts, Brian Lumley’s The Taint, Stephen Gallagher’s Out of his Mind, Peter Straub’s Houses Without Doors, Richard Matheson’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet and a whole bunch of others I could go on listing all day (see what I did there...). Let’s get this straight, though, I love Neil’s work: I love his comics, his novels, his ‘children’s’ books (which are tons better than some adult books I’ve read)... but I especially love his short stories and poems. I don’t think I could pick a favourite out of the collection, but the ones that really made me go, wow this bloke is something else, are ‘Murder Mysteries’ (angels investigating the first ever killing) and ‘The Wedding Present’ (a kind of Dorian Gray deal, tucked away in the introduction – I’d never seen that done before). I also love it when writers give an insight into why they wrote a story and luckily Neil’s one of those... It’s probably why I did the same thing at the end of Touching the Flame.

The Hobbit

As much as I love its older brothers – the Lord of the Rings books (cheat, cheat, cheat!) The Hobbit for me has special connotations. I read this even before I got the thirst to read every genre book going, and was enchanted by the Hobbits, by Gandalf, by the Dwarves, by Gollum and the Dragon. It’s a much simpler tale than LotRs, which is probably why it took me so long to get into those books after reading this, and it caught me at just the right time in my life for it to become a novel I’ll keep returning to. I’m really looking forward to the movie version if it’s anything like the others, because it’s going to bring that six year old kid alive again in the audience.





The Silence of the Lambs

Damn, can you get any more of a polar opposite? Although it’s quite fun to imagine Hannibal Lecter running round causing mayhem in the Shire... no, don’t even go there, Paul. To me, the serial killer, crime thriller, whatever you want to call it, has always been as terrifying as any horror novel. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the more mystery-based ‘whodunnit?’ type of book (Colin Dexter’s Morse novels, for example, hugely influenced my own Gemini Factor... I know, another big flipping cheat!), but I also have a soft spot – if that’s the right word – for the more extreme crime fare. I’m only just recently catching up with John Connolly (shame on me!) and loving his stuff so I could have chosen Every Dead Thing, his stunning debut, or I could have picked books by Mo Hayder, Boris Starling, Tess Gerritsen... oh, sorry, I’m doing it again... The novel I have gone for in this vein is what I consider to be the pinnacle of the police procedural/serial killer sub-genre. I have to say, I read this – back to back with Red Dragon – after seeing Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster strut their Oscar-winning stuff, so it was always them saying the lines, but there was so much more to the novel than the movie. More character background stuff, more about Lecter and Starling’s relationship, more about the investigation, more... if you’ll pardon the expression considering Hannibal’s appetites, meat on the bones. Thomas Harris doesn’t write many books, but when he does he turns out belters.

So there you have it, my list of favourites – though many more than five, and many more I could have mentioned on top of that... But I hope it’s given you a bit of an insight into who’s influenced me and my own writing. Till next time...