After less than fifteen years as a published writer, Tim Lebbon has not only become a dominant name in dark fiction, but has proven himself of possessing an exceptional talent for writing outside conventional boundaries.  Whether you’re a fan of horror or fantasy, Tim's work can satisfy any craving.  He's a fine writer.  Simple as that.  He has won a Bram Stoker Award and three British Fantasy Awards, most recently for his fantasy novel DUSK, one of several stories set in the world of Noreela.  He currently lives in a small village in Monmouthshire with his wife and two children.  Learn more about Tim at www.timlebbon.net.

 

It has been just over 10 years since your first novel, MESMER, was published.  Since then, nearly two dozen books bearing your name have been published as well.  Tell us about your evolution as a writer during this time.  Is MESMER very different from the kind of material you write today, either in terms of content, style, or technique?

Well, ten years is a long time, so I do feel that I’ve moved on quite a bit since writing MESMER. That was my first novel, and I’ve learned a lot about novel writing since then.  It still has a big place in my heart, and it always will.  I still think it’s a good book, and it tackled some of the issues I continue to write about now – loss, dislocation, the truth beneath the veil of reality.

I think all writers strive to move on, both stylistically and thematically.  I try hard to make every book I write better than the last, and if the time comes when I think I’m just turning them out, one after another, that’s when I’ll quit.  But there are many more places I want to explore with my writing, and lots more things I want to try, so hopefully that’ll never happen.  

 
Give us an update on the current state of the U.K. horror publishing market.  Have more publishers been willing to take a chance here?

Publishers over here have been publishing ‘darker’ work for the past few years, but now they’re starting to call it horror again.  Virgin have actually just announced the launch of a horror line, with books by Ramsey Campbell, Conrad Williams, Thomas Ligotti and Adam Nevill.  And I’ve also just signed a deal with Allison & Busby, a publisher previously known for crime, who are starting to publish horror and fantasy novels.  It’s very exciting to see horror being acknowledged by publishers over here again, and I have high hopes – I’ve always said that there’s a hungry readership for it here, so I think the time is right.

 
Last year was your first as a full-time writer after ditching the day job.  Any regrets?  Any worries?

No regrets whatsoever.  I can barely remember my day job any more, and the memories of it feel like those of another person.  Worries?  A few… for the past 20 years I’ve been used to a salary at the end of every month, and I’m not getting that now.  But I wouldn’t change things for the world.  This is what I’ve always wanted, what I’ve worked hard for for ten years, and I feel very lucky.   

 
The theme of nature often finds its way into your work, not just as the background to the story, but almost as one of the characters – a true force that changes dramatically and wreaks havoc on its inhabitants.  Is this just one of those subjects that you've been contemplating throughout your life?

I love nature, hate what we’re doing to it, and I enjoy writing about it.  I like nothing more than walking in the country with my family, and we’re lucky enough to live somewhere where that’s only a couple of minutes from our front door.  I can appreciate the power and wonder of nature, but I can see the way we’ve treated it, especially over the last 100 years or so.  There’s a great arrogance in humanity, I believe, and one day we’ll have that arrogance wiped away.  In some of my writing, I think about how that will happen.

I think setting is vital to a story, and I always work very hard to establish a landscape and background, whether that be rural or urban.  Everyone is affected by their surroundings, I believe, so it’s difficult to write good characters without also exploring what makes them the way they are.  And as you say, nature has a character all of its own.   

 
DUSK and DAWN are perhaps the ultimate exploration of this idea as we get to see not only how a society can deteriorate when a basic facet of nature – in this case, magic – is removed, but also what happens when it returns.  Although the books are fantasy, are the effects of these changes really any different than what would happen in any modern-day world under similar circumstances?

An analogy I’ve used before is, imagine our world if electricity suddenly stopped working.  Within days we’d be back in the dark ages, quite literally.  And within weeks or months, society as we know it would have collapsed.  What happens in DUSK and DAWN is not quite as sudden and severe, but the decline is there, and in some ways they’re very grim and downbeat books.  They’re set in a world where people have mainly given up hope, but the most exciting thing for me was exploring what would happen if hope once again flourished.  Yes, I guess in writing these books I was really writing about our world – the environmental impact we’ve had on Earth, echoed in the misuse of magic in Noreela.  And while my outlook might come across as quite downbeat, I have a strong belief in basic human goodness.  Trouble is, as in a fantasy novel, it’s the bad stuff that seems to have most of an impact. 

 

Speaking of DUSK and DAWN, tell us more about the process of writing these books.  How much of a challenge was it to come up with such a vibrant, living world all from scratch?

It was a huge challenge, but I loved every minute of it.  A very different experience from writing contemporary horror novels like BERSERK and FACE, because with those I already have a recognized world to draw upon.  With the fantasy, it’s building it up one block at a time… but that’s what I enjoyed so much.  I could give my imagination free reign.  So I had drug mines and sentient tumbleweed, and oh what fun I had!

I’ve written two more novels set in the same world.  FALLEN, a stand alone story set in Noreela, is due out in the USA this month (April ’08) and it’ll also be released in hardback in the UK this August, from Allison & Busby.  I’ve also delivered THE ISLAND – another stand alone tale.  And the wonderful thing is, Noreela is starting to feel like a very real place to me now.  These two books are both very different from DUSK and DAWN, but Noreela is there all the time, a whole new world slowly being given life, and history.  It’s an amazing feeling, and I hope to visit that place again.  

 
Did you plan it all out beforehand or did you need to fill in most of the blanks as you went along?

A bit of both.  I knew roughly where I was going with the whole story arc for DUSK and DAWN, but a lot of the detail emerged as I was writing.  This was quite complex sometimes – I was forever forgetting the names of certain plants, or places.  But gradually over four novels, and several novellas and short stories, I’ve built up something of a Noreela ‘bible’.

 
As a fan of these two books, one question that often occurred to me while reading them is: why did magic come back?  Why now?  Is it a force with a conscience that thought the world was ready for its return?  Wasn't it clear that its power was too great for some to resist using in evil ways?

Magic does come across as almost sentient… but yet also, it has less free will than the people upon whom it bestows itself.  I liked the idea of Noreela as a vast consciousness, so far beyond humanity that it was impossible to understand, or even acknowledge.  And also… well, I was the storyteller, and I like the idea of people being given a second chance.  

 
If there's one thing to be learned it's that perhaps societies can never truly live in harmony with such power, as natural as it may be.  There will always be someone or something to muck it up.  Would you agree with this?

Yes, pretty much.  As I mentioned above, I believe in essential human goodness – most people just want to get on with their lives, be nice to other people, and have people be nice to them in return.  But it’s always the minority that messes it up for everyone else. 

 

FACE and BERSERK both touch on fears experienced within the family, whether it’s the death of a son or being terrorized by a stranger.  In either case we see just how far these events can drive them to the brink of madness.  Did writing these stories help you to confront your own fears since becoming a father?  Were they more difficult to write than average?

I wrote FACE soon after becoming a father for the first time. I’m glad that shows through!  Yes, they were difficult to write, but they plumbed my own fears and uncertainties, so in a way I was writing about what I knew.  Whether they helped me confront my fears or not, I’m not so sure… those fears still remain – the safety of my family – and writing about them did little to lessen them.  It helped me understand and crystallize those fears, perhaps. 

But my main aim with both books was to write a good story.  There’s stuff I got right, and other stuff I think I was probably adrift on.  The grief, for instance, in BERSERK.  When I wrote that novel, I didn’t really know the true intensity and strangeness of grief, or the feeling of loss.

 

Are your children old enough to read your books?  If not, when do you think they will be ready?  And do they often wonder just what it is that Daddy is doing in front of that computer all day?

My daughter Ellie is 9, and no, she’s not read any of my books yet.  As soon as she’s able, maybe in a couple of years – and if she wants to – I’m more than happy for her to read most of my work.  At 10 or 11 I was reading James Herbert, and I quickly moved on to Stephen King.  Didn’t do me any harm…

Actually I’ve given talks in her school, and most of her friends and their parents know what I do.  One talk lasted about ten minutes, and then the teacher suggested a quick Q&A session… which lasted for over an hour!  The kids were fascinated, and it was a very rewarding experience.

My boy Daniel doesn’t really understand yet.  And he’s too busy destroying things to sit down and read, most of the time.

I’ve written a young adult novel – first in a trilogy – which my agent is about to send out to publishers.  And also this year I’ll be writing the first in a series called THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON for Atheneum, in collaboration with Chris Golden.  So one way or another, my daughter will have something of mine to read soon.

 

It’s no secret that you favor novellas as your medium through which to tell a tale.  Why?

To be honest, my feelings are shifting slightly.  I still love novellas, and I’ll always enjoy the relatively quick process of writing one – they have more akin to short stories than to novels, I believe, but with more room for character development.  But over the past couple of years, I’ve started to enjoy the novel writing process more than ever before.  Perhaps it’s because of the fun I’ve been having with these fantasy novels, or maybe just because I now have more time to write.  Working a day job, writing during lunchtimes and evenings, a novel seemed to take forever.

I’ve just written a new novella, in fact, called THE REACH OF CHILDREN, which I’m very proud of.  Humdrumming will be publishing this in September.

 

Have you found that publishers are increasingly embracing this form?  Has it ever been a hindrance to getting your work published?

Novellas are very difficult to place in the mainstream.  But indie publishers still publish them, and I’ve always been lucky in that I’ve never written a novella that wasn’t published.  I’m up to (quick count…) nineteen now.  And I’m currently working on a new one called LONESOME BILL for an anthology of four ‘weird westerns’. 

 

MIND THE GAP, due out later this year, features your collaboration with Chris Golden.  How well did you work together?   And in general, do you typically find that mixing your style and ideas with other authors in previous collaborations has come naturally and with ease?

I love collaborating, and I’ve enjoyed it every time I’ve tried it (with Simon Clark, Gavin Williams, and I’m in the middle of a novel with Pete Crowther).

Chris and I have really clicked.  When we first met we hit it off straight away, and Chris soon suggested we work on something together.  MIND THE GAP is the result, and we’ve just finished the second book in that Hidden Cities series, THE MAP OF MOMENTS. We’re planning more, and honestly, we hope they go on and on.  They’re such fun to write, and we work very well together.  We tend to do a chapter or two each, then have a detailed discussion about where to go (following a loose synopsis, of course).  During that process, we both rewrite – he Goldenises my Lebbonisms, and I Lebbonise his Goldenisms.  And we come up with something that I think is a unique, distinct voice, and something that neither of us would have written on our own.  They’re quite dark, involved novels, and I’m delighted with how they’re turning out.

We’re also doing the JACK LONDON books I mentioned above, and we have plans for the Greatest TV Series Ever Made.  Once someone introduces another 3 free days per week, we’ll get to that baby.

 

Now that you’ve tackled – with great success – the world of straight fantasy via DUSK AND DAWN, are there other projects that you are yearning to develop that you have a similar passion for?  Any new worlds you’d like to create or something completely different than you’ve attempted before?

At the moment I seem to be getting a slew of ideas for stand-alone fantasy novels.  I also have several ideas for new novels set in Noreela, a new apocalyptic horror novel that I’ve done a few chapters on, and more ideas for young adult novels.  I’d love to write a crime novel – it would be very, very dark, of course – and I also have constant urges to write a screenplay (actually I’ve done a couple based on my own books… I’d like to do an original).  But it all takes time… Maybe we need 4 extra days per week, not 3.

 

What can we look forward to from you in the near future on the publishing front?

FALLEN is out in the US this month (April).  MIND THE GAP is out at the end of May, and sometime this summer Night Shade Books are publishing my new horror novel BAR NONE.  In August, my first mainstream UK publications are released – FALLEN in hardback, and my horror novel THE EVERLASTING in mass market paperback.  Very excited about that.  Cemetery Dance will soon be releasing BRITISH INVASION, the anthology I edited with Chris Golden and James A. Moore.  And there’s other stuff that I can’t really elaborate on yet, including a huge collection, a new tie-in novel, and more.  All very exciting!  And you can keep up with my stuff on my websites (yes, there are three!):

www.timlebbon.net
www.noreela.com
www.thehiddencities.com

 

Thank you, Tim, for sharing your thoughts with us.  It’s an absolute honor to include you within our virtual pages.

Thank you.  It’s a real honor to be here.