Interviewing Steve Toase
Hellooo!
I recently reviewed the excellent Dirt Upon My Skin by Steve Toase (which you can get hold off via the publisher at https://blackshuckbooks.co.uk/shadows-37/ ) which is a great collection of spooky tales often centring around an archaeological mystery of some kind. Perfect reading as the nights lengthen. I had the pleasure to ask Steve some questions about the collection and their love of horror,
How do you like to booktempt people into reading Dirt Upon My Skin?
Archaeology and horror come together in Dirt Upon My Skin, capturing the unsettling character of both, finding the weirdness of the world and discovering the strangeness of the past lurking just below the surface of the land.
Archaeology and Horror have always been crossing paths. What makes it an inspiration for any stories?
I think there are a lot of elements to this.
Archaeology is telling stories about the past, based on the evidence we find during excavations, and we find strange things. Examples from excavations I’ve worked on include witch bottles, clay stains in graves that are all that remain of Roman burials, and one thousand year old human hair.
Those finds create a connection with people from the past, whose lives we can never really know, and create space to write horror. It would be too easy to say it is because you are surrounded by the dead in archaeology, but you are surrounded by so many stories you can only glimpse, and that allows you to explore horror in many different guises.
What is your own background in archaeology and how have you felt when the supernatural gets reared around a site? What do you love about the subject?
I worked on my first excavation back in 1994 as a volunteer, but I was very lucky the site was a commercial excavation. That means we were excavating ahead of development (in this case, the site was ahead of a quarry expansion), so I was getting professional experience from day one.
I went on to do a HND in Practical Archaeology at Yeovil College (probably one of the best courses at the time for preparing people for a career in field archaeology), followed by a BSc in Archaeological Sciences. I then spent five years working on commercial sites, before returning to university to study for an MA in Landscape Archaeology.
I think there is an inherent oddness to archaeology. There is a distance of time but also the closeness and intimacy of dealing with the past of people you will never know. This juxtaposition opens up space for the supernatural.
While I’ve never worked on a site that directly had a supernatural dimension, I have visited a lot of monuments that have a folkloric element (such as Avebury or Wayland’s Smithy), and I think it is useful to be able to hold the two aspects of the site, the archaeological interpretation and the folkloric stories, in your head at one time.
There’s a lot of research about the past in the past, and the afterlife of monuments that creates space for these stories to become part of the narrative of places, and I think those individual encounters people have with locations that have an odd atmosphere are an important aspect of their social history.
I love how archaeology encompasses the whole of humanity, from the earliest traces, right up to contemporary archaeology. The first of two excellent books on the latter is Dr Alice Gorman’s Dr Space Junk Vs The Universe, exploring the archaeology of humanity’s interactions with space, whether that is in a terrestrial setting, or in orbit and further out in the universe.
The second is Rachael Kiddey’s Homeless Heritage, exploring the social world of people experiencing homelessness using an archaeological approach to make their experiences more visible.
What was the hardest story to write in the collection and why?
I think that has to be Terminus Post Quem. Terminus Post Quem is an epistolary story that uses the structure of an archaeological context record and specialist reports from a site report to tell the story. To make it work I had to make the reports convincing, but also make sure the story was slowly revealed throughout. Neither task was particularly easy!
Who are some of your favourite horror short fiction writers?
Priya Sharma, Tracy Fahey, Sarah Read, Chip Houser, Julie C Day, Carina Bissett, Laird Barron, Thomas Ligotti, Nathan Ballingrud and Jim Fogg.
If you want to get a good sense of excellent short fiction, I can recommend two series of collections.
The first is the Black Shuck Shadows collections, which gives a fantastic overview of how vibrant and healthy horror short fiction is, with books by Charlotte Bond, Dan Coxon, Gary McMahon, Penny Jones, Kit Power, and many, many others. Of course I’m a little biased as Dirt Upon My Skin is part of the Black Shuck Shadows series :)
The second is the British Library Tales of the Weird, an ongoing series of thematic anthologies, collecting together classic and obscure stories. I think my favourite is Tales of the Tattooed: An Anthology of Ink. However, I’d recommend any of them, and they do a subscription service which is excellent.
What else can we look forward to from you in the future and in the weird world of social media where can we find out more from you?
I am continuing to write for Fortean Times, both features and as their comic reviewer. I have several short stories coming out toward the end of the year. I’m also working on a new novel, and have recently finished a 1970s style pulp novel I will be trying to find a publisher for. Apart from that, I have my blog stevetoase.co.uk, where I write about pulp biker fiction, biker films like Psychomania, and recommendations for cafés in my Kaffee (und Kuchen) Racer series.
I am at
https://bsky.app/profile/stevetoase.bsky.social
https://x.com/stevetoase
www.stevetoase.co.uk
https://www.instagram.com/hermannyorks/
If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?
One book I always recommend is The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’ Shea. It’s ostensibly a kid’s book, but the way it deals with the magic and rules of the otherworld had a huge influence on the way faery works in The Ercildoun Accord, the first story in Dirt Upon My Skin. In The Ercildoun Accord a professional archaeologist enters faery to carry out what is essentially a commercial excavation, but has to navigate the rules, foibles, and intentions of the faery court. Reading Hounds of the Morrigan definitely guided me in how I approached that in my own story.
