Interviewing Ashley Stokes

Hellooo!

Last week I reviewed Gigantic by Ashley Stokes a funny, smart and perceptive tale of cryptozoologists in Surrey but also about the dangers of obsession. Ashley very kindly agreed to answer some questions about the book!

How would you booktempt Gigantic?

It’s gigantic, obviously, one man’s quest for truth, destiny and the solution to the greatest mystery of all time. It’s also the first novel ever written about bigfoot hunting in the London Borough of Sutton. It may be the only book ever to be set in the London Borough of Sutton, too. It’s also written in quite a distinct way, part dodgy dossier and part madman’s confessional tract.

How do you tend to see our lead Kevin – hero or lost soul?

Kevin does have a stubborn adherence to truth, justice and the Kevin way, and he is capable of stepping up and making sacrifices, but if he’s a hero he’s more a Wetherspoons Rorschach than a Luke Skywalker. He is very, very definitely a lost soul, trapped in a loop that first looped him in his troubled childhood, doomed to always play to a gallery that isn’t there. I am drawn to this sort of character, someone who badly wants something they clearly can’t have yet goes all out to get it. In Kevin, I sort of walked the guy to edge of it, the limits of needing and yearning.

It sounds like we share a common experience of weird tv shows exploring myths and folklore thanks to Arthur C Clark and the library section full of strange tales? Was it interesting to relive those times?

It was actually brilliant and unforeseen. I had just set out to write something funny, but when Kevin’s voice started to kick-in I started to mainline a lot of memories about where I come from creatively, from my late childhood and early teens when I was obsessed with SF and horror and the paranormal at a time when it was everywhere. It was fun to go back to a world of spinner racks in libraries full of Philip K Dick and Lovecraft paperbacks and fantasy art on LP covers and TV programmes or even features on current affairs shows that had a lot of paranormal content inseparable from humdrum reporting. When there was less media, everything could have a kind of authority. Now there is so much media, we assume that nothing is true, everything is suspect. Part of the journey of writing the book was realising that the question is not just what if there were bigfoot hunters in Sutton, but also what if that world of 70s exotica and subculture turned out to be the real world after all?

This is a novel of perspectives was it hard getting each character’s voice right?

It was tricky, yes, and the biggest task was finding the right tone for Kevin. Early on, he was too shouty, sometimes too coarse, and too repetitive, and in his scenes with Maxine, they tended to shout at each other too much. It could seem a tad soap operatic or sitcomish. Toning him down and retuning his dial was the biggest job.

Kevin’s partner-in-crime, the cryptozoologist Derek Funnel, his voice I pretty much nailed straightaway, but he wasn’t a Satanist in the first draft, so that needed developing. Team Leader and voice of reason Maxine’s tone also was pretty stable from the off; I just tried not to make her sound too prim (which seems to be a temptation for some reason). Kevin’s estranged wife, Bohoslava gave me the most problems because initially I had no first-hand experience of how a young Ukrainian woman might speak. I then realised that she’s been taught to speak English by Kevin, so she mangles English like he does . Overall, getting Kevin right was the hardest task. The realisation of the book does depend on it. Initially, I did just want the story to be funny on a linguistic level but it did grow into something a bit more substantial.

You could just have been very cruel to Kevin but you do make us actually understand him. Is that important to making comedy work?

I had many conniptions and went through many contortions trying to get this aspect of the story right. Initially, in 2011, when I had the original idea, I thought pointing out a shouty man who believes anything would be a cautionary tale, a warning from history. By 2016,  he was no longer a warning but someone many of us were confronted by on social media every day. I did let the book go for a while as a result, though something about it ultimately seemed worth salvaging. I mean, a novel about bigfoot hunting in Sutton is either going to be your signature move or your doom.

I also tried not explaining Kevin at all (I do like the early Hannibal Lector’s comment along the lines of ‘Don't try to explain me, I just happened’), but that didn’t work and did read like Kev was being mocked. Certainly, highlighting the reasons behind Kevin’s obsessions made the comedy subtler, I hope, and maybe more tragi-comic when before it was all about the set-piece and the one liner. This was quite a sobering lesson overall, but it has probably made me a better writer.

What else can we look forward to from you next and where can we hear more from you?

I am working on a sequence called The Underkin and Other Stories, short stories loosely connected by a recurring cursed book, the haunted town of Gyddon, encroachments from an extra-dimension and a world-altering Great Disorder, an invasion of psychotropic spores that divides the stories into Before, During and After. Some have already appeared in Shadow Booth, Unsung Online, Storgy, Black Static and others. The first in the sequence, The Validations, will be in Nightscript 7 next month. I hope to finish the whole book by next spring. I am otherwise found at @AshleyJStokes on Twitter and Instagram and my website is www.ashleystokes.net.

If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read, what would it be and why?

That’s such a hard question as different books mean different things to you at different times. So, recently, the past few years, the book I’ve read that opened me up a bit was Nathan Ballingrad’s North American Lake Monsters. Not only is it beautifully and evocatively written, it reminded me of the scope and power of the horror short story, that the world is a horror story after all and that is its truth.