Guest Interview - Tim Lebbon on The Last Storm

Hellooo!!

I’ve enjoyed Tim Lebbon’s work before and during the time we shall not talk about while we were all stuck at home I really enjoyed their SF thriller Eden that provided scares, thrills and an important message about climate change. Today sees the publication of Tim’s next novel The Last Storm from Titan. I’ll be reviewing this weekend but here are some details!

With global warming out of control, large swathes of North America have been struck by famine and drought and are now known as the Desert. A young woman sets out across this dry, hostile landscape, gradually building an arcane apparatus she believes will bring rain to the parched earth.

Jesse lives alone, far from civilization. Once, he too made rain, but he stopped when his abilities caused fatalities, bringing down not just rain but scorpions, strange snakes, and spiders. When his daughter Ash inherited this tainted gift, Jesse did his best to stop her. His attempt went tragically wrong, and he believes himself responsible for her death.

But now his estranged wife Karina brings news that Ash is still alive. And she’s rainmaking again. Terrified of what she might bring down upon the desperate communities of the Desert, they set out to find her. But Jesse and Karina are not the only ones looking for Ash. As the storms she conjures become more violent and deadly, some follow her seeking hope. And one is hungry for revenge.

The awesome Jim of the amazing horror site Gingernuts of Horror was able to ask some questions of Tim about the new book. I am already enjoying this tale a lot and this makes make me look forward to the story even more!

Over to Jim!

The Last Storm is published early July, it must feel good to have a book coming out after the mess of the pandemic? 

Absolutely. This is actually my first original novel in two years (following on from Eden), so I'm very excited to see it out there. As usual Titan have come up with a glorious cover, and I'm lucky enough to have loads of very lovely blurbs from writers I respect and admire. In some ways Covid feels like just a momentary blip ... but in other ways it's been a ten-year-long 18 months of nothing. So yes, it'll be good to have a new book on the shelves.   

Nature and the climate feel like characters in their own right in your fiction, and they have become more antagonistic in your most recent novels. How does this reflect your view of our world and what drives you in these portrayals?

I've always written about nature in my novels, from my very earliest mass market novel The Nature of Balance. I'm a real lover of nature, always have been, and I love living in the countryside, so I guess it's only natural that it often creeps into my fiction. It is featuring more heavily now, probably because I'm more worried than I've ever been about what we've done to the world and how we continue to influence the climate. Isn't everyone? I hope so! And it's an interesting observation that it's become more antagonistic –– I hadn't consciously noticed that, but I guess it's my simmering anger at what we've done to the world bleeding through and giving nature a route to fight back in my writing. Even with The Nature of Balance, though, nature was giving humanity a bit of a kicking! So I guess that aspect has always been there too. I do think we'll adapt and change as nature changes, and hopefully we'll also do our best to stop how much we're changing nature. But in my darker moments, such optimism feels pretty naive.

You wrote this novel longhand. How did that affect your experience of crafting the story compared with typing it? Is this a method you’ll stick with?

It was a hell of a task, more in the typing-up process than anything else. I started just before lockdown (I blame Rio Yours, one of my best friends and our best writers, who writes everything longhand. So, I thought I'd give it a try). Unfortunately, rather than travelling away from home and writing in cafes or on the tops of our local mountains, due to lockdown I had to find a quiet corner in our own house (with my son finishing A levels, my wife working at home, and my daughter completing her degree) and scritch and scratch into a series of notebooks. I really enjoyed the process, and I think it made the story flow much more naturally. I'm not a great typist -- even though I've written almost 50 novels, they're all been written using 4 or 5 fingers! So usually when I type I'm often breaking the flow because I'm constantly going back, correcting mistakes, and inevitably editing the writing. Working by hand, there was very little editing going on ... this was all pure first draft, and I think that helped the flow immensely. Saying that ... I have yet to repeat the experience! I probably will one day. It's all storytelling, whichever method you use.


The Last Storm feels like a logical successor to Eden, but where Eden felt somewhat upbeat in tone The Last Storm is a far angrier and more rural novel, where did this shift in tone come from? 

Maybe because I was writing it during Covid? I don't know, it is a more brutal downbeat book in many ways, but there's always optimism in my work (although sometimes maybe you have to dig deep). It was a very strange time, writing the novel longhand in a pile of notebooks, trying to find a quiet spot in our small house with my wife working from home, my son finishing his A levels from home, and my daughter home from uni finishing her degree. Luckily we all get on great and lockdown never felt difficult for us, but being the writer I am, I did let the anxieties of Covid get to me sometimes. Maybe that bled through into the novel.


In both novels the world is broken and on the brink of total shutdown, however The Last Storm to me has characters that are more akin to the world they live in, every single one of the main protagonists, is broken, was this a conscious decision on your part?

Hmmm, no I don't think that was conscious. In Eden my group of characters was a team from the beginning, supporting each other through their troubles. The Last Storm features a fractured family also confronting dangers from outside, so the set up is very different from the start. I don't think this was a conscious decision, just something that I think served the story best. It's as much a novel about the family coming together and discovering themselves again, as it is about the more supernatural elements and challenges from outside. And I think that's the sort of novel that works best for me.      

What would you like the readers to take away from reading The Last Storm? 

The memory of an exciting, action-packed story that has family at its heart.