Interviewing Verity Holloway

Helloo!

Last week I had the pleasure of reading the short fiction collection Cheer The Sick by Verity Holloway this is a fascinating mix of tales from horror to fantasy and science fiction often with a twist of the weird and the historical thrown in. Thoughtful and hugely enjoyable I highly recommend it. It was a pleasure to invite Verity to the blog to talk about the book and how these stories came about.

How do you like to booktempt people into reading Cheer the Sick?

I like to stand in people’s gardens and emit a piercing shriek until they buy a book.

Actually, I never know how to pitch my books. Cheer The Sick is a collection of weird fiction. It’s about alchemy and blood-drinking and spirits and cursed objects. But it’s also about the human body, the weirdest thing of all.

I will now emit a piercing shriek.

Sickness has often been used in fiction more as a punishment or plot device but your stories often bring sickness and the characters impacted to the fore. What has influenced those roles?

I have a rare connective tissue disorder called Marfan syndrome. Some of my earliest memories are of being told my body was bad, wrong, and inconvenient. Five years ago, I had open heart surgery, and I may one day need another. So sickness and disability are always at the forefront of what I do as a writer. I’m painfully aware of sickness as shorthand for evil in fiction, too. That doesn’t mean I’m striving for ‘good representation’ in my work. I want messy, complicated characters who also happen to be sick.

I also love medical paraphernalia. I have three cabinets of Victorian medicine bottles, and more in storage. There’s a horrendous silver enema syringe in my living room. My ancestor, Thomas Holloway, was a very successful quack, and I have lots of his jars and advertising cards. Aesthetically, I find it all very exciting.

Several of your tales are set in different periods while other use alternate versions of our world. What do you enjoy about these kind of tales?

I’m a huge history nerd, particularly when it comes to the nineteenth century. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch PG films, but I had permission to read whatever educational books I fancied. So I was sitting there at nine years old with photographs of the Franklin expedition ice mummies like, “Yippee!” Sweet Valley High sort of passed me by.

As a writer, I like the constraints of historical fiction. You have to think very carefully about class, and gender, and technology, and how information is spread and communicated in your chosen time period. Nowadays, if we don’t know something, we can reach into our pockets and consult the Internet. For the Gothic, I like to put characters into situations where they know very few facts, and where they’re caught by strict societal expectations. That breeds paranoia and tension, and that’s where the fun is, for me.

In writing the historical tales how much do you like to research the history of the period or even the stories of the time?

I’m constantly reading and gathering for pleasure, and once I’ve decided on a historical setting I like to research on the job to keep myself anchored in that period. I particularly love reading first-hand accounts - people’s letters and diaries. They’re often hilarious, and much more modern in attitude than you might expect. I find people don’t really change. Once I can envision a character, putting them into a historical setting is the easy part.

I’m always reading short fiction from the Victorian period, too. Thanks to editors like Johnny Mains, scores of lost short stories have resurfaced in recent years, and there’s nothing more exciting to me. Pulp is interesting – the stories that never expected to survive.

Who are some of your favourite short story writers?

Lucie McKnight Hardy is always brilliant. RL Summerling is stunning. Priya Sharma, too. And A.C. Wise – The Ghost Sequences is one of my favourite recent collections.

Which was the hardest story in the collection to write and why?

Veterans was the hardest by a long way. It was the first science fiction story I’d done, and I had to make everything far more rigid and specific than I’m used to. I’m a Gothic writer, I think. I like Gothic handwaving: ‘Look at this crazy thing. No, I will not be explaining how it works’. Veterans is about bureaucracy, so I couldn’t get away with that. I wanted to play with the idea of nostalgia as a weapon, how nationalism tricks people into longing for a world that never was. The story is really about the cruelty of the disability benefits system, which your average abled person is unaware of. The humiliation is the point of that system. It’s there to punish, not to help. I had to look that in the eye to write Veterans, and it’s easy to succumb to despair when you see just how beige and boring evil is.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and in this weird world of social media where can we find out more?

I’m working on a new novel about a doomsday cult during the 1850s cholera epidemic, because I’m an all-round fun guy. Ask me anything about cesspits.

I’ve moved to Bluesky recently, and I think I’m staying. It feels like Twitter used to.
@verityholloway.bsky.social. You can also find me at www.verityholloway.com

What great books have you read recently?

Mother Naked by Glen James Brown blew my socks off. It’s part ghost story, part revenge quest, and it engages with class in a way that’s so visceral and tragic. I’m glad I took a chance on it.