Hellooo!

I recently reviewed a great collection of weird and horror fiction Hunting By The River by Daniel Carpenter with a focus on the strangeness of urban life and a delicious ability to unsettle you. I recently had the chance to ask Daniel some questions about this collection and a few other things.

How do you like to booktempt people to read Hunting By The River?

Hunting by the River is a collection of short stories about places and the people who get lost in them. They’re mainly rooted in two cities: London and Manchester, both of which I’ve called home, and they straddle the Weird and the eerie. 

In these stories cities feature a lot, linked to places you know well and these places have a duality to them. How can cities be seen as both a modern place to live and rather creepy?

We like to think, especially in England, that isolation is something associated with the Gothic; with ancient, crumbling mansions, flickering candlelight, and endless countryside. But I think the most isolating thing you can do is live in a city - especially now. There’s something quite unsettling about being surrounded by people, but feeling lost and alone, and that’s prevalent across a lot of modern society, but none more so than in our cities. There’s rising homelessness, working classes being forced out as neighbourhoods get gentrified, there’s swathes of industry being carved up and replaced by apps, AI and the gig economy. More and more people are falling through the cracks and I don’t think we consider where they end up. Cities can swallow all of these people up and hide them away in the corners. That’s a frightening thing. 

There’s a quote at the start of the collection from Rowland Atkinson’s Alpha City, “A city is not a natural occurrence.” He’s talking about the unseen, but very real forces that shape a city, from politicians, through to construction firms, engineers, and perhaps more nebulously, “competing interests of the powerful.” That quote stuck with me for a long time when I was putting this collection together. How these oddly vague, distant and unknowable forces shape our reality. It’s practically eldritch. 

Are cities alive with the past?

Good question! I think places are alive, everywhere. There’s that idea in the middle of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, where buildings capture ‘recordings’ of the past in the stone, replaying them like ghosts again and again and again. Cities do that too. There are echoes and echoes of the past everywhere we walk. And that’s not just simply something Big and Important and Historical - though of course there is that too - but there are echoes of our own past, echoes of culture too. I try and explore that in A Moment Could Last Them Forever - where the medium at the centre of the story makes sigils out of people’s journeys across the city. These very personal journeys become unique shapes that capture the immediate past. There’s a strange, unknowable power in them in that story and I think that’s true in real life too. 

 John Darnielle writes towards the end of Devil House, “To have a left a place once is to have left something behind.” If that’s true, then cities are full of the detritus of our lives, and the lives of everyone who ever lived in them - and that’s in the buildings we walk past, it’s in the faded graffiti on the walls, and it’s underneath us, buried. 

What do you enjoy about writing short stories?

In his introduction to Year’s Best Weird Fiction vol. 5, Robert Shearman got as close as anyone has managed to articulating exactly what it is about short fiction that I love. “Even if the subject matter of a novel is designed to provoke unease, its structure isn’t—the way that, by and large, it promises you a beginning, a middle and an end, and usually in that order, and will find space in the luxury of its length to give definite clarity and meaning into the bargain. The short story, in contrast, never allows the reader to relax, never wants the reader to relax, and all the time you’re reading one you’re asking yourself at what point it might betray you.” 

So I enjoy the way short stories allow for ambiguity, how they allow authors to play with form and structure. I think there's a freedom to short fiction that novels don't have. That's not to say that writing short stories is any easier than writing a novel, the forms are so different that there's not really a comparison. But I have tried writing a novel several times (I'm on my… third attempt at one right now?) and I find it extraordinarily difficult to do. 

What was the hardest story to write?

‘Habitual’ by far. That was a story where the central idea - a man winds up being the sole resident in a block of luxury flats in London - was in my head for at least a year. I tried so many times to start the story, and abandoned it (there’s a draft somewhere in which he has a dream apartment that extends across the whole city, there’s a version that’s much more of a ghost story, there’s… all sorts). I kept on chucking it out because it wasn’t working, but that central idea, that concept was just too interesting to me. I wanted to write about it, but I just couldn’t quite figure out why. 

Then, one day, I got an email from editor Dan Coxon, inviting me to contribute to an anthology titled For Tomorrow. The idea was that all the stories would be about a class of ‘96 who experienced a terrible event at school. Stories could be set anytime after that, but they had to be about someone in that class. 

As soon as I got the pitch my mind went back to my man, alone in the block of flats. It had to be about him - and with the core concept of the anthology in my head, the character and the story came together, finally. 

The why is always the hardest part of any story. Why am I telling this story? Why should I write it? Why is this character at the centre of it? Why is this the perfect place to end it? All of those questions stumped me at every point during ‘Habitual’ but finding the answers was probably one of the most satisfying things during the writing of the collection. 

Who are some of your favourite short fiction authors?

Oh blimey, I’ll try and keep this short… Joel Lane, Irenosen Okojie, Kelly Link, Nathan Ballingrud, Gary Budden, E. Nesbit. All of them, in one way or another, had a big influence on the stories in the book. 

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

I’m working on a novel at the moment, set during the Iraq War protests in mid-2000’s Manchester. It’s a sort of attempt to write about teenage alienation, post-hardcore music and weird Victorian medicine. Ask me how it’s going in about six months. It probably won’t be about those things anymore. 

What one book, not your own, would you wish you could get everyone to read and why?

Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane. Possibly the biggest influence on the collection. Lane was one of the finest British horror writers, and Where Furnaces Burn is probably his best collection of stories. It follows a police officer working a beat in the West Midlands over about twenty years, each story taking the form of a case, or crime he’s investigated. It’s pure horror - absolutely terrifying in places - but, its real genius is the way Lane follows this character through the years, as his life falls apart, as he experiences the political turmoil of the period, and the genuine horrors he witnesses in his job. It's full of some of the most incredible imagery I've ever read, not only the horror but the sense of place too. I've never read urban landscapes written quite as well Lane died in 2013, but his work has been republished over the last few years by Influx Press. Their editions are really beautiful, and though I’d recommend every one of his books, you really should start with this one.