Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview J. Ashley-Smith, whose novel Ariadne, I Love You, debuts on July 20 from Meerkat Press.
You grew up in Cambridge, UK, “hiding
with imaginary companions in the foundations of an Edwardian townhouse”. Tell
us more…
I was a pretty solitary and imaginative
kid, with a tendency towards all-consuming daydreams. When I was little, I had
an imaginary friend called “Baby Bear,” who wasn’t an actual bear but this big,
bald adult male—think Uncle Fester—that hung around with me. Who knows where
the hell that came from! I was tight with Baby Bear for one or two years, and
then one day left him behind on a road trip with my parents to the prehistoric
flint mine, Grimes Graves. That was it for Baby Bear. He’s probably still
hanging out there—or perhaps that’s where he came from in the first place…
There was (and still is) a crawlspace
beneath the floorboards of my parents’ house, and I set up a den down there for
reading by torchlight. I had a weird—by which I mean “straight-up terrifying”—encounter,
which led to me never going down there again. With the benefit of adult
hindsight, I assume it was the wildly overactive imagination of an 11-year old.
But at the time, I was convinced it was supernatural.
How did you move from studying film and
creative writing into the British Indie music scene, and how has that affected
what you write?
That shift was completely natural. I
was in a band all through uni and when, after I graduated, that band got
signed, I followed that path. I might have been a film editor. I might have
been a script writer. But the music took off and I followed.
I don’t know how much it’s affected
what I write—except to delay by decades me taking writing seriously. Throughout
my music career (if that’s what it can be called), I existed in a perpetual
cycle of obsessions, with all my focus for months at a time on music, then
growing sick of it, escaping for months into writing, then back again. I
produced a lot of words in that time, but never finished anything.
That whole period was, of course, a big
influence in the writing of Ariadne, I Love You—the milieu, especially, and
the characters.
What led you to move from Britain to
Australia and has that influenced or altered the way you imagine the uncanny?
I moved for love. And yes it’s
absolutely influenced my perception of weirdness. Being an ex-pat is always
strange because you don’t belong anywhere—you’re a stranger to both the place
you’ve left and the place you now live. When I moved to Australia, I was
constantly done in by how things were almost, but not quite, the same. Of
course, the land itself, the climate—all of that—is completely different. But
there’s this cultural overlay that seems so similar, it seduced me into
believing that nothing had changed for me. But then something would jar, a
wrong note would strike and I’d find myself looking at everything askance. Where
the hell even am I? That kind of wrongness and disorientation, the sense of
everyday things just out of true, is something that obsesses me and which crops
up again and again in my stories.
What made you return to writing after
fifteen years in the music biz?
The label my last band were signed with
folded and we had to go back to the drawing board. We were writing new
material, doing shows, all of that. But the spark wasn’t there for me anymore. I
knew we could make it work, could ‘make it’ if we just kept plugging away—after
all, we’d done it before. But I looked ahead, imagined that life, what ‘making
it’ would actually look like, and I guess I realised I didn’t actually want
that.
In my last couple of years in the UK
before we moved, I wrote the first draft of a novel, which I tried to revise
once we landed in Australia. I hadn’t take account of the psychic impacts of
moving to the other side of the planet, of building up a life again from
scratch, and just couldn’t finish it. I didn’t write again for almost eight
years, until my second son was born. That was when I really—finally—committed
to doing the work.
Your short fiction has won national
competitions and the Aurealis Awards, also being short-listed numerous times.
How does that affect your confidence as a writer?
Recognition is always wonderful, of
course. And the kind of recognition that comes with competitions and awards is
incredibly validating. Having said that, nothing beats the thrill of someone
reading your book, loving it, and telling you so.
The Attic Tragedy has elements of ghost and horror story
in its composition. What does that mean?
Ha ha! You tell me!
I really don’t think about stories that
way—in terms of the mixing of genres or elements. I never thought of The
Attic Tragedy as a horror story when I was writing it, though it has some
incredibly confronting scenes. The story grew out of an obsession with a dream
I’d had, about a girl who could speak to ghosts but wanted an operation to
switch them off. So the ghosts were always there, swirling around the character
of Sylvie, who grew out of that dream. The story itself didn’t really come
alive, though, until the character of George started to develop. She is
grounded and earthy, someone for whom ghosts are completely unreal. The horrors
that she has to endure—whether inflicted by others or by herself—are all too
real, very much of this world. In that story, it’s not the ghosts that are
frightening, but the people.
Your next book, Ariadne, I Love You,
appears in July 2021. Tell us something about Jude, your protagonist.
Jude is kind of a dick. He’s self-possessed,
obsessive, hungry—qualities typical of an ambitious musician on the rise. The
story shows Jude at a number of points in his life: as an aspiring dropout at
university; a layabout scrounger in his twenties, on the tip of a creative
breakthrough; and as a forty-something has been alcoholic, having lost it all. He
was genuinely successful at one point, and the wellspring of that success was inappropriate
unrequited love for his ex-bandmate’s girlfriend. Something he has never gotten
over.
The blurb says that Jude wouldn’t go on
a last comeback tour if it weren’t for Coreen. “Coreen is dead. And, worse than
that, she's married.” Who is Coreen and what is she?
Coreen is the Australian girlfriend of
Jude’s ex-bandmate. Jude is just about motivated to get his shit together for a
last hurrah gig in Australia—a retrospective of his now-defunct career—by the
promise of seeing Coreen again. But by the time he actually makes it overseas,
something terrible and terminal has happened to Coreen. Having burned all his
bridges at home and in Oz, Jude ends up in a train carriage in the bush where
he sees Coreen again—her, or something like her.
This story too has a ghost or ghosts,
and horror. Where does the horror come from?
It’s not clear whether the story has
ghosts. There’s something there at the old train carriage, but Jude
doesn’t find out what until it’s far too late.
The thing that scares me in this story,
that compelled me to write it, is not so much the supernatural elements (if, in
fact, there are any), but rather the choices the characters make. Jude’s
obsession leads him to actions that make me thrill with anxiety to even think
about. This is a thread that runs through all my favourite horror stories: the
monstrous choices made by compellingly flawed characters, choices that lead to
fates worse than death.
What type of
horror do you write, or is that too simplistic?
Again, I just don’t think about stories
in that way. When I start a story, I’m usually pursuing a feeling or an image.
Things unfold.
I like ambiguity. I like things that
are hidden, unseen. I suppose I tend towards the ‘quiet’ end of the horror
spectrum, but am not averse to explosions of terrible violence (though there’s
none of that in Ariadne). As to what unfolds and at which end of the
spectrum a story lands, I’m often led by the characters—and am frequently
surprised by them too.
Horror writers seem to confront things
the rest of us won’t, or can’t. Why do you think that is?
Why and what a person writes—their
approach, their obsessions—is extraordinarily personal, unique to each writer. I
know why I’m drawn to the dark stuff (and no, I’m not going to tell), but I
wouldn’t dare presume on behalf of another. Perhaps it would be better to flip
this around and say, “We have a thriving horror scene because so many writers
are willing to confront things that most others daren’t.”
Having said that, perhaps there is
something about confronting your own dark side and the darkness in the world
that brings both you and the world into sharper focus, brings fear and the
objects of fear more under your control. Writers in the horror community are
some of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever met, and perhaps that’s
what you get for purging your demons.
What’s the importance of horror in
2021. There has been a massive resurgence of horror films and fiction. What
role does it play?
Speaking personally, and extending what
we touched on above, writing horror can be a way of bringing a degree of
control to fear and uncertainty. As a writer and as a reader, it’s cathartic to
face your fears and explore them in a safe environment, one in which there is
no risk to you but a quickening of your pulse. It’s a safe way to
process—whether directly or indirectly—the horror that we see in the world all
around us.
We’re living through an extraordinarily
uncertain time. The world today is, frankly, terrifying. There are forces at
play—geopolitical tension, resource shortage, societal impacts of climate change,
an evolving global pandemic—that define all of our futures for better or worse,
few of which we have any direct control over. It’s easy to become overwhelmed
by it all. The best horror deals with big fears on a small scale, personally,
obliquely. Perhaps its recent rise could be attributed, in part, to an appetite
for eating our way through this superabundance of fear, one bite at a time.
There are some terrific film directors
out there making amazing horror films. Who would you choose to direct a film of
your books, if you could choose anyone?
Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field In
England, Rebecca), Jennifer Kent (Babadook, Nightingale), and Ari
Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) have all made movies that I’ve loved, and I’d
be thrilled to see how they might translate stories I’ve written.
What are you working on right now?
This is a big year for finishing big
things. Right now, I’m putting the final touches on a collection that includes
two new, previously unpublished novellas, as well as a whole bunch of shorter
stories. Once that’s wrapped, I’m itching to get back to final revisions of a
novel I’ve been working on for the last five years. Both projects that I’m very
excited about.
Do you have any favourite horror
writers from the present or the past - or books generally?
Wow, that’s a big question! How long
have you got? There are so many I could name, but I’m going to limit it to the books
that have made the most lasting impression on me in recent years (that I’ve read
in recent years, that is)… Kaaron Warren’s The Grief Hole. Nathan
Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters. Robert Hood’s Peripheral
Visions. Kathe Koja’s The Cipher. Laird Barron’s Occultation. Thomas
Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco.
Going back a bit further (and a bit
beyond the horror genre), I could read Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier and
Ira Levin on infinite repeat and still find things to learn from and be in awe
of.
About J. Ashley-Smith:
J. Ashley Smith is a British–Australian writer of dark fiction
and other materials. His short stories have twice won national competitions and
been shortlisted seven times for Aurealis Awards, winning both Best Horror (Old
Growth, 2017) and Best Fantasy (The Further Shore, 2018). His novella, The
Attic Tragedy, was released by Meerkat Press in 2020 and has since been
shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, an Australian Shadows Award, and a Shirley
Jackson Award.
J. lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North
Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.
You can connect with J. at spooktapes.net, or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Ariadne,
I Love You is available now from Meerkat Press.
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