AUTHOR INTERVIEW: CRAIG WALLWORK

We wanted to know more about our anthology authors so we asked if we could pick their brains and scoop out the delicious brilliance.

Next up is Craig Wallwork, who generously provided us with pure nightmare fuel "A Terrifying Silence":

IP: Would you survive one of your stories in real life? Which one and how would you last? 

C: There’s a story I wrote called Sicko that featured in the collection, Gory Hole. It’s about a stag do (Batchelor party for our overseas comrades) where the groom and his friends get hunted down by mutant rabid deer. They hole up at a quaint English B and B and have to survive the night.

I think the inspiration came from Dog Soldiers, and Night of the Living Dead, but I didn’t want to go with werewolves and zombies, so I figured mutant deer was fairly original.

The carnage that ensues suggests it’s a near impossible to survive the night, but as most hunters will proclaim, deer lack confidence. They’re like the Cervidae equivalent of Woody Allen, but with less baggage. Loud noises and strong scents will generally send them running, so I figure if I bath in lavender, rosemary, and Russian sage, and sing at the top of my voice Celine Dion’s, My Heart Will Go On, I’ll be good until dawn.

IP: What is the most unconventional piece of inspiration you’ve had?

C: I think it was Chuck Palahnuik who said that you wouldn’t sit on the toilet if you didn’t need to take a shit. That was his way of saying, why force yourself to write when the inspiration isn’t there. For many years, I assumed to be a writer you had to write so many words per day. If you

didn’t, you weren’t a writer. The longer you buy into that fallacy, you come to the understanding that what you write is terrible. Whereas, writing when you’re inspired leads to inspirational writing. As soon as you realise this, you only visit the toilet when you need it.

IP: How do you write? What does your ‘routine’/‘set up’ look like? Do you have a playlist?

C: When you’re trying to be a decent father, husband, son, and friend, as well as holding down a full-time job, routine is sporadic at best. I sometimes book time off work and spend the day writing. My father couldn’t fathom this. “Why don’t you get out, visit places, go to the pub?” While all those things are all well and good, writing is the escape. Ernest Hemingway once said, "In order to write about life, first you must live it.” He and my father would have gotten along great. But I don’t subscribe to the live life to the fullest before you can write about it. Henry

James probably died a virgin, and yet his books deal with the rules of attraction and sex better than most of his contemporaries. William Blake travelled only fifty miles in his life, but his imagination was unrivalled. I guess I lean more toward Faulkner: “A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.” For me, it’s all about imagination. If you have that, you can write anything. But I’m digressing. I write when I can. That’s the simplest explanation. And I can’t, nor will I ever, write a single line while listening to music. Silence is my muse, because somewhere in that void, there are voices screaming out waiting to be heard.

IP: What are you currently working on? If you're not working on anything at the moment, what work are you most proud of? (Big yourself up!)

C: I’ve just finished a novel that throws out all the tropes of vampire lore. It’s called Instruction Manual to Being a Vampire, and is about a young woman who befriends an old vampire priest. They form an unconventional relationship where she is bait to allow him to feed from society’s most undesirables. It’s inspired by the Joseph Campbell theory of seeking a second father that Palahniuk adopted in Fight Club. There are other influences in there too; Midnight Mass, Harold and Maude, Leon, Boundaries (Christopher Plummer/Vera Farmiga), Salem’s Lot, The Hunger, the list is endless and varied. It’s a dysfunctional relationship story at its core, but scratch away and there’s a deeper message about loneliness, mental health, and the toxicity found within society.

Right now, I’m polishing it ready to send out to beta readers, and then I’ll be pitching to publishers/agents. It’s a cool story, lots of gore, laughs, guts and garters. Actually, I don’t think there are garters. There’s a scene in a sex shop where a man gets his face peeled off, so I’m fairly certain garters will feature in there. But what I’m most proud about is that the reader should be questioning throughout the whole narrative whether this is about a vampire or a serial killer.

IP: What are your favourite things about the horror/writing community at the moment? 

C: I had a bad time a few years back with Human Tenderloin, my horror short collection. It got little to no interest on release, even though it was endorsed by bestselling authors Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones. Somehow it made it to the long list for the Stokers, but died a

painful, slow and agonising death at the last hurdle. When you write something you care a lot about, then to see it become the pariah of the pack, it winds you. To be honest, it took me a long time to gather my breath again. Eventually, I reached out and spoke with a few writers.

Laurel Hightower, as much a kind person as she is an amazing writer, offered me her time and advice. Same with Shane Keene. They both ended up offering me the opportunity to submit to anthologies they were editing at the time, (Shattered and Splintered, and Morbidologies). I got to

hang with the likes of Gwendolyn Kiste, Gemma Amor, Gabino Iglesias, Stephen Graham Jones, Eric LaRocca, Shane Hawk, Sonora Taylor, and Jonathan Janz to name a few. The horror writing community is small. And yes, it has its issues, but in the main, it looks out for each other, and at times, can be the scaffold a broken writer needs to stay upright.

IP: Who would you say is the biggest supporter of your writing? 

C: It’s a cliché, but my wife, Carla. She is witness to all the doubt I harvest about my writing. She is the first to register the upset in my face when things don’t go well. She is the one who hugs me and says don’t worry, they’ll be other opportunities. It’s cringe (a phrase my kids use a lot) but at my darkest, she is the light. But she is also the first to know about the acceptances, book deals, and the praise birthed from my work. And by virtue of her love, she must endure reading the first drafts of anything I write. It’s not easy living with a writer. They are capricious, often times miserable with crippling episodes of self-doubt. But for all the energy and time a writer puts into their work, for all the pain and frustration they experience while building worlds, an equal amount of compassion is needed by them around them. Carla has that in abundance, and without that support, I’d never get off the floor.

IP: Why do you write?

C: Because within writers lives a hundred monsters, a thousand killers, a dozen angels, and they’re all waiting for a chance to be freed. You become a kind of warden, a gatekeeper, choosing when to unlock the door and let them slip out into the world. That’s the whimsical way of articulating why a writer writes. But the truth is, I like scaring people. I like moving readers to tears, and inspiring them. To know you’ve influenced a person’s day, that your words are floating around in their head while they order that coffee to go, it makes you feel good. So, I guess I write to feel good. In that way, it’s therapy.

IP: Name a writer that inspires you and why?

C: Michael McDowell. Blackwater, a classic Southern Gothic series of books about the Caskey family, blew me away. I began that book with no preconceived idea of what to expect. I had no expectations, nor was I privy to the fact McDowell had been dead for over twenty years, and that he had, in the late 1980s, penned the first draft of the Beetlejuice screenplay, which, through subsequent research, was a lot darker than the movie we know today. His writing allowed me to walk along the Caskey family halls, console myself in their chairs, eat at their tables, sleep in their beds, and attend their many funerals. Like the many ghosts born from the Perdido over the course of his book, McDowell wandered into my life, made bright the lights around me, and chilled my skin. Every writer has a book that they aim to parallel. Not in story, but in the feelings gleaned while reading it. Blackwater is what I’m always aiming for.

IP: What would be the worst superpower to have? 

C: The power to induce a bowel movement when within just a few feet of a person. That’d be a terrible power to have. Unless of course you want someone to shit themselves. I see the benefits of attending a Trump rally or some Right-Wing demonstration. But you’d never be able to have an intimate relationship with anyone ever again. Can you imagine the state of the bed if you just leaned in for a kiss?

IP: And because we have to ask - favourite horror movie?

C: Too cruel. I’m a huge movie buff. The Instruction Manual to Being a Vampire is chock full of movie references, mostly horror, and while I have a varied and extensive knowledge of horror dating from the Bray Studio days to A24, I still have to go with, The Exorcist. I know, not very original, but it’s the one movie where horror is adjacent to the core message of faith. I also learnt a lot about writing from Blatty’s work, in that if you’re going to tender scenes of gore and depravity, do so only to push the narrative forward, not to shock. Everything you do must serve a purpose, if it doesn’t, then it’s a cheap thrill that invariably weakens the structure of your story. Many may feel that certain scenes within The Exorcist were written to scare, to leave its audience with mouth agape, and while it does that, Blatty fashioned those scenes out of necessity not shock. He needed the mother, Chris O’Neil, to understand that her daughter was possessed. To do this meant pushing the boundaries. Writers can learn a lot from this simple message. I know I did.

Craig Wallwork is the author of the Tom Nolan series of horror thrillers, as well as the collections, Human Tenderloin, Quintessence of Dust, and Gory Hole. His other novels include, The Sound of Loneliness, and, Heart of Glass.

He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize in fiction, and has had many of his short stories published in anthologies.

He lives in England with his wife and two children.

You can find him on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.