Prospering by Shadows
An Interview with Richard Calder
“The central question of contemporary life, it seems to me, is: do we oppose our shadows, or live with them and thereby seek to prosper by them?”
Richard Calder is no stranger to the umbral regions of the psyche. From his first novel Dead Girls (1995) to his most recent, Lord Soho (2002), he’s taken readers on disturbing odysseys to the depths of depravity and the frontiers of possibility. These tales of dissolution and transcendence have been characterised by Paul Di Filippo as the culmination of nearly 120 years of symbolist fiction. Calder’s own take on his work seems to place it somewhere between Orphic ritual and research methodology for the observation and interpretation of the flawed nature of humanity.
“If we don’t live with our shadows, that is, if we don’t live through the exploration and delineation of fantasy and instead take refuge in intolerance and cant, then we’re condemned to be half-people, continually projecting the ‘libertine within’ onto the ‘other.’ The outcome is hypocrisy, the deliberate embrace of ignorance, scapegoating, witch-hunting—oh, this cynical misanthrope could go on, and on… And then the world really will end in a great panic, not with a bang, but a hysterical shriek.
“I’ve been drawn to the ‘fantastic’ because I’m interested in the kind of narrative that you usually find in the contes cruels of fairy tales or folk tales. Narratives that aren’t representations of the everyday social world, but which deal with deep primal states, chiefly the beauty of Hell and the aesthetics of Persephone’s boudoir. I grew up in what, for want of a better word, I’d call an ‘uncultured’ environment—one without books or much experience of the world of theatre, art galleries, music… Largely due to this, I was engaged, from my early teens (by way of writing, drawing and painting) in something I only later knew is referred to as ‘Outsider Art’: work generally produced by self-taught eccentrics, psychiatric patients, recluses and criminals.
“In some ways, I still have the same ‘outsider’s’ concerns. I’m interested in realising some kind of very personal, primal vision, and in constructing a world where the raw material that constitutes the cruel ‘fairy tale’ of childhood can find a home. There’s an attempt to discover in that raw material universal themes, which may be used to decode the world we live in; but also to discover how one’s personal, idiosyncratic world can be a gate that opens up onto the inner life of Everyman. That’s my reason for being a writer of the ‘fantastic.’”
Calder’s tales cavort across the boundaries between fantasy and SF, merging re-mixed mythology with perverse bio-technology, idiosyncratic metaphysics with linguistic pyrotechnics, relentlessly inventive eroticism with primal fear. The untrammelled sweep of his imaginings has led to his novels being credited with the revivification of several well-worn traditions—gothicism, romanticism, decadence and ‘golden age’ SF. And his nine novels to date have led to comparisons with a geographically, historically and stylistically disparate array of writers, including: Poe, Wilde, Shaw, JM Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Machen, Beardsley, Apollinaire, Huysmans, Bierce, William Hope Hodgson , Clark Ashton Smith, Ben Hecht, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Samuel Delaney, Angela Carter, Jack Womack, Lucius Shepard, Robert Coover, Dan Simmons and Michael Moorcock.
Richard Calder was born in Whitechapel, in East London, in 1956, a location to which he has returned after a childhood in southern Essex and travels to Australia, Thailand and the Philippines. He’s been a full-time writer since 1990, producing reviews, stories and nine novels often labelled cyber-decadent or cyber-gothic, but which defy classification: Dead Girls (1992), Dead Boys (1994), Dead Things (1996), Cythera (1998), Frenzetta (1998), The Twist (1999), Malignos (2000), Impakto (2001), Lord Soho (2002).
East London is awash in myth and urban folklore—the plague, the fire, the Hawksmoor churches, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, Spring heeled Jack, Jack the Ripper, the blitz and gangland executions. I ask Calder to what extent his origins in a location defined by its stories has impacted on his work.
“More than I’d thought—until recently, that is. Until I came back to live in Whitechapel. Being here, I’ve become intensely interested in East End mythology. The place is incredibly vibrant, and there’s this dark, gothic, somewhat sinister side to life that I find immensely appealing. I moved out to the suburbs when I was pretty young, and the Brutalist landscapes of the south Essex estates, and the attendant ennui—call it Spleen de Essex—finds a place in my work from the Rainham marshland scenes in Dead Girls to ‘the Sink’ in “Incunabula” [an episode of Lord Soho]. The real East End is quite different from the ‘new East End’ of south Essex. Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green—I love these places. In fact, I’ve just completed something that draws quite heavily on spirit of place and East End myth—but at the moment it’s a book seeking a home, so I’ll not say anything further!”
