Fantastic Metropolis

“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!”

For me, Calder’s work has echoes of another powerful symbolist and native of London, William Blake. There’s a similar despair at the inability of human beings to transcend their basic drives, desires and prejudices. In Blake’s poem “London” he lamented: ‘In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.’ And in several of Calder’s novels the denizens of Britain, the ‘Darkling Isle’, are prone to reject freedom and responsibility in favour of contented and parochial serfdom. But to what extent do these aspects of his fiction reflect a critique of the way we think and live with each other—particularly those of us dwelling in the Darkling Isle?

“They reflect, I suppose, the sense that Blakean energy—or ‘evil’, if you like—often seems sadly absent from contemporary British life. Instead of dynamism, there’s a hysterical pursuit of momentary euphoria; and there’s often a mean-spiritedness, or spitefulness, to people’s lives, that I find distressing. This tends to mean that though ‘individuality’ is enshrined, there’s very little true individualism, and this because the country has, to a large extent, been infantilised. People seem to be consumed by the twin pursuits of doing as they please while, paradoxically, pointing the accusing finger and informing on each other, like nasty children. At the same time, people are living in a constant state of panic. It’s the panic, I suppose, that interests me most. I’ve long been fascinated by hysteria, and particularly mass hysteria: alien abduction, satanic ritual abuse, the ‘stranger’ in our midst who is a threat to our children (and the child in our midst who is a threat to us), recovered memory, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome—all of these concerns seem to be part of a larger, hysterical plague sweeping across Britain, and indeed, the world. We are living in an age of grand paranoia.”

So does Calder believe British culture to more authoritarian and intolerant than that of other countries in which he’s lived?

“A few years back, a poll conducted by Index on Censorship revealed that most British people want more censorship, not less. Authoritarianism often works from the bottom up, and the infantile nature of mass society seems to predicate Big Brother. No accident it’s the name of the UK’s most popular reality television programme. Britain is a very censorious society. We tend to think it’s not, because we all tend to be free to do as we wish so long as what we do doesn’t matter. We live, today, in a kind of two-way panopticon, eternally watched and watching, caught up in a cycle of victimhood and accusation—players in a piece of sadomasochistic theatre whose true nature we choose to remain ignorant of.

“Somewhere, in The Twist, the narrator says something along the lines that there is ignorance, and there is wilful ignorance, that the people amongst whom she lived chose to be ignorant. It was not that they had low IQs or were disadvantaged in any meaningful way; they were stupid because they liked being stupid, in the same way that pigs like rolling in their own shit; it suited them. It made them feel good. Ignorance, for many, is a life-style choice. And ignorance, moreover, is aggressive, not passive. It seeks to convert. It is evangelical. If knowledge is power, then ignorance is power, too, because ignorance is a form of knowledge, that is, it is an interpretation of the world.”

I put it to Calder that his awareness of the authoritarianism of his native land has been intensified by his time outside the country. I ask if he has come to feel something of an outsider in his native land, and to what extent this impacts on the way he looks at the place?

“I do feel like something of an outsider in Britain and I think, now, I always will. You stay abroad too long and it becomes difficult to readjust, to re-integrate yourself back into what was once familiar. You have to accept that things will never be the same, that the old life will never, perhaps, be truly available to you, and that your own country has, in many ways, become a foreign country. I must admit to feeling a certain melancholy about this.”

“But I’m not the complete misanthrope that I sometimes appear. I love London, and am glad to be here. I’ve had some problems with ill health, which living in the tropics either caused, or exacerbated—and medical treatment has certainly been one reason for being in Blighty, where, I believe, hospitals sometimes even go to the trouble of sterilising surgical instruments, if not their wards. But I really don’t know how long I’ll stay. If I love London, I love the romance of travel and living abroad, and I particularly love the mad, bad Far East. Maybe I’ll be back abroad in the not-too-distant future. Who knows?”

But there’s more to Calder’s alien’s eye view than a lack of fit in the City and country in which he grew up. Nearly all his key characters share their creator’s status as outsider—being either exiles seeking homelands not at odds with their nature, or rebels trying to transform the societies in which they live. I wonder to what extent his experience of life in Thailand and the Philippines informed the representation of ‘otherness’ and alienation in his stories.

“The Far East has certainly offered up a powerful metaphor—an alien landscape for alienated anti-heroes. Of course, the ‘outsider’ nature of my characters is something I (like they) have brought to the Far East, and not really something discovered there. The experience of living outside your own country, and particularly, outside its culture, has an obviously transformative effect on a writer’s work. For good or ill, you become more aware of your culture, both its importance and shortcomings. You become more aware of its contingency.

“You also become aware—when you manage to lose some of the liberal presuppositions that travel with you as part of your psychological baggage—of just how truly different an alien culture can be, and how Westerners ‘Orientalise’ and falsify alien cultures to justify their own worldview. For instance, there’s what the writer Chandra Mohanty has identified as the ‘colonial gaze’ of western feminists: the defining of ‘third world women’ as religious (read ‘not progressive’), family oriented (read ‘traditional’), legal minors (read ‘they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their-rights’), illiterate (read ‘ignorant’), and domestic (read ‘backward’). But travel, unfortunately, can narrow the mind, as well as broaden it. A reassessment of one’s beliefs can lead to an uncomfortable process of disillusionment that ends in cynicism. There is a bitter edge to some of the Thailand scenes in Cythera. I hope I redressed the balance in Malignos and its evocation of the Philippines.”

Myth, Art, Dream

Calder’s books reveal a fascination with the malleability of identity and consciousness. And the complexity and flux of the human psyche is captured perfectly by the dense poetics of his language, high-energy baroque plotting and opulent layers of symbolism—religious, mythic, historical and technological. But which myths have personal significance for Calder?

“The Orphic sect in ancient Greece represented Eros as a god who brings worlds into existence. And it’s always seemed to me that the erotic impulse lies at the root of all mythmaking and world creation. My fiction seems haunted by a certain kind of muse figure, a succubus, or handmaiden of the Dark Mother, Lilith (which makes me sound like a character out of a Tim Powers’ novel, I suppose!) who celebrates the myths and symbols of the ‘Dark Eros.’ She’s the companion, or tutelary goddess, of outsiders and outlaws, and she appears, one way or another, in different guises, throughout my work.”

Calder’s most recent book, Lord Soho, is a series of linked novellas, each based around a narrative at the heart of a popular opera. I ask what led him to rummage for new meaning in the frayed glamour of these familiar tales.

“I wrote Lord Soho in Castillejos, a small town on the Zambales coast in the Philippines. The idea for the book grew out of a longstanding desire to construct a novel from a series of interconnected novellas—I’m a big fan of Keith Roberts’ work, and had always been impressed by the structure of Pavane, The Chalk Giants and Kiteworld. I’d also entertained a similarly longstanding idea of writing a version of The Beggar’s Opera and/or The Threepenny Opera. After a while, the two projects simply came together. I like opera—I like its huge artificiality, hyper-emotionalism and campiness—and so it seemed natural to base the subsequent novellas in Lord Soho on The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata, Patience, and Turandot. ‘Punch and Judy’ inspired the last novella in the series, but Harrison Birtwistle has written an opera of the same name. Angela Carter, of course, had, in The Bloody Chamber, re-written Perrault, and the idea of writing a collection of stories underpinned by the ‘fairy tale’—the kind of fairy tale world to be found in opera—was another powerful influence.”

But there’s more to Calder’s work than a fascination with traditional forms of storytelling. Time after time, his narratives invade the territory in which myth and history collide to transform consciousness—collective and individual. What draws him to this theme, and how does he feel these symbolic forces influence the way we live and think?

“I’m interested in history’s sub-texts. The genesis of a fiction might, for me, lie in the question: what were the real causes of the Second World War—the political rationalisation of Lebensraum, or a hidden psychological agenda (hidden even to the Nazis themselves) to literalise certain dark, repressed, libidinous energies? Similarly: what are the sub-texts of many contemporary moral panics—do they suggest that an ancient, murky, a-historical and ‘mythic’ impulse is likewise struggling to realise itself, and that the ‘panicked’ general public are merely its unconscious vectors? I’m fascinated by the idea that we all live secret histories, secret lives, and that history, and contemporary reality, is actually something other—something darker, but more meaningful, more mythic—than it appears.”

Having meandered onto the subject of moral panics, I ask Calder about an issue that resurfaces in several of his stories, the fear of violence towards and by children. What provoked his imagining of the boys’ towns in Cythera: was it a satirical representation of a deep-rooted fear of the threat children pose to social stability and the dangers they face from potential abusers?

“More than anything, Cythera is about hysteria. I wrote it in Thailand in 1995-6, when I’d lie in bed late at night and listen to the BBC World Service, and in particular, to reports concerning London and England. For a while, they were dominated by stories that focused both on child criminality and the threat to children from abusers. A nation that, on the one hand, seemed to be increasingly worried about a supposed outbreak of viciousness amongst children was also becoming increasingly protective of childhood innocence—the hysteria surrounding the Bulger case was, of course, the sine qua non. The two attitudes seemed to converge into an overriding concern about control: control of children’s minds, their movements and ultimately, of course, their bodies. This in turn seemed to reflect the mindset of a nation that felt it had lost control, was drifting in a godless, capricious universe, and felt that discipline needed to be re-established in order to recapture some lost notion of security and concomitant ‘innocence.’

“I immediately re-read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—perhaps the greatest play ever written about hysteria and the role that society sometimes affords children in justifying its paranoia. Then, as now, it often seemed to me that the world would be destroyed, not in some nuclear winter, or by overpopulation or something more exotic, like an asteroid strike, but by fantasy: a pandemic of mass hysteria. Freud was perhaps the definitive writer of the last century, and perhaps our own century, too, in recognizing that the central element to modern man and society is fantasy. And this surely makes the role of the fantasist an important one. I’m talking about fantasy here as a serious exploration of society’s shadow-side, of course, the dark terrain of its psychological underworld, and not as simple escapism.”

These excursions into the interior of that dark terrain have earned comparisons with the past masters of symbolist fiction, and led to the construction of the term ‘cyber-decadence.’ Decadence is a dangerous path for any artist to tread, whatever their accomplishments. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was received with incontinent enthusiasm in America, while a notorious review in the London Daily Chronicle in 1890 described it as “a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” Words that came to haunt Wilde when repeated at the 1895 trial that led to his imprisonment.

More than a century after Wilde’s death, decadent art may have lost its overt ability to shock, but it still elicits a strong response from critics and readers. So while Calder’s devotees see the books as witty, transgressive examinations of the human condition, his detractors tend to be appalled by the same ‘mephitic odours’ that offended the olfactory sensibilities of the Daily Chronicle critic.

Our discussion of the continuing allure of the themes, tropes and symbols of decadence provokes a reflection on the history of Calder’s attraction to the movement.

“I read a lot of Decadent writing, and books about the Decadents, when I was a teenager: Baudelaire, the French Symbolists, Huysmans, Wilde, and art books like Philippe Jullian’s ‘Dreamers of Decadence.’ It wasn’t merely the literature, or the art, that I enjoyed so much, but the pose, too, I suppose. And when you’re in your teens a pose is, after all, so important! When I was sixteen I spent a few weeks in Paris with a friend: it was an incredibly hot summer, and we’d saunter around in our seventies’ velvet suits, floppy black hats and walking canes. At that age, you’re supposed to look a bit of a prat, so I mention all this without too much embarrassment. But there is something of a painful awareness that the attention we received was likely from the ghost of Baron Charlus rather than the cute little French girls we desperately hoped to take back to our flea-bitten hotel. Over the years, however, the furniture and poses of Decadence have given way to a concern with the meat of Decadence—that is, its transgressive agenda, an aesthetic pose that is all about a critical opposition to what society deems ‘normal’ but which, under a David Lynch-like microscope, is revealed to be a ‘normality’ writhing with corruption.”

This fascination with the ‘meat’ of decadence has led to the creation of a dazzling array of flawed characters, people with self-destructive tendencies, people at odds with the worlds they inhabit. Then there are the surreal aberrations of accepted notions of technology, gender, sexuality, social organisation… I ask Calder what draws him to these ‘damaged’ characters and what attracts him to the notion of the perverse?

“Another interviewer said he couldn’t take to Frenzetta because he found its central characters so unlikeable. I don’t actually think Duane and Frenzy are particularly unlikeable—I’m biased of course—but it’s not necessary for fictional characters to be likeable. That is a kind of backdoor way of introducing a moral argument for art. It’s only necessary that they be interesting. At best, they should cast a spell on the reader and draw him or her into their world. We don’t generally care to read about happiness. The Devil really does have all the best tunes. We want drama. Conflict. Blood and sweat. Art is Dionysian, and if my heroines, or muses, are rather maenad-like, then my heroes are their votaries, and so am I.

“Perverted is from the Latin pervertire, meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to turn upside down.’ To turn the world upside down—that certainly fascinates me, in terms of overthrowing the established order of things, or indeed, paramount reality. Freud argued that the perversions are monstrous and terrifying ‘as if they exerted a seductive influence; as if at bottom a secret envy of those who enjoy them had to be strangled.’ The perverse—that is, going against the grain, taking the left-hand path, choosing fantasy over reality, play over what is socially useful, pleasure over work—seems key to all artistic endeavour. The realm of the erotic is the foundation of the world. The ‘perverse’ characters in my books, the champions of the perverse, if you like, are opposed to, or at war with, those whose dark, psychic necessities have become oppressive, destructive and cruel because repressed and literalised instead of turned into play, art, or finally, love. The psychotherapist Thomas Moore has pointed to ‘a kind of love not rooted in relationship. It is unstable and unreliable and yet love all the same.’ I’d like to think that some of my protagonists explore, and discover, different kinds of love, and that, though strange, and sometimes violent, it is a love more intense, and in a sense truer, than conventional modes of affection.”

So is Calder suggesting a moral foundation to his baroque, grotesque and erotically charged narratives?

“My moral stance is to oppose the ‘moral’ stance. I’d characterise myself as a libertine writer. I believe fiction, the whole imaginative process, should be free from societal constraints—both external constraints and the internalised, self-censorship mechanisms that society often relies on to control its dissidents. We happen to live in a Sadeian society, but one that doesn’t know, or understand, its own nature. Repressed, fearful, it literalises and externalises its dark side through laws, wars, prisons and panics. Literalism is poverty of the imagination, the inability to live through chthonic myth, art and dream. I think it’s ethical to oppose this literalism, this savage, false innocence, through fantasy. And since part of my fictional project is to unveil unconscious motivations, that is, the secret life that goes on in society’s deep cellars, my narratives often have a tendency towards the dreamlike and surreal.”

Possession, Transformation, Strangeness

This rejection of social and cultural coercion, together with Calder’s searingly satirical vision of authoritarian capitalism in Cythera, leads me to speculate that his fiction may be informed by an anarcho-syndicalist critique of contemporary modes of social and political organisation. But, it turns out, I’m way off beam, and the craziness of trying to cram a writer so fascinated by notions of flux and flexibility into a political category soon becomes apparent. A literary libertine Calder may be, but a political libertarian?

“I’ve never been called an anarcho-syndicalist before! I think what would make me an unlikely candidate for election to their exalted ranks is the fact that I don’t believe that human beings are fundamentally good—I believe them, instead, to be both fundamentally good and fundamentally evil. I do oppose all forms of exploitation and control. But I also recognise that the human psyche is hardwired in such a way that it yearns for domination and submission, and there’s not much we can do about it except come to understand ourselves.

“E.M. Forster gave two cheers for democracy, but called Love the longed-for republic. Contemporary hedonism doesn’t have much time for love—we are intolerant of its language in politics, commerce, education and science. If I’m not much of a political animal—certainly not a party political one—then I’m a bit of a Marcusian when it comes to individual issues, especially issues of individual liberty. I would find myself in opposition to any creed that attempts to restrict or marginalize the expression of love, that is, desire, in speech, art, literature, and ultimately, thought. This, perhaps, makes me into something Richard Rorty calls a ‘romantic bourgeois liberal’: a believer in piecemeal reforms advancing economic justice, the freedoms people are able to enjoy, and the practical worth of thinking of others as like ourselves while remaining sceptical to political thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes for injustice and exploitation.

“In terms of politics, the 1980s was a time when I was rather comfortably cocooned from the effects of Thatcherism, but the atmosphere of the 1970s is certainly present in my books—particularly the early books. The dangers of the Far Right are expressed in the Dead trilogy through the mad human supremacist party ‘The Human Front.’ Everything in the Dead trilogy is seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy, and this reflects the fact that I was summoning up a lot of material from my adolescence and teenage years.”

Having established that Richard Calder and I were teenagers in England in the same decade I feel obliged to ask to what extent the DIY ethos of Punk—the music, the fashions, the attitude—affected his worldview and his writing.

“Considerably. There’s something about genre fiction—particularly science fiction—that’s inherently not respectable. I like that. I’ve really only been interested in science fiction at two points in its development: the New Wave and Cyberpunk. Both ‘movements’ suggested SF could do anything and, at the same time, that a littérateur could get his or her hands dirty—in fact if they didn’t, you just knew they were doomed to live out their days in the ghetto of the bourgeois novel. I liked everything about the early days of punk, the self-assemblage of the music, the self-authoring quality of the artists, the fashions… Punk seemed to suggest the best way to play pop or rock music was, in some sense, not to play pop or rock music, just as I believe that the best way to write science fiction is not to write science fiction.”

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The cyber element of Calder’s cyber-decadence seems to be driven by a feeling of apprehension leavened with a sense of possibility. So does his interest in technological mutation relate to a concern with the destructive effect our tools are having on the way we live and relate to each other? Or is it an aspect of his apparently obsessive interest in the notion of the plasticity of identity?

“I’m not really interested in futurology, and what social conscience I possess is rarely stirred by meditations upon the possibly adverse consequences of certain technologies. Susan Sontag characterised science fiction as a literature of disaster, and it’s disaster as literature that is my prime concern. For me, technology, when evoked, is there to flesh out a decimated landscape, or—in the ‘Dead’ trilogy, for example—to literally de-flesh and replace the natural with the artificial and thus aestheticise the world. I used nanotechnology in the ‘Dead’ trilogy originally because it seemed such a nice 21st-century interpretation of clockwork, that is, the mechanisms that animated the 18th automata that inspired the vampiric ‘dead girls.’

“As you suggest, technology, for me, does suggest other possibilities: the re-wiring of identity, a re-writing of time and space, and a re-working and perversion of reality—all of which occurs courtesy of the nanovirus ‘doll plague.’ I’m interested in the ‘plasticity of identity’ because, for one thing, none of us are whom we seem to be—we are all a collection of masks—and also because I feel that each fiction involving a fantasy quest should reveal, not merely the outward journey, but an inner one, too, leading to some kind of transformation, or resurrection, of the spirit.”

The ideas of transformation and transcendence pervade much of Calder’s work: books such as Impakto and Malignos have at their heart a complex cosmology, and many of his stories centre on the human longing to escape the quotidian existence and the yearning for contact with the numinous. To what extent do the obsessions of the characters reflect those of their author?

“A person is sometimes born with psychic energies so pressing that they spend their whole life trying to give them sufficient imaginative form. In this regard, I think the characters in my books do reflect my own preoccupations. They too seem imbued with certain kinds of dark, psychic energy that they seek to realise through acts of desire and escape. I might say I lived vicariously through my characters—but characters and author more properly enjoy symbiosis. A magician may evoke a spirit or demon and hope to lend that entity autonomous life, but in the act the magician, in turn, is himself possessed.

“When you have had some success at delineating a character dialogue becomes a matter of listening in, eavesdropping—you do quite literally hear voices inside your head. My fiction seems to contain plenty of characters who are addicted to each other, either through physical necessity—like Ignatz and Primavera—or because they are psychic vampires. Or sometimes, I suppose, because they are both!

“And you might say I’m somewhat addicted to my characters. For me, they hold out the prospect of escape into another world where certain psychic energies are so important that one cannot live, or be whole, without them, and where their realisation represents the realisation of one’s self. In turn, of course, I am quite happy to offer myself up and let my characters feed off me.”

But, stepping outside the role of storyteller, what is Calder’s personal take on matters metaphysical?

“Basically, I’m a rationalist and a sceptic—I find surrender to the irrational rather a terrifying prospect. The life of reason has always seemed humankind’s best and last hope. We live, however, in a very unreasonable society—one that uses the language of reason, albeit in a somewhat debased form, to fabricate justifications for increasingly irrational behaviour. When the metaphysical, or supernatural, element to life is denied—or else atrophies—violence and sex remain as conduits for the divine. If this side to life fails to find expression in fantasy and art then the angels of hell are manifested through the sexual allure of disaster, epidemics, insanity, crime and the constant threat of a sub-human ‘other.’ Today, only things that are pathological seem to express some kind of metaphysic—but I opt for a pathology of art, not of life.”

It’s become a cliché to suggest that fresh and original writing is necessarily driven by a persistent, almost involuntary, preoccupation with a theme or idea. But absorption and fixation seep from every other line of the sumptuous, orgiastic and dazzling prose of books such as Lord Soho and Malignos; so I just have to ask, what obsesses Richard Calder?

“I’m obsessed with language. That’s necessary, if you’re a writer. You feel the overrididng need to put your hands into the sticky mire of language and revel in its sensuality, just as a painter feels the need to play about with paint, a sculptor to carress stone, a musician to immerse themselves in sonic voluptuousness. But an artist should not only be obsessed, but possessed—by some kind of daimonic force. Freud observed (and W.H. Auden wrote a prose poem on the subject) that it is a writer’s wound that bestows creativity. Going to that source, a writer is bound to encounter something that is idiosyncratic and strange. In his Western Canon, Harold Bloom names 26 ‘most significant’ western writers since the middle ages. Bloom says that what links the 26 writers is, above all, strangeness, ‘a mode of originality which either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.’ Authenticity is all.”

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Richard Calder’s stories “Toxine” and “Mosquito” can be read right here at Fantastic Metropolis.