The Laws of Fear

An interview with Stephen Laws by Matt Williams

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Stephen Laws' writing is his willingness to tell it like it is. Not that you're likely, as you go about your daily business, to find gaping chasms spitting your town apart, unleashing evil forces on mankind (all of which happens to the small town of Edmonville in the author's latest novel, Chasm). But if you want to read about natural terrors - urban disintegration and relationship breakdowns, to name but two - as well as supernatural ones, then his latest book is definitely for you.

Laws has always had an interest in the fantastical. A great deal of his formative years were spent in cinema halls; it was also here that he was to nurture a lifelong fascination with stop-motion photography (as exemplified by the films of Ray Harryhausen), science fiction and Gothic horror.

In later years he drifted into local government, working his way up to a senior administrative position.

Laws only began writing seriously - mostly short stories (some of which were broadcast on radio) - in his twenties. He later wrote a play on spec which was accepted (though not filmed) by the BBC. His first novel, Ghost Train (1985) was greeted with acclaim on its release. Since then he has released nine consistently solid, fast-moving and often terrifying books, all of which have earned him the enviable position as one of Britain's top horror writers.

Ghost Train

This interview took place during the 1998 FantasyCon in Birmingham, UK. I had arranged to meet Steve around 6pm where I found him in the lounge bar seated at the grand piano, hammering the ivories for all he was worth. As well as being a film fanatic, Laws is a huge fan of movie scores. Hence at any given time during the course of the convention he could be found at the keyboard, taking requests and hosting his own special music quiz: Guess the movie theme.

Just before the interview commenced he played me a composition of his entitled "Gordon's Theme". Gordon is one of the main characters in Chasm, someone whose stammering has rendered him mute, incapable of interacting with the real world - except through music. True, Gordon's instrument is flamenco guitar but when transcribed for the piano, Laws' music, complete with acknowledged mistakes (hey, this is a 'Con, people do drink during these things), is as haunting and moving as Gordon's anguished plight throughout the novel.

We find a quiet spot downstairs and I begin by asking Laws about his portrayal of families. One of the most memorably nasty group of characters Laws has ever written about are to be found in his latest book; these are the Caffneys - the sort of family you pray you never meet. He also details the gradual relationship breakdown that occurs between married couple Alex and Candy. These might be down-on-their-luck, sometimes pathetic characters; but Laws has a way of showing their sympathetic side too.

"If you're trying to write good horror or fantasy fiction, from my point of view it's not about the sword-wielding hero who arrives casting magic spells and ends up saving the day," says Laws. "My stuff has always been very firmly rooted in reality - it's all I can do. I'm kind of challenged and also excited by the prospect of putting real people in extraordinary circumstances. To make it work, and work well, I've got to have some connection with the characters. If I can't do that then I'm not succeeding. You've got to make it real before you take that step into the unreal."

This is something Laws shares with several other writers. Ramsey Campbell, in particular, comes to mind. Both writers incorporate bleak urban and suburban landscapes into their novels.

"Ramsey and I are very good mates but Ramsey's style is completely different from mine," explains Laws. "We both have a shared interest in characters from these kind of backgrounds. What I like is to have real characters in conflict. Who are suddenly placed in this position where their differences and conflicts are dwarfed by the cataclysm that has been visited upon them. So they must then pull together. With Chasm particularly, some of them do and some of them don't. But the beauty of the book, what really got me going, wasn't the horror but the positive bonding aspects. And let me tell you, it was a hard task to pull off successfully.

"I wanted the reader to care as much about the characters as I did. It's a big cast and some of them don't make it through. That's life. It's a case that the ones that make it through, at the end of that process look back and think, 'Why the hell were we so worried about this?' This is particularly true of the characters of Jay O'Connor and Juliet DeLore - I think their inclusion makes Chasm the best love story I've ever written. If not for this cataclysm which brought them together, they would never have met. Both characters are from very different social backgrounds - Jay is a school caretaker, Juliet is a beautiful young woman with a model's looks who wouldn't have given Jay a second glance in real life. (Indeed, at the end of the book this is presented as an alternate scenario - what might have happened if not for the quake.)

"It's the positive values of this book that really got me through. Not the horror or the action, stuff like that, but the developing relationship between Juliet and Jay. Jay is almost like an anti-hero. A renegade. If these two had met on a street they would never have connected. But because they were thrown into this disaster scenario they had to adapt. And eventually that turns to love."

Most of Laws' novels utilise urban settings. He grew up (and still lives) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city of archaic industry (shipbuilding) and the place where Laws has set several of his stories to date. I wondered, did this background to some extent mirror the empty, used-up lives of some of his characters? Swallowing them whole - as in Chasm.

Macabre

Juliet, for example, is subjected to a terrible ordeal at the hands of her former lover, Trevor (surely a thinly veiled condemnation of wife-beating?); and in previous novels he has written about homelessness (Macabre); and organised crime (The Frighteners).

"Firstly, let me say that none of what you've described is the result of personal experience. I've got a very loving family, I didn't come from a broken background. But working in local government (before I became a full time writer), I dealt with a lot of people in difficult circumstances. It's not that I've used individual cases," he stresses, "but I did learn to react to people who'd found themselves in similar predicaments. To be honest with you, I've always had that in my heart - to my detriment sometimes.

"It's a difficult to talk about horror fiction in terms of redemption and the positive aspects. What we're supposed to talk about are the really horrible things. Presumably that's how you sell a horror novel. My books start off with people in all these awful circumstances. And things often get worse before they get better. But they do change.

"I deeply care about the characters when I'm writing about them. I mean, I was very involved with the female characters in Gideon to the extent that a good deal of that book was about domestic violence and degradation.

"We all know why we watch a movie or read a book. All right, sometimes we look to be entertained. We want to see Godzilla stamping all over everything. But sometimes we want a bit more than that.

We want to be touched. When someone reads one of my books I'd like them to cry, or at least to be connected so emotionally with my writing that they come out of it saying, 'That was fucking excellent!' Now, this isn't a play for acceptance on my part. I do this because nothing else gives me as much satisfaction. Horror isn't horror unless it connects with real people.

"I recently saw the film The New York Ripper (directed by goremeister Lucio Fulci)," grimaces Laws "and that had no absolutely no moral viewpoint, other than watching people getting slashed. There are books like that too. As much as I wanted to like it - for all kinds of obscure reasons - I just couldn't. We're getting off the subject a bit now, but I just wish Lucio Fulci had done a good picture. All the time I was watching that film I was thinking, 'I could have done so much more with this.'

"Horror comes from an identification with real people and what happens to them. It's the easiest thing in the world to write a slasher novel. You can describe a gutting in graphic detail, but what's the point?"

Laws, it has to be said, hammers home his anti-urban crime message quite strongly in Chasm. What are his thoughts on the subject of city crime in the 90s? Does he see any easy solutions? Or does he despair?...

"What I'm trying to do with my books is deal with the real world and present it in a realistic way before I then spin off into the unreal. Unless you're aware of the real problems of life you can't write about the fantastical. It's a kind of a seduction. Crime will always be there, and as the media becomes more sophisticated in reporting crime we'll see more of it on the news. I sense warning bells though because I think we've developed a very disaffected youth culture. I'm hoping, as a socialist, that our new government will turn things around. I'm very committed to that happening. But I've got this horrible feeling that we've got a youth culture without hope. One that doesn't care about the establishment, not realising that eventually they will become the establishment. They need something to believe in, to care about, to aim for.

"Speaking as an old-timer, in my day you could leave school and were pretty much guaranteed a job. It didn't matter what you were going to do. There was this clear-cut path: you got a job, paid your mother lodgings, went out three nights a week, got pissed. You went to the night-clubs, you fell in love. All that engendered respect: you had money, you were your own man. Now we have a post-Margaret Thatcher Tory culture where third generation kids have no fucking chance of a job. And that makes me so angry.

"The fourth part of The Frighteners was originally called 'Maggie's Children' but I had to change it because it was too controversial.

"People need dignity, they need respect. They need money in their pockets to go out and buy what the hell they want without having to resort to crime."

It's interesting that the Caffneys manage to enlist the young and direct their behaviour so easily. Their capacity for evil being greater because they're more malleable, more open to outside influence and persuasion. There's almost a Lord of the Flies scenario going on here.

"Lord of the Flies wasn't in my mind," muses the author, "but I think you might be right. Subconsciously it might have affected my portrayal of the children. Despite the fact that they're doing what the Caffneys want them to do, there's always a suggestion that fate might be involved. There are scenes where Jay sees naked terror in the eyes of these kids who are doing what the Caffneys want them to do. And you can sense not so much their reluctance but their horror at what they're doing. I'm convinced that the kids (in the book) are both entirely evil and entirely innocent. Especially because they're so young. At that age one's moral identity is more easily shaped and you're never entirely sure about the difference between right and wrong. That's why we teach children in the first place, isn't it?"

The Vorla is one of Chasm's most memorable "characters". A huge, dark, sentient tide that tries on several occasions to engulf its human antagonists by rising from the chasm and submerging them (both physically and mentally) when they least expect it. I suggest that the Vorla might, metaphorically-speaking, mirror society's youth rehabilitation centres where, instead of learning about dignity and morality, youth "master the art of crime" from the hardened criminals. That its sole purpose is to taint their pliant minds with its own inherent darkness.

"That's right," he agrees. "The whole point of the book is that the Vorla is us. You know, I carved this book out of my soul, but it also gave me the opportunity to say things that I really care about. Not just about the Caffneys but about the nature of the human condition. After all, all of us have the chance to be saints or demons. It's about deciding which way you want to go. And that's a hard choice to take."

So the Vorla is man's capacity for evil, the sub-conscious concentrated into physical form?

"Absolutely. It's the tangible essence of evil. If you go to the quote at the beginning of the book - and yes, it's probably bad form to quote from a previous book (this particular quote being from the character of Antony Curtis, a reporter for the Independent Daily in Laws' previous book, Somewhere South of Midnight) - when I was writing Somewhere South of Midnight the reporter was trying to sort out what the hell was going on around him.

Somewhere South of Midnight

Curtis comes up with a speech that really touched on what I wanted to explore to the extent that when I got to Chasm I just had to quote him. His speech was actually me thinking aloud, and the question he posed was, 'What if evil was tangible?' It comes out of us; it's a part of us but at the same time independent of us. To be honest it was a very complicated scenario to develop. By the end of Chasm you find that the characters have made the conscious decision to reject the evil in themselves. Instead they develop love, fidelity and faith and decide that's the direction they're going to go in."

In a interview with Fear magazine several years ago Laws said that for The Frighteners he made a conscious decision to view evil as part and parcel of man's soul, his psyche. In Chasm it's both internal and external; internal in that the evil of the Caffneys represents man's base survival instincts, in all its unpleasant manifestations; and external (physical) in that you also have the malignant, sentient reality of the Vorla. One is inextricably linked to the other.

"As I've said, intrinsically, the Vorla is us. The power and passion I derived from writing this book was from the characters, who find themselves in a new and frightening world after the quake, a world where the evil that men do is tangible and threatening. But for the first time they have the chance to have a hands-on battle with that evil. As the book progresses you find they're not just sitting there worrying about the evil inside them. It's there in front of them and they're presented with a chance that we, as 'observers', will never have: to confront evil and beat it back inside."

At this point, Laws becomes very emotional, and his voice begins to crack. Obviously this is an important novel to him.

"Yes, it was a big big important book for me, not in terms of the action and the zombies and stuff, but the real emotions I explored in it."

The Caffneys are like exaggerated "bad council tenants". The disruptive "bad apples" which sour and poison those around them (especially the youngsters in Chasm). The Vorla's concentrated evil only adds to their capacity for corruption, pouring fuel on the proverbial fire. We all know, or know someone who knows, a "bad" family, who spoil the neighbourhood for everyone else, something the author can personally relate to. "I've dealt with people like that" says Laws. "I found the Caffneys both fascinating and scary to write about. In fact, I had a hard time writing about them full stop. There were sequences where I could have gone a lot further because, let's face it, when a family like that go on the warpath - woe betide the unlucky bastard that gets in their way.

"Going back to the Vorla, being evil it offers itself to the good characters as well as the bad. But the good characters, people like Jay and Alex, come to reject it - and it hates them for it. The Caffneys however embrace the Vorla. At the end of the day, what can that lead to other than complete destruction?

"On the other hand, Jay and Juliet, and Gordon and Alex are the opposite. I was seriously into these characters when I was writing the book. They're all aspects of me but coming from different directions. I've written lots of characters which I've felt good about before but I feel truly powerful about the ones in Chasm."

I wondered if there was any relevance in the fact that several of the main characters in Chasm experience extreme emotions - anger and domestic violence from Alex and Candy, despair from Gordon as the bullies in the street outside his window mercilessly taunt him - just prior to the actual quake?

'Yes, good point," says Laws, nodding. "All the characters build to an emotional intensity where all these negative emotions contribute to their world literally falling apart. Having fallen apart they then have to go in whichever direction they can. In its original draft the book was incredibly powerful simply because it was very much more negative. I was asked to rewrite Jay O'Connor, for example, because his personality was so nihilistic."

I ask Laws about one of Chasm's creepiest creations - the Cherubim. Although ostensibly child-like in origin, these strange creatures are bat-like, lithe and inhumanely fast. In fact, they're almost angelic - but how many angels do you know that have teeth? What inspired this creation?

He laughs. "To be honest I haven't a clue! I think it's to do with afterlife and perceptions of afterlife in terms of angels and so on. I fucking love the Cherubim. It was such a task to make them real because they're such strange and surreal beings. I guess they're the first intonation in the book of a supernatural element. In fact, the first one you see is scrambling around on the shelves among the cornflakes packets. Weird!

"If there's anything that influenced the creation of these strange 'children' - and it wasn't a conscious decision when I was writing - then it's Larry Cohen's film It's Alive. Certainly the idea of children having fangs. Maybe the imagery from that film was in my mind when I conjured them. I'm not sure.

"More profoundly, I've been in churches where I've gone for personal solace and spiritual peace, and I couldn't help but notice that, up above you, are all these leering plaster saints. There's this very stern-looking Christ on the cross. And then there are the cherubs, perched in the balcony. And I think, 'What the hell are they doing up there? Aren't they going to fall and hurt themselves?' And that tight, curly hair. And the way they look at you. It makes you think to yourself: 'Christ! They're going to fly off there and bite somebody!'

"It was just the idea of this reversal. Of beautiful kids being absolute devils. Also, I guess it may have come out of Alex and Candy's loss of their kid. Thinking about their loss enough may somehow have conjured the Cherubim into being.

"The Cherubim are first and foremost amoral," explains Laws. "They're neither good nor evil. What they are is protective of each other. The only reason that guy gets killed at the start is because he stamps one of them to death. Because he's frightened. They know they're little, they know they're vulnerable, they know they're dangerous. In their world (and I can't tell you what that world is without giving away a major plot-point, sorry) adults aren't supposed to exist. But all of a sudden they turn up and there's this conflict between them. I love the way they're entranced when Gordon plays the guitar, for example. They don't harm him because the music is alien to them. In their way they're feral innocence. Innocence without morality. They will love you if you are yourself; but they'll tear your fucking throat out if you're bad!"

Some hours pass. We all go out to eat and then return for the infamous Saturday night BFS Raffle. Here, believe it or not, I win a certificate entitling me to appear as a character in the next Stephen Laws novel! Coincidence or what?! However, since it's likely to be a horror novel, I guess I'll die horribly. (Hope I get lots of sex first though!)

We resume the interview at the witching hour, both somewhat the worse for alcohol.

Seeing as there's a veritable deluge of disaster novels and movies doing the rounds at the moment (books like Simon Clark's King Blood and films such as Armageddon and Godzilla), I wondered whether Chasm was Laws' take on this perennially popular sub-genre?

"No," he states firmly. "I planned this before big movies came back into fashion. Now, of course, the trend is a return to the big disaster epics of the 70s. My problem is that it takes me a long time to write a new novel, and sometimes during the writing I get overtaken by books and movies.

Three months before Chasm came out people were saying, 'Oh! You must have been capitalising on a trend', but that wasn't the case.

Yes, Chasm is a disaster epic - even a movie if you like. It's got a big cast of characters, a disaster scenario- "

It's very visual.

"Thank you. That means a lot to me. In a way it's like The Poseidon Adventure, except the boat doesn't turn upside down. Chasm is about an earthquake. I mean, how are you going to handle that except to deal with the people who survive the quake? Unfortunately the trend appeared so there might be a tendency for people to think I'm cashing-in. What they don't know is that it took me two years to write it.

"I've got no doubt at all that the book I'm working on now will be second-guessed by the time it comes out next year. There'll be some new trend and again people will comment that I'm out to take advantage of it. But that's simply not the case. I only write the books I want to write."

Laws explores the nature of good and evil on quite an intellectual level in Chasm. Is he religious himself?

"Over the years my writing has been accused of being very religious, and probably profoundly Christian too. It's true that I have a deep belief in the spiritual nature of humankind. We're different from the animals in that respect. I mean, the very fact that we're sitting here now, doing this interview. It's not natural. We should be out in the fields grazing, procreating, whatever. Why are we doing this? It's because we're different - we're searching for a deeper meaning, which is something books can sometimes give us. I'm always keen to explore this spiritual angle, but in a very realistic setting.

"Let's take the question of what happens when you die. What Chasm does is take you one step beyond death. In this book I've put a bunch of - hopefully - very believable characters into a very strange scenario where it begins as an earthquake, and when the dust settles all of a sudden we're in a completely different, ruined world where the normal rules, as we understand them, no longer apply. And where damaged and forlorn people have a chance to either rape, riot and pillage; or alternatively, find love and redemption.

"I had - literally - the best of both worlds writing Chasm. Without giving too much away Chasm is also about alternate realities. With this book I could write for the characters the sort of scenario they would want to be in - and then switch back to reality. Have both a happy and a sad ending at the same time."

Laws' ultimate aim, though, is to give his readers a rollicking good read. "Above all I want people to come out of this book and think: 'Yes! That was excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed it.' It might not be good, but it's got my heart and soul in it. It's a case of telling a good, powerful story with a real human resonance to it. And if I never write anything again I'll be happy."

Originally appeared on the Masters of Terror website, 2000.