An Interview With William Meikle

William Meikle is the author of 9 published novels and over 150 short stories.  The following are available on Kindle: Darkness Follows, Carnacki: Heaven and Hell, The Haunting of Esther Cox, Brotherhood of the Thorns, Crustaceans, Chronicles of Augustus Seton, The Invasion (Extended Version), The Valley, The Road Hole Bunker Mystery, The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet, and Island Life. Question:  You have said of your novel, The Valley, that it was your tribute to Conan Doyle. Where you referring to its 19th century setting or the theme of this adventure narrative?  Answer: The origins of "The Valley" are pretty simple to trace. In Fortean circles there have been attempts to find a picture that many claim to have seen, yet no-one has been able to find. This fabled photograph is said to show a group of Civil-War era men standing in a row wearing big grins. Spreadeagled on the ground in front of them is the body of a huge bird, a being that could only come from pre-history. In some accounts this bird is a giant eagle, in others it is even stranger, a leathery, paper thin Pterosaur. Whatever the case, that image was the thing in my mind, and I had a "What if..." moment, wondering what would happen if cowboys came across a Lost World. From that single thought, the initial concept of The Valley was born.  Big beasties fascinate me.  Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche. I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it? On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up. Then there's the long tradition of Lost World tales, both in movies and fiction. Over the years I've devoured as many as I can find, from Conan Doyle through Haggard, from Tarzan in Pellucidar to Doug McLure in the Land that Time Forgot. Many of these tales involve dinosaurs, but I wanted something different. For a while I didn't know exactly what "creatures" I needed, but that all changed as soon as the setting clicked. Back in 2005 I had the good fortune to holiday in the Rockies. It was while scanning through photographs of that trip that the thought of the high mountain valley came to me, and when Neil Jackson told me about Montana and the Big Hole Valley, I knew I'd found my spot. And the pictures of the ice and snow from my trip also gave me the era from which I would draw my creatures -- the last Ice Age. I now knew that my protagonists would be heading into a Lost Valley where relic animals lived, and that these creatures would be hairy and large. I had an image of a herd of mammoths by a partially-frozen lake, and that was the image that drove me on in the early concepts. But, to wind back to the question, yes, Doyle is the grandaddy of the genre, and his works were among the first things I remember reading. If the Lost World is a tribute to anyone, it is to him. Question:  Most of your novels are set in Scotland. How important is Scottish folklore and mythology to you as a writer?  Answer: Most of my work, long and short form, has been set in Scotland, and a lot of it uses the history and folklore. There's just something about the misty landscapes and old buildings that speaks straight to my soul. (Bloody Celts... we get all sentimental at the least wee thing). But I think it's the people that influence me most. Everybody in Scotland's got stories to tell, and once you get them going, you can't stop them. I love chatting to people, (usually in pubs) and finding out the -weird- shit they've experienced. My Glasgow PI, Derek Adams is mainly based on a bloke I met years ago in a bar in Partick, and quite a few of the characters that turn up and talk too much in my books can be found in real life in bars in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews. I grew up in the West Coast of Scotland in an environment where the supernatural was almost commonplace. My grannie certainly had a touch of “the sight”, always knowing when someone in the family was in trouble. There are numerous stories told of family members meeting other, long dead, family in their dreams, and I myself have had more than a few encounters, with dead family, plus meetings with what I can only class as residents of faerie. I have had several precognitive dreams, one of which saved me from a potentially fatal car crash.  I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as “weird shit”. I’ve spent far too much time surfing and reading fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction. So, there’s that, and the fact that I was grew up with the sixties explosion of popular culture embracing the supernatural and the weird. Hammer horror movies got me young, and led me back to the Universal originals. My early reading somehow all tended to gravitate in similar directions, with DC comics leading me into pulp and to finding Tarzan. Tarzan is the second novel I remember reading. (The first was Treasure Island, so I was already well on the way to the land of adventure even then.) I quickly read everything of Burroughs I could find. Then I devoured Wells, Verne and Haggard. I moved on to Conan Doyle before I was twelve, and Professor Challenger’s adventures in spiritualism led me, almost directly, to Dennis Wheatley, Algernon Blackwood, and then on to Lovecraft. Then Stephen King came along. There’s a separate but related thread of a deep love of detective novels running parallel to this, as Conan Doyle also gave me Holmes, then I moved on to Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Ed McBain, reading everything by them I could find.  Mix all that lot together, add a dash of ZULU, a hefty slug of heroic fantasy from Howard, Leiber and Moorcock, a sprinkle of fast moving Scottish thrillers from John Buchan and Alistair MacLean, and a final pinch of piratical swashbuckling. Leave to marinate for fifty years and what do you get?  A psyche with a deep love of the weird in its most basic forms, and the urge to beat the shit out of monsters. Question:  A writer with a shared interest in fantasy and horror fiction is Stephen King. After many experiments in various genres he seems to have most fun where his imagination finds the least number of formal restrictions. Is that the genre's appeal for you, too?  Answer: It's pulp fiction that interests me, and I find that it crosses many genres almost seamlessly. I rarely think about "genre" anyway. I write what I want to write and leave marketing labels to the publishers. That said, there -is- indeed a freedom in writing about the supernatural where, instead of having a man come in with a gun to get the scene moving, you can have any manner of things going on as long as you can explain them away to the reader's satisfaction. The verisimilitude matters though -- the reader has to -believe-, and that can be difficult to pull off. Question: Some biographical information? Answer: I'm a fifty-something Scotsman, now living in Newfoundland.  I didn't chose writing, it chose me. The urge to write is more of a need, a similar addiction to the one I used to have for cigarettes and still have for beer. I -nearly- became a scientist. I have a degree in Botany, specialising in the archaeological history that can be gleaned from studying peat bogs. But I couldn't get a grant for a PhD, then I followed a woman to London and ended up by accident more than design in a career in IT. I actually took it seriously for a while, but the need to write slowly welled up and subsumed it a few years back. That, and the fact that I like to move around and not be tied to one place for any length of time has limited career opportunities a bit. According to my family I'm "away with the fairies" too often for anything else to hold my attention for long. When I was at school my books and my guitar were all that kept me sane in a town that was going downhill fast. The steelworks shut and employment got worse. I -could- have started writing about that, but why bother? All I had to do was walk outside and I'd get it slapped in my face. That horror was all too real. So I took up my pen and wrote. At first it was song lyrics, designed (mostly unsuccessfully) to get me closer to girls.    I tried my hand at a few short stories but had no confidence in them and hid them away. And that was that for many years.  I didn't get the urge again until I was past thirty and trapped in a very boring job. My home town had continued to stagnate and, unless I wanted to spend my whole life drinking (something I was actively considering at the time), returning there wasn't an option. Back in the very early '90s I had an idea for a story... I hadn't written much of anything since the mid-70s at school, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I had an image in my mind of an old man watching a young woman's ghost. That image grew into a story, that story grew into other stories, and before I knew it I had an obsession in charge of my life. So it all started with a little ghost story, "Dancers"; one that ended up getting published in All Hallows, getting turned into a short movie, getting read on several radio stations, getting published in Greek, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew, and getting reprinted in The Weekly News in Scotland.  Years on I've written other ghost stories, but have increasingly moved away from that first love towards more pulpy concerns, of men and monsters, beer and ciggies, big guns and loose women, swords and sorcery, aliens and mass carnage. But just this past year, the cycle has turned again, and I find my interest in the spectre renewed. I've written several straight ghost stories for GWP chapbooks, had an ebook of CARNACKI: GHOSTFINDER tales published, and sold a handful of stories to professional anthologies featuring old-school haunts and spectres.  Part of this renewed interest has to do with me starting to feel my age in my second half-century, where my aches and pains are growing and my youth seems ever further away, so that I find myself looking forward to what might lie ahead.  But mostly I think it's love... a love for the old stories, for the strange and the weird, for the supernatural in its more obscure forms. I write to escape.  I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it. Question:  What's next for you and your audience?  Answer: I have numerous work in the pipeline. There's the already placed work  - the 3rd Midnight Eye Book is due this fall, with Derek fighting a werewolf cult in Glasgow and Newfoundland - a Viking vs Yeti ebook that's a -load- of fun. - various chapbooks and box sets are coming from the Penny Dreadful Company - several novels and ebooks are coming from Ghostwriter Publications - there are three film scripts in various stages of production, including a film version of the 1st Midnight Eye File: The Amulet - a much anticipated appearance of The Midnight Eye in Cthulhu 2012, a hardcover anthology from Mythos Books  - and I've got stories coming in several other professional anthologies And I'm working on the 4th Midnight Eye File novel, which involves something evil lurking under the Merchant City. And there's the submissions. I've got stories out at seven other anthologies, four magazines, two podcasts and a newspaper, and a novel looking for a big publisher. All details at my website at http://www.williammeikle.com  This interview is also scheduled to appear on eBOOK HIGHLIGHTS.