Anne Billson: Bleeding London Dry

Interview by Gerald Houghton (1996)

Freelance, novelist and self-confessed Charles Willeford fan, Anne Billson was born in Stockport in 1954. She studied graphic design at the Central School of Art and Design, lived briefly in Japan, and served time as a secretary, cinema cashier and photographer. These days she writes on film for the Sunday Telegraph and GQ. She is also the author of two of the most refreshing British horror novels of the last five years.

A Who's Who entry would list interests including opera, gardening (although, alas, since leaving Cambridge she no longer has one), and skin diseases. 'I like medical books with lurid illustrations,' she says. 'I'm one of those people who takes David Cronenberg movies personally.' These days she lives in London.

Oooh-whee-oooh
Anne Billson's first book was an inauspicious film novelisation for New English Library, Dream Demon. It was that rare thing, a Brit-horror flick. Made in 1988, it starred Kathleen Wilhoite and Jemma Redgrave, with alleged comic relief by way of Tim Spall and Jimmy Nail. It was not good.

Anne Billson: I would never cast any of my books out into the cold and pretend I hadn't written them, or wish I hadn't. I know lots of people who do books like this and consider it a kind of hack work, but that's cheating. Though Dream Demon wasn't really an original I did enjoy writing it because they were dithering over the end of the film. That's why, when I wrote it, I actually made up quite a lot. I'm quite fond of it, but I don't think it's in print any more. I think it reads very well. I did it for not very much money, my first fiction writing job.

The original screenplay was by a friend of mine [Christopher Wicking] which is how I came to do the novelisation. But I think it got too many people pulling it this way and that. Like a film made by committee, going in different directions at once. I thought some of the casting was rather weak and the director [Harley Cokliss] wasn't very good. Jemma Redgrave was awful, although she's got better since. But when I first saw it I thought she was just dreadful, and when your main character is that bad. . . It had some interesting ideas. It was a bit of a botched job, but it had the right idea.

I'd like to see more English horror films. Although Hellraiser [was very good] it was compromised. It was shot in Dollis Hill and they gave everyone American accents, and it was so obviously North London. It was a shame because it was so peculiarly English.

Fresh Talent
The London of Billson's debut proper, Suckers, was the Cool Britannia of the eighties, awash in smart young things and chic Docklands towerblocks vibrating with potency and prestige. The narrator, Dora Vale, a 'creative consultant' (she makes up market research and calls it conceptual art), visits the headquarters of the uber-voguish Bellini magazine only to discover, for sinister reasons, that it does its business at night.

Aware there's little mileage in milking the nocturnal Bellini board, Billson plays on our jaded preconceptions, unconsciously remaking Hammer's Satanic Rites of Dracula as a black, bloodletting yuppie-scum comedy. This deft blend of Bram Stoker and Julie Burchill earned her place on Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists' list for 1993.

I'd seen [The Satanic Rites of Dracula] before - seen all of the Dracula things before - and I think I saw it again or read about it again after I'd written the book, and thought 'Oh yeah, that all ties in.' I quite like the film, but it's the one they all dump on. I'm not one of those people, like at the beginning of Stiff Lips, who can point at a picture of Christopher Lee with fangs and tell you exactly which Dracula it comes from.

I got the actual idea for Suckers at the end of the eighties, but it took so long to write that it was the nineties before it came out. It's definitely rooted in the eighties. It's probably the most autobiographical book in some ways, because when I'd go to parties I'd see everyone wearing black. Everyone. All the women would have the same frock on, which was slightly galling to someone like me who been deliberately trying to dress in black for decades. If I wanted to retain my individuality I had to dress in colour. I'd like to think I'm a nicer person than Dora.

Our narrator's spiky asides and snotty past hardly make her sympathetic, and the novel revolves around her on-going romantic obsession with the vacuously arrogant - and married - Duncan that will have most readers scratching their heads. When his wife falls prey to the undead, Dora can see only green lights all the way.

You can let rip with a character in a book. They can be a bit like you - but then you can off-load on them all the things you'd never dare do. That's why I say that Suckers is a little autobiographical - not in all ways, fortunately. Certainly there was an incident where I made an offer for a flat and got gazumped. And I often wondered how interesting it would be to actually stalk the occupant of the house. They'd never know who it was or why. But I never followed through, just thought 'What if?' And so Dora in the book actually does that.

At some point Salman Rushdie called it a satire - a satire on the eighties - but once he'd said that it was like the word of God. Everybody assumed that that was it. Though it was very nice of him, everybody kind of refused to think for themselves after that. So whenever anybody mentions the book, that's what they quote. I suppose that happens when someone is well known enough, they make one thing gospel. It may very well be satire, but I wrote it as a story, and if someone responds to it then great.

I have a real attachment to storytelling - it's hugely underrated, I think. Some people think they can get away without it and, unless you're a genius like Bunuel, you can't. I don't think you necessarily have to tell the story in a straightforward way, but there has to be a good story there. Once you have it you can throw it out the window, but there has to be some sort of structure. I don't want to impress people with my writing, I want them to think, 'Hey, this is a really good read.' I want you to keep reading to the end. I'm always starting a literary novel and [finding] there's no reason why you'd want to finish it. Take it or leave it. I really really want to know what happens.

The Land of Silk and Honey
This year's Stiff Lips is Billson's take on that most troubled form, the ghost story. Claire, a bit fat, a bit unfashionable, has a friend called Sophie - Sophie Antigone Warbeck Macallan - who is the height of fashion: money, talent, gorgeous new Notting Hill flat. Sophie has it all. And ghosts.

They play in her flat, these ghosts. Music. Seeing they're the unquiet spirits of the Drunken Boats, rotten Prog-rockers who died in violent circumstances at the arse-end of one unmemorable LP. Someone suggests the house should have a Black Plaque: 'It's like a Blue Plaque, only black.' Sophie doesn't mind, though Claire is jealous. Sophie even finds a new boyfriend upstairs in the bookish Robert. Until someone mentions that no one's lived upstairs since a man called Robert slashed his throat ear-to-ear in the bathroom mirror.

I was always going to write a ghost story. I think one of the original inspirations for it was the film Ghost, with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. I wasn't too keen on it, but from a story point of view it had interesting ideas. I just wished Patrick Swayze had been evil; it would've been so much more fun. I tried to write that version in a way. The evil version of Ghost.

Stiff Lips is a good fifty pages too long, but the balance of its ghosts between fear and favour is deft and offsets some slightly limp social comedy that reads like Suckers off-cuts. The cover may be crap, but the contents are far less James Herbert than you might think. So, given her vampires and now ghosts, we ask: is Billson determined to novel her way through the horror pantheon here?

It's not intentional. I like horror, but I don't feel in a way that I'm writing standard horror stories. I don't think it's any desire of mine to write something specifically different but it's the way they come out. They probably come out more mainstream than horror, though I'd be quite happy for them to be straight down the line horror. But yes, I guess all my ideas tend to come from that area. The next one I guess you'd call a Rosemary's Baby type - demon pregnancies - which is the one I'm writing at the moment. So yeah, it's not that I consciously think which sub-genre shall I dip into next, but obviously I didn't want to write another vampire when I'd just done one. Maybe I'll write another when I've got through all the other sub-genres.

I don't really consider them anything [generic]. Like I don't think people set out to write (or maybe they do?) a bestseller or a novel like this. I set out with an original idea and what comes out isn't necessarily what the original idea was.

I like horror fiction. I think it's the one underrated genre. The most underrated genre. Crime and thrillers are now slightly respectable. Especially in this country. Elmore Leonard and so on are really regarded with a lot of respect. The equivalent here probably not quite so much. But mention horror and everyone will not take it seriously. I think Stephen King, for example is a really good American writer. I mean he has lots of faults but he's a damn good story teller, but no one will ever take him seriously, because he writes in a popular genre.

I haven't read much contemporary horror fiction in the last couple of years because I've been trying to write it, but when I was doing a lot of horror reviewing for The Times (I think I did the first broadsheet literary page horror round-up, which I'm rather proud of - letters to The Times for quite a few years) I was reading some great stuff. People like Ramsey Campbell are just not given the recognition they deserve, just because they're horror writers. If you read these books they tell you more about the state of the nation today and the place we live in than a lot of so-called literary novels. Plus, you get a damn good story. It's not because they're not well written, it's because they tell a story without rambling around. It's weird, but only time will tell.

Does Stiff Lips owe something to Ramsey Campbell?

Quite likely, but not consciously. The conscious things I think are probably MR James; you can't write a ghost story without owing something to MR James somewhere. Obviously Turn of The Screw. You probably noticed in the very structure of Stiff Lips, I nodded towards traditional ghost stories. The way there's a group of people sitting around telling each other stories, which in a way most MR James stories are: some old codgers in their club saying 'This happened to a friend of mine, you know.' It's always several times removed from reality.

[In Stiff Lips] it's a bit of an affectation, I know. It doesn't have that much bearing on the story, though at the same time I wanted to emphasise the unreliability of the narrator, get you a few steps removed so you're never quite sure if the story is true. The most pretentious allusion or influence is probably Joseph Conrad, which was completely accidental. I was reading a Conrad book a few years ago and the structure was so complicated. First it was the narrator, with Conrad's voice, then within that was another narrator, and inside that was somebody telling a story. It was wonderfully complicated and I liked that idea and I tried to pay homage to that in a way. Hence the Conrad quote at the beginning of the book.

I like it in a book like this, where the events are dodgy. I'm not saying it's a psychological story and not a ghost story, but all the most fun ghost stories have that area and all those layers of narrative, and we're never quite sure when one starts and one stops and whose story it is. If it's the truth. Gives it an extra edge, especially when you're dealing with something that may or may not be real.

And are the book's ghosts real?

Well, I don't think I can answer that, I have to leave that up to the readers, but I hate those stories where you wake up and it was all a dream. I think the house is incredibly haunted; there are loads of ghosts in it. But I just think there's more of an edge - and it's a bit more scary - if you're not quite sure. When I was younger I never actually believed in ghosts, but that didn't rule out my seeing one! And in a way that would be even more scary, if you didn't believe in what you were seeing and you still saw it. I thought that would be just as frightening, if not more.

You have no idea of the power of the human mind. For all you know ghosts might be a part of that in the same way that psychosomatic diseases are no less worse than ones with a physical condition. I'm sceptical about this, in the way that I'm sceptical about everything.

I took it [the title] from a Japanese pop group. In about '79-80 I lived in Japan and there was a pop song which I thought was called 'Steel Flips', as in some sort of mechanoid dolphin. Then I read the lyrics and it was like 'Stiff Lips', and it just stuck at the back of my head and got recycled all those years later. I was going to call it Dead Heads at one point until someone pointed out that was fans of the Grateful Dead. I didn't want to get mistaken for a book about the Grateful Dead. It's really difficult with titles. I don't think it's perfect but it's quite sort of catchy.

'Lighten up, Jodie'
More recently Billson has joined the ranks of those penning mini-books for the BFI's Modern Classics series, elaborating on her love for John Carpenter's grue-spattered remake of The Thing and talking to the director himself about its making.

The film itself is a masterpiece of its kind, but since its kind is really little more than a superior haunted-house-cum-monster-picture, Billson's unenviable task is to try to explain the mechanics of two film types that scarcely need explanation when they work this well.

As a consequence, her book is fannish without offering any perceptibly personal point of view, studiously dismembering scenes of brilliant cinematic tension that look flat and hackneyed on the page. The X-Files doesn't plagiarise for nothing.

[The BFI] wrote me a letter saying do you want to do one, and they sent a list of possible films and I said 'I don't like any of these'. But I gave them a list of films I wouldn't mind doing. A couple of them were already being done - Chinatown and The Shining. I know Blade Runner's been done but I couldn't face that. I quite fancied The Charge Of The Light Brigade, the Tony Richardson version, which I think is one of the underrated movies. Nobody likes it. Richard Lester's Three Musketeers. I really like the story. And Dawn of The Dead.

But I was kind of glad I chose The Thing because it's ripe for reassessment. It's time it got its due. And also, I don't think anyone's ever given Carpenter his due. I really liked Escape From LA It was stupid, but it was really good fun, and everyone I sent to see it enjoyed it. Again it was one those the critics hated, but what's wrong with a film being fun?

[The Thing] is hugely underrated. Everybody dumped on it when it came out. Everybody. I went to see it around the same time with a friend and we were both knocked out. I wasn't a film critic then, and it wasn't the first time there was something I disagreed with the critics about, but it was just such a disappointment that no one saw anything in this film. I just thought it was so tense. I really thought I was going to have to walk out of the cinema in the first half-hour - the thought of what was going to come along. It was the classic limited number of characters in a limited situation, but done with such flair. And it had this sort of epic feel to it. It's a film that I've watched so many times. I think it's a landmark.

People are starting to appreciate it now, but it's not the classic fan base. Through the years I've met all these people who say they like it, and the big shame is that many are much too young to have ever have seen it on the big screen. All they've seen is the hideous pan and scan version which doesn't give a true impression of this brilliant widescreen epic quality.

John Carpenter is a man of the seventies, his film-making sensibility really is very seventies, and that was out of order in the eighties. He never gets the recognition he deserves. He makes movies to entertain people.

I get so annoyed with these critics - even though I am one. The current thing that annoys me is the received wisdom that Elizabeth Hurley is a really bad actress. 'Okay, so she's in Austin Powers, let's let rip her to bits and say how bad she is. She can't deliver her lines, she's really lame, she's a bit wooden.' And everybody's gone through that, and I think, she's not great, but she's not that bad, you know?

Not like Uma Thurman.

Oh god, she's awful! And I'm getting hugely fed up with Jodie Foster. I mean, she can act but I'm getting so fed up with her humourlessness. She's a great actress and she's done some great stuff, but really, lighten up Jodie! It's the way everybody piles on with their twopenny worth. Saying the same thing without thinking it through.

Suckers and Stiff Lips may still be around (it's now 1999) as Pan paperbacks. The Thing was published by the British Film Institute as part of their paperback Modern Classics series and may also be in print. The Dream Demon novelisation (written as a novel and reading as such) was published by NEL (not the current incarnation of that imprint) in 1989.