Gathering Clouds: An Interview with Storm Constantine
by David Kendall (1995)
How did you get into writing?
I've written since I was a little kid. Right from when I first learned to string letters together I wrote little stories which I illustrated, so it's something that's been with me all my life.
And always about mythological subjects?
Yes. My parents gave me loads of books on Ancient Egypt and Greece. I was brought up on those myths rather than traditional fantasy like Tolkien or anything, so I came from that angle really.
Did you write for any of the small press magazines before your first novel was published?
No. I used to write for myself and my friends all the way through my school and teenage years and the only thing that made me think about it seriously, I suppose, was that I was galloping towards 30, I was about 25 at the time, and I thought, This is it. What's going to happen to me? I was working in a library and I thought, I do not want to work for local government for the rest of my life -- big revaluation time -- and I thought, what could I do writing words? So I decided to try and finish something. I was just really lucky the first person that saw it bought it. That was the first Wraeththu book.
Your books are all pretty long.
Yeah, they go on a bit.
They must take you a while to write.
It takes me about a year to produce a book, but actual writing time is only about three months because I do a lot of other stuff in between. It's writing the first drafts that's really difficult.
About Stalking Tender Prey: I don't know whether it's fair to say you've altered your style but you've certainly changed your language.
Do you think so? That's interesting, tell me about it.
Well for me, after reading something like Burying the Shadow, it seems you're using... let me try and phrase this properly. You're using simpler language I think.
There is a reason for that: one of the reasons might be that about a year and a half ago I started teaching a writing class, and obviously when you're working with other people you read up a lot on the mechanics of the craft. I think one of the things I've learned as I've been editing other people is conciseness and clarity are really important in writing, so maybe my own style has been affected by what I've been doing with them.
I just noticed that you're using words that are familiar as opposed to those that are unfamiliar most of the time, and it moved the story along faster because of that. But Prey is also something of a commercial change as well, in that you've set the novel in the contemporary world.
Well obviously, after being a fantasy writer for nearly 11 years and reaching only a limited audience, there is the temptation to go for a wider audience. One of the mechanics of that is to set the work in the contemporary world which apparently people find easy to cope with, so there's that and perhaps a simplification of the language I use.
And often by setting work in the contemporary world it means that you can use actual magic rituals and practices that are about without having to cloak it in invented names and terms. You can use shamanic experiences and call it shamanic without having to create a whole new mythos around it of your own.
That's true. All the stuff that appears in the Grigori trilogy; I've worked with Andrew Collins closely. Andy works with psychics a lot, and much of the material they come up with he couldn't possibly put in a non-fiction book because it sounds too off the wall. For fiction it's superb. The visionary sequences in Prey and the sequels are all from his psychic Debbie Benstead, things that Andy couldn't use, so I've had it.
Have you bent it to your own mythos? Or did the nature of the psychic's visions dictate what you wrote around it?
Well, Andy's looking into the history of the Nephilim and the Watchers very closely and he's using known facts, stuff that's actually been dug up. At the same time he's working with psychics and visionary material which is conjecture really. I don't know if it's true or not, but it's superb for fiction.
Have you done any psychic questing yourself?
I've done bits. Not so much questing: I've done a lot of magical work with Andy, experimenting with stuff, trying to get information.
And that's connected with your own work?
Yes. Andy's finished one book and he's going to do another one, still working on the same subject, and so am I.
Did you meet him by chance?
No. A few years ago Andy sent a copy of The Black Alchemist to Carl McCoy. I was down at Carl's house and he said, I've had this book through. I looked at it and we thought, weird, as you do when you're first confronted with this sort of material. You think this guy is mad or a liar. Anyway, years later, before I started the Grigori trilogy, I got a letter from Andy. He'd been put in touch with me by Jamie Spracklen, who produces a fanzine called Hieroglyphica. He'd said to Andy, I know this author who's working on the same material as you, maybe you should talk. So I got a letter off Andy, remembered who he was and thought, oh dear, don't know about this. We arranged to meet and the minute I met him and Debbie, and Richard who's his researcher, we hit it off brilliantly. I realised he wasn't mad, he was a really nice guy and we've been close friends ever since.
Does your figure of Shemyaza come from Collins' research into the Fallen Angel statue in Rosslyn Chapel?
No. My interest in Shemyaza predates that. When I was researching for the Wraeththu trilogy, way back in the eighties, I came across this character and it was such a fascinating subject. There's something about fallen angels that really grips peoples' imaginations. There's something strange about it, almost as if it were a racial memory.
But is that an actual race or rather symbolic of the loss myth in general?
What Andy's doing, I don't know whether it's fact or not. I can be sceptical and I like to have hard evidence. The evidence at the moment seems to suggest the myths are based on an actual race who weren't supernatural or anything like that. The reason they were depicted as having wings is that they used to cut off the wings of griffin vultures and use them in their shamanic rituals. So, to other people, they would be like winged men because they had these 13 or 14 foot wings on their shoulders. Cave paintings have been found which depict these people wearing wings so we think that's where these myths come from.
So does that mean they were a separate race or a different tribe within the same race?
A different tribe but slightly more spiritually advanced. Evidence also suggests that not so much technologically, but with medicine, astronomy and mathematics they were slightly more advanced.
That's interesting: in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wildman, Michael Taussig talks about the way the Indians in the lowlands of South America were viewed by whites as having magical powers. For those Indians it was another tribe up in the Highlands that had the real access to those powers: the idea that you could almost project magical powers on to someone.
I think one of the interesting things about highlands/lowlands is the word 'heaven': you know that the angels are supposed to come from heaven. When you look at the root word for heaven, the really ancient words, what heaven really means is 'high place' and high place could be anything. In Prey they come from the mountains.
Which goes along with the vultures you mentioned earlier; that their nests might have been in high places. So you have done a lot of work with Andy Collins?
Yes. I've edited From The Ashes of Angels [a Michael Joseph hardback] for him, and he's helped me with research and plot ideas, mainly because we're going at the same subject from different angles: fiction and non-fiction.
So are you using the research to create your own synthesis of the fictional and mythical sources?
Absolutely, yes. I don't stick to the facts as Andy presents them, I'll think, maybe for a fictional book they need to be bent a bit here and there.
And often you can be more truthful to your subject in fiction than when you're reporting facts?
Yes.
Hermaphrodites and androgynous figures appear frequently in your work. Is that tied up with your interest in angels?
Originally that was the first research I did into the subject: they were regarded as androgynous or could take on flesh and choose which sex they were, which inspired the Wraeththu material. But the stuff I've got into recently seems to suggest they were a race of men and women.
What else influenced you as an early writer?
Like I said, I started with Egyptian and Greek myths. Then I was about 14 I discovered Michael Moorcock and this was like an epiphany to me really. Here was someone creating his own new myths, somebody who was writing the stuff I'd read all my life, but it was new and original. He'd invented his pantheon and it inspired me to think I could do this too. Then I got into Tanith Lee and Jane Gaskell and went on from there really.
Ursula Le Guin? Were the Earthsea books an influence?
No. I read the Earthsea stuff quite late on. And then someone said to me, 'Oh, you've obviously read Left Hand of Darkness because that's about hermaphrodites.' I hadn't; I tried to read it just after the Wraeththu books came out and just couldn't get into it. It was too clinical, there wasn't really any passion in it for me.
Another thing that seems quite central to your work is the exchange of magical energies via sex: images of vampirism and elements of Tantrism. The idea that sex is for something other than procreation and pleasure.
Yes.
I wondered if that came from the ideas of sex magic itself, or were you using it as a metaphor.
Yes. I suppose it is a metaphor really, but I think that the energies you conjure in sex... it's like energy can't be destroyed, it only changes. From a young age when I first discovered sex, I wondered what happened to it. It seemed like a really potent force and that's where my interests about it came from, getting to it via fiction.
Do you think of your books as being Gothic?
People tell me they are.
What about yourself?
No, not really. When you look at what is traditionally Gothic fiction I don't think that all my work fits into that category. I suppose it's seen as Gothic because of the way I look.
One element of Gothic fiction is the use of discarded folk myths, but there also seems to be a kind of pagan Gothic imagery in Prey.
I must admit that I'm not into modern paganism. I find it a bit too twee and fluffy and I'm not into that.
Also, there are some very Brontesque images in Prey; and twins, is that something you're interested in?
I think twins are an interesting subject. A lot of writers have explored the special relationship that twins have. There's something, I don't know, esoteric about it, and things that perhaps haven't been investigated quite so fully about the connections they have spiritually as well as physically.
Does that tie in with Ancient Egyptian faiths of brother-sister relationships?
Yes [laughs]. There's a lot of that in Egyptian mythology so I suppose it is connected with that.
I just wondered if that was one of the focal points you spin your fiction around.
I don't actually choose any focal points. What comes out at the time comes out, and I think readers are better placed to analyse things afterwards because they've got the distance to look at a body of work and make deductions. A writer is very close to a body of work and a lot of it is unconscious. You don't sit there and say right, I'm going to weave this or that element in here, it just happens.
Lost races and inherited bloodlines in fantasy often get criticised as reactionary.
I haven't really thought about it a great deal. There is something in us that the idea of an aristocracy appeals to; a tenurated, rarefied section of the community that is special. I don't think that is reflected in modern day society but I think as far as fantasy or the historical stuff is concerned, the aristocracy are something different and special.
There's certainly a lot of subcultures that like to think of themselves as aristocratic or special.
If you look at the origins of the aristocracy, it's the Watcher imagery, the people who actually interbred with the angels and so had royal blood. This made them different physically and mentally, so as far as my books are concerned the attraction is that.
You've also woven in bits from Gothic music subculture as well.
Yeah, definitely.
Have you read Poppy Z Brite, who has done similar things?
Yes. Obviously it was brought to my attention. People said, 'Oh, you've got to read her, she's on the same wavelength as you.' So I read her stuff and I love her short stories. I've actually used them in class as examples of superb short fiction. Some of them are just so well put together, there's not a spare word, and the plots are excellent. The novels are interesting. I like reading them, but I don't think she's done her best one yet.
It's interesting how vampires got transposed onto that landscape of Southern Gothic. Obviously we don't have that here, but you've managed to use the bleak heathery landscape very well. That Brontesque Romantic imagery works very well with vampire figures.
Well, I think the way the Gothic subculture has arisen is interesting, and the way that vampire fiction in itself is a genre now. I think Anne Rice did a lot to promote that Southern Gothic. She was certainly responsible for that.
But the way that vampires have gone, from Byronesque aristocrats to rock stars, then back to the 'street', is fascinating in its own right.
Yes. I mean when it started off it was a hideous monster, something to be shunned. It captivated people, but not through beauty, just the sheer monstrosity of it, and now we've turned it into this sort of sex symbol where the vampires are all really good looking. I think the way people have done that is interesting. I've done it myself in novels too.
Well, you certainly don't get the Max Schreck/Nosferatu figure very often anymore.
And that was the original image, wasn't it? How did that change?
You going to explain that to me? How did it happen?
Well, I think that vampirism is a metaphor for oral sex. There's all this sucking business, and also it's like sexual Russian Roulette when the vampire visits you, you either get immortal life and eternal youth with this sexy creature or you die. And when you've got that thing scratching at your window you don't know what you're going to get. It's obviously a romantic image for people, when you think of all the Vampire societies that have sprung up there's obviously some deep core archetypal need being fulfilled there.
Do you belong to any of those?
No, though one of their founder people, Tina Russ, has written for Visionary Tongue, a magazine I'm involved with.
But to get back to vampires and sex. If what you say is true then that would say we're more at ease with sex now than we were 100 years ago.
[laughs] I think I really needed not to have had a few beers beforehand to think of the sociological aspects of this. Sorry.
Where are you planning on going with the trilogy of angel books?
It finishes in Kurdistan which is, of course, Eden. The third book takes it right back into the mountains, to the source.
And why do you think that angels are so popular in fiction at the moment?
Maybe this is millennium fever creeping up on people. I think it's going to be big, and this is something Andy thinks as well. Not so much the fluffy little denizens of God type angels but I think that the fallen angel, bestower of knowledge, going against the heavenly hierarchy iis certainly catching on. I think there'll be more novels about it. Graham Masterton has already done one about the Watchers, called The Sleepers. I think it's going to be a real big thing as we creep up toward the millennium. People, scholars are thinking it.
That's the angel as symbol of rebellion rather than harbinger of doom?
Oh, nothing like that. It's all to do with knowledge: forbidden knowledge. To me, angels stand for rebellion, questioning and knowledge really.
So, do you publish your own writing in Visionary Tongue?
I don't write in it. I'm an editor. It takes up the time I used to spend managing a band. They've split up now anyway.
Did this come from your creative writing course?
It started off as that. I used to do a magazine for my students and a fanzine for the band, and when the band [Empyrean] split up and I wasn't doing that anymore I missed it. And of course the Nephilim weren't working either. I used to do a lot of work on the Watchmen fanzine so I missed that too. My friend Eloise [Coquio] and I thought, what can we do that's different. We didn't want to do a musically orientated magazine because there's plenty of those, so we thought of fiction, specifically the sort of fiction we like.
Do your novels get many sales in America?
The Wraeththu books sell really well in America. They're the only books I still get royalties off, really. I've not managed to sell anything else there because they're very resistant to what they call 'mystical material.' I do quite well in Australia.
I wouldn't have thought Americans were particularly resistant to mystical material.
Publishers underestimate their audience. I think the audience would like it but the publishers are very reticent. They want derivative sword and sorcery stuff or else horror, and I think I fall between two stools, that's the trouble.
And a lot of American horror is specifically urban or in small towns.
[laughs] And in America. I used to have an American agent. I sent her a synopsis of Prey, and she asked me to set it in America. How can I possibly write a convincing novel about America when I've never been there?
So, after this trilogy, do you think you'll be finished with angels?
There's so much material: so much stuff that Andy's hoicking out of all sorts of obscure tomes.
This is all from the ancient Hebrew?
The Dead Sea Scrolls have provided a lot of material, and also Sumerian cuneiforms and cylinders. All kinds of stuff that's never been used by writers before because it hasn't been translated before, basically. Oh, I'll never be finished with them.
The first two parts of the trilogy, Stalking Tender Prey and Scenting Hallowed Blood, are available now, published by Signet in paperback.