Dan Holloway interview: The Company of Fellows

The Company of Fellows by Dan Holloway

70p/99c

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Nook

As well as thrillers, Dan Holloway writes and performs transgressive shorts with titles like Meat, SKIN BOOK, The Last Fluffer in La La Land, and The Things We Talked About While She Was Bleeding Out, which can all be found in his collection (life:) razorblades included. He is also the author of literary novels Songs from the Other Side of the Wall and The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes (all royalties from which are being donated to the Red Cross Tsunami Relief Fund)

Can you sum up The Company Of Fellows in no more than 25 words?

Imagine the Hannibal Lecter novels set in Oxford University

How important is a book's central character?

Absolutely essential, especially if you’re writing a series. The problem a writer faces though is balancing their protagonist against their villain. A villain is always more fun for the writer and more alluring for the reader. If you’re writing one-offs you can give in to that to some extent. You can’t if you’re writing a series, because however great your villain readers will come back for the second book if they love the protagonist. Which is also a great exercise for the author because it makes you put the effort into the repeated characters. The other challenge I’ve found with a serial character is how to keep enough back to allow them to develop over the series, or at least to allow the reader new information.

My main character, Tommy West, has a massive great conflict at his centre which gives me all kinds of fun to play with. He was a successful academic till he had a breakdown. He reinvented himself as an interior designer, but he desperately misses the intellectual cut and thrust of the life he left behind – only going back to it brings back all the ghosts that sent him to his breakdown first time round. So I get to dangle him on this tightrope, unable to resist mysteries that draw him back into that world, but unable to cope when he gets there. It gives an extra dimension of danger to everything he does.

What aspects of marketing your book do you enjoy?

Live readings. Without a shadow of a doubt. Like I get tiresome saying to people, we don’t write books we write stories, and storytelling has a history that stretches back way way before the written word to the campfire. I just don’t get any writer who doesn’t relish standing or sitting in front of a live audience and watching the whites of their eyes as the story unfolds, listening to the laughter turn to gasps, watching faces smile and contort to horror then come back to an uneasy smile. Of course it helps if you’re a complete exhibitionist. I once crossed over a square in Athens when we were on holiday so I could happen to be passing a camera crew that was interviewing tourists about restaurant prices for local news.

If you had to re-read a crime novel right now, what would you choose?

Hannibal. It’s a book that pushes so many boundaries for a crime novel – in many ways it’s more Interview with the Vampire than Silence of the Lambs. I hated it first time I read it because I was expecting something like Red Dragon or Silence, but I went back and read it again and realised just how good it was. It’s like Edgar Alan Poe at his best. I must have read it about 20 times now. I even had the Hannibal Lecter novels as my specialist subject when I went on Mastermind in 2006.

What are the greatest opportunities facing writers these days?

It depends entirely what you want. I think if you write in commercial genres, you can sidestep some of the old barriers and prove that you *can* sell. I also think midlist writers have a great opportunity to make the kind of modest partial living they no longer can in print. But I think to some extent Kindle is the opiate of the writer. The success stories we see around us can blind us to what’s best for our books and our writing – we can spend too much time trying to do what Amanda Hocking or Saffina Desforges did and stop thinking what *we* should do. But the one real edge we have as indies is flexibility – the ability to tweak and change and do what’s right for us. If we give that up to follow “accepted wisdom” uncritically we lose the edge.

Which author should be much better known?

Cody James. She writes the most extraordinary, exhilarating prose you’ll ever read. I’ll declare a conflict of interest – her novel The Dead Beat was one of the first books I published when I set up eight cuts gallery press, but that was because it left such a blistering impression on me. It’s based on her life as a meth addict in late 90s San Francisco. I learned the most important lesson of my writing life from Cody. I want to quote a fairly long piece from an interview she gave. It’s something everyone who, like us, writes about the darker side of life, would do well to read and digest.:

“We were characters, misfits, and outcasts, and that’s why we gravitated towards each other, towards a scene where there was acceptance, loud music by bands who didn’t know how to play their instruments, S&M clubs, drugs, alcohol, motorcycles and fights. We weren’t stereotypes – that’s who we were. What upsets me more than anything in novels and movies in this genre (Selby Jr. I’m looking at you) is that they seem hell bent on portraying only the moments of shock and depravity – they rob the reader and the viewer of the full experience. Yes, we were really fucked up and yes, we did bad things, but we were still trying. I still spent some Sunday mornings eating cereal and watching cartoons with a 7ft tranny. And, even though you’re all jacked up and your apartment has no furniture, you still try. Even though the person cooking the turkey has been up for three days and can’t remember how to work a stove, and your guests keep going to the bathroom to shoot up and then keep falling asleep in the mashed potatoes, you’re still there celebrating Thanksgiving. There are still moments of utter joy and there is still so much laughter. If, as an artist, you don’t portray that, you’re nothing but a cheap hack.”

What are your views on eBook pricing?

This is such a hot topic. A couple of years ago I remember a massive debate about “free”, when Chris “Long Tail” Anderson’s book of that title came out. I wrote a lot of articles about it, got very irate when traditionally published writers waded in critically as though I’d been trying to diddle them out of a living. I think that’s what bothers me the most in the debate (which has moved on at a gazillion miles an hour since then) – defensiveness. I don’t get the idea that someone is somehow “entitled” to make a living at writing simply “because”, whether that because has to do with having a backlist or an agent or having a name on the indie scene or having put in a lot of hard work or having paid one's apprenticeship dues – whatever. The only thing we’re entitled to is what people will pay for our writing. So I really don’t buy into the whole “are books being devalued?” debate as a moral one.

The question for me is what works. I think the key here is that we’re in a shifting landscape and that makes flexibility and an open mind essential. I’d say keep your eyes open and be wary of putting too much store by established authors’ tactics. If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that the authors in the best position to benefit from e-self-publishing in the long run are those in what I call the large middle, midlist writers who build a loyal readership at a stable price from $2.99-$4.99, writers who aren’t interested in jockeying up the charts.

Do you have any other projects on the go?

I can’t remember a time when I had fewer projects on the go than I have fingers to count them on. I run a literary project for urban and underground writing, eight cuts gallery and our show The New Libertines is touring festivals and fringes this summer. I’m also performing some of my transgressive fiction at Brighton Fringe’s Grit Lit on May 12^th.

In terms of my own writing I have two things on the go. There’s All the Dark Places, the next Tommy West thriller after The Company of Fellows. It’s about an elderly writer whose ramblings about a horrific murder she claims to have witnessed are dismissed as the ravings of an old woman slowly losing her mind when it becomes clear they are lifted from the plots of novels she wrote 40 years earlier. But Tommy thinks she may have written those novels to shed light on unsolved deaths that occurred during student riots in Oxford during the late 60s. And when he arrives at her house one day to find that she’s died in a fall he is even more convinced.

Publishing-wise, on June 1^st I’m bringing out Penny Goring’s The Zoom Zoom, the most extraordinary debut collection of shorts and poems, and Stuart Estell’s mind-boggling novella Verruca Music, through the eight cuts gallery press imprint. I’m also polishing Black Heart High, a young adult dark urban fantasy/paranormal romance I’m publishing to Kindle on June 1^st

The Company of Fellows by Dan Holloway

70p/99c

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Nook