The Curious Case of the Writer Who Collaborated With Himself
Or
You Can’t Go Home Again
By Steven Savile
As a journalist, Kristy French is never going to win a Pulitzer while she’s at The Newcastle Gazette covering bake sales and town fêtes. But a missing persons report could be about to change all that.
As a novelist, Ben Shelton’s career’s over before it’s begun, he’s the proverbial one-hit wonder. The two of them have never met, but they’re about to become the most important people in each other’s lives. It isn’t love. It’s survival.
Johnny Lisker and his friend Alex Slater are having a beer in the local pub after Alex’s longtime girlfriend Beth broke his heart. It should be a quiet night. It isn’t. Johnny stabs a man. Suddenly, he and Alex are on the run from the law and there’s no going back.
Just outside of the village of Westbrooke, disgraced American doctor Brent Richards is obsessed with playing the Devil. He has manufactured a strain of virus he calls N.E.S.T., one that effects the bodies’ pain threshold as well as its need for nourishment. The side effects include blisters along the mouth, rapid weight loss – and the insatiable need to feed.
Three people are missing. Murdered. And the death toll is not about to stop rising.
Small towns are meant to be sleepy. Safe. They are not meant to be meat. Within a single week, Kristy, Ben. and Westbrooke’s residents have the comfortable safety of their world torn out from under them. People they have known all their lives turn on them and no one knows what is happening, why, or how to stop it.
There’s blood on the streets, and the suffering has only just begun.
I’m going to talk to you now like we’re friends, old friends, in fact, who have a shared history going back easily thirty years. You see, as strange as it sounds, a misheard segue by a Radio One DJ in 1991 led to the title The Sufferer’s Song lodging itself in my brain, and once it was in there it was hard to shake it. I mean, even now, I like it, even if it may be a little on the pretentious side. What can I say? I was 21-22, and who isn’t a little pretentious when they’re that age? I was straight out of university parties and deep and meaningful conversations about this philosopher and that political injustice.
Anyway, I’ve talked about my route to publishing before – very much a case of write, fail, write, fail, write some more, fail some more, in a trial of persistence and no little madness. But I’ll do a very quick recap here, I’d seen an advert in Frighteners, the sister magazine of FEAR, asking for 40,000 word long stories to be serialised, and written The Secret Life of Colours, or what became that, eventually, and sold it to Oliver Frey at Frighteners, along with a couple of short stories and was convinced I was going to be the next big thing, ish. The ego of youth was quickly crushed when Newsfield went bankrupt and the cheques were never cut, meaning the overdraft, which had been secured on the promise of those publications (to buy a very nice computer to write on) spiralled. I found myself left with a 40k story that was too long to sell to any mag, and too short to sell to any publisher… so I cast about, I phoned Alan Bryce at Dark Side and tried to convince him to do fiction, I phoned up a bunch of editors, including Richard Evans at Gollancz who had always been incredibly supportive, and the best advice I got was trying to find a way to squeeze another 20k out of it in edits. So that was my plan, do that, find an agent, change my world. Easy.
It was quite the fantastical novel, really, inspired in no small part by my love of Clive Barker’s more out there phantasmagorias, and at 60k was exciting enough to land me an agent down in London, who wanted more of the fantastic, and somehow, changing massively from what it had been, the story crept up to just shy of 80k. We even sold it. Only for it to be ‘unsold’ after Sting’s Rainforest Crusade and the collapse of the Net Book Agreement saw massive hikes in paper prices and an average mass-market book going from 49p to 4.99 in 18 months.
What should have been a time of great excitement ended up being some of the worst months of my life, with the book ‘given back’, my agent trying to tell me it would all work out, I was great, book two would be the one. I was looking for what to do, and that title was lodged in my brain. It felt like the logical thing to do. I mean, The Sufferer’s Song was crying out to be written. Now was the time. And all that guff.
I’d been corresponding with Richard Laymon, which, given I was a young lad in Northumberland, and he was a bestselling novelist out in some distant glamourous part of America was crazy to my mind. There was nothing like the excitement when one of those blue airmail envelopes landed on my doorstep – and Richard, let’s make no bones about it, was a great correspondent. Seriously, his letters ran easily 1500 to 2000 words, talked about life and writing and were full of encouragement and little nods to jokes he’d put into his latest work. At one point I started asking him advice about what to do next and if he’d consider reading some of my stuff. The cheek of it! But he did, indeed, and wrote a lovely note in which he described the stuff as ‘reminiscent of a young Ramsey Campbell’ which was high praise then, and high praise today. But more than that, he started telling me about the practicalities he’d faced, and the hurdles he’d had to overcome in his own writing path, from the breakout book to the less successful follow-ups, and the career that might have been. He gave some generous advice in terms of being more commercial and less opaque, writing longer and giving the characters space to breathe, encouraging me to show the nastiness and trust my horror readers to stay with me during it, and lots of other little bits and pieces that I took to heart when I sat down to write The Sufferer’s Song.
He absolutely shaped the way the book ended up being written. There’s even a small passage that’s a homage to one of his own works, and I recall his delight reading a scene where a woman heats up a chip pan, then goes upstairs and pours the boiling fat over the face of her sleeping husband as payback for the mental abuses he’d put her through over the years. He loved a good revenge scene. Especially one that didn’t flinch.
Looking back from here, 2021, at a story I wrote the first lines of in 1992, it’s crazy to think just how long this thing took. I mean from first draft through second and then being lost, to being here, now… an actual print novel, paperback and hardcover, and an ebook – I mean, in formats that didn’t exist when I wrote about the Fools that Lived on the Hill… but there’s that arrogance of youth to it all, too, and I love that.
I had a ritual for any story back then, which always began the same way, with me walking up the ridiculously steep bank in Prudhoe to the local stationary store at the top, where I’d buy a massive sheet of A1 card and a red and blue Pental pen and rush home to begin mapping out an idea.
This time there must have been 10,000 words crammed onto that piece of paper, spanning both sides, all of them spinning off from this thing I remembered from a university lecture when I should have been paying attention to what my criminology tutor was trying to impress upon me. Unfortunately for my academic career, when he’d touched on this notion of nature and nurture, and the fact that ‘scientists’ back in the day (I remember the name Cesare Lombroso, funny how things stick) had been obsessed with finding the thing, the lesion on the brain that made you a criminal, and how perceptions of what made you different had changed during the years, without really straying from those century-old notions that it had a medical root cause. I can remember the tutor talking about what drove someone who was a ‘pleasure seeker’ personality—in his example a motor racing driver—and what kept pushing him to go faster and faster was a desperate attempt to trying to recapture the thrill he first felt at speed, and how that thrill became more and more elusive, and would inevitably need more and more extreme highs to even come close to the same sense of excitement thanks to the diminishing returns of pleasure. The idea was that somehow this lack of something in the wiring of their brains could be the same kind of thing that ‘made’ criminal behaviour so attractive to those who lacked access to formula 1 cars…
It’s funny, I can still remember the notes I doodled in that lecture, about a scientist trying to create some sort of Neurological Stimuli Trigger and tying it into pleasure and pain receptors, making the body respond to the stimuli, the thrill, and manipulating it.
That would have been two years before I wrote the letters N.E.S.T. on that huge sheet of A1 and began creating the disgraced military scientist Brent Richards, and his facility at Havendene, which was a nursing home around the corner from where I lived in reality. N.E.S.T. Neuro-Emotional-Stimuli-Triggers. Just typing that out now brings a whole slew of memories rushing back, which in itself is pretty interesting. It’s something I’ve become more fascinated by the older I’ve become, too, looking at the tricks of memory in stories like Scavenger Summer and Shiftling, a dementia-like evil in Remember Me Yesterday, and more. A half-decent shrink would no doubt tell me there’s something in that.
Anyway, back to 1992.
It took me 18 months from that empty page to the finished 160,000-word manuscript, encouraged by Richard Laymon to make it long, make it a real meaty experience, right at the time paper prices went mad and horror lost its hold in the mainstream marketplace with the likes of Steve Harris, another writer who offered incredible encouragement back in the day, (and even set me up on his email as part of the Razor Gang even as he shared stories of punching out his editor at Headline and other stuff. I remember him being really big on that time slowing down under moments of duress thing, and that bled into parts of how The Sufferer’s Song was written), Bob Shaw, telling me some of the most mundane horrors he’d imagined, like watching someone on a train pull the old ring pull on their can of Coke and put the ring pull inside the can before they started to drink, and how in his mind he saw the metal edge going down, slicing through the insides of their throat and killing them (this kind of mundane horror made its way into half a dozen deaths in The Sufferer’s Song, because as Bob said, not all deaths had to have great drama or tragedy, sometimes the most mundane were truly the most horrific. And of course, Laymon himself. It was such an odd time for horror. I mean, whilst not disappearing exactly, these guys were all diminishing in terms of their presence on the shelves. I can still remember vividly when the genre as a whole was removed from the local Dillons and subsumed into fantasy and SF on the shelf space, before it actually disappeared completely upstairs into general fiction where it was damned near impossible to find anything.
There’s so much I want to say here, about what made the book that after 30 years is finally rearing its ugly head (not so ugly, Ivan has done a fabulous job of capturing the 90s Steve Crisp vibe with his cover), but it could easily end up being a 10,000-word piece instead of the little chat I’d promised Gavin.
It’s a thing of its time – of course it is, how could it be anything else? Written in the early 90s by a kid who had no hope. That’s the last piece I want to cover about where the horrors of The Sufferer’s Song came from. I’d come out of uni with a decent degree, into nothing. There were no jobs to be had. It wasn’t just a case of not looking. I’d send out 30 applications a week and get nowhere. The North East, back then, was dying and dying hard. I joke about it, but you could see the difference Pre and Post-Keagan and the revitalisation of the football team, giving the city pride again. I’d done a few days as a double glazing salesman, an afternoon as a burglar alarm rep but hated the way they timed the arrivals for post-six when families would be sitting down to eat because ‘the decision maker’ was home… I’d done a couple of weeks as a telesales guy hawking ad space for a free paper, where one joker had phoned in to list a used punchbag for sale, which during the course of the ad turned out to be his wife… I’d done a few hours in the fish factory before I’d walked out feeling sick, and basically, hadn’t survived more than a two day spell at anything because it was deathly. This stuff can sound kind of funny now, looking back, but back then it was soul-destroying. I survived on twenty five quid a week dole money. There were weeks I only managed to eat because one of those new (then) discount foreign supermarkets had opened in Gateshead that sold non-brand goods, so I could get a tin of beans for 3p and spaghetti hoops for the same. For a couple of quid I managed to get food for a couple of days, and walked everywhere because I couldn’t afford the five or six quid it was for a bus pass.
There’s a lot of buzz now about regional voices, but back then it seemed you could only sell your book if it was set in London or New York, and there was no real presence of the kind of voice I was, younger generation, dirt poor and angry. A lot of that rage filtered into the book, I can see that with the benefit of hindsight.
Here’s the thing, I could only afford to write this book because my then girlfriend, who was by far the most supportive of any partner I’ve ever had when it comes to writing, kept food on the table – she earned 60 quid a week as a nanny – and told me to write. We had a rent of about 120 quid a month as I recall, so 2 weeks worked covered the rent, my dole money covered bills, and her other money covered food. We quite literally lived hand to mouth. But in those days she’d come home every night wanting to read the pages I’d added. Every day. I’d get up, sit at the kitchen table with a pen and paper, sketch out a scene, write it up long hand, then in the hour before she came home go through to the lounge (I had a desk in the corner) and type up the days’ work. We’d talk the story through. I’d tell her excitedly about ideas, almost re-enacting scenes as I danced around the room, until finally it was done. 18 months. This was it. It was going to change everything. They’d pay me, I’d clear my debts, and we’d get back to where we needed to be. Writing would be my escape.
I sent it to my agent in London with massive excitement because this was it, surely. Laymon had read huge passages and said it was great, Chaz Brenchley, one of my oldest writing friends, had read it cover to cover and said he thought it was absolutely publishable and should find a home… and my agent, who had always wanted me to be a fabulist, read it and dumped me because it was too fucking nasty. And everything that had been building to that point died there and then.
I can’t even begin to tell you the soul sucking pit of depressive despair I sank into. I remember one night, sitting in a chair in the lounge, crying my eyes out and telling my girlfriend I was done, I might as well kill myself because no one in this fucking world would give a shit, and the scary thing was I know I was absolutely serious. The thought of another two years living hand to mouth, watching everything crumble around me, was more than I could bear. So that depression cycle told me there was a way out of it, and it was scarily attractive for a while. But in the end I opted for another kind of death. I sold my computer, an Acorn Archimedes, to buy food, and, still in the grip of something way beyond simple sadness, told her what it meant, the symbolism of selling it. I was giving up on the dream of being a writer. We needed the 200 quid I could still get for that 1800 quid computer. We had the bailiffs threatening court for unpaid council tax. That computer, my only asset in the world, was rent and food.
So, the day before it went away, she came home from work with a box of paper, 2500 pages, A4, and I backed up everything onto 3.5” floppies, and printed out the 900 page manuscript and all of my stories up until that date.
I never showed the book to another publisher. Ever. How could I let it out of my hands? That paper copy was the only copy in the world, and if something happened to it, it was gone forever. But I couldn’t photocopy it either, at 5p a page those 900s pages would cost me two weeks worth of unemployment, meaning I couldn’t pay bills or food, or a week’s wage for her. And the cost was way beyond that. It had cost me my agent, and in my mind, my career. I was never going to escape Newcastle, or the poverty trap I was very much stuck in, degree or no degree.
Instead, I started looking for work down South. I went for interviews to do ad sales for glossy mags in London and pretty much anything else I could find in the Guardian job pages, rather than just the local Evening Chronicle ads on a Thursday. Somehow, after about a thousand applications and a dreadful interview, I landed a job with the Ministry of Defence, and suddenly I had enough money to live. Nine grand a year, paid fortnightly. 350 quid a time, minus tax. So I probably ended up having 220-250 in my pocket every couple of weeks. We found a new place to live, between her job and mine, and looking at the bank I realised I might, just might have the money to buy a PC on credit and cover the 40-50 quid a month that would run. So I went to Thorn and bought an Olivetti 386, thinking finally I could go back to The Sufferer’s Song and fix whatever had burned my career.
Of course, it couldn’t run the discs the manuscript was saved on, so it was still dead to me.
There was probably a four year gap when I didn’t write, as I fought to clear debts and just live, but when I had that Olivetti I had a chance to go again, and ended up writing Laughing Boy’s Shadow.
I always figured that The Sufferer’s Song would never be more than that 900 page stack of papers—it was one of the few things I took with me when I emigrated, and I still have it in a trunk in my study today—but decades later I discovered a RISC-OS emulator for the Archimedes that would enable me to source the roms for the old Writer program I’d written the book in, and drag the novel from the corrupted floppies onto a hard drive as a pretty mangled file…
That was probably ten years ago.
For several years I thought, you know… I really should do something with this, but who the hell wants to see something I wrote in 1992-3? Why would anyone ever be interested?
The only way I could ever answer that was to sit down and read it again. So I did.
And you know what? I realised it was good. I mean, not something I’d ever write now, but there was an energy to it that is inescapably that of a young man fighting to be free of his lot in life, raging at the poverty of the North East (which is also reflected massively in Laughing Boy’s Shadow in which the dying city of Newcastle is an actual living breathing character, with a soul all of its own), listening to mentors he trusts and respects, and reaching for something. I mean really reaching. Not just writing neat little ideas, but trying to do something of worth beyond the nastiness of chip pan fat and electricity pylons…
The hardest thing by far was to resist the temptation to tinker.
Because it is what it is, not just me writing today with the unreliable tricks of memory describing Northumberland in 1992-3, and colouring it with nostalgia, it’s a novel of its time, that I couldn’t write today with iPhones and the internet, smoking bans, social care and so much else. And it’s lovely for it. So instead of somehow trying to go back and collaborate with the 21-year-old me, the man who is 30 years older gets to smile and look back fondly at a kid who very much doesn’t exist anymore, but is absolutely alive in these pages, and was fundamental in him getting to where he is now, and for that reason those words, his story, they deserve not to be touched.
And here we are, thirty years after it was written, the book that cost me an agent, ended my career as a novelist before it had begun, and was mentored into life by several authors who are no longer with us. The Sufferer’s Song is finally a thing. But not for long. A curiosity like this, I don’t want it out forever, despite the powers of independent publishing and the temptations of vanity and ego, so for a month, to celebrate my birthday and the anniversary of the idea and the writing beginning, I’m selling it through Amazon, and have it in Kindle Unlimited, in hardcover and paperback for those like me who love real books, and then it is gone. It’s a time capsule. The writer before he became the writer. The kid in love with all things horror. The talent that was raw and hungry. And it’s a great way for someone, say, who wants to be a writer themselves, to look at where I ended up with Glass Town and see where I came from, and maybe just maybe be inspired to take their own journey.
Steven Savile
The Sufferer’s Song
As a journalist, Kristy French is never going to win a Pulitzer while she’s at The Newcastle Gazette covering bake sales and town fêtes. But a missing persons report could be about to change all that.
As a novelist, Ben Shelton’s career’s over before it’s begun, he’s the proverbial one-hit wonder. The two of them have never met, but they’re about to become the most important people in each other’s lives. It isn’t love. It’s survival.
Johnny Lisker and his friend Alex Slater are having a beer in the local pub after Alex’s longtime girlfriend Beth broke his heart. It should be a quiet night. It isn’t. Johnny stabs a man. Suddenly, he and Alex are on the run from the law and there’s no going back.
Just outside of the village of Westbrooke, disgraced American doctor Brent Richards is obsessed with playing the Devil. He has manufactured a strain of virus he calls N.E.S.T., one that effects the bodies’ pain threshold as well as its need for nourishment. The side effects include blisters along the mouth, rapid weight loss – and the insatiable need to feed.
Three people are missing. Murdered. And the death toll is not about to stop rising.
Small towns are meant to be sleepy. Safe. They are not meant to be meat. Within a single week, Kristy, Ben. and Westbrooke’s residents have the comfortable safety of their world torn out from under them. People they have known all their lives turn on them and no one knows what is happening, why, or how to stop it.
There’s blood on the streets, and the suffering has only just begun.
You can buy The Sufferer’s Song from Amazon UK & Amazon US
Steven Savile
Among other properties, Steve has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, and Rogue Angel.
He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers award for his novel, SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR, and the inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars award for TAU CETI (co-authored with International Bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson).
Writing as Matt Langley his young adult novel BLACK FLAG was a finalist for the People’s Book Prize 2015.
Over the last few years, Steve had been fulfilling the lifelong dream of designing and writing roleplaying games. He’s written the monster manual, Carte Monstrorum, for the gothic horror RPG LexOccultum, as well as a soon to be released campaign for Trudvang Chronicles, Lost Heroes, and the world book for a retro dungeon delve game, Ruin Masters. He’s currently working on The Seed of the Vanir, an elves companion for Trudvang.
Under house names, Steve has also ghost-written a number of successful street-lit and hip-hop novels over the last ten years.
Steve is currently the lead narrative designer on two mobile game projects for Yoozoo Games and BigPoint, one is a huge Viking kingmaker adventure, the other is a spin on the darkest fairy tales out there.
You can find out more about Steven via his official website www.stevensavile.com
You can follow Steven on Twitter @StevenSavile
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