A Horror World Conversation with Steven Savile
By Steven E. Wedel

Not so long ago, many people across Europe noticed a strange man sitting in coffee shops, writing. Why was he writing? Well, maybe because he can’t seem to hold too many other jobs for more than a day. Or, if he does, people around him get fired. Or, maybe he’s a coffee-loving hobo with a computer. Who knows?

Oh yeah. We do. He was internationally best-selling author Steven Savile. And he was working on his latest book, SILVER. A knowledge of the cities where all those coffee shops were was important to the book. Yes, one of the best things about being a writer is claiming just about anything is research.

But let’s let Steve tell us about that.

Horror World: Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us at Horror World. Let’s start off with that tour of coffee shops. Is coffee important to the plot of SILVER, or are you simply addicted?

Steven Savile: Ha! What can I say? I’m European - we’ve got a coffee shop culture over here. It’s not really as decadent as it sounds. Actually maybe it is. I could pretend it is about living life to the full, or as Nuanda liked to say in Dead Poets Society, sucking the marrow out of life, but in truth it’s about tricking my brain. I’ve got a fantastic study in the apartment, antique leather armchair, books all around, a wonderful regency style desk with leather inlay, hundred year old typewriter. It’s pretty much my sanctuary. But you know the deal, writing is just about the loneliest job in the world, and I am a social soul. I love the company of people. I love having that hubbub of life going on around me. I like my friends being able to swing by and grab a latte to break up the day.

I’ve got a routine. I deal with the business stuff when I wake up, which usually takes and hour or so, then I take the short walk around to Javasavi, which is a bohemian mismatch of a cafe with battered secondhand furniture. Coffee’s a pretty serious business over here. No one that I know drinks any sort of instant rubbish. Thick, black and strong enough to stand your spoon up in, that’s the order of the day. We’ve got our own espresso machine in the house, and stock up on fresh coffee beans whenever we’re in London. Fortnum and Mason - makes me sound like a terrible snob doesn’t it? Anyway, after about 90 min-120 min in Javasavi, I’ll make a short trek to one of a few other cafes, Brasco, which comes complete with its own enormous black and white still from Scarface, which is where I tend to do most of my work, or I’ll cross over the water into Stockholm proper, onto the Södermalm island, to Lila Cafet på Söder - or the the Little Cafe on Söder - where Macarena makes the most incredible cakes, muffins, cookies and cinnamon buns. Lila Cafet is one of my favourite spots in the city. The coffee’s great, but it’s the atmosphere that does it. Not so long ago an Aussie guy travelling across Europe came in with his guitar and played a 50 minute set just because he wanted to make people smile. That’s one of the best things about Stockholm, really, there’s so much culture and Swedes really do value their social lives. It just so happens that coffee plays a large part in all of our lives.

I guess I should explain what I mean by tricking my mind... basically the changing locations helps me trick myself into being more productive. I know I’ll write about 1,000 words in Javasavi, maybe 1500 in the second cafe, and 500 to 1,000 in my study, without ever feeling like it is a real slog. And instead of being alone, I get to relax, talk books with my pal Jeremy Duns, who is an excellent thriller writer who lives on the other side of the city, or football and books and stuff with Stefan Lindblad, another mate who is a cover artist who lives nearby.

HW: All right, enough about the coffee. The plot of SILVER sounds very intriguing. The 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot have been melted down to create a dagger. That dagger winds up in the hands of a cult. Tell us more, please.

SS: This is the nightmare question I really ought to have perfected a good answer to by now. Basically it’s a novel of post-9-11 terrorism. 13 people commit suicide in 13 capital cities across Europe, burning themselves alive. Moments before they do, they deliver the same chilling message to the news channels and newspapers, promising forty days and forty nights of fear. Our heroes are ex special forces, they’re smart, hard, and because they’re ‘off the books’ they get away with doing stuff that, say, an MI6 agent, would have more difficulty doing. During Silver they’re autonomous. They answer only to The Old Man, Sir Charles Wyndham. Sir Charles basically rescued each of them from their own personal hells and made them his people. When the 13 martyrs burn themselves there’s no way these guys can’t get involved... but they really have no idea of just what they’re getting involved in, even as it becomes clear that at least one of the messages from the martyrs is different, and seems to fit Nostradamus’ prophesied assassination of the Pope.

HW: SILVER marks a departure for you as you move into the world of historical thrillers. Are you simply branching out, or have you said all you want to say in the world of horror?

SS:  Well if I go back to my bookshelf and have a look, I’ve got four fantasy novels (Inheritance, Dominion, Retribution and Curse of the Necrarch) which have a strong undead flavour but are very definitely fantasy (of the Tolkeinesque variety) over horror. I’ve got two celtic fantasy novels (Slaine the Exile and Slaine the Defiler). I’ve got a bunch of Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval and even Stargate, which are much more science fiction than anything else. I’ve got an awful lot of stuff, and very very little of it is horror. I do go to dark places in what I do, I mean parts of Silver are seriously horrific. They hurt. They draw upon things I learned about horror as an emotion and hit hard, but they’re much more restrained/constrained than they’d be if I were a horror writer. I had a conversation a few years back with some of the guys at the British Fantasy Society bash in Nottingham, and happened to say ‘I’m not a horror writer’ to which I got the barrage of ‘Oh, god, you’re one of them? You deny your roots’ etc. But seriously, I’ve written one pure horror novel, which has never been published, a couple of Dark Fantasy novels, but in the main I’ve flirted much more with the darker edges of fantasy than I ever did horror...

So does this mean I’m done with horror?

I’m not sure I ever even started with it, to be fair. What I am doing is exploring stuff that interests me. I write full time, that means 8 plus hours a day, every day. I need to be engaged. I need to love what I am doing. Right now I am planning a series of novels based in the 1980s, featuring an ex-SBS man (Special Boat Service) after his return from the Falklands War, into a collapsing economy, a collapsing wall in Berlin and so many changes, who is forced to become a dirty jobs guy for the British Government. And I’ve basically wrapped a 130,000 word Greyfriar’s novel, London Macabre, which is fabulist Victoriana... but again flirts with the dark places...

So, I may never be done with horror, or at least the emotions it evinces in readers, no matter what stories I choose to tell.

HW: Judas has been in the news recently as the controversial Gospel of Judas came to light. Can you tell us more about what inspired the plot of SILVER?

SS: I'm going to pinch some of the author's afterword to answer this one:

Right around the same time as this idea started niggling at me, I was reading The Gospel of Judas, published by The National Geographic Society, and like a lot of the rest of the world, was fascinated by the idea that the Great Betrayal could, in fact, have been the Ultimate Sacrifice.

I knew immediately that I wanted to tell the story from the other side.

Actually we need to go back a little further in time. It’s the middle of the night, 3 or 4 am, September 1996, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After was on the CD player, and the Simpsons were flickering away on the small portable TV in the corner. I lay on a bed in a seedy student apartment in Newcastle (just around the corner from the place Ronan breaks into in the opening chapters, actually) with my two best friends, Gary and Dene, when Gary flicked through the channels on the TV, bored, and stumbled across Henry Lincoln telling his fabulous story about Rennes-le-Château and Bérenger Saunière (check out Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh if you haven’t already). I was hooked. I kept thinking ‘this would make an awesome novel’ but I knew I was a long way from accomplished enough to tackle something like that, so I filed it away, always intending to come back to it.

Move on the best part of a decade . . . move from the seedy apartment in Newcastle to a baking beach in Egypt . . . and dripping with sweat, I am finishing the last few pages of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and instead of closing the book on the final scene, I skim the ads in the back (don’t tell me I am the only one who does this, I won’t believe you) and saw the write up for his next novel, The Da Vinci Code, which, while being nothing like the story I had spent ten years imagining (being as I wanted to do it as an historical, from the perspective of the Templar Knights guarding the road to Jerusalem and holing themselves up in the temple before emerging with both mother and child they must smuggle out of the Holy Land), pretty much killed the idea stone dead. My wife tells me I actually threw my paperback into the sea. I do admit to feeling a huge amount of frustration. And of course, The Da Vinci Code had been out for several years by this point, but somehow I had managed to avoid hearing what it was actually about.

Apparently I am very good at avoiding spoilers.

So, flash forward to London as 2005 became 2006 . . . I walked into Waterstones on Oxford Street, determined to find research material to write a thriller about Antarctica being the foundation for the lost civilization of Atlantis, and found hundreds upon hundreds of copies of Stel Pavlou’s Decipher everywhere. A quick glance at the back and my heart sank. Yet again, a great idea torpedoed by arriving late to the party. I think this is every writer’s nightmare. We could literally stop ourselves from writing a word if we discounted every idea that has been done before. On the shelf beside Decipher, however, was the very striking hardcover of the Gospel of Judas. I bought both books and had finished the Gospel before I went to bed that night. The beginnings of Silver were with me when I awoke the next day.

I didn’t talk about it with anyone, but decided I needed to do some research. Like most people, I had a passing familiarity with the biblical Gospels, and thanks to the millennial fear that had gripped the world around 1999, was au fait with a lot of end-of-the-world prophecies, the Gnostic gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls and such.

Having decided I wanted to tell the story of Judas in some way, my mind went back to the shekels. It was a short step from ‘he can’t get rid of them’ to turn them into a cursed inheritance his children couldn’t get rid of, but I am getting ahead of myself here. One of my very first research days was spent looking at the name Iscariot and its alternate. It was one of those days when, as a writer, you start to think not only does your story make sense, you’ve stumbled onto the truth...

The most likely explanation derives from the Hebrew איש־קריות (Κ-Qrîyôth) or ‘Man of Kerioth,’ Kerioth being the name of not one, but two Judean towns. The second theory, and the one that I chose to exploit in Silver, is that Iscariot identifies Judas as descending from the line of Sicarii assassins, who were almost certainly the world’s first terrorist group. Historians argue that the Sicarii did not come into being until the fifth or sixth decades of the first century, which would mean Judas himself could not have been a member.

Very few reliable histories exist from the day, obviously, but a lot of what we take as truth comes from the writings of Jospehus, i.e., The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. The Jewish War is an account of the Jewish revolt against Rome (AD 66-70), and whilst reading this, I came across one reference to Menahem ben Jair, the grandson of Judas Iscariot. Until that point I had never considered the idea that Judas would have had children. It was as alien a concept as the idea that Jesus’ bloodline might have been smuggled out of the Holy Land. Menahem, grandson of Judas, leader of the Sicarii assassins.

Suddenly things began to formulate, threads of story pulled together, and the idea of the cursed coins becoming a ‘family inheritance’ was born. But of course, with the revelations of the Gospel of Judas fresh in my mind, how cursed would these coins truly have been? Wouldn’t they have been more like a treasured reminder of just how much their grandfather had sacrificed? And how better to remember that sacrifice and honor the man ‘of the sicarii’ than to forge it into a silver dagger.

Of course silver makes a very impractical weapon because it is so soft, but as a ceremonial piece it makes perfect sense.

The next moment of synchronicity came in discovering that there had been an earthquake in the Masada region a few years earlier, and with that I knew not only how I would lose the dagger for two thousand years, but how I would recover it.

It was one of those beautiful moments where research gives us an answer every bit as good as any our subconscious could dream up. Give me a truth to lay down as a foundation for the building blocks of story every day of the week.

HW: Now, some other book with a historical religious theme stirred up a lot of anger from the Catholic church a few years ago (which, of course, helped make it a bestseller). Is SILVER causing any grief to the clergy? Or, do you think it could? Will professors be writing theses defending and condemning you?

SS: Erm. this is going out in America, right? I get to plead the Fifth... As it stands no, I haven’t had any book burnings or outraged clergy, but it is early days... and if I am honest, I know it’s going to piss off plenty of Catholics, but it’s a bit of an equal opportunity pisser-offer is Silver, being as it revolves around the Judaic definition of a Messiah, and basically it demands you think. I spent a lot of time and research studying the histories around Silver, around the Sicarii assassins and Masada, the contradictions in the Bible, the gnostic gospels, and then I delved into other faiths and other end of the world theories and, well, let’s just say I took a lot of time to set up a framework that works, and makes narrative sense but doesn’t demand you BELIEVE. Some will hate it, some will love it, others will release it is just what it is, a good story.

HW: We talked earlier about how almost anything can pass for research when you’re a writer. You are a lover of television. Not only have you written tie-in novels for popular sci-fi TV shows, but you’ve also written a book about fantasy television called, appropriately enough, FANTASTIC TV. What can you tell us about that project?

SS: Fantastic TV was a labour of love, at least that’s what I told the missus to defend the hundreds of hours of trash television I had to watch to compile it. It’s the one book I hope gets noticed, if that makes sense, because it is an ultimately personal book. It covers fifty years of brilliant TV shows, everything from the Twilight Zone to Torchwood. It’s opinionated rather than encyclopedic. And some shows you love don’t make the final cut, often because what I would say about them I basically already say about other shows. I know it’s uncool to say stuff like this, but I really hope it gets noticed by people. It’s jammed with stuff, facts, observations, interviews with the guys behind the scenes, and it’s good. It was a couple of years of my life in the making, and that in itself should be a clue as to how much it means to me.

HW: When will FANTASTIC TV hit the streets?

SS: Any day now is what I’ve been saying for a while now. We’ve been basically held up waiting for image rights on some of the shots, but they’re all done now, so it’s at the printer, and should be hitting the streets pretty much now.

HW: THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE is a Stargate novel releasing this spring. Can you tell us more about this one?

SS: One of the curiosities of the media world, sometimes, is the approval process. Throne is a perfect example of this, I wrote it in late 2007 early 2008 and it’s currently waiting for final approval from MGM, so by the time it actually comes out I think I will have written four full novels and a stack of stories in between. The story? Basically, it’s an SG1 adventure, with the original team. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is safe to say that this particular creature lets the beholder see what it most needs... and sometimes what you need, well it isn’t what you want... it was originally conceived as a time travel trilogy and would have the team stuck in Nazi Germany around the fall of the Reich, but I decided to move it into an alien world but it still explores many of the same themes. 

HW: Is it difficult writing a tie-in novel? How much freedom vs. limitations do you have?

SS: How long’s a piece of string? The main thing is that, no matter what you might think, we aren’t allowed to simply do what we want, we have to get approval at every stage of the process, meaning from the conception of the idea, the writing of the outline, to the manuscript itself, and while we might create it (we aren’t adapting existing scripts, so it is an original novel) we don’t get final say in what or how we tell our story. It can be very difficult at times, leaping through all of the hoops - but generally we’re fans of what we’re writing about, or we wouldn’t be doing it - but oddly, while you might think that makes it incredibly confining, sometimes those hoops, those existing constraints and internal logic challenges of the shows, make the writing incredibly liberating because we get to dive into the hows and whys - how would it work in the show? And finding those logical solutions, well, there lies freedom. So, for instance, with my Primeval novel, everything is consistent with the show’s internal logic, it just extrapolates on it, looking for new ways to push and pull at what the fans already know and love. And believe me, they know, meaning you need to nail characters, phraseology, everything. But that only serves to improve your other work, because it means you learn to write fully rounded characters that lives and breathe...

HW: You have several other tie-ins, and while I’d like to ask about all of them, I’m sure you probably have other deadlines. How about if you just tell us a story about one of them? Maybe the most difficult or most interesting to write?

SS:  Well, rather than talk about the books themselves, there’s one particular moment that does stick out in my mind - and that was when I was invited to write my first story for Doctor Who. I phoned my mother to tell her, and bear in mind I’d been selling stories for over a decade and had been living as a full time writer for probably 2 years at the time, she says ‘I guess that means you’re a real writer now...’

HW: You also had a book reissued by some outfit called HW Press a while back. There are still a few copies of LAUGHING BOY’S SHADOW available. Why don’t you tell us a little about that? It’ll keep Nanci from beating me for not pimping HW Press books. Please make it good!

SS: No pressure eh? Man, LBS, I love that book, it may not be the best thing I’ve ever done, which is hardly surprising being as it was one of the first things I ever wrote, but it shows even then a lot of what I was interested in and what I was capable of. There’s a youthful energy about it, and boy, it goes to some dark places. It is the portrait of the writer as an angry young man. It’s all about my home town, and very much a novel of the time. I couldn’t write it now. That’s one reason why when Nanci agreed to release it I didn’t return to the text and tighten it up. I could have. I could have fixed the passive sentences and sharpened up some of the more surreal moments, but that, I thought, would have somehow lessened what was there and would have cheated the kid who wrote it. Back then I was watching the city fall apart, I wrote about that, about homelessness and the culture of violence that existed (we had youth riots and the like, which I talk about in the afterword), and even as I wrote the first words I knew I wanted to write a novel in which you not only sympathised but empathised  with a mass murderer. One review of the Swedish edition came out a few years back, and to paraphrase, said something like ‘why would anyone want to write something like this? you finish reading and you feel dirty...’ I reckon that means the young me managed what he set out to do.

HW: Why can’t you hold a “real” job for any period of time? Seriously, how did your family react when you told them you wanted to be a professional writer? And not just a writer, but a writer of dark stories?

SS:  Because I am a shiftless good for nothing... sorry, I was channeling at least a dozen of my old employers there. In truth, I’m a pretty smart guy and I get bored very quickly if things aren’t stimulating. Most jobs just didn’t hold my interest. They weren’t challenging. They didn’t make me use my brain. Writing did. I decided very young that I wanted to be a writer... one might almost think I kept taking lousy jobs so I didn’t want to stay in them... meaning writing became more than just a pass time. Family reaction? Get a proper job. That was pretty much it. But, to be fair, once I’d taken the leap, they were very supportive. It isn’t easy, being a full time novelist comes with a very uncertain financial package, and the fact I am in my fifth year now, living off my words, so maybe quitting all of those crap jobs wasn’t such a bad thing!

HW: What advice would you give to the aspiring young writer trying to break in today?

SS:  Write the stories only you can write. Don’t try to be the next anybody, be the first you. Easier said than done.

HW: All right, we’re winding this down. Tell me what I forgot to ask, or tell us about any other projects coming soon.

SS: Coming up? Well, ones we haven’t mentioned... hmm... the next year or so will see the release of Crucible of Eternity, a Guild Wars novel through Simon & Schuster, London Macabre and The Odalisque and Other Strange Stories (one novel, one big fat short story collection) are coming out from Dark Regions Press. Monster Town, a collaborative novella has just come out from Bad Moon Books (written with Brian M. Logan, ex-actor turned screenwriter), and then of course there’s Gold, the follow-up to Silver, coming early next year... so that’s about it.

HW: Steve, thank you again for taking the time to talk with us. Best of luck in all your future projects.

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