Why A Pulp Memoir? – Rafe McGregor

This year marks the emerald anniversary of my first professional sale and publication as an author. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never taken stock of my whole writing ‘career’ (if that’s the right word), which began in earnest four years before that sale, and two decades seems an appropriate (if extremely tardy) time to ask myself whether I’ve succeeded or failed at it. If nothing else, the answer might determine what I do with the next two decades (or, more realistically, whatever part thereof is left).

From one point of view, it’s been a success. By this summer, I’ll have authored twenty books (divided evenly between academic monographs on culture, crime, and politics and small press pulp fiction novels and collections) and three hundred shorter works (including several as editor). While I’d be lying if I said I was proud of every single long and short piece published, I’d defend one of the monographs and one of the short story collections as being right up there with the best. Though two good or better books and a few good articles and short stories isn’t much in twenty years, I’m happy with it. A slight change of perspective, however, tells a very different tale. None of my long or short works have ever been published by the Big Four or elite university presses such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or Stanford or in periodicals with more than a few thousand readers so I may well be overrating the quality of my oeuvre. A quantitative evaluation is nigh mortifying: none of all those publications made me more than £1,000 and most of them didn’t earn anything at all. Forgetting about the money for a minute, which no professional writer can afford to do, with a mere two exceptions, my estimated readership has been in four figures (or less) for each. If the lack of quantity reflects a lack of quality, then I have indeed overrated myself.

Put like that, I’d have to say I failed, but it’s all too easy to compare oneself to the best-known writers – Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, James Ellroy, China Miéville, etc. – when the reality is that they constitute a tiny percentage of the profession. Let me try a different tack: what was my goal when I set out? To earn a ‘modest’ living from writing fiction and nonfiction which, for reasons I can’t remember, I set at £30,000 per annum in 2006. Given the various financial and cost of living crises since, that would probably be £50,000 now. The latest statistics suggest I set the bar outrageously high. At present, more than four in five novelists in the UK support themselves with other jobs, their median annual income from writing is £7,000 (less than a third of minimum wage), and the income of the top 10% is disproportionally high compared to the rest. I haven’t made £30,000 from writing in twenty years, let alone each year, which simply confirms my failure. In mitigation, in 2006 there was still a ‘mid-list’ of novelists, a host of magazines accepting article or story submissions from unknown authors, and readerships were expanding rather than shrinking, meaning my goal wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds in hindsight. All that has of course changed several times over, courtesy of the digitisation of everyday life, shifts away from reading novels and watching films to online gaming, and the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Perhaps, after all, there is some success in still being able to publish and still getting read, even if by only a few hundred people each time?

Or perhaps I’m asking the wrong question and the issue at stake isn’t success or failure but why I started writing for publication in the first place and why I’m still doing it two decades later? I didn’t start in 2006 to earn £30,000 (I was already making slightly more than that) – I started to earn a modest living by writing. Notwithstanding the failure of that goal, I managed to keep up a steady rate of publication (a book each year and a short work each month) in spite of never having more than 50% of my working week to write, edit, and research. Let me change tack one last time. If, as seems highly likely at the moment, that 50% drops to 0%, what will I do? I’ll do what I did from 2002 to 2006, write on weekends, holidays, nights…whenever time permits…which implies I’m doing it for pleasure. Call me naïve, but when Stephen King writes ‘I did it for the pure joy of the thing’ in On Writing, I believe him and I don’t begrudge a single cent of the many millions he was talented and lucky enough to earn while he was enjoying himself. If the ‘right’ question to ask is why I have spent so much time writing for the last twenty years, then the answer is for the pure joy. And spending that much time doing something enjoyable, something whose product a few thousand other people have enjoyed, is worth doing for as long as time permits.

All of which is why I collected seventy-five of my short nonfiction works in A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006-2026. Is it a memoir? Not really, but it does include both my first and most recent publication, spanning the full range of the two decades. There are also autobiographical reflections on my experiences as a writer in the introduction and conclusion, in the three interviews (one from 2009 and two from 2024), and in the essays about my two novels (published in 2009 and 2017). Perhaps I should have called the collection ‘A False Memoir’, except that Jim Harrison beat me to that title fifty-five years ago with Wolf: A False Memoir (which, if anyone is interested, has absolutely nothing to do with the film Wolf, whose screenplay he wrote twenty years later). If it isn’t really a memoir, is it pulp? Most definitely. The essays, reviews, and interviews are divided into four parts, one each on crime, fantasy, weird, and climate fiction. While I don’t regard the popular distinction between artistic and genre fiction as either accurate or useful, as I mention more than once in the collection, much of what I’ve written about would be classified as pulp fiction by most critics, including: Sherlock Holmes across the centuries, the Lone Wolf gamebooks, H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, and Sharksploitation movies. The earliest pulp fiction character I discuss is H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who first appeared in King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 and the latest is Ice Cube’s Will Radford, the protagonist of the 2025 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which might just be the worst film I’ve ever seen. And if that doesn’t convince you to take a look, I’m not sure what will…

A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006–2026 by Rafe McGregor: now out, in print and ebook!

free epub | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Nine years ago we published our most succesful ever book, The Adventures of Roderick Langham, which sold over 1500 copies, and now its author, Rafe McGregor is back with an extensive collection of his essays, reviews and interviews: A Pulp Memoir.

Who really killed Sir Charles Baskerville? What are weird tales? When did Octavia Butler complete her parables? Where did Allan Quatermain retire? Why were the last two Bond movies so strange? How did Sharksploitation get so big? Why is it so hard to film the collapse of the world as we know it? What happened to gamebooks? Who is Thomas Ligotti? These and many other questions about detective, fantastic, weird, and climate fiction are answered in Rafe McGregor’s selection of his best short nonfiction from the past twenty years. The collection also includes a new essay on one of the most provocative and irreverent manifestos of the twenty-first century and reflections on writing as a practice, writing as a discipline, and writing as a career.

Some of the writing will be familiar to readers of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction, but much of it will be new to you, having appeared in venues as diverse as Dalesman, The London Magazine, Crime Always Pays, Shots Crime and Thriller Ezine, Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy: The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind, CADS (Crime and Detective Stories), The Millions, Crime Factory, the Crime Readers’ Association, Crime Fiction Lover, the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, the British Society of Criminology, and the British Fantasy Society.

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Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist and author of twenty books, divided evenly between monographs on culture, crime, and politics and pulp fiction. He has published over three hundred essays, reviews, and short stories, many of which have appeared in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, the UK’s second-longest-running amateur speculative fiction magazine.

Cover by Reece Burns.

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Buy now to save money! For the first six months of release, the paperback will be exclusive to Amazon, so that you can buy it for just £7.99. After that, we will choose expanded distribution, but the minimum price will be higher.

Notes I Never Wrote – Rafe McGregor

 

A Note on Notes

When I realised I’d published twenty books in twenty years (or, more accurately, will have twenty published or ‘in press’ by the time the anniversary arrives in a few weeks), my next goal was to have all twenty available in one form or another. Thanks to a belated and reluctant engagement with Kindle, I’ve now done that, with the five books that were published as large print paperbacks from 2008 to 2011 available on Amazon as of last month. They are all short and belong to two trilogies of short books. The Captain Jackson crime and espionage thrillers were all published in 2008 (ignoring my two amateurish attempts at self-publishing): The Secret Policeman (a novella), The Secret Agent (a collection of six short stories, originally published from 2007 to 2008), and The Secret Service (another novella). The two Forgotten Stories short horror collections form a trilogy with John Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in March 2010): Eight Weird Tales (September 2010, tales originally published from 2007 to 2010) and Six Strange Cases (February 2011, two of the cases originally published in 2009). These have been available on Kindle since 2024.

As I was putting the finishing touches on The Secret Agent, I realised that the three short story collections were published before a habit I subsequently adopted in imitation of Stephen King, including notes as a postscript. I prefer this to a foreword as there’s no need to avoid spoilers and I love reading other writer’s notes because they often mention the inspiration or origin of the stories – something about which most writers (and many readers) are curious. I wrote a short introduction to Eight Weird Tales, where I identified Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Anthony Hope, and H.P. Lovecraft as my inspirations, but it was so dull that I left it out of the Kindle edition. Instead, I thought I’d present the notes I never wrote here, excluding those on the two Roderick Langham stories, which were collected in The Adventures of Roderick Langham (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in 2017, complete with notes). That leaves all six stories from The Secret Agent, seven from Eight Weird Tales, and five from Six Strange Cases. 

The Secret Agent

Two: The Captain Jackson stories were all written in a two-year period from 2004 to 2006 and professionally published from 2007 to 2008. As such, they are my oldest work, fiction and nonfiction included, and full of the usual mistakes one associates with a novice author. ‘Two’ was my first published short story, appearing in Hardluck Stories at the beginning of 2007 and is the only one in this collection not to feature Jackson (though I made a weak attempt to frame it as what might now be called a spinoff). It was never intended to be part of the collection, but I needed a sixth story to include and the one I was working on, which would have seen Jackson in Boston, was taking too long to write. I started another one, set in Geneva, but didn’t finish that either and decided to use what I already had, i.e. ‘Two’. The inspiration for the story was something that nearly happened, didn’t, and made me think about what might have happened.

Clock Work: At the core of each of the stories in The Secret Agent is a single action scene and, in retrospect, I was very naïve to assume that writing these well would be enough to sell them for professional rates. The scene at the centre of this story was inspired by the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Special Operations Executive agents, in Prague-Libeň in June 1942. I learned about it from a military history magazine that would inspire several short stories and articles, which I first read in a Starbucks in Oxford, which explains the setting. Heydrich was probably the most dangerous of all of Hitler’s inner circle and would later be the subject of a Roderick Langham memoir, The Naval Cadet. The story was also published as ‘Murder by Numbers’.

Contre Temps: Many of the locations in The Secret Agent (and The Secret Service) were places that my wife and I visited while on holiday in our first few years of living together. (We lived near an airport in the days of the 99p ticket.) This narrative was inspired by a disappointing trip to Quebec. (In fairness, Quebec was fine; it was Quebec City that was a disappointment.) ‘Contre Temps’ was the first time I tried something different with the Jackson short stories because the action scene at its core never happens: Megan misses Jackson in consequence of her monolingualism, which almost certainly works out better for both her and Ashley (yes, this is the spinoff connection). While I don’t think it’s the best, it is the most widely read of all the Jackson stories courtesy of its appearance in a trade paperback collection of crime fiction.

Fall Guy: I think it’s fair to say that most inspiration for stories, whether they end up being long or short, requires a minimum of two sources, a literal coincidence of some sort. In this case, the combination was a misadventure while skiing and reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice (2002), the second novel in her Rizzoli & Isles series. I can’t remember which came first, but it doesn’t matter because the second event resonated with the first and I had enough to start writing. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to meet Dr Gerritsen briefly. A clever, kind, charming woman who is very generous with her time and was treated appallingly by Alfonso Cuarón and Hollywood with regard to the blockbuster feature film, Gravity (2013). Her chapter in Hollywood vs. the Author (2018) is quite harrowing.

The Secret Agent: This is the longest Jackson short story at eight and a half thousand words and might be more accurately categorised as a novelette, i.e. somewhere in between a short story and a novella. ‘The Secret Agent’ is the first and only time I’ve set out to write a narrative of that length and it was also the first of all eight of the Jackson stories to be professionally published (The Secret Policeman and The Secret Service were both initially self-published, in 2005 and 2006 respectively). The scene at its core is a story told to me by a colleague some years before the writing and to this day I’m still not sure if he made it up or not. The coincidence that turned a scene into a story was the 7/7 bombings, during which my wife and I were in London (albeit very far from harm).

Hit and Miss: The last Jackson story to be written and published and the last in the chronology, which is: The Secret Policeman, ‘Clock Work’, ‘Contre Temps’, ‘Fall Guy’, ‘The Secret Agent’, and The Secret Service. The inspiration is the most banal of any of these notes. While possessed of many virtues, not the least of which is putting up with me for so long, my wife is indeed messy. She left a hammer outside the garage one day. I picked it up with thoughts of how it could have been used to break into the garage or house and then reversed direction, thinking how fortuitous it would have been if it had been left on the other side of a break-in. By the time this happened, I’d already been considering how many of Jackson’s enemies might want to interrupt his retirement and how they would go about it.

Eight Weird Tales

The Letters of Reverend Dyer: As will be apparent from both The Adventures of Roderick Langham and The Memoirs of Roderick Langham (forthcoming from Theaker’s Paperback Library), I’ve been fascinated by Whitby, the Yorkshire Coast, and North-East Yorkshire in its entirety for a long time. This story was inspired by Whitby, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cycle, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘The Drowned Geologist (1898)’, which was first published in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. I spent a very enjoyable day researching it at the Whitby Museum, which was then and is still run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. ‘The Letters of Reverend Dyer’ was my first attempt at writing speculative fiction.

Fleet: The inspiration was a curious combination of unrelated things: my return to university as a mature student, James’ ghost stories, a comment I’d read about one of his stories (I can’t remember either which story or where I read the comment), and an interest in medieval military orders. Though I visited the location of the final scene, I couldn’t see any sign of the Templar priory at all and remain unsure as to whether I was in exactly the right place. After my wife and I moved to the East Riding of Yorkshire, I spent some time exploring the surrounds, but many of these excursions were conducted in haste and at a time when information on the internet was relatively limited and smartphones restricted to the rich.

The Signal Station: One of the locations I did manage to find and visited several times over many years of days and occasionally nights spent in Scarborough. Not the least of the fascinations of North-East Yorkshire for me is the Roman occupation, although very little evidence of it remains. The inspirations are Lovecraft again, the series of comics and graphic novels that feature the Irish hero Sláine MacRoth and were first published in 2000 AD in 1983 and in Warrior’s Dawn in 2005, and the first year of my postgraduate studies. I did attempt to visit all of the signal station sights in my travels, but – once again – can’t be certain if I wasn't in the wrong place for one or two of them. The story was also published as ‘The Chapel on the Headland’ and is revisited in ‘The Screaming Man’.

Devil’s Own: Another location I visited, though my tour of the Towton battlefield was very haphazard and probably missed at least one important site. While the UK’s most brutal battle can hardly be called banal, the coincidence that inspired the story was, simply, that either shortly before or shortly after my excursion, I saw a military history book with ‘blood-soaked soil’ in the title. (I can’t remember which title and I’m sure there are many anyway.) A more insightful observation might be that another of my fascinations with North-East Yorkshire is the way in which there is so much under the soil – foundations, fossils, gemstones, and…bones. The story was also published as ‘Black Mac Sween’ and is revisited in ‘The Red Trees’.

Spurn: The geography and history of Spurn (the Spurn peninsular) and Spurn Point (Spurn Head) are both intriguing and I won’t bore readers with either here. Like Towton, I know I found the right place but am less certain that I saw everything I came for. The location aside, the inspiration was a combination of several things: a pamphlet I picked up somewhere in the East Riding about the drowned city of Ravenser Odd, Mark Valentine’s notes on one of his Connoisseur short stories (I can’t remember where the notes were published), and some very shoddy historical research on my part. In 2022, the precise location of Ravenser Odd was discovered and there was an exhibition at the Hull History Centre in 2024. Unfortunately, by that time I was living on the other side of the country and wasn’t able to visit. The story was also published as ‘The Stones at Spurn Point’.

Murder in the Minster: This is a Ruritanian pastiche and its inspirations are: Hope’s originals, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Rupert of Hentzau (1895), and the lesser known The Heart of Princess Osra (1896); the various homages that have followed, including John Haythorne’s The Strelsau Dimension (1981) and John Spurling’s After Zenda (1995); and a website called The Ruritanian Resistance. If anyone notices a correspondence between Rassendyll and Bauer on the one hand and Forrester and Jackson on the other, it’s because this story could – and perhaps should – have been another Jackson outing. At the time of writing, I was disappointed with the lack of commercial success I was having and thought I’d try something different. The location is based on a visit to Howden Minster, which also appears in ‘Spurn’.

Letter from the Helmand: This is the most unlikely source of inspiration I can imagine and also the most shameful. I went through a brief stage of reading the autobiographies of retired generals, which were usually disappointing as most had prioritised promotion over action and most toed the party line in their narratives because they had too much to lose. One of my selections was It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1992), which I read shortly before or after reading about the first combat death of a British soldier during the War in Afghanistan (in 2006). Schwarzkopf mentions a story he wrote while at West Point, in which he deliberately and cleverly conflated two wars nearly two millennia apart. I pretty much plagiarised the whole thing, compounding my crime by plagiarising Doyle, who begins his most famous series with a military doctor returning from…Afghanistan.

Six Strange Cases 

The Short Spoon: This was originally intended to be the first in a mystery series that would feature a retired police detective and have more of a commercial appeal than the Jackson short stories. The problem was that even in its leanest version the story was a novelette, significantly limiting the paying markets to which it could be submitted. At about the same time, I started what was intended to be a noir novel, one that might end up as either a crime thriller with an occult atmosphere or an occult thriller with a detective protagonist. The retired detective mystery was absorbed into the Titus Farrow novel, which gave me about sixteen thousand words of work-in-progress. When my literary agent couldn’t sell Bloody Reckoning (eventually published by Lume Books in 2017), I suggested The Short Spoon, but she wasn’t interested in anything that crossed genres. I didn’t want to waste all that writing, however, and thought it could be published in a collection rather than a magazine, which was how Six Strange Cases was conceived.

Meet El Presidente: ‘The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise’ aside, ‘Meet El Presidente’ is probably my worst short story and its origin is at least partly responsible for that. In contrast, there is nothing wrong with the inspiration: over a decade, I kept coming across the phrase ‘el presidente’ in unusual and incompatible contexts (unusual if you don’t speak Spanish, which I don’t) and started thinking about whether there was a thematic link. I could have made a respectable narrative out of that idea given enough time, but I was in a rush to publish Six Strange Cases. So I combined the offcuts of The Short Spoon that I hadn’t used in ‘The Short Spoon’ with parts of an unfinished story that was called ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ and threw it all into something that was more pot than plot. All unfortunate because the inspiration was promising and ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ was shaping up to be one of my better tales.

The Month of the Wolf: Very obviously inspired by my many visits to and stays in Whitby and my longstanding interest in the Black Dog phenomenon. Less obviously, the story has its origins in a cycle of stories that begins with Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1936), continues with Robert Bloch’s ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1950), and concludes (for now) with Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories. Like almost everything in this collection and much of what I was writing at the time, this was rushed to publication and I felt I’d once again wasted a promising premise. I was thus very pleased to have a revised and improved version, ‘The Barghest’, published several years later. I have a third version planned, though I doubt I’ll ever write it.

Blue Mail: Notwithstanding the Roderick Langham adventure in Six Strange Cases, this is the only story that was previously published. Notwithstanding a different Roderick Langham adventure, ‘Blue Mail’ is also the best short fiction I have written. That surprises me for at least two reasons. First, I’ve already explained the dubious origins of Farrow in my notes on ‘The Short Spoon’ and ‘Meet El Presidente’. He was my attempt to write noir, which is not my forte, and the first and third narratives in which he appeared were bits and pieces cobbled together from unfinished work. What were the chances this outing would be any better? Second, I have absolutely no idea what inspired ‘Blue Mail’ other than several pleasant visits to Cornwall and St Ives. What turns another pedestrian outing for Farrow into something that I hope is quite good is the ‘twist’ in the middle, who is blackmailing whom, and I just can’t remember how or why it came to me.

The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise: I’m pretty sure this is my worst short story. It was rejected everywhere I sent it, including by a publication that was specifically seeking absurd, nonsense, bizarre, or surreal stories (whose title escapes me now). It is also my only attempt to write flash fiction and that’s probably for the best. Having said all that it hardly seems to matter what my inspiration was, but I may as well finish the full set of notes. Once again, there was a coincidence and this particular combination was learning about Russell’s paradox (sets that are not sets of themselves) in a logic class shortly after watching Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), which my wife enjoyed but I didn’t. No, I didn’t force her to read the story as payback and no, I still don’t understand Russell’s paradox.

Forty Years of Stephen King – Rafe McGregor

Stephen King is one of a mere handful of authors to have sold hundreds of millions of books. Though he has written across multiple genres, he is best known for his horror fiction and more specifically as the author of: The Shining (1977), Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Misery (1987), Pet Sematary (1983), and his apocalyptic masterpiece, The Stand (1978, republished in 1990). King was born in Portland (Maine), in 1947, and will be turning eighty next year. He began writing fiction at a very young age and made his first professional sale, a short story called ‘The Glass Floor’, to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967, nearly sixty years ago. He is currently completing Other Worlds Than These, which is the final instalment of a trilogy that began with The Talisman in 1984, continued with Black House in 2001 (both of which were co-authored with the late Peter Straub), and is due for publication in October. My mother was a great fan of King so the house was full of his novels when I was growing up and I’ve been reading his work for about forty years now. I’ve also become an unreserved and unashamed fan…why?

Lots of reasons. First, I must give my mother credit for never forcing King on me. Unfortunately, she didn’t live long enough for me to thank her, but she clearly knew my teenage self very well; that my curiosity would be more of a motivation than any recommendation. Second, King seems like a really (and rarely) decent human being. At least from his public persona and autobiographical writing. His to-and-fro with Trump on Twitter was particularly entertaining. So are his responses to book burners. I could go on. Also, King doesn’t have to be that way – he has sufficient celebrity to be as obnoxious as he wants without losing his fanbase. Third, he has written the best book on writing that I’ve ever read and am ever going to read, titled, simply, On Writing (2000). As such, I regard him as a writer’s writer (whatever, precisely, that may mean). Fourth, in spite of all the money and fame, he’s an underdog, ignored and even despised by the literary establishment and academia until very recently and then recognised with reluctance. Even champions of genre fiction like S.T. Joshi seem to have taken great pleasure in deriding almost everything about his writing. I almost always agree with Joshi, but he tears King to pieces in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction (2001), setting him up as a kind of anti-Ramsey-Campbell, who is represented as the second coming of Lovecraft. (I don’t object to the comparison between Campbell and Lovecraft, but to King as an inferior binary opposite.) While I’m not going to pretend that I’ve loved every word of his that I’ve read (on which, more below), given that, at the latest count, he’s published sixty-seven long and two hundred short works of fiction, there are bound to be at least some mediocre or subpar offerings. There are also, however, many great offerings and perhaps even a work of two of genius.

In spite of my lengthy acquaintance with and enjoyment of King’s oeuvre I’ve only very recently completed all six of the novels for which he is famous. Misery is my favourite, a great narrative that succeeds on multiple levels and is essential reading for anyone who enjoys books about writing and the writing life, whether fiction or nonfiction. The Shining is excellent, especially the effortless changes of perspective from father to mother to child and back again. This is King doing what he does best, exploring either the traditional or nuclear family in all its complexity of love, hate, joy, sorrow, comfort, and anxiety. At its most basic, The Shining is the tale of a haunted house, the house being a giant hotel isolated in the winter snows. I’ve seen the novel criticised for its lack of internal logic (a recurring complaint from King’s detractors), but as someone who pays a great deal of – probably too much – attention to such things, I don’t see the problem. The supernatural elements make sense, they move the plot along…what’s not to like? Carrie and Pet Sematary are competent and maybe even original outings in the horror genre, with King playing to another strength of his, the representation of the worlds of children and teenagers, but neither are favourites of mine. Salem’s Lot and The Stand were, regrettably, too long for me, which was a shame regarding the latter because I really wanted to like it. There just wasn’t enough story to sustain either novel all the way to the end and with respect to the former, I thought the short story ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ (which was first published in Night Shift in 1978) far superior. It is probably not surprising that the two of the six I like the most are about writers and, more specifically, writers with addictions, as King reveals in his discussion of his own struggles with addiction in the autobiographical part of On Writing.

Surely this is faint praise if I’m recommending no more than two of King’s six most successful novels? I’m not alone in this assessment because in an interview in Far Out magazine in 2022, he listed his favourite five stories, only one of which is from the six: ‘Survivor Type’ (1982), Misery, Lisey’s Story (2006), ‘The Body’ (1982), and Billy Summers (2021). What is particularly interesting about this list is that only one of his favourites has a supernatural element (Lisey’s Story), much of which is presented with great subtlety. I think King is at his best without the supernatural and in his shorter work, albeit with several exceptions that prove the rule. My own list of favourites also includes only one of the six (mimicking King’s choice) and one other from his list: ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ (1982), Misery, ‘Survivor Type’, ‘N.’ (2008), and Cycle of the Werewolf (1983). One novel, two novellas, and two short stories, in the first three of which the supernatural is absent. I was lucky enough to read ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ before I saw the film (which I also enjoyed, but is not as good) and without any spoilers, both of which contributed significantly to my reading experience.

I think I’ve already justified my enthusiasm for both King and his work, but let me say one more thing to make this a genuine appreciation. His own list of favourites covers forty years of writing and mine twenty-five. Since his big break with Carrie in 1974, the quality of King’s work has remained consistent, in spite of the life-changing injuries he sustained when he was run over by a reckless minivan driver in 1999. Since then he has published, among others, Lisey’s Story, Just After Sunset (2008), The Outsider (2018), and Billy Summers. The first of these is an epic love letter to his wife, the second one of his best short story collections to date, the third an excellent occult detective story, and the fourth a great crime thriller. I hope there are more to come and I hope we’re both around for his eightieth birthday…

The Writing Life – Rafe McGregor

For the last twenty years, I’ve been fascinated by what is called ‘the literary life’, ‘the writing life’, being ‘bound up with books’, being a ‘bookman’ (or bookwoman), and various other more oblique or less elegant phrases. Regarding terminology, I’m not keen on either of the last two because they imply an emphasis on reading (or collecting) books rather than writing them and while one cannot write without reading, I know plenty of people who love reading but have no desire to write anything beyond an email or shopping list. Calling a life literary seems pretentious to me, though perhaps that’s just because I never aspired to be the next Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Douglas Coupland, J.M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, or David Peace (I’m just not clever or creative enough.) Which leaves me with the writing life. What is it and have I been living it?

One of the best descriptions I’ve ever read is by Octavia Butler, from the archive of letters, diaries, journals, commonplace books, and datebooks that has recently been made available by The Huntington Library in San Merino, California. She gets straight to the heart of the matter: ‘Will always write, no matter what. This is a fact of my life. Thus I must always leave time in my day for writing.’ The writing life is nothing more and nothing less than a life spent writing; writing, typing, or recording one word after another until one has a paragraph, a stanza, a draft, a manuscript or something else someone somewhere might read. And that remains the case even when writing doesn’t earn any money or when there might be very little time for it. Here is Gareth L. Powell in About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022), picking up where Butler leaves off: ‘However you decide to organise your life, remember why you’re doing it. The goal is to get everything else under control, so you can be wild and free in your creative endeavours.’ For me, the writing life has had several characteristics that seem to have been shared by better known writers of speculative fiction and I want to draw attention to five.

First – and I place this first for good reason – is notetaking. In Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023), M. John Harrison writes: ‘But notes make good source material, and when you keep notebooks they eventually begin to suggest something.’ Like many writers (and researchers), I’m a compulsive notetaker. And happy with it. Where I could and should do better is that I often throw my handwritten notes away or delete my digital ones and…of course…sometimes find I could’ve used them later. Here is Butler, once again cutting straight to the core, describing exactly why I make so many notes: ‘Writing things down a little might help untangle them – answers in a flash of insight or something.’ My creative process is very unimaginative in that whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction I usually start with notes rather than with an exposition or introduction. My writing is labour-intensive, perspiration not inspiration, proceeding slowly from rough notes to detailed notes to a first draft to up to a dozen more before something someone somewhere might enjoy reading emerges from the mess.

The second characteristic is collecting. I know few people who live the writing life without loving and collecting books (including in digital form, whether listened to or read onscreen). I listen to as many books as I read, to save my eyes and maximise my reading time, but I still love the look, feel, and smell of actual books. I’m with Ursula Le Guin when she wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 2008: ‘The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.’ I’ve been collecting on and off for forty-five years and probably have about four thousand books and magazines on my shelves, which is a little disappointing as it isn’t much of an advance on what I had ten years ago, but probably for the best until someone donates me a bigger house. Harrison has a depressing take on collections like mine for writers like me, i.e. those in the latter part of their lives: ‘You imagine someone saying, “They meant so much to him, choose anything you like,” then, when everyone has gone, looking around at all the books still left and wondering what on earth to do with them because even the charity shops aren’t interested.’

Third, drafting – as distinct from notetaking, revising, editing, or proving. In my short-lived career as a creative writing tutor, I used to call this 3FD: finish the f— first draft. (You might be surprised at how sensitive many creative writing students are, which is what the silly em dash is doing there.) I later realised that many if not most fiction writers recommend the same thing when it comes to writing a novel. Here’s Joanne Harris in Ten Things About Writing: Build Your Story…One Word at a Time (2020): ‘It’s tempting to tinker about with your first draft as you go along, but, barring a small amount of day-to-day line-work, which might help you get into the mood for writing, it’s nearly always better to just get your draft down. Even a dirty first draft is easier to work with than a clean first chapter.’ I’m not sure how useful the advice is in general, but given my own practice (described above), it’s exactly what I need. Once I have a completed first draft instead of detailed notes, the rest is relatively easy, whether it’s another three or ten drafts. In Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (1998), Le Guin explains precisely how one gets that first draft down: ‘The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence – to keep the story going. Forward movement, pace, and rhythm are words that are going to return often in this book.’

The fourth characteristic is walking. Powell reminds us that, ‘Spending all day in a chair, hunched over a keyboard, can be desperately bad for your long-term health. In order to perform to the best of your abilities, you have to make time for a little exercise, even if it’s just a stroll around the block.’ Harrison takes a much more robust approach, which is why one of his chapters is titled ‘write all night, walk all day’. He replaced walking with running and then rock climbing when he moved to the Peak District, both of which I enjoyed when I was younger, but neither of which have the same value for me as walking. I couldn’t find a fiction author who captures what I get from walking and what it means to me so I’ve resorted to my favourite book on the subject, A Philosophy of Walking (published in 2011 and translated to English in 2023), by the French philosopher Frédéric Gros: ‘Walking is something other than a way of relaxing after a hard day’s work, something other than a remedy for ennui, a health regimen, a social ritual, or even a source of inspiration.’ He is absolutely right, but it is also all of those things he lists…at least to me.

The fifth and final characteristic is what I’m going to call judging, which is a poor description of what I’m trying to communicate. Let me try another approach: if I could go back in time, give myself one piece of advice, and insist to myself that I follow it, what would it be? (I had to add the third part because I often fail to follow good advice, regardless of its source.) Without doubt: find a way of determining when to persevere and when to give up. Obviously, that advice is useful beyond writing. Less obviously, I’m not talking about persevering with or giving up the writing life. What I mean is judging when to persevere with a project and when to give up on it – because I’ve wasted hours, days, weeks, months, and perhaps even years rewriting and revising work I should have just left (but not thrown away or deleted) in draft. Harris says it best: ‘Don’t throw valuable time at a dead project. Yes, giving up can be painful. But sometimes you have to plough over your crop in order to plant something else.’ But how does one know when the project is dead? While I have a better sense now than I did when I began, I’m still not sure and if someone had told me how important deciding whether to cultivate or plough was twenty years ago, I might have eventually worked it out. In Steering the Craft, Le Guin doesn’t provide an answer, but she does show where and how it can – must, even – be found: ‘Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work.’ Judging what has potential and what doesn’t remains one of the most difficult things for me.

Writing Above the Curve? – Rafe McGregor

I first watched F1, Joseph Kosinski’s 2025 Hollywood blockbuster, at home rather than on the big screen, had mixed feelings about it, and did what I usually do in such cases – read a few reviews the next morning. The most pithy (I’ve forgotten where it was) stated: ‘this is not the film you want it to be.’ True on many levels, including the most fundamental. This is a story about a never-has-been fifty-something racing driver, Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt), whose Formula One career was cut short by his youthful recklessness but is given one last shot to compete by his friend, a former-teammate-turned-owner. Spoiler alert, Sonny achieves what he couldn’t manage thirty years ago, winning the final race of the season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The problem from a narrative point of view is that Sonny’s character is as static as his driving is dynamic. The most basic story human beings tell is about someone who went somewhere or did something and was changed by the going or doing. At the end of the film, however, Sonny is not only the same man he was at beginning, but the same reckless, fearless, and rootless man he was in his twenties. And in case this isn’t disappointing enough, the film rubs its flaw in our faces in the closing scene. In the eighth minute (of one hundred and forty-eight), Sonny is heading for the Baja 1000 when his friend catches up with him and makes him the offer he can’t refuse. What does he do immediately after victory in Abu Dhabi? Leaves without saying goodbye and signs up for the Baja 1000. The places he went and the things he did changed nothing. It wasn’t the film I wanted it to be.

So why write about it at all, never mind in a zine dedicated to speculative fiction? About two-thirds of the way through the narrative, there is a scene where Kate McKenna (played by Kerry Condon), Sonny’s love-interest in what is for the most part a sausage-fest, asks him why he has come back to Formula One at his age. With typical masculine reticence, he declines to answer. Then, after a suitable amount of encouragement and a single manly tear, he says something very interesting: ‘It’s rare, but sometimes there’s…this moment in the car where everything goes quiet. My heartbeat slows…it’s peaceful and I can see everything and no one, no one, can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to, I want to…cos in that moment, I’m flying.’ The moment about which Sonny is talking is difficult to describe, but is something like what the philosopher (and Nobel laureate in Literature) Jean-Paul Sartre called being-in-itself, a kind of purity of being that we, as conscious and self-conscious living things, can rarely, if ever, reach. (In Sartre’s taxonomy, we are being-for-itself). It is pure consciousness, meaning consciousness of nothing or just nothingness itself (Sartre’s magnum opus was called Being and Nothingness), the breaking down of the barrier between subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and perhaps even mind and body. That moment has frequently and fraudulently been sold to us as ‘flow’ and ‘mindfulness’, the latter as a snake oil remedy for exploitation by our employers or Big Tech. I wondered what the equivalent moment in writing might be.

Once again, I did what I usually do (when I have a question about writing), turned to my three favourite books on writing, all of which I have read or listened to multiple times and all of which I will no doubt read or listen to many more times in the future. In order of precedence, these are: Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), Chuck Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience (2013), and Brian Dillon’s Essayism (2017). Stephen King needs no introduction and I’ve written about him many times in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and elsewhere. Chuck Wendig is an American speculative fiction author best known for his Star Wars: Aftermath Trilogy (2015-2017), three novels that connect the original trilogy of films to the sequel trilogy in what is now known as the Skywalker Saga. Brian Dillon is an Irish author best known for his nonfiction, especially his essays, and is also a highly respected art curator. As the title suggests, Essayism is about Dillon’s forté rather than fiction writing so I shall replace it with a recent find, Gareth L.Powell’s About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022). Powell is a prolific English science fiction author who has been publishing short stories, novellas, and novels since 2002. I want to call Powell and Wendig ‘mid-list’ authors, but I’m not sure if I should because, first, I’m not sure if a mid-list of professional novelists still exists and, second, it sounds disrespectful…which is not my intention: as much as I love On Writing, I never aspired to be a bestseller so there is a sense in which Powell’s and Wendig’s books are much more relevant to my experience as an author.

King describes something very similar to Sonny’s moment and even uses ‘moment’ to introduce it. This passage appears during his description of the problems he had writing The Stand (1978), his fifth novel and one of the half-dozen for which he is most famous: ‘At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking above the curve,” and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic,” and it’s that, too…The rest of the book ran itself off in nine weeks.’ Wendig prefers ‘momentum’ to moment and focuses on its significance in completing a first draft rather than on the experience of writing with (or in a state of) momentum: ‘Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping.’ Powell is concerned with something similar to the ever-elusive moment when he writes: ‘I think you find your voice when you give yourself permission to stop trying to write like anyone else and just put the words down on the page as they occur to you. And you find your groove when you’re writing in the right way for you.’

None of these are describing Sonny’s moment, although King comes very close. King is actually discussing two separate but related experiences: the first is thinking above the curve, the moment when the solution to his narrative problem came to him; and the second what we might call writing above the curve, finishing what many consider his best book in nine weeks. It is the writing above the curve in which I’m interested. Comparing Sonny’s dialogue with King’s passage, I have a bone to pick with the F1’s script. Sonny says, ‘I want to…cos in that moment, I’m flying.’ Flying is just a version of driving, with much more speed and freedom and I imagine many pilots who fly professionally or for pleasure don’t experience the breakdown of subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and all the rest to which Sonny is referring. When he says driving in the moment is like flying, it’s akin to an author saying that writing in the moment with a pen is like writing on a keyboard. It’s not that the moment makes one experience like a similar experience that is more intense, but that in the moment, all experiences are intense, regardless of whether one is driving, flying, writing, typing, or practising zazen. While King writes about thinking above the curve rather than writing above the curve, it seems likely he had some (or perhaps a great deal of) experience of the latter in those nine weeks he mentions.

Describing the moment in writing is very difficult, which may be why so few people have tried and why I should cut the screenwriters of F1 some slack. For me, writing above the curve is when I cease being conscious of what I’m writing – the genre, the structure, the audience, the publisher, all of that – and simply write (the story, novel, essay, monograph, whatever it is). It feels like writing without any rules or restrictions. It’s not, of course, because the rules and restrictions are all there, but I’m no longer aware of them and am just typing one word after another. At such times, I often touch-type too, which is something I can’t do when I’m aware that I’m typing. It seems like the manuscript is writing itself (which it’s obviously not either). I don’t have much more to say about the experience except that while it’s not the only or even main reason I write, it probably is comparable to racing (or zazen, or whatever). I first felt it when I was writing my first (and, in retrospect, best) novel and the last thing I will say is that, for me, it only happens when I’m working on a manuscript that takes multiple sittings, like a novel, monograph, novelette, or long essay. I’m not sure why, but the sustained attention required for these medium-to-large projects seems to facilitate writing above the curve in a way that short stories, blog posts, and reviews don’t. I’ve sketched a poor picture of the experience, but if you’ve felt it (in writing or elsewhere), then I think you’ll understand precisely what I’ve failed to articulate.