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This Ain't Written Like The Hardy Boys

A Conversation with Irish Horror Writer/Filmmaker Darryl Sloan

Mick Halpin: Darryl Sloan, welcome to the Writing Show – where writing is always the story! You've written a couple of horror books. When was the last time that you were scared shitless?

Darryl Sloan: The one thing that actually jumps to my mind is an experience that I had, when I was just ten years old, of walking through a park (not too far from here, in Portadown) called Bachelor's Walk. I was with my friends at the time. There were these guys who were about seventeen or eighteen. One of them came running over to me with a knife in one hand and a hatchet in the other- now this is no joke- he came up to me, he put the knife at my back and he held the hatchet over his head. He said, "Hey boy, come over here with us!" And my two friends... just... kept... walking! Now they were my age so I can't really blame them for that. But I can remember just thinking, "This is it. I'm going to die." And I just burst out crying, "Leave me alone!" And he just laughed and ran back over to his mates. In all honesty that is the only time in my life that I have felt scared like that. But that's a long time ago. Ten years old.

DS: I remember my uncle, when I was about five years old, maybe even earlier- this is probably one of my earliest memories- he brought a video recorder around to the house. This was one of these newfangled inventions, very very new. And the movie he had was called Horror Express. It was about this big train going through the icy wastes of Siberia. They had this thing that they had dug out of the ice in a crate on the train. People were getting curious about what they had in the crate. All I can remember is the panel being pulled back and the ice had thawed and there was this horrible creature with these big glowing red eyes. And when he stared at you, he made you go blind! Your eyes went white and blood started dripping out of them. According to my aunt, I ran right out of the house and down the street as a result of this. I had an early introduction to horror.

MH: A couple years later- we're jumping around just a little bit here- you picked up a video recorder of your own and began making movies that sound like Hammer Horrors, Cushing….

DS: Yeah, this happened around the late 80's when we were in our late teens. Chiefly me and my friend Andrew Harrison. We decided we were going to make this big zombie movie. He had got a camcorder and we hired our friends to act in this. I was going to do the music because that was one of my passions. And so we started about creating this movie called Zombie Genocide.

DS: We had literally next to nothing to do it with. I know Andrew did invest a little bit of money. He bought a couple of replica guns, which is kind of a crazy thing to own in 1993 in Northern Ireland when The Troubles were very much happening. But we did this and we did it with guerrilla filmmaking. We didn't get permission to fire these guns off anywhere, we just fired them off- and then we ran! We didn't have any editing equipment or anything. We filmed it as we shot it. We've made a lot of movies since then, but amazingly, Zombie Genocide is the one that people still love.

MH: You get people calling you up and writing you up and emailing you even today, talking about this film you made when you were eighteen?

DS: In fact just today an email came in from someone asking about Zombie Genocide.

MH: You said that you've made, how many movies was it? After Zombie Genocide?

DS: Zombie Genocide was finished in 1993. It took about two and a half years to make. There was a big gap after that of about five years and we lost touch with each other. Andrew got married, lived across the other end of town. But we got back together in ‘98 and made one called The Wages of Sin. Which is about as close to a political sort of film as we've ever made, because we don't go for that kind of thing. In Northern Ireland you're kind of expected to do something political because of the Troubles and everything…. But this was a movie about a hitman who got tortured by the ghosts of his victims. It's been compared a little bit to David Lynch's work and Reservoir Dogs in some reviews. It's a bit of a short. Again, we had very primate equipment, but this time we edited using a video recorder, not just right on the spot. We actually won an award at an Italian film festival for that one.

DS: In the year 2000 we made one called Dark Light which was a vampire action movie. It was a return to a long form, this one was over sixty minutes long, like Zombie Genocide. It's sort of gone into a bit on anonymity, that one there.

DS: Then we did another short called Encounter at Black Ridge which was a homage to old 50's B-Movie sci-fi. Then in 2002 we made Saul's Pupils. We made Saul's Pupils because of a script that came to our attention written by a local fellow called Glenn Poole. Saul's Pupils is all about the question, "How far will you go for love?" It's about a kidnap situation with a ransom, but the ransom in not for money. It's a girl who's been kidnapped by a demonic entity. The price to pay is that the girl's lover has to kill three people for the demon before the demon will release his girl. "Do you do it? Do you not? Is it worth it to lose your soul for the girl you love?"

DS: Our most recent one is called Don't Look in the Attic. It's all about a women who lives in a house and hears strange noises coming from the attic. It's very much a tension piece. There's no blood whatsoever. It's the first family friendly movie that we've made.

DS: One of the nice things to happen with me working in a school is that the English department in the school got behind the film. As part of teaching suspense to the kids, they show this film every year to the second years and I get to do a little talk about how to create suspense in a story telling situation.

DS: We're just gearing up this year to make another film. Possibly Shadow of the Dead, I think Shadow of the Dead is a few years away. We're going to make another short one in between. We've got a guy on board now who's got a three thousand pound camera- that's going to be a step in the right direction for us.

MH: Zombies! Gotta love those guys. Why is this genre so enduring?

DS: I have no idea! It is the strangest thing, it really is. If you want to write a successful novel, write a zombie novel. And there are so many of them out now, it's unbelievable. There are all these self-published things. If you go into zombies, you've got instant fandom.

DS: I do love post-apocalyptic films and books. That would definitely be my favourite subgenre. Zombies in particular afford a chance to philosophize a little bit about life and death.

MH: Whether it's zombies, an icy doom or tripods from space, your fiction and flicks have a strong theme of "the end is nigh." Or is it what happens to individual people when faced with a cataclysmic crisis? Is that the interesting part?

DS: There's just something about the end of the world. One of the nicest teasers I ever saw for a zombie story was for a comic collection called The Walking Dead. It was something along the lines of "Now that the zombies are here, it's time to finally start living." I thought that was such a good quote. I was like, "Yeah, that's right." We live these lives that are built around capitalism, selfishness, looking out for ourselves, trying to make money. There are actually other ways to live your life. If you were more concerned with survival, your life would be so different. And probably, in a funny way, much more fulfilling. I think that's the fascination that there is with me with the post-apocalyptic scenarios: the chance for a massive change. I think it really is true.

DS: One of my favourite novels is [John Wyndham's]The Day Of The Triffids. On one level it's a novel about walking plants. It's kind of a little bit silly. But when you read the novel-! You have to ignore the movie that was made, that really was a B movie. But that book- the plants are hardly in that story. It's a story about the collapse of civilization. It's a story about difficult situations. If you're the one person in the world who can see, surrounded by an entire country full of blind people flailing along for the next bit of food… how many can you save alone? Should you even try, or should you be using your energy to try something else? These are amazing questions.

DS: A lot of authors say that they were reading from when they were no age. That was not the case with me. I couldn’t stand books through most of my school years. It was only when I was fourteen that I actually got a book that I enjoyed. It was called [Robert C. O'Brien's] Z for Zachariah. It was the story of a girl who survives a nuclear war mysteriously because of some kind of weather phenomenon in her valley that allows her to stay isolated and not suffer the radiation effects. Just an amazing novel. It allowed me to think, yeah there really is something to this [reading] thing.

DS: The first story that I really enjoyed writing was when I was fifteen. Our English homework was to write a story called "The Dark." The title was great- it was going to be a horror story! I was thrilled to do my homework. Now, normally I wouldn't enjoy my homework, but I loved it. You had to write a five hundred word story, which was two sides of a file page normally. Mine ended up being twelve sides of a file page- three thousand words. I can remember my English teacher writing a very nice comment on the back of it. Apparently it was the talk of the staff room as well, which was really, really nice. I've actually kept that story, all these years. One of these days if I'm ever famous maybe I'll sell it and make a lot of money. [laughs]

DS: Another favourite apocalyptic novel is The Death of Grass by John Christopher. It's all about the question of, "If you're travelling across the country after the end of the world where there are bandits everywhere and food shortages- how mean are you willing to be to protect your family? Would you take food from another innocent family just so your own could have it? It's totally different than selfishness because it's not for you. It's for the people you love and want to protect. I just love those questions being put forward. It takes a story to be a post-apocalyptic story to do this kind of thing right.

MH: If there is an entire world full of people who need help, is it worthwhile to even try to save them? Or should you just cut and run, grab the few that you can save and go with them? That's a theme that comes up in Chion, your most recent novel. Tell us a little bit about the novel.

DS: Imagine you're a fourteen year old kid in school in the middle of winter. In the classroom, just beyond the windows, you see the snowflakes start to fall. Everybody thinks, "Fantastic! There's going to be a carpet of snow by the time it's break time. We're all going to get outdoors, we're going to have a slugfest. It's going to be great."

DS: Waiting for the bell to rings. It rings. "Yeah!" We get our bags together. But before you make it out of the classroom, you hear the sound of screaming coming from another part of the building. Everybody streams out into the corridor and they look down into the playground. They see some of the other kids who made it out to the playground before them. The kids are lying there on the snow, and they're writhing about, they can't seem to stand up. And they're screaming! So what's going on?

DS: When the first kid ran out into the snow, his foot stuck to it. He fell forward and landed flat on his face. His face stuck to it! Whatever it is that is falling from the sky is not snow. It's something else. Or at least it's some kind of modified snow. And it's stronger that superglue. As soon as you touch it, you stick to it. And it's not only around the school, it's not only around the town, it's all over the entire country. So, this is the scenario I'm presenting right at the beginning of the book: now, if you have a country covered in this snow, how does everyone get rescued?

DS: Even if another foreign power comes in with helicopters, they cannot land the helicopters anywhere. Nothing can travel on the roads. People who were outside when the snow fell are dead. If they were in a car, the cars have ground to a halt, they're trapped in the cars. Anyone indoors is trapped in the building that they're in. Whatever food that you have in that building is the only food that you're likely to get. And the worst thing of all is that this "snow" isn't melting. So: how do you get out of that situation? All that's left to do is to wait to die.

MH: Jamie Metcalfe decides that he is not going to wait to starve to death with seven hundred other pupils.

DS: Before the panic sets in, there's actually a little bit of a novelty effect for the pupils. They trust that somehow the adult world is going to rescue them from this. But Jamie does not have this kind of faith because he is dying. He has this unique outlook. There is one girl in the school that he loves. He figures out a way that he can just save her along with himself and no one else. The novel is basically about how he goes about that.

MH: It's a very creative notion. It's quite well executed. It presents a very interesting situation, like you've said, and puts it in language that not only young adults would enjoy and be able to identify with, but it's a good read for adults as well.

DS: I try to write for the Young Adult audience in a way that's not like the Hardy Boys.

MH: I know where you get your ideas. Ulterior and Chion are set at the same place- Clounagh Junior High School. This is actually the real school where you teach. Have any of the students read these books?

DS: Ulterior was released four years ago. One of the first things that I wanted to do was to show the kids the books. So, I made a charity gig out of it. Any of the copies I sold within school made some money for charity. I think it was about six hundred pounds or so I raised for Children in Need. There's about two hundred kids in every school year and usually about sixty of them are interested in buying the novel each year.

DS: There was a huge marketing concern went into the choice of setting the book in the school. I was about to embark on spending two thousand pounds to do an offset print run of my novel.

DS: I know that these days when you self-publish you usually do Print On Demand [POD]. But back then I didn't know about Print On Demand. And it's actually good in a way that I didn't. It meant that I had to spend the money on it, and when I spent the money on it I was going to make damn sure that it sold. I think when you get an easy way out, you only have to invest a couple hundred pounds, it's all too easy to sit on your laurels. I'm discovering that actually with the newest novel, because with the latest novel I wrote I did use Print On Demand.

MH: Back to the offset print run. One thousand books cost basically me two thousand pounds. It was very, very scary having them all sitting there in my office when they arrived. But I also knew that if I failed someone to sell this thing on a national or international level, every school year was going to bring two hundred more kids to the school. That's two hundred more kids I could market the book to. Thankfully it did only take about three, three and a half years to get rid of all one thousand. A lot of them sold way beyond the borders of the school. But I did have my marketing head on when I was thinking about this.

DS: I was excited to make it a local setting as well. I knew the kids would get a real kick out of something like this. This is something that very rarely ever happens. I can never imagine being back at school and having one of the teachers suddenly announce, "Here's a science fiction horror novel written all about your school."

DS: Some people have actually said it's nice to see something good coming out of the town, in relation to the films. It's kind of funny that they say that because the films are quite gruesome. They're all about blood and killing. Portadown has seen its share of killing in real life. It was kind of at the centre of the whole Drumcree thing for many years. It was very much at the center of all the trouble in the country. But it's nice that people say that. Anyone with their head screwed on can distinguish entertainment from real life. A lot of the horror in the films and in my books is very much of a comic-bookish variety. I see that as fairly harmless.

MH: Your first novel, Ulterior- did you try that first with mainstream houses and agents, the traditional route?

DS: To be honest I was just too impatient to go about it the traditional way. I gave up after a few tries. I said, "here we go, let's do this. I've got some money in my bank account, I'm going to spend it. I'm going to get these books out." Even the thought of getting an agent- it means the agent has to place your work with a publisher. If a publisher accepts your work, it's probably another year's wait while that prepare it for publication. I was sitting there on this finished novel that I knew I could get into book form within a few months. It was that, or wait for years to see anything come to fruition- or maybe have nothing come to fruition.

DS: Those were the kinds of thoughts I was having at the time.

MH: What would that price be in dollars? What is the price internationally?

DS: Roughly double it. $8.00. I do offer it for $7.99 on the website. The shipping to America is $5.00, whereas I can ship it for 70p, the equivalent of $1.50, to the UK. But still it only amounts to $12.99 out of your pocket to get a book from Northern Ireland to America.

MH: It's extraordinary the economics of it. Not long back we had a guest called Tim Harper, in an interview called "Inside a Self-Publishing Company," where he revealed all the different ways that many of these companies will overcharge for printing, overcharge for this, that, the other service. If you have, like you're saying, the desktop publishing experience, if you can create a cover that actually looks decent- like, for instance, Chion's cover-

DS: For that I have to thank a friend called Mark Stevens. I actually had my own ideas for a cover… it was going to have the school on the front of it with a dead boy. But Mark just sent me something off the fly, and it was really good looking! I tossed and turned a bit as to which direction I was going to go but eventually went with his. It looks quite professional.

MH: That is so important, especially if you're competing with twelve million other self-published works.

DS: I did read a book recently called Mind's Eye by Philip Henry- if you go to philiphenry.com, that's his website- the book was a really great read. Really, really funny. A good old monster romp, a little bit like Black Lagoon I suppose. Just a great book, but I can't help but think that Philip is going to suffer because of that cover. It's so off-putting.

DS: People buy books according to genre, mostly. The thing that communicates the genre more than anything is the artwork. I like end-of-the-world books. Another of my favourite end-of-the-world books is a largely obscure one. It's by Orson Scott Card and it's called The Folk of the Fringe. I would have never discovered it other than in the bargain basement at a newsagents, I saw this ruined city with these badly-dressed people walking toward it. I thought, "Oh! This looks like to sort of thing I would read!" And I loved the book. The cover art really communicated the genre that the book was in.

MH: Other than covers that look unattractive or unprofessional, what other mistakes do many self-publishing or POD authors make?

DS: There's all kids of bad grammar going on. People just aren't willing to learn correct grammar before they commit their book to be published, whether it's self-published or whatever. I was kind of the same when I was writing Ulterior. I just assumed that I knew everything intuitively about grammar that I needed to know. Since then I have read Stephen King's On Writing and more importantly, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. It's painfully apparent to me now that I didn't know enough about grammar.

DS: Ulterior still reads pretty well, but definitely there were some mistakes I was making that, if I had simply taken the time to read this little one hundred page book, would have been so much better. Punctuation and grammar mistakes abound is self-published fiction. It's kind of sad. Just take time to learn the nuts and bolts of the craft!

DS: It's also important for the self-published writer to get editorial input, even non-professional editorial input, on their work. Before I released Chion, I let five or six people read it. A couple of those people were aspiring writers, others were just regular folk, but everybody brought something to the table and a lot of stuff got fixed.

MH: What about self-promotion and marketing? Do most self-published authors market themselves correctly?

DS: Podcasts are great. There's a really good one going on there at Writing Show. It's fantastic that my voice is going to be heard there. And hopefully, some of you folk listening to this are going to buy my book! [laughs]

MH: I certainly hope so. I have read it myself. A review is up on criticalmick.com. I recommend it. So, by networking through the blogging community, the podcasting community- that's important, you say. Your own blog, by the way- what's the URL for that?

DS: www.darrylsloan.com Now, the thing is, there are five ways to spell "Darryl" and two ways to spell "Sloan." There's another URL that's a lot easier: www.midnightpictures.co.uk. Either of those two URLs will get you to my blog.

DS: One of the best decisions I made regarding my own personal website was to literally make the website a blog. As soon as you go to the website, you don't have to click on the blog, it's just thrown in your face. Blogging is the big thing now. One of he key things is just to put yourself on the page and let people read about you. Have some interesting things to say. It keeps people coming back as well, it really helps the fanbase when they can easily put comments in and everything.

MH: In your own blog, you've talked about everything from those text-based games to twelve tips from The Elements of Style by E.B. White, you've talked about the publication of Chion. You were even putting up proposals for the cover and asking for comments on them.

DS: Yes, I was.

MH: That's very innovative. I think that's brilliant. That's a cross between interactivity, self-publishing, community… at least in myself, it built up a bit of anticipation. I was checking back every so often, "Oh, I wonder if that's out yet?" It really worked.

DS: There was definitely a sense [of community]. I can remember when I published Ulterior. I had a website back then, but it was kind of like you were Speaking into this void. You weren't sure how many people were interested in it or not. Whereas this time, even if it was only five or six people making regular comments, there was a great sense of anticipation. These people were waiting for this book. It was a really nice feeling and it wouldn't have been that way without blogging.

MH: You also have some of your own fiction In convenient .mp3 format.

DS: I love podcasting although I haven't delved into it to a great extent yet. I love to go out for walks at night and normally, now, I have podcasts rather than music going in my .mp3 player when I am out walking. Hopefully I'll not get mugged when I am doing that. This is Portadown and I am six foot four.

MH: We never found out what happened to that guy with the axe--- he might still be lurking in the park.

DS: Oh well. I'm probably bigger than him now.

MH: Is it difficult to get books into the physical bookstores? We've talked about Amazon, we've talked about direct sales. What about the old shop on the corner?

DS: This time around I haven’t actually concentrated on that so much. I've got it into the local Eason stores and one in Belfast. It's also in Belfast's Forbidden Planet store. I am more interested, really, in the online thing. More and more people are buying things online.

DS: Before I move on to that, though, I should say that a lot of self-published writers talk about there being a stigma to actually getting their books into stores. That might be true in America but it doesn't seem to be true here. No one seemed to realize that I was pushing a self-published novel. I wasn't about to tell them that that is what I was doing!

DS: There might be a certain advantage to not having the word "iUniverse" or "Lulu" on the spine of your book. I still think that most of the bookshops here wouldn't know the difference. We're so far away from America. I didn't encounter that kind of attitude.

DS: Some people asked, "who's your publisher?" I just said "Midnight Pictures" even though Midnight Pictures is me and Andrew. It was so easy to get books into bookstores.

DS: The thing that frustrates me about bookstores is chasing the invoices later. Bookstores don't always pay up when they should. It's just carelessness, it's nothing deliberate. It's really frustrating and time-consuming sometimes. But online is definitely where it's at for me. I want to chase that more than anything. I found eBay to be a particularly good market.

MH: You had a very good marketing strategy on eBay, I understand.

DS: At the beginning I was simply listing my book in their "First editions, signed" category. It sells for a while, then it dries up. You'll get people who will take a chance on a new author they have not heard of. When I sold Ulterior, it all dried up after about thirty sales. But then I made a tiny little change that allowed the sales to go on for another one hundred and fifty, maybe, I'm not even sure how many. In fact, I ran out of copies and I could have continued selling. That was when I ran out of my one thousand copies.

DS: The change that I made was simply in the title of the eBay listing. Instead of saying, "Ulterior, novel by Darryl Sloan, first edition, blah blah blah" I simply said, "Ulterior, first edition novel [Stephen King/Dean Koontz fans]".

DS: Now, some people might think, "that's terrible! That's cheating!" But, Stephen King and Dean Koontz are two big influences on me and I reckon, if you like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, you'll like me. Anyone who searches eBay for Stephen King finds Stephen King- and me! Right? So it gets my book seen by a lot more people. It just kept selling.

DS: Technically, though, it's called "keyword spamming." I don't think eBay like it, but I haven't had any customer who have complained. I have only ever seen three or four copies of Ulterior ever show up on eBay after that, which is testament to the fact that a lot of people who bought it liked it- otherwise they would have just been throwing them back on and reselling.

MH: It's an innovative tactic, it's original… hell, it works!

DS: It's amazing that such a tiny little thing can make a difference between having the books sitting in your house and getting rid of them. Just that tiny little change!

MH: You were mentioning Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Who does it right, in your opinion? Who else out there would you recommend, both Young Adult and other?

DS: I like Orson Scott Card a lot. I do feel a great sense of kinship with what he writes about, particularly when he talks about matters of religion. I also like the old stuff by John Christopher- he wrote The Tripods, The Death of Grass, a number of other disaster novels. I'm a fan of John Wyndham, who wrote Day of the Triffids. I do like Ray Bradbury- Fahrenheit 451, great novel.

MH: Are there any up-and-comers you'd recommend? Any other people who are out there in your own shoes, maybe just a fellow who's got the nine-to-fiver during the day and is sitting there at night, stuffing those Jiffy bags and sending them out?

DS: I'm going to recommend Philip Henry, my friend from up north. philiphenry.com is where you can find him. He's doing good things. He's got a fantastic sense of humor, a very Northern Irish sense of humor. He's got two books out- one is called Vampire Dawn, the other is called Mind's Eye.

MH: Have you read Brave Men Run by any chance?

DS: Mathew Selznik? I have heard of it. No, I haven't read that yet.

MH: He gave us quite a good interview.

DS: I'll have to listen to that. I have sampled some of these podcast novels. I tried the Scott Sigler stuff and the J. C. Hutchins stuff, but it didn’t really click with me. One that I do like, actually, is called Forever Fifteen. The website is foreverfifteen.com. It's a vampire novel about a girl who is stuck aged fifteen forever.

DS: I would actually consider podcasting a novel myself, but I am hesitant to do that because something in me doesn't want to give it away for free. Some of these authors talk about how they give it away free as a marketing tool. But any podcasts that I have listened to, I haven't come back later and bought the paperback. It's certainly something I might do with Ulterior since Ulterior has had its run.

MH: What project are you working on now?

DS: What I would love to do for the next while is crank out a few short stories and maybe work towards putting together a short story anthology. I have a strong idea for a supernatural novella. It would be nice to put a novella together with a collection of short stories, very much like Stephen King's Skeleton Crew, which began with that big long one, "The Mist."

DS: There's a whole lot of things that are clamouring for my attention, I am not sure which one I'm going to try next. And Andrew is anxious of course to get a film underway. So I think that's what next on the cards.

DS: Whenever I am writing a novel it's playing through my head very much like a movie, and I'm trying to get the words on the page that fit what I'm seeing in my mind's eye. There's a certain type of story that fits a film better than a book. Before the interview began, we were talking about a film that Andrew and I are hoping to make one day called Shadow of the Dead. There's all kinds of thrills and spills: it's a zombie film! I'll talk about a particular scene that we have planned and why this is better as a film than as a book, because I had actually considered writing it as a book as well.

DS: If you imagine a school classroom on the ground floor of a school and some kids are looking out of the window. They see the caretaker bumbling around outside like he's drunk. Now, the audience is clued in to the fact that the caretaker is actually a zombie and this movie on the verge of a zombie apocalypse scenario. The kids are just having a ball, laughing at him.

DS: It's a science classroom and there are some taps around. One of the kid takes a balloon from his pocket. He fills it up with water. You know what's coming next- they're going to throw it out the window, create a splash on top of his head, hopefully, if they can aim true. So the whole class is tensed up, the teacher is busy in the corner, doesn't see what's going on. They open the back door of the classroom. One of the students hurls the balloon across the car park toward the caretaker. We can see it coming, maybe in slow motion in the movie.

MH: Whether it's a book or a movie, how do you create a good opener? How do you get them to invest their attention in you?

DS: You've got to get that very good first paragraph going- an intriguing comment. The first paragraph of Chion starts this way:

DS: You would expect to hear the occasional scream if you spent seven hours a day, five days a week in this place. But you'd know it was nothing serious; just a couple of hyperactive boys getting a little too zealous in their horseplay, or maybe two quarrelling girls pulling the hair out of each other. With forty-three classrooms in Clounagh Junior High School, all connected by long, thin corridors, it wasn't difficult for sound to travel. And with six hundred and fifty children, aged eleven to fourteen, in varying degrees of hyperactivity, there was a high likelihood that you would occasionally hear a scream coming from another part of the building, and it wouldn't alarm you. But fourteen year old Jamie Metcalfe was alarmed- so alarmed that he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end….

DS: So, there you go. I worked a lot on that opening. I think it creates a sense of mystery, and you're getting the word "scream" in there fairly early. It's a school situation....

DS: One of my favourite openings from any novel is from The Day of the Triffids! I think this a just a fantastic way to start a book. Here's the first paragraph:

DS: When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

DS: I just love that beginning- Wednesday, you think of bustling traffic, activity, noise. Sunday, you think of the absence of noise. What has just happened to the world? I love that- fantastic!

MH: It's a strong opener. Music, fiction, games, programming, filmmaking – that's a lot of hats. Does, like John MacKenna says, it all come from the same place?

DS: There's a real joy in actually making something and seeing it go somewhere. I have to say – me writing a novel and everything, you have to think you might get a big head on your shoulders. It's not actually about that at all. It's actually about creating something that you really love and putting it out somewhere. And if someone likes your baby…!

DS: I remember listening to an interview with George Lucas. He was talking about his old film, THX-1138.

MH: That was his first movie, before he was famous.

DS: It's a really great movie, actually. But people back then didn't really get where he was coming from, it was such a strange movie. The distributors (or whoever it was that was handling it) decided that things needed to be cut. He described how that felt. It was like they said, "We've got your daughter here, and we're going to give her back- but we're going to just take this one little finger. We're going to cut this one finger off of her and you can have her back."

DS: That just shows where he was coming from as a filmmaker. I hope I am coming from the same kind of attitude that he has, that it's all about the work, it's never about the person.

MH: You've shown a lot of promise, both in the material you have put out and the way you have put it out. I wish you the best in your career.

DS: Thanks very much!

MH: Listen, it's been great talking with you here today.

DS: You too, thank you very much!

Mick Halpin's "unruly review" of Darryl Sloan's novel Chion can be found on criticalmick.com. Another notable interview with Darryl Sloan can be found on Podler. And, of course, Darryl's homepage, with his blog and full information about his books and films, is www.midnightpictures.co.uk

Yo! This interview transcript and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2007 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

Irate, huh? Managed to piss off another one? Direct your hatemail to mick @ mickhalpin dot com.

This Page Was Last Updated On 23 April, 2007.