Critical Mick

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The Bastard Child of Stephen King and Douglas Adams

Critical Mick quizzes Mind's Eye author Philip Henry on monsters, Booker Prize winners, John Hughes movies and surviving high school in Portstewart, Northern Ireland. Email interview, August 2007.

Critical Mick: Sure, it has monsters! But to me Mind's Eye feels more about what it was like to be in high school in Portstewart in the late 80's. There's a healthy dose of "real life" among the tentacles.

Philip Henry: Yes, there is. Something that always pissed me off about books, movies and TV programmes, is how unrealistic they are in terms of teenage relationships. For example let's take John Hughes's 80s blubber-fest Some Kind Of Wonderful. Lea Thompson is going out with the rich, arrogant asshole, while Eric Stoltz is the poor artist from a working-class family. And in Hughesland, rich, arrogant guy gets the elbow as soon as misunderstood artist opens his heart to this honey. Really? Do you remember any of the sex-kittens from high school dumping their rich, jock boyfriends to go out with the school weirdo? No, me either. That's why I actually made all the teenagers in Mind's Eye (at least in my estimation) real. I wanted there to be at least one book out there that told the truth to teenagers.

CM: Give us the one-sentence elevator pitch for Mind's Eye.

PH: My original pitch was: ‘It's about the monsters of high school.' See what I did there? As far as the story goes, it's about a sea monster killing the pupils of this school, but the absolute best bit is… [Ping!] Oh, is this your floor? Right. Bye.

CM: On philiphenry.com, you mention "It's up to the readers to guess which elements are true and which are made up." I accept that challenge! Am I right…

PH: There are loads more you’ve missed. I’ll give you two off the top of my head: the drowned dog story is true, as is the RE teacher and the copy of [Stephen King's] Carrie. Maxine Dawson is a real person, too. If you’re out there, Maxine, email me!!!

CM: I'm glad to see there's none of the usual Norn Iron clichés in Mind's Eye. Also glad to see that the monster was not Ye Olde Cliché of a vampire, a wolfman, a mummy etc.

PH: Hey, my first book was Vampire Dawn, and my new book is its sequel, Vampire Twilight, and I'm sure I'll be doing a werewolf book somewhere down the line. Those things have been done to death (and undeath) but you can always find a new variation on an old theme. When Vampire Dawn came out I got asked a lot: "Which author are you most like?" and I never knew how to answer that question. I remember in one newspaper interview I said I was the bastard child of Stephen King and Douglas Adams. They didn't print it.

CM: What's a young man's best defence against things that lurk in Irish shadows?

PH: Never having sex, drinking alcohol or doing drugs. Isn't that what they say in Scream? Failing that, a big sharp axe will do.

CM: Narky bastard that I am, I've got to point out that Mind's Eye is not perfect. I still found the book to be a hell of a lot of fun. Tell me a bit about how it was written.

PH: Well, you haven't posted your review so I can't address specific points, so I'll just explain some of my thinking behind it. It was inspired by The Catcher In The Rye, which is one of my all-time favourite books. I wanted to do something similar but with a horror slant to it. And as I said earlier, I wanted to write a book that showed teenagers as the confused, horny, fickle, outsiders that a lot of them feel like. Once I got the monster's illusionary ability down, that created a platform for me to say a lot of things. The tagline on the book says Don't Believe What You See. This is the theme of the book, shown on three levels:
1. Don't believe Hollywood movies, they're wrong;
2. Don't believe that thing that looks like your friend, it isn't; and
3. Don't believe what you see in the news media because it's most likely bollocks.

PH: When the monster is revealed, Greek history buffs will understand a lot of the references, but I suppose 99% of people won't. So here are a few: when the bully takes the girl's coat and hangs it on the tree to dry while the other bully shows him his dragon tattoo – anyone get that that was a reference to Jason & The Golden Fleece? When Jason found the Golden Fleece it was hanging on a tree protected by a dragon. The Harper sisters are the Harpies. The name of the boat is the Argo, the name of Jason's boat. See, you think I make all this stuff up, but I do research. And if any of you are wondering what Greek mythology has to do with a book set in Portstewart, well, you find out three-quarters of the way through it.

CM: How was your first novel written?

PH: The repeated pressing of keys in a pre-arranged sequence.

CM: How did you get it published?

PH: There are only seven publishers in the whole Writers and Artists' Yearbook who accept horror and all seven of them rejected Vampire Dawn – one rejection told me horror was dead in the UK. Ow, please, my sides are splitting. So I did a search on the Internet and found a few horror publishers in America and the first one I emailed it to, Black Death Books, took it.

CM: How has it been received?

PH: Mostly in Jiffy Bags. No, I only had one bad review – that I know of – and I didn't pay much heed to it because it seemed to have been written by a simpleton. No, that's not sour grapes, well, not totally, but the guy said: "This book reminds me of that film Interview With The Vampire Slayer" (Anyone see that?) and "Why are there constant references to Pink Floyd and Queen?" There's one reference to each of them, personally I wouldn't call that constant.

CM: What was your reaction?

PH: I was really relieved that people liked it. When you write a book you really are putting yourself out there for all to see and judge. It was sort of like I was standing naked in Waterstone's or something and, as a small group of brave women will testify, that isn't a pretty sight.

CM: What did you learn in writing the first novel that you used in writing Mind's Eye?

PH: I haven't read Vampire Dawn since it was published. Mostly because I read it so many times before it went to the printers -- trying to weed out typos -- that I knew it inside out. I think I'll leave it a while longer then hopefully when I read it, I'll have forgotten some of it. If there's one thing I would change it's the slightly sycophantic start of chapter two. It's about Tony and Cherie Blair and it makes me squirm to think of it. In my defence, that book was written just after Labour got into power and I (and the rest of the UK) thought they were going to make things better. Naïve. Only in hindsight do I see how naïve. So that's the one thing I'll always try to do in future: Stay away from current affairs.

CM: What did you learn in publishing the first novel that you used in producing Mind's Eye?

PH: That no matter how many times, or how many people, proof-read it, typos will always slip by, and if you keep polishing and polishing and polishing, you'll never get the book out. There's a point where you have to draw the line and say that's it. It may nark you (like in chapter one of Vampire Dawn when I say illicit instead of elicit) but live with it; you're in good company. I find at least one spelling mistake in almost every book I read. The last one was Stephen King's Insomnia. He wrote "united," when he meant "untied." Very easily done and the spellchecker won't question it. If it can slip past him and all his professional proof-readers, I won't lose any sleep over it.

CM: And what have you learned from the first two that's making your forthcoming third novel easier?

PH: Well, since my third is Vampire Twilight, a sequel, a lot of the framework was already in place. A lot of the characters from the first book are returning so a certain amount of character creation has been done. At 6 months, it's actually the fastest book I've ever written. I think there's a confidence that comes from knowing you can actually complete a novel (something I was very unsure of when writing Vampire Dawn) and that makes things go faster. I've just finished my fourth novel, Freak, and managed to break my personal word-count record with that one, which was nice.

CM: Yikes- I was just taking the piss out of vampires up above. Post Blade, Post Buffy, is there any life left in that genre?

PH:Sure there is. I'm pretty sure no other book or movie ends like Vampire Dawn, and ditto with Vampire Twilight. For Vampire Twilight I came up with this idea for the story (something to help the bad guys) and I don't think anyone's ever done anything like it before. Go on, read it and prove me wrong.

CM: I just might! Criticalmick.com has covered Bram Stoker's Dracula and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. Hell! I even got a kick out of Undead & Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson.

PH: Undead & Unwed?! You are a big fat girlie man, Critical Mick.

CM: Am not!

PH: Are too! DOUBLE are too!

CM: Oh yeah? Well, um... ah... the cover of Mind's Eye has come in for some criticism.

PH: Only from Darryl Sloan! Seriously, the book has been out over a year now and he is the only one who has said anything negative about the cover. See, the story is, Darryl designed a cover for me, and though it was much more professional looking than mine, I didn't like it. So I didn't use it. But he swears he's not narked about me not using it. I can see what he means about mine, but stuff that matters to Darryl wouldn't matter to me. Like he said the horizon on the cover isn't at a perfect, flat 180 degrees. It isn't, but I don't care. The truth is, I was on a deadline, I needed something quick, so I threw it together myself. And I like it. It's rough around the edges, literally, but I think it conveys the right mood of the kids entering the unknown. And the author gets the final word. I didn't agree with Darryl's choice for the Chion cover, either. I saw some of the earlier mock-ups and preferred one of them. The cover he went with is very professionally done, but it's also very bare, almost blank, and doesn't convey anything about the story. Chion is a very original post-apocalypse, sci-fi story and I don't think the cover shows that at all.

CM: What's your opinion on the new technologies like Internet communities, podcasting, blogging, webzines, Printing on Demand?

PH: I get bored with Internet communities. I signed up to a few message boards and chat-rooms but lost interest after about a week. It just seems an awful waste of time to go on and talk shite for hours every night when I could be doing something constructive. Podcasting sounds great but I haven't got Broadband yet – that's what you get for living in the sticks. I'm getting it soon, though, and I'm looking forward to the indie movies on YouTube. Blogging is very weird. When the whole blogging fad hit a couple of years ago someone asked me why I didn't turn my website into a blogsite? I told them I had no desire to write my diary on the Internet for all to see. I don't know how people reveal every detail of their lives online, and I don't know what kind of sad-acts would want to read it. Probably the same people who watch Big Brother. Webzines are OK – they save paper and all that – but for longer articles they're not so good because I don't want to read them at my desk. Printing on Demand seems to be the way forward. The problem with this country is publishers pay £4m to some brilliant writer like Jordan and then have nothing left in the kitty to get real novelists, who don't write with crayons, signed up. POD has made self-publishing cheap and easy, and that can only be a good thing.

CM: Do you read self-published books yourself?

PH: Yes. Sometimes I just pick one at random on nothing other than the cover. I like being surprised. And if I do like a POD book, the author always likes it if you drop them a line. If they're anything like me, it probably makes their day.

CM: What's your opinion of them?

PH: It's a bit like asking me what I think of movies. Some are great, some are shit, some are average. Some have the germ of a good idea poorly executed. The thing to remember is that writing is an art form and like all art, it's subjective. Last year I read Life of Pi, purely because it won the Booker and I thought it was the most boring pile of shite I have ever endured. Yet the Booker judges gave Yan Martel a £50k prize and called it a classic. Having said that, Vernon God Little also won the Booker and it's very good.

CM: What mistakes do most self-publishers and POD authors make?

PH: They think they're going to be rich!! They also think when the book's published their work is done. It's actually just begun. You spend the six months after publishing trying to get reviews, interviews, posters, anything that will let as many people as possible know that MY BOOK IS OUT!!!

CM: Thirteen best books on your shelves:

PH:

CM: Have we read any of the same stuff? Was my review way off about them?

PH: Oh my God, you liked Life of Pi!! Why? The first third of it is totally boring, the second third is just a fictionalised SAS survival manual, and while the last third may have a twist, I don't think it makes up for the two-hundred pages of abject boredom you have to put up with to get to it. I hated this book so much I now work it into my introduction: "Hello, pleased to meet you, my name's Philip -- Don't read Life Of Pi: it's crap – so, do you come here often?"

PH: Angels & Demons: I can't actually make out whether you liked this or not from your 'review.' I liked it. I've read all Dan Brown's books. I started with The Da Vinci Code and worked my way backwards, so the latest one I read was Deception Point, which has a fantastic premise for a book. He's a great thriller writer.

PH: Divorcing Jack: Well, you gotta love Colin Bateman, don't you? I've read all his books. Though as my list above shows, I think Empire State is his best. Just for it's sheer weirdness. It's like a trip through American pop culture wrapped up in a thriller. Very cool.

PH: Undead & Unwed: I was just joking earlier about you being a big fat girlie man. This book sounds pretty cool actually. Yeah. I think I'll buy it.

CM: What project are you working on now?

PH: Well, it's Top Secret. I'm actually writing my first non-horror novel. It's Top Secret because I'm going to release it under a pseudonym. Why, I hear you ask? Well, for a couple of reasons. 1) Horror has always been seen as the poor cousin of literature, so just to give myself as fair a shake of the stick as anyone else, I'm going to use a different name and see what happens. And 2) I want to try to release two books a year, and instead of over-saturating myself in the horror genre, I thought I'd try another genre, which I wanted to do somewhere down the line anyway. All I can say is it's about a teenage boy trying to solve a murder (that makes it sound like the Hardy Boys – it's not) while trying to decide what to do with his life and trying to pluck up the courage to approach the girl he's in love with. It's written in a very strange way, which is slowing me down really badly, but I will prevail!

PH: Apart from that, I've written the screenplay for a little no-budget road movie and I'm trying to get some people together to help make that. I got an email from a guy in Londonderry the other day who is also making a movie, a horror, and wanted me to have a look at the script for him, so I may be getting involved with that, too.

CM: What project must you complete as your life's work?

PH: I guess I'd better finish the vampire trilogy before I fall off the peg. Vampire Twilight will be out very soon (in fact it may well be out by the time you post this) but it's only the second part and at the end I have left some stuff unresolved and sown a lot of seeds for what will happen in the last part, so if I croak before I finish it, there'll be a lot of pissed off people. Having said that, all the books can stand alone. I sort of see Vampire Twilight as my Empire Strikes Back, which you can watch without having seen the other movies, but if you do see the others then everything ties up.

CM: What's on your nightstand at the moment?

PH: I've whittled my To Be Read pile down to four at the minute (there's usually about 15-20) so I'll have to go on another mad shopping spree soon. I've just started A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. The other three are The Witches of Chiswick by Robert Rankin, Lisey's Story by Stephen King and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I'm Looking forward to them all.

CM: Many thanks, Philip: Final question: where do you get your ideas?

PH: Tesco's. £2 each or three for a fiver.

More information on Mind's Eye and the first two instalments of the vampire trilogy are available on Philip Henry's site, philiphenry.com.

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 4 September, 2007.