CONRAD WILLIAMS: ONE ON ONE

By Alan Kelly

Joseph Conrad’s ‘We Live as We Dream - Alone’ is a cruel but appropriate epigraph for Conrad Williams’ ONE. Williams’ protagonist Richard Jane is working beneath an oil rig when what at first appears to be a Gamma Ray obliterates all above him –thematically there are one or two parallels between Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – the post-apocalyptic setting, fatherhood, how humanity can be pushed to the very brink of madness when thrown into a hellish environment by unknown circumstances outside of their control. One may even be inclined to describe ONE as a savage revisionist reworking of Richard Christian Matheson's I Am Legend.  Though this is where any similarities to both McCarthy and Matheson end. Jane is dragged into a world populated by disease, carrion, ruthless demoralised people and a race of creatures which, to those fortunate enough not to have made their acquaintance are nicknamed Skinners – Williams’ ONE is a smorgasbord of high-octane shocks, supernatural overtones, visceral skin tearing terror and psychological horror. 

PENNY BLOOD: Reading ONE is tantamount to ‘walking through a moonscape infected by dreams of perversion and violence…’ that is quite an elegant description of a world ravaged by a gamma ray burst – you’re a recipient of The British Fantasy Award and The Horror Guild Award for The Unblemished. How long have you wrote in the field of horror/apocalyptic fantasy?

WILLIAMS: For as long as I can remember. I wrote my first horror story aged seven. It was about a woman trapped in a burning house. I suppose my need to write in this field came from the feelings I experienced while watching monster films as a child. I remember Dad taking me to see The Land That Time Forgot, starring Doug McClure. We stayed in the cinema to watch it twice. I love dinosaurs. And I love monster stories in which a band of brave people are picked off one by one. I wanted to do a similar thing in The Unblemished. Other scary films that got to me as a kid: the original King Kong, the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a TV series called The Invaders...

PENNY BLOOD: ONE is more hyper focused when you compare it to The Unblemished, which is more disparate regarding subplots and characterisation – What I found unusual is that everything is from Jane, the protagonist’s point of view, even though it is written in the third person – yet it works. Did you originally write drafts in the first or second person?

WILLIAMS: I was always going to write it in the third person limited, so from day one I was seeing the world through Jane's eyes. I wanted to keep a tight rein on the book and make it feel intimate, despite its epic themes. There were too many major characters in The Unblemished to have it anything other than third person omniscient, a mode I dislike, usually.

PENNY BLOOD: ONE has allusions to Richard Christian Matheson’s I Am Legend – was Matheson an influence while writing ONE?

WILLIAMS: How could he not be? Any post-apocalyptic survivor narrative is going to have his shadow over it. It's a great, great novel. A brief, brilliant piece of sustained tension. Other novels that influenced me include The Stand, Riddley Walker, The Road, anything by Ballard.

PENNY BLOOD: There is a certain Kafkaesque paranoiac vibe that exists in your writing – your characters, whether it is Sarah in The Unblemished or Jane in ONE – they are all running either from something awful or approaching it to protect their children – and there is nearly always going to be horrifying consequences – the perils of parenthood play a large part in your work, why this route?

WILLIAMS: Is it too easy an answer to say that it's because I'm a parent? Certainly, since the birth of my first son in 2002, a lot of my work (The Unblemished, ONE, Rain, Blonde on a Stick - a dark crime thriller which is to be published in 2010) are concerned with pregnancy, children and their relationship with parents. Any parent who writes cannot fail to engage with this subject. It's a way of dealing with the phobias that come with your children.

PENNY BLOOD: Deathray wrote the following about ONE “not since Alien has the dual dismay and joy of birth been tapped so well.” When writing about how the Skinners reproduce – you do nastiness and the explicit extremely well, there are so many writers who seem to do it merely for the shock factor alone – are you drawn to extreme literature and film?

WILLIAMS: Not really. I prefer subtlety in any art form, but the stuff I write tends to contain unavoidable scenes of carnage. I think that's the key, though, Whether it's avoidable. I hope I've never written a scene in which something awful happens that didn't need to be there. And I think, if you go back to the scenes you're thinking about, I've painted them in pretty broad strokes. I want the reader to fill in the gaps. I don't go on, page after page, relishing the red.

PENNY BLOOD: Critics like you – I can understand why – but have you found it difficult writing in this field i.e. horror?

WILLIAMS: Not really. I mean it is a difficult genre to do well; there are traps peculiar to horror that you have to try to avoid, but I couldn't imagine not writing about the grimmest aspects of human, and inhuman, life.

PENNY BLOOD: Your short story “The Cold” is featured in the forthcoming Hellbound Hearts – could you tell me a bit about your contribution to the anthology?

WILLIAMS: I'm very excited to be involved in the project. I'm not allowed to say much before publication, but it was a big thrill to write a Hellraiser story, and I got to invent my own Cenobite. My story is set in Manchester during the winter and it concerns a jaded detective. That's all I can reveal...

PENNY BLOOD: Has any of your work been optioned for adaptation?

WILLIAMS: Nearly. Head Injuries was optioned by Michael Winterbottom and I was contracted to write three drafts of the screenplay. It didn't work out. I think I was too raw a scriptwriter and too precious about the original text to really carve it up into a more filmic adaptation. On the back of some great reviews, The Unblemished received a lot of attention from Hollywood. But nobody went for it, unfortunately.

PENNY BLOOD: Are you currently working on another novel and if so, what will the next be about?

WILLIAMS: As mentioned earlier, I have a novel from MaxCrime, a new imprint at John Blake Publishing, which should be out, if all goes well, in May or June 2010. It's called Blonde on a Stick and concerns a priviate investigator hunting for a missing person while trying to keep hold of the rags of his own life – his wife was murdered and his daughter has disappeared. Other than that, I'm working on a novel called Loss of Separation, which deals with one of my big fears: air disasters. I no longer have a publisher since Virgin cancelled their horror list, so I'm enjoying writing it without a deadline hovering. Hopefully that will be done next year and I'll be able to find someone who wants to release it.