Robert Shearman is probably still best known to most readers of Sci-Fi Bulletin as the author of Dalek, the first appearance of Terry Nation’s creations in the 2005 Doctor Who revival (a story that he has recently novelised for BBC Books’ Target range). But Shearman is an accomplished writer of short stories, stories that can unsettle you, and make you look at the world a little differently. His new magnum opus, We All Hear Stories in the Dark, was published by PS Publishing earlier in the summer – originally intended for a launch at StokerCon – and consists of 101 stories that are interlinked by your own choices as you go along. Shearman chatted with Paul Simpson about the book and revealed some of the challenges and choices involved…

 

Are you pleased with the reaction so far to We All Hear Stories in the Dark?

I’m actually quite buoyed up by the fact that We All Hear Stories is doing surprisingly well in sales, which I wasn’t necessarily anticipating.

I’m surprised specifically I suppose because of the problem I’ve always had with We All Hear Stories in the Dark. This has gone on for years: I occasionally get invited to lunch with publishers who want to talk about what sort of novels I have in mind and what ideas I have got. And I say, ‘Oh well, I’m currently doing this book’ and I tell them.

But as I’ve tried to explain it to people and indeed potential customers, they never quite understand what it is until they see it. It wasn’t until I was actually able to show the first draft – which was only 99 stories at that point – to PS Publishing over lunch that they could.

I was always aware that until people could see the physical shape of it, they couldn’t appreciate what it really was. I think people would tend to think I was exaggerating, or that it was a bit crazy but it wasn’t obviously quite the strange totem of insanity that they thought it sounded like, because that couldn’t be real.

So I always thought that a convention was essential for sales because until people actually saw the bloody thing, they wouldn’t be interested. I always assumed this is a book which would do OK on word of mouth, people having first seen it and read it.

We had to actually get people to say, ‘Oh my god it’s that!’ because it was going to be physically visible. But I think people have bought into the conceit of it.

To me it seemed like a huge Choose Your Own Adventure. Those sort of games books do seem to be on the increase again so the concept isn’t as alien as it might have been 10 years ago.

Yes, when I began actually working on it I think people knew what they were, but I remember that Marcus Gipps said to me some years ago, ‘The whole problem with the book is that it’s a great idea but you’ve had to take 3 minutes to explain it to me and you haven’t got 3 minutes. If you can’t get a simple way of explaining this without having to see it, then no one’s going to care.’

I think there is now a simple way of explaining it more than there probably was back then. I think being able to say things like ‘It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure of 101 stories’ pretty much covers it in a way that may not have been so apparent half a dozen years ago.

The difficulty was always that I knew that the book was quite a show off book… very high minded about what it’s showing off but it is trying to be quite intellectual in its own probably not necessarily very intellectual way. It’s trying to reflect upon the nature of storytelling and the ways in which we respond to art. It’s a book largely about grief and that’s why I wrote it.

The thing is, you don’t want to laden people with that when you’re describing it; what you want to go for is the idea that you could do anything. It’s 101 crazy stories, as if realistically, which isn’t of course the case, it could be any 101 stories you can just think up.

That was the hard part for me. When I finished the first draft, it had taken me years and I read it back and thought, ‘Only 80 of these stories that I’ve now written feel like they should be part of this book.’ And then you had to throw all the other ones away and start again and you think, ‘Well, I could write another 20 odd stories’ and you say, ‘That’s another two years, isn’t it.’ Then you say, ‘Yeah but you’ve got to continue it because you can’t at this stage just send out a book where the critics will say “Well it’s a lovely conceit but actually effectively it’s just a bunch of stories stitched together.”’

It has to feel like it was a proper thought-through thing so as I wrote it, I had to find stories which seemed like echoes or contrasts to something else.

It was always a question of actually saying how is the maze going to work? As opposed to simply ‘Have I got another story to tell?’

So how did you make the maze work? It’s a Choose Your Own Emotion in some ways isn’t it?

Yes, and that’s kind of the fun part. It took me a few years to work that out.

Structuring a map wasn’t so hard; obviously you couldn’t draw a physical map of it because it’s too big. It really is too big! I was trying to find scientific data on this for quite some time and eventually Simon Guerrier asked somebody who worked with Brian Cox to help. They all got around the table and said, ‘Yeah the number of permutations in this book is actually genuinely astronomical. There is no way that you could write out a map of this because it requires more paper than probably exists.’ That’s pretty good I suppose – don’t quite see what’s so complex but that’s what mathematics does of course.

When I structured the maze, I listed all the stories as were and I had to find five stories that could lead into them and five stories that could lead out of them and obviously try to feel that those connections always felt relevant. Sometimes I’d want there to be connecting points which felt deeply emotional; I wanted there to be connecting points which felt comically trivial because that’s funny, you want a random element of that. You say things like, ‘Well, the connecting part between this story and that story is that they both have talking animals in, alright?’ That’s going to be the connecting point, but that in itself reflects the way in which you write the question.

What you hope is at the end when people read the stores that the more philosophical questions, which you try and write in a light hearted way, are paid off. And things that just feel like they’re being randomly jovial also pay off.

It has to have those contrasts.

It took me a few months. I wrote most of the book fairly blind, nervously thinking I had to have written enough stories to work out where the gaps were. The ones that filled the gaps actually became my favourite stories.

I thought you would either love those most or loathe them the most. I don’t think there can be an in-between.

No. The ones I look back at with a special fondness are where I was saying, ‘OK, I think that a story about the grief connected with the disappearance of Stan Laurel from the Laurel and Hardy movies fits so well into this slot although this is actually a story that I don’t think wouldn’t exist in isolation very well.’ Or where you say, ‘I need a story now of much more emotional heft.’ Or ‘I need there to be stories which remind us more of the Arabian Nights feel a bit’ – which is why I put a Scheherazade story in. Every single time you would go back to the maze and shake it a bit then say ‘What isn’t now paying off?’ My wife got really concerned; she said, ‘You’re never ever going to allow this to be finished because you’re constantly replacing stories,’ and I said, ‘I could go on forever.’

The problem is that the further you go through this, there’s always the bottom tier of things that you don’t think are quite shining in the right way now. At some point you have to accept that some stories, which you might like as stories, now don’t feel like they’re quite working as hard as other ones, but only for structural reasons.

In the last few days I’ve been sending out individual stories to people whose names are in them – I copy and paste a story from the document and send it to them. Every single time I’ve done it I’ve thought, ‘Yeah, it’s a good story.’ I’ve never yet thought, ‘Oh that’s not such a good one is it?’ which I certainly would have done two years ago. There are stories still now that I think, ‘Oh well, they’re probably in the bottom ten now.’

But in the same way that everybody will read the book differently, everybody will have a different bottom ten because of what the book is talking to. I have dipped in and there’s not one story that hasn’t made me think at the end of it.

That’s good. And there are ones that you will like and ones that you just don’t like. But that I think is part of the job of it.

This is why there are some stories in there which I think are offensive, because you have to risk feeling as you’re going into this that you’re going to be presented with something which does run the whole gamut of reactions. There’s no point doing the book if you come out of it and say at the end of it…

‘Ah, it was alright…’

Yes, or even, ‘I don’t actually honestly feel that there is that much difference between them’. Some years ago I did books for ChiZine, which were compilations of some of my short stories. They wanted a horror collection, and part of the difficulty you’ve got is that as soon as people know it is a horror anthology or weird fantasy anthology or a comedy anthology, they already knows all your surprises.

What I really wanted to do was give the feel of uneasiness; that every single time you go to a new story, not only can you not tell immediately what sort of tone or flavour of darkness this might have, but you can’t even tell halfway through. Suddenly stories which feel like they were going to be horror stories aren’t horror stories. Stories which felt like they were nice comedies suddenly become a bit more malignant, other stories which you thought were just concept pieces become very emotional. That felt to me like trying to answer that whole idea that I had to make it so that reading became a somewhat uneasy experience, which generally isn’t the case.

I wrote an essay which is within the book (but you only actually access it if you cheat), which talks about the concept of short story writing, the way I see it. Novels are basically, I always believe, reassuring things. The reason people read novels is that once you get past a certain stage of them you’re relaxing with characters you understand and you understand the tone is not going to suddenly change on you. Whereas short story collections are designed to make you always feel that actually you’re having to reinvent once more your expectations of what this might be. My wife hates reading short story collections partly because she can never relax with them. I wanted to say, ‘Well, if that’s the case, let’s actually make that part of the game.’

Beta readers and copy editors and other people have read the book, and some have come out of it having done the maze saying, ‘This is a really lovely warm book’ and I say thank you, and other people come out of it and say ‘I was very offended by it’ and I say, ‘OK good, that’s fun too.’

It depends upon the paths that you take and your own responses to what you think that you want. There’s a dark path in the book. Structurally I do cheat on certain things: there are certain stories that I want to cut you away from. If you start following only the dark stories, it gets progressively harder to get to the darker ones because I don’t want people to stumble into them unless they’ve actually chosen to go down that route. There’s a really nasty piece and the only way into it is if you’ve read another really nasty piece beforehand and it says to you, ‘Are you sure you want to go down here?’ Even when you get to that story you’re only given two options. ‘You can still cut away from this, you can go read something nice, try that… seriously, try that because this is a vile piece.’

I hated doing things like that but otherwise there seemed to be no point to the book. If every reading experience is going to be more or less the same, just ‘another quirky story by Rob’, I think everybody would get very fed up with it. It would seem like this is just 101 stories – but I really wanted this to feel like it was a proper, fairly organic thing; that it kept changing with you.

What I want from it is that people feel that it becomes their book. The odds of anyone reading the same book are so remote – no one else will ever really follow your maze. It’s more about the importance of which stories you choose to discard. I don’t want people to feel that they have read all 101 stories. It would be nice if people played it a few times, but it’s actually really about as much the stories that you leave out as the stories you pick to read.

That you don’t know what’s in those stories you leave out.

Yes, that’s right. At the very first junction it says OK, where do you want to start? If you choose to do something comic you go into a story about Snoopy dying. It’s quite a funny story but from the first sentence I say, ‘OK, it’s about the death of Snoopy’, so in some ways I’m hitting you over the head immediately with the fact there’s been a cruel trick played on you. It’s not just going to be funny, because it’s this strange story about one of the bit part players of the Peanuts franchise dressing up in a Snoopy costume so that she can become as famous as Snoopy. It’s quite funny and it’s certainly about the structure of comedy. It’s a big essay really about how Schulz would do that four panel technique that makes his jokes work.

It was fun to write a story like that but at the same time I was also aware that I was letting people know I wasn’t going to do a bit of P.G. Wodehouse. I’m giving them something slightly odder and that might make them more wary of me after the story or not. Depends if they found it funny or not.

But it’s fun to do that. Xanna Eve Chown, who was editing it, said that she was tickled by one story, number 21, which is an essay about the quality of the silent movies that had flourished during the Siege of Constantinople in 1453. It’s absolute nonsense but it’s funny to write about the fact that while they were in isolation these people were developing silent movie techniques to make themselves entertained. The writer was arguing that the films aren’t very good which is kind of amusing; Xanna thought it was hilarious. She sent it to a couple of friends who later said, ‘Well, that’s just meaningless’, and the wonderful difference of reaction is part of the fun of it. You want to keep on surprising people who either will take your promise on board or they say no I just don’t understand why you’re doing that. I want that response.

My wife is really offended and bothered by some of the stories in the book, which some other people find delightful, and it’s always a question, when people read it, of finding which are the ones that really annoy them because it never seems to be the same. I’m always told that people are annoyed.

Maybe it’s because it is a positive reaction – not in terms of positive against negative or whatever, but it’s a reaction that they have had to consciously make.

Exactly. The only really boring reaction is when you read a story and go…meh. And obviously that will happen and then hopefully you’ll make a decision out of that story where you say ‘Well, I’ll make the next one a little bit more exciting then’ and of course that affects you. If you don’t enjoy that one, you’re going to try and react against it, which is good.

In terms of practicalities, were you writing the stories reacting to the one you’d written previously?

Mostly yes, although not always directly. So what I would do, and still do, is I have notebooks which I fill with story ideas. Most of the time those story ideas are kind of fun but they need to develop, so most of the stories in the book were reactions to things I’d been trying to grow in my head for a few years.

I loved the prologue…

Oh thank you. I was so scared of writing it, I thought it was written very very late.

Let’s talk about a few of the stories – the first one I read was the Snoopy story…

That’s a story that I remember spending several years thinking about. That’s a relatively early one.

How about number 3, ‘Sympathy for the Shorn’?

That one took quite a long time to think through and it was just a silly idea. I think the notebook said ‘What if haircuts were painful?’ (laughs) which is not very sophisticated but I just thought it would be really funny if when you snap off someone’s hair, it was genuinely like snapping off someone’s limb. Then I thought ‘OK, I don’t really know what you can do with that’.

What happened in that instance was I went to Budapest. I went to the Torture Museum there, which is horrifying, I mean really horrifying. I found a photograph of the guy that in the book I call Baby Stalin but I think he was actually called Little Stalin – because I’m not using any historical figure – and he’s at a school being presented with a birthday cake. It’s horrifying, just to have this smiling man with all these children around a pool while they give him a birthday cake.

I wrote a story as soon as I came back from Budapest based upon that photograph, about somebody who was recalling some years later how she had met this guy who was now seen by the country as being this sort of fascist dictator. She was selected by the school to take the birthday cake but in doing so, she sneezed over it, this long snot, and before she actually emerged into the hall, all the teachers had had to try and pick it off – and they all knew that they were going to die if they didn’t get this right.

Having written this quite funny story, because I just wanted to write about bogies, I realised that for the story to work, I now had to find stories which seemed to echo that society. I went back and I thought, ‘I can start using things like the haircut thing’ which had been in my notebook now for three years. So suddenly you go back to your ideas and they start reacting in some ways off bigger ideas that you already had, and give them new purpose.

So, it’s not necessarily the next thing you write because you’re writing in a lot of different directions at once. You are still trying to write a story which is a response to a story which you’re going to call Number 78. It might be Number 14 that the response is but nevertheless you say, ‘OK, I now know there’s a story set in that sort of society but now there’s a fantastical element to it and it’s about the way in which we treat outsiders’… and suddenly you’ve got a story which actually feels like it has some point.

Most of the trouble with writing weird fiction is that you get these bonkers ideas and they make you chuckle, but until you actually find some emotional reason for doing it, it’s just nonsense. Most of the stuff you write down therefore is not any worse than any of the stuff that you don’t adapt to. It’s just that you haven’t yet found a reason for making that work. The thing that I’ve always found very frustrating about reading absurdist fiction sometimes is you just think, ‘Oh (sigh) I just don’t care I because I can’t find any sort of emotional beat to it.’

There was a whole series of 1920s Russian weird short story writers, and they were all killed because it was so dissident to be doing this. You read the stories and you think you’re so sorry for everything they went through, that is appalling, but these stories are just annoying because it’s just people falling off chairs. It’s incredible: there’s a story in which somebody just falls off a chair every paragraph and that’s the story. It’s just annoying… and actually I quite like that. I do kind of remember it!

The basic answer is stories would be dictated by the emotional need to argue against a previous one. It’s usually an argument against as well because some of the stories are very fierce.

That’s certainly the way the reader approaches it but was that the way in which you approached writing it? There’s a story near the end of the first volume about the guy who gets the villagers lining up and kisses them, which pulls their souls out?

Oh yeah. That’s an odd story but I don’t think that story in particular would work outside the confines of the book. It’s not actually a real show-off story but the artwork for that is gorgeous. That was a story, very specifically, about trying to write about the emotional effect of what these stories are.

The artwork on that one depicts the ending.

There’s always a danger to that and with the artwork, I said to Reggie [Oliver], ‘I want you to do what you want. I want you to produce what you feel inspired by and I don’t want you to worry necessarily about whether you think it’s better to spoil, in effect, the story.’ Because in some ways that’s part of the game as well.

I wanted some funky artwork. Occasionally what would actually really frustrate me when it came in was it contradicts what I’ve described and you think, ‘OK, I don’t know why you’ve done that, have you read it?’ And then you think, ‘Well, that’s in some ways the point. I want this to be Reggie’s response as well.’ I want the book to be a series of responses and Reggie’s artwork is as much of a response as any other readers’.

What I liked as well is that Reggie wouldn’t necessarily even illustrate in the same tone that I’ve written the story in. So one of the things that I found surprising was story number 1 which has this sort of Grim Reaper figure in Brighton. I thought he’d made it look like it’s just a traditional ghost story, and of course it isn’t that at all. It’s quite an emotional tale but it’s not a spooky or a horror story. And he’s saying to people it’s a horror story and then they’re lied to and I thought, ‘Well, yeah that’s the book.’

The book is actually very heavy with death. The book is inspired by the death of my parents, who died as I was writing it, and the resultant depression. An awful lot of the book is actually about very openly dealing with grief and I think, again not to make it sound too heavy, with the mental health fallout of that.

Most of the book does touch upon these things and I think it’s what gives it its spine. When I went back to it I found these perfectly decent short stories I’d written which didn’t now seem emotionally or thematically to do with what I think the book was.

It helped once I’d written the prologue, which was quite a lengthy thing to write. I knew I had to write it and I was really scared of writing it because I knew that it’s alright to say ‘I’ve written a good story, number 6’ or ‘my story number 24 is quite fun’, but I also had to suggest a whole range of different storytelling techniques.

So the prologue opens being quite a sort of very emotionally grieving thing, but it becomes a series of gags. It becomes this gag in the library then it becomes a sort of philosophical thing about the nature of the way in which stories bounce off each other and it’s like it constantly shifts, the way the book shifts.

I very consciously spent ages writing the prologue and rewriting and rewriting it, thinking I wanted to try to compartmentalise the effect of the book within a few pages. Once I’d got away with it I thought, ‘That’s helping me now go back to the other stories and say ‘Does this feel relevant to what the prologue is now setting up?’’ Sometimes it just didn’t.

What writing things like the prologue and doing that harder structural maze later revealed was all the emotional gaps and the things I wanted to be saying but hadn’t yet.

Because it was a book which I could tell I was never going to write this sort of again. I just thought I have to make it so that I look at it as there’s nothing that I meant to say that’s been left out because this is the one chance I’ve got to do this.

 

We All Hear Stories in the Dark is available now from PS Publishing