This is the reflective essay that formed part of my Creative Writing dissertation project when I was at Kingston University in 2018. This accompanies my short story The Landlady.
In approaching my Creative Writing Dissertation project I originally envisaged to create a piece derivative and largely based on a world and genre that I had already created. This approach was borne out of a feeling that my comfort zone wherein I feel my strongest writing emanates from would make for a straightforward and almost simple piece of writing to produce.
However, this familiarity with the genre presented in my project proposal, while easy to make a proposal for, proved uninspiring and altogether unimaginative. My own writing process demands that the idea that I am working on be imaginatively challenging; while the piece I proposed is certainly something I do feel has a creative worth that is worthy of my time as a writer to pursue, it was not to be for my dissertation, hence I scrapped it after discussion with my peers, some of whom found themselves in similar positions.
This is a decision I didn’t take lightly but neither regret. Counsel with my peers – and indeed some initial feedback with the piece The Landlady, which remained an extra-curricular project – proved vital in propelling me to make the switch in project. Ultimately when drafting this piece further it became clear that my peer group, largely comprised of like-minded writers, were going to be more instrumental in forming this piece from an unfinished draft into the polished piece of fiction I feel it is. Indeed, the primary source of feedback for my ideas, especially when deciding to make the drastic change in my project became my peer group.
Indeed, after taking the piece out of mothballs I took the chance to re-evaluate it and I deemed it worthy of becoming my dissertation piece, for reasons I intend to explore further in this essay. I did, however, conclude rapidly that this piece was something I not only saw creative worth in but was one I genuinely felt passionate about finishing. This would’ve been a stark contrast to the mechanical attitude I feel I could’ve taken with my proposed piece. The opportunity to push my own personal boundaries and explore a section of genre fiction I had been enjoying in my leisure time as a reader and appreciative of from a writing perspective was one I am pleased to have taken.
The Landlady comprises my first real foray as a writer into a genre that is emergent to me – that of classic horror and thriller fiction. This is at odds to my usual genre of post-apocalyptic science-fiction but I feel allows me to transfer a great deal of my core skills from there to horror – namely my ability to patch in the reader’s imagination a vivid and engaging setting and location. This is key in horror fiction and I feel my piece depicts the fictional town of Medford in a similar ominous light and questions the reader to find out what is happening – and push them to read onward.
Challenging this sense of a comfort zone that I was finding all-too-easy to slip into was a conscious decision too throughout the planning process for this piece. It was an opportunity – rare in the progression of the Creative Writing course at Kingston – to push my boundaries as a genre fiction writer and ultimately show my versatility. I was also inspired to avoid this particular pitfall by noting how members of my peer group were approaching their respective pieces; some were appreciably struggling. This propelled me to be bold and daring with The Landlady in terms of genre, but also to base the work firmly in the skills I have already honed and built on throughout my time at Kingston.
In actively choosing to pursue a project themed around a genre new to me as a writer, horror, I made an active decision to base this work on that of an author whose work in the genre had been both an introduction to horror fiction itself but also who serves as an inspiration to me as a writer: James Herbert. Herbert’s work, most notably works such as The Rats, The Fog and The Magic Cottage which served as base inspiration for my own piece The Landlady, were important books which I feel have contributed in inspiring this piece. Indeed, choosing the classic “haunted house” setting was largely inspired by Herbert’s The Magic Cottage, though it is his wide body of work in general that served as primary inspiration. My depiction of the destruction of Holman Hall as an “implosion” is a direct reference to Herbert’s depiction of the destruction of Gramarye in The Magic Cottage, where the house “imploded, went back into itself. Became nothing but smouldering rubble, the channel beneath it sealed, I hope for ever.”[1] The Landlady, while an effective and strong piece of fiction is also in part a homage to Herbert’s work; indeed, the inclusion of many aspects gleaned from being a keen fan of Herbert’s work are, as I see them, indicative of how fondly I regard these books and it is this affection for Herbert’s work which I feel have translated into The Landlady to make it both an effective piece of fiction on its own but also a fitting tribute to an author I as a writer admire greatly.
In my piece The Landlady I made a conscious effort to channel some of the aspects of James Herbert’s work that both appeal to me as a casual reader but that I identify as strengths as a writer. His storytelling style is unpretentious and effective – indeed, this is a direct eschewing of more “literary” storytelling styles. Of course, this isn’t to say that Herbert’s work doesn’t have an underlying message; his prose style simply does not pause the story and its effective and exhilarating pacing. His work also imbues a timeless sense of macabre horror, which is an ever-present thread throughout all the novels of his which I have read, both in my leisure reading and as inspiration for The Landlady. The fact that Herbert’s work is a real underrated gem in the fiction canon (largely overshadowed by Stephen King) attracted me to write The Landlady as a homage and affectionate tribute to an underappreciated author whose general philosophy toward storytelling and writing is one that I wholeheartedly subscribe to.
In crafting The Landlady I made a careful choice to not only take off-the-shelf aspects from Herbert’s works but to also mix those aspects with the strongest parts of my own writing to create something that is not merely a derivative work in the style of James Herbert but is something that is unashamedly an affectionate tribute and written with Herbert’s style and philosophy in mind but also a discrete piece of work that can form a strong part of my own writing canon. I used some oblique references to Herbert’s work – the name Holman Hall derived from the protagonist’s name, John Holman[2], in The Fog being an incongruous example but intentionally so; this is an obvious reward at the outset and throughout that will immediately appeal to Herbert aficionados. Indeed, the biggest and clearest example of this which I feel thoroughly telegraphs my intentions with the piece is naming the protagonist in my piece Jimmy Herbert, which of course is expanded in the scene where the register is signed to use Herbert’s full name.
I also made a conscious effort to capture Herbert’s sense of blunt, almost completely un-literary and plot-centric prose. The characters of Jimmy and Connie exist purely to experience the macabre horror of Holman Hall – in my prose I chose to not dedicate a great deal of time toward explaining why they find themselves in the fictional town of Medford and how they then leave. These aspects are ultimately unnecessary points – I focus clearly on them being in Medford essentially because the plot demands it. In drafting the opening scenes with the pair being unceremoniously dumped in Medford and finding themselves drawn inexorably toward the titular landlady’s house of horrors I played into my own key skills of building an atmospheric and foreboding presence in the town – something in Medford simply doesn’t feel right, and it is through the prose that I seed this sensation in, while avoiding explicitly stating it.
Secondly, I took a cue from several aspects of Herbert books with took macabre takes on expressing human desire and passion. A particularly visceral take is the scene in Domain where a survivor of the apocalypse is accosted by a rapist in an abandoned cinema. The tension in the scene is palpable but the intention of the assailant is unknown, though hinted, until quite far into the scene, when contact is made and “it was then that she knew the intent.”[3] This scene continues, with Sharon, the victim, beginning to fight back, “the stiffened fingers of her other hand [jabbing] wildly for his eyes”[4] until it mashes with the main narrative of the mutant rats, the first of which finishing the job Sharon begins by blinding the attacker, “lunged with barely a pause for the opening from which bloody juices streamed.”[5]
A running thread throughout Herbert’s work is that of a gritty, grimy undertone to sex that, while unpleasant and undignified, does resonate with a grounded sense of reality that casts the dressing-up of these scenes as found in romance novels totally aside; the depictions of sex in Herbert books, while not necessarily discrete do have a running thread of normalcy, as these flowery depictions of relations are likely, from the information I have been able to gather, not entirely accurate depictions of real-life scenarios.
In adapting this aspect for use in The Landlady, I used my characters quite blatant desires (set out through their characterisation) to propel the story forward, while leaving a fair amount to the imagination of the reader. In crafting the passion scene between Jimmy and Connie I did take hints from Herbert’s wry depictions of the acts in question, which elicited an amused reaction from my peer group in workshop. However, this did not deter me because I was fully aware that I was channelling Herbert’s overall style in that section, and which is why in redrafting it I was reticent to make substantial changes because of my strength of feeling in how it depicted that evocation.
Another factor in the breathless pace in which I move my protagonists from the initial setting to Holman Hall, which is the main setting; Medford being window-dressing that sets up the mood and environment is that the word count for the assignment was very constrictive; I feel The Landlady toward the end was brought to a rapid climax artificially because I was conscious that the work wasn’t going to fit entirely within the allotted and extended word count. Reflecting on this I feel The Landlady would’ve been much better served by a word count of 10,000 words, potentially moving to a novella of 20,000 in an expanded form which would’ve allowed for more space to experiment with atmosphere.
Reflecting on the feedback I received I was reticent too in cutting what seems to be an unnecessary addition to the story that may contribute to its overweight word count – the scene of Matthew loading the van at his employers, the butchers, and almost being caught with suspect meat in his possession. This scene was by design totally separate at first to the main plot thread centred at Holman Hall; the intention here to ape a technique I had noticed in Herbert’s own work to set scenes or, in longer works certainly, start chapters from a totally different point of view but which is linked as the scene continues to the narrative at the heart of the story. Because this was an oblique reference and nod to Herbert’s core style that I had identified I resisted feedback to cut the scene.
Indeed, an example of where Herbert does this is in The Fog; at multiple points the story the narrative seems to switch to an apparently-unrelated vignette. At the start of chapter 8 the narrative switches, showing suddenly how “Herbert Brown was worried about his pigeons.”[6] This seems disconnected from the narrative at first but as the sensation of normality is built up, an ominous sensation follows. We are slowly turned against the character of Herbert Brown, who is depicted as an “animal”[7] by his long-suffering wife after drunkenly urinating on the pavement outside their back door. The tables turn on the character of Herbert Brown when his beloved pigeons, who he describes much more reverently than his wife when, unbeknownst to Brown, the birds are afflicted by the titular fog and proceed to turn on Brown in a visceral and gruesome display of horror, with the “whole hut erupt[ing] into a whirlwind of screeching, fluttering bodies as the birds flew at [Brown] from all sides.”[8] It is this evocation of horror from a seemingly-unconnected thread that ties into the main narrative that I was emulating in The Landlady.
Characterisation, too, was an aspect I considered to a degree with The Landlady; it is perhaps the weakest skill as a writer I have, and one I have not felt I have had a great deal of attention spent on over the course of my studies. But in focusing my piece on taking the core strengths of James Herbert’s work and transposing them to my own discrete piece of work I could take hints from Herbert’s style of characterisation – in that characters exist very much to serve the plot first and foremost and imbue a literary or moral message second. Again, any scope to expand on my characters was curtailed by the repressive word count of the piece that I was assigned.
Overall with The Landlady I played very much to my strengths in terms of plot-centric and effective prose which is a quality very much identifiable in the work of James Herbert that I have enjoyed and subconsciously taken great hints from. The blunt and matter-of-fact prose reflects a sense of gritty and grim realism that does add to the genre of horror in question a great deal of atmosphere and punchiness.
Reflectively, The Landlady imbues everything I have come to know about writing prose and my own approach to it; Herbert’s work is unashamedly commercial but, despite the aura I have sensed from members of faculty across my studies, that is not to the work’s detriment. That is not to say that commercial fiction cannot be literary or have an underlying message or theme but Herbert’s work, and my tribute to it in The Landlady, shows that this does not, as perhaps it has always seemed through a significant portion of the teaching at Kingston, come at the expense of plot. Indeed, it is Herbert’s commercial nature and aptitude for effective and memorable works of fiction and the inspiration that has brought about to experiment in a new genre as a writer that brightened my outlook at the end of my studies.
2,592 words
Bibliography
Herbert, James, The Fog (Pan Books, 2010; originally New English Library, 1975)
Herbert, James, Domain (Pan Books 2012; originally New English Library, 1984)
Herbert, James, The Magic Cottage, (Pan Books, 2007; originally New English Library, 1986)
[1] Herbert, James, The Magic Cottage, (Pan Books 2007; originally New English Library, 1986) p. 390
[2] Herbert, James, The Fog (Pan Books 2010; originally New English Library, 1975), p. 8
[3] Herbert, James, Domain (Pan Books 2012; originally New English Library, 1984) p. 143
[4] Ibid., p. 146
[5] Ibid., p. 147
[6] Herbert, James, The Fog (Pan Books, 2010; originally New English Library, 1975), p. 93
[7] Ibid., p. 99
[8] Ibid., p. 101
Richard Holliday - Author 