Jasper Bark, UK horror author and unapologetic madman, is currently celebrating the release of his new trilogy, Draw You In. I do not remember how I stumbled across the first book in the series last winter, but I’m so glad I did. Bark is a master storyteller, literally drawing the reader into his prose like a spider to its web, hooking you well before you realize you’ve been trapped and then teasing you while you squirm. He’s also a helluva nice guy, and an absolute riot to talk with. I’m honoured to share the following interview with our audience, and truly hope you explore his work. If you need more convincing, just take a look at his website! (Spoiler alert: it’s INSANE!)
Draw You In is a conspiracy thriller wrapped in a horror story, twisting and turning through multiple layers that will send you to the Google machine to see if some of the details are true. And they are. Bark did his research and told me during his interview that he even wrote sections of the story with real artists in the comic industry.
Here is the synopsis from his publisher, Crystal Lake:
“Can you disappear so completely that only one person remembers you existed?
That’s what comics creator Linda Corrigan asks when her editor disappears without a trace. Drawn into an FBI investigation by Agent McPherson, Linda and comics historian Richard Ford unearths a chilling link to the forgotten comic artist R. L. Carver, whose work might just hold the key to a series of mysterious disappearances.
As they explore Carver’s life, they uncover the secret history of horror comics, the misfits, madcaps and macabre masters who forged an industry, frightened a generation and felt the heat of the Federal Government. They also stumble on the shadow history of the United States on a road trip that veers into the nation’s dark underbelly, where forbidden knowledge and forgotten lore awaits them.
Described as ‘Kavalier and Clay meets Clive Barker’, it contains stories within stories that explore horror in all its subgenres, from quiet to psychological horror, from hardcore to cosmic horror. Experience the epic conspiracy thriller that redefines the genre for a new generation.”
If you love horror, the history of comic books, and conspiracy theories, you need to read this trilogy.
Interview With Horror Author Jasper Bark
GoH: You have quite the storied past! No apologies for the pun. Can you tell us about your early years working in the theatre?
JB: I’m the UK equivalent of a high school dropout. I left school at sixteen and left home a year later. I sofa surfed and hustled for a year, getting involved in various nefarious schemes until I stumbled on the most nefarious practice of all – live theatre.
I didn’t have any qualifications or professional experience when I started out, so I got into theatre in the same way that I later got into journalism, through pure BS and bravado, talking my way into a training scheme as a playwright and performer when I was still a teen. I then went on to form a Theatre Arts Co-operative with some other theatre practitioners, at the age of 20 in the UK city of Carlisle.
This all went swimmingly, for a few years, until we were booked to stage the city’s Bonfire Night celebrations. This is a uniquely British annual festival that’s kind of like a cross between the 4th of July and Halloween, wherein we build huge fires, let off fireworks, make jack-o-lanterns out of turnips and celebrate (or commiserate) the fact that Guy Fawkes didn’t blow up the Houses of Parliament some four hundred years ago.
Our company worked with the city’s 18 to 25 year old unemployed to stage a mass public spectacle with puppets mounted on cars, a full street band, a thrash metal band and the world’s first all-female pyrotechnic team. We had a record turnout of 10,000 people. Unfortunately, one local councillor decided to make a stink about this in the local press.
Because we refused to back down and apologise for the event, it became a huge controversy and eventually our funding was withdrawn. One minute we were being handed the key to the city on a plate, the next we were tarred and feathered and ridden to the county limits.
After this I moved to London to join my future wife who was studying drama at Goldsmith’s University. I became a stand up and performance poet and made lots of blink-and-you’ll-miss-me appearances on television, and toured the UK as a performer.
GoH: As a screenwriter, what shows and games did you work on?
JB: I have to say, I’m more of a scriptwriter than a screenwriter. I have written several short films and an unproduced treatment for director Mark Tonderai’s Shona Films. Other than that I’ve written sketches for BBC Radio and quite a few stage plays one of which A Glasgow Kiss, won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh International Festival. The games work I did was very tedious, there’s a lot of work for hire work done on games, or there was in the days before AI, so I mostly wrote a lot of incidental dialogue as part of an uncredited team. I did write the novelisation of Rebellion’s best-selling Sniper Elite game though.
The medium that I’ve written the most scripts for is definitely comics and graphic novels. I was nominated for a British Comics Award and an Ashcan Award for my comics work.
GoH: How did you eventually become an author? Have you always written horror?
JB: I’ve been publishing short stories in magazines and anthologies since the mid 90s. It was around this time that I blagged my way into a journalism career. I became a film and music journalist, reviewing albums, gigs and films as well as interviewing celebrities and film directors while still working as a stand up, so I was basically paid to go out of an evening and write about it later.
After a few years doing this, I became increasingly aware that I had someone else’s dream job. I realised that I needed to write something that wasn’t simply a reaction to someone else’s creativity. Because of my job I was able to get into any gig or film premier in London, so I used that as a way of getting in the good books of lots of editors by inviting them out to whatever they wanted to see. As a result of this, I was able to break into the closed shop of the comics world and eventually give up my job as a journalist and Cable TV presenter.
After writing all manner of comics for the British, European and American markets, I was asked to write an original novel based on the 2000AD comics character Strontium Dog. As it was my first time attempting a novel I wrote it in collaboration with veteran author Steve Lyons. My comics work was mainly on a work-for-hire basis, often writing comics based on existing franchises from companies like Dreamworks Animation, Disney, Aardman Animation, Games Workshop and others. So, my first novels were also written on a work-for-hire basis, either in shared worlds or for franchises owned by companies like Newline Cinema and Rebellion Games.
This was only marginally more creatively satisfying than being a journalist, because all too often I was playing in someone else’s sandpit and writing according to their rules. This dissatisfaction came to a head when my wife told me she’d never read anything I’d written to which she could point and say this was written in my voice and was something only I could have written. As much as this stung, I realised she was right. So, I walked away from some really well paid games writing work and tried to find my voice. This is probably one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.
The novel that had gotten the most traction up to that point was Way of the Barefoot Zombie, published by mainstream publishers Abaddon Books. While writing that I realised that my first genre love, growing up had always been horror. I drifted away from the genre in my early twenties, but I kept coming back and checking in with it like a guilty pleasure. It occurred to me that it was simply the best genre for me to express the things I wanted to explore in fiction. I found my voice and it was hideous! And since then I’ve never looked back.
GoH: Tell us about your writing process. Do you start with an outline, or do your characters wreak havoc and dictate the plot points?
JB: That all depends on the story. When I began writing novels, on a work-for-hire basis, in order to sell your book to an editor, you had to present them with a full chapter-by-chapter breakdown. So, when I began writing the novels I wanted to write, I naturally started as a plotter, working everything out in advance.
However, some stories just don’t want to be plotted in advance, no matter how hard you try and do that. There are some stories that just want you to sit your ass down and tell them, without worrying about things like plot.
Plotting in advance allows you to do all kinds of clever and subtle things with narrative, theme and structure, but you can’t do this at the expense of spontaneity. If you plot too much in advance, your story risks becoming tired and stale, because you’re simply telling the story you’ve worked in your outline over again in more detail. The risk with ‘pantsing’ (from the phrase ‘flying by the seat of your pants’) is that if you have no idea where the story is going, you might run out of steam and never find out how it ends, or the ending you do devise might be weak or unconvincing.
Even when I’m pantsing, I’m still thinking ahead at least a few scenes, so I know where the story is going next, even if I don’t write anything down or have the full details. When I’m plotting, I will leave a lot of room for spontaneity in the story. So, even if I know how something is going to turn out, I won’t know the way it’s going to arrive at that point. I’ll leave a lot of room for the story to surprise me, because if it doesn’t surprise me as the author, it won’t surprise or delight the reader and that would be the worst thing.
GoH: As an author with experience in both acting and screenwriting, I imagine writing dialogue comes very easily to you. When I read your dialogue scenes, I see them in my mind like a movie. Have you ever had to wrestle with yourself to make a character work, or do they always flow?
JB: Thank you for that lovely compliment, that’s very kind of you to say. I have to confess that my dialogue, like my prose, doesn’t always flow. I edit and rewrite heavily. Even at this stage in my career, my first drafts are terrible and read as though they’re written by someone who’s never done this before. Luckily, I’ve learned how to improve them.
As to whether the dialogue always flows, that depends on the character. With some characters it feels like they’ve been waiting their whole lives for you to write them and the minute they enter any scene they can’t shut up.
Writing mythological characters or characters from a long running franchise, like superheroes or Doctor Who, is also very easy. Those characters practically write themselves, you’ve grown up reading them so you already have their voice in your head and they just take over whenever you come to write their dialogue.
Some characters are smarter or wittier than I am. I had one character who was firing off a string of put downs at my other character and I was struggling to think of ripostes that were even half as funny. Whenever I did think of something, the character would fire back with a zinger that was twice as good. I’ve had characters suddenly make insights into other character’s motivations or personalities that have floored me with their perception. I’ve honestly sat there, at my keyboard, thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”
I have occasionally had to wrestle with myself to make a character work though. Most notably in my novel Way of the Barefoot Zombie, the villain of the piece, Doc Papa simply refused to speak for the first two thirds of the novel. I sat there, twiddling my thumbs because he just would remain silent whenever I came to write him. I was on a tight deadline to deliver that novel and I just had to fake it until he finally deigned to talk. So that does happen and when it does there’s nothing you can do about it.
GoH: You obviously do a lot of research while writing. Can you tell us how long you spend on that, and how deep down the rabbit hole you go? Which book(s) took you the longest to research? What’s the oddest/most vile subject you’ve researched?
JB: I spend a lot of time on research. Possibly as much time as an academic writing a thesis. If I’m writing about a specific place, I will research it’s geography, it’s architecture, it’s history and politics. If I haven’t visited, I will walk down its roads and through its neighbourhoods on Google Maps, I’ll visit Tripadvisor to read reviews of stores and restaurants that my characters pop into, so it’s as authentic as possible.
I think I did the most research on the Draw You In trilogy, because my characters not only embark on a road trip across a good part of the States, but the plot concerns itself with the history of the horror comic from the 1950s to the present day. I’ve loved horror comics ever since I was a tiny child, so that was actually one of the biggest pleasures in writing these three books.
GoH: What inspired this trilogy?
JB: The initial inspiration for Draw You In was the early works of James Herbert. I have a huge soft spot for his 70s novels in which a plucky band of protagonists faces off against a ‘big bad’ – such as an evil fog, a sentient darkness or a gaggle of plane crash victims’ disembodied souls. As they do this, Herbert cuts away every few chapters to give us a vignette in which a hapless soul falls foul of the ‘big bad’ and we get a glimpse into the victim’s life in their final moments.
I began Draw You In as a thought experiment, to see where I might be able to take this way of telling a horror story. Along the way, it gained a deeper meaning and a more complex structure. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Possession by A S Byatt were instrumental in this growth and development.
GoH: There are real people in this trilogy. What was it like researching them and working them into your stories?
JB: There are historic characters, who were around at key points in the history of horror comics, it was fun to research and include them, and there are living comic creators who appear as themselves.
One of the themes of all three novels was the way that fiction and reality bleed into each other, especially in the world of horror comics. Comic creators have been appearing in their comics since the days of EC horror comics. Sometimes, comics fiction becomes reality, as happened when groups like Anonymous and Occupy Wall St started adopting the Guy Fawkes mask from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta.
I wanted to explore this in many ways, not only in terms of the story but also the composition of the novel. So I invited two real life comic legends – Walt and Louise Simonson to appear as themselves in the novel. They wrote all their own dialogue for the scenes in which they appeared, as well as their own actions. We wrote those scenes in a ‘round-robin’ fashion passing the scene backwards and forwards until it was finished. This meant that both collaborators could have changed the story in any way they saw fit, during their appearance and I would have had to have gone along with it, and they certainly took it in directions I didn’t envisage.
GoH: What would you like people to know about the Draw You In trilogy?
There is a corollary to Walt and Louise’s appearance in the trilogy. Not only did real life people step into the fictional world of Draw You In, but the fictional characters also escaped into the real world.
There are stories within stories throughout all three books. One of those stories is the graphic novel series the protagonist, cartoonist Linda Corrigan is working on, called Doom Divine. Linda actually wrote and illustrated a prose prequel to her graphic novel series, Doom Divine: Vein Glorious Love with the help of artist Ali Vermeeren and me. You can read this book for free by subscribing to my newsletter here.
Linda wasn’t the only character to escape into the real world. R. L. Carver, the legendary cartoonist, for whom the trilogy’s three protagonists are searching, also escaped the fictional confines of the novel and snuck into reality. In the run-up to the launch of the trilogy, I convinced a bunch of reputable comics news sites and blogs to run stories about some unpublished printer’s proofs I claimed to have discovered in the attic of a deceased collector, which included original strips by an artist called R. L. Carver. The strips were fakes made to look like original comics from the 50s and the 70s. I asked readers if they knew anything about the artist who purportedly drew them. For a few months, I had members of the comics community searching for info on Carver, just as the protagonists of the trilogy do. So, for a brief time, R. L. Carver and his work really did exist in the imagination of some people. You can read more about the hoax in this article from The Gingernuts of Horror.
And if you’re interested, here are some links where you can read the horror comics written and drawn by my fictional character:
Killer Caboose ran on the Tripwire site.
Sign of the Crimes ran on Down the Tubes
And Tipping the Scales ran on the Diversions of the Groovy Kind blog
GoH: Now that this trilogy is wrapped, do you have any new wips you’d like to tease us with?
JB: I have several new books coming out from my publishers, Crystal Lake Entertainment this year. There’s a novella called Dead Scalp, which is a Weird-Western Splatterpunk story which I promise is like nothing you have ever read before. I have also just handed the finished MS of a new novel called Harmed and Dangerous. This is a Southern Gothic, Paranormal Thriller with major Folk Horror vibes. It addresses LGBTQIA themes and also explores father and daughter relationships. Be sure to place your orders now. Don’t be the only weird kid on your block to miss out.
GoH: Thanks for sharing your wild tales and the inner workings of your mind with us, Jasper. You’re a truly unique man, and your stories are spine tingling!
JB: Thanks so much for having me, Kate and for asking such intelligent questions. I’ve had a
blast with this interview.
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Kate’s love of all things dark began as a child and deepened when she realized what being an adult meant. She was born with a pencil in her hand and loves nothing more than writing horrific stories to tantalize her inner demons. Kate lives in Hamilton, Ontario Canada with her husband and her boys, stirring up trouble wherever she can.