Interviewing Alys Earl

Helloo!!

Last week I reviewed the enticing and atmospheric modern gothic tale Time's Fool by Alys Earl exploring the strange dynamics between two students on the cusp of adulthood and a strange alluring ageless man. Alys kindly agreed to answer some questions about the story and the joy of the gothic.

How do you like to booktempt Time’s Fool?

I like to call it a Gothic novel for the student loan generation, or alternatively, what happens when you leave it to the humanities students to deal with the vampires.

What led to this choice of story?

It has always been vampires for me, they are one of the longest standing fascinations of my life and Time’s Fool is, in many ways, my love song to the Gothic stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ever since I was tiny, I’ve devoured ghost stories, vampire stories, supernatural tales, and it has never gone away - I’m a member of the Dracula Society, most of my favourite books are Gothic in some form or another, so what I really wanted to do was write something that was in some way a tribute to the classics of the genre. But I think, being me, I also wanted to pick at some of those Victorian certainties that lie underneath those stories – and linger unquestioned in a lot of modern Gothic forms.

I’ve always felt that the (long)Victorian Gothic has left us with a very troubled legacy in terms of knowledge, virtue, the past, and Otherness. There was this great belief in progress as an enlightening force, and that the past was some dark pit of mystery and superstition. As such, those stories were were written at a time when there was an almost colonial approach to the supernatural- I think it’s a character in one of the Anno Dracula books that describes the Victorian spiritualist view of the afterlife as something that could be mapped and measured, explained. These things were fascinating, but open to categorisation. However little else they have in common in terms of outlook, Stoker, Shelley, Le Fanu all had this belief that even if we don’t understand these things now, their causes will become clear in very short order.

So, I suppose part of what I wanted to do was write a sort of postmodernist vampire story, one which is suspicious of the structures of morality that we lay upon these things, but also of the structure of the stories we tell about our own lives, and how we centre ourselves within them.

The story has character battling their inner natures. Was this deliberate and why do we like characters with this type of duality to them?

I mean, it was absolutely deliberate! It’s my best thing!

We are fascinated by monsters, and what constitutes monstrosity, and I think the reason for that is that most people recognise the potential for… if not monstrosity, then at least harm within themselves. We all have dark drives, selfish places within us and, for the most part, we do not act on them. What I think fiction does is that it gives us a safe place to hold those parts of ourselves and those we love, to bring them up into the light, and let them have their time without harming anyone. The lovely thing about characters like this in fiction is that they let us feel sympathy for the devil, in a way we can’t in real life.

And, because it is fiction, there is a metaphorical function there, as well as the cathartic one. We all have things that we can’t talk about, inner needs, inner natures that we fear will render us monstrous in the eyes of those around us. I’ve sometimes joked that Time’s Fool is my depression in a cape and fangs, and on one level, it is. The violence of self-loathing and despair, the conviction that you are innately but privately hateful, are things I wanted to communicate quite starkly. This particular aspect of it was made more important to me, as, when I was writing Time’s Fool, I was living as a closeted trans person. So, I had this social persona as a cis, straight mother of two, and – because my children were quite young - I was spending a lot of time in mother and baby groups, things like that, and all these people were assuming I was one of them, while underneath there was this growing awareness that… I wasn’t. And there was this knowledge and this fear that, at any moment I could say or do something that would mark me as monstrous in the eyes of some of these people, and I put a lot of that unease and alienation into the character of the creature.

Time’s Fool is a modern gothic in conversation with gothic novels. What do you think the appeal of the gothic is today?

I think the appeal of the Gothic today is what it always has been – to indulge an element of nostalgia, but also to tell us the truths of the world in a way that we cannot ignore. The Gothic works on the idea of there being a polite veneer of society by which we all abide, beneath which there is malevolence, and terror, yes, but also sometimes also, liberation and grace. It’s about looking into the dark places and finding important things there.

You’ve also written short stories. Do you approach novels and short fiction in the same way or do you find a different approach better?

So, for me, a novel is a nice, sane, logical thing. It has a logical progression – idea, exploration, three quarters of a shaky first draft, solid second draft, ruthless third draft, and then endless editing. So long as you have the self discipline to turn up every day, put in a couple of hours or a couple of thousand words, then eventually, you’ll have something at the end of it. Whether it’s good or not is irrelevant, but it’ll be there.

A short story is like having a goblin appear in your brain one day, and it won’t stop screaming until you start writing. After a few hundred words, the goblin goes into a coma from which it cannot be wakened. You save, exit, and give it up as a bad job, which is fine for two or three months, but then maybe the goblin wakes up, and this time it’s got a pointy stick.

What I’m saying is, novels – lawful good. Short stories – chaotic evil. Also, I don’t write a lot of short stories.

What else can you we look forward from you in the future and where can we find out more?

The professional answer to this one is “on my website!” but honestly, you’ll have a lot more luck on Twitter, where I am @alysdragon.

As to future projects, I’m currently trying to place my second novel, tentatively titled One Song. It’s the first part of a four book urban fantasy series based around two of the other great loves of my life – English and Scottish Faerie lore, and the city of Norwich. It is a lot more upbeat and rollicking than Time’s Fool, but there is still a Gothic sensibility behind it. Watch this space, I guess!

If there was one book; not your own, that you wish everyone in the world could be able to read what would it be and why?

This is a really difficult question, because there are so many good books out there, and people are so different that I think we all need fiction that does different things for us. That said, a book I wish were far more widely read is Little, Big by John Crowley.