My trip to FantasyCon in Nottingham at the weekend has reinforced my assertion that the best, most imaginative writers in the UK exist outside of the mainstream.
It’s long been the case that our best script writers are not to be found in the committee-led world of British TV or the barren wilderness of our laughable film industry; they are working in comics. The likes of Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar create characters and worlds that are not only triumphs of imagination and fine examples of what creative people can achieve when left to their own devices, but are also better written in terms both of dialogue and narrative than their more mainstream cousins.
It dawned on me this weekend that comics are not the only place where imagination still flourishes. Genres like horror, fantasy and science fiction tend to be looked down on by the mainstream (even as it ingests those genres’ best ideas and shits them out, minus all their nutritional components, for public consumption) and therefore receive minimal attention and the writers within them struggle both for recognition and a living wage. Nonetheless if, as a reader, you want to be taken to somewhere beyond the corner of your street; to experience something out of the ordinary and be introduced to unforgettable characters that you can’t meet everyday in the supermarket, you need to look beyond the confines of John Grisham and Martina Cole.
I therefore commend to you the work of Michael Marshall (and his alter ego Michael Marshall Smith), Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris, Sarah Pinborough, Jasper Fforde, Conrad Williams, Guy Adams, Nicholas Royle… The list goes on and on an on (and I’m only listing those I’ve personally read and can recommend). Your best introduction is going to be to buy any of the numerous anthologies edited by Stephen Jones (The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror is a good place to start), read the short stories and then explore more work by the authors you like, of which there will be many.
And don’t be put off by labels or some inherited genre prejudice you can’t even remember acquiring; these are good stories told by terrific writers who care about what they’re doing and, given the poor state of the publishing industry, are not just churning it out for the cash.
There’s a whole new world of imagination, creativity and wonder out there people, but the entrance to that world is not to be found in WH Smiths. Do your brain a favour and go read something new.
