The nation’s gripped today with the hunt for the ‘Essex Lion’. I have my own views (and fascinations) with stories about creatures alien to the UK on the loose. But for now, I’m just enjoying the ride…
Apparently Essex folk have been asked to remain indoors while the hunt (left – pic courtesy of the Daily Mail) for the big pussy (sorry) continues. I for one hope that this is it/ isn’t it debate continues en mass for at least the next few days, as rumours abound on the internet, as pics of footprints are scoured over, as the lion sleeps tonight. Because it’s great, free PR for my book, Paint this town Red, ain’t it? Eh?
But also because, frankly, I love a great story like this. Mass hysteria. Hoaxery. Men forming impromptu hunting parties. It’s got it all, hasn’t it? Well, if you’re not sure, just take a look at the witness’s reaction to seeing the beast in the Daily (Heil) Mail article above.
And here’s my own views on creatures alien to the UK from an interview I recently did with the Ginger Nuts of Horror:
When did your fascination with creatures alien to the UK begin?
I’m an animal lover, first and foremost. Always had been. When I was little, I either wanted to be – and usually this depended on what day you asked me what answer you’d get – a zoo keeper, a Manchester United goalkeeper, or a writer. Generally, I shun beachy kinds of holidays – for the most part – and save up to go on safari adventures instead. And I’ve been on the big cat trail a few times now. In Kenya and Senegal, and then in India on the search for tigers. This tends to make me sound more adventurous than I really am, but I don’t really care. Writing’s all about reinventing things!
Anyway, I’d been quite keen on writing a Creature Feature for a while. I touched on it in my novel When Elephants Walk Through the Gorbals – a dark crime-thriller which won quite a decent award but which for some reason hasn’t been picked up for publication – but I wanted to go deeper. Bring the creature to the fore with this one.
As to the alien to the UK aspect of this question, I’ll take you back to the guest blog I wrote for GNOH a few weeks back. Paint this town Red is inspired by what I imagine are very common small-town rumours which I experienced in my small town – I’ll leave it unnamed, to preserve the air of mystery – when I was growing up. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, there was talk of a large feline – perhaps a lynx – which was stalking the nearby hills, picking off livestock. There were plenty of sightings, most of which were discredited, but some couldn’t simply be explained away by Mrs. Goggins’ black moggie being on the prowl.
One night, bunch of mates and I engineered a large and rather over-complicated lie which meant that each of our parents believed we were staying at one of the others’ houses. Instead we decided to go camping up in the hills surrounding the town. We got our hands on a few cans of underage liquor, stolen from unsuspecting dads and the like, and we packed up our sleeping bags and our tents and we set out to find the Black Panther, as it was becoming commonly known.
One of my mates in particular had done quite a lot of research into the panther and, as darkness crept in and we failed to get our fire going, he told us all he knew about the panther. The thing which really got the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end was what he said about how the panther breathed. He claimed you could hear it, a rasping, throaty sound, before it came for you.
Anyway, we passed the evening telling stories and jokes and drinking up our pilfered booze, and in the end we turned in for the night. I woke up freezing cold in the wee small hours, already alert. And it was then that I heard the exact same breathing which my mate had described hours earlier, coming from outside the tent. I’d love to have said that I ran out, camera in hand, and got the snap which scooped the local paper. But I didn’t. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, and prayed that if it was really the panther, it would go for one of my mates first instead of me.
The next morning, nobody else claimed to have heard the panther, and indeed, one of my mates was being mocked for snoring, so the rasping, throaty sound could have been him. Or then again, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we really did have a close encounter with the black panther. Maybe we came this close.
I wanted to recreate the peculiar atmosphere which surrounded our town when these rumours were floating about. That weird sense of being hunted and of wanting to hunt it at the same time. That weird sense of belief and disbelief at the same time. And I also wanted to explore what would happen to such rumours in the internet age, when anybody can post a picture of a large footprint on Facebook, or Twitter, and can suddenly make a myth real, by word of mouth.
But I also wanted to go further. Creatures in fiction are often loci for metaphors (I’ve already mentioned the one I’ve suggested in the text; the alcoholism strand). Or they’re given anthropomorphic traits. We try and understand them through our own eyes and experiences. I wanted to create a true alien creature whose motives are forever clouded. But also one onto whom the townspeople (and the author. Me!) project their own experiences and fears.
A lot of people claim that they can’t exist as we don’t have any good photographic or video evidence. What’s your take on this?
I’m not sure. I want to believe. Because I want there to be elements of the mysterious and the fantastic which colour our world. I want there to be more than petrol strikes and Saturday night TV ‘talent’ shows and Conservative governments. But then, I don’t think I’m not the only one thinks that. I’ve been up to Loch Ness a few times and, without fail, I’ll be staring at the water for a while and suddenly I’ll see something move and I’ll reach for the camera and then… It’s gone. And I’ll think, that’ll have been a log, or a wave, or a… A… dinosaur? Having been on safari in India on the search for tigers, just as an example, I know that animals in the wild won’t play ball. They won’t just sit there posing waiting for you to get your camera or mobile phone ready. They sniff out humans and hide. Natural response. They don’t want to be seen. I haven’t got much evidence of the fact I saw a tiger in the wild in India. But I did. I promise you I did.
But surely some of them must be the locals trying to drum up tourist for their village?
Bullseye. And surely some suspicion must be cast my way too. Isn’t it a coincidence that almost on the day my novel was released, there was a spate of new sightings of the fabled Calderdale Cat Beast? Meaning that when I called up some of the local papers in Yorkshire, editors were far more willing to run press releases about my book because they tied in with the news… Can you picture me creating fake footprints down by the river in Hebden Bridge? Or dressing up in fur and running across fields in pursuit of rabbits? Or savaging some of the local farm animals? All in the name of marketing, my friend, all in the name of marketing… Seriously though, the idea of locals making up these stories, crying wolf so to speak, forms one of the plot strands in Paint this town Red.
Which myths about these creatures are your favourite?
It would have to be the Daddy of them all, the Beast of Bodmin Moor. The whole story has a Hound of the Baskervilles feel to it. Only, featuring a big cat, of course. After countless ‘sightings’, and rumours, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food conducted an official investigation in 1995, and found that there was “no verifiable evidence” of an exotic feline on the loose and Feline Fine. But it’s the twist to the tale that I love the most. Not a week after the report was published, a little lad found a fairly whopping cat skull at the side of a stream. Not even hidden. Myths suddenly morphed into reality, red in tooth and claw. If this wasn’t verifiable evidence, then what was?
(The footnote to this story is more prosaic: the skull was analysed by the Natural History Museum and although it did prove that the skull did belong to a leopard, it also proved that the leopard couldn’t have died in the UK. Apparently it contained eggs laid by a species of cockroach which could not have been found on these shores and there were marks on the skull which suggested the skin had been scraped off it with a knife. But what if these were the plants, not the skull…)
My new short story (~45 pages), “The Tournament,” is available FREE for a limited time this month. To take advantage, download it onto your Kindle from Amazon US or UK today and tomorrow (Wednesday 29th and Thursday 30th August)
paintthistownred 