1.- Could you introduce yourself to JamReads’ readers?
My name’s Daniel Church. I’m a British writer of horror fiction. I live on the Wirral, in North-West England, and I’m married to a wonderful and supportive woman thanks to whom I’m able to write full time.

2.- What made you start writing?
I’m not 100% sure of the root causes, but I've been doing it since I was old enough to understand what stories were. I don’t know if it was for attention, or trying to catch something of the thrill or the magic that I felt, but I was doing it. Star Wars was a bit of an influence, but British TV shows like Blake’s 7 and Dr Who (especially the Tom Baker era) probably had much more to do with it! Some of the first books I read that weren’t specifically for kids were the novelisations of Dr Who in my local library – this was in the days before video, let alone DVD or streaming, so those were the only way to experience the episodes you wanted to watch again or had never had a chance to see in the first place. Plus there was a fair bit of macabre stuff on TV – Jackanory, a children’s story-telling programme, did two seasons called Spine Chillers which had actors reading classic ghost and horror stories by the likes of H.G. Wells, M.R. James and Saki. I think I heard ‘Sredni Vashtar’ for the first time when I was about six or seven years old.
I had a pretty ordinary, stable middle-class upbringing, but it was a fairly awkward childhood – I was a bit of a misfit, I think. Some people have suggested I may be on the autism spectrum; I don’t know if that’s true or not. But I struggled socially, was bullied a lot. Escaping into a world where I was in control, or could imagine myself as the hero, had a great deal of appeal. Later I was interested in acting and filmmaking, but after college I gravitated back to writing as you can write a book with nothing more than pen and paper – you don’t need a camera and a crew and a cast, or the money you need to make all those things happen!

3.- Horror is an interesting genre. Why would you say you love this genre as a writer? Why do you think people are so attracted to horror?
One of the things that drew me back to horror, as a field to work in, was that it’s something that can take you to quite extreme places – not in terms of gore or explicitness, but in terms of emotion. I remember seeing some Greek tragedies on stage, like Antigone, and the intense kind of emotion involved in that went and how it ended. I remember reading a few short horror stories – particularly ‘Gerassimos Flamotas: A Day in the Life’ by Simon Clark- which had the same effect, and I wanted to do the same.
In day to day life, most of us try to avoid those kinds of extreme experiences or situations, so horror can be a safe way of going there. And good horror, in particular, can be exploring things we’re really frightened of, whether it’s something believable like human cruelty or ghosts or monsters. Someone described Ramsey Campbell’s fiction as taking place ‘anywhere that our imaginations can interpret in terms of nightmare’ and that’s a really good description of horror in general – what happens when something goes off in the worst direction possible, when you lose all control? And that’s another part of horror’s appeal – it can happen anywhere, and in any setting, and in any other genre. Romance? Western? Crime? Thriller? Fantasy? Science fiction? Historical fiction? Any one of those can turn into horror. There’ll be an element of the dark or the macabre in pretty much anything I do, I think, so working in this genre basically means I’ve got the biggest possible sandpit to play in.

4.- Your first published novel was The Hollows. How did the idea for this one appear? What do you wanted to explore with it?
It’s a strange story, actually. I was on a long train journey, en route to a funeral in the Peak District, and decided to write to pass the time. So I wrote the first word that came into my head, which was the name ‘Ellie,’ then carried it on into a sentence, which was ‘Ellie crouched and peered down the slope at the body.’ That turned into an opening scene about a policewoman in the Peaks finding a man who’d frozen to death in sight of his own home, and trying to work out why.
For various reasons I put it aside, and eventually lost those pages, but I wanted to pick up the thread and answer the questions. So several years later I rewrote the opening scene from memory and carried it on. I’d no idea where it was going to go at first, but eventually I decided that there were creatures of some kind, who came out by night – or who’d just started coming out by night again.
Beyond that, it was a case of building a mythology up to support them, and as I researched the folklore of Derbyshire and the Peaks, I find it incredibly rich in material that I incorporated into what I was doing. The winter setting also made me think of the winter solstice, and the rituals and festivals we’ve got that go back to those times where the winters and long nights must have seemed everlasting and people huddled around fires hoping the sun would come back and trying not to think about what was out there in the darkness..

5.- How did you feel when The Hollows was shortlisted as a finalist for the British Fantasy Awards?
Happily astonished, basically. Really everything about The Hollows was happily astonishing. The publisher had enormous enthusiasm for it, there was a big buzz among reviewers, and it sold far better than anyone expected, especially in the US – it even went to a second printing! So the nomination was really the cherry on top. It ended up on a hell of a good shortlist too – there’d have been no shame in losing to any of the other authors. The one that won in my end, though, was my favourite of the lot – Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home, which I think might be a bona fide classic. Everyone should read that one. (But if they could snag a copy of The Hollows while they’re at it, I won’t complain.)

6.- Your second novel, The Ravening, will be published this September. How would you describe the experience of writing your sophomore novel?
People talk about the ‘difficult second novel,’ but… whew. The thing is that every book is different, and has its own rules – half the job is finding out what they are. I had to keep reminding myself that The Ravening wasn’t The Hollows and wouldn’t work the same way.
It didn’t have the easiest birth. The book starts with the events leading to Jenna’s mother disappearing when she’s fifteen and then jumps forward to when Jenna’s thirty, when the thing that was responsible for her mother’s disappearance comes back into her life. I had to know the answers to a few questions before I could start work – what the thing was, why it had waited so long to come back, and what kind of a person Jenna had become as a result of what had happened. At one point I wrote a number of chapters covering the intervening fifteen years, then deleted them. But they gave me an idea of who Jenna was by the age of thirty, and some of the material was used later in the book.
Even then, I had to go through a lot of edits with Simon Spanton, my editor at Angry Robot, before we were both happy with the end product. As I say, it was a difficult birth. But you learn lessons from the stuff that doesn’t go so well, too. The third book, comparatively speaking, came fairly easily, although I’m still waiting to hear what my editor thinks of that one!

7.- Cults and folklore play an important role in this new novel; why did you decide to include them in your novel?
Folklore fascinates me because it’s often a way of transmitting knowledge down over time, outside official channels. Often as an oral tradition because the people sharing it might well be unable to read and write. (So many folk songs, especially in Ireland and Scotland, are about injustices and cruelty inflicted by the ruling class or a foreign occupier, or both; history’s written by the victors, so ballads and folktales were a way to preserve the knowledge of what really happened)
Whatever was behind the story can be distorted or embellished in the retelling, of course, but it’s fascinating to think about what may be behind some tales. If not something real, then a way to give shape to deep, primal fears. So it’s a very rich seam to mine. M.R. James said that in writing a ghost story, the ghost should behave in a way that was as consistent as possible with folklore. That makes more and more sense to me as I go on, though at the same time if it needs to be different you have to let it…
Cults fascinate me because when people are convinced they’re right, they can do terrible things – their behaviour can be indistinguishable from that of a psychopath. So a cult’s like a microcosm of humanity at its worst: manipulators at the top, and the brainwashed or conned below.
That said, there isn’t a cult in The Ravening in that sense. What we have are a small number of people who’ve discovered something, a secret, and they each want to exploit that secret to get what they want, no matter what the human cost to others. Which touches on the root of all human wickedness, I think. When you reject other people’s humanity – when you see them as evil, or as things to be used, or obstacles to be disposed of – that’s when we’re capable of doing terrible things.

8.- How would you pitch The Ravening as a combination of two horror pieces?
The first piece I’d compare it to would be a 2017 Austrian film called Cold Hell, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky and starring a brilliant actress called Violetta Schurawlow. She plays a cabbie who witnesses a murder and gets chased relentlessly by the killer through Vienna. Luckily for her, she has deep-seated rage issues and is capable of just about whatever it takes to survive. She has a lot in common with Jenna in that sense!
As for the second, I’d suggest the Elm Street films, because there’s a monster that invades her dreams. And it’s even uglier than Freddy Krueger. Although neither of those films have people trying to force the main character to have a baby to further their own dastardly plans – Jenna has to deal with all that as well!

9.- Which horror pieces (any medium) would you recommend to people that enjoyed The Ravening?
Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Cold Hell, definitely. The Ritual – Adam Nevill’s book or David Bruckner’s film adaptation – or indeed anything else by Adam Nevill. Also anything by Hailey Piper. Oh, and These Foolish and Harmful Delights by Cate Gardner – a very underrated collection of novelettes and novellas full of strangeness and weirdly disturbing monsters.

10.- What can we expect from Daniel Church in the future?
I have a third horror novel coming next year. I’ve completed a fourth book, which should be ready to send to my agent in the next few months, and have begun what I’m hoping will be my fifth. Beyond that, my plan is to keep writing books and getting them published until I finally fall off the perch….