FROM SNOWSTORMS TO DYSTOPIA
Well, it’s finally happened. I can hardly believe it. My debut novel, The Waiting Rooms, will be published next July.
Woohoo! It still feels a little unreal. As if I’ve just been notified that I’ve won the lottery: I’m not sure if it’s some kind of phishing scam or joke. Like most new writers, the journey to publication has not been straightforward. But it has trained me well in the art of resilience.
You could say I’ve come full circle. As a child I loved writing stories and boy, did I write a lot. I remember one about a rather fierce talking dog from another planet. Even back then, I favoured the dystopian. My mother would tidy up the pages I’d left scattered around the house and post a few off to unsuspecting relatives, softening the blow with a painting or two. The rest mysteriously disappeared.
My viewing habits as an early teen cultivated my love for the darker genres. Unbeknownst to my parents, every Friday I’d sneak into my sister’s bedroom to watch the Hammer House of Horror late-night double bill. These black-and-white classics were barely visible on the portable TV’s twelve inch display, compounded by the aerial, which looked like a circular coat hanger and was about as effective. You had to twiddle with it constantly to dispel the snowstorm fuzzing up the screen.
Another weekly ritual was Anglia TV’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. My sister and I were hooked from the opening titles: flashes of tarot cards and roulette wheels with an alluring Bond-like silhouette of a woman dancing in flames to music from a fairground carousel. That’s when I realised the difference between those early horror films and these stories. Horror films frightened me. Tales of the Unexpected terrified me. With horror, I had a mental fire exit: such things could never happen. There was no such escape from Roald Dahl. He planted his stories firmly in the familiar, lulling you into a false sense of security before delivering his macabre twists. No need for blood or gore. Those tales haunted me.
Author Eve Smith with her faithful writing companion, Lola.
So, a few decades later, when I took to the page once more, it was those kinds of stories I wanted to write: the ones that stay with you long after you finish them. Mine may feel a touch more dystopian than Tales of the Unexpected, but, these days, you don’t have to wander far to find nightmarish worlds very close to our own. Like the excellent series Black Mirror, my alternative realities deal in the familiar, the all-too possible. As Margaret Atwood said of her prophetic fiction, I truly hope they never happen. But I do hope the discomfort and dilemmas they foment survive long after the tweets and the headlines have faded. Because that is the power of storytelling.