If you’ve read any good horror anthologies over the last few years, chances are you’ve read some of British author Phil Sloman’s work.  The man’s more prolific than jack-o’ lanterns are at Halloween.  Known predominantly for his short stories (at the moment at least), Sloman has become a veritable master at producing unsettling tales of terror that often deal with a slipping state of sanity.

With an impressive number of tales soon to be published, as well as a few other pieces currently in the pipeline, what better time to catch up with the man behind the words, to find out where he gets his terrifying ideas from, how he approaches his writing, and what his thoughts on the current world of horror.

Possibly one of the most thorough and in-depth interviews to appear on DLS Reviews to date, here’s what the master scribbler of slipping sanity has to say…

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DLS – Following a number of pieces of flash fiction, I understand your first full-length short story was ‘The Banshee’s Egg’ which was included within the ‘Potatoes’ (2014) anthology.  Did you find it tough coming up with the idea for a horror story based around a potato of all things (as the anthology dictated)?  And why did you choose to give your tale a setting stooped in Scottish history (which I must add you absolutely nailed)?

PS – Thanks for saying I nailed the Scottish history part. My wife is from over the border and would lynch me if I’d failed to do so!

Having a potato themed anthology to pitch to was an interesting one. I think I came across it on Facebook when Theresa Derwin was promoting the idea and then I bumped in Allen Ashley at a British Fantasy Society event where we got to talking about it briefly which resolved me to putting something forward. The nice thing about having the theme of a potato is it challenges you as a writer to come up with something for people which works. For the previous year or so I had been entering a weekly online ‘competition’ run by Lily Childs where we had to enter a flash fiction tale of up to 100 words incorporating three words of Lily’s choosing. That was great practice as my mind always runs away with variations on themes and I owe a lot to my writing today to taking part in Lily’s challenge. 

For The Banshee’s Egg it struck me that I should have the potato be something different. Yes, a potato in essence but what if someone were to think there was power to this humble spud. What if it was the egg of a mythical being? From there the story grew and from somewhere I conjured up the Scottish setting and poor old Marnie who was such a lovely person. Perhaps the reason it was set in Scotland is because I knew there needed to be something folkloric about it and where better than the wilds of the Scottish Highlands!

DLS – Following this your short story ‘There Was An Old Man Who Swallowed A Fly’ (aka ‘P is for Pathophobia’) appeared in Dean M Drinkel’s follow-up phobia-inspired anthology ‘Phobophobias’ (2014).  The concept and delivery of the story is nothing short of inspired.  But the thing that stands out the most is the thick splattering of black comedy that coats the entire tale.  Can you tell us a little about writing the short, whether the comedy element came naturally, and how successful you think you were with it?

PS – The story idea itself came from my walking down the road one day and almost swallowing a fly. Write what you know, they say. From there things began ticking over and out came the story of John Hinklow and his misfortunes. And I think this was the start of me finding my voice as a writer. I’d written many failed unconscious pastiches of other writers’ styles before so this was the first one which I would class as my personality on the page. And I guess that’s where the humour comes from, my own wry outlook on the world. And the story needed the humour. Whilst on face value it’s a dark comedic piece, it’s also about isolation from the world, both how we isolate ourselves and how others let us become isolated. John has neighbours in his street but we never see them which is telling in itself. So without that humour it becomes such a bleak piece

 and I think it would suffer for it.

DLS – I must admit, I absolutely loved the short story ‘The Man Who Fed The Foxes’ that was originally published in James Ward Kirk’s ‘Bones III’ (2014) anthology (it’s now been reprinted for the first time in your new ‘Broken On The Inside’ (2018) collection).  The story deals with some heart-wrenchingly downcast themes, such as betrayal, loss, mental and emotional deterioration, and ultimately madness.  However, it’s with the almost palpable bitterness in the story where it’s able to grab you by the throat and keep the suffocating pressure on.  Did you find it difficult conjuring up such powerfully evocative levels of hurt and anger to achieve such a believable amount of pain in order to bludgeon the reader with?  Was this always your intention? I almost daren’t ask if it stems from any personal experience…

DLS – Your short story ‘Herb Law’ which appeared in Dean M. Drinkel’s third Tres Librorum Prohibitorum anthology entitled ‘The Grimorium Verum’ (2015), included aspects which could perhaps be said to edge towards torture

DLS – I understand the next story of yours to be published was the short tale ‘Discomfort Food’ which was included within Stewart Hotson’s ‘Chip Shop Horrors’ (2015) anthology (and later republished in your recent ‘Broken On The Inside’ (2018) collection).  This was a particularly weird and off-the-frigging-wall story involving a disgruntled fast food employee who undergoes a colossal mental breakdown.  In fact it’s like the film ‘Falling Down’ on acid.  Where the hell did you get your ideas and inspiration for this messed-up little treat from?

PS – It all stemmed from the story title (a lot of my story ideas do). If I remember it rightly, Stewart approached me (or it might have been Theresa Derwin) to submit a story for consideration for Chip Shop of Horrors. I spent a good week or so trying to work out what the hell I was going to write when the phrase comfort food hit me. So what happens if your food doesn’t comfort you? Would that be called Discomfort Food? And what would that look like? Already I was starting to think of the food as a living entity so now it had to do something. Something discomforting. So let’s have the food accuse Rebecca of something. Something secret. Something nasty. And why not have them start to sing at her at the same time. And so on, and so on. And that is how Discomfort Food was born or prepared depending on your point of view.

Adding to the story was the easy part as I used to work in a multiplex cinema so a lot of the management stuff, the operational parts, are based loosely on experience. Obviously the more violent and graphic parts of the story came from my imagination rather than any tales from the world of the multiplex!

I do remember reading the opening section at EdgeLit one year and it was this great thing to do as the audience laughed in all the right places and there’s this phrase in the opening about a ‘colonic in reverse’ which received the right level of laughter twinned with squeamish euughs. I did embarrass myself to a degree though by dancing slightly as I sang out the taunt from the food!

DLS – Next came the publication of your short ‘Hive Mind’ in the ‘Teeming Terrors’ (2015) anthology.  This short tale harked back to the glorious days of pulp horror, like a proper ‘old school’ 80s style tale that could easily have come from the likes of ‘Creepshow’ etc.  What inspired you to go for such a style of horror, and are you a fan of such 80s pulp?

PS – A book called Teeming Terrors screams out for some old school pulp! I used to love all the old Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Lost Valley type films growing up as a kid so playing around with bugs in the jungle was something to have fun with. Plus I was also able to sneak a little nod to fellow writer James Everington within the pages which was great. This was another one of those where the story title came to me and then I played around with it. We have a lot of bee boxes and bug houses in the garden so I suppose that is where the term hive mind sprang from. It was also the quickest story I’ve ever written having it started and finished within a three day period to hit the submission window closure. Not something I generally like doing but I obviously did well enough that day.

DLS – The following release from you was your highly-revered novella ‘Becoming David’ (2016).  The tale involved a cannibalistic serial killer who’s seemingly being haunted by one of his recent victims.  The psychological aspect of the story is what I’d call classic ‘Sloman’, however I’d be interested to hear about the challenges you faced with writing a tale that, from the outset, you would usually expect to be laced with graphic depictions of violence, but instead delivers a more reserved story that chills rather than sickens.  Indeed, was this approach a conscious objective for you when writing the tale?  And did you find you had to hold back on naturally veering down more gratuitous avenues?

PS – People often comment on the fact there is less gore than expected - although some scenes you definitely wouldn’t read to your kids – and you’re spot on about it being a conscious decision. For me, Becoming David was always about exp

loring what happens if a bad guy develops a conscience whether that be his own decision or not. Obviously there had to be gore but it’s not something I necessarily like to dwell on and for the more graphic dissection scenes I actually took a lot of detail from cookbooks to make it more matter of fact though that in and of itself makes that scene more unpalatable (Rick Stein is very good if you want to learn how to skin a fish properly). Overall I generally like to leave people to imagine the more extreme aspects of the story than have me describe them as I think this has far more impact than if I lay it all out on the page. Plus there would be only so many times I could talk about a knife plunging, or flesh tearing, and so on.

Therefore the focus for me was on Richard and David, the distinct personalities and how they both changed over time. I think that makes for a more intimate story and hopefully that worked for the reader. In doing that I think I achieved what I wanted, people coming away questioning the essence of what they had read, which aspects were real and which were imagined. I know there have been a few readers coming away pondering the book for days after which I take as a huge compliment. 

But I think the biggest challenge was getting people to give a damn about Richard. He’s an uncaring cannibalistic serial killer but also a person you would readily pass in the street and not know any different. He’s a long way from the cultured, charismatic Hannibal Lecter which I wanted to avoid replicating. So taking this dull accountant with a taste for human flesh and having him drive the story, having people root for him when the police come calling, that was the biggest challenge and from the reaction to the novella - having it nominated for a British Fantasy Society Best Newcomer award – tells me that I must have done something right.

DLS – In your recent short story collection ‘Broken On The Inside’ (2018), two of the tales incorporate emotionally drained principal characters that suffer from blackouts.  Is this an affliction you’ve encountered in the real world, and why did you choose to incorporate such a specific ailment in more than one tale?

PS – It isn’t something I’ve ever personally experienced or know anyone who has so that aspect in the stories was me creating the situation and hoping I’d described it properly. In part it’s probably a slightly lazy way to break up the story, to give a natural scene break so I can move things on. However, it also helps to add to the ambiguity for the character and the reader. Particularly with The Man Who Fed the Foxes, just what did happen in that period after he’s blacked out? Obviously all becomes revealed, or at least hinted at, later on.

DLS –  Your short story ‘And The Desert Cried Tears’ which was included within the ‘This Twisted Earth’ (2016) anthology was a harsh and bitter tale drenched in sorrow that was very aptly set in the Sahara desert.  The story included a mindboggling twist that I guarantee absolutely no one would have seen coming.  Did you plan the story in its entirety from the outset, particularly this colossal twist, or did you just leave the tale to tell itself?  And where did you get your motivation for the story from?

PS – This all comes originally from the brain of my good friend Mr Dion Winton-Polak. The whole This Twisted Earth concept is something he has been playing with for years in his head until he was in a position to get a troupe of authors together to play in his world. The overarching concept is that time has become displaced so you can have Roman gladiators appear in modern day Italy for example. So the time periods merge with each other but the geographical location stays the same rather than those gladiators appearing in the Arctic Circle. It took me a while to get my head around the concept but when I did I realised I needed to create something which created a major juxtaposition. Something, as you say, which would be completely unexpected to find in somewhere like the Sahara. Now the joy is that the Earth has changed so much over the millennia and I’m sure will continue to do so that the plausibility – once you concede these pockets of time shifting – actually works. 

There were two other things which drove the story. One was a plea Dion put out for less Euro/US-centric stories with a lack of diverse characters as well as no more dinosaurs roaming the streets of New York! That got me to thinking about Africa. The second thing was I wanted to tell a sad tale, one of grief but also of love. So there had to be tears and nowhere in the world are tears more precious than in the middle of the desert. So we have the love story of Shola and Ruwa. A little hidden piece in the story is that Ruwa means water in Hausa but also beauty in Arabic which I quite like. From there the backstory all developed and allowed me to merge with that twist you alluded to.

DLS – Your story ‘The Darkness In Our Dreams’ which was included within the ‘The Anatomy Of Monsters’ (2017) anthology told the story of two lifelong friends who come up against the darker side of dreams.  I’d be interested to learn what your inspiration was for the story, and your motivations for taking it to such an utterly bleak conclusion.  It certainly provokes one hell of a gloomy reaction from the reader.

PS – I was approached alongside a group of other writers to put in stories for this new anthology with the concept of telling the birth of famous monsters such as the Wolfman, the Phantom of the Opera and so on and so forth. We were given free rein to pick a monster and so my brain did what it usually does and picked something a little off-piste, picturing the birth of nightmares given they have haunted us for millennia. So that was the concept but where on earth were nightmares given birth? I used to read a lot of Norse mythology as a kid, though this story is not embedded in that mythology, and it seemed the right thing to place the story in the mists of time in a Scandinavian / Germanic type setting in an isolated village in a mountain valley. And to explore things further I needed two close friends to focus on, Stefan and Dieter, and the peril that they are faced with. It was only as I was writing the piece that I realised the beautiful freedom I had in playing with reality given the dream world available and it was then I knew what I needed to do to tie things up. One of the rarer occasions where I wasn’t sure of my ending at the outset. And that ending was traumatic to pull together. Reading it back now for this interview reminds me just how tough it was to write and for obvious reasons to those who have read it. I don’t really do happy endings.

DLS – In your short story ‘Virtually Famous’ (2017) which first appeared within the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ (2017) anthology and was later included within the ‘Broken On The Inside’ (2018) collection, we see a B-List celebrity having a career resurrection thanks to an online virtual reality game that takes a disturbing progression from relatively straight-laced, to downright sick.  Where did you get your ideas for this twisted jaunt, and was the social commentary side of the story something that you felt was an important aspect to its final delivery?

PS – The social commentary aspect was important for me. There’s a lot of my own personal anger and angst bubbling under the surface in Virtually Famous. If you go on social media you’re only a few clicks away from seeing aggressive trolling of people and sadly this sometimes spills into the real world with physical attacks on people. So it was too easy to create a world where people essentially live without inhibitions as nothing seems real behind the anonymity of a screen.

I am also fascinated by the cult of celebrity. This thing where someone famous for pretending to be someone else has millions of people worshipping at their altar, hoping to get a hint of their life. And the world has changed so much in the way we can access the lives of other people that we can only be a few short years away from getting to live a fake life of those society created deities. 

The idea for the story itself was something which turned me inside out for weeks. It’s a bit of a brain twister at times. The initial concept was what if someone played themselves in a computer game and that idea then evolved into the celebrity aspect. After that it was drawing out what would happen if said celebrity couldn’t tell the real world from the fake. Now that sounds vaguely simple when you write it down like that but trying to draw all the aspects together, to weave it seamlessly to make sense, I’m pretty sure I lost track of which way was up and which was down at times and I think different readers will interpret the ending in different ways. I know I do and I wrote the blooming thing! 

I suppose there’s also an almost murder mystery vibe going on too and it’s no surprise to see Chet’s manager described with a resemblance to Hitchcock in the main room where the ‘here and now’ takes place.

DLS – Your short story ‘Gifts’ which appeared in The Sinister Horror Company’s excellent ‘The Blackroom Manuscripts: Volume III’ (2018) had a decidedly 80’s ‘Pet Semetary’ feel to it.  Was this intentional, akin to the Duffer Brothers ‘Stranger Things’?  Or was that just how the story came out?

PS – This is what I love when other people come back with comments on my stories as there’s stuff in them which I’d never really considered. I remember George Illet Anderson writing a review for this and saying about it being folk horror and when I read that I thought ‘You know what, he’s right’ but I’d never consciously written it in those terms. 

Gifts was a story I was looking to find a home for. When the Sinister Horror Company asked me for a story it seemed the perfect place plus the opportunity to help raise a bit of cash for charity. Now I’ll have to put my hand up here and say I haven’t read or watched Pet Semetary but I get the sense of where you’re coming from! In my head the story was about the relationship between the husband and wife and the more supernatural/creature element was a way to drive that to a crunch point. I guess the real inspiration for it is our own cats who come and leave gifts every now and again of a small rodent so the ‘what if’ question came along about something more preternatural doing the same. In my head the creatures look a bit like the monsters in Critters although slightly stretched here and there so I guess that might be where some of the 80s vibe came from. 

DLS – And then we come on to the publication of your collection – ‘Broken On The Inside’ (2018).  It included a brand new short story ‘Broken On The Inside’ which is a bit of a slowburner, with the real horror in the story coming in the very last couple of pages via a pretty brutal twist ending.  In writing short stories of this nature, do you often find that an impactful twist ending like this is almost essential, and when thinking up the idea for such a short, do you often find that you think up the twist ending then work back from there?

PS – That’s exactly the approach I take in general, knowing what the ending is going to be and working it back from there. There were added parts to the ending in Broken, especially the role of the doctor which grew into more than I had originally envisaged, but the essence was right there from the start. I’ve said this elsewhere but I see this, especially with short stories, in the same way a comedian will work out the punchline they’re aiming for and work their joke out from there.

And I always think you need the ending to have something dramatic or shocking about it. I’m not very good at writing happy endings, the ones where everything works out great in the end and everyone lives happily ever after. So I try for the dramatic or the unexpected, something to get the reader thinking after the event. For Becoming David I had the last sentence written before I’d even written the opening paragraph! 

The strange thing in writing this way is that you personally know pretty much how your story is going to end so you have no surprise to give you a tingle. Therefore, there’s always the fear that you haven’t achieved the big reveal or you’ve been too abstract in how you’ve laid out your hand that the reader won’t understand what you’ve tried to do. With Broken on the Inside I was convinced that the twist was really obvious but so far I’ve been proven wrong.

DLS – Recently Grimbold Books have released their ‘Holding On By Our Fingertips’ (2018) anthology which included your short story ‘Dust’.  The tale is an emotionally heavy one with a depressing post-apocalyptic backdrop.  What drew you to write such a heart-wrenching tale set in such a lonely end-of-the-world setting?

PS – The brief was how do people react to the end of the world, that initial point rather than deep into Walking Dead style territory where months or years have gone by. When I was a kid we read and watched Raymond Briggs’ When The Wind Blows as we were in that era when nuclear war was deemed close enough that you needed to teach kids about how to build a fallout shelter and what the blast radius would be if a bomb hit London; I grew up in Sussex and there’s road signs in When The Wind Blows pointing to places local to me then. So that was a big influence on Dust except there was something else I wanted to explore which was the dementia aspect. What happens if someone isn’t fully aware of what’s going on? How does their partner deal with that kind of thing? So Dust is really about the relationship between Lizzie and her unnamed partner and it drained me at times. I always try to put myself into the mind set of my characters and it was far too easy to imagine how things might play out if that were my wife and I in our dotage. And we experienced it to a degree with my grandmother who suffered a stroke. She lived a few years after but there would always be that piece where, in her less aware states, she would sometimes call me by my uncle’s name rather than my own and I’d get that slight clench in my chest.

DLS – Even more recently, Black Shuck Books published your short ‘A Dog Is For Death’ within their ‘In Dog We Trust’ (2018) anthology.  Your offering is a gritty, gut-wrenching story encapsulating the vile brutality of illegal dog fights.  It’s a difficult read, undoubtedly more so for real dog lovers.  Did you find it hard to write about the cruelty that’s so graphically depicted in the tale?  And did you find it quite therapeutic to reap such a rewarding comeuppance within the story?

PS – It was hard to write but I think we need to reflect the dark underbelly of society in what we write. If we can’t do that in horror then where else can we? It’s interesting to hear you describe the cruelty as graphically described because it’s something I tried to hint at more, using the reaction of the crowd rather than detailing the fight itself. It was one of the aspects of the story I spent a lot of time on purely because I wouldn’t want anyone to read it and go ‘wow, dog fighting sounds cool’. It’s not. It’s abhorrent. Getting revenge on Beako, the criminal of the piece, was something I had perhaps a bit too much fun with but it was thoroughly deserved. He was a nasty piece of work who got what was coming to him and then some more.

DLS – I understand you have a couple of short stories that are due to be published shortly.  The first of these is your tale ‘Les Vacances’ which is due to be included within Western Legends Publishing’s ‘Into The Night Eternal’ (2018).  The story reads like a cross between a classic Hammer Horror plot and ‘The Wicker Man’, with a hint of ‘Tombs Of The Blind Dead’ thrown in for good measure.  Were you aiming for this sort of vibe, and what was the inspiration behind this decidedly creepy tale.

PS – That’s exactly the vibe I was aiming for and I’m glad it came across as such. The story came about because Dean M Drinkel, the editor for the anthology, asked me to write him a French folk horror story. My first instinct was that I didn’t know how to write folk horror let alone French folk horror. I had a stab at a different story set in France in World War II where a couple of German soldiers are lost in a forest but it simply wouldn’t click for me. And then the penny dropped, I needed to write a Hammeresque story set somewhere in France. I love Hammer films so pulling together the plot was reasonably simple after that. I was then able to weave a lot of my childhood into the story. We grew up on the south coast of England so family holidays often took us to France. One year we went on holiday to the countryside in the south of France and stayed at a gite. I’d have been somewhere in my early teens. There wasn’t a monastery there but a lot of the imagery, both from France and England, come from my own childhood and also experiences later in life.

It was then a case of looking at the fractured nature of Frank and Elizabeth’s relationship as a couple married for twenty plus years and how the interaction with the locals brought out the real them. Plus it was great fun to sketch some witchcraft and superstition into the story as I don’t often get to work in that part of the genre – hopefully I’ve done it justice!

Into The Night Eternal has now come out for Kindle and the paperback should be available any time soon.

DLS – I believe you also have a story entitled ‘The Girl With Three Eyes’ which is due to included within ‘The Alchemy Press Book Of Horrors’ (2018) anthology later on in the year.  The short tale explores the sensitive and sadly topical subject of gun crime in modern day schools, with what I would call a textbook ‘Phil Sloman’ edge to it.  Were you nervous about including such a sensitive subject matter in a horror story, and did the ‘Third Eye’ aspect of the tale stem from anywhere or anything in particular?

PS – I was so excited to get an acceptance for this! Alchemy Press had around 400 submissions and to get picked, especially alongside so many legends of the genre, was a great honour.

I wasn’t nervous about writing about gun crime in schools but I’m hoping I got it right. It’s easy for me as a writer to put the words down on the page but there are others out there who have sadly lived it for real. So I guess my approach was to write the story and weave the gun violence into the narrative without glamorising it. The ‘third eye’ aspect came to me because I needed something to represent the paranoia of the protagonist. The concept then built from there, becoming something greater. I guess you could build it up to represent some kind of depiction of how we’re always being watched so maybe I that was something too on a subconscious level.

The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors launches on 20 October at FantasyCon in Chester and there’ll be a whole host of the authors there to do signings.

DLS – Aside from these couple of soon to be published short stories, have you anything else in the pipeline which you can tell us about?  What are you working on at the moment and have you any thoughts for future projects?

PS – I recently was involved with a charity anthology called Under The Weather through Burdizzo Books and Back Road Books who published it jointly to raise money for Resources for Autism. My story was called Richard of Cork and involves leprechauns and a young man seeking revenge for the death of his father. The book is out now and available on Amazon.

I’m currently working on a novella called Stanley Sebastian Solomon which is about a bloke paroled into a halfway house and the other inhabitants. It’s an angry story so I drop in and out of writing it as it can be claustrophobic at times plus I’m writing it for me so, with no real deadline, it’s taken far longer than it should. But then I look back at all the stuff I have out this year and realise perhaps why I’ve not got it completed yet! 

I’ve also got a chapter to write in a shark themed book but that won’t be for a while as the other writers need to do their thing first. And after that it’s on to getting into the world of writing novels and I’ve a couple of idea fighting to get out on to the page so they should be fun!

DLS – Finally, in these interviews I like to ask people’s top five all time novels.  Do you fancy giving us yours?

PS – Crap, just five! Ok, here goes: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. That’s my answer today but it could easily be different if you asked me next week. 

Thanks a lot for having me here, Chris. It’s been great fun chatting with you.

DLS - Many thanks for taking the time out to answer all of those questions Phil, and for providing such a wonderful insight into your work, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you over at DLS Reviews.

© DLS Reviews

You can see in-depth reviews of Phil Sloman’s work here:

• Phobophobias (2014)
• Becoming David (2016)
• The Blackroom Manuscripts: Volume III (2018)
• Broken On The Inside (2018)
• The Woods (2019)