Fantasist Paul Meloy, winner of the British Fantasy Society award for best short story in 2005 (for “Black Static,” which is included in his collection Islington Crocodiles, reviewed here, crafts stories that fuse realism with nightmares, tragedy with glass-etching humor. Here, he shares his thoughts on inspiration, criticism, dreams, and much more.

Your short story, “Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow,” has been unfavorably compared to Shaun of the Dead. I think it’s a reviewer’s crutch to fall back on comparisons to pop culture icons (”Just like Annie, but with zombies!”), but I’m wondering how you feel about mixed reviews. Are you the kind of author who feels there’s no such thing as bad press, or have you shattered a few computer monitors?

Any comparison to Shaun of the Dead is okay by me. I’ve been lucky on the whole. A lot of my stories have been reviewed or commented on very positively. I’ve had a few pastings but on the whole it’s been a good experience. One reviewer did say about “Islington Crocodiles” (the story) that he didn’t have a clue what it was about as he stopped reading halfway through. Bit like A. A. Gill saying, don’t ask me what the food tasted like because I threw the fork down halfway between the plate and my mouth. All that shows is a reviewer’s inability to do his job—whether self-appointed or commissioned—properly. It’s pretty funny. Someone else read “Jean Harlow” and finished by saying they went away wanting to find a bucket of dirty water to stick their head in. It was a scathing but penetrating review and I enjoyed it immensely. Then you get compared to William Burroughs or Martin Amis and it’s all okay again! Kathy Sedia included the first chapter of an unwritten novella in her anthology Paper Cities [reviewed in The Fix]; it was a courageous thing for her to do primarily because the city in the story doesn’t appear until much later in the book and was only hinted at towards the end of the chapter she included. It was also a very cartoony, frenetic introduction to a much longer story and as it turned out some people loved it and some people wished me dead. It’s pretty horrible to have your baby called a window-licker when its entire potential remains concealed, but then it introduced me to great lads like Benedict Jones and Steve Pirie amongst others who said really nice things about it. You can’t win them all.

According to your Facebook page, you’re a psychiatric nurse. How did you come to that profession? A superficial reading of your stories (especially the psych. ward flashbacks in “Islington Crocodiles”) suggests your work informs your writing. Do you agree with that, or are you drawing these characters from some deeper personal repository?

Like most psychiatric nurses I kind of drifted into it as an alternative to doing anything else. I had a vague idea I wanted to work with people and had an interest in how the mind works and its pathology so it seemed like the right option. I worked for three years on an Adolescent Unit in Cambridge post qualifying. Ray Cade and Steve Iden from Islington Crocodiles are composites of kids I worked with although I never met anyone quite as menacing as Ray. Plenty of Steve’s though. I’m also interested in the process of psychotherapy, particularly Jung’s approach. I think an understanding of the Unconscious, its processes, dreams, and symbols are, if not essential, certainly very useful for someone writing fantasy.

The mythology that runs through your collection, Islington Crocodiles, is consistent throughout the stories. Did your universe spring to mind fully formed one day, or did it evolve over the course of writing several stories? Also, do you remember the genesis of this mythology—did it come from a dream, a patient’s delusion, what?

It became evident that there was a coherence running through the stories with recurrent symbols, resonances, and motifs. Characters seemed to want to reappear and re-engage and it wasn’t long before I realised that there was an epic story struggling to be written. It takes me ages to write anything, so other stories I have in mind are in pieces, half-written or just floating around as ideas or titles but trust me, there’s a beginning, middle, and end to it all. A lot of my ideas and characters come to me in dreams fully formed. I wrote “The Vague” by trying not to think about the story too much and letting my unconscious drive it. I had no idea what was going to happen to Adam and Robin scene by scene. When it was finished I went back through it and wrote down all the major symbols: cutlery, werewolves, wheelchairs, glass, bells, etc., and referred them back to some dream analysis. All the symbols were consistent and relevant to the subject matter of the story. Combinations of words and neologisms are common in my dreams. Firmament Surgeons, Quay-Endula, and Toyceivers are examples. There are characters in stories not yet written that emerged in a series of nightmares. They’re proper bastards.

Do you subscribe to the hypothesis that “everything in the dream is the dreamer,” or do you believe there’s something more metaphysical to dreams?

I don’t believe dreams are there just to do us a favour. As if the unconscious is some benign sorting office. There’s no reason to believe that the unconscious isn’t as polluted and pathological as our conscious mind. I think you have to apply a bit of discernment with dreams. Sometimes it’s easy to recognise a symbol and interpret it, or attribute aspects to your anima or animus, or your sexuality. Sometimes it’s a bit of wish fulfilment, a bit of fantasy or frustrated desire being played out. Sometimes dreams are plagued by a sense of nostalgia or longing that remains in your psyche and dogs you all the next day. And maybe there’s a receiving apparatus for visions built in there, too.

Your writing has been called “edgy” by Graham Joyce and others. Great advertisement for your work, but I’m wondering if it’s more curse than blessing. Does being called “edgy” make it more difficult to write in a non-derivative way—does it make you self-conscious?

To be honest I look back at most of my stuff and wonder how it got on the page. Because I’ve had some really fabulous feedback from some great people, readers and reviewers alike, it’s certainly made me concentrate more on what I write and how I use the words. When someone decides to read something they’re really giving you permission to talk to them uninterrupted for hours at a time. You owe them something a little bit above a pedestrian drone.

Your writing has also been called cinematic, and not always as a compliment. Do you create your stories with some sort of internal storyboard in mind? Have you ever tried writing a screenplay?

I’d never write a screenplay. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I picture the scenes and characters very clearly and enjoy writing expansive, descriptive sentences. The writer who influenced me most when I was younger was Harlan Ellison. He could write something as small and delicate as a French pastry then drive over you in a tank just as you were dabbing the sugar from your lips. He showed me you could write controlled, intense prose or let it all out in a flamboyant and indelicate romp. He also challenged conventions and form and insisted writers broke moulds and tried to write in new and innovative ways. The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World is probably the book that made me sit up and go: yeah! Yeah, I want to do this!

Tell us about the first story you ever wrote.

It was a quest novel and I was about eleven. It kept me happy one summer holiday. I wrote another novel when I was in my early 20s. It was pretentious and not very good at all, although it was a repository for some of the ideas I’m still using now that I wasn’t able to use effectively back then. It was called The Flyblown Man. In a completely different incarnation, he comes into a story I’m writing at the moment called “Dogs with Their Eyes Shut.” It’s going to be a novella along the lines of “Jean Harlow” further developing the Quay-Endula mythology.

Is there a novel in the works?

I don’t know if I’m hardwired to write a novel. If I do it’ll come very suddenly and I’ll go, what the fuck happened there? I think the closest I’ll come will be to finish all the Quay-Endula stories and hope they tie up in a coherent way. I like the idea of a story told in different styles with overlapping characters and timeframes, something you can dip into anywhere and get a sense of being immersed in a world that’s organic and vivid and alive.

Who are the folks you admire in the horror/fantasy/spec fiction world? Any lesser known authors who deserve a shout-out?

There’s a cohort of fans, artists, and writers in the field at the moment that are very mutually supportive and generous. It’s a great thing to be a part of. It’s a real family. Tim Lebbon is probably one of the hardest working and enthusiastic writers I know. No one cares more about the genre and his fellow writers than Tim. Andy Humphrey writes beautiful, moving, clear prose. Charlie Williams has written my favourite series of books about Royston Blake and deserves to be read by everyone. Dave Mathew puts more clever phrases in his stories than anyone else I know. There’s Gary McMahon, Mark Samuels, Tony Richards, Conrad Williams…it’s a long list of elegant and intelligent writers who use language with love and are contributing a fine body of work to the genre.