G.P. Ritchie
I grew up in Glasgow and was educated there, getting a degree in Computer Science and Microprocessor Systems. Since graduation I’ve spent small pockets of time working in Manchester, Dublin, and Utrecht, but mainly I’ve been in Edinburgh. I’ve always worked in the technology sector, usually in software development.
My wife and teenage son have kept me basically social, saving me from the after-midnight life of the full-on tech geek. Despite my career background, my fascination with what makes people tick has often left me wondering whether I’m actually a frustrated psychologist. My solution has been to enjoy a rewarding career in technology, while exploring the psychological darkness of dangerous imaginary characters. It turns out these sorts of people are so much safer to meet on the page!
WEBSITE LINKS
https://amazon.com/author/gpritchie
https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/the-angels-gate
https://readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway/the-angels-gate
Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?
I’ve had a life-long fascination with the weird, wherever I’ve found it. When I was young, I borrowed a compendium of a magazine called Man, Myth and Magic from an uncle, which was a publication describing itself as an “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural”. My brother and I then went on to collect every issue of a similar, later magazine called The Unexplained. What attracted me to that kind of material was the way it seemed to overlay the reality known to science with something deeper and stranger, and I guess I’ve been prone to viewing the world that way ever since.
Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life?
I’d pickThe Butcher from The Angel’s Gate or Maxim Vorsky from One Night Only. One is supernatural, the other not, so they are different kinds of dangerous, but either one is a very bad encounter after midnight.
Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?
Growing up, my local library allowed me to immerse myself in all kinds of speculative fiction – horror, fantasy and science-fiction. But alongside that, I spent a lot of time with folklore, legends and supposedly real-life experiences of the weird. I was fascinated by the sheer amount of testimony around things that shouldn’t be able to happen, and yet throughout history, were continually reported. Believer or skeptic, it’s a curious thing, the paranormal. It is so obviously a beast that will not die that it must be an intrinsic part of us.
The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations. What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?
Horror is a very broad category, so I can only talk from a personal perspective. I’m not a big fan of grisly torture and bloodletting for its own sake. I prefer horror fiction to contain some element of the supernatural, allowing us to serve up the misery with a slice of transcendence.
A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years?
Cinema and literature are very responsive – we’ve already seen waves of creativity in horror about politics and mindless consumerism, and I wouldn’t be surprised if climate concerns feature more prominently, moving across from disaster movies to the genre of full-on fear.
I also wonder if we’ll see some tackling of our tendency towards tribalism. Division is very exploitable from a marketing perspective: if you want to sell a product or a message in our world you start by identifying your target demographic, then draw a thick line around them. That process of emphasizing difference to create belonging and otherness seems to have become turbocharged by social media, and it’s everywhere.
Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it?
Because horror often speaks to the greatest fears and deepest mysteries of human existence, making the genre capable of posing questions we’ve never stopped trying to answer, and probably never will.
What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre?
One simple definition I like for horror is “bad things happening to people you care about”. Some parts of the genre display a tendency to focus on the novelty or grotesqueness of those bad things, but fail at creating the empathy we need in order to care about the characters those things happen to.
What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off?
I have this habit of avoiding horror and crime fiction if I’m writing in that genre at the time. And since that’s my genre and I’m a slow writer, my definition of new turns out to be not very new at all. This essentially means that by the time I get around to authors, the world has long-since taken notice. As an embarrassing example, I discovered both Joe Hill and Adam Nevill more recently than I should have. It’s better late than never, I guess…
Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you?
Obviously, it’s great when someone likes what you do, but that doesn’t quite deliver visceral gut punch of stumbling upon something properly venomous. So, after a giddy run of positive reviews on my first novel, One Night Only, I received an almost shell-shocked condemnation from someone offended by the dark horror elements. This happened despite the description and cover making it clear this supernatural crime novel was anything but cosy.
I console myself that this kind of experience is inevitable when multiple human beings read what you write – we’re a subjective species with highly individual preferences!
What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?
Hands down, the marketing of the finished work. Some of us are not wired that way, and it’s a big, joyless learning curve.
Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?
I like to think of my fiction as grounded the world we know – so even the weirdest stuff needs to be integrated somehow with real people, real situations and real consequences. Given that, the best I can do is state that there are some subjects I won’t write about lightly. When you are working in a dark genre like crime or horror it is difficult to definitively say never. Many characters in these genres move far beyond the bounds of social acceptability, so they might take the writer and the reader somewhere uncomfortable as a result.
Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?
I think I’ve become less infatuated with the wide-eyed shock of the strange that interested me in earlier in life, and more concerned with how to translate that feeling into some kind of meaning for myself, and hopefully, the reader.
The child in me still sees being an author as an almost unattainable, near mystical career choice. My original target was to have written a novel by age thirty, and what with work and family I missed that one by nearly two decades. At my age, the advantage is you feel less compelled to find ways to please some notion of a market in order to make a career – which is an increasingly tough gig anyway. Instead I can focus on writing things that I care about.
What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?
There’s lots of it, valuable at different times and contexts.
For instance, I’d always admired Stephen King’s idea of losing ten percent to get to the second draft, and asking yourself which words are really paying their keep. But recently, a beta reader for The Angel’s Gate pointed out a problem that I could only solve by extending a specific story, so nothing is true all the time.
Which of your characters is your favourite?
Hard to pick one, but I have a soft spot for Elisia Petrakis, my cyber-specialist police detective. She hasn’t had her own stage yet, but I see it happening.
Which of your books best represents you?
That’s my last book The Angel’s Gate and other Mysteries. The mix of stories is a weird manifestation of my main preoccupations and influences. But inevitably, whatever a person writes has them in it. I can find scenes from my own life in One Night Only, albeit distorted in a grimmer direction, so, it’s simply the case that One Night Only represents a smaller subset of me than The Angel’s Gate does.
Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
I don’t know if I have a favourite, but here’s a couple people have commented on.
This passage occurs near the start of a female character’s story from my latest, The Angel’s Gate:
Dropping into the back of his van was a fall down the face of a mountain. Sleep roared in the frigid waters below, a hungry beast beneath an ice-cliff. She flailed desperately, but found no purchase, only a terrifying plummet into unconsciousness.
And this line was uttered by a villain in my first book One Night Only:
Evil is a fully resilient system: there’s a little bit in all of us.
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?
The Angel’s Gate is out now – it’s a collection of stories in the horror/suspense genre. The stories are varied, taking in crime, folklore, possession, hauntings, even a western. But they are all about crucial points in the lives of the characters involved. As a sample for people unsure about committing I took one standalone novella from that book – Swole – and made it available separately at low cost.
As for coming next, I have two ideas on the go. One is for a series of novels that involve the cyber-specialist character I mentioned earlier. The second is a shorter story, and it ties in with your next question on clichés, oddly enough. I’ll race those two against each other and see what happens, but I imagine the novella might beat the trilogy…
If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?
Genies don’t go back into bottles, and not everyone wants them to, so erasure is too big of an ask. But off the top of my head, I’d happily see less of the traditional exorcism thing. Blatty and Friedkin produced such a great movie that it grew too influential, and we’ve suffered derivative material done far less well ever since.
I’m also, psychologically speaking, uncomfortable with the whole narrative that underpins traditional religious exorcism. That story usually includes: that a human being is now reduced to a pawn in a cosmic battle, that they are somehow complicit in their affliction, and that any resolution will require extreme struggle and even violence. It is no surprise that we’ve recorded many cases of harm in the real world when that narrative has been enacted.
What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?
If we are going to throw around the word “great”, then I’ll give the accolade to Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which I’ve always returned to, even as I get older. It was a book that expanded my childhood mind in odd directions, including Jungian psychology, anthropology and the dangers of raising the dead (who knew?) On the adult side, Irecently re-read Fevre Dream by George RR Martin, and it remains a great blend of the historical and the horrific.
As for disappointment, even good books will disappoint someone, so just because it wasn’t for me, I’m unsure about singling something out in public… HOWEVER, and only since you forced my hand, I’ll mention that famous death and resurrection horror Finnigan’s Wake by James Joyce. I barely made it through two pages of that thing, and I won’t pick it up again without the promise of an at-least degree-level qualification.
What’s the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer?
I’d like to be asked “Where do you get your ideas from?” This, apparently, is the one question real writers are always asked, so it will be a bit of a watershed moment to encounter it in the wild.
My answer would be that my ideas arise in all sorts of ways, from visiting unusual places, to snippets of overheard conversation and obviously from reading anything and everything. But for me, those individual ideas tend to sit around gathering dust on the flat pack shelving of my mind until eventually some fresh thought hits the shelf beside a stale one. That’s when I might discover a combination worth running with…
Swole: A Gym Rat’s Tale by G.P. Ritchie
Tony Minetti believes in self-improvement, and takes jobs to support a gym habit designed to get his body into shape. He hates when other guys make more gains than he does, and the last straw arrives in the form of his scrawny friend Steve, now sculpted like an action figure.
When Steve credits his bodybuilder physique to a compound from an unknown company on the dark web, a compound available to anyone prepared to pay the price, Tony has a choice to make. The whole thing might be a bogus sales pitch, or it just might be Tony’s best way to finally get swole. And being swole is something Tony wants, whatever the cost.
Swole is a standalone novella taken from The Angel’s Gate And Other Mysteries, also available now.
