Publishing purgatory & The Gallows Pole
Benjamin Myers, Pike nostalgia, submissions limbo + UK Halloween haunts
One of the best novels I’ve read belatedly this year has been The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, the brutal story of the Cragg Vale Coiners in the north of England. It’s a brilliant reminder that historical fiction doesn’t have to lean into polite costume drama, instead it can be raw, dark, and full of folklore.
This week in IF YOU GO AWAY I write about The Gallows Pole, reflect on my own stint in publishing purgatory, revisit Christopher Pike’s teen horror Weekend, and look ahead to the Halloween haunts I’ve got lined up this October.
Publishing purgatory
One of the reasons that I’ve been quiet over the summer has been the brutal reality of trying to land publishers for my fiction. I’ve had a lifetime of pitching to editors and trying to persuade people to work with me on each new project, so none of this comes as a surprise, but familiarity with the process doesn’t make the experience any easier.
It feels like water, struggling to get things over the line, when the reality is that I have a completed novel that I’m happy with and a 6,000-word short that feels like the best thing I’ve ever written. I owe it to those stories to find somebody to publish them, but the process of doing so is cannibalising time that I’d rather spend writing new stories and trying to improve. In past years when I collaborated with artists on comic-books regularly there was always a sense of momentum, of one thing naturally leading to another, but working in isolation on prose is more of a cold start.
If you’ve ever tried to land a literary agent in the UK, you’ll know that a minimum of three months is standard when you’re waiting for replies, but more common is no reply at all. It’s difficult to keep track and realistically know who isn’t interested in your work and who hasn’t worked through their to-do list yet. When you’re pitching directly to publishers the wait can become almost infinite, with no guarantee that you’ll ever get a rejection and sometimes no indication what the wait time might be.
I shot myself in the foot at the beginning of the year with the short story, aiming to publish in one of the UK’s best respected literary journals before looking elsewhere. This resulted in seven months spent waiting for a rejection when I should have sent simultaneous submissions. Schoolboy error.
Trying to find new publishers to work with has been a slow burn so far, despite a couple of promising leads, but I’m keeping the faith. I can always improve as a writer, but I have to believe that I have something unique to offer. Circumstance has led to false starts and dead ends, but in my life I’ve been offered a publishing deal for my terrible first novel (don’t write a novel before you’ve lived), received contracts from IDW for a creator-owned series, been offered a six-issue series by Dark Horse, had self-published work make the cover of Rue Morgue and generate interest from multiple film production companies…
I’m cognisant that a lot of my wins were for projects where I collaborated with phenomenal artists, but those were invariably projects that I initiated, based on my ideas and my scripts, which I pitched to publishers and promoted. Getting over this current hurdle of seeing new prose in print is tough, but I have to believe that it will be worth the effort.
REVIEW – The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers
After reading several well-meaning novels written in the past decade that seemed to lack teeth or worse, prioritise moral condescension over narrative coherency, I’m beginning to feel that Benjamin Myers is a breath of fresh air in today’s publishing landscape. I loved his short story collection, Male Tears (2021) and The Gallows Pole (2017) is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in years.
I would never seek out historical fiction intentionally, but this story of the fate of the Cragg Vale Coiners in northern England at the end of the 1700s captivated me from start to finish. The locations described in the story weren’t exactly on the doorstep of my childhood in north-east England, but they were close enough to all feel familiar, which helped ease me into the world. The novel follows the rise and fall of a community on the moors who worked together to forge new coins using surplus metals clipped from existing currency, undermining the sovereignty of the king and bringing a brief period of prosperity to families more used to subsiding on the dregs of civilised society.
Part of my fascination with the story came from juxtaposing my knowledge of the Regency period and the Romantic movement that took place only a generation or two later with the levels of deprivation endured by these moorland families around 1770. Imagining Jane Austen writing her novels of class and social mobility potentially within the same lifetime as these men whose lives were dictated by laws that they could barely read or comprehend brought the whole sorry affair to life.
Myers knows how to write about the brutal simplicity of lives of poverty, where the conceptual laws of kings collide with the more pragmatic laws of men used to providing for their families by force and cunning. Any poetry in The Gallows Pole arises from the determination of these families to survive their circumstances, juxtaposed against the folly of them striving for more in a country where their fates were determined already by the place of their birth.
The Gallows Pole is a novel where hard-earned knowledge of the natural world meets folklore and superstition, and we watch these mortal characters build their own mythologies, for better and worse. Benjamin Myers tells a forgotten chapter of history, about the downfall of a group whose exploits became a local legend. I loved it.
REVIEW – Weekend by Christopher Pike
Christopher Pike, the 1980s and 1990s king of young adult horror novels in the US and to a lesser extent the UK, was my absolute favourite author from around the ages of 9 or 10 to 13. His stories felt nihilistic, unpredictable and as likely to end in the death of the narrator as they were uncovering the culprit or resolving the incident that triggered a mystery. Out of nostalgia I’ve returned to his books this year, re-reading some old favourites and picking up novels that I’ve either never read or borrowed once or twice from our public library but don’t remember.
Weekend (1986) was I think only Pike’s second or third published novel. I’ve been bouncing around chronologically reading his earlier and later books. In aggregate, I’m seeing the same archetypal characters recurring across different situations, the same limited themes, and uncovering a formula that I wouldn’t have spotted as a ten year old but that’s beginning to sap the joy from re-reading his oeuvre. More often than not the characters are on the cusp of graduating from school or college and waiting to hear whether they’ve been accepted by prestigious universities. There’s usually a wild card transfer student who’s new to the friend group and could turn out to be a villain or an ally. Look out for a minority character from the wrong side of the streets, who may or may not be versed in the use of a switchblade. Bitchy, jealous girls are as often the antagonists as supernatural creatures. Really, the novelty from novel to novel lies in Pike’s research into folklore and myths from other cultures, integrating second-hand concepts like aliens and monsters into middle-class American high school life.
I get the impression that near the beginning of his career, Pike was dissuaded by his editors from being too overtly supernatural, restricting his teen stories to resolvable mysteries with potentially creepy causes. That was the case for Weekend, which brings together a group of teens at an isolated weekend getaway to resolve the question of who poisoned one of the girls at a previous party and why. The characters are pretty much all stock Pike archetypes that he’d go on to improve for series like the Forever Friends trilogy, and most galling was that I was two-thirds of my way into the book before realising that it was a complete Heathers rip-off! I don’t think that Weekend has aged particularly well and the familiarity of the whole setup is putting me off returning to Pike again anytime soon. This is probably the end of my Pike revisitation exercise, life is too short, but you can read my other Christopher Pike reviews here: The Final Friends trilogy, followed by Fall Into Darkness, Whisper of Death, Scavenger Hunt (read but forgot to write a review, message if you want my thoughts), and Spellbound.
REVIEW – Lovett at Theatre Royal Plymouth
I finally caught Lucy Roslyn’s one-woman show I this month, and it’s stayed with me in the way that genuinely unsettling theatre should. The premise repositions Mrs Lovett from Sweeney Todd’s supporting character to centre stage, telling her life before the infamous pie-making partnership.
The play opens in total darkness with the visceral sound of a knife being sharpened. When the lights come up, Roslyn takes her place at the butcher’s block and delivers a powerhouse performance that could have been a straightforward villain’s monologue but becomes something far more disturbing. The tagline asks “Where was God when Mrs Lovett needed him?” and that question sits at the heart of everything. What I got wasn’t the graphic horror I’d expected, but something more insidious, a story about how a callous world shapes people into monsters.
The wicked brilliance of Lovett is its ability to paint Eleanor’s descent into savagery as inevitable, the only rational response to impossible circumstances. Roslyn makes you complicit in that logic, makes you understand it, and that’s what makes it genuinely dark rather than just theatrical. It’s a masterclass in empathy as horror.
You can read my full review at Plymouth Live: Lovett at Theatre Royal Plymouth is ‘a masterclass in dark theatre’
Halloween Season Begins
Today I’m watching Austentatious, the Austen-inspired improv show that’s become one of the biggest draws at Edinburgh Fringe and a hit on BBC Radio 4. The premise is that the actors pick a novel title from the audience and begin telling the tale in Austen-like fashion. I’m expecting romantic romps, elopements, mistaken identities, and drawing room antics. After spending months immersed in The Gallows Pole’s brutal 18th century Yorkshire, returning to Regency comedy would be a shock to the system, if I hadn’t been in Bath recently watching a production of Emma as part of the Jane Austen Festival.
Next week I’ll be attending the launch of Bodmin Jail’s Halloween season. The jail, constructed in 1779, has witnessed enough grief and despair to earn its reputation as one of the UK’s most haunted sites. This October they’re running their Haunted Gallery exhibit exploring famous hauntings, plus Ghost Walks, overnight paranormal investigations, and their Go Darker guided tours.
You’ll be pleased to read that I’m now fully booked for Halloween this year, with arrangements in place to visit Halloween Haunt Fest, Xtreme Scream Park, House of Frankenstein After Dark, FEAR Scream Park at Avon Valley, Alton Towers Scarefest, and Screamfest, with a small chance I might make it to another North West based venue, possibly Farmageddon, which looks brutal. Did you have any idea how many Halloween haunts there are in the vicinity of Manchester and Liverpool?!? How can I even choose?
Halloween Haunt Fest features the UK’s first Texas Chainsaw Massacre themed maze, so I get to live out one of my favourite films, alongside one based on Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, which I guess I need to watch before I visit? Xtreme Scream Park has some of the longest scare mazes in the UK, and I’ve never been to Melton Mowbray before, plus their very Last of Us-esque Spores maze launches this year and I have high hopes. Screamfest, when I visited two years ago, was the most theatrical of all the events I’ve attended, and had a massive outdoor maze the culminated in me running the length of a football field to escape a gang dressed as scarecrows who found me alone.
My life goals still include a trip to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, but travelling the breadth of the UK has given me a newfound appreciation for the work that goes into putting on a good Halloween haunt. Universal Studios might have the IP licenses and big money behind it, but I’m pretty sure you get a different kind of kick being chased through the same derelict jail that once housed one of the UK’s most notorious serial killers.
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Click through to read a short comic that ends in tragedy, based on a true story. Also based on years of teenage alcohol-induced blackouts and bad dreams.
Playlist of the week
Back by unpopular demand, this week’s playlist pulls together alt-rock, post-grunge and punk chaos, including a lot of women screaming, Blood Command’s Quitters Don’t Smoke, Teen Jesus & the Jean Teasers’ Balcony, Pollyanna’s Mars, and Halsey’s Experiment on Me, alongside Marmozets, Dinosaur Pile-Up, and Pinkshift.
I’m on the hunt for an agent at the moment, too. I feel your pain.