AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Bill Davidson on the joy of horror and new Dundee thriller King of Crows.

Bookish for as long as he can recall, Bill Davidson, 65, “can’t remember a time when I didn’t go to bed with a book”. The Dundee man, who recently moved back to the city after 20 years in Dorset, says he read everything from “Biggles to Billy Bunter”. But his own novels are a far cry from those tales of derring-do and it was Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot that truly kickstarted his love of horror. “It scared the pants off me,” he admits.

Now, he has left his former career in local government to focus on his passion for writing. But his time with Dundee’s Environmental Health Department has proved invaluable as inspiration for his new book.

“I got a call from a shop on the ground floor of an old mill to report that their floor had collapsed into a deep hole,” he says. “This wasn’t just a hole, it was The Scouringburn down there, an underground river, complete with the bones of a rotten boat. It’s still there, running in darkness. What a fantastic, spooky setting.

“Years later, I heard my amazingly talented sisterin-law, Fiona, telling old Celtic legends. Put those two things together and you’ve got the start of something.”

Bill describes his writing style as more of a pantser than a plotter. “Plotters develop their plotlines and characters in great detail before writing a word of the actual story. Pantsers get an idea and just start writing, going by the seat of their pants,” he explains. “I’m not an out-and-out pantser, but I’m no plotter. I need to get the bones of the story down and then I just go for it. If it starts to veer off course, or my characters begin to have ideas of their own, I just let that happen. In my view, that’s where the good stuff is.”

Bill has been surprised by the reaction that some people have to the news that he writes horror stories saying that they can react, “As if it’s something to be ashamed about. Horror might be the least-respected genre of literature, but whether you consider yourself a fan or not, most fiction contains some element of

horror. In Harry Potter, did you get a chill from the dementors? In Lord of the Rings, it’s hard to avoid the fact that it’s real, properly scary horror. Just think of the ring-wraiths,” he points out.

For Bill: “Good horror fiction should be a shivery delight, a ghost train ride that you can be sure will soon end, so you can step blinking into the sunlight once again.

“At its best it’s almost as if you can tap into that feeling of being a child again, and give yourself to a delicious dose of fear. Not fear of war, of inability to pay the gas bill but of ghosties and ghoulies and things that, no matter how well written, can’t crawl out of the pages of the book to truly harm us.”

The author, who has also published a collection of short stories, New Gods, Old Monsters, and his debut novel, The Orangerie, has delighted in delving into Dundee’s underworld for Kind of Crows: “Dundee is an absolutely fantastic setting for a Gothic tale,” he enthuses. “It carries its history with it, with massive old mills of mud-coloured stone and, of course, its very own, largely forgotten, underground river.”

Bill hasn’t finished exploring the dark side of life just yet. He describes his next novel The Living Must Die as, “a very different take on the Zombie trope”.

Bill Davidson says Dundee is a fantastic setting for a Gothic tale.