Skin Flicks
Perhaps the most subversive of my thrillers (and definitely the funniest) it's also the one that keeps getting optioned for a movie (three times now).
When I was planning it, I definitely wanted to try and push the envelope as far as the humour was concerned. I didn't see any reason why a horror novel couldn't be humorous, but the decision made my publishers twitchy.
The starting point was a disastrous photo-shoot I did for The Manchester Evening News short-lived colour magazine. The photographer engaged to capture my essence on celluloid wanted to pose me, looking suitably psychotic, against a blood-spattered backdrop and had purchased a tin of red paint, with which to achieve the effect. It wasn't till he got to the studio that he realised he'd inadvertently picked up a tin of non-drip! As he manfully hurled spoonfuls of red glop at the backdrop, he jokingly remarked that I'd 'probably get a book out of this,' and of course, that was enough to get my thought processes up and running. The scene made it into the book more or less unchanged and the 'fictional' author, Philip Cassiday, has a name that's not a hundred miles away from my own!
OK, so I had a scene and I had a character, a hapless photographer naturally, but I needed a theme. For some reason, I found myself thinking about skin. This lead me to read up on the Aztecs, who were pretty adept at removing the stuff. Would it be possible, I wondered, to incorporate the mythology of The Aztecs into a contemporary setting?
The Damien Hirst school of 'art as outrage' also seemed to be a subject worth commenting on and I started asking myself, how far would somebody be prepared to go down that road? A slaughtered cow, a slaughtered human being. To some minds, there's no difference at all...
Like Speak No Evil before it, the plot is basically Faustian. The photographer, Danny abandons his principals in order to achieve success and in the end, he has a terrible price to pay for his ambition...
The Manchester locations are all recognisable places to anybody who lives in the city and it has been suggested that several of the main characters are based on real people too, but on that point I maintain a diplomatic silence. On a less positive note, just after commissioning this book, my editor Peter Lavery, defected to Pan Macmillan and from this point on, I didn't feel that my publishers were 100% behind me, even though I went on to do three more books for them.
FACT: Just as the book suggests, the clock tower of Manchester Town Hall, really is riddled with dry rot! Go up there at your peril. I know I did.