Jack Buxton: Nightmare Realms and Loveless Strangers
With the recent release of Jack Buxton’s Love Amongst Strangers novella, The Other Side as an e-book, we thought it prudent to catch up with the South London writer for a bit of Q&A regarding his new and future work.
Blackfriars Bestiary: So first off: sell us The Other Side. What’s the book about, and how did it come about?
Jack Buxton: Right, The Other Side is an adventure/horror story that jumps from A to C, visits B before moving on to D. Confused? Me too.
Okay, so The Other Side is a book interwoven by three storylines that eventually all join into one by the last chapter. The main narrative is about the journey of Ayesha Swanson, a young confident magician who wakes up in a desolate world where literally everything is out to harvest her soul for reasons yet unknown.
The second is about a girl that finds herself trapped within a lovely dream that eventually turns sour, and the third is about Ayesha’s best friend, Aimi, who wakes up imprisoned in a dungeon under the River Thames.
Doesn’t make sense? Give it a read to see what I mean!
BF: Were there any real differences in the original Psychopomp serial you worked on and the final novel?
JB: Yeah, you know there were five short stories featured in Psychopomp spread out over each issue, each story was written to be as independent as possible to stand as a single feature, although the overall plan was to make it a serial, to link them together, so I introduced small cliff-hangers. The story line with the girl trapped in a dream, however, is totally original to the book and doesn’t feature in Psychopomp.
BF: The Other Side is your first published novel, right? But I’m assuming it’s not the first book you’ve written, so I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about how you started writing and what your influences are?
JB: As a youngster I was always interested in creating stories, be it with toys at first or whatever, but eventually I started to draw and make my own little (and very crappy) comic strips – I remember making a Sonic the Hedgehog one specifically. When I started to write and finish complete stories was probably when I moved to Cyprus in 2011, where I started to write my first novel, an undead western, The Righteous and the Undead. If you have ever been to Cyprus, you’ll notice that there are places that look like desert land and it hugely inspired the Wild West theme – oh, and that many of the elderly Greek people reminded me of the undead, too.
BF: Are there any books by other authors you wish you’d written first?
JB: Yeah loads! But to narrow it down to one that I think as an influence to so many stories, even if it’s not directly intended, is Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Think about it, it includes horror, studies human behaviour in crowds, loneliness, psyche, disillusions, teamwork and throws in the odd bit of humour.
BF: And conversely, are there any books by other authors that you’re really glad you didn’t write?
JB: Well to add a twist to this question, I’d say IT and the Dark Tower series by Stephen King – if I had an ounce of the power to create and write such genius, I wouldn’t enjoy them myself. I fucking love those books!
BF: The Other Side is quite a psychedelic book at times, is this the result of your natural mind-set or were other factors involved in shaping the story?
JB: Reading back, there are quite some psychedelic parts, and I wish I could say I was on acid, but I wasn’t. I usually go through phases listening to certain types of music – at the time, and if I remember correctly, I was listening to a lot of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, amongst others that I subtly hinted at throughout the story.
BF: A lot of the book takes place in the mystical realm of Datura, what was your thinking when it came to removing the characters from their more recognisable settings?
JB: Well, when planning the story, I wanted to create something in the Love Amongst Strangers universe that hasn’t really been done before, and the Dagobah system from Star Wars automatically appealed to me as a setting wise for some reason. I wanted dark, dangerous and mysterious, but still a liveable place for its inhabitants. Datura is a world where fiction remains fiction within a galaxy humans haven’t and never will find. At the end of the book, you question if Datura was even there in the first place.
BF: You also took away Ayesha’s magic. Was there a specific reasoning for this?
JB: Yeah, I think taking away the main character’s powers gives the story an extra depth, focusing more on her struggles to survive mentally in the place she has found herself, rather than surviving physically by using her magic. Take someone out of his or her comfort zone and watch what happens.
BF: Which of the characters was the most fun for you to write and which would you like to return to?
JB: Mister Mo was pretty cool to write. He’s annoying at times, but delivers the right sense of humour to add comic relief to the bad that’s happening elsewhere. Aside from Mo, Vin was a good character to be for a while too; in my mind, he sounded like a English version of Kelsey Grammer and had a Dr. No kind of look. He’s the bad guy, but if you look at it from his point of view, he is only trying to survive, same as Ayesha is. There is also mention of a King, the Aether King – his name appears in a lot of what I have written.
BF: And lastly, would you like to tell us about your future projects – what can we expect from Jack Buxton next?
JB: Well, like I mentioned before, I have The Righteous and the Undead, which I would like to return to one day and revise it for a fifth time. Aside from that, I am in the middle of developing a nine part, noir mini-series, and planning a second full novel as well as creating the odd short story or poem here and there.
You may say them somewhere, who knows? So until then, if then exists, ta ta.