Chris Womersley

And I'm waiting for some, I don't know, inspiration, I guess, even though sort of inspirations for amateurs a little bit.

But at the same time, it's still something needs to kind of strike from a lateral direction that enables you to finish it off, or in my case anyway.

I think my work always has a certain sort of melancholy to it.

I suppose it's sort of a lyrical melancholy, I suppose, would be in the ballpark of what I'm sort of aiming for.

And I'm also a big fan of the idea of the uncanny, you know, or the unheimlich, as Freud would have had it, of this idea of things that are sort of...

I mean, surrealism, I guess, is in the realm of the uncanny, things that are recognisably of our everyday worlds, but then there's just some element about them that's not quite the same.

You know, one of the stories ends with the line, something like, you know, to believe in one fantastic thing was to believe in all of them.

I mean, just to call the stories fantastic is maybe a little bit of a push, but there's certainly a sort of a surreal element and an element of unreliability and ambiguity in a lot of the stories that I enjoy, that sense of the world existing in a way that we can never possibly really understand.

Yeah, I'm happy with the term Gothic.

I mean, I think, you know, I sort of became a Gothic writer apparently with my second novel, Bereft, which is sort of in some ways a ghost story.

And I think the Gothic is about breaking down things that we would historically take as being kind of...

binaries, you know, in the sense of, you know, male, female, day, night, living, dead, dreaming, waking, all those kind of things are kind of broken down in the Gothic.

If you think of classic literature like Frankenstein or Dracula, you know, he's alive, but he's also dead.

You know, Dickens has always been a really big one, I think.

My mum read me Great Expectations when I was sort of 12 or something.

And it's sort of, it really stuck in my head, you know, the whole thing of, you know, and, you know, if anyone's read any of my work, I guess you could sort of see traces in it of Magwitch, the convict in the moors and, you know, confronting Pip and threatening him.

And so that kind of stuff I find really evocative and earthy and sort of visceral.

It really sort of appeals to me.

I read a lot of Poe when I was really young.

I mean, look, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house that had a big bookshelf and my parents never stopped me from reading anything.