Stanley Riiks Interview Part 3

What other writers have influenced you?

The usual suspects: King, Barker, Koontz, Gaiman, J. K. Rowling, no surprises there. But, these guys, for me are surpasses by:

Garth Ennis who writes the best comics, brutal, violent, fun. Preacheris my favourite of his.

Gary McMahon whose Dead Bad Thingsis one of the darkest, nastiest, and filthiest novels I’ve ever read. It’s sublime. I read it years ago, and it’s still one of my favourites.

Andy Remic creates the best fantasy worlds, and inhabits them with amazing characters. And then he kills and tortures them. The blend of horror and fantasy is pure genius. He’s the only writer ever to make me physically wince while reading.

Neal Asher creates worlds I want to visit (Spatterjay), and A.I. I want to meet. SF at its best, complex plotting and great story-telling.

James A. Moore is another fantasy/horror writer who really punches you in the face with his novels. You don’t so much read them as experience them.

The only other author who deserves a special mention is Richard Kadrey and his Sandman Slim books. This series is a serious blast of adrenaline, full-octane, furiousness.

In terms of non-fiction it’s less about the writers and more about the topics, biographies on Ian Fleming, Warren Buffett, Hitler, Jenna Jameson. I read quite a range! I’m interested in how people work, and I like to know how companies and businesses work, like Apple, Amazon, WordPress.

 

What are your other influences?

I love films, I used to go to the cinema every week. I watch everything, romantic comedies, horror films and everything in between. Recently I’ve gotten bored with modern films that are just too long. I find myself bored halfway through a two-and-a-half-hour film, so we’ve started watching classics from the 90s and 2000s, like The Matrix,The Transporter, Leon.

I enjoy manga and anima, and US comic books. Particularly the darker ones like Batman, Preacher, The Sandmanand Vertigo comics.

 

Do you have any rituals or routines when you write?

I used to have a candle that I would burn, but my desk is now filled with mortgage statements and searches, so that would be a fire hazard. I just sit and type on my iMac. For non-fiction I usually need to concentrate more, but I will come back to something and add bits and pieces, expand areas in a very organic way, because I have the structure laid down. For fiction I flow more easily into the story, so it’s organic in a very different way.

 

If you could go back in time to when you started writing and give yourself one piece of advice what would it be?

Keep going. There have been times when I’ve given up, but it’s a very cathartic experience, and creating is a beautiful thing. More people should do it, not necessarily for publishing, but just for the joy of creating something from nothing but their imagination.

Also, I believe that nearly everybody has an area of expertise, and they can share that knowledge.

 

What book are you reading now?

The Soldier by Neal Asher. I’ve read a few of his, the covers are amazing. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s how I pick them usually, and Asher had never let me down.

 

What is your proudest moment as a writer?

Seeing the cover of Think Rich, Get Rich.

 

Are you disappointed with any of your work when you look back on it?

When I edit I’m disappointed by every other word. Editing is actually something I feel quite good at, but it makes me cringe when reading my work back. Like when you record your voice and then listen to it. It doesn’t sound like that in your head. Words can’t capture the perfect of your imagination.

 

What’s next?

I’m editing the first two books in a series of erotic novels for a friend (just a slight change of direction there!). At the moment I’m happy to consume words rather than writing them for a little while longer.

 

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B089SB6KRM

 

Stanley Riiks Interview Part 2

What does rich mean to you?

I think being rich is being financially independent. Not many people are. Financial independence means not being dependent on anyone, not a company for your wages, not your boss for a job. Having your own income outside of work, having a passive income, having time and money, and not having to choose between one or the other. Be able to live the life you want, to me that’s rich.

 

Is this a get rich quick scheme?

It’s not a get rich quick scheme. Nor it is a network marketing scheme, and it’s not an advert for a game or a course. A lot of the financial books I’ve read are just sales tools. I’m not upselling anything, I’ve just sharing hard-won knowledge.

 

Why do you feel now is the right time to launch a book like Think Rich, Get Rich: 5 Steps to Financial Independence?

The likelihood is we are going into one of the worse recessions on record. Now is the best time for people to be gaining knowledge about finance. This isn’t a book for rich people, they already know the secrets to wealth, this is a book for anyone who wants to know some of those secrets and set themselves up to be wealthy.

 

You’ve been writing for a while now. What inspired you to start writing?

I loved reading when I was young. And then I just kind of lost interest for a few years, but as a teenager I rediscovered books when I bought one of the Conan novels on my way home from school. I took it home, read the first chapter, then went straight out and bought a couple more books. It was my first fantasy novel and I was hooked. After that I borrowed my dad’s Stephen King novels and read those, and then SF, and everything else. I joined multiple book clubs, I visited the school and local libraries, and loved being in worlds not my own.

I started writing in my mid-teens, and enjoyed the feeling of being god, being in total and utter control of my characters’ lives and the worlds they lived in.

 

Why the switch to non-fiction after many years of writing fiction?

I started writing fiction, but I also had a diary, so my connection with non-fiction is long. I’ve written book reviews for as long as I can remember, and I don’t restrict myself to any one genre. I just write. Sometimes that’s stories, sometimes those stories are real and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t pick categories to write in, it just depends what I’m interested in at the time.

I’ve been away for a while

It’s been almost a year since my last blog post. (I feel like I’m writing a confession!).

Life has unfortunately gotten in the way of writing. I didn’t write anything at all during the whole of 2019. I posted some reviews, but that’s it.

I also stopped working on the small press that I helped found, Morpheus Tales, to concentrate on my writing, would you believe!

Morpheus Tales is unfortunately on pause at the moment.

But now, during lockdown, I’ve started to write again (it only takes a pandemic!). Not the horror, fantasy or SF I usually write to escape the horrors of the real world, but a book about life. And how to win at it.

It’s called (third title change):

Think Rich, Get Rich: 5 Steps To Financial Independence

Or How The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Poorer

And is now available on Amazon UK and Amazon.com

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS By John Wyndham – Reviewed

In my much younger days I watched the BBC dramatisation of this book. It gave me nightmares. I remember it to this day, many many years later. So I approached this novel with some trepidation.

The original, the book, is somewhat different to my memories of the mini-series though.

I think in my young mind it’s been partially merged with Arthur Dent in his dressing gown, but those deadly plants I remember far too well.

Bill Masen wakes up in hospital to silence. It’s strangely quiet. And while he waits for his blindfold to be removed after his operation he gradually becomes aware that things have changed overnight. The nurses are not at their stations, the hospital and outside are strangely quiet. When he heads out tentatively to investigate, his blindfold still in place, he realises that much of the rest of the hospital is blind too.

As Bill ventures outside he realises that the blindness is not restricted to the hospital, and that soon London will become an apocalyptic wasteland, run by gangs of criminals…

The Triffids, flesh eating man-sized plants that have a whip-like stinger are only part of his apocalyptic world. This is really the story of man’s descent when the world becomes blind overnight.

This is The Walking Dead but with killer plants instead of zombies, and set in 50s Britain.

I’m sure the TV series made more of the killer plants, in the book they are a mere part of the hysteria and menace of post-normal life. The Day of the Triffids is a classic SF apocalypse novel, and the precursor to virtually every post-apocalypse story ever since.

Tragic, quietly brilliant, and disturbing.

URBAN GOTHIC By Brian Keene – Reviewed

Does this book represent horror? Probably not present day horror as the book is now nearly ten years old. It certainly feels of a time, although is that because it feels so familiar? There’s nothing in the book to date it, no trademarks or brands that are now defunct. No historic attitude or clothes. Cellphones, that most telling of recent items, are present.

So what are we looking at here? A haunted house story… Essentially. But one with a twisted sense of realism. The house is only haunted by hideously deformed human beings, cannibals, rabid and misshapen.

A group of teenagers enter the house, having been chased through a bad neighbourhood by a gang of not-so-ruthless “thugs”, little knowing the rumours and stories about it. Then they find themselves trapped inside, the prey of dangerous, mutated cannibals in a desperate struggle to survive.

Keene gives us familiar tropes and twists them, much in the same way Edward Lee does, so keeping a realism that is shocking and nasty, in the same way Ketchum managed with Off Season. The horror here is the brutality of humanity rather than actual monsters.

Back to my original question, does this book represent horror? To a certain extent, yes, it does. There isn’t anything new here. The entire problem with the genre is that it’s stuck with a single and simple premise, the evocation of an emotion: fear. Sure, it’s actually pretty difficult to achieve. And it’s the same things that make us scared, like haunted houses, crazy killers, and this book plays on those stereotypes. The failure of the book, as the failure with most horror novels, and the failure of the genre, is that in order for us to feel fear, to be scared, to be horrified, is that we need to feel.

Keene does a good job, this is by no means a bad horror novel. But it failed to make me feel. SF often does a similar job of not making me feel anything for the main characters, but SF is about ideas. If I’m not emotionally involved in the characters in an SF novel it doesn’t mean the book fails. For me, now, horror fails if I don’t feel. If the main characters are brutally tortured and killed and I don’t care, then they might as well not have been killed and I might as well not have bothered.

I’ve read far too many books in my forty odd years for everything to touch me. I’m jaded. I’m cynical. I don’t care about real people most of the time, why would I care about some words on a page. But that’s what good horror makes me do. It doesn’t have to be a whole novel, sometimes it’s a scene in a fantasy. The torture scene in an Andy Remic fantasy novel had me cringing for several pages, because I cared about the characters. Without that engagement horror is dead.

That is the main reason Stephen King is successful, he draws you into the story, gets you involved with the characters and then he hurts them, and by extension, he hurts you too.

For all his stereotype twisting and all his brutality (which I did enjoy), Keene failed to make me feel anything. This isn’t a bad book by any means, and like the genre itself, I feel I’ve grown out of it a little. Not by choice, I wish I jumped at the scary parts of films, I wish I loved every character I read about, but I don’t. The novelty has worn off.

May be horror is not my genre any more.

SHE WHO WAITS By Daniel Polansky – Reviewed

The third and final book in the Low Town trilogy, a grim-dark fantasy set in the filth pit of Low Town, where our anti-hero, Warden, rules with an iron fist, treading a careful path between the city guard, the larger crime families, the corrupt but powerful Black House and his various enemies.

But Warden knows his cards are marked, there are too many people out to kill him and the whole of Low Town is about to go up in smoke as two crews are about to make war and he’s in the middle of it. So he hatches a plot to escape with his ragtag family. But will he make his escape? Will Low Town implode before he gets on his ship? Will he escape the clutches of his enemies as their numbers continue to grow?

Polansky has created a brilliantly realised world, and inhabited it with a bunch of interesting criminal types. This third book doesn’t really add anything to the world, but brings the story to a close in a satisfying way.

Better to start with the first book in the series, although all of the books are roughly stand-alone stories, they read better as a set and are quick and easy to read.

I’ll be checking out Polansky’s other books soon.

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE By Ian Fleming – Reviewed

Bond is after Blofeld again, and heads to the Alps in his search after procuring some information from a very helpful Corsican gangster, whose daughter falls for our hero. But as Bond enters the strange lair of the master criminal he soon realises that he is as much a prisoner as the rest of the group, and then comes to the conclusion that another master crime is about to be perpetrated.

Can Bond escape the clutches of Blofeld? Can he discover the master criminal’s plans and thwart them? Will he find love and happiness?

Fleming gives us a bit more insight into the character of Bond, who, at the start of the book is fed-up and thinking of quitting the service. His interest in sparked by a girl, and over the course of the book he falls in love. Has the womanising spy finally been tamed?

Fleming is moving with the times, his classic pulp fictions no longer enough for a modern audience, he adds an element of realism to his character. For the modern reader we have the use of biological weapons, a rather too modern reality, to contend with.

Even more than before this Bond book is a modern thriller, seeing plenty of action and car chases, that become the hallmark of the Bond films.

Fleming ramps up the pace of the book towards a shocking climax.

Brilliant Bond at his best.

NEMESIS By James Swallow – Reviewed

A band of assassins is put together, the very best of the best, and sent to kill the arch-traitor Horus. The leader of the rebellion against the almighty emperor…

The first half of the book is taken up with the collection of the varied and talented assassins, giving us an insight into their personalities and how they work. Unfortunately there are a few too many of them and there is little characterisation, apart from their physical bearings, to separate them easily.

The second half of the book quickly ramps up the pace and sees our anti-heroes on a world struggling with the Horus Heresy (the split of the human empire), the governors siding with the rebellious Primarch Horus and the people of the world imperials to the core, fighting their corner despite heavy losses. The assassins decide to help out the imperial guerrillas.

Meanwhile a savage killer is making its way across the universe, heading for its own ultimate goal…
What happens when a band of assassins intent on killing the enemy of the Imperium clash with the universe’s most expert murderer…

And we have the Nemesis of the title.

It takes a little while to get into the book, but the second half more than makes up for it. Brilliantly gory and intelligent – although not necessarily an important part of the Heresy story – it is interesting to see how things progress from the Imperial perspective outside of the Space Marines.

The later parts of the book reminded me slightly of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.

A new view of the Heresy, and some interesting new characters and viewpoints of this pivotal moment in Imperial history. A great jumping on point for this epic series.

HORNS By Joe Hill – Reviewed

When Ig wakes up after a night he can’t remember his lack of memory is the least of his problems: he has developed horns, like a devil, that make people tell him their deepest, darkness thoughts. And as Ig is the town pariah, thought to have murdered his childhood sweetheart, the truths he hears are unkind to say the least…

Hill is a natural storyteller, much like his father, and manages to suck you into the story and his characters. This book reminded me of King’s work, as well as Odd Thomas by Koontz.

It’s the murder mystery that initially draws you in, but the characters are what continue to keep your interest after the mystery is solved.

Involving and entertaining, but lacking a sufficiently explosive climax. The book further cements Hill as one of the best writers of horror in America.

A THOUSAND SONS By Graham McNeill – Reviewed

The Horus Heresy is about to begin. The traitor hasn’t yet shown his true colours.

The Thousand Sons are the most advanced warriors when it comes to using the Great Ocean, what will come to be known as the Warp. Magnus the Red, their fearless one-eyed leader, is desperate to warn the Emperor of the impending chaos that is coming when he learns of it through his powers.

But others are plotting to put a stop to the Thousand Sons and their use of the knowledge of the warp, calling it sorcery.
There will be a judgement on the planet of Nikaea that will have repercussions across the universe.

While it’s always good to see the stories of the people and the warriors of the massively epic Heresy, this is part of it that truly resonates across the galaxy. The Thousand Sons will become chaos-infested monsters in the future of the 40K universe, but here they are fiercely loyal warriors of the Emperor.

Their destiny is to be corrupted and this is the first step towards their destruction.

The judgement at Nikaea is a pivotal moment in the conflict that is yet to come.

This book has all the action and excitement we’ve come to expect from the 40K universe, and the Black Library. But, it also has well crafted characters, a deep back story, true conflict, and, what is normally lacking in SF novels, a heart.

McNeill has managed to create a quietly astounding novel in the Horus Heresy series. Ok, so it appears to have been cut in half and we have to wait for the other book to fully see the destruction of an entire Astartes legion, but this is still brother verses brother in an epic battle for the universe.

Great stuff from McNeill again, the Horus Heresy doesn’t get much better than this.