Coffinmaker’s Blues: Collected Writings on Terror by Stephen Volk

(Electric Dreamhouse, 2019)

Reviewed by Geoff Ryman

I was sent this book to review by the publishers at the author’s request.

When I was 12, like Stephen King, I graduated from Famous Monsters of Filmland to another newsstand journal, Castle of Frankenstein. The photos may not have been as good, and the text looked like it had been typed not typeset, but it was a satisfying read. Contributors like Lin Carter or Richard Lupoff wrote like horror films and fiction had value.

Coffinmaker’s Blues by Stephen Volk may feel for some like a collection of good blogposts. For me, the collection re-created the sensation of reading my favourite mag—respectful writing about something people disrespect.

Stephen Volk is a veteran writer of horror TV and screenplays. He’s worked with William Friedkin; he was the creative force behind the sensational TV one-off Ghostwatch. This collection of sixty monthly pieces for first The Third Alternative then Black Static begins with articles first published in 2004 and ends with those from 2016. Two more recent postscripts round things off.

Volk has received a lot of unhelpful notes from producers. His exasperation with critical remarks brings a smile. In ‘Do I Know You?’ from May 2012, he skewers the writer workshop axiom that a character must want something or have a goal. As Volk reminds us, most of us AREN’T actively seeking our goals. He goes on:

Another demand is to make characters “likeable” which in my experience is never a useful instruction. In fact, I’d ask the opposite: “What’s wrong with this person?”

This is a book about writing per se as much as it is about horror. Like Stephen King’s On Writing, the book is full of practical advice on how to get the best out of yourself and your work. Some of his best passages give fresh, thought-provoking rules of thumb. What he gets out of seeing Psycho:

The reasons we Horror writers should remember Hitchcock and Psycho is that their power to shock depends on three things: clarity of geography (where people are: the death of Abrogast); narrative context (where the scenes are: the death of Marion), and style.

The piece ‘Bus Moment’ from November 2011 reflects on the ubiquity in horror films of the jump cut—the fake scare that jolts, rattles and so often cheats. Volk regrets jump cuts but knows why he uses them.

The artist Grayson Perry says, “play is often a time when children process difficult emotional situations through metaphorical games”. …And the “scare moment” is part of that game we play—just not the whole thing.

Artists, photographers, anthropologists, biologists—Volk’s range of references go far beyond Lovecraft, Poe, and classic or not-so-classic movies. Harold Pinter gets quoted to devastating effect in ‘Mirrors for Eyes’, a June 2015 wander around affectless monsters such as robots, cyborgs, zombies and psychopaths. It’s occasioned by Volk’s love of Westworld, both the original movie and the TV series. The piece lacks focus until Volk quotes Harold Pinter’s enraged Nobel prize speech, slamming American culture. Volk concludes ‘Hannibal is also, to me—like Westworld—a chilling picture of America.’

A final postscript piece from 2018 ‘The State of Us’ quotes evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse on why biologically, we are programmed to jump first and only then find out the threat was not real.

In other words, our imagination played a huge part in creating an anxiety-based way of thinking. Those humans with better imagination and more anxiety survived….

I found this strangely liberating because it shows we are essentially animals created from terror…

At his best, Volk’s practical, anecdotal approach draws conclusions that have the authority of wide reading and hands-on industry experience.

Not every essay hangs together. Sometimes Volk free-associates around a topic. We might get an anecdote from the industry, an interesting quote from a philosopher, and a nod at a favourite franchise. It’s entertaining, but I didn’t always see a point. These are monthly pieces, written while pitching, re-writing, or tearing your hair out at a producer’s behaviour.

But at his best, Volk argues for the importance of Horror (always with a capital letter) in terms that are used to describe literature.

In ‘Wrong is Good’, from June 2013 he discusses Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle and how it got pulled by the BBC. Potter’s play was difficult and morally ambiguous—plain wrong in the eyes of the BBC programmers.

Wrong is good, dangerous, tricky, and frightening to deal with—but as a Horror writer you have to go there, unfalteringly. Otherwise, what is the point? The Wrong is where we see the Real in our hearts.

Part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much is generational. I know Volk’s references. We probably had similar schooling. Like me, Volk seems to think that Horror is literature or can be. I can’t define literature, but I know it when I see it. Literature takes the high road, the steep climb, aiming high and advancing the craft to do so even when it confounds audiences or offends gatekeepers. From again, ‘The State of Us’.

The horror of living. The meaningless(ness) of life which fiction tries to ameliorate with shape and pattern. But in reality life has no punchline except for death….

The plain fact is, we are, each of us, walking horror stories.

We are the horror, Poe says.

We always will be.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.