INTRODUCTION
I first met Stephen Gregory around 1990, having discovered his work via an enthusiastic endorsement of his second novel The Woodwitch from Ramsey Campbell, who described the book as ‘a powerful novel of psychological terror and a thorough reinvention of the Gothic landscape.’
After gleefully devouring both The Woodwitch (and finding Ramsey’s quote to be entirely accurate) and Stephen’s equally wonderful first novel The Cormorant, I duly contacted John Gilbert, editor of Fear Magazine, and asked him whether he would be interested in an interview with/article on Stephen and his work. John said he would, whereupon I immediately set myself the task of tracking the elusive author down.
Perhaps I’m being melodramatic by describing Stephen as elusive, though what you have to remember is that this was in the days before Facebook and Twitter, even before email. I can’t, therefore, now remember exactly how I tracked Stephen to the isolated cottage in the Welsh countryside where (just like his protagonist in The Woodwitch) he was then living with only his dog for company, though I suspect it was through a combination of letters and phone calls, firstly with Stephen’s publisher and latterly with Stephen himself.
I had hoped to use that long-ago interview – recorded on a Dictaphone, hand-transcribed, re-edited into a concise article and then painstakingly typed up on a manual typewriter – as the basis for this introduction, but looking back through the entire 34-issue run of Fear I made a disappointing and long-forgotten discovery: it was never published. I know John had intended to use it, but I know too that Fear was abruptly cut off in its prime when its parent company, Newsfield Publications, unexpectedly went belly-up, and so I can only conclude that the crash happened before my interview with Stephen, of which no copy exists that I’m aware of, managed to see print.
My account of that first meeting will, I’m afraid, have to therefore rely entirely on my own admittedly vague memories. What I recall is that I disembarked at a tiny train station somewhere in Wales, to find that Stephen, a kind, gentle, softly spoken man, was waiting for me. He drove me to his cottage, made a pot of tea (and possibly even some sandwiches) and we spent a very congenial afternoon chatting about books and writing. Indeed, it was so congenial that Stephen and I subsequently became friends, to the extent that my wife Nel and I even used to pay occasional weekend visits to Stephen and his other half Christine in Caernarvon, before the two of them upped sticks and moved to Brunei, where Stephen has now been living and teaching for the past fifteen years or so.
Speaking to Stephen over cups of tea in his little cottage on that drizzly afternoon twenty-five years ago, what struck me was how pleased but baffled he was that his work had been so enthusiastically embraced by the horror genre. Despite the ghost story elements in The Cormorant, coupled with the strong suggestion that the titular bird is, to all intents and purposes, a malign and destructive spirit, and despite the protagonist Andrew Pinkney’s macabre preoccupation with death and decay in The Woodwitch, Stephen was of the opinion that he didn’t write horror. It wasn’t a snobbish attitude on his part; it wasn’t that he was contemptuous of the genre in any way; it was simply that he knew very little about it. He confessed to me that he hadn’t read much horror, and therefore had no more than a passing knowledge of its history, its conventions, its trends. I recall his concern when he showed me a copy of a Dean R. Koontz novel, which his then-editor had sent him, accompanied by the suggestion that his next book should be aimed more overtly at the commercial horror market. At the time Stephen was working on a third novel called The Brittlestar, which – largely because it wasn’t the commercial horror blockbuster his editor had been hoping for – would subsequently be rejected by his publisher Sceptre.
All of which leads me neatly to the book you now hold in your hands.
As those of you who have leafed through The Blood of Angels, or possibly even read it, before turning to this introduction will know, Brittlestar is the title of the second of the novel’s four parts. The gestation of The Blood of Angels is an interesting one. As I recall, it started out as three separate short novels, each of which featured a male protagonist at a different stage of his life. The first, Toadstone (whether this was the original title or not, I don’t know), featured a naïve and somewhat socially awkward young man in his early to mid-twenties; the second, The Brittlestar, featured a man in his thirties, whose lonely life on a permanently-moored boat is disrupted by the arrival of his younger sister; and the third, Star-Splitter/Ammonite, took as its main character an even lonelier man in his fifties, embittered by life, who doggedly refuses to leave his home despite the fact that he has been driven upstairs by the rising tides, which surge into the downstairs rooms of his house at night, bringing with them all manner of strange and unwelcome aquatic visitors.
Unable to sell any of these novels (a fact which both astonishes and enrages me even now – how could publishers turn down such great work?), Stephen contacted me in 1993 or thereabouts to ask whether I thought my then-publisher Judy Piatkus might be interested in taking a look at them. I paved the way by sending Judy a letter waxing lyrical about Stephen’s work, and was duly delighted when I discovered that Judy had liked all three books enough to make Stephen an offer.
Now this is where it gets interesting.
I’m not sure at what stage it was suggested, or by whom, that the separate protagonists of the three novels shared enough common characteristics that they might well be seen as the same character at different stages of his life, but ultimately the decision was made to amalgamate all three narratives into a novel recounting significant episodes in the varied and tempestuous life of a single man, the extraordinary Harry Clewe.
As a result of this decision The Blood of Angels was born, and subsequently became – and remains – a novel that is far more than the sum of its parts. Like life itself, it is complex and contradictory. It is, on the one hand, a richly-textured, heart-achingly poignant and poetic portrait of a sensitive, lonely, unhappy man who has been dealt a cruel hand by life, and on the other it is a rough, blustering, wind-swept story about a filthy, monstrous – indeed murderous! – individual, whose every relationship ends in unmitigated disaster.
As in all of Stephen’s work, the natural world – of which Harry Clewe himself is an integral part – plays an important role in the book. Nature in all its many and varied forms is here portrayed as an elemental force, and birds in particular are seen (as in The Cormorant) as malign, destructive spirits or harbingers of doom. Fire, water, rock and earth feature heavily in the first third of the narrative, as does – most prominently – the natterjack toad, which is regarded by an already unraveling Harry as a talisman, a charm that brings him good fortune, whereas the sea and its moods dominate the final two-thirds. Indeed, the sea can almost be seen as a separate character – or more accurately, perhaps, as Harry’s alter ego. Swirling and crashing and foaming, it often mirrors his turbulent, unpredictable emotions, a state of affairs that is invariably a precursor to violence and tragedy.
What else can I say about The Blood of Angels? Perhaps most pertinently that it is both a beautifully-written book with a compelling narrative, and a lusty storm of a story that will sweep you up from its first page and take you on a breathless, emotionally exhausting but ultimately invigorating journey.
If this is your first encounter with Stephen Gregory’s fiction, then please don’t make it your last. After reading this book, do yourself a favour and check out his others: The Cormorant, The Woodwitch, The Perils and Dangers of This Night, The Waking That Kills and Wakening the Crow. In my opinion he is, quite simply, one of the best and most underrated novelists in the world.
Buy his work. Read it. Cherish it.
Mark Morris
2015