I was first introduced to Christopher Fowler’s books over twenty-five years ago, via the horror section of my local library. Roofworld was my first: a tale of secret communities on the rooftops of London, invisible from the ground, their inhabitants moving from building to building on a series of zip lines. To a country-dweller such as I, it was so intensely visual that even now, whenever I’m in London, I find myself looking at rooftops more often than at the city streets.
After that I looked for more novels by the same author. I soon realized that his work was not easy to categorize. Few of his books sit comfortably in the horror section. Red Bride is a classic femme fatale tale, Spanky a hip retelling of Faust. Psychoville is a suburban Natural Born Killers; Soho Black is at the same time a zombie fable and a barbed satire on the film industry. Plastic is a version of Bridget Jones’s Diary reimagined by Quentin Tarantino; Calabash is both an extended metaphor of adolescent alienation and a portal to Narnia, with subterranean echoes of Gormenghast.
Fowler’s masterly short fiction reflects an even broader spectrum of influences. Film and literary references abound, as do references to popular culture, comics and the media. As we see in his memoir, Paperboy, much of his work reveals an enduring love of literature and the cinema, as well as a keen sense of humour, an eye for period detail and a boundless enthusiasm for anecdotes, eclectic facts, strange occurrences, unsolved mysteries, bizarre customs, macabre crimes, and tales of the unexpected.
London looms large in the landscape, of course: a London of many faces, reflecting the many faces of the human psyche. Victorian London rubs shoulders with the nightclubs and cafés of Soho; the homeless and the marginalized watch passers-by from the alleyways. Wealth and misery, pleasure and fear, horror and farce co-exist in close proximity to each other, divided by the finest of membranes. In Fowler’s London, the worlds of film noir and Ealing comedy are never very far apart, and even in the most ordinary of settings – a launderette, a shopping mall, a neat little suburban house – everyday horrors are lurking, awaiting their chance to slip out from the shadows.
In Fowler’s world, reality and fantasy are always dangerously close. Executives make secret pacts with demons, lonely adolescents plot to blow up their neighbourhoods, and prim suburban housewives are subject to creeping neurological meltdowns that culminate in orgies of violence among the cupcakes and tea-towels. In Fowler’s world, the illusion of sanity is a pair of net curtains that conceals an ominous reality. No one is ever completely safe; no one is entirely stable. Everyday things can suddenly take a turn for the sinister, and all it takes is a tiny twist – a chance meeting, a thoughtless mistake – for a life to be thrown out of balance and for the darkness to emerge.
All this is combined with an unfailing eye for detail, a dry and satirical sense of humour, an insight into human nature that seems close to uncanny, and is delivered with a style and panache that sometimes seem almost effortless – but don’t be fooled. It takes real skill to sound this good, and the lightness of the author’s touch conceals an underlying narrative of alienation, of urban unrest, of social satire, of psychological unease, and of the darkness that hides in plain sight, along the façades of the mundane.
Perhaps this deceptive lightness of touch is why the author, in spite of having won countless genre awards, has never received the mainstream literary acclaim he so deserves. Perhaps it is the mercurial quality of his writing that has kept him from settling comfortably into a niche. Perhaps it is the sheer scope and variety of his output that continue to defy categorization. Now more internationally known for his Bryant & May detective series – the seemingly nostalgic exploits of a pair of elderly sleuths, filled with disquieting details and dark, subversive humour – he continues to alarm and entertain his readers, while also creating some of the most accomplished and intricate set-pieces in the whole of the mystery genre.
I’m delighted to see that the author’s earlier novels (and indeed his entire short-story oeuvre) are now being made available in ebook. They are still as fresh and topical as they were when they first appeared – and it’s interesting to note that, though originally written as speculative fiction, many of them now seem uncomfortably prescient in the light of current events. If you are already familiar with the work of Christopher Fowler, then you’re probably already celebrating this re-release of his backlist. If not, I almost envy you: you have something wonderful in store. But be warned, once you have entered Fowler’s world, you may never look at your own in quite the same way again . . .
Joanne Harris, December 2015