All Hail His Grace: The King of Irish Gothic Horror
Last Friday, I sat down with A.M. Shine at Tigh Neachtain, a jewel of a pub in the heart of Galway City. Al arrived in a leather jacket, a brown one this time, and we managed to find a small booth tucked away in the back. After ordering a drink, he jumped straight into the craic before I could blink, and I couldn’t help but marvel at how perfectly he reflected the ‘nonchalant, full-time author look.’
But can one expect anything different from a man who has managed to infiltrate the holy halls of Hollywood? Yet despite the success of his first novel, The Watchers, A.M. Shine is as humble as they come, and an absolute joy to talk to.
We quickly moved into general questions about his writing before discussing his latest novel, Grace.
I began the interview by asking:
AK: What does your writing process look like?
AMS: I'm full time writing now thankfully; that was the dream in life. Unfortunately, that does come with its own kind of issues because there’s a lot of staring into space, just trying to come up with ideas for writing.
When I was writing The Watchers, I worked a retail job at a shoe shop, so I was writing every weekend. But I found that this actually gave me time to think about the ideas, and if you write yourself into a corner, you can just go to work for a week and think about it.
Now, I try to give myself a word count for the week or for the month. It's not about the hours you spend writing; it’s more about the word count and the quality. I’m not one of these writers who sits down and flies through a first draft, I can’t just write 90,000 words in the first seven or eight months and say, ‘I’ll go back and fix that’. I can’t leave a chapter if I'm not happy with it. It just really annoys me, so usually every morning when I sit down to write, I'll read what I've already written, and then I'll start making changes, so everything is edited as I go on.
AK: Do you prefer being a full-time writer, or do you miss your previous way of working sometimes?
AMS: No, I hated it (laughing). I did a Master's in history, and then I moved to Italy for seven or eight months, just to practice writing, see if I could. I wrote a novella of fifty-five thousand words. It was an awful, weird horror fantasy; I had no style.
At that time, I had only the very basic fundamentals of writing. Living in Italy was fun, drinking wine and writing all the time, but what it produced was terrible. Then I came back to Ireland and started doing a lot of gothic short stories, in the same vein as Poe and Lovecraft. So, I just started practicing.
AK: Do you have any other creative outlets?
AMS: Classical guitar. I used to play more. I’ve forgotten most of the songs now, but I can still play. I wanted to be a musician before I wanted to be a writer.
AK: When did you seriously begin writing?
AMS: I didn’t start writing until I was twenty-seven. I used to write a bit, but I never actually sat down to write stories until I finished university. Doing history and writing so many essays, which were written like science papers, there was no room for adverbs or adjectives; it’s really strict. At the time, I was reading a lot of Victorian Horror novellas, and I just loved the richness of the language. That’s why I moved to Italy, because I wanted to write something like that, just play with words for a while. But yeah, I was a late bloomer.
AK: What is your favourite part about writing?
AMS: My favourite part of the entire process is editing; I love editing. I know some writers love having a blank page because they like the idea of the freedom you have, just to play with that, but I think the hard work is getting everything down, getting the form and structure. With a blank page, your characters are still strangers. It’s only when you start editing that the personality comes through.
AK: Least favourite part?
AMS: I don’t hate anything about writing, really. Maybe starting something new after just finishing off. When Grace came out, for example, every single sentence had been scrutinized by the editor and me, and the book was exactly as I wanted it to be. Then you go and start a new book, and everything is shit again, like you sit down and write the first few pages, and you can’t keep the standard from the book you just finished. You have to live with the fact that everything has to be shit again for a while.
AK: That was my next question: are you working on something new at the moment?
AMS: Yes, I am working on two different novel ideas, just floating those around, and also the third Watchers book. I can’t reveal too much, as I might change the plots, but I will say that I have been messing around with a dual timeline in one of them.
At this point in the conversation, I decided to switch to questions related to his most recent novel, Grace.
For our readers unfamiliar with the novel, below is a brief synopsis:
‘Off the west coast of Ireland lies a lonely island, isolated and wilfully forgotten. Some say there hasn't been a child born on the island for thirty years. Others speak of strange deaths there, decades ago. But no one really knows what happened. Locals believe that the dark times are behind them.
They are mistaken.
Grace, adopted at four years old, has never known where she came from. A mysterious phone call leads her back to the island where she was born – and where a terrible evil has been disturbed.
As the evil starts to spread, Grace finds herself dragged back into a living nightmare that threatens to engulf anyone who steps into its path.’
AK: I loved that in Grace, the protagonist is immediately making a journey. There is no delay; the reader is just thrown right into the story. Could you talk a bit about this?
AMS: My novels usually begin with the first chapter in the present, but have bits of flashback in between. Like in Grace, the character is going somewhere, and I’m getting the journey done and revealing why she’s going there.
Horror is all about building suspense, so it’s important to have a good handle on how it all plays out. That’s why the books I’ve written now, apart from The Watchers, they all play out over a few days. I prefer this because I find it more immediate and allows me to find the beats to make the story as interesting and creepy as I can.
AK: I am a huge Game of Thrones fan, so I really enjoyed the multiple POV’s in Grace.
AMS: Thank you. At the end of the novel, when they are all going towards the hilltop, I thought, how else am I going to get them there? It’s a great chance to give everyone the spotlight, without giving them too much time.
AK: This is a personal opinion, but I believe you did a remarkable job giving the reader the ability to differentiate between a large cast of characters, without over-explaining or info-dumping.
AMS: There were actually more descriptions about all of them in the original first chapters in the pub, but my editor and I decided to cut them out because it was a cool chapter, and it read better once I removed the filler explanation.
For example, you can have a lot of characters, and you might get tied up describing them, but if you have just enough description to put them in the reader’s head, that will probably carry them through.
AK: Now that we are on the topic of ‘kill your darlings’, is it hard for you to go through a page like that, find it so well written, and then have to cut some parts of it?
AMS: No, I don’t mind because I put the words on the side—I have so many documents of extracts from different books in which the writing is good. I’ll use it again if I have a character in a similar situation. There is a reason there are so many twists in Grace: I had all these parts of maybe four or five different novels that I had begun and scrapped, but something was always missing, so I just reassembled them.
Shine’s novels take place in a multitude of different Irish settings. However, the setting for Grace is unique in its utter isolation from modern civilization. I felt inclined to ask more about this as the island is its own dark character, looming like fog over the town’s inhabitants.
AK: The setting of Grace really added to the novel. What inspired this?
AMS: The island I went to, and from which the book is based, would be Inishbofin. It’s where the locals go, and it’s amazing. Unlike Inis Mór, it's self-sufficient, so the islanders don't need to commute to the mainland as much. The waves, the rocks, the sound of it. Just a weird, wild island. In all the books I have written, isolating your characters is so important. You need a reason to keep them away from the comfort and safety they would otherwise turn to. This proved to be the perfect setting.
I actually already had a scene about going to the island from a different book, as well as quite a few other scenes that I reassembled for the beginning of Grace. After the pub scene was added, I thought, ‘well, that’s fifteen-twenty thousand words,’ and then we just picked it up from there and went with it.
AK: So, you had that much already written?
AMS: Pretty much. I had to change a lot of it to make it work and make it fresh. It was funny because the names stay, and in every single version of the books that I abandoned, there was always a Valentine. I love that name.
AK: I really like the name Valentine, as well. Quite fitting for an antagonist.
AMS: Yes, I picked the name because of Menlo Castle—I'm actually from Menlo—It’s a castle down by the river Corrib. It was owned by the Blakes, and Valentine Blake was the last owner. He was going to the dentist in Dublin in 1910, and while he was away, the castle burned down, and his daughter died.
AK: You’re obviously very knowledgeable about history. Is that a big influence on your work?
AMS: Oh yes, definitely. I tend to use a lot of Irish folklore and superstition in my stories, but everything is changed and reimagined, because I think—especially in Ireland— anyone would know all the stories so well.
I use the Bodach in Grace. Folklore says he’s like a bogeyman, but in my novel, he is many things. So, he aligns well with the lore, but remains his own thing.
AK: How long did it take to write Grace?
AMS: As I mentioned before, I had some of the work done already, but usually a novel takes me about a year to write, sometimes a bit less. If you think about it in terms of months, that’s less than ten thousand words a month, two and a half thousand words a week. Now, if you can do that and keep it really tight when you get to the end, you’re grand.
I had read Grace before sitting down with Al, and found the novel kept me consistently on my toes. Each chapter is a tour de force of eerie horror in its own right, and the twists come before one can even process the last.
Naturally, I felt inclined to ask about the thought process that went into making the book read like a thriller.
AK: I really enjoyed how many twists there are in Grace. Did you have them planned out or did they come later on in the process?
AMS: A few of them I had planned. One of the twists in Grace, I had always wanted to incorporate. I do have a list of all the twists you can do in literature. So I wrote them down because you can’t just keep doing the same twists over and over again in your books. But at this point, I am running out of twists to use.
AK: From the success of The Watchers, which was your first book, and now with Grace, has your approach changed? Are you doing anything differently?
AMS: I think it doesn’t get any easier the more novels you write, because you have to work out what you have already done, and you can’t do anything twice. I love the locations used in all my books, and it was important to make it as creepy as possible. So, in The Watchers, we did the woodlands, in The Creeper, an Irish village. In Stay in the Light, we had a bit of underground horror in the Burren, and then we had the island. So, I’m kind of running out of places to have these creepy Irish happenings. Likewise with the twists as well, and the characters. I would say the process hasn’t changed too much; it just gets difficult because you’ve already done so much.
AK: Which of your novels is your favourite?
AMS: I would probably say The Creeper. It’s my girlfriend’s favourite, my mom’s favourite, my dad’s favourite.
When The Watchers had just come out, I had already written the first draft of The Creeper. I had a year between the deadline, so I put months and months into making every single thing descriptive and creepy, so even the simplest paragraph is dark (laughing).
People pick on The Creeper, especially the ending, but I always say it’s my favourite. The main character, Ben French, is doing a Master’s in history and working in a shoe shop. He is unlike me in personality, but his life circumstances are exactly the same as mine. However, I do love Grace as well because of the twists and the characters.
A.M. Shine is the author of multiple novels, including The Watchers, The Creeper, Stay in the Light, and Grace. His first novel, The Watchers, was adapted into a major motion picture, available to stream on NOW, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
To read more about his work: https://www.amshinewriter.com/
Follow him: https://www.instagram.com/nocturn_al_shine/
https://www.facebook.com/amshinewriter/
Author Photo Taken by Izabella Krasa
