Meet Benjamin Unsworth

Every Friday, we meet a member of the BFS and peer deep into their soul (or, at least, a form they filled out). Want to be featured? Email us: online@britishfantasysociety.org

Name: 
Benjamin (Ben) Kurt Unsworth

Which region are you based in? 
Northumbria and the Lake District

If you write, which genre: 
Horror

Are you drawn to any specific SFFH sub-genres?
“Weird” horror, gothic

Your influences

Tell us about the book/film/thing that got you into SFFH: What was it? How old were you? What impact did it have on you?

It’s quite hard to pinpoint one specifically, because Dad (Simon Kurt Unsworth, himself an author) has been feeding me a diet of horror fiction and movies for as long as I can remember. Doctor Who has been my one true love since I was four or five, and I must’ve first read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams not long after then. But I’ve never had the same compulsion to write SF like I have horror.

With horror, a lot of my absolute favourites of the genre even now are ones that I can’t remember not being in my life. Films like The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Night of the Demon (1957), or Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and books like John Wyndham’s Chocky, John Llewellyn Probert’s The Nine Deaths of Dr. Valentine, and Stephen King’s The Shining (for instance) all fall under that category; they’re pieces of work I get just as excited by now as when I first experienced them, perhaps even more so. It’d be remiss of me not mention Darren Shan’s Demonata book series either, a YA horror decalogy which I read far too young and which I enjoyed to the degree that I’m positive it made my mother very concerned for my sanity.

How does that early influence show up for you (in life/writing/agenting/publishing/editing/reading) now?

Ross, one of my go-to beta readers of most things I write, asked me a few years ago whether I love Scream (1996). I replied in the affirmative, but asked him why. His answer was that my stories all had a slightly knowing quality; my characters have watched horror films and so they acknowledge that you don’t go towards a creaking door in a haunted house.

It wasn’t a deliberate influence, but I think it’s certainly true—I get very annoyed at characters or situations that seem isolated from everything. I suppose that’s why I adore The Abominable Dr. Phibes so much—Phibes kills people in the style of the ten plagues of Egypt, and so I think he *must* know he’s off his rocker and almost enjoys playing up to or against the tropes of his madness. So yes, a lot of those horrors I first read or watched very likely set the template for what I consider “tropes”.

Where do you draw your creative inspiration from?

A lot of writers I know work off the principle of writing what frightens them. And that’s more than valid—some of the scariest things I’ve ever read have been written by authors working within in that bracket. M.R. James, Dean Koontz, Robert Shearman, Ramsey Campbell, Eric LaRocca, Mark Morris—to name but a few—have all terrified me with what are evidently their own fears.

For my own writing, I’d much rather take something which doesn’t scare me at all and push myself by twisting it into something wholeheartedly unnerving. The other side of that coin then is figuring out what I can draw out any dissonance from, where a simple thing just gets weirder and weirder the more you think about it. The last story I finished writing, Remedies for Earthenware Teapots, literally just began with me trying to work out the most innocent, least likely thing you’d find in a Black Museum. Teapots were the first thing to come to mind and I (well, the insomniac me who does his best writing at 2am) ran with the concept.

Who do you look to as a genre hero? Why?

Is it tacky to say my dad? I can certainly “blame” him for helping me into this bizarre world of horror fiction and horror films.

Beyond him, if this were that “If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive…” question, Peter Cushing or Vincent Price (pictured in vampire form with vampire muppet) would spring to mind.

Or, to pick authors, Robert Holmes (to me, the Dennis Potter of Doctor Who scriptwriters). In the case of the former, they just feel like the embodiment of verisimilitude and acceptance and if I can be anywhere near as brilliant—as a person, regardless of my craft—as them I can die happy. In the case of Holmes, while I’m not a seventies kid by any stretch of the imagination, Doctor Who between 1963-89 is my go-to era (though I have nothing against the revival era, which I also adore) and his scripts to me aren’t scripts—even when they’re not at their finest, there’s always something about them which is worthy of being called a masterpiece. 

Your Work

You’re stuck in an elevator for 60 seconds with that hero, and they want you to describe your work. Give us the pitch.

Well, I’m not being stuck in a lift with my dad. He’s had to put up with me my entire life, so I’ll give him a minute off and let Robert Holmes suffer this one.

I write weird fiction. I like to make the mundane interesting and to me mood is crucial. I can hand you any number of macabre creations, but the mood is what I keep first and foremost in my mind. My stories should hit you in one way as you read and then, the more you think about them, it should slowly occur to you how messed up or how utterly bizarre they truly are.

What are you working on right now?

With my debut solo collection, Into Wrack and Ruin, is launching on 20 September at Edge-Lit, so I’m very much thinking about what my next project is going to be and I am back to writing and submitting to open submissions calls. I don’t have a bucket list as such, but there are certain publishers I want to be published by, and I know a portmanteau horror collection is something I want to do; I have the “interlinking” bits, I just need to work out what exactly I need the stories to be.

Thinking about all the stories/work you’ve done, what sticks out most in your mind? Why?

Oddly, while I said before I never felt compelled to write SF anywhere near as much as horror, the one bit of SF I’ve written is I think some of my best work. I actually submitted it as part of my A-level English coursework—we had to do an essay on one piece of prose and one of poetry through the lens of some literary criticism (e.g. feminism or psychoanalysis), but for one of the two you could do a “recreative” piece, half your own writing in the style of the author and half a commentary on your own writing. 

Therefore, months before we even had to hand in a rough plan to our teachers, I had already gone to mine and asked whether I could do an excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy focusing on the Babel Fish as an oppressed minority. She laughed, said yes somewhat hesitantly, and then I spent about five months trying to squeeze everything I wanted to write into just 750 words.

I got 24/25, which I’ll happily receive.

Where and when do you create/are you at your most creative?

It’s an utter pain, but my brain seems to work out any plot strands or come up with its most impulsive ideas at 2am. Almost always on the dot! I rarely work at a desk though. Writing isn’t full-time for me—it’s more of an omnipresent and ravenous hobby—though I treat the end result professionally, and so I aim to reserve writing at a desk for my uni essays or anything “official”.

What’s the best advice you’ve received about creativity?

Never delete your stories. I must have about twenty stories which shall never see the light of day and were written by a much younger, more naïve me; however those stories are still good for something. I keep them all in a folder labelled “Frankenstein’s Monsters” because—even if the whole is faulty and not something I’d unleash upon the world—there are often individual parts where I got a character description just the way I wanted it or where I captured a certain mood. Who says they can’t eventually go towards a different experiment deserving of a full-throated cry of “It’s alive!!”?

What’s your writing soundtrack?

It varies. Never anything bombastic, but often a film soundtrack. It has to be something like a Giallo soundtrack (Nora Orlandi’s score for The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) and Bruno Nicolai’s one for The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) spring to mind) or frequently classical music (Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies are go-tos). 

That rule is flexible if the story calls for a certain mood. For one I wrote not long ago I deliberately wanted to feel quite Dennis Wheatley; I ended up playing the James Bernard’s soundtrack to The Devil Rides Out (1968) on a loop for about three hours straight while I got the opening half written. It’s a film I adore, and the score is bombastic, but I was using it more as a vehicle to a mindset than an actual silence-blotter-outer.

The Quick-Fire Round

Sci-fi, fantasy or horror?
Doctor Who is my true love, but horror makes up the majority of whatever else I write and read.

Quiet or loud?
Quiet. Loud noises are the devil incarnate.

Dark or light?
Light. I like to be able to see what I’m doing.

Strict lines or genre blend?
Genre-blend. But know the rules first before you start to bend them.

Awards or bestseller?
To receive/be? I honestly don’t mind. People enjoying my work and me writing what I want to write is by far the most important thing for me. 

Fiction or non-fiction?
Fiction.

Poetry or prose?
Prose.

Plotter or pantser?
Halfway. Have a specific moment or a specific premise in mind, but then see what comes organically.

Reading or listening?
Reading. Although I listen to far too many audio dramas (so, full cast stories as opposed to just readings).

Notebook or computer?
Computer, just for the sake of my writing hand not hurting. 

Favourite SFFH book of all time?
No!! That’s cruelty against voracious readers! I’d feel like I were cheating on all my other books if I couldn’t at least give a top 3 per sub-genre, haha.

Last book you read?
The Burial of the Rats, a Penguin Books collection of some of Bram Stoker’s fiction.

Any SFFH author on auto-buy?
Eric LaRocca is my most recently acquired auto-buy.

Favourite podcast?
As mentioned, I tend to go for audio dramas actually. But I think Scarred For Life is fabulous, not least because I seem to know a handful of the interviewees—I can import my friends into my ears whenever I want!

The Home Stretch

What’s the best thing about being part of the SFFH community?

The people. I remember utterly bricking it on the drive to my first convention (in 2022). I was so worried people would just think I was the “nepo baby”! I was only 17 then as well and I had this dreadful feeling that people would just wonder when my parents would come and collect me. Suffice to say, by the end of the weekend I felt not only like one of the gang, but it was like finding a family I never knew I wanted.

Time to plug your stuff! Where can we find you and your work? What have you got coming up? Consider this your advertising space.

The collection Dad and I co-authored (I can tell you he wrote 4 and I wrote 3, however we deliberately don’t attribute the stories to either one of us), Uneasy Beginnings, is available from Black Shuck Books. 

My debut solo collection, Into Wrack and Ruin, will be out on 20 September from Phantasmagoria Books, an imprint of Phantasmagoria Magazine. We’re launching it at EdgeLit! 

Entirely by accident, I seem to be in a lot of issues of We Belong Dead magazine, which runs articles and reviews on horror films and plumbs the depths of nerdiness; the same is true of Phantasmagoria Magazine, as Trev seems happy to keep letting me either pen him stories or write reviews or write articles, and it’s nice having a continuity of sorts there.

Although I can’t reveal any particular details, one story of mine was also fairly recently accepted by Alex S. Johnson for his Billy Martin (Poppy Z. Brite) tribute anthology and I’ve been invited to submit a story to an editor whose series of books I’ve long admired—watch this space, as they say.

I don’t have a blog, but I am working on that. I’m quite “reserved” on social media also, hence why I only have Instagram (b_k_unsworth) and Facebook (Ben Unsworth); particularly the latter I like to keep to either people I know or people who I’m in some capacity familiar with. But I do check the profiles of whoever sends me a message or friend request, so it isn’t an instant no.

And while I’m frequently taken aback and thrown off-guard, people are more than welcome to find me at events like EdgeLit or FantasyCon and have a chat. Spotting me is fairly easy; I’m invariably the sole person wearing a bow tie, as well as an outrageous waistcoat and/or shirt.