Neil Williamson on Meet Your Maker
Summary
Brian and Jeff interview Glasgow-based award-winning writer, editor, and musician Neil Williamson about the relationship between horror and joy..
Neil frames horror as the fun of “relishing the darkness” through traditions like Halloween and campy horror. Williamson recounts his path into writing via lyric-writing in a teenage band and into horror through the UK’s Carry On Screaming, Universal monster films, and authors like Stephen King, James Herbert, and Ramsey Campbell.
They discuss Neil's BSFA-winning anthology Blood and the Bricks, and how he has reworked folk-horror tropes by relocating isolation, insular communities, and mythology into urban settings. This move was influenced by his novella Charlie Says and UK public information films, Cold War fears, and post-Brexit political shifts.
The conversation also touches on contemporary surveillance anxieties, highlights stories such as “Dance Macabre” and “Hagstone,” and ends with Williamson’s recent horror-joy recommendations.
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