Sarah Pinborough ('Feeding Ground', 'The Hidden')

Interview by Alan Kelly

Sarah Pinborough is primarily a horror writer with forays into science-fiction, thrillers, media tie-ins and more personal tales of magic realism and mortality. To date she has written six paperback originals for Leisure books, a novella for PS Publishing and a series of short stories for numerous anthologies. The content of her work is as it comes, sick, funny and nastier than a sack full of burning ferrets on a bonfire. I was greatly impressed by her stab at the creature feature subgenre with Feeding Ground – set in the same universe as Breeding Ground (On my own TBR list) – women suddenly become grotesquely obese and give birth to ravenous giant spider, and a Kingpin discovers a way to control some of them, with crack cocaine...

Pinborough weaves (pun somewhere) a story brimming with smarts. She writes men wonderfully, builds up the tension just right and even the most sympathetic characters are never safe (something I always appreciate.) I plan on spending this Christmas – which I always feel is not unlike spending a day crawling out of a mangled car wreck (I need some uplifting tales to get through it) - getting lost in her novels. So, to anyone who hasn’t read Sarah Pinborough, please do and if you don’t I just pray the squealers eat you slowly. She is a writer to savour.

Sarah Pinborough spent a large chunk of her early twenties being chased down streets by weirdoes waving thorny vines over their heads – so it wasn’t until her late twenties that she thought it best to do a 'Jane Austen' and lock herself in her attic, along with her cat Mr. Fing and get down to some serious writing. The daughter of a now retired diplomat, much of her early years was spent rummaging around the Middle East, in her late childhood she was sent off to an all-girls boarding school, an experience she admits still provides her with a lot of horrifying material. During her formative years, the old women at the Church or "the bitch-whore of a housemistress" dragged the rebellious, spirited girl to mass every Sunday, pinching her cheeks and cooing over her. Behaviour that the young girl couldn’t quite fathom, what with being in a girl’s school and lacking the necessary frames of references to fully comprehend their meaning (No boys.) While the other girls where stick thin, had perfect clothes and hair and boyfriends, Pinborough was climbing out her bedroom window, consuming the daily calorific intake of an entire American Southern State, starting revolutions, and having great fun.

When did you decided to write and how long you’ve been doing it?

I think that like most people who end up doing this full time I started messing around and writing stories from as soon as I could write. Life got busy in my early twenties but then when I hit around 29 or 30 I decided to have a go at writing a novel (The Hidden) and since then I've been writing constantly.

You’ve said The Language of Dying is your most personal story to date. Would I be correct in assuming this has been a labour of love for you or is bringing parts of yourself into a book difficult?

It was in many ways a labour of love I suppose, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. I think when we go through traumatic or upsetting experiences our brain is very good at making us almost forget them so we can just crack on with things. I wanted to get some of those experiences down on paper so that even when I had forgotten them, I could remind myself. Some experiences are too important and teach us too much to become too vague. It is a work of fiction though; I've just based it around some of the events of my life. It was a dark book to write and I remember when I finished thinking, 'Thank God that's done - time to write an ordinary fun horror novel and relax.'

As a child you travelled all sorts of places followed by a long stretch in a boarding school. How have these experiences informed your writing, if at all?

I have used my travels in short stories. The Bohemian of The Arbat (Summer Chills) was set in Communist Moscow in the 80s, which is when my parents were posted there, and more recently, Our Man in the Sudan, (Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20) was set in the Sudan (obviously!) back in the days before the internet etc, which is also when I lived there.

I think any travel informs writers because it gives you a different set of images, smells and cultures to store away in the mind bank for future projects. Boarding school forces you to spend huge amounts of time with lots of different types of people so I think subconsciously I may have built a character bank there (Sorry girls and boys!)

What can you tell me about the collaborative MUSE project which you’re a part of with Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Langan?

It's actually, now, Alex, Sarah, Rhodi Hawk and I. It's a pretty kickass project but we're not talking about it. The difficulty we have is that we're all so ridiculously busy with our own projects that its hard finding time to get it sorted. We're three-quarters done though and it's not what a reader would necessarily expect from us, but I hope it goes down well - if and when it eventually comes out.

You’ve wrote media tie-ins for Torchwood – a novel called Into the Silence. Have you anymore Torchwood books planned and how does this differ from your personal work?

I also wrote a short story for them for the Consequences book but at the moment there are no plans for any more. It was interesting to write for someone else's characters and world, and I found I enjoyed it far more than I thought. Plus, they're shorter than writing one of my own novels so it was a quicker write and a more linear story. I'm glad I had the experience.

Can you tell me a bit about your working day? Do you write full-time?

Yes, this is my second year of full-time writing. Normally I get up about eight and like to be writing by half-past. It's pretty much, up, cup of tea, check emails and then work. I do a couple of hours and then do forty minutes or so on the cross-trainer before having a shower. At about two I settle down for the afternoon session which is either more writing or planning what comes next! I like writing in the morning's best. I recently quit Twitter because it was causing too much morning distraction and slowing me down. Obviously, not all days are as organised as I'd like them to be and you know how it is, life gets in the way of work a lot!

What films, books, and music motivate you while writing?

None really! I don't have music on when I write (I'm too easily distracted) and writing slows my reading down, especially now that I'm writing thrillers. The plots are complex and the writing is hard work, so when I finish for the day I don't really want to pick up a book. My TBR pile is embarrassingly large at the moment.

Was Feeding Ground a fun creature feature story to write? It sort of has a Shaun Hutson vibe – though smarter.

When I started to write it I knew it would be my last straight horror novel for a while and I wanted it to be the kind of book that I loved in the days before Stephen King came along. I loved Herbert's Rats (there is a small homage to that in Feeding Ground) and I also loved Shaun Hutson's Slugs (his daughter went to the school I last taught at and he brought me in a signed copy!) and I thought the Widows from Breeding Ground (or The Whites and Squealers as they become known in Feeding Ground) had the potential for that kind of horror. I wanted it to do 'exactly as it said on the tin' to quote that awful advert.

Is it true that you used former students of yours as characters in some of your books? And was Janine in fact based on Madonna? (feel free to ignore this question, though with Madonna being the high priestess of transformation, anything is possible!)

I have definitely used my student's names! In fact, all the main characters in Feeding Ground have names from children that I've taught or teachers that I've taught with! It's the one thing that I hate about writing full-time - I now have to put thought into coming up with character names. The kids used to love it though. And as for Queen Madge - She would never have given birth to a spider. . . she would have imported one from a poverty stricken country!

Final question, what are Sarah Pinborough’s plans for the future?

At the moment the future is pretty busy. I've got the first of my supernatural thriller trilogy A Matter of Bloodcoming out in hardback in March, and the first of my YA trilogy The Double Edged Sword coming out in hardback in September, both from Gollancz. Currently I'm hard at work on the second thriller and am also working on a script of The Hidden with a London-based writer and director. Busy, busy, busy!