Five Questions for Lee Battersby

I first encountered Lee Battersby by reading one of short stories. I then met him a few weeks later at a science fiction convention, and I'm very pleased to be able to call him my friend. I'm also in the weird position where I have been his friend for almost exactly as long as I have been a fan of his writing. I've read his short fiction, including his excellent solo collection Through Soft Air, and now I'm immensely happy to be able to read his debut novel, The Corpse-Rat King (available now from Angry Robot).

I'm halfway through the book at the moment, and enjoying it immensely. Lee is exceptionally good at juggling humour and horror - not the "ooh, ahh, vampires and werewolves" kind of horror, the "ah! ah! fetch me the mind soap!" kind - and that talent is boldly on display here. A sequel novel is due early next year, I can't imagine how Lee won't have a long, lucrative career ahead of him. If the nicest thing for a writer is to succeed, the second nicest thing is to see a deserving friend succeed - and succeeding he certainly is. This past weekend I asked Lee five questions.

Your debut novel The Corpse-Rat King has recently been published by Angry Robot Books. I'm struck by its grit: for me fantasy is often a genre of beautiful mountain vistas, rival aristocratic houses and enormous wars. Your book seems to be the opposite of that: the battle seems to be over at the start of the book, half the aristocrats are dead, and the story itself seems caked in mud and shit from the first page. Was this a deliberate attempt to find a different approach to the genre, or were there other inspirations?

"I guess you could say my inspirations are the opposite of what you read in the book - the novel was written in frustration at all those soft-focus phat phantasies that seem to say "Weren't medieval times just so grand and flowery and wasn't it great when we had Kings and nobles to do all our thinking for us so we could get on with the task of being jolly yeomen?". I wanted to write something foul and smelly and with dirt jammed so far under its fingernails that they split. And then my absurdist self snuck into the process while I wasn't looking and kind of subverted that aim too, so I ended up with something partway between all of it."

Five Questions for Brandon Graham

Comic book creator Brandon Graham has been gathering a lot of attention in the past 12 months, thanks to his critically acclaimed relaunch of the Rob Liefeld comic book Prophet. He's a master of surreal fantasy and science fiction, and can push it in both dramatic and comedic directions with equally impressive results. He also wrote and drew the acclaimed comic series King City, and is currently producing the wonderfully strange Multiple Warheads: Alphabet to Infinity (also through Image Comics).

I am an enormous fan of his work, and am absolutely delighted to welcome his as my first recipient of this blog's Five Questions.

1. Why comics? What drew you to the medium and not fine art, film or something else?

"I grew up liking comics more than anything, both my parents and my older brother read them. Comics were the most exciting thing I had around me as a kid and as I got older I got more and more into the possibilities comics allow and how untapped the medium is. Also just how much fun it is to work in.

It's really exciting, especially when I'm doing everything myself, there's so many options on what to focus on, it can be lettering one day and then architecture or dialog the next and then how those things work together to tell a story."