Take 5 with Richard Jay Parker

Pick one book from each decade of your life. Who would you like to give that book to and why?

0- 9 ~ The Rats
James Herbert

Read this when I was nine.

Would give it to my parents now so they would, at least, have some idea of why I’m so warped.

10-19 ~ Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

Would give this one to anyone who hasn’t learnt an alternative language.

XXXX

XXX

20 – 29 ~ American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis

Would give this to the police.

30 – 39 ~ Falling Angel
William Hjortsberg

Would give this to the Chinese Whisperings writers.

Dark, satanic, noir crime. Very apposite.

What genre do you normally write in? What do you enjoy most about this genre? What do you find challenging?

Thriller is such a large umbrella but if you put ‘dark’ and ‘unsettling’ before it then that would be a more defined description.

I love the plotting.

What is the worst ‘knock’ you’ve had to recover from as a writer?

Big agency swinging between ‘love it/come see us tomorrow!’ and then unceremoniously dropping me and refusing to return my emails a few weeks later because they couldn’t agree on the direction of rewrite.

What was the first story you remember doing for the sheer joy of writing (ie. It wasn’t a school project or homework!) and how old were you?

I was probably around five.

It was something to do with a teacher being a sinister impostor. I didn’t know how accurate this was until I left school.

What is your favourite short story and why?

THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OfF NANTUCKET by Edgar Allan Poe.

I enjoyed this because the character that gets cannibalized at sea is called Richard Parker. Years after the story was written the events happened for real and the name of the cannibalized sailor?

Richard Parker.