Barnard Castle
I come from a market town in the north east of England. The town in The Hollow Tree, Ullathorne, is not Barney (as we call it), and Tyrdale is not Teesdale. Nor is the school in the book my school (Teesdale Comprehensive). But, of course, there are similarities, and the geography is closely paralleled. Teesdale is beautiful, stark, lush, and ancient, and so is Tyrdale. My late father was originally from Uruguay, my mother from London, so for whatever reason, although I grew up there, I am not sure I have ever felt from Barney. It’s probably a crucial distinction. I have often been mildly envious of people who feel they have a strong identity linked to a place, a nation, a country, a team, a lifestyle. I never have. But equally it means I am not keen on being definitive about myself. I think that’s why I can’t choose a suitable tattoo. Anyway, my childhood in Teesdale is undoubtedly deeply, sometimes sorely, imprinted in me. As I get older, the more it means to me, for reasons that are obscure. I think of, and dream of, the dale. This view, that beach, this bend in the river. There are some riverside woods there that still remain the ideal of rural beauty to me. The book would not exist without it. Nor would I.
Lankum—“The Wild Rover” (from The Livelong Day)
I fell in love with folk music too late in my life. I sometimes regret I came to it only in my late 20s, especially as I grew up in the north of England, where such rich and beautiful songs were born. Indeed, I grew up in the town where Lord Barnard (the murderer in some versions of Matty Groves/Little Musgrave) originally gadded about. But I had little knowledge of folk,. I was obsessed with new music instead. I had no interest in the past. But maybe this music came to me at the right time, when I could be so receptive, surprised, and grateful. The book refers to several songs by name, notably Rufford Park Poachers (Buck or doe believe it so/a pheasant or a hare/were sent on earth for everyone/quite equal for to share) and the voice of Sandy Denny. But I listened to the masterful Lankum when editing the book and this song in particular, with its growing power, its driving grace, was the soundtrack to that work. I saw them live in Edinburgh not long after the book was completed, and they were brilliant, one of the best bands around.
England on Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion’s Psychic Landscape, by Stephen Ellcock and Mat Osman
This entrancing, bewitching book—a superlative gallery of images of Old and New Weird England with a hallucinatory accompanying text by Osman—was beside my laptop, and in my mind, as I completed the book. I finished a rewrite of The Hollow Tree in a cold writer’s retreat in France and spent hours with its richness, its oddness, its revelations.
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher
I didn’t study English at university and came to serious reading late. Although I have written poetry since I was a teen, comics, newspapers, and the music press were my main reading well into my 20s. So, when I began to write in earnest, I did not feel ready or right or, really, allowed to write short stories or literary novels. I felt much more comfortable with blogging (maybe because it was close to my then-day job, in journalism). It was a lyrical, erratic, often tortured blog, under a pseudonym, and I was an avid fan of Mark Fisher’s seminal K-Punk blog. He noticed my writing—I am not clear how—and he was very kind with his public compliments, and sent me supportive messages. As well as some of my close friends, he made me feel I could, at my best, write. And his posts on music, on films, on horror, on hauntology, made permanent impressions on me. So did the solidarity, and the generosity. Some of the eeriness of The Hollow Tree may also be in debt to some of our interactions. He was an inspiration.
GB84 by David Peace
The Red Riding Quartet gripped, and horrified, and scared me, but it was GB84 that set off some kind of detonation in my mind. In GB84, David Peace tipped up something real and grim and painful, the miners’ strike, and underneath it found something else—deep occult fissures, state malignancy, brutal secrecy—and created a kind of horror story from a national calamity. And like Benjamin Myer’s The Gallows Pole, it took the North and its people seriously, strangely, tragically. It’s a hand grenade of a book, but for some reason—its style, its attitude, its anger, its multiple voices—it also just felt right. I remember reading it in a fever and thinking: Yes. The same way I felt reading The Names by Don DeLillo for the first time. David Peace is bloody brilliant.
Philip Miller lives in Edinburgh. He was a newspaper journalist for twenty years, and was twice named Arts Writer of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards. His previous novels include The Blue Horse, All the Galaxies and The Goldenacre, and his poetry, including a first collection, has been published online and in print.
