Books - C L Raven Interview

With True Believer's Comic Festival Summer Variant Edition coming up on 5th August, the Defective Inspector dug out his notebook and submitted a witness statement... er... interview with horror writers C L Raven...

Continuing my theme of chatting with artists I spoke with the lovely, albeit unusual, twins C L Raven while at TBCF in February. These horror writing creatures of the night appealed to my Goth-ier side and when people advertise themselves as (and I quote) “Biggest threat to Stephen King since the Plymouth van.” I can’t help but be up for a chat.

Defective Inspector (DI): I know you are Cathryn and Lynsey, so I get where C L came from, but why C L Raven? (And yes I have watched the video from 2011!)

C L Raven (CLR): We admire your dedication! We’d almost forgotten about that glorious video. Our real surname is Davies, but half of Wales has the Davies surname (not even joking), so we wanted something horror-esque. Poe’s The Raven poem is one of our favourite poems, so we took Raven from that. Plus Ravens are associated with death and graveyards. And now we have raven tattoos.

DI: I’m part Welsh y’know! But I am one of the other 3 families in Wales… But onto your work! According to Amazon your most recent work is "The Reverend Burdizzo's Hymn Book" but I didn't see your names credited! What the hell? (pun intended)

CLR: Amazon weirdly put that as one of ours, when they were supposed to put as contributors. We have a short story in there. Amazon does what it wants!

DI: Could you tell me a bit about the Hymn Book or alternatively Bleeding Empire?

CLR: The stories in the Hymn Book are all based on hymn titles. Our story is called Some Strings Attached and is about a theatre director who has a horrifying solution for his under-performing dancers. Our title was Lord of the Dance but someone else took the title so we had to use a different one as we refused to give up the hymn.

Bleeding Empire is our latest novel. It’s a fantasy comedy about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and their terrible efforts to end the world. There are five Horsemen, because Death screwed up the reproduction and had twins. It was shortlisted by Gollancz to be published but as they published Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, they didn’t want another funny apocalypse book, even though they loved it. So basically, Neil Gaiman is the reason we missed our shot at glory. We will forever hold a grudge against that brilliant man.

DI: What’s currently being worked on? Or is that secret?

CLR: We’re working on several projects at the moment. We’ve just finished writing a novel about a necromancer who helps the police. We’re also working on a comic script, some short stories and our first ever film script, which will hopefully be in production this year. The film is based on our short story, The Black Kiss, from our Romance is Dead trilogy. We plan to release our third historical horror later this year, so we’re polishing that too.

DI: Who does your cover art? Is you?!

CLR: LOL no. Children draw better than we do. We have two artists – River Rose and David V G Davies (no relation. See, we weren’t kidding about the Davies thing), who is actually a film and prop maker.

DI: I know you are going to the Summer version of True Believers, any other places you are looking forward to?

CLR: We were recently guests at Edinburgh Horror Con May 12th and 13th. We’ll be at London Horror Con 1st & 2nd September and we’ll also be at Liverpool Horror Con, Birmingham Horror Con, Bristol Horror Con, and a faery festival.

DI: Apart from your own work... What is your favourite horror novel?

CLR: It has to be Dracula. We re-read it while staying in a hostel right beside Whitby abbey and the graveyard. It had to be done.

DI: Anything you'd like to add?

CLR: Check out our Amazon page so we don’t die penniless and insane like Poe. That would be a disappointing end to our disappointing lives :D

DI: On an unrelated note… You two live very awesome lives if Twitter is anything to go by!

CLR: hahah thanks! Our lives are somewhat interesting at times!

You can follow their interesting lives here
Make them penny-full through Amazon as purchases here
Meet them at Summer’s TBCF here
Or just read about them here

Follow the Defective Inspector on Twitter @DefectInspec

Images are from Amazon, Wikipedia or C L Raven’s Twitter.