Choose Your Own Demise With Ashley Lister’s Novel Horror Concept
UK horror author Ashley Lister likely needs no introduction to those of you who devour indie books like midnight snacks after a kegger. With more than sixty books under his belt, you’ve probably read more than one of his titles already. If you haven’t, you should. They’re deliciously devilish, dreadfully dark, and decidedly depraved. I’ve been online friends with Lister for several years now, and I can tell you that the humour he shares in his work reflects his real personality. The man is a legend. He agreed to an interview after I read the first book in his newest series #Dead End Tours which I will share in a moment, but first, we need to talk about the books, themselves.
#Dead End Tours is a series of stories centered on business partners Billy and Tina, who guide illegal urban exploration tours in the darkest corners of England. The series currently comprises 3 books, but there are plans for more. Lister has developed an intriguing formula with unlimited potential for future stories, something akin to a very adult Scooby Doo. Billy and Tina split their clientele in each book based on their tour preferences. Billy leads a historical version of the tour, and Tina takes the braver customers on a paranormal investigation. They face a different horror in each book, from ghosts and witches to zombies and clowns, and people die. Unlike Scooby Doo, there is graphic horror, graphic sex, and nobody gets away with anything.
The chapters go back and forth between Billy’s tour and Tina’s, giving the reader a fully-rounded history of the building they are exploring as well as a view of the comedy and drama that befall their clients. It’s a delicate balance, but Lister writes in a way that makes it easy to remember which character belongs to which tour, and where in the building everyone is. If you’ve ever been on a large paranormal investigation, you’ll understand how chaotic it can get when the crowd is split into smaller groups and scattered into the darkness. Part of the story revolves around Billy and Tina trying to keep all of their ducks in a row before and after things go awry. It’s a realistic depiction of how a tour like this would operate, and just how quickly things can go wrong.
In #Dead End Tours: St. Ralph’s Hospital, Billy and Tina lead their groups through an abandoned Victorian-era sanatorium. The story, as it goes, is that the original physician and owner of the hospital, Winchester, was a psychotic man who took out his fits of fury on the patients. His business partner, meanwhile, was operating his own nefarious side gig involving Resurrectionists (grave robbers) and the illegal purchase of corpses for medical studies. The hospital opened just after the notorious Jack the Ripper stopped terrorizing London, which is not a coincidence. To make things even scarier, two murderous brothers may be hiding in the area on the night of the tour, having evaded the police for several days after killing someone in cold blood.
Billy’s assistant, Cal, is employed to provide faux jump scares throughout the evening, but the ghosts of St. Ralph’s don’t really need any help. They’re roaming the halls alongside the tourists, and they are mad. #Dead End Tours: St. Ralph’s Hospital provides plenty of paranormal horror as well as the very real terror of the murderous brothers who, it turns out, are hiding in a building on the hospital grounds. One of the brothers is even more unhinged than Winchester. To say more would spoil the story, so I’ll leave it at that.
While I enjoyed the entire story, my favourite parts were the flashbacks to 1889. Lister has a PhD in Creative Writing, and his prowess shines when he takes us back in time, giving voices to Victorian madmen so convincingly that it feels like we are in the room with the characters. He brings us directly into their minds, and we hear what they hear, we feel how they feel, and we rage when they rage. We also cower when we’re taken out of their minds and are put before them to be on the receiving end of their terror. His portrayal of the tour customers becoming rattled when the ghosts begin to show themselves is also well done, but it’s being placed directly in the historical characters’ world that impresses me the most.
The series is going to wow readers, especially those who enjoy paranormal investigations or urban exploration (urbex). But wait, there’s more! Lister has created an itch.io game to accompany the series! It’s the first of its kind, a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style game that allows the player to follow either Billy or Tina’s tour through an abandoned theatre and make choices along the way that usually end badly. I played it more times than I can count, laughing every time I died because Lister’s trademark humour is present at every turn. It was a “meta” experience, reading the book and then playing a game with the characters I’d just spent time with. If this is the future of horror books, Lister needs to trademark it. It’s bloody brilliant.
With that, I think it’s time to introduce you to the man, the myth, the legend, the incorrigible, Ashley Lister.
GoH: Dr. Lister, I presume! Thank you for joining me today. As I mentioned above, you have a PhD in Creative Writing. Was that your original scholastic goal? Were you always a writer, or did this vocation blossom over time?
AL: Hi Kate. Thanks for having me. To answer your question: the writing came first, and the PhD came second. I’ve been writing since I was old enough to hammer the keys on my father’s Remington typewriter. I’ve always enjoyed storytelling and I think I’d published thirty or forty novels when I got interested in doing an English degree. From there, I decided I needed to do a PhD to explore the relationship between plot and genre in short fiction. It proved to be a fascinating area of study.
GoH: Has horror always been your genre of choice? Who were your early favourite horror authors/books? Did anyone influence your early work?
AL: I’ve always been a huge fan of Stephen King. Richard Laymon was a superb influence, as was Clive Barker and James Herbert. More recently I’ve been reading a lot of Adam Nevil in mainstream horror and enjoying the wealth of talent that can be found in the Indie Horror community. My earliest influences, the writers that made me want to tell stories because they’d given me so much pleasure with theirs, were Enid Blyton, the children’s author, and Agatha Christie, the mystery writer.
GoH: How many books have you written? What other genres have you written/do you enjoy reading? Which of your own books is the one that stands out in your mind as “Yeah, that book represents me perfectly”, and how so?
AL: I’ve written more than sixty books. How to Write Short Stories and Get Them Published is based on my teaching and my academic studies. However, the one that best sums up the personality I try to convey through my writing is Conversations with Dead Serial Killers. It’s a blend of excessive research and a fairly dark sense of humour. It’s a book that begins with the opening line: The thing that few people appreciated about Ed Gein was his skill as a seamstress. I believe that’s the reason why one reviewer said my books have a sense of humour that’s so dark Stephen Hawking could have written a thesis on the subject.
GoH: I have a cheeky question, if I may? Your stories are often peppered with x-rated spicey content. To me, this feels like an homage to 80s horror when the T&A was just as important as the jump scares. Is this a deliberate choice, or are you just a perv?
AL: The answer is YES to both questions. I am a pervert, but I also believe sex is such an important part of life it shouldn’t be ignored in fiction. I also include sexual elements in my poetry, like the following lines from ‘Le Petit Mort’, one of the poems from my collection Old People Sex.
What are you supposed to do
when your lover dies during sex?
It worries me
because I see
the subject being
quite complex.
I know this notion’s pretty vile
but if you’ve just become a necrophile
Should you enjoy the calm before the storm
and finish off, whilst she’s still warm?
Or do you wait ‘til she’s a little colder
then draw on pubes, so she looks older?
Just what are you
supposed to do
when your lover dies
whilst you’re shagging?
Is it really crass
to keep ploughing her ass
when her body’s ready
for bagging?
Is now the time to moan with rage?
Or do you just put the gerbil back in its cage?
Should you wipe down all her holes?
Can the fruit you’ve used go back in the bowl?
Is this the right time to say a prayer?
And if she’s dead, do you still have to pay her?
GoH: Switching gears, we’re here today to talk about your new #Dead End Tours series. As a former paranormal investigator myself, I have questions! Firstly, are you a fan of ghost tours or urban exploration? If so, give us some examples of the tours/explorations you’ve been on.
AL: I’ve been on one ghost tour, around an abandoned cinema. I’ve also watched thousands of urban explorations and ghost tours on YouTube and on those TV shows with the very excitable narrators who think every squeak and shadow is absolute proof of the existence of the supernatural. I thought the atmosphere of an urbex tour was conducive to the mood of a horror story and I also thought that a team of characters engaged in such adventures would be ideal to encounter different staples from the horror environment, such as ghosts, zombies and clowns.
GoH: What inspired you to write this series now?
AL: The thing that inspired me to write this story now was the fact that Billy, Tina and Cal are facing horror story monsters, but they’re also expected to contend with one of the most horrific aspects of modern society: customer services. Of all the things I’ve ever written about, nothing is as scary as some hard-faced customer, threatening to get you sacked because their beverage was too hot or too cold, or they objected to the price they had to pay or the length of time they had to wait. There is no scene in the most sadistic horror movies that frightens me more than the thought of being a minimum-wage-slave facing an angry customer who has the entitled attitude that they can remove your income. It’s an aspect of horror that most of us face in our day-to-day lives and I wanted to have that lurking as a touchstone of reality for readers who’ve experienced that unpleasantness.
GoH: There are so many amateur paranormal investigators out there now! Have you had any comments from that community about this series?
AL: I’ve not had any comments on this series however, I sent a copy of Conversations with Dead Serial Killers to a psychic acquaintance on Instagram and she heartily approved of the way I’d portrayed a charlatan psychic with his cold-reading skills and his heartless attitude toward exploiting the bereaved.
If there are any investigators out there who’ve read the books, I’d love to know if you think I’ve captured the authenticity of the experience, or if you think I’m way off the mark.
GoH: I really enjoyed the fact that you alternated present-time chapters with those illuminating historical context. In St. Ralph’s Hospital, Jack the Ripper and the idea of resurrectionists are the historical focus. Are these themes that have always interested you?
AL: As a society, I think we have a grim fascination with the likes of Saucy Jack and all those semi-professional grave robbers of the late nineteenth century. It’s almost as though we’re tapping into dark secrets that should never have been revealed. When it comes to horror, I think that it’s fun to revisit these parts of history so we can get the thrill of reliving that experience. Also, acknowledging that those things really happened is a way to remind readers that something similar (or potentially worse) might possibly happen to the characters in the story they’re enjoying.
GoH: Can you tell us about the other #Dead End Tour books?
AL: In #DeadEndTours: Hurting Fields, the tour goes around an abandoned airfield. Well, it should be abandoned but some things got left behind. This is a story of zombies and military experimentation. https://mybook.to/HurtingFields
In #DeadEndTours: In Too Deep, the tour goes around an abandoned amusement park. The land itself has a history of witchcraft and this ties in with the horrific and bloody clown-related tragedy that is still celebrated by local weirdos. https://mybook.to/DETInTooDeep
Link to all of the #Dead End Tours books: https://mybook.to/DeadEndTours
GoH: You have custom artwork at the head of every chapter. Can you tell us about the artist, and what it was like working with them?
AL: The cover art for all of my recent novels has been done by the author, and my close friend, Colin Davies. He and I were chatting one evening about how epigrams had always been at the start of the fiction we loved as children, and he suggested he could include those for the next title I was working on. Because he’s a writer, and he knows which parts of the chapter are important to me, he seems to pick the right thing to illustrate each time.
GoH: One of the most unique features of this new series is the fact that you’ve created an itch.io Choose Your Own Adventure style game to accompany the books. How did you come up with this concept? How long did it take to create? Will there be more games like this one in the future?
AL: The adventure game: the concept came about again, because of my friend Colin. He’s just on the last stages of his MA and one of the modules he’d selected had been about writing games. After talking with him about this, and seeing what he produced, I thought the concept of a #DeadEndTour as a game was one that might be a lot of fun. Several readers have said that they think they would easily survive one of the tours and I wanted to see if that sort of thinking was right.
How long did it take? The basic idea was something I came up with over lunch one day when I skipped the gym. I then had a weekend where I did nothing for forty-eight hours except work on the structure of the game and then build and develop the content. A fortnight later (with Colin’s help on the illustrations) the game was complete. It then went off to a group of beta testers who told me which parts worked and which parts didn’t.
Will there be more games like this one? It’s a tempting prospect. I had so much fun creating this one, and the feedback from people has been disturbingly enthusiastic. (I had one player message me to say, “I’ve died four times now. I shouldn’t have stolen that violin!”) And each time I get a message like that, I know people have been having fun with the game – and that was all I ever wanted. I do think it would be fun to try another one of these games because the format of the stories lends itself to the structure (although, Colin did suggest I should look at writing a game around my novel Blackstone Towers, because that also has a similar framework). All of which is my way of saying, I’ve got no specific plans, but I had too much fun with it to let it be a one-off.
Link to the game: https://arlister.itch.io/deadendtours-the-cursed-playhouse
GoH: Last question! Can you tell us about your current wip/s or plans for future releases? Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
AL: I’m currently working on #DeadEndTours: T&W (book 4 in the series). This is a different format and a different approach to the story, but it features many of the same characters and tropes that have already been in the first three novels. I’m hoping to have it finished before the end of the year.
For those who enjoy the world of #DeadEndTours, or for those who want to test the waters without making a financial commitment, I’ve got a free short story available for anyone signing up to my newsletter: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/hetp4gp67i
And there you have it! Ashley Lister is a prolific writer, a teacher, a poet, and the comic relief we all need in this world. If you enjoy dark humour, descriptive horror and a bit of debauchery, check out the #Dead End Tours series. I guarantee you’ll go back to his website for more.
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Kate’s love of all things dark began as a child and deepened when she realized what being an adult meant. She was born with a pencil in her hand and loves nothing more than writing horrific stories to tantalize her inner demons. Kate lives in Hamilton, Ontario Canada with her husband and her boys, stirring up trouble wherever she can.