Mark Brownless Q&A – The Hand of an Angel
Yesterday I shared my review of the darkly chilling The Hand of an Angel. If you missed that then you can catch up here.
This weekend is the blog tour for The Hand of an Angel and I am thrilled to be joined by author, Mark Brownless, as we chat about the nature of his story and consider why hospitals can be perfect settings for creepy tales:
The Hand of an Angel does get very dark in places. I had a quick check on Amazon and spotted it is ranked in Science Fiction and Fantasy classification and also Medical Thrillers – could consideration be made to class it as a Horror tale?
The book does cross a few genres, which creates its own challenges when trying to categorise and promote it for the reader – Sarah Pinborough has had huge success of late by doing this, however. There are science fiction elements, but it’s more ‘fictional science’ rather than spaceships and aliens.
Essentially The Hand of an Angel is a psychological medical thriller. It plays with the idea of reality – what is real? Do we believe all the main character says he’s seen when he has his near death experience, or is it the product of an oxygen-starved brain?
I’ve always been fascinated by unexplained phenomena like near death experience in this case, alien abduction, Nessie and Bigfoot. These type of themes lend themselves to the horror genre from the fear of the unknown, and I agree, that late on there are some more horror-type elements in the book. When I wrote the ending I had Stephen King in mind with some of his big set pieces like at the end of It and Needful Things. The tension building over the last few chapters, and the increasing presence of Hoody has that supernatural element as well. I hope people find it satisfying.
Much of the story is set around a hospital. All those rooms, all those corridors, the strange contraptions and the ever present presence of illness and even death. Does a hospital make a great setting for a thriller? As a supplemental question…are there too few medical thrillers?
Oh yeah, hospitals make great locations. I had to build my own hospital in The Hand of an Angel, because I didn’t know of one that had all the elements I needed for the story. If we are talking about scary hospitals, one has to think of Victorian asylums. I had great fun in writing about the old parts of ‘my’ hospital and trying to make them have that kind of feel in the type of bricks used and the design of the corridors, etc. The hospital is such an integral part of the story that I’ve always felt it’s a character in itself – the old and the new struggling with each other, the underfunded research wing that hasn’t even been completed, in contrast to the ostentatious atrium foyer and glass roof.
I’m not sure if there are too few medical thrillers. I love Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books, but there are a lot of others in that pathologist / post mortem sub-genre. I think a medical thriller has to be intrinsically medical – it can’t just be a story that happens to be set in a hospital or with doctors and nurses, so in that sense there may be too few. There are a lot of good medical thrillers out there, though, and I hope mine measures up.
The one element I found most disturbing in The Hand of an Angel was the transformation in the lead character, Tom, through the story. Is it fun to build up a character to then break him down or did some guilt creep in?
The book starts off slowly with us getting to know the family at the centre of the story. I really want you to get to know them, to share some experiences with them almost as if you are part of their family. As a kid I read a lot of James Herbert. His book, The Magic Cottage, spent the first hundred pages or so building the relationship of this couple in their holiday home. I loved it and actually didn’t like it when Herbert started to pull the rug out from under them. So yes, I want you to like Tom and Sarah and the family, and I want you to be annoyed with me when bad stuff happens. Because it does.
What comes next from Mark Brownless? Is there a work in progress which you can chat about?
Well I’m just about to upload the second of my Locksley short story series to Amazon for pre-order. It’s a re-telling of Robin Hood and arose from a challenge in a writing group about getting a short story written, edited, with a cover done and on pre-order within a month. I want Robin to be real and grounded, to be someone who doesn’t really have a choice with what happens to him, and to be driven by doing what is right. I’m hoping to release a chapter a month for the next few months, each with a cliff-hanger ending like those old Saturday morning serials.
My next novel again looks at reality, but this time in the form of memories. Can you trust them? Can you rely on them? And what happens when you find out that your memories aren’t quite what you thought. I decided to revisit memories and incidents of childhood, but as an adult looking back from present day. Earlier on I was talking about unexplained phenomena, and The Shadow Man will follow this theme by having a background of spontaneous human combustion, and lean a lot more to horror than The Hand of an Angel. I’m hoping to have The Shadow Man available by the end of the year.
Huge thanks to Mark for finding time in his busy week to answer my questions. The Hand of an Angel is available to order here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hand-Angel-shattering-thriller-heart-stopping-ebook/dp/B077Y83GT1/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529830185&sr=8-1&keywords=the+hand+of+an+angel
