Mark Haddon, 61, was born in Northampton and lives in Oxford. Between 1987 and 2002 he published more than a dozen books for children, including the Agent Z series, before his multimillion-selling success with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, longlisted for the Booker in 2003. Among his subsequent books are the story collection The Pier Falls, described by the Evening Standard as “almost hellishly morbid… as if Ian McEwan had never turned nice”, and The Porpoise (2019), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction. The protagonists in his new story collection, Dogs and Monsters, include a Roman saint, a minotaur’s mother and a woman who has run away from a shadowy bioengineering facility.
How did this collection come together?
Slowly and piecemeal. I had a heart bypass [in 2019], then brain fog, then long Covid, which I think I’m getting over. Some of the stories were written in windows in the fog, some before that period. I like the 19th-century idea of a short story where you just pack everything in, a contrast to the Carveresque short story which has become a kind of orthodox model and often seems like a snippet from a larger narrative. So I tend to think in terms of big arcs – a real beginning, a real middle and a real end – but I’ve since had to learn to write in a different way, building tiny pieces in the dark without thinking about larger structures. This was the last lot of big arcs!
What leads you to write stories with so much action?
One difference between what you might loosely call literary fiction and genre fiction is a kind of decorous avoidance of the overly dramatic. I always think of the sex scene in The Well of Loneliness: “And that night they were not parted.” Come on! Let’s see what happens! Or the Hilary Mantel story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which pulls away at the end. In genre fiction – horror, police procedural, whatever – that’s where the story would start, isn’t it? Keep the camera running. You get to the end of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and think the drama is about to start: now the real difficulties will happen; now you have a family.
Why do you like retelling old tales from new angles?
I like to look for the gaps in myths and legends, the bits we don’t see, the points of view of people who don’t have power. Unless you go back and read One Thousand and One Nights, you have this nursery image of it being about the power of stories that save this woman’s life; but the actual framing device is that she’s still raped every night, which is just scrubbed completely from the sanitised version we have.
Your own fiction doesn’t skimp on grisly detail…
I’m a longtime fan of 24 Hours in A&E. I’m utterly fascinated by the way bodies work and the way bodies don’t, the way they act as both vehicles and prisons. When I read fiction which is bodiless, where people are voices interacting with each other, I find it odd; bodies are such a good source of drama.
Systems of power are a recurring theme: why?
Partly because of being sent away to a school like the one in My Old School [a story in the book]. I find it really hard to join organisations where I might be compelled to obey their rules; I’m always conscious of who is suffering as a result of those systems. If you see me day to day, I seem like such a sort of rule-following bourgeois cartoon, but deep down I’m a truculent radical in disguise. I’m a real anti-joiner.
Had you long wanted to write about boarding school?
No, the opposite. I have lots of stories from that period, but public schoolboys have occupied centre stage one way or another for too long; we need to not hear about them. With the passage of time, though, I felt that if I didn’t do it now, I’d die before I write it! It’s a perennial story about loyalty and cruelty. A huge influence was Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless [1906], about a brutal military academy; I can’t remember a single thing about it except reading it and thinking, my god, it sounds like my school.
Was there ever a point at which you felt writing fiction had become a way to process your experience?
I’ve never thought of writing as a way of understanding my life. Writing is more like a service to the reader: it’s not about you.
Do you feel like that because you started out writing for children?
I think it would’ve been the case anyway, but writing for children is a reminder that you cannot indulge yourself for a moment. There’s a person you’re talking to: you could lose them any time unless you’re making enough effort, sentence by sentence, to hold their attention.
Tell us what you’ve enjoyed reading recently.
Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, a cannibalism novel from Argentina: absolutely disgusting, utterly gripping. And Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. An amazing passage describing “a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others” reads like the recipe for every zombie movie, game and TV series. I love the prose of that period: phrases like “all the sluices of general charity were now shut”. I found myself underlining something on every page. I did the same with Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which I’m just starting to reread again. Too many science fiction novels I read are weighed down by exposition. I really love encountering a book brave enough to treat you as if you inhabit that world and need nothing explaining.
What did you read as a child?
Science encyclopedias! I love those encyclopedias from the late 60s and early 70s: the low-quality printing, the fonts, the way some of the facts are slightly wrong now.
Do you still have any of them?
Oh yes. I’m embarrassed to say I got quite a few of them as prizes. I was a little swot. The most important book I had as a child was called Origins of the Universe by Albert Hinkelbein – the headmaster’s prize from Duston Eldean junior school in, ooh, 1972.
• Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon will be published by Chatto & Windus on 29 August. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
