Adam Marek on Frankenstein’s Podcast

The following is a short extract taken from Adam Marek's appearance on Ep. 116 of Frankenstein's Podcast. Click the link to listen to the full conversation, which delves into Ray Harryhausen's 1981 classic: Clash of the Titans.

I ask new guests two questions just to get a feel for how you are with monster stuff: What is your favourite monster in all a pop culture, and if it isn't the same, what would you consider the scariest?

My favourite and the scariest definitely aren't the same. My favourite is a choice between two really that I love both deeply. Godzilla I've been a fan of since, well, forever. I can remember on Tuesday evenings when I was really little, like 6, 7 years old in the UK before bedtime there would be a monster feature on every week, and often that would feature Godzilla movies which I absolutely loved. I watch any of the Godzilla iterations, even the cartoon with Godzuki up to the Monarch series, I love it all. 

Swamp Thing would be the other one. I've been reading the comics for a while - haven't really seen that many good film adaptations of it, sadly, but I like the whole swamp aesthetic. I'm a big fan of swamps and marshes - the Dagobah scenes in Empire Strikes Back were always my favourite. I'd love to go hang out on Dagobah for a bit. One of my other passions is birding, so I spend a lot of time on marshes, walking around, looking for birds. I was on a marsh this morning looking at birds. In fact.

I share Swamp Things swampy love!

So is Swamp Thing your scariest or just your second most liked?

So the scariest - I've just got a general thing about zombies. I've always been drawn to zombie movies. I grew up in a family who are obsessed with horror. My mum, my dad, my aunt and uncle, even my nan and granddad would read horror, and were big fans of horror movies, and so I watched a lot of really frightening things when I was way too young.

And zombies have just stayed with me. I have really regular recurring nightmares about zombies, but I really want to watch them. I only just watched The Last of Us because I knew I was going to give myself nightmares, but it was just getting so many good things said about it, I couldn't resist. I did watch it in the end, and I only had a couple of horrible nightmares.

Zombies are definitely the thing that freak me out the most. Whether they're slow lurching George Romero ones or the 28 Days Later charging-at-you ones, I just find them all equally terrifying but fascinating at the same time.

I feel like there's an element of hopelessness with zombies. It's usually equated with the end of the world, and it's either live with zombies or be a zombie.

Right, it’s a terrifying notion, and the idea of being eaten is really unpleasant. I feel like I've rehearsed the apocalypse so many times in nightmares that when it happens I'll be ready for it, I reckon. But in my dreams I've always got some kind of useless tool for defending myself, like a lighter or a pencil or something really stupid. So I'll be trying to smash in zombie heads with something really ineffective. It's kind of frustrating when it means you wake up mid battle, just stressed. 

I like the types of stories that you're able to do in your collections. How do you think the short story lends itself to weirdness?

Oh, thank you. Yeah. It really, it just lends itself to, to weirdness. I love coming up with weird concepts and making them work and making them plausible. The kind of challenge with fantastical concepts, if you're going to stretch them out to the length of a novel, you need to put in all kinds of scaffolding and escalation. A lot of weird ideas, you just can't stretch them to the novel lengths. But I think the short story form is where they sit most naturally. 

We’re mostly a creature feature podcast, so what's one story in your collection you would point to our listeners to? 

The last story Defending the Pencil Factory is inspired by my recurring nightmares. It’s about a group of karate students who are out practicing when an army of zombies comes invading, and the only place they can find shelter is a pencil factory. So they're holed up in there, fighting off these legions of zombies with pencils, like I've often found myself doing. 

I just wrote a new short story for another one for Comma Press for an anthology called, The Monster Capital, talking about, the evils of capitalism manifested as different monsters and fantastical scenarios. I wrote a new story for that involving cyborgs and the horror of the replacement cycle.