About ten years ago, I published a collection of my short fiction called Die Laughing which contained a story titled Anti-Social. The basic concept was a near-future Britain in which almost everyone is armed and free to deliver capital punishment if anyone is offensive or anti-social. I think I wanted a kind of Black Mirror type tale that was a little satirical and a lot scary and ended up with a story I liked a great deal. A few years later, I was thinking about that one and saw it as a longer piece. Novel-length. The only issue was it being different to my usual stuff. There was nothing supernatural or obviously horror in the concept but I still liked it and still saw it having potential with a larger scope than a short story. I wrote that book which became the first draft of Terminal State (I think the working title was Toxic), let it rest for a month and then wrote a second draft to tighten things up. The main change from the basics of the short piece was the idea that not everyone could be armed or legal or deliver instant execution. Only certain people could do this which made it a lot more frightening. After all, who’s to say if the driver you just cut off is allowed to kill you for your bad driving? Or your neighbour beating his wife – are you allowed to go to their house with your gun and make sure he never hits her again?
I did the usual round of submissions to agents and eventually sold it to one (for the record, I think it was submission 90 or so). She saw the same in my book as I did. Ditto a second. Not a third, though. After eighteen months of trying, she told me it wasn’t happening with any publishers and she was moving away from my kind of fiction which left me back at square one. Not a great time for me, really. Anyway, I went back on submission to agents for a year and had no success, so towards the end of last year, I started thinking about doing this one myself but also doing it under a new name to separate it from Luke Walker’s out and out horror. Terminal State is horror in as much as it’s a horrific idea and situation for the characters, but without the supernatural angle. . .
So, Rob Harrison was born. I did kick around the idea of keeping Luke and Rob completely separate as I know a couple of my writer friends do with the names they write under, but decided against it. Publicly, it’s no secret both names are me, but all I really care about are the books and the hope that people respond to something different from me. (And in case anyone wonders, I took the name Rob Harrison from the first piece I wrote that felt like it could go somewhere – a novella I wrote on and off between the ages of 17 and 21. It didn’t go anywhere for obvious reasons but I liked the character and his name. Close to thirty years later, it’s nice to give it a new life).
Terminal State will be published in two weeks. More to come about the book nearer the time.
Rob/Luke
Luke Walker - Writer 