Neil McRobert is no stranger to the macabre. As a writer, academic, and host of the Talking Scared podcast, he has spent years in conversation with the titans of horror fiction – listening, learning, and, it would seem, nurturing a few dark ideas of his own. Now he steps out from behind the microphone with Good Boy, his debut novella, published on 9 October by Wild Hunt Books as part of their Northern Weird Project.
The Northern Weird Project brings together six short works from authors based in the North of England, each using the region as an active presence within their stories.
Good Boy is a supernatural horror yarn in the key of early King and the darker edge of Dahl, with shades of John Langan’s The Fisherman and the tender melancholy of Raymond Briggs. It begins when a boy disappears on the edge of a small northern town. A local woman spots a stranger digging a grave where the child was last seen, and when she confronts him, she realises his purpose is far more sinister than she could ever have guessed.
Inspired in part by McRobert’s own much-loved dog, Ted — who takes pride of place on the front cover — Good Boy dances deftly between dread and devotion, weaving dark humour with a sharp tug of heartache through a story steeped in loyalty and loss, in memory, and the ghosts — literal and otherwise — that refuse to loosen their hold.
In celebration of the book’s release, CinemaChords’ Howard Gorman sat down with McRobert to discuss the origins of the book, the peculiarities of writing within the Northern Weird tradition, and how folklore, fear, and heartbreak converge in a novella that reads like the very best kind of fireside yarns — the kind that carve themselves a place in your memory and beg to be told again and again, maybe to your grandkids, on some dark and windy night, years from now.
