Jay Caselberg Interview Published on: 15, Dec 2020

That's really hard. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Maybe when my old man was working at an old press where they set metal type. Thought that was fascinating.

Ha. My chemistry demonstrator kept on telling me that I should be doing arts because my descriptions of reactions were too creative. In the end, probably turned out he was right. Was more interested in the workings of the mind than the bubbling of reagents anyway.

I don't know if it is lesser-known, but I have alway found the underground cistern fascinating. It's used as a setting in one of the chapters in Breath, the book I wrote as Jackson Creed.

It's that all truth is relative. that it's a social construction. There is no hard and fast concrete reality. Everything is created by consensus and because people agree it's so.

Everywhere has its own special magic if you are looking out for it. Problem is, if you spend too much time travelling, everything is different, and in the end, everything starts to become the same. It is the difference that sets things apart.

I suddenly realised after bumping into an online community almost by accident, that I might in fact be good enough.

So, that was kind of a requirement of my first major book publisher. I was writing then as James A. Hartley. Roc Books, a division of Penguin, had just signed a few weeks earlier, a writer by the name of James A. Hetley. The marketing department thought it would be too confusing, so they asked me if I had another name. As it happened, I did. Caselberg is the name I was born with. Hartley I acquired through my mother's remarriage at one point.

It's a classic good vs. evil fantasy with awakening powers of our young protagonist. Much of it is set, however, through the landscape and environments of somewhere quite similar to Turkey.

Not sure if there is a particular inspiration. A bit of myself. A bit of other people I have come across mixed in. The other characters in the books are a collage of people I have known or worked with or had dealings with. I could probably call them out by name, but I'm not going to.

There's a trend in modern literature to spoon feed the reader. Personally, I have a lot more faith in the reader's imagination. Give your reader enough to go on with and let them fill in the rest. There's a few old noir movies that work that way. Much better to let them paint the picture for themselves.

That was "Empties" that later became my rather psychologically brutal novel now titled The Hollowed.

Truly an island in the middle of Britain. It was like stepping into another country. All those magnificent buildings, the student life, the scarves and gowns. That being said, it was also the period of the crombie and the bovver boots and the nascence of skins and punks, so there was a bit of that pushing at the seams as well.

None, really. Genre, to me, remains nothing more than a marketing strategy. A story turns out as it is meant to turn out. In the end, it is the tale itself that dictates the genre and yet often, with my stuff, it doesn't. It kind of walks the borders of particular genres, even though normally it is pretty dark and contemplative. In the end, I guess I just write what I write.

I am in the initial stages of a new novel, but that is writing again as someone else. If we want to put a label on it, it is probably closest to fantasy.

Can't remember now. You probably have a better idea than I do. But it's been worthwhile.