Tell us about your new novel
Everything Will Swallow You is a book about friendship, the power of landscape and dusty objects, community, used records and lightly nomadic lifestyles lived just outside conventional society. It’s also an exploration of how folklore makes the transition from lived events to the stories that we tell ourselves, many decades later. It’s about quite a few other things too, but I don’t want to take up your entire newspaper trying to explain.
Carl is such an unusual character. How did you come up with him?
Once day I was walking near the sea in west Dorset and thought “What if an animal walked out of the waves and sat down next to that guy over there on the shingle and the animal was in fact a hyper-intelligent, hyper-sensitive, folkloric doglike creature?” Then I decided it would be fun to find out what the story behind that was, over the course of a 100,000-plus-word narrative. And it was.
The power of landscape and nature is key to your work. How have your surroundings influenced you?
I write nearly all the best bits of my books in my head on walks. I think all books would be better if they could be completely written on walks.
Music, obscure bands and the secrets of record collecting play a huge part in the novel. You made your name as the Guardian’s youngest ever chief music critic at 23. How has journalism fed into your books?
My love of music always finds a way of sneaking into my books, even in a book that’s ostensibly not about music at all. But it’s especially present in Everything Will Swallow You and Villager, both of which are partly themed around lost psychedelic records. Journalism, however, held me back from writing fiction for many years. Giving it up in 2015 and getting out of a journalistic mindset was part of what finally enabled me to write fiction I believed in.
RM Block
How does this novel compare to your previous two?
Structurally, it involved some harder work, and felt like a bigger world to carry around inside my head every day. It packs a slightly bigger emotional punch too, I think.
You’re a remarkably eclectic writer. Why is that?
I’d hate to repeat myself or bore my readers.
Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia, your book about your year as Britain’s most inept pro golfer, was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. Tell us more
I abandoned my mission to become a great golfer around the time I turned 17, but always had the lingering question of “What if I’d persevered? Would I have been good enough?” My research for this book answered that with a resounding “No” but it was fun to write about, as so many embarrassing occurrences can be.
Your “cats and more” themed memoir The Good The Bad & The Furry became a bestseller in 2013. What’s it about?
It is definitely about cats. But it was really mostly my way of sneaking lots of other stories about life in the countryside – and about my loud, sweary dad – into a book that I probably couldn’t have got commissioned at the time if I hadn’t presented it as being about cats.
21st-Century Yokel, in 2017, became the fastest-ever crowdfunded book in Britain and was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. It was the first book you truly wanted to write?
It was. It was the first time I felt totally freed, as a writer, and when the only authorial voice inside my head was my own.
Your debut collection of short stories, Help the Witch, won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing Award in 2019
It did! Which still makes me chuckle, as – although spooky at times – it’s not horror writing. I’m far too much of a wimp to be a horror writer.
You got your fingers burned with the Unbound fiasco?
Yes, and various other body parts.
Which projects are you working on?
I’ve almost finished a new collection of short stories and am about a quarter of the way through a new (very different again) novel.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Several. My favourite was probably the walk I did in 2016 on the Herefordshire-Wales border after reading Bruce Chatwin’s fabulous novel On The Black Hill.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Read loads, write loads.
Who do you admire the most?
Bees and sheep.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I will introduce electronic ankle tags for everyone who leaves plastic bags full of dog poo in the countryside.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare; Eight Mountains; and The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Which public event affected you most?
Nothing has ever quite hit me again like England losing to Argentina in the 1986 World Cup.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
I was swimming in the Lot river in France earlier this year, amongst thousands of dragonflies, and I thought, “It doesn’t get more amazing than this.”
Your most treasured possession?
A “cover version” my mum did of a great (nameless) Lee Krasner painting.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
A 1953 first edition of Welsh Legends by D Parry Jones.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
EL Doctorow, Annie Proulx.
The best and worst things about where you live in Devon?
Best: moorland and sea being so close. Worst: proliferation of crap new executive housing estates.
What is your favourite quotation?
“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” – Dorothy Parker
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Owen Meany from John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.
A book to make me laugh?
Naked by David Sedaris.
A book that might move me to tears?
The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd.
Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox is published by Swift Press
