WILL YOU SEND A DINGHY, PLEASE?

THERE’S ALWAYS ROMERO Johnny Mains This interview was conducted with the late George Romero on 7.8.2014 not long after his visit to London Film and Comic Con where I first met him and gave him a copy of an anthology that his short story ‘Clay’ had appeared in. As it was a UK book club edition, George hadn’t seen it before and was thrilled to get it. As with all best intentions, I meant to transcribe the interview straight after, but life, as it is wont to do, got in the way. So, for posterity, here it, never before published – I only had half an hour with George to get as much in as possible. I hope the resulting chat acts as a tribute to how warm and generous George was. He is very much missed. JM: Do you still like doing the convention circuit, and how much of a cut do they take from you? GR (Laughs): Well, they’re all different, sometimes you have to give them a cut, sometimes they just want you to be there, so they’ll fly you out; they’re all different. The circuits are tiring...

Doing the research for my volumes of Victorian ghost literature by women writers, one of the biggest challenges I face is trying to decipher who writers are when they use a pseudonym, or worse, are labeled as 'anonymous'. The reasons for taking on a different name in those days were many. It could be that you wanted to air your grievances with someone, but to do so under your own name could bring ruin to your good name or you wanted to write something that wasn't romantic fiction and women just weren't taken seriously as men at writing. Many of the pen names have been revealed - some during the author's lives - some after their deaths , but the fact that Mary Ann Evans wrote one of the finest novels in existence, Middlemarch, under the name George Eliot, was probably influenced by the fact she critiqued the 'Belle Lettres' section of The Westminster Review which was more commonly known as 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' section - and when El...