wyld: Yeah. Well, I trust him and I know that he reads my book and that he takes elements from it and he knows what I like. But it’s very much a process between me and my publicist and editor and Darren [the graphic designer]. Because it’s no good if the sales team don’t like it, if they don’t think it will sell... structo: They don’t push you to have a big knife with blood dripping off it on the front? wyld: No, with the hardback you can have a lot more artistic licence than with the paperback. The paperback of the first one is still nice; it’s actually [a photo of] Staffan Gnosspelius, who is an illustrator who works in Brixton, on my grandparents’ sugar cane farm. So it is quite specific. I take lots of pictures when I can and that one happened to fit quite well. I have had an unusual amount of input, and I do remember the first time I approached my editor about the cover, and her face dropped. You get a lot of authors going, I’ll just knock up my own in Photoshop. Ultimately I go with what my sales team would want, because they’re the people who have to sell it.
“What I really wanted to write was a big aÀion thriller, something with Arnold Schwarzenegger and machine guns and blood and explosions” structo: I listened to an interesting interview with you where you had talked about what you had read when you were growing up. You mentioned Point Horror, then you moved onto Stephen King and then you mentioned Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers particularly. All quite dark reads. wyld: I did set out to try and write something a bit frightening. It’s not as frightening as I wanted it to be. Before I wrote the first book, when I was studying at Goldsmiths, I got really frustrated because what I really wanted to write was a big action thriller, something with Ar-
18