Scottish Novelist David Sodergren on the Punk Rock Possibilities of Self Publishing

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with renown Scottish horror writer David Sodergren.

If you’re a horror fan who’s even moderately online, you’ve heard of—or, even more likely, seen pictures of—David Sodergren’s books.

Maggie’s Grave, The Haar, Rotten Tommy, The Forgotten Island, Night Shoot: These are just a few of the dozen-plus titles he’s published. David’s work has found fans around the world, thanks to his knack for crafting fast-paced plots, memorable characters, and inventive supernatural creatures. Plus, his eye-catching covers photograph beautifully, frequently appearing on Instagram and BookTok “best of” lists in all their gory glory.

David writes, edits, and markets his books entirely solo, outside the churning machine of traditional publishing. His independent imprint, Paperbacks and Pugs, is an impressively successful labor of love, all fueled by his passion for the horror genre.

David kindly spoke with me for nearly an hour, which resulted in the wonderful challenge of cutting our conversation down from the original 8,000 word transcript into something inbox-sized. He’s very generous, very funny, and a true horror fan. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

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Michelle Delgado: Obviously, we’re here to talk about the paperbacks—but could we start with the pug?

David Sodergren: Little Boris just turned 10 five days ago, so he's getting old now. We named him partly after Boris Karloff, partly because I thought it was just a really cute name for a pug. If you look on the spines of any of my books, my logo that my wife made for me is his face with his little tongue coming out, as it constantly is.

Funnily enough, I started an Instagram that was showing pictures of my paperback book collection next to him, because he'll pose for anything as long as he gets a treat afterwards. That got me a little following—enough of a following that I thought, "Well, if I was to actually write a book, maybe some of these people would buy it." Somehow the impetus to actually start writing was the fact that people liked my dog. It's a very strange way of going about it.

He's sat next to me sleeping through the writing of every single thing I've ever written. He's always there, sometimes under my elbow. I do have shoulder problems occasionally, because I write like that. But I'm not gonna move him. He's so comfortable.

I was having a lot of leg pain for a while, and I kept wondering if it was from running. My husband finally pointed out, “Well, you have a fifteen-pound cat sleeping on you every day for hours. Do you think maybe that could be causing it?”

No...absolutely not. Must be something else. 

Do you remember your early encounters with horror and how you came into this strange, wonderful world?

I was born into it. I never had any choice in the matter. Most of my earliest childhood memories are related to a horror film I saw on TV. Back when I was growing up in the early '80s, before I went to school, they would show black and white films like Jack Arnold's Tarantula and the original Thing From Another World. They would be on TV, you know, two in the afternoon before the kids half hour cartoons and stuff came on, so I remember seeing The Thing, Tarantula, King Kong. Those are my earliest memories from a very, very, very, very young age. I loved it.

I collected skeletons and vampires and ghouls and things. I started reading sort of horror adjacent kidlits. There was a series books called The Three Investigators that had the Alfred Hitchcock Presents. They were really cool—it was just like The Famous Five or The Secret Seven, but, you know, spooky Scooby Doo type stuff, solving these supernatural issues that were, if I remember correctly, never actually supernatural. The Hardy Boys had The Case of the Haunted Fort. As soon as I saw the word "haunted," I was like, "Yep, that one, that one." Night of the Werewolf. "Yep, that."

Then, at my dad's work, they had some James Herbert novels. James Herbert’s not so famous in America, I don't think—but he was like our British Stephen King, most famous for The Rats and The Fog. My dad used to bring me those books back, and I don't even know how old I was. I remember reading The Fog when I was in primary six, which would put me at about 11 years old, and getting loads of trouble from the teacher because the cover was a severed head. It had some very unpleasant things involving teachers in it.

I've been obsessed my entire life, and it's never waned, and it's never stopped. And despite my mom saying it's a phase, you'll grow out of it 35 years ago—I'm still here.

I became interested in horror in a more serious way in the last five years or so. It makes me feel excited to be alive—it’s given me a sense of curiosity and wonder that I’m so thankful to still have as an adult.

It makes me jealous, in a way, to hear that, because I have been watching horror films religiously for well over 30 years. So I've seen all the big ones, and then I've seen all the kind-of-big ones, then all the medium ones. Nowadays I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, sifting through absolute garbage, looking for that one little shining diamond.

And you do still find them. But for someone like yourself, there's still so much amazing stuff for you to watch. It's going to be so awesome, that journey. There are so many films I wish I could go back and see again for the very first time and just be blown away by Cronenberg's The Fly again, or Carpenter's The Thing, you know? Because you can never really recapture that. It's such an amazing genre. It's so all encompassing.

Are there any unexpected gems you've encountered recently?

There's this series I'm watching at the moment—it's a Japanese found footage series called Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! It's a ten-film series of found footage movies.

This series is absolutely mind boggling. It's designed as a TV series investigating supernatural phenomena. The first couple of features, they're good—and then it just keeps going and going. I'm on part seven now, and it's become this epic cosmic horror of insane Lovecraftian proportions. The last episode I watched had time travel and floating giants in the sky. And it's no budget. The special effects are just crafted by the guy on his computer, and they look it—but there's so much ambition and heart and emotion in it that it's just actually jaw dropping to watch. I absolutely love it.

It's not available anywhere, but they are on YouTube with fan subtitles, unofficial. But how else can you see it? I've still got three of them to go. I'm so excited. I'm trying to not rush through them all. But also, the last one I watched had callbacks to episodes one and two and three. So I can't wait too long, or I'll forget.

That sounds amazing. I’m sure you’ve already seen it, but it makes me think of Noroi: The Curse.

It's the same director! Shiraishi. 

No way! I loved that movie. It felt almost wrong to be seeing it—it had a very disturbing, unnerving authenticity. That's wild that it's the same director.

That's crazy. Yeah, he's a one man industry in Japan, of found footage. He's done Noroi, Occult. This is way lower budget than Noroi, but it's the same sort of milieu of the the sort of the ectoplasmic worm universe.

[Note: I’m currently four episodes deep and it is SO GOOD! The link below will take you to the playlist David emailed me after our chat.]

I briefly lived in Scotland during college, and it made such an impression on me. How similar is the Scotland where you live to the Scotland in your novels? What is the importance of place in your work?

Yes, Scotland is a huge part of my books. I find it really inspiring, partly because it's not actually featured that often. We don't have a vast swath of Scottish horror filmmakers, writers, authors, and yet—I mean, you've been up in the Highlands, so just a wee trip up there immediately gets my mind racing. You've got your mountains and your lochs, and your forests and everything. Instantly, I'm seeing that, and and I'm thinking, “Right, okay, right. What's that? Oh, yeah, this tree's alive. It's coming at you.”

It's really beautiful, but it's also hugely atmospheric. And I think partly the Scottish weather also plays into that. I named one of my books, The Haar, after the weather condition. The haar is that sea mist that comes in on from the north and east coast.

I'm in the Pacific Northwest, which is a similar latitude, and I feel both places get stereotyped the same way. People say, “Oh, I could never live there, it rains all the time.”

But it’s not the rain that I associate with either place—it's the mistiness, the in-between-ness. Like some places in the Highlands, there are vast stretches of forest and not a lot of people here. Plus, there are extremes: In the summer you get tons of sunlight, and in the winter, you get very little.

I try and ground my stories in a form of reality. I really do like setting stories in these little small villages and towns, because there's a particular type of person lives there. Without drawing on terrible stereotypes—I don't mean this in a bad way—there's a sort of small town, village-y mentality that can lend itself really well to the telling of a horror story. Maggie's Grave is a good example of that, where they're all nice people, but there's that shared secret that you can get in the population of a village or town. It doesn't work transplanted to a city.

Also, the thing with Scotland is that weather can affect people. We can be slightly more, as we would say, dour. Not miserable, but we can be quite a grumpy nation. And again, that's a fun thing to play with.

One of the funniest reviews of your work I’ve seen was from someone who was disgruntled that you write such horrible men. It really made me laugh, because I love the way you write bad men. To me, it almost functions as comic relief—terrible things happen to them, but they’re also pretty terrible.

Could you speak to your thought process? It feels similar to what you said earlier, about taking something real and then punching it up for effect.

Yeah, absolutely. I think some of these men who are offended are perhaps a bit annoyed at how close it's hitting to home. Because a lot of men are terrible—I don't have to tell you that!

I've seen that criticism a lot, and it's funny—I have stopped reading my reviews now, they just annoy me—but I remember two in a row. Night Shoot, I think it was. There were two reviews, both one star, and the first one said that the book was disgustingly misogynistic. And the review right after that said “social justice warrior woke crap.” Which is it!

I don't think they read your book! Like, if they read it, they didn't read it. You know what I mean? Because I think your values come through. Your politics are legible, at least to me, and I would hope to other readers.

I hope so, too. I am surprised at people's reactions sometimes, because I think my politics are very obvious. Anyways, I don't read my reviews, because once the book's out there, people can think what they want. That's fine. But sometimes you'll see someone, and they've misunderstood something so extraordinarily, to the point where it's not like, "Well, that's their take on it." It's like, you've completely misunderstood. You've misread it.

I personally just always find women to be slightly more interesting, compelling protagonists. The type of men that I'm writing are perhaps slightly more one-dimensional. So quite often, yeah, I'd say I do use them as a sort of comic relief. The guys in The Haar, they're sleazy, but they're the punch line. If I remember correctly, the guy is talking about how the G spot doesn't exist or something like that—it's all there for laughs. Because you know what? These men do exist.

My first couple of books, certainly Forgotten Island and Night Shoot, every single man is a scumbag. There are lots of nice men out there as well, so I’ll put some of them in, too. But the book I've just finished outlining this afternoon is like, “Nah…they're all scumbags.”

You've written some lovely men, too. In The Haar, there’s Arthur, who has this very sweet, very pure love for our protagonist. And you write some complicated women, like in Maggie's Grave. Your characters aren’t one dimensional.

I mean, sometimes they are. I know people have said that they found Patrick Grant, the baddie in The Haar, sort of one dimensional. And yeah, he is. I viewed The Haar as a fairy tale.  Quite a lot my books I view as fairy tales. He is the evil queen, the wicked stepmother—and I don't think that adding more characterization to him would have improved the book in any way. In fact, I think it would have detracted from it, because he just would have had an extra six, seven pages of what? Him at home, being mean to the staff? I don't know. I think sometimes people think that every character has to have this in-depth characterization, but actually, some of them don't need to.

I know sometimes people get really offended and shocked and appalled and horrified. But [when] I'm writing them, with one or two exceptions, I'm just sitting with a great big grin on my face because I'm having so much fun. I never set out to offend or appall someone. Offending someone is the easiest thing in the entire world. You throw in some racism, or something like that—it's so easy, it's pathetic. Anyone can offend anyone. There's no talent in that. There's no skill.

Whereas, grossing you out, making you laugh, making you feel something—that's much more interesting to me. So, yeah, I'm always surprised when people are offended at something, because I never set out to do that.

Definitely the most common complaint about my books was that there was too much sex or swearing in them. Less so about the violence! But sex and swearing—first of all, with the swearing, welcome to Scotland. Fuck it. I've been on my best behavior here.

But yeah, there seems to be this very sort of puritanical, anti-sex response as well. Perhaps the newer generation aren't my readership. My reading demographic seems to skew women aged 30 to 50, 60, or so. I'm happy with that.

That's very cool. I hope to be one of the 50- to 60-year-old women someday, still reading horror and finding the coolest authors.

I love to see someone who's older than me, who's just loving gruesome horror stuff. I'm like, "Yes, that's me! I'm gonna be that." There's no doubt about it, I'm in my mid 40s now. There's no turning back. 

I feel I have to ask you a question about self publishing. This is my read, and I’d be curious about your thoughts on it: It seems like there’s a component of the self publishing world that’s very grifty and preys on people's dreams. They're like, “Spend $500 on my video course and do the special incantation, and you'll print money!” And then there's a totally separate realm that feels very DIY, very punk.

You've actually nailed it in your question, especially with the punk rock aspect of it. I have turned down a trad publishing deal from a major publisher—one of the Big Four, they call it—because I value my independence more than anything. I love doing every single aspect of it.

Self publishing is an enormous amount of work, absolutely enormous. I went full time almost a year ago to write, and my wife was away the last couple of days, so it's the first two days I've taken off since. I [usually work] nine hour days—but it's because I absolutely love it. You've got your writing, your editing, your formatting. Once you've done all that, your marketing takes an enormous amount of time. And now that I've gotten slightly more well-known, I've got interviews, emails. I sell signed books through the store, that takes ages. It's a huge amount of work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. And what I love about it is that independence.

I'm autistic, so I only really can focus on what I want to focus on at any time. I’m currently working on ten books at once, but not jumping back and forth between all ten. It's like, “Which one am I going to focus on right now? This one's in this stage, so I'll do a few drafts.” I couldn't work with a publisher, because they'll say, "Right, we need the sequel to The Haar by October." And I'd be like, “Well…”

It's not for me, traditional publishing. For some people, that's the absolute goal. I've never really cared. I'm doing all right. People like my books, and I'm happy with that. I don't have this huge desire to find my books in airport bookshops or something. If they do, great—they now could do that, I've done wide distribution. In theory, you could find them in any shop.

But I just like writing, and I like that sort of punk rock attitude. I'm not punk rock guy, I'm very boring. I sit home and write. I don't really drink. I don't go out to nightclubs. I just sit with my pug. I watch horror films. Sometimes, I'll watch a musical. That's my life. But I love the punk rock spirit and ethos. I can write what I want, when I want. I don't have to answer to anybody, and I can just put it out there myself, and people can find it and read it and enjoy it. I absolutely love that.

Does punk rock still exist in this day and age? I don't know, but that feels like publishing punk rock to me.

I also notice more and more new releases that feel as though the publisher has rushed something to market. The developmental editing was maybe not there, or there are typos. I don't think that the Big Four always equate with quality anymore.

See, that's where the autistic hyperfocus comes in again. Also a complete love of language and grammar. I go over those books over and over again, looking at them from the point of view of someone who didn't write it. Most people say, “Always hire an editor to do your books.” I think that's a great idea that I don't do, because I know I can do it myself.

Am I right in thinking that the same Trevor Henderson who does your covers is the Trevor Henderson of Siren Head fame? 

Absolutely. Big Trev, aye. 

That is so cool! So many new releases don’t have original art. They have Shutterstock and Getty Images spliced together, and it’s just…

That little black silhouette of a man, with their back to you. That's not drawing me in, someone with their back to me. Get a grip!

I hate going into a bookshop now or just looking at the covers. They're just absolutely abysmal. I don't know how people choose—because I choose a book by its cover. The cover's hugely important to me, because that's what still draws me to books and films: an amazing poster, an amazing cover.

I was very lucky with Trevor, because I got in before Siren Head. I'd seen his work—he was doing a sort of footage type series of photos that people would send in, and he would put a ghoul of some variety in them. I loved that. So I got him to do The Forgotten Island. And you know, even though he's now designing creatures for Hollywood movies, he still does my covers when I ask him. I’m super grateful to him for that, because the fact is, he's not priced me out completely. He's a super lovely guy.

I want to bring back the days when we had actual paintings on book covers. Even the pulpiest old paperbacks used to have original art! That’s a very cool thing about self publishing—that you can get the exact cover that you want.

That's the one aspect where I'm like, right, I'm not going to do this myself. I've got this huge list of artists that I want to work with at some point. Some of them reached out to me, some of them I've just seen on Instagram or something. But, yeah, I will always be using actual artists. No AI from me, I'll tell you—because that's the next thing you've got to deal with. It will never be used by me, ever. Hopefully, I'm established enough now that people will know that.

I think it'd be really difficult now for a new author starting out, because people are going to be looking at your work saying, is this AI? Is this cover AI? I don't know how to navigate that, to be honest.

Especially when you have the whole self-publishing ecosystem where there are all these people saying, “You can publish 20 books a year, and if you make $200 from each of them, and you do the cover with AI…”

It just makes the self publishers who are really out there trying look bad. Self publishing already has this reputation as being amateur hour. And look, in many cases, it is. There's a lot of people who should never have written a book—but there's also thousands and thousands of really talented authors out there doing it all themselves, and the more AI slop piles on on top of that, the more we get buried under it. We have to crawl and say, “No, we're trying! We're good!”

AI really should be a wake up call for authors to put their own voice into their books. If you read one of mine, you can know fairly early on that it's me in the style of writing—the way I do these incredibly short little paragraphs, and the type of dialogue. Put your voice on the page! If someone's reading your book and saying, “Is this AI?” Then perhaps part of that problem is your boring writing. Put weird stuff that only could have come from your mind in there.

I've already taken you away from writing more books, so I will wrap up with one last question: Can you tell me anything about what you're currently working on?

I've just actually written out my schedule minutes ago—my next eleven. I've got a novella coming out. I've not really spoken about this much, apart from on my Patreon, but it’s—I don't even know how to classify it. I'd say it's a folk horror, but it's more anxiety horror or cringe horror. It's a book where you're just shouting at the page, “Get out! Get out of there, you idiot!!” for like, 100 pages.

After that, I've got two period pieces coming, which I've not really done before. One is about nuns. I was doing research on that earlier this year, so I went off to Italy and toured around 16th century convents, because it's set in an Italian convent in the 1890s. That's a wild one, that. We've got a medieval one coming. We've got ghosts. Oh, I can't talk about that one. There's one that’s gonna tie into some earlier stuff in a really cool way that I'm going to keep a secret.

One's almost finished, one's in its fifth draft, and the rest are fully outlined chapter by chapter for my next eleven. I'm pretty set until 2030. But then a new idea pops up, and one of those will get pushed aside.

I think that's very good news for for horror, for readers, and for books in general.

Next Up: Wild Card!

I originally planned to run a really lovely interview next week, but I might take a brief detour. After revisiting the 28 Days series, I’ve been thinking a lot about dystopian horror. I also fell in love with Alejandro Amenábar’s 1996 movie Tesis a few weeks ago and am still reeling. Or maybe I’ll be in an interview-editing mood this weekend after all! Who’s to say! We’ll find out next week together.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.