Interview with Psychological Thriller Author Simon Dillon

The spirit of Simon Dillon took human form in 1975, in accordance with The Prophecy. He kept a low profile during his formative years, living the first twenty or so of them in Oxford, before attending University in Southampton, and shortly afterwards hiding undercover in a television job. In the intervening years, he honed his writing skills and has now been unleashed on the world, deploying various short stories and novels to deliberately and ruthlessly entertain his readers. He presently lives in the South-West of England with his wife and two children, busily brainwashing the latter with the books he loved growing up.

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Title: Phantom Audition
Author: Simon Dillon
Publisher: Dragon Soul Press
Pages: 300
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Small-time actress Mia Yardley, recently widowed wife of renowned actor Steven Yardley, discovers her late husband’s secret acting diary. The diary details appointments made with a psychic medium, who advised Steven on which roles to take. It also raises questions about his mysterious and inexplicable suicide. Seeking answers, Mia speaks to the medium, but in doing so is drawn into an ever- deepening mystery about what happened to her husband during the final days of his life. Eventually, she is forced to ask the terrible question: was Steven Yardley murdered by a vengeful evil from beyond the grave?

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Can you tell us what your new book is about?

Phantom Audition is gothic thriller about widowed bit-part actress Mia Yardley, who investigates the mysterious suicide of her more famous actor husband, Steven. Before his death, Steven took a film role playing famous abstract artist Edward Bingley, who also committed suicide in mysterious circumstances. When Mia discovers her husband only took roles based on consultations with a medium, she comes to suspect her husband may have buried himself in the role a little too much - possibly to the point where supernatural forces were involved.

Can you tell us a little about your main and supporting characters?

Mia is a woman isolated by grief, surrounded by hostile staff and relatives (including Steven’s sister Jemima). They look down their nose at her, thinking her unworthy of inheriting the Yardley ancestral Jacobean mansion. The house intimidates and unnerves Mia, and she is desperately trying to rediscover who she is, to escape her husband’s shadow.

In flashbacks, Steven is introduced. He appears charming at first, but did his later behaviour (mirroring that of Edward Bingley) reveal his true character, or was something more sinister responsible for his descent into drug addicted hedonism?

Other key characters include Mia’s loyal best friend Bronwyn, who helps investigate Steven’s suicide, the enigmatic Etta Amble, the medium Steven consulted, and Verity, a member of Mia’s staff who may just have a few dark secrets of her own. Lurking behind the main story is the past relationship between Edward Bingley and his fellow artist Horace Bailey. Were they the best of friends, as everyone thought? Or was Bailey secretly jealous of Bingley’s immense success?

Your book is set in the south-west of England.  Can you tell us why you chose this location in particular?

Mainly because I live here and love the area. Many of my novels take place in the south-west, with its rugged coastlines and beautiful countryside. Then of course there’s Dartmoor; a perfect combination of beautiful, bleak, and sinister.

But most of the novel takes place inside Elm House, the Jacobean mansion. Many of these old buildings are fascinating, and a great many of them still contain priest holes, like in the book. Of course, a good sinister haunted house is essential for a story like this.

How long did it take you to write your book?

I finished the first draft of this one in two months, which is something of a record for me. Of course, that doesn’t include all the outlines, character profiles, and research I did beforehand, so add at least another month of work on top of that.

What has been the most pivotal point of your writing life?

That’s an exceptionally difficult question, and probably impossible to answer with any degree of accuracy. Certainly, being published by a traditional publisher was a pivotal point. Dragon Soul Press have published three of my gothic horror/thrillers so far, with Spectre of Springwell Forest, The Irresistible Summons, and of course this one, Phantom Audition.

What kind of advice would you give other gothic horror/thriller authors?

Find a great ending and work backwards from that point. Don’t waste your time on anything less than an ending that you personally are absolutely blown away by.

This may seem like odd advice considering the genre, but don’t try too hard to scare people - at least not at first. You want to draw them in, lulling them into the narrative, seducing them into your world… until they cannot escape. My favourite horror stories are those that don’t overtly scare the reader whilst the plot is in progress, but then send them back into the real world feeling profoundly disturbed and unsettled by the finale. Covertly getting beneath the skin of the reader is a skill to be mastered in this genre.

Be sparing with blood and gore and deploy it selectively. Gruesome, gross-out sequences tend to result in either lurid fascination or revulsion, not fear. The more you use them, the less effective they are.

Focus on building suspense, mystery, and something that gets the reader consistently turning pages.

Don’t overcomplicate the narrative but have a single, ideally sympathetic protagonist, who is easy to relate to and root for - even if they make poor choices.

Be aware of genre conventions and master them. Don’t break an honoured convention unless for this reason: to replace it with something better. Working within a formula is fine, but don’t be predictable. Agatha Christie worked within a formula, with consistently unpredictable results. Give the reader what they want, but not the way they expect it.

Don’t make your premise too outlandish and unrelatable. All the best gothic horror comes from easily relatable real-life situations, often exaggerated and dialed up to eleven. For example, a child who acts up in school causing grief for the parents is a real-life situation that can then be exaggerated into a horror tale. Is the child possessed, for instance?

Finally, whatever you do, don’t consciously insert any kind of heavy-handed “message”. Grinding the religious or political axe is for preachers, politicians, activists, and so on, not authors in this genre. Instead, simply concentrate on telling a good story. Whatever is important to you will then be inherent in the text. What’s more, your beliefs will come over far less finger-waggingly and far more convincingly.




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