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Brutalist is the multi storey car park in Stourbridge It's Kerry Hadley-Pryce Week in Outsideleft and we're talking to the critically acclaimed author on her home grounds...

Brutalist is the multi storey car park in Stourbridge

It's Kerry Hadley-Pryce Week in Outsideleft and we're talking to the critically acclaimed author on her home grounds...

by Ancient Champion, Columnist
first published: January, 2025

approximate reading time: minutes

Is there a one word description of Lie of the Land?
KHP: Darkest.

Kerry Hadley-Pryce Week logo

Car Park

I feel like I’ve known her for what feels like 20 years and I feel like she has known people like me for just as long. I’m relaxed about the idea of Kerry Hadley-Pryce Week in Outsideleft and it begins auspiciously, especially well, with a phone call, from Kerry’s assistant, and directions to a meeting place in the Black Country, to talk about her new novel Lie of the Land, published by Salt Publishing on January 6th.  

Kerry is critically acclaimed for the artistry of Lie of the Land and as well as her previous novels, The Black Country, Gamble, God’s Country and numerous incursions into edgy and uncomfortable short story terrain. 

“Kerry will see you there,” the assistant says, with a reassuring and non-perfunctory cheer, a bright businesslike you’ll like it, air… Like they’d clearly never been anywhere near where I have been told to go. The brutalist, dank, damp, multi storey car park in the Black Country’s wintery Stourbridge. “Kerry said for you to park up top. For the view.” 

I don’t park up top. I park on the ground and take the lift. I don’t like heights. The lift smells of nothing. I know you didn’t expect me to say that. The heights I don’t like.  That soul escaping vertigo thing catholics know. And it’s raining sleet when I arrive and Kerry is not already there. So I have sometimes to myself, to approach the edge. Later I will say to her, in the form of a question, this view… This is your bardo. 

There’s a luminosity to the gloom, it’s midday and I’m in Stourbridge. Of course there is. I can’t stand it, I want to collude in a subterfuge, I exist at the coal face of artifice not art. Kerry’s worlds are all too real. 

I might tell you that Kerry’s characters often look like me and dress like me. Ha! Of course they don’t look like me or dress like me! They look like you and behave like your favourite friends and neighbours, with their misreading of their pathological conformity as individuality. Kerry polishes their dull sheen with an application of a kind of symbolistic unconscious ethnography to render their world whole. There’s a soupçon of Scott Fitzgerald and I don’t mean that slanderously slenderly and a mammoth hunk of Black Country rock and roll. Dick Diver would endure.

“Hi.” Kerry has called after emerging from a stairwell. Alerting, as one might, a trauma victim when approached from behind. She has two dogs with her. I couldn’t be anyone else, there’s nothing or no one up here except a few cars straddling the parking bays. 

Kerry approaches the edge and surveys the lie of the land through the murk. “Look at it, that view. It’s neither one thing nor the other, and I love that.” 

“It’s your Bardo…”

“Most definitely.”

We don’t look for long before Kerry says,  “Let’s go. We don’t have to take the stairs.”

Kerry Hadley Pryce reading from The Black Country

As we shape to leave, I begin with a convoluted, concatenated question. House style… 

Outsideleft: In Lie of the Land, there is a lot of… Looking. Peering and perhaps seeing. But characters do not always see what they want to see. There’s a large element of through the glass darkly maybe, something not fully understood on the other side, and a the wan reflection, the counterculture notes, masculinity faltering boxed in and enduring, adhering to tradition or archetype and therefore failed. An arthroscopic lack of self-awareness from all except Catherine, apparently who may or ultimately may not be a supernatural or maybe a transcendental figure?
Kerry Hadley-Pryce: I’m interested in what you think about Catherine. She definitely has, perhaps, a more philosophical quality, maybe even voicing what some of us think – or maybe wouldn’t even say. She represents someone who ‘has’, or appears to have all the trappings of things that people strive for. She is, to Jemma, what she might have, or what, if she’s not careful, she will have.

OL: Catherine? I get breathless with excitement whenever Catherine appears. Would you come up here with Jemma?
KHP: Let me think about this...
I would only come up here with someone I trusted and was perhaps friendly with. Since I know the way that Jemma thinks, she’s the same, so I don’t really believe she’d want to be up here with me.

OL: Seriously, is there a single one of your characters in Lie of the Land, that you’d invite over for tea?
KHP:
In fairness, I’m not an inviter-over-for-tea kind of person. Unsociability, see. But if you made me, it’d be Rory. I quite like him, in a shallow and objectifying kind of way.

OL: A lot of this work happens in the dark. Like a Hammer vampire horror, or 28 Days of Night, for me there’s a palpable relief when the morning comes. When I and your characters make it through until morning.
KHP:
You’re right about the Hammer horror. I’m a big fan. I know, I know… Seriously though, yes, it was a decision that the night, the dark, should play a role in the narrative. Life becomes fearful when there’s a massive secret to keep hold of, and the night – the dead of night – is such a fear-filled place for people who harbour guilt, isn’t it?

OL: Have you ever misplaced an earring? It's odd isn't it…Supposing I did read a piece of misplaced earring malarky in your book, I thought, that never ever goes well. Perhaps we should reconsider earrings as pairs. They should be sold in trios for reasons of plausible deniability?
KHP:
We should reconsider earrings sold in clumps. I say ‘clumps’ as a collective noun for several earrings – more than three, I mean. Selling earrings in pairs has always been ridiculously irritating. Manufacturers of earrings *know* that you’ll lose one and therefore have to buy another pair. On the other hand, if you’re one of those people who only have one ear pierced, a pair of earrings operates on an entirely different level. 

OL: Is there a one word description of Lie of the Land?
KHP:
Darkest.

Tomorrow, we'll take in the canal.


Essential Information
KERRY HADLEY-PRYCE WEEK at OUTSIDELEFT
1. Introducing KHP...
2. Excerpt from Lie of the Land
3. Brutalist is the multi storey car park in Stourbridge
4. The Canal
5. 
Welcome to the Walking Week
6. The Happy Shopper (#41)

Main car park image by Richard Rogerson from wikicommons
Kerry at Salt Publishing is here
Kerry is appearing at the Bear Bookshop in Bearwood on January 25th at 6pm, info here
And at the Wolverhampton LitFest with R.M. Francis, info here

Ancient Champion
Columnist

Ancient Champion writes for OUTSIDELEFT while relentlessly recording and releasing instrumental easy listening music for difficult people. The Champ is working on Public Transport, a new short story collection that takes up where 2021's Six Stories About Motoring Nowhere (Disco City Books) left off. It should be ready in time for the summer holidays. More info at AncientChampion.com


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