The science fiction horror story that perfectly sums up 2020

Imagine you woke up alone, in a room that was pitching and rattling and you didn’t know who you were or why you were there. Then you realise it’s a train carriage, and it’s full of dead people. And you don’t know where the train is going, or why.

David Quantick might have accidentally written the novel that completely sums up 2020.

“I had the idea about 15 years ago,” says Quantick of Night Train, out now from Titan Books. “Somebody waking up in a dark room that’s making a lot of noise and shaking violently, and then they realise they’re on a train, and I’d never done anything with it. And then it was… well, what happens? And the answer is they go into the next carriage. And that’s always a good way to think about writing. Well, what happens next?”

“What happens next?” could be a mantra for Quantick’s working life. In writing terms, he’s something of a jack of all trades and, somewhat annoyingly, a master at all of them. Night Train is his second novel for Titan, and his fifth one since his self-published debut Sparks in 2012. He’s written a clutch of music and comedy biographies with subjects ranging from The Beatles to The Clash, Bill Hicks to Richard Pryor. Two writing guides. A comic book series with the artist Shaky Kane.

He’s written for and appeared on radio, having his own slot on Collins and Maconie’s Hit Parade in the Nineties, and has a huge list of credits for TV writing, including the satirical The Day Today, Spitting Image, Brass Eye, Smack the Pony, Harry Enfield, Harry Hill, The Thick of It, and the HBO political comedy Veep, which won an Emmy in 2015.

And he began his writing career at NME, starting in 1983 and working at the music paper on what many – of a certain age – consider its glory years in the early 1990s.

Throughout all this, though, Quantick has had a love of science fiction literature, and with his latest two books, this month’s Night Train and his previous one for Titan last year, All My Colors, he’s firmly establishing himself in the genre he has such an affinity for.

Night Train is a paranoid, frenetic and above all funny tour de force. The mysterious woman starts to get snatches of her life back, including her name, Garland, and as she moves through the carriages on the seemingly endless train rushing through a perpetual darkness, she picks up two other travelling companions, the dour Banks and the youthful yet amicably violent Poppy, neither of whom can remember why they are on the train either.

It could perhaps be described as one of those allegorical science fiction novels that tell us we are all on a journey we don’t really understand where our past is meaningless and our future uncertain, and all that matters is the moment we are in. Except Quantick throws in monsters and mayhem and has far too much fun with it.

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“It wasn’t meant to be funny,” the writer explains. “It was meant to be really horrible and dark but every time I wrote a scene with the three characters it just ended up with them saying funny things. I kept saying to the characters, ‘Come on, come on, stop being silly’, and I had to keep putting in more and more bloodthirsty deaths to try to make it serious again. I was like, ‘Stop it, or I’m going to have to have someone explode.’ But they just kept making jokes.

“To write something like Night Train… it gave me a lot of freedom to do something like that, because otherwise people just think you’ve gone mad.”

So what are Quantick’s science fiction roots, then? “I was a big fan of John Wyndham when I was a kid, I loved Iain Banks, and I read loads of science fiction when I was younger, I watched loads of science fiction movies and TV.” Who’s he reading at the moment from the current crop of authors? “Becky Chambers [The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet] is very good, Tade Thompson is very good… his Rosewater novels are amazing books, they’re going to be big films one day.”

Quantick was born in South Yorkshire and then moved at an early age with his adoptive family to Plymouth. His Devon burr might be familiar to you from his voiceover narration of the mid-2000s reality show Coach Trip.

He studied law at University College London – “I had no talent for law at all” – and was there at the same time as Ricky Gervais, Lloyd Cole and Jane Fallon. “They were my more successful associates,” he says. “It was great being in London during that period, I really liked music, you could go and see the aftermath-of-punk bands and go out all the time… I really had no interest in law and no ability in it. I took the civil service exam in an attempt to be in the real world and I nearly failed it.”

Deciding the real world was probably not for him, Quantick then wrote to NME and told them “that I didn’t like it”. He says: “I remember writing, ‘Bob Seger is not enough’, because they’d done a review of Bob Seger.” He pauses. “I mean, I like Bob Seger now, but anyway, instead of telling me to go off and die, the NME editor invited me in and gave me some records, so I became a music journalist on £35 a week. And then everybody immediately went on strike for the summer.”

Quantick joined NME in 1983, and confesses the first few years were not particularly great ones for music. “Basically they’d had several golden ages, they’d had the Seventies with Bowie and Roxy Music, then they’d done punk really well… I mean, they had Julie Burchill and Danny Baker and Tony Parsons.

“The NME is always totally dependent on what’s going on in music to be good and it has to be a mixture of commercial and interesting, so when I came along there wasn’t a lot going on. There was the Smiths and REM but white guitar music was at a bit of a low. It was the MTV era and the NME was not very good at covering the MTV era so apart from the people it was a really boring time until about 1988 when Ecstasy came in and everything went mad.

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“Then I really loved that period, you had acid house, you had baggy, you had Madchester, and I was working with people like Stuart Maconie and Andrew Collins and I had a lot of fun at the end of the Eighties and in the Nineties as a music journalist.”

Quantick was at NME until 1997. “I was there too long, I remember one of the editors basically asking me if I was ever going to leave.” But the escape tunnel was already being dug, in the shape of a column that Quantick wrote with the late Steven Wells called Culture Vulture. The Scottish writer and TV and radio producer Armando Iannucci read the column and wrote to the pair asking if they wanted to work with him, and that ended up leading to writing for The Day Today, the magazine news show parody that was notable for its pool of talent including Rebecca Front, David Schneider, Doon Mackichan and, of course, for unleashing Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge on the world.

Quantick’s TV and radio career saw him both writing and making front-of-camera and mic appearances on a raft of shows, but it was in 2012 that he turned his hand to writing novels. His first effort was called Sparks, about a Gen X waster who is dumped by his girlfriend so travels between alternate realities looking for a version of his beloved Alison who won’t be put off by his slacker sensibilities.

“I wrote it, took it to an agent who liked it, and then went off it,” says Quantick. “But the fact that somebody had liked it meant it might not be crap, so I sent it to another agent and nobody really wanted it. Then my wife Jenna found an article about self-publishing and someone who had made a vast amount of money, so I put Sparks online and I didn’t make a vast amount of money, I made about £3 a week from it.”

However, the author Neil Gaiman liked the novel, and said so, calling Quantick “one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing”, and that gave him the impetus and confidence to write another. His next novel was The Mule, which was released in 2016 by the crowd-funding publisher Unbound. The Mule is an almost Hitchcockian caper in which an eccentric translator of books gets caught up in a dense and hilariously unlikely conspiracy after meeting a beautiful woman in a bar.

And that led to his association with Titan and his first novel for them last year, All My Colors. It’s about a man who can’t understand why none of his friends know anything about a book he vividly remembers reading, nor can he find it in any library or bookshop. So he decides to write it himself, achieves great success… and unleashes dark forces.

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The idea had its germination in Quantick’s own experiences. “Years ago I read a science fiction story as a teenager from a library book and it was all about a man living in a nightmare, and it had a Twilight Zone sort of twist which was that the real life was the nightmare and he was sleeping and dreaming a real boring life.

“And I could not find this story anywhere after that. I got obsessed, I started going on eBay and buying science fiction collections and I still can’t find it. At one point I was so obsessed I thought I’m going to have to write it myself, like someone who wants a TV set so goes and builds one out of cardboard. But I knew I couldn’t just go and write someone else’s story, but that made me think… what if someone did that? And then it was, what if there was a book and nobody could remember this book apart from you, what if this was…” He stops. “I can’t think of the name of any books now. Give me the name of a book.”

Um, On The Road, maybe? “OK, what if it was 1958 and you remembered On The Road and nobody else did. Of course, the Richard Curtis film Yesterday answers that in a different way; what would The Beatles’ songs sound like if someone else did them?”

All My Colors was a critical success and Quantick is justifiably proud of it. And his publishers Titan, who specialise in often quirky, left-field science fiction and fantasy, gave him a contract for Night Train, and allowed him to push the envelope of weirdness even further.

Quantick is currently writing a new novel called Black Ocean, which he describes as “the world’s first K-pop science fiction parallel universe novel”. Then he says: “Actually, it’s not about a parallel universe at all. It’s more like the world’s first K-pop science fiction… actually, shall I just tell you what it’s about? It’s about a teenage girl in North Korea who wakes up one day and finds herself in a K-pop training academy and it’s about K-pop and a conspiracy to destroy the world.”

The novel takes its title from the K-pop phenomenon where a gig audience will turn off their phones, lightsticks and any light sources to create a sea of darkness as a protest against the quality of the band currently onstage. “K-pop fans gave Trump a black ocean,” he adds.

Aside from that, he’s adapting All My Colors for a film company, and has one or two ideas at various stages, including a film project that is a romantic comedy “with a twist, obviously”. But writing quirkily different science fiction novels certainly seems to be his current jam.

Gaiman’s pronouncement that Quantick is one of writing’s “best-kept secrets” looks set to be superseded with the publication of Night Train, which is going to establish him as one of the most original genre writers in Britain. Get on board now, and say that you were there at the (almost) beginning.

And if anyone knows the name and author of that science fiction story Quantick has been searching for since he was a teenager, then he’d undoubtedly be delighted to hear it.

‘Night Train’ by David Quantick is out now from Titan Books