Today we’re excited to be joined by Leigh Radford whose debut novel One Yellow Eye wove an emotionally rich and compelling story full of humanity and science, often undermining expectations. We delve into the themes explored in the book and using horror to explore them in innovative ways.
Hi Leigh, thank you for joining us today. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your book One Yellow Eye?
It’s such a pleasure, thank you for having me.
I used to work as a broadcast journalist, first in sport, then across the arts, making programmes and documentaries for digital radio and podcasts back when no one listened to them! Then I was a book publicist for a long time. I always wanted to write but never had the courage to, like so many aspiring authors.
One Yellow Eye is my debut, it’s pitched as horror but it’s fundamentally a love story about how far we’ll go to keep the ones we love alive, and it’s inspired by my experiences of nursing my wonderful Dad, Roger, when he was dying from cancer. Grief changed me as a person and I needed an outlet to process my complex bereavement, so I turned to writing.
The novel begins in the aftermath of a viral outbreak in which the infected have developed all the hallmarks of a zombie virus – the lumbering gait, the bleeding from the eyes, a voracious desire to bite each other. Three months after the last of the infected were exterminated, life is struggling back to normal. However, one woman, Kesta Shelley, harbours a potentially deadly secret. Her infected husband Tim lies handcuffed to the radiator in their spare bedroom, while she works relentlessly and increasingly unethically as a biomedical scientist to try and bring him back from the undead.
This is such a unique take on the apocalypse. What informed your decision to tell the story in this way and utilise classic horror tropes through this lens?
One of my favourite films is Edgar Wright’s Shaun Of The Dead. I love the bittersweet closing image of Nick Frost’s zombie character being kept in Simon Pegg’s garden shed, blithely playing X Box. When I was looking after Dad, that image came back to me because I was anxious about shielding him from Covid at a time when he had virtually no natural immunity due to his leukemia. Anything could have killed him, and it felt like my sole responsibility to stop that from happening. I came back to that concept, the concealment of a zombie by someone totally devoted to them and unable to accept their tragic fate, after Dad died. I’ve always found zombies to be a particularly chilling horror trope because they are essentially just us but stripped of our humanity. Losing our agency so abruptly is terrifying. And it felt very real to me, that turning point when someone is dying, when they are no longer entirely there as you knew them. I know that’s grim, but it’s a difficult truth to accept. Most people aren’t afforded the luxury of a pretty death. I wanted to use zombies as a way of writing about terminal illness in an honest and hopefully relatable way. Death is messy and bleak and horrifying yet somehow my Dad and I managed to laugh through it. That was how we coped. I wanted to be true to that. When you lose someone, there can be no happy ending, no matter how hard you try.
The way you explore grief in this novel is astounding, brave and raw. How did you approach tackling this topic in this particular way?
It was something I had survived and needed to write about as a catharsis. I wrote about the pain I had internalized when I was caring for Dad. You can’t sit around crying when someone needs constant support, you have to swallow it down, compartmentalize it, never let them see how much it’s affecting you. My Dad was so strong, I owed it to him to follow his lead. I lost him incrementally over many months, I knew his death was coming, that I couldn’t prevent it, and that things would get harder and harder. I didn’t always get things right. But when Dad died my grief detonated. I was so full of anger and blame. I channeled the unpalatable things I felt into Kesta’s character and her actions. I had no confidence that I’d be able to write a good story, but I knew I had insight into how disabling grief could be and that might resonate with readers who’d been through it too. I hope it’s given the novel its heart.
What is one message or lingering thought that you’d like readers to take away from this book?
That grief comes in all shapes and sizes, but the common denominator is that it really bloody hurts. Grief changes you and it’s not always something you recover from fully. If you’re going through a bereavement, be gentle with yourself, hold on, keep going, day by day. If you’re not going through it, then lucky you – but please try and offer the best support and compassion you can to any friends or family in need. Their grief is not something for you to be embarrassed by or to feel awkward around. Please show up and be supportive, you don’t need to be a miracle worker, just be there, just keep checking in, don’t gaslight the griever into feeling like it hasn’t happened or that they need to hurry up and heal. We should always remember that we never truly know what someone is going through unless we ask them, and unless they feel able to share it with us.
How do you think your background in publicity, journalism and production informs your writing?
I think it helps to clarify the book’s hook or specific talking points. If you want to promote it, you do need to think objectively about its genuine interest, themes or topics that could spark conversation or debate amongst readers. These might be universal human experiences like grief or something that’s more specific to you as the writer which could then be of interest to readers for you to share. It’s hard to engage people with a total fictional story, so it’s key to find relatable, common ground. Thinking about it as a conversation outside of the scope of the story can help to connect it with readers and in turn with journalists who do like to find real life lurking in fiction if they’re to engage with it.
If you could re-examine any other classic horror trope, what would it be and what would your new lens entail?
My second novel She’s All The Rage is about possession and exorcism and I am hoping that book three is at least vampire adjacent. I think that there are so many possibilities with horror tropes because they are usually inspired by our deepest and darkest universal fears, so they always have emotional upheaval or some aspect of the human experience in crisis at their heart.
What songs or music would serve as your ideal soundtrack for One Yellow Eye?
I write in total silence because I’m easily distracted, but I always start planning out a story by compiling a soundtrack that feels fitting for it, which I then listen to over and over again on the long walks I take to clear my head when I’m worrying about plot. I find this really helpful because it helps set the tone of the story and which songs might underscore or power particular scenes. I have about twenty songs on the One Yellow Eye soundtrack, but particularly Everlong by Foo Fighters, Monkey Gone To
Heaven by Pixies, and two excellent covers, the Babes In Toyland cover of All By Myself by Eric Carmen, and The Wombats cover of Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love. I like to make things sweepingly romantic while still keeping it punk.
What books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
One of the genuine and unexpected privileges of being a writer is being asked to read and blurb the books of other writers. I mean seriously, what a treat. I’ve loved The Brides by Charlotte Cross, a gothic, sapphic imagining of the lives of the women who become the brides of Dracula. I got to read Rotten Heart by Kat Dunn, which is a Hamlet inspired revenge story, and found it gripping. A book I have had on my TBR list and need to get to asap is Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor. A forbidden romance between a painter and a priest set during a sweltering New York summer? Er, yes please!
If possible, please can you share a little about what you are currently working on or any upcoming projects you have?
I have a short story in the upcoming Beasts of England folk horror collection with Dead Ink Books publishing this autumn which I’m excited about. And I have just had the publishers sign off on my second novel after what felt like a mammoth slog – the book two terror is very real, and I still feel like One Yellow Eye was a fluke somehow. She’s All The Rage is out in early 2027. It’s about a thirty-something woman, down on her luck, living in New York and working in the cut-throat world of advertising, who unwittingly becomes the new wearer of a second-hand purple and silver three-piece suit, which may or may not be possessed by an entity hellbent on mischief and revenge. It’s about how childhood shame can infect the fabric of who we are as adults no matter how hard we try to dress the part.
Finally if you could only use five words to describe One Yellow Eye, what would they be?
Either cannot let this love die or if we’re talking adjectives then harrowing, heartbreaking, propulsive, real, and funny.
