Denis Evans - An Interview

Open Shelf caught up with author Denis Evans to find out more. 

You can find The Infinite Velvet Dark HERE.

What was the very first spark that led to The Infinite Velvet Dark?

It was quite literally a dream, years ago now. One of those rare ones you wake from knowing you need to catch before it disappears. I scribbled down what I could and then spent the next few days turning it over in my head.

What survived from that dream was the catalyst at the centre of the book, the existential mechanism the whole story eventually turns on. I have to be annoyingly vague about that for spoiler reasons, but it left me with a very strong feeling and a lot of questions I couldn't answer. That is usually a good sign for me. If an idea keeps nagging at me after the dream itself has faded, I know there may be a story in it.

So it went onto my ever-growing list of story ideas and sat there patiently until I finally had the time, and probably the nerve, to find out where it went.

The central premise is immediately striking: a man goes into debt simply to be allowed to work. Where did that idea come from?

That one came out of a fairly bleak stretch of real life. I started noticing how much of my time and money seemed to be going on permission rather than on the thing I was actually trying to do: fees, taxes, certificates, renewals, subscriptions, forms, and hoops to jump through just to keep moving.

At the same time, I was dealing with technology being quietly retired underneath me. Perfectly capable hardware or software would suddenly become 'unsupported', so staying compatible meant buying what was, in practical terms, the same thing again simply to carry on doing work I already knew how to do.

None of that is a conspiracy, and that's exactly what interested me. You don't need one villain in a dark room plotting to trap people. You only need enough separate systems, each acting perfectly reasonably in its own interests, all taking a little piece of your ability to participate. Push that curve far enough and you arrive at Elias's world, where a person's income is effectively spoken for before they've earned it, and permission to work has itself become the product being sold.

At that point you've reinvented indentured servitude with much better branding. Dark, I know.

Was Elias always the protagonist, or did he emerge as the story developed?

He was always the protagonist, but he was absolutely not always the Elias in the finished book.

The Elias in the original dream was a hardened career criminal, and I didn't particularly like him. The story treated him accordingly too: his arc was shorter, harsher, and the Infinite Velvet Dark he found did not end especially well for him.

What changed was that I realised a criminal can act on a world like this. He can steal from it, outwit it, work around it - maybe even flourish in it. In a strange way, that lets the world off the hook. Once Elias became a welder instead, just a basically decent working man with no leverage, no special access and nothing but his own hands and a stubborn refusal to give in, everything became more uncomfortable and much more interesting.

The better a man he became, the more painful it was to watch that world grind him down. I think that was when I really started caring about him.

The novel starts with a rooftop chase rather than exposition. Why did you choose to introduce readers to the world through action rather than explanation?

Simply because nothing else I tried had the same grip. I did agonise over the order, and I tried several more sensible ways into the story, but every one of them felt like I was politely showing the reader through the front door when what I really wanted was to grab them by the sleeve and pull them straight into Elias's problem.

The rooftop won on shock and momentum, and eventually I stopped arguing with it.

It is also where the original dream began, so in a sense the book has always opened there. That first vision started on the rooftop and ran into what readers will recognise as the much larger, stranger part of the story. Everything I later built before it was me asking, 'All right, how on earth did this man get here?'

One fair warning is that the language in that opening is strong. Elias genuinely believes he is about to die. Cleaning him up in that moment would have made him less convincing, and I think it would have made the writing less honest too.

The city feels oppressive, lived-in, and authentic without lengthy explanations. How did you approach worldbuilding while resisting the temptation to over-explain?

Honestly, I had to explain less than I expected, and I suspect that's partly a sign of the times rather than any great skill on my part. A lot of what I'm describing sits just close enough to things we already recognise that readers arrive half-briefed. I didn't need to explain the system in a lecture. I only needed to show somebody trying to live inside it. I know - I'm a riot at parties.

The temptation to over-explain was constant, though. Earlier drafts had more screens, more background wars, more crime figures, more commentary, more little pieces of Elias mentally explaining the world. By the third or fourth read I realised those passages were doing the opposite of what I wanted. They were slowing the story down and actually making the world feel smaller because I was closing off the reader's imagination.

So a lot went in the bin. That's one of the less glamorous parts of self-publishing: there isn't an editor standing over you saying, 'Yes, lovely paragraph. Cut it.' You have to become that person yourself. A few of those cuts hurt, but the book is better for them.

I have noted the tactile quality of the setting, from rain-slick stairwells to decaying advertising murals. What role do sensory details play in your writing process?

A huge one, because I tend to see a scene before I can properly write it. If I can't picture where everyone is standing, what the surfaces feel like, where the light is coming from, or what is broken, I usually can't make the scene behave.

There are two perfectly valid ways to write a setting. You can give the reader only a few lines and let their imagination build almost everything, or you can make the place concrete enough that they feel they could walk around it. This book needed the second approach. Elias's world is strange enough already, so the ordinary details are what give the reader something solid to hold onto. The rain, mould, damaged stairwells and half-dead adverts aren't just decoration. They're evidence that people actually have to live there, and that nobody in charge has cared about it for a very long time.

It also helps me solve scenes. A rooftop is just a rooftop until I start asking what is on it, what is broken, where Elias could hide, what he could climb, and why none of those things will save him. Once my mind's eye has supplied the props, the set becomes real enough for me to write inside it.

Visually, Blade Runner is obviously somewhere in my DNA. I still think about that contrast between gorgeous neon and the soaked, grimy darkness underneath it. A friend of mine, the author Eamonn Bradley, does something I admire enormously in The Ranger too: he can place you so firmly in a landscape or a room that you almost know where everything is without being told you're being shown. That's a standard I had somewhere in the back of my mind.

The city itself almost feels like a character. Did you consciously write it that way, or did that emerge naturally?

It emerged, I think, and then I noticed it happening and rather leaned into it. I didn't sit down thinking, 'I'll make the city a character.' I set out to build a system, and a system that large has to live somewhere. But once the housing, transport, credentials, debt, work and paperwork all belong to the same machine, the place stops feeling like scenery. It starts making decisions for people.

There is somebody in the book you could reasonably call a villain, but even he is being squeezed by the same machinery in his own way. He isn't the source of Elias's situation. He's another symptom of it, doing what the system rewards him for doing. Remove him and somebody else would probably fulfil the contract tomorrow.

That, to me, is much more unsettling than a single evil mastermind. Elias has nobody he can confront and defeat. He has the city's opinion of him, and the city doesn't care who he is.

The book presents a future where debt, bureaucracy, and certification have become tools of control. Were there any real-world influences behind those systems?

Oh, absolutely. Probably too many, if I'm honest.

Selling a house, arranging bridging finance and buying another one when moving home, gave me a fresh appreciation for how exhausting ordinary bureaucracy can become when several organisations all need something from you at once. Or, more accurately, feel entitled to it - and once they have it, dragging their heels and responding in their own sweet time (or not - giving rise to the stress of constant chasing for progression or closure).

In my work as a developer I've also had expiring subscriptions, credentials and certificates coming out of my ears, plus the constant pressure of software and hardware becoming obsolete because something further up the chain has moved on.

None of those things on its own is sinister. Most even have perfectly sensible reasons behind them. What interested me was the cumulative effect. A bureaucracy doesn't need an evil intention in order to feel oppressive to the person at the bottom of it. Each organisation can be behaving reasonably, each fee can be defensible, and you can still end up with somebody whose time, money and choices are being steadily consumed from every direction.

So I didn't have to invent Elias's world from nothing. I mostly took things that already irritate or exhaust us, turned the dial rather further than I'd like reality to go, and asked what happens if there is nowhere left outside the system to stand.

My review notes that you trust readers to keep up rather than stopping to explain everything. How do you determine what to leave unsaid?

My rough test is whether the reader can get there from behaviour. If a character's reaction already tells you what something means, stopping to explain it as well risks insulting the reader twice: once by assuming they didn't notice, and again by making them read the explanation anyway.

The other half is Elias himself. He doesn't explain his world because it is his world. None of us walk into our own kitchens and mentally narrate what a kettle is for. Anything Elias would take for granted, I try to let him take for granted too. That means the reader learns the setting from the edges, slightly out of order, the same way you might learn a country you've just moved to.

US-CAN is probably my favourite example. I never stop and explain exactly what happened to the United States and Canada, when it happened, or whether anybody was asked. People simply use the name as though it has always been there. Whether the two countries formally merged, drifted into some shared authority, or merely became so entangled that ordinary people stopped distinguishing between them is, to me, more interesting left as a question.

I like giving the reader enough pieces to build something, but not necessarily handing them the picture on the box.

Your prose often feels dense, sensory, and immersive. Do you write with visual images in mind, or is the rhythm of the language equally important to you?

Image first, almost always. I usually see the scene before I have a sentence for it, and a lot of the writing process is simply trying to get what I can see onto the page without losing too much in transit.

The opening rooftop is a good example because its geography had to make sense. Elias is savvy and survival-minded, so if there were an obvious place to hide or a sensible route off that roof, he'd use it. I needed to know where the stairwell housing was, what was on the roof, how high things were and what he could physically reach before I could write his decisions honestly.

Rhythm tends to arrive in the second pass. I read a lot of it aloud. Does it flow? Does it stumble in the right place? Is a sentence too long for somebody who is panicking, or too clipped for a quiet reflective moment? Sometimes a sentence is perfectly accurate but still feels the wrong shape, and I can usually hear that before I can explain why.

So the image builds the scene and the rhythm decides whether the prose survives, I suppose. That sounds suspiciously tidy now that I've said it.

The action scenes carry a powerful sense of momentum and claustrophobia. How do you create tension on the page without losing clarity?

The first thing is geography. I want the reader to know where the door is, where the drop is, what's behind Elias and what he can reach before everything starts moving. Once they're standing in the right place, I can speed things up without forcing them to stop and redraw the room in their head. To my mind, confusion isn't tension. It's just confusion, and it is a very quick way to throw somebody out of a scene.

The second thing is that Elias's attention narrows under pressure. He stops noticing the whole environment and starts noticing only what might keep him alive: the ledge, the distance, his footing, the state of his hands, the next usable object. That narrowing does a lot of the claustrophobic work for me.

I do the same thing with the prose. Paragraphs tend to get shorter, sentences harder, and unnecessary dialogue tags or observations disappear. When Elias has time to think, the language can wander with him. When he has three seconds to make a decision, it shouldn't.

Several chapters have been described as feeling almost like short films or self-contained vignettes. Was that a deliberate structural choice?

Not entirely consciously, although I'm not surprised it came out that way. I've spent a lifetime watching films and television, and I naturally think in scenes. I tend to see a moment quite clearly, write that moment, and only afterwards worry about how it joins to what came before and after.

It turned out to suit this book. Dystopia can become exhausting if it is just one long unbroken descent. Misery without shape eventually becomes background noise. Giving sections their own little arc lets the reader finish something, feel something specific, then move on rather than simply trudging through another fifty pages of gloom.

It also gave me permission to step sideways when the story needed it. The Art interlude, for example, can stand on its own because by then the book has quietly taught the reader that a chapter doesn't always have to behave like the one before it.

The novel balances large-scale ideas with intensely personal moments. Which of those comes more naturally to you as a writer?

The personal moments, I think, although the big ideas are probably the ones that make the most noise in my head.

I genuinely enjoy the small human scenes more. A conversation, a look, somebody doing one decent thing for somebody else. They feel instinctive to write because I can concentrate on what a person is feeling rather than managing an entire world at once.

The large-scale ideas arrive differently. Once one takes hold, my brain tends to branch in six directions at once and I end up frantically making notes before half of it disappears. It's exciting, but also oddly stressful because suddenly one idea has consequences for five chapters, three pieces of history and something a character said eighty pages ago.

The satisfying part is when those two scales finally meet. The huge idea only really matters to me once I can see what it does to one person in one room.

Elias is not a revolutionary, hero, or chosen one. He's a welder trying to survive. What interested you about telling the story through someone so ordinary?

I wanted him to be somebody you could actually know.

Elias isn't secretly important. Nobody has been waiting for him. He hasn't got a unique ability, a prophecy, an organisation or finances behind him, or even particularly good luck. He's a welder. He's tired, broke, occasionally sarcastic, and mostly wants the world to leave him alone long enough to earn a living, or at least survive in a fashion.

And I love that kind of protagonist. I've always had a soft spot for stories that puncture the 'chosen one' idea. LEXX did that in its own wonderfully strange way, and Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain books surprised (and absolutely delighted me!) when I discovered that the serious, heroic-looking figure on the covers was actually spending a fair amount of his time desperately trying NOT to be a hero, and somehow not only consistently surviving, but actually gaining thoroughly undeserved respect, fame and honour whilst doing so!

Elias is obviously a very different character, and it’s a grim alternative future that he is an unfortunate participant in, but that idea stayed with me. I wanted to know what happens when something enormous happens to somebody who isn't destined for anything.

Because that's pretty much most of us, isn't it?

Much of the novel's emotional impact comes from Elias's exhaustion, persistence, and small moments of hope. How did you ensure those quieter elements remained visible amid the larger narrative?

I don't think I consciously protected those moments at first. I just found that I cared about them more than I expected to.

Once Elias stopped being the rather unpleasant man from my original dream and became this basically decent, exhausted working bloke, I didn't want his life to turn into one uninterrupted catalogue of misery. Real people don't work like that. Even when things are awful, we still laugh at something stupid, notice something beautiful, help somebody, get ridiculously pleased by a small kindness, or convince ourselves tomorrow might be better.

Those moments became important because they're the pieces of Elias the system hasn't managed to take from him. It can take his money, his time, his choices and eventually almost everything familiar around him, but he can still care about another person.

By the end I think his stubborn ability to remain Elias, and to keep some capacity for empathy, interested me far more than whether he could simply 'win'.

The municipal housing sequence has resonated strongly with readers. Why was it important to focus on simple comforts like a functioning window, a room with no assigned purpose, or a key with a space for a name?

Because 'home' is made up of ridiculously small things when you actually stop and think about it.

Elias doesn't dream of being rich. His ambitions have been ground down so far that a window he can physically open feels extraordinary, especially when he's living in a cube pod where even that would be a very bad design feature. A room that doesn't have to serve a basic set defined purpose feels extravagant. And that little blank space on the key fob, waiting for someone's name, is perhaps the closest the system ever comes to saying, 'This is yours. You belong here.'

I found that surprisingly emotional to write.

[SPOILER]And then, of course, Elias gives it away. That's the part that mattered most to me. He wants those things desperately, but once he sees how Art, Dana and little Janik are still living, under that motorway, he can't un-know what he's seen. He doesn't make a speech about sacrifice. He just changes the name on the opportunity and invents an excuse for passing it on to Art, in order to have him accept it without shame, guilt or concern for Elias.

I think that tells you more about Elias than anything I could have had him say.

One of the book's strengths is showing how bureaucracy can shape lives as effectively as violence. What drew you to that theme?

Probably the fact that bureaucracy is so ordinary. Violence announces itself. Paperwork can quietly alter the course of your life while everybody involved remains polite.

I've always disliked faceless systems, especially the moment when something plainly affecting a human being becomes a case number, a policy, a field on a form or 'the process'. Nobody necessarily has to be cruel. In fact, everyone can be perfectly pleasant while the outcome itself is brutal.

That fascinated me for Elias because he isn't fighting a dictator. He can't storm a building, expose one corrupt official and fix everything. Most of the people he encounters are just doing their jobs inside rules they didn't write. The harm comes from the accumulation of those rules and from the fact that no single person feels responsible for the whole result.

I find that much more frightening than an obvious villain, perhaps because we've all had at least a tiny taste of it.

The story begins grounded in debt, labour, and survival, but eventually opens into something much larger and stranger. How early did you know the true scope of the novel?

Very early, oddly enough. The grand scale was already there in the original dream, although in a much simpler form. In fact, that was the part I knew first.

What I didn't yet have was a believable road from an ordinary man's life to that enormous second half. Once I changed Elias from the unrepentant criminal in the dream into the man he became, I had to work backwards and build the debt, labour, housing and survival story around him in a way that would make the reader understand why he is where he is when the impossible finally happens.

So the cosmic part wasn't me continually making the story bigger. If anything, I spent most of the writing process making the beginning smaller, more human and more specific so that the later scale actually meant something.

A universe is impressive. A universe happening to someone you've come to care about is something else.

There's a recurring tension between systems that reduce people to records and individuals struggling to retain their humanity. Was that one of the central themes from the start?

Yes, although I didn't realise at first just how dominant it would become.

To come back to something I said earlier - I've never been comfortable with faceless systems or with the way a person can disappear behind an account number, a status, a category or a piece of policy.

That was present from the beginning, but initially it was more background texture than central theme.

As I built the nuts and bolts of Elias's world, I kept finding real-world echoes I could push a little further, and the theme grew almost by itself. The more efficiently the system classified people, the more important it became to me that Elias remained stubbornly difficult to reduce to a record.

I think that's also why the friendships matter so much. Art doesn't know Elias as a file. He knows the man. That distinction becomes incredibly important in a world increasingly designed not to make one.

The title The Infinite Velvet Dark is evocative and mysterious. What does it mean to you?

It came from trying to find words for something that is almost impossible to describe without falling into familiar phrases about darkness, stars and infinity.

'Infinite' gives me the scale. 'Dark' gives me the obvious fear of it. 'Velvet' changes the feeling. Velvet can be black and light-catching at the same time; it can look bottomless but also soft, almost comforting. Move it slightly and there is a sheen across it, little points and changes in the surface. That felt right for the way Elias's relationship with the dark evolves.

At first it is absence, danger and the unknown. Later it becomes something much more complicated: still immeasurable, still frightening, but also beautiful, intimate and, in a strange way, home-like.

I liked that the same three words could mean something different depending on where Elias was emotionally when he looked into it.

The review highlights the Art interlude as one of the novel's most emotionally resonant sections. What inspired you to step away from Elias's perspective at that point in the story?

Art changed while I was writing him. I originally had a different arc in mind for him, and readers may be able to guess from his full name what sort of direction I was initially considering. But the more time I spent with him, the less interested I became in using him as a mechanism and the more I liked him as a person.

By that point Elias is carrying his own assumptions, suspicions and regrets about Art, but he is no longer in any position to check whether those assumptions are fair. That bothered me. I wanted the reader to be allowed something Elias couldn't have: a look at Art when Elias wasn't there.

The interlude also gave me a chance to show the shape of Elias's absence from the other side. Up to then the story is naturally preoccupied with what has happened to Elias. Art reminded me that when somebody disappears, the story doesn't stop for everybody they leave behind.

The revelation that there is effectively no procedure for someone like Elias simply disappearing is quietly devastating. Why was it important to explore the consequences of absence rather than focusing solely on the missing person?

Because disappearing doesn't only happen to the person who disappears.

From Elias's point of view, everything has changed beyond recognition. But back home people are still getting up, going to work, making dinner and wondering where the hell he went. They don't get the explanation the reader gets. They just get the empty space.

What interested me with Art was that the system is extremely good at recording people when they're where it expects them to be, but surprisingly bad at understanding a person who simply falls out of it. There isn't a neat box for what happened to Elias, so Art is left trying to make meaning out of absence.

And uncertainty can be crueller than grief. Grief at least gives you something solid to begin accepting. Art can't properly mourn Elias, then move on and find true closure, because there is still that tiny possibility that he escaped.

Then Janik once again asks when he's coming back. That one hurt, as it freshly opens up the wound for him each time he is asked, and it brings it all back to the forefront of his mind, to agonise and second-guess himself over ‘what may be’, once again.

Art's determination to believe that Elias "got out" is both hopeful and heartbreaking. What were you trying to capture about friendship and grief in those scenes?

That very human habit of keeping one small door open when closing it would hurt too much.

Art genuinely has grounds for hope. There is no body. People do disappear and turn up years later. So when he tells himself Elias got out, he isn't inventing something completely impossible. But he is also choosing the version of the story he can live with.

I think we do that for people we love all the time, particularly when there can never be a definitive answer. We leave room for the kinder possibility. In Art's case it also gives him a kind of emotional balance: Elias once gave him and his family a chance at a better life, and Art needs to believe that somehow Elias found one too — and that he was hopefully instrumental in that.

The tragedy is that hope is doing two jobs at once. It is comforting him, and it is postponing grief. That's what I was trying to get at with 'living in hope'.

Janik's simple question, "When's your friend coming back to see us?" has a powerful emotional impact. Do you find that the smallest moments are often the hardest to write?

Oh, absolutely.

The shorter the moment, the fewer places there are to hide. If I've got several paragraphs, the effect can come from the accumulation of detail. If I've got one sentence, every word has to earn its place.

I can spend a frankly ridiculous amount of time changing a tiny line, reading it aloud, putting the original back, changing one word, deciding the first version was better, then staring at it again the next morning.

Janik's question works for me because he isn't trying to be poignant. He's a child asking a perfectly reasonable question about the nice man he remembers. The pain belongs entirely to Art, and to the reader who knows why Art can't answer honestly.

Those are often the lines that take the longest because if I push them too hard, they stop feeling true.

After spending so much time with this world and these characters, what do you feel The Infinite Velvet Dark is ultimately saying about people, even amid all its dystopian darkness?

That people endure, I think, but not just in the grim, teeth-clenched sense of surviving another day.

Elias is pushed an absurdly long way, and the thing I kept coming back to was how difficult it is to completely extinguish somebody's capacity to care. Unfairness can make people bitter, certainly, but it can also make them fiercely protective of fairness. Being treated without empathy can make the smallest act of empathy from somebody else feel enormous.

For all the darkness in the book, the things that matter most to Elias are eventually companionship, friendship, empathy, balance, peace and, yes, even genuine love, in a form. Not winning. Not becoming powerful. Not proving himself important.

I'd like readers to come away feeling that the book isn't really arguing that people are small in an enormous universe. If anything, I think it ends up saying the opposite: that kindness, memory and connection are astonishingly large things, precisely because the universe doesn't owe us any of them.

That's the hopeful part for me. I didn't set out to write a hopeful book, but somehow it got in there anyway.

And that was that.

But then Denis dropped in something else, a thought of his own that didn't fit any of the questions. We love when authors go rogue during an interview!

One thing I probably over-analyse is whether a character's decision genuinely belongs to that character. Out-of-character plot contrivances are a pet hate of mine, especially when somebody suddenly becomes less intelligent simply because the plot needs them to walk into danger.

So I spent a slightly ridiculous amount of time making sure Elias had already considered the obvious alternatives. On the rooftop, for example, the height of the stairwell housing, the useless door, the lack of cover and the absence of nearby roofs aren't just scenery or filler. They're there so the reader can see that he hasn't missed the easy solution. If Elias doesn't take option X, I want there to be a good reason why option X doesn't actually work.

I tried to give the antagonist the same courtesy. He has his own habits, experience and sense of risk, and he shouldn't suddenly behave foolishly just because I need Elias to escape. I think readers forgive an extraordinary situation far more readily than they forgive a character acting like a different person for one convenient paragraph.

Thanks to Denis for joining us to discuss The Infinite Velvet Dark and more!

You can read more about Denis and his work HERE.