M. John Harrison is eighty today. For an overview of his life and work, I would recommend this recent video from Steve Andrews, aka Outlaw Bookseller, who guides us through the chronology of Mike’s novels and stories with the help of his gorgeous collection of first editions.
The first story of Mike’s I read was ‘The Ice Monkey’, in a 1980 anthology called New Terrors 2, edited by Ramsey Campbell. I stumbled across this little paperback in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, and bought it primarily because it contained a story by Chris – ‘The Miraculous Cairn’ – that I had not yet read. This would have been in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, before Chris and I met and before I sold my first story.
Anthologies are strange beasts, their importance (or otherwise) becoming clear only with the passage of time. Looking down that table of contents now, ‘The Miraculous Cairn’ and ‘The Ice Monkey’ shine out clearly as flecks of gold in a pan of river gravel. When I first happened upon New Terrors 2, my own journey as a writer was barely begun. I kept rereading both stories obsessively, Chris’s scintillating ‘episode’ in the Dream Archipelago sequence as an internal, foundational lodestone and Mike’s gritty hyperrealism as a way of writing – of putting words together – that I’d been searching for without knowing it existed. I’d heard his name but not read his work. This story – the twisting of an ostensibly familiar urban landscape into something more liminal, less knowable – seemed to offer something of my own anti-mimetic apprehension of the mundane, realised in a language I responded to on a gut level but could not dream of emulating.
Since then, I’ve read everything he’s written, more or less. I’ve made some progress as a writer, but the importance of Mike’s achievement has never lessened for me. I still love ‘The Ice Monkey’, which remains – as it does in the story – a kind of talisman, a single image that is simultaneously the embodiment of an entire oeuvre.
We are very lucky to have a new MJH novel to look forward to in 2026. In addition to that, Serpent’s Tail are reissuing his 1992 masterpiece The Course of the Heart in just a couple of weeks’ time.
Happy birthday, Mike – and many happy returns.