David Quantick

David Quantick is an author, television writer and radio broadcaster. As well as All My Colors, he wrote the surreal thriller The Mule (“the Da Vinci Code with better grammar” – The Independent) and the comic scifi novel Sparks (“excellent” – Neil Gaiman). He also wrote the critically-acclaimed TV drama Snodgrass, currently being developed into a feature film, and Dickens In Rome, a new play for Northern Stage.

Quantick has won several broadcast awards, including an Emmy as part of the writing team on Veep.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Quantick's reply:

I’m in a random selection of books right now. I bought Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, which is a Penguin paperback from the 1930s and is a kind of parable about the rise of fascism (I have a slightly dubious obsession with Nazi counterfactuals like The Man In The High Castle and, in a different vein, Norman Spinrad’s astonishing, hilarious The Iron Dream). It’s quite eccentric and not at all manly, which I like.

I just finished David Stubbs’ Mars by 1980, a history of electronic music from Stockhausen to the Aphex Twin, which means that everything I read is now soundtracks by bleeps and clanks and makes my life a lot more interesting, like I am being pursued by faulty robots.

And I have just finished It, by Stephen King, which is not only one of the best King novels - being both a perfect evocation of lost youth and also totally scary – but also, I realised, a continuation of the kind of story invented by E Nesbit, taken on by Enid Blyton, carried on by the Scooby-Doo stories, and beautifully pastiched in Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. It has inspired me.

Visit David Quantick's website.

The Page 69 Test: All My Colors.

--Marshal Zeringue