What's the pitch? 

The Wobble Club is a novel about a morbidly obese London based couple and what happens when one of them wants to go on a diet but the other refuses. 

Described by a leading journalist as Martin Amis meets Stephen King, this is a visceral tale which veers from high drama and dark humour to horror,  tragedy and a lot of empathy. Who hasn't wanted to or tried to lose weight at some point in their life? 

Who am I? 

My name is Simon Rumley and I’ve lived in South London most of my adult life. My favourite chocolate bar is a Double Decker.  My day job is an indie film writer/director working in extreme drama and psychological horror. 

I’ve directed 9 feature films and segments in 2 anthologies.

My films have premiered at Toronto, SXSW and Rotterdam and have shown on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies, the Horror Channel, Shudder, Channel 4, Sundance Channel etc. 

I’ve won best film or best director at the world's leading genre festivals: Sitges, Fantastic Fest, Fantasia, Frightfest as well as at smaller festivals such as Boston Underground, Fantaspoa, Lund and Ravenna.  

Here are some quotes about me and some of my films: 

‘There have been a lot of column inches dedicated to the most talented British directors who have emerged this century...But one of the best, and certainly most distinctive, is Simon Rumley.’ Total Film

‘Rumley is one of the most interesting, unconventional British filmmakers of the moment.’ Screen Daily

‘Rumley is one of the most important and intelligent British film-makers working today.’ Empire Magazine

‘Enfant terrible of British horror.’ The Independent

So is The Wobble Club is any good?

I’d like to think so!

I’ve spent my whole life writing film scripts and, therefore, understand character arcs, plot construction, dialogue etc better than most. Of course, writing a screenplay and a novel are two very different practices but there is a large cross-over of skills required for both. 

As an example of my prose, here’s the opening paragraph:

'The day started like every working weekday; at the shrill bequest of Brolly’s 7.45am alarm. The noise pecked his skull and drilled into his consciousness. He itched his nose on the Kit-Kat pillowcase and wiped his eye mucus onto the Freddo duvet. He scratched his cheek, dragged his left arm above his head and dug his right arm under his belly. With capillary bursting effort and an extended elephantine grunt, he pushed into the heavy gauge bedsprings and leveraged his body onto its left side. He dropped onto his back and used his weight’s momentum to roll onto the other side of the Super King Size bed which, with its reinforced and melded mesh base was designed, like everything in Brolly’s life, for the obese.'

What’s The Wobble Club actually about?

In their mid-thirties, Gill and Brolly live together in South London, in a terraced house just off the Walworth Road. She has a degree in Urban Planning and is the manager of a hardware store near Borough Market. He runs an online bespoke tailoring business called Suits You, Sir! He weighs about 42 stone, she weighs about 35. Both find it hard to walk more than 15 metres and she has a walking stick to help her. They use mobility scooters, share a bariatric bathroom and have a chairlift to take them upstairs. 

At the end of a typical day of mass calorific consumption, Brolly drops the bombshell that he thinks they should go on a diet. Gill does her best to ignore the suggestion and they continue the weekend as they would usually, eating a Quadruple Full English breakfast at a local café and partaking in a nearby pub’s Sunday All You Can Eat Carvery Competition where they’re the in-house reigning champions. 

Realising Gill has no interest in joining him, Brolly decides  to go it alone. And behind her back, he goes on a diet. 

Dark humour melds with tragedy and horror as love takes unexpected directions and both characters have to overcome conflict and struggle to stay alive… 

What's my inspiration? 

In my mid forties, my trousers started to become a lot harder to fit into.  I could see the bulge on my tummy and the handles around my waist. My t-shirts started to stretch and some of my jackets were impossible to zip up. As a swimmer, i started to notice I was still sweating after leaving the pool. Most tellingly, it was London’s underground which really made me notice how unfit I was - rather than overweight. I always used to walk easily up the escalator but at some point found myself panting and sweating from what would be little more than 25 seconds of ascension. And wheezing, too. It was a physically uncomfortable experience.

I was obese. I wasn’t really aware of it at the time and a combination of binge-drinking, binge-sweet eating and a load of takeaways, combined with a lack of regular exercise helped to load on the weight. Even on short walks down the street, my heart pounded and my legs chaffed together. It was like carrying a couple of rucksacks of extra weight with me. Which, of course, is exactly what it was. 

The Wobble Club comes from these personal experiences, being happily overweight, knowing I was consuming too much but not caring because I enjoyed it. It all influenced how I shaped Gill and Brolly who aren’t just obese but morbidly obese as defined by the medical community. They’re real people and the type who are often pilloried in tabloid newspapers and reality TV shows but I’ve I created them with empathy and love and absolutely no desire to judge any of their actions. I’ve made them as positive as possible but I do put them through the wring and like all my fiction, I’ve pushed their circumstances to the limits. I’ve pushed their weight, the amount they eat, the people they meet, the things that happen to them.  

Eating is Gill and Brolly’s hobby, their sport, their everything. It’s their identity and without that crazy capacity to eat, they’d have a different identity. Be different people. Brolly actually wants to become a different person, of course, but Gill doesn’t and given that her body is her own, even if her weight is life-threatening, who’s to argue that she should lose weight? That she shouldn’t stay morbidly obese if she wants to?  

As I started to think about shedding my own weight, as I tentatively started diets, the idea of what would happen with a morbidly obese couple when one wanted to go on a diet and the other refused, jumped out at me. 

Who hasn’t tried to lose weight at some point? EVERYONE understands that. Everyone empathises with that. Everyone wants to look better, feel better; it’s part of the human condition. Losing weight is a universal goal and so this novel is universal in its own twisted logic, in its own dysmorphic way.

What will happen next?

Having read the novel, the good folk at White Fox Publishing (www.wearewhitefox.com/our-work/fiction/) described it as 'A rather extraordinary mix of funny, grotesque and affecting.' And they've agreed to help me bring The Wobble Club into the world. 

The money raised will contribute towards the production of The Wobble Club into both an eBook and a physical copy which will be distributed into both larger bookshops around the country such as Waterstones and  smaller independent bookshops. 

In order to make this a reality, things such as copy editing, format layout, proof-reading, book design, sales repping, distribution, warehousing etc all have to happen before the novel ends up in the public domain. And, of course, it all costs money. 

Please help out, there's some fantastic rewards. 

Publication is planned for Autumn ’23 so this is a long process!