Angela Slatter's Blog, page 27

Suspended in Dusk II: Ramsey Campbell

Since today is the official release day of Suspended in Dusk II, how about I let the legendary Ramsey Campbell take over the blog?

1. What was the inspiration for your SiD2 story?

“Above the World” has its roots in an acid trip I took in the mid-seventies, when Jenny and I climbed Skiddaw above Keswick. Certain images – the view into the heart of the heather, for instance – are described pretty well as I experienced them. Other elements – the birds in the wall, for example, and the post office in the cottage – were observed later on, and all the named locations are real or were (alas, the Swan Hotel no longer exists).

2. Who are your top five horror-writing inspirations?

Lovecraft for his sense of structure and modulation of language, which is far more varied in his work than is often appreciated. M. R James for images that show just enough to suggest far worse. Blackwood and Machen for reaching through terror towards awe. Shirley Jackson for delicacy of disquiet – restraint that adds to the power of her work. All that said, Graham Greene and Nabokov are equally crucial to my stuff.

3. You get to choose one book for a desert island exile (yes, you did something terrible): what is it?

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell.

4. What’s your favourite trope in horror?

Misperception – the apparently innocent item or event that turns out to conceal the uncanny or the dreadful. (“…and put its arms round my neck…”)

5. What’s next for you? 

Really quite a lot. The autumn will see The Way of the Worm, the final volume of my trilogy, and a new collection, By the Light of My Skull, both from PS. Centipede Press has an immense two-volume retrospective of short tales, Fearful Implications. Flame Tree will be issuing Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach and Think Yourself Lucky into the mass market, along with backlist titles. Right now I’m working on a new novel, The Wise Friend.

 

Bio:

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach. He recently brought out his Brichester Mythos trilogy, consisting of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, The Pretence and The Booking are novellas. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, Fearful Implications and By the Light of My Skull, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain, where a film of The Influence is in production. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.

 

Suspended in Dusk II: Nerine Dorman

Over at the blog today, Nerine Dorman talks Suspended in Dusk II.

1. What was the inspiration for your SiD2 story, “That Damned Cat”?

I’d been wanting to write horror for a while, but the concept for my story had been bugging me intensely for ages. So while my story didn’t quite come out dark and horror-ish, it still borrows from stock horror themes (demons, possession, evil cults) which I then subverted into a somewhat humorous yarn. The cat in the story is very much inspired by my own tortoiseshell horror Kali, whom we often joked was the result of a demonic invocation that went horribly wrong. (She is an erstwhile feral cat that adopted us more than a decade ago, and has ruled our household with her velvet claw ever since.)

2. Who are your top five horror-writing inspirations?

First and foremost, Poppy Z Brite. I love his lush, dark prose that takes time to engage your senses. Not so much about the story but the gooey essence of the world and the characters that inhabit it. I owe some debt to Clive Barker as well, though I haven’t read nearly enough of his writing as I’d like to – it’s more his worlds that have captured my imagination. Having a story published in an anthology celebrating his Nightbreed has been one of my publishing highlights. HP Lovecraft, as complicated as he is, is another huge influence on me – especially in terms of the defamiliarisation of his settings and the hints of primordial strange that sludges onto the pages. Even if his writing itself is quite cumbersome, it has some sort of enigmatic quality that I can’t quite escape. I’m going to add Neil Gaiman to the pile, even though strictly speaking he’s not a horror author per se – he has written some pretty dark fiction, and his Sandman comic books lean heavily on the genre at times. Lastly, there’s Algernon Blackwood. Specifically his story “The Willows” is one that I return to often – it’s an absolute masterpiece in building tension and where the environment itself becomes the antagonist.

3. You get to choose one book for a desert island exile (yes, you did something terrible): what is it?

My go to is The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I make no apologies.

4. What’s your favourite trope in horror?

My favourite trope in a story is where the hero is faced with a choice of beating the horror at cost of his own life, or recognising the innate darkness within himself, and embracing it, and thereby being transformed by it to become more than human. Off hand, I’m thinking of that wonderful, cheesestastic film “Dagon” and its ilk.

5. What’s next for you? 

Currently, I’m plodding away at the first draft of a YA SF novel that’s best described as a mash-up of Star Wars and Dragonriders of Pern. Once again, I make no apologies. I don’t like limiting myself by genre. I’ve also got a hot date with revising and releasing some of my back list this year, my urban fantasy novel Inkarna, which will release with its sequel, Thanatos. And I’m also expecting edits back on a fantasy novel that’s currently sitting with one of my favourite editors – but I can’t make any announcements yet as nothing has been finalised. As always, I continue to curate the South African Horrorfest Bloody Parchment short story competition and anthology, which is a labour of love for me and offers an opportunity for fresh voices in dark SFF and horror an opportunity to shine.

 

Biography:

Nerine Dorman is a South African author and editor of SFF currently residing in Cape Town. Her short fiction has been published in an assortment of anthologies, including the Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed; The Endless Ages Anthology for Vampire: The Masquerade; the Wraeththu mythos; and War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, among others. Her YA fantasy novel Dragon Forged was a finalist in the 2017 Sanlam Youth Literature Prize, and she is the curator of the South African Horrorfest Bloody Parchment event and short story competition. In addition, she is a founding member of the SFF authors’ co-operative Skolion.

 

Gaslight Gothic: Strange Tales of Sherlock Holmes

The fabulous Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer has reviewed Gaslight Gothic: Strange Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by  J.R. Campbell & Charles Prepolec, published by  EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. I’m especially delighted as he says lovely things about my story, “A Matter of Light”, in which Kit Caswell from Ripper meets Mr Holmes.

A Matter of Light by Angela Slatter is another interesting story in the anthology, and is perhaps the one that gave me the most to think about in terms of Holmes and Watson as characters. Featuring another occult detective, the character Kit Caswell (who I understand has featured in other works by the author), it’s a brilliant and multi-faceted story that really deserves multiple readings to fully comprehend everything to be found in its relatively short word-count. On the first reading, it’s a clever and inventive murder-mystery that makes use of social taboos that Conan Doyle would not have dared stray into in his canon writings, albeit with an overt occult angle at the end. But further readings highlight the difficulties that a female detective (occult or otherwise) would have encountered had they attempted to follow in Holmes’ footsteps; and in particular, Slatter uses this angle to throw light on some of the far less savoury aspects of Holmes as a character, particularly that much-lauded aspect of his ‘chivalry’ towards women which would obviously be seen in a much different light by the women themselves. 

Suspended in Dusk II: Dan Rabarts

Today’s SiDII author is Dan Rabarts, talking about his story “Riptide”.

1. What was the inspiration for your SiD2 story?

Several years ago I was working on story fragments for an anthology called Regeneration, and one of those story threads started with the idea of the tide, and how it washes up the beach to sweep away the traces of the past few hours to leave it clean, fresh. This story drew me into a place I struggled to go, especially since the beach that forms the background of Riptide is a place I know very well, a stretch of sea where I spent many hours growing up, a stretch of sea that once tried to hold onto me forever. On the one hand, this story is an exploration of what might’ve been, had things gone differently that particular day, and how so many of the monsters we live with we never see and so struggle to confront. I ended up placing a (very) different story in Regeneration, but I’ll always credit the editors for planting the seed of this story, which is particularly personal to me.

2. Who are your top five horror-writing inspirations?

Only five? Let’s mention Mr King, since reading IT when I was 14 I simply had to find more stories that left me haunted. Kiwi fantasy/sci-fi author Hugh Cook, now sadly deceased, is right up there too. His writing is slivered through with moments of sudden, brutal darkness, and as another author I was reading in my mid-teens, his impact has had an influence on my writing from the time I first tried my hand at wordsmithing. (That’s a Hugh Cook reference, BTW. See what I mean?). A couple of indie authors are next on the list, starting with Jack Kincaid. Kincaid’s novel Hoad’s Grim, a notoriously underappreciated book which I first experienced as an audiobook drama and which remains my preferred entertainment for long drives up the country on my own in the dark, brought me squarely back into the horror zone after a few years of traipsing around in fantasy worlds.This also drew me into the realm of podcast fiction, where I discovered Phil Rossi and his cosmic horror, including Crescent, Eden and Harvey. And no such list of this nature could be complete without mentioning the single biggest inspiration in my efforts to create dark fiction that resonates, burns, and haunts, and that of course is Lee Murray, my writing partner and one of my favourite authors hands-down.

3. You get to choose one book for a desert island exile (yes, you did something terrible): what is it?

The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency? Bear Grylls’ Survival Almanac? Weave Your Empire from a Coconut Palm?

4. What’s your favourite trope in horror? 

Probably the well-worn path that the monster is not really the monster we think it is; that the real monsters are inside us. People are far more monstrous than any vampire or zombie can ever be, thanks to man’s inhumanity to man and all that, which is possibly why I’m such a fan of dystopia and apocalyptic fiction where the horror stems from what we’re capable to doing to our world and to each other. Possibly because those are far more real terrors than the made-up ones, and also because if fiction serves a purpose it may be as a warning to the rest of the world, and although we’ll never know if those warnings just might change the future, we scream them to the darkness regardless, hoping someone can hear us.

5. What’s next for you?

I have two novels due for release later this year. Teeth of the Wolf, the sequel to Hounds of the Underworld with Lee Murray is due out from Raw Dog Screaming Press in October, and we’re just starting work on Book 3. Brothers of the Knife, the first book in the Children of Bane dark fantasy series from Omnium Gatherum is due out later this year, with the second book, Sons of the Curse, slated for early next year. The third book in that series, Sisters of Spindrift, is my current work in progress and the reason I get up at some insane cold hour of the morning to tap words onto a screen to the smell of hot coffee. I’ve also got short fiction due out this year in Cthulhu: Land of the Long White Cloud, and Pantheon Magazine. So basically, what’s next for me is a lot of daily wordcounts and quite a bit of proofing and editing. And early morning coffee.

Bio:

Dan Rabarts is a New Zealand author, editor and podcast narrator, winner of four Sir Julius Vogel Awards and two Australian Shadows Awards, occasional sailor of sailing things, part-time metalhead and father of two wee miracles in a house on a hill under the southern sun. His science fiction, dark fantasy and horror short stories have been published in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. Together with Lee Murray, he co-edited the award-winning anthologies Baby Teeth – Bite-sized Tales of Terror and At The Edge, and co-writes the Path of Ra series from Raw Dog Screaming Press, starting with Hounds of the Underworld and continuing in Teeth of the Wolf. His first solo novel, Brothers of the Knife, kicks off the grimdark-yet-madcap Children of Bane fantasy series (Omnium Gatherum) in late 2018. Find out more at dan.rabarts.com.

 

Suspended in Dusk II: Karen Runge

Karen Runge is an author and visual artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her works have appeared in various anthologies and other publications around the world. Her first solo short story collection, ‘Seven Sins’ was published by Concord Free Press in 2016, and her first novel ‘Seeing Double’ made its debut in 2017, from Grey Matter Press. Never shy of darker themes in horror fiction, she has been dubbed ‘The Queen of Extreme’ and ‘Princess of Pain’ by various bloggers and book reviewers. The late Jack Ketchum once said in response to one of her stories: ‘Karen, you scare me.’

1. What was the inspiration for your SiD2 story, ‘Angeline’?

The song ‘Angelene’ by PJ Harvey. I even used the name, just with slightly altered spelling. I love PJ Harvey’s music. Apart from her gorgeous sound, her lyrics are so poetic and powerful, often with something dark or sinister seething just out of sight. The lyrics to that song in particular had me gripped for a good while before I realised this fascination was my own subconscious telling me to write something around them. I bade the call, and so ‘Angeline’ was born.

2. Who are your top five horror-writing inspirations?

I always loved horror and always wanted to be a writer. When I hit my teens I was ripping through books like a rabid wolf, and realised that there is a lot of horror in what people describe as more ‘literary’ works. Those are the ones that really set me on the path to forming my own style. John Fowles’ ‘The Collector’, Margaret Atwood’s ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Man Crazy’ each in their own way had a huge impact on me. Then there’s the obligatory Stephen King (in my case it was ‘Carrie’—just wow), and Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’. I think all this rounded me out as a writer who goes for detailed prose and deep character development, with a strong draw for digging into the disturbing and the unspeakable. This would also explain why my own stories seldom have supernatural elements—I’m all about the psych.

3. You get to choose one book for a desert island exile (yes, you did something terrible): what is it?

So I’ll surprise the hell out of everyone here and say my pick is ‘The Coral Island’ by R.M. Ballantyne. First, it’s a great read with likable characters and a fantastically fun ‘journey’ type of plot. Second, the horror elements in it (which blindside the reader about a third of the way through) are some of the most extreme I’ve ever read. To give you an idea, to this day I don’t eat pork—I’m actually phobic about the very idea of eating pork—and 50% of the blame for that lies at this book’s feet. (The other 50% belongs to ‘Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child’. I read this book and watched this movie at around the same time. That ‘time’ being when I was still way too young for either of them. And yes, it’s quite evident that I’m still scarred!) The other benefit to taking this book with me is that it’s full of groovy little tips on how to survive an island marooning type situation. I’d say that makes it the best pick all round.

4. What’s your favourite trope in horror?

It’s probably easier for me to talk about tropes I don’t like than tropes that I do. I’m all the way zombie’d out, for example. I really wish we’d let those undead dudes rest for a little while, please. They’ve damn well earned it. I’m a big believer that any trope (so long as it isn’t tired as all hell, as in the case of zombies) can work if it’s handled from a fresh perspective. Stephen Graham Jones’ ‘The Last Final Girl’ was a hilarious and very well written dig at the whole Final Girl thing, for example. It was so all the way in the reader’s face, and owning it, that it couldn’t be anything but a fresh take. There isn’t much out there that can’t be done well, because as is true in most things, it’s not WHAT you’re doing so much as it is HOW you’re doing it.

5. What’s next for you? 

I’m currently involved in a very big and very exciting project which I very unfortunately cannot talk about just yet! It’ll be a great day when I finally get to make that announcement. In the meantime I’m busting my behind on a few new shorts, and I also have a novel currently sulking in the corner. Each of these are at varying stages of development, but I’m currently in a great space as an artist and am really enjoying everything I’m doing.

Suspended in Dusk II is out from Grey Matter Press and edited by Simon Dewar.

Kickstarter: Women Up to No Good

Upper Rubber Boot are kickstarting two awesome anthologies: Broad Knowledge and Sharp & Sugar Tooth!

If you’ve got some spare shekels, throw them this way!

 

Thanks, Hannah!

Gorgeous review of The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales by Hannah right here.

Thanks, Erica O. for recommending me!

I love it when people discover books like this; first published in 2011, I love that she’s still getting new readers!

Gaslight Gothic!

I’m so very excited to have a story in this wonderful anthology from EDGE, edited by JR Campbell and Charles Prepolec! Gaslight Gothic has a Kit Caswell (Ripper) story in it, called “A Matter of Light” – and she gets to take on Sherlock Holmes himself! This was a huge challenge, but I’m pretty happy with the result.

The fourth anthology in the Gaslight series explores the darkest side of the world’s most popular detective, Sherlock Holmes. Gaslight Gothic features dark fiction by esteemed authors:

David Stuart Davies
Lyndsay Faye
Nancy Holder
Mark A. Latham
James Lovegrove
Mark Morris
Josh Reynolds
Angela Slatter
Kevin P. Thornton
Stephen Volk

Gaslight Gothic: Strange Tales of Sherlock Holmes will be available for preorder on Kindle on June 23, 2018 Watch for details at our EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing website: http://www.edgewebsite.com/

The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

Cover reveal for the next instalment in the Stephen Jones curated mosaic novel, The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming.

I’ve got a story in here, along with such luminaries as Kim Newman, Pete Adkins, Brian Hodge, Lisa Morton, Lynda E. Rucker, Michael Marshall Smith …

From Pegasus Books, and available for pre-order!

Corpselight won an Australian Shadows Award!

What a delight! The big demon head can sit on the shelf next to the HP Lovecraft head and they can glare at each other for eternity!

Thanks to the judges and the organisers, thanks to the wonderful Kat Clay for accepting on my behalf and Jenny Breukelaar for transporting the heavy thing to Sydney for me to collect, and thank you so much to my fellow shortlistees: your works are astonishing and I am both humbled and honoured to be amongst you.