Angela Slatter's Blog, page 78

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Simon Kurt Unsworth

Simon Kurt Unsworth is the author of the recent release The Devil’s Detective as well as the short story collections Quiet Houses and Lost Places. He’s been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Collection prize. His work can be found hiding (waiting to jump out and scare the proverbial out of you) in a variety of anthologies such as At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Postscripts, Gaslight Arcanum, Gaslight Grotesque, and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth. Determined to outdo us all, he has not merely a to-be-read pile but a to-be-read house.

What inspired your story “Little Traveller”?

The truthful answer to this is, I’m not completely sure! I’d seen one of those short news article pieces about travelling the seas around Somalia and the private security the shipping companies use and another about the militia’s in Somalia, and how all its members tended to be young and male, often orphaned and using drugs, how the militia became a kind of replacement family (albeit a fucked-up one) and the two things kind of gelled in my head. The rest of it, I’m glad to say, kind of fell from my fingers as I typed – it was one of those stories that came out pretty much fully formed, with little conscious plotting or intervention on my part.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

I think ‘The Mezzotint’ by M R James – I saw it being performed as an illustrated monologue on TV when I was about 7 or so, and I loved it. Around the same time (far too young!) I read King’s Carrie, and although I didn’t understand most of it I loved that too. Both of the stories spoke to some part of me which replied enthusiastically and hasn’t stopped gabbling since. Not too long after that, I read ‘Salem’s Lot and that was it, I was gone and I’ve never come back.

Name your three favourite horror writers.

Stephen King, M R James and Junji Ito – with a sympathetic ‘almost made the cut’ nod to TED Klein.

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional  jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

Dunno. My short stories are mostly horror but occasionally they turn into something else (or at least, I think they do) and my novel The Devil’s Detective is either a horror wearing a thriller’s clothes or a thriller wearing a horror’s clothes. Ultimately, I don’t think it matters – I write to explore the things that bother me and to test the edges of the world as I understand it, and to see how to make sense of it. I set out sometimes to frighten or horrify or excite my reader and I happen to write in the horror field, but good stories are good stories and one day I might set out to make them swoon or smile or laugh and that’ll be okay too. For now, though, it’s darkness and misery and fragility and lost hopes…

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! What isn’t? My TBR pile is actually a TBR house! I live surrounded by books I’ve not read, that I want to reread, that I’ve not even found yet but which catch my eye… Having said that, I’m about to go on holiday, and the books I’m taking with me are Kim Newman’s An English Ghost Story, Warren Fahey’s Fragment  and rereads of some Lovecraft and Crichton’s The Lost World as I recently reread Jurassic Park and loved it all over again.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

 

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Adrian Cole

Adrian Cole began writing at the tender age of 10, although he wasn’t ready to submit professionally until he was much older – at 19. His first published work was a ghost story for IPC magazines in 1972, followed soon after by a trilogy of sword & planet novels, The Dream Lords (Zebra, US) in the 1970s. Since then he has gone on to have more than 2 dozen novels published and many short stories and his work has been translated into a number of foreign editions.

He writes science fiction, heroic fantasy, sword & sorcery, horror, pulp fiction, Mythos and has had two young adult novels published, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants. His best known works are the Omaran Saga and Star Requiem quartets. His most recent is the novel The Shadow Academy and the anthology Nick Nightmare Investigates, which has been shortlisted for this year’s BFS Awards.

What inspired your story “A Girl and Her Dolls”?

My story, “A Girl and Her Dolls”, was inspired by my growing frustration with the way that violence escalates, sometimes uncontrollably, on all levels, and at the time I was appalled by the terrorism in the Middle East and indeed, at home in England. How many times throughout history have we seen this kind of mindless human cruelty? So I took the concept and channelled it into the relatively innocent form of a young girl, who saw herself being persecuted unreasonably and who reacted, as she thought, appropriately.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

The first story I can remember making a real impact on me was Algernon Blackwood’s “The Doll”. So maybe that impact has lasted a long time!

Name your three favourite horror writers.

Three favorite horror writers would be: Algernon Blackwood, H P Lovecraft and Jonathan Carroll, who is more than a “horror” writer – he’s certainly very dark, macabre.

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

I am currently exploring horror fiction as a writer more intensively than in the past, but I have also written sf (latest novel is The Shadow Academy) fantasy (Omaran Saga), sword and sorcery (The Voidal saga) and what seems to be called “pulp” fiction, although there are differences of opinion about the latter as a genre. My Nick Nightmare, the self-styled Private Eye, Public Fist, is a series which blends and merges anything and everything that I can fit – crime, Mythos, super-heroes, black magic, Celtic lore, steampunk and so on. I am also in the process of writing a longer work, set in an alternative Romano/Celtic Europe in which characters from our history, notably Arminius, the Germanic warlord, Germanicus and Boudicca re-write history as we know it. The teacher who once told me I had an “over-active imagination” was not wrong!

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

Books to read – well, a whole lot of horror anthologies and collections, as I’m enjoying getting into the genre as much as ever. Also getting thru Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful Alfred saga (plus his work on Waterloo) – and a couple of his books as John LeCarre. And I’m always re-reading favorite stuff from the past, in particular at the moment JG Ballard. Oh, and any number of comics and graphic novels.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Kurt Fawver

Kurt Fawver is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and weird fiction. He’s published fiction in numerous magazines and anthologies, and has forthcoming stories in the Lovecraft eZine, Xnoybis, and Midian Unmade (Tor, 2015). Kurt has released one collection of short stories, Forever, in Pieces (Villipede Publications, 2013), and is working feverishly to compile a second. Besides fiction, Kurt also writes scholarly articles and nonfiction essays, many of which have been published in various journals and scholarly tomes, including the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. Kurt holds a Ph.D. in literature and teaches at a large state university where, every semester, he tries to impart to his students the necessity of horror. You can find Kurt online at kdfawver.blogspot.com or facebook.com/kfawver.

What inspired your story “Marrowvale”?

The primary inspiration for my story was my hometown, which, like the eponymous “Marrowvale”, is an unassuming, slowly eroding backwater village nestled in central Pennsylvania. The people there are largely xenophobic and highly protective of their customs and culture — a culture that, above all else, revels in tromping about the wilderness (whether to hunt game, go camping, ride all-terrain vehicles, or hold bonfire parties). Growing up, I always suspected that the people of my hometown were belligerent to outsiders because they were hiding a deep, dark secret which would, of course, manifest itself in the wilderness and be latently (if not openly) hostile toward anything from the “outside” world.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” I first read it in 8th or 9th grade. It’s the first story I can remember reading where the terrible things that happened within its pages had no logical cause, no good reason for occurring. There was no locus of the “evil” in the story other than antiquated and ill-defined tradition — banality at its finest. Add to that the story’s concluding ambiguity and sense that this tradition might continue indefinitely, and the tale became the first to leave me with a distinct and prescient feeling of horror, a sense that the world (maybe the universe) was ultimately not a place of rationality and order, but a sphere of chaos seething with violence and indifference.

Name your three favourite horror writers.

It’s cliched to say, but my choice would vary from day to day. That said, three who consistently earn the distinction are William Hope Hodgson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson. (But Clive Barker, Algernon Blackwood, and Thomas Ligotti often bump up into the top three as well.)

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

My writing is almost unequivocally dark, but it’s not always relegated to the boxes we normally check to see if something is “horror” or not. Sometimes I write stories that might be better classified as “weird fiction” and sometimes I write stories that would fall firmly in the “dark fantasy” section of the bookstore. I’ve tried my hand at incorporating SF elements into my fiction on several occasions and I even have a handful of tales that are probably closer to what we might call magical realism. I suppose what I’m saying in a roundabout way is that while I might be most proficient with horror I’ll use whatever tool from the speculative fiction shed is necessary when I see a job it can perform or a particular narrative it can best construct.

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

At times, given the size of the stack, it seems like the whole of English literature must be in there. At the moment, titles near the top include Ray Cluley’s Probably Monsters, Molly Tanzer’s Vermilion, D.P. Watt’s The Phantasmagorical Imperative, Matthew Bartlett’s Gateways to Abomination, Terrence Holt’s In the Valley of the Kings, and Sarah Lotz’s Day Four.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Paul Finch

Paul Finch is a former cop and journalist, and, having read History at Goldsmiths College, London, a qualified historian, though he currently earns his living as a full-time writer.

He cut his literary teeth penning episodes of the British TV crime drama, The Bill, and has written extensively in the field of children’s animation. However, he is probably best known for his work in thrillers, dark fantasy and horror, in which capacity he is a two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award and a one-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award.

He is responsible for numerous short stories and novellas, but also for two horror movies (a third of his, War Wolf, is in pre-production), for several full-cast Dr Who audio dramas, and a series of best-selling crime novels from Avon Books at HarperCollins, featuring the British police detective, Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg.

Paul lives in Lancashire, UK, with his wife Cathy and his children, Eleanor and Harry. His website can be found at http://paulfinch-writer.blogspot.co.uk/, and he can be followed on Twitter as @paulfinchauthor.

What inspired your story “House of the Hag”?

My love of native British folklore and mythology. Cathy and I travel as often as we can, usually trying to get into those oddball out-of-the-way places, and on one such trip to the Scottish Highlands – many years ago now, though the memory stuck – I was fascinated to learn about a series of neolithic stone monuments in a high, lonely glen, which were at the centre of all kinds of mysterious rumours. Okay, enigmatic standing stones, henges, barrows and the like are common throughout Britain, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone had written a spooky story about them, but the myths themselves are many and varied, and the particular idea I was struck with on this occasion was something I’d never encountered before, so I thought ‘what the hell’ and wrote it.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

One of the earliest I remember was “The Inn” by Guy Preston, which I first discovered in The 2nd Pan Book of Horror Stories. It’s not by any means the best horror story ever written, nor is it the most original – but I was very young at the time, and recall being utterly terrified, sitting up alone in bed and unable to turn the pages fast enough. That’s got to be the main ambition of a horror story, I suppose, in respect of which The Inn succeeded admirably with me.

Name your three favourite horror writers.

That’s a really difficult question to answer, if not impossible. There are literally hundreds who all occupy similar positions of worthiness in my mind, though for all sorts of reasons. It’s probably easier if I just tell you which current authors are names I look out for whenever I take an anthology down from a shelf and consider buying it. There are still plenty of those, but the three that most readily spring to mind are: Reggie Oliver, Adam Nevill and Steve Duffy.

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

It’s ranged widely over the years and hopefully will continue to. I’ve done sci-fi in Dr Who and high fantasy in my Arthurian novels for Abaddon Books, but I’m probably best known these days for hard-edged crime. My Heck novels at Avon are easily my best-selling titles, so that’s the field I’m firmly planted in at present. Horror is still one of my greatest loves of course, and that colours everything. Quite a few reviewers have referred to my Heck novels as police-horror.

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

A wide assortment. I’m a big Peter James fan. Also in crime terms, I’m getting into Craig Robertson, Steve Mosby, Stav Sherez and Deon Meyer. In horror terms, I’m a bit old-school. I’ve always got at least one Adam Nevill to read, but I’m currently recquainting myself with a few classics – Barker and Aycliffe to name two, while Dan Simmons’s The Terror is the big fat one I’m planning to take on holiday with me.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

The Sourdough Posts: Under the Mountain

Image taken from page 78 of “Songs for Little People,” published in 1896. (The British Library)

The Sourdough Posts: Under the Mountain

Ah, and the last Sourdough post! “Under the Mountain” loops back to the events of “Sister, Sister” and some of the characters, but this time it focuses on Magdalene, Theodora’s daughter. When the inhabitants of the Golden Lily Inn and Brothel left Lodellan in the dead of night, to go and live on the country estate Theodora had purchased, Magdalene was still little. She had only brief memories of her father, Stellan, the prince of the city, and had been rescued by her mother from the troll-wife who’d been posing as Polly, Theodora’s lost sister.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the mother and daughter, and how their lives might be after that night, and after Theodora’s desperate race through the streets to save her stolen child. I thought that knowing that her sister, her true sister, had been stolen away also might trouble her, especially given how much bitterness and resentment had been sown in that relationship by the false Polly. I thought it would turn into guilt and eat away at Theodora. Perhaps she wouldn’t have gone off looking for her sister if things with Magdalene hadn’t become so fraught.

And I thought about Magdalene, a teenager and growing more angry and unpleasant by the day, though unable to really control herself as she wasn’t who she’d been brought up to believe she was. She was fighting against a nature she didn’t know she was heir to … yet she still loved Theodora fiercely, still had that attachment to her mother that sent her out into the world to follow her and bring her home. Of course, things seldom go as planned.

 

Under the Mountain [extract]

The sight of the inn picks at the stitches of my memory. The splintered shingle, emblazoned with a faded golden lily, swings in the breeze. I stare at it for a while, trying to catch at the recollection, mentally trying to scratch an itch I can’t quite locate. I push the aged door and it swings to easily. The place seems deserted, but in a corner, wedged in the angle of a padded bench beneath a hissing gaslight, is a man, pieces of parchment gathered in front of him. His hair was black and he was handsome, once. Now the hair is shot with iron-grey and he’s crumpled, body, face, and (I suspect) soul. His bearing speaks of loss.

‘Faideau?’ I ask.

He blinks, and I realise I am nothing more than a silhouette against the light. I close the door so he may see me clearly: tall and strong, long blonde locks, high cheekbones, ice-blue eyes. No sign of the unwellness, of the ache in my bones that does not come from hard riding. I find the shadowy space a relief.

‘Who wants to know?’ He is not drunk, but he is aggressive. His eyes are dark.

I did not need to come here. I had no requirement to speak to anyone but those who would have sold me fresh provisions and stabled my horse for the night. I know where I’m going, having studied Theodora’s books and the notes she left behind. I did not need to visit this place. I don’t really know why I came. I do not remember him, but this is the man Theodora mentioned with a sad amusement, a pang for what might have been. This was the one who did not take advantage of her favours after her fall from grace. When she changed from princess to whore and embraced her new calling as much to embarrass my father as to soothe her own pain, this was the one man she did not hold in utter contempt. Thus, she told me later, she did not sleep with him.

‘I’m Magdalene.’ I see him all uncomprehending. ‘Theodora’s daughter.’

‘Theodora.’ In his voice is such love and ache for my mother that I am embarrassed for him, to see his heart so naked. ‘How is she?’

How to say, to tell anyone how she was? How her night terrors had been getting worse. How thirteen years of them had made her gaunt and thin, drawn shadows under her eyes and washed their pale blue to the grey of a sickly sky. How long streaks of silver-white had threaded through her hair. How Theodora, whose beauty once made kings and clergy weak, had begun to fade.

‘Gone. She’s gone,’ I say and he misunderstands and I think the heart will flop out of his chest. ‘No, no! She is alive, but she is gone. She—left me.’

‘You? Left you?’ And I know he is thinking back to that night when Theodora ran through the streets of Lodellan and saved me from the thing posing as her sister. And he asks himself what I have asked myself: how could Theodora leave me?

‘She slipped away in the night, left me a letter. Went to search for Polly, her true sister. She said even if all she finds are the bones, it will help.’

He slumps even further down as if the mention of Polly adds weight to him. When he raises his eyes to meet mine I see secrets there, pushing their way to the surface. But I don’t want them.

‘Do you remember? Any of it? The time when childer went missing?’ he asks, peering at me. I take a seat opposite as he continues, ‘You don’t look like her, you know. Not at all.’

I shake my head. ‘I do not remember.’

But sometimes I dream of a pretty blonde woman. She grows and changes. Her voice remains honeyed even as she turns into something that will eat me; something that is all appetite. I fear my mother had similar dreams, for she would wake clutching at me, feeling to make sure my flesh was my own. That it did not shift and change into something other. He wipes a hand across his face and I see the map tattooed there. Curiosity shimmers.

‘What’s that?’

‘A reminder,’ he sighs and looks at the marks on the back of his hand as if they are foreign to him. ‘How are the others? Grammy, Kitty?’

‘Kitty and Livilla and their children left a few years ago.’ I do not tell him why. I do not tell him how they feared for their off-spring in the face of my tempers; how their last words to Theodora were bitter. ‘Fra died last spring. Grammy and Fenric are there, old but well enough. Rilka we see sometimes—she comes and goes according to her own counsel.’

He looks sad to know these things. ‘Have you gone to see your father?’

‘No, why would I?’

‘Why would you come here?’

I hesitate. ‘I don’t know. I had to stop somewhere.’ I cannot tell him about our fights, Theodora’s and mine; about the rage, about my guilt, about my last words to her, but I think he may guess. ‘I just stopped here for one night, for supplies. I remembered the inn, or at least I seemed to.’

‘You should stay then. Plenty of beds.’ He grins without humour. ‘Take your pick.’

*

The blue room has a view out over the Lilyhead fountain, but I don’t look down. Instead I stare straight ahead and concentrate on the sculptured lineaments of the palace. I have no memory of living there; I recall my father following us when we left that funny little man’s house on the night we fled Lodellan. I remember his blonde hair, and his lovely green eyes shining with tears in the lamplight. I remember how disgusted Theodora’s expression was when she gazed upon him. The sun is setting, all red-gold and raw, burning the sky as it plummets. Below I can hear the clank of pots in the kitchen like a call to arms.

*

Faideau has a disreputable apron tied around him, the lacy frills hang torn and frayed. I see no sign of the drunkard of whom Theodora spoke so sadly and fondly. His hands are steady on the knife and his movements, though slow, are assured. He sees me in the doorway and smiles. I wonder what Theodora would have said had she seen him like this.

‘Did you find everything you need?’

I nod. ‘Thank you.’ Wondering how much small talk there can be between we two.

‘Why did your mother leave you?’ he asks without preamble.

I lie. I lie because I don’t want to think about it. ‘I don’t know.’ He doesn’t believe me, begins to tell me his story, perhaps in the hope that one confidence will draw out another. ‘When I was a boy—’

‘I do not have time for this!’

‘You have plenty, missy, you’re not going anywhere in the night.’ He will reel out this tale at his own pace and I have no choice but to listen.

I’m old enough to know that secrets don’t spill quickly, they bleed, they seep.

‘When I was a boy, I was adopted by a very bad man. I was brought up by brigands but left to my own devices an awful lot. Often I’d sneak away to another part of the woods and watch a family who made their home there. Mother, father and a daughter, they were happy and loving. I’d watch all three, unseen. I was very careful never to let my foster-father or any of his men know. That family was my secret—I kept it to keep them safe.

‘I made friends with the little girl. I was treated so very well in their home. The first tenderness I ever experienced came from them. I wanted nothing in life but to be loved, to belong to that family. I would lie on my bed of bracken at night and dream of four walls and a hearth, of the sounds of people who loved me sleeping nearby.’

‘Faideau.’ I itch to shake him, to stop him, but he ignores me. I have enough shadows of my own; I do not wish to carry those of another.

‘Your mother, even then, was as beautiful as a new day. Then the baby arrived and I was displaced. The mother was preoccupied and Theodora wanted only to play with the new human doll. I interested her not at all. Perhaps if I’d been older I would have known that things would return to normal if only I’d the patience to wait. That their love hadn’t gone, merely been distracted.’ He frowns as if he could tell his younger self these things and thus avoid all that had come about.

‘In the woods, Magdalene, there are wolves, trolls, men who turn into beasts at the first sign of the moon, women who do worse. All in all, witches are the least of your worries. Things in the forest speak, things that shouldn’t, and they know what’s in your heart. A troll-wife found me hiding, watching Theodora and her mother and new sister at the stream.’

My heart clenches. His confession will hurt us both. ‘It—she—told me I could win their love if only I did her a favour. It was a joke she said, no one would get hurt—that sometimes we needed to use tricks to get what we really, really wanted.’

And he told me how he stole away the true Polly lying fresh in her basket, and took her to the doors of the kingdom under the mountain. How the troll-wife gave him another child in return, a misshapen lump of flesh, a wailing thing that she touched and moulded until it took on the appearance of the infant he had brought. How he returned it to where Theodora’s mother might find it and his head was filled with thoughts of how much this family would love him. But the guilt ate at him, night and day, so any joy he might have had was bitter. He was uncomfortable and afraid that somehow he might be discovered. That the mewling changeling might somehow betray him. His fear transmitted itself to the family and so they became ill at ease in his presence. After a while he stopped going to visit.

I could have told him, even I, that such an act will return a greater pain to the perpetrator than the victim, how selfishness is never rewarded. How, when I had screamed at my mother and wished her gone, the very next day she was. And how on the morning I found her missing I could not imagine a worse ache than that of the loss of her.

‘How could she not know you, Faideau? To meet you again?’

He shrugs. ‘When she came to Lodellan as the prince’s bride, all royal and shiny, there were so many years between us and I wore another name, once, when I was small. And I was so much less than I had been. The boy had faded from her memory; the man was a drunk. And so this,’ he gestures as if a shared history is spread before us rather than the components of a meal, ‘is all my fault.’

‘But you were only a child,’ I say. He smiles coldly.

‘Someone else said that to me once, or something very like.’ He shakes his head.

How do I judge this man? How dare I judge him? Had he been stronger, had he been better, Theodora may not have married my father and we would not have been as we were. My aunt would never have been stolen away; we would not have fled the city; we would not have had this vein of agony running through our lives. I would have had a different father; or I would not have existed at all. I do not find that last thought painful.

‘So, I ask again, Magdalene, why did your mother leave you?’ But I do not say anything, do not give him even a scrap and he hands me a plate. ‘I think you should leave very early. I don’t want to see you again.’

I almost open my mouth then, but he continues, reluctantly, as if he now gives me information against his will. ‘Your mother is known, Magdalene, in the forest. She travelled its ways long before she came to Lodellan. She knows its dangers. Be careful. Don’t stray from the path.’

***

 

 

 

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Cliff McNish

Cliff McNish, acclaimed as ‘one of our most talented thriller writers’ (The Times), has written numerous award-winning fantasy, SF, horror and supernatural novels for children and young adults. His initial fantasy series, The Doomspell Trilogy, was published in 26 languages worldwide. His 2006 ghost story Breathe was voted in May 2013 as one of the top 100 adult and children’s novels of all time by the Schools Network of British Librarians.

What inspired your story “Who Will Stop Me Now”?

I’ve always pitied Medusa. Perseus is such a sanctimonious ass. He’s given every advantage, the gifts the gods supply him lay Medusa’s death pathetically easily in his lap, and yet he’s remembered … as the HERO. Uh-uh. Don’t like that. And I just enjoyed the idea of a girl totally embracing terror’s destination. Exulting in chaos.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

An SF story I read when I was about 12. What appeared to be a boy walking with his father through an exhibition of aliens at a zoo. The last ‘creature’ turned out, of course, to be a real human boy – the last of his kind. Such an obvious switch, but as a kid I had no idea it was coming and was totally devastated. I’ve never been able to find out who wrote it.

Name your three favourite horror writers.

Impossible. But I’ll name three I love: Steve Rasnic Tem, Melvin Burgess (not heard of him? He writes YA fiction, and his Bloodtide is one of the most impressive slices of pure horror I’ve ever read). Oh, and I’ve loved more than one Graham Masterton. His best passages are insanely good.

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

“Who Will Stop Me Now” is actually my very FIRST pure adult horror story. (We’ll, I have written one more, but it’s in my drawer.) I’ve written an adult comedy-horror film script, though, and an adult ghost script.

My 14 published novels so far are for 9-12 year olds and YA, but to be honest they are (mostly) full of horror. My novel Savannah Grey is about a girl who has a weapon in her throat, and is stalked by three monsters. It’s outright horror. As (with a supernatural slant) are my YA ghost novels Breathe and The Hunting Ground. I do occasionally write nicer animals stories, though. It’s nice to pretend you have a gentling aspect.

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

I’m just about to start China Miéville’s short story collection Three Moments of an Explosion. His Perdido Street Station is often classed as ‘fantasy’ but is probably the most extendedly beautiful and accomplished horror novel I’ve ever read.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

The Clowns on the Balcony

So, every afternoon around 3.30 I hear sounds out on the balcony, the scrape and scratch of large claws grabbing onto the metal railing. No, it’s not a monstrous attack, it’s these guys, the resident clowns. I generally go out, say hello, tell them they’re purdy, then go back to work. And they seem happy with that.

But some days I’m caught up in what I’m doing and I don’t go out. I don’t acknowledge them. That’s when crap happens.

Yesterday was one of those days. I didn’t go out and then I heard a strange noise, a crunching vegetable’ish sound. So, I went onto the balcony to find that one of my beautiful orchids (which you can see in the bottom of the above photo) was someone’s late lunch. I spent some time yelling obscenities, and of course taking actions shots. Assholes. These birds are assholes. But cute.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Paul Meloy

Paul Meloy was born in 1966. He is the author of Islington Crocodiles, Dogs With Their Eyes Shut, The Night Clock and a forthcoming collection called Electric Breakfast. He is working on his second novel, a sequel to The Night Clock. He lives in Devon with his family.

What inspired your story “Joe is a Barber”?

A haircut. I was working in Bury St Edmunds and went for a trim in a small basement barbershop off the high street. Smart young men in waistcoats and ties worked silently while their boss patrolled behind them checking their work. It was quite tense. And I’m always struck by how intimate a haircut is, how vulnerable you are in that chair, and the story came to me on the drive back to work in a complete narrative consisting of single lines.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

Probably The Interlopers by Ramsey Campbell, although it was so long ago I should probably cite the impact the whole book (Demons by Daylight) had on me. It was a cumulative effect of reading something so surreal and unsettling that I instantly knew I had discovered a depth to something I hadn’t known existed. Proper scary! Still wonderfully confusing!

Name your three favourite horror writers.

Adam Nevill

Stephen King

Justin Cronin

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

Graham Joyce defined my stuff as ‘fractured realism’, which will do for me. I tend to strive for a sense of awe, or wonder, rather than outright fear, although fear is certainly a part of the mix. I suppose it’s more magic realism, or dark fantasy with elements of horror.

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

Sacrifice by Paul Finch, The Stormwatcher by Graham Joyce, Houses without Doors by Pete Straub and Song of Shadows by John Connolly.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

 

 

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories: Simon Bestwick

Having fled a life of soul-killing jobs (office worker, fast food operative, WP operator, training administrator, call centre worker), the very talented Mr Simon Bestwick is now spending his days doing what he loves: writing. Which is a fortunate thing for us all. He’s published two novels, a chapbook, and three short story collections, and now takes some time out to discuss his story from The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories.

What inspired your story “Horn of the Hunter”?

I could be glib and say ‘the present government here in the UK’… but would actually also be partly true. I’d had the basic premise of the story in my mind for some time, but hadn’t been able to decide what the ‘Big Bad’ in it would be: first it was genetic mutants, then later a pack of hellhounds, but none of them seemed right. And then a couple of months ago, we had an election, and the Conservative Party got back in. As some non-UK readers might not know – but British readers will know all too well – their attitude towards anyone claiming welfare or state support, anyone poor or vulnerable, is one of depraved indifference at best, and outright sadism at worst. And just to put the tin lid on it, having got back into power, they announced they wanted to legalise fox-hunting – hunting animals with dogs for sport – which was banned some years ago. For me, that just sums these [TRIES TO FIND NON-OBSCENE WORD; FAILS] up for me… anyway, things came together very neatly after that.

What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you?

‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ by Edgar Allan Poe. I was very lucky when I was a small boy, because my Grandpa owned this big thick book called ‘A Century Of Thrillers’, which was a compendium of great horror stories. There was stuff by Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Poe – no Lovecraft or M.R. James, though, oddly enough; I didn’t encounter them till some years later. Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, and some stories by lesser known writers – there was one called ‘The Lighthouse On Shivering Sands’ by J.S. Fletcher… but ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ was the one that actually, genuinely frightened me. There’s the setting, the castle, the devastation outside, there’s the incredibly gruesome idea of the Red Death itself (to a small boy, of course, anything gory is awesome.) And then there’s that ending, and most of all that last line: And darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. That line is The end of everything. There is no escape. It was as if the horror in the story had actually reached out from the page and touched me. It was scary, not in a sense of creepiness or pleasing terror, but in the sense of a picture of a world in which you and everything and everyone you love are annihilated.

Other stories: ‘The Pond’ by Nigel Kneale, ‘The Extra Passenger’ and ‘The Lonesome Place’ by August Derleth – the last one has the truly fascinating idea of a creature that’s shaped out of fear itself – ‘The Boorees’ by Dorothy K. Haynes, about these creature that live up a chimney… I’d better stop or I’ll be here all day.

Name your three favourite horror writers.

This is a tough one, because I’m really bad at lists – I always want to include more authors. Ramsey Campbell, because I don’t think anyone’s done as much to promote the idea of horror as a form of literature, and who’s consistently produced so much stuff of such a high standard in the field.

Next: Ray Bradbury. Some would say he’s science fiction, not horror, but for them I have three words: The October Country. Bradbury was a genius – ‘The Scythe’, ‘The Next In Line’, so many others…

Finally, Richard Matheson: Shock 3 blew me away – like Bradbury, he’s one of those writers who overlaps between horror and science fiction. That’s a provisional list, and if you ask me tomorrow I’ll have some completely different names.

Is your writing generally firmly in the horror arena or do you do occasional jaunts into other areas of speculative fiction?

More and more at the moment, and there are a lot of reasons for that. I think horror’s a genre that kind of exists at the crossroads. It’s at this place where fantasy, science fiction and crime fiction – and most other genres, really – overlap, and you can take what you need from the others. And some of the best work happens at that overlap.

There’s a story I wrote a couple of years ago called ‘Lex Draconis’, which is in an anthology called Tales of the Nun and Dragon. You had to write a story involving either a nun or a dragon, so I decided to put both in, and somewhere along the line the phrase ‘nun-on-dragon action’ popped into my head and that story happened. It’s not something that would ever have happened if not for that anthology, but I absolutely love the result. It’s sort of fantasy, and it’s funny and odd and kind of a love story, and nothing like anything else I’ve done. At some point I’d love to write more in that sort of vein. So if anyone wants to buy a copy of that anthology… hint, hint.

There’s a novel coming out next year – inshallah! I can’t say anything else till the contracts are signed – that’s a mixture of horror, thriller and post-apocalyptic SF. I’ve also just finished a crime novel, but whether anything comes out of that remains to be seen.

What’s in your to-be-read pile at the moment?

A hell of a lot. There’s loads of books I’ve bought and not read – we’ve just moved house, so a lot of them are still packed away – and then there’s the stuff on the Kindle. Right now I’m just starting on John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, and I’ve also got two novellas, Albion Fay by Mark Morris and Leytonstone by Stephen Volk, to hand. Also, there’s a copy of this book bought alongside them, called The Bureau Of Them by Cate Gardner – but I’ve already read that (perk of the job) and it’s brilliant. You should all read it.

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories can be pre-ordered here.

Of Sorrow and Such available for pre-order!

All of the undignified happy dancing this morning: my Tor.com novella, Of Sorrow and Such, is available for pre-order.

If you feel so moved, go here – but please note that only Amazon and Barnes and Noble currently have the pre-order thing going on.

Set in the Sourdough world, it follows Patience Gideon (Sykes that was for fans of Sourdough and Other Stories) in another adventure.

Margo Lanagan said: “Of Sorrow and Such takes you to dark, unsettling places. Angela Slatter’s magic is earthy, bodily and beleaguered; in the hands of tough, clever Patience Gideon it’s a powerful instrument for wresting justice from a hostile world. A riveting read.”

Juliet Marillier said: “Of Sorrow and Such is Angela Slatter at her best. Characters and settings spring fully alive from the page, and the storytelling provides rich nourishment for both intellect and spirit.”

And I didn’t even pay them!