Angela Slatter's Blog, page 86
March 26, 2015
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird
Another cracking read from Paula Guran and Prime Books! Collecting some outstanding reprints, this anthology is available for order here.
CONTENTS:
The Same Deep Waters As You • Brian Hodge
Mysterium Tremendum • Laird Barron
The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings • Caitlín R. Kiernan
Bloom • John Langan
At Home With Azathoth • John Shirley
The Litany of Earth • Ruthanna Emrys
Necrotic Cove • Lois Gresh
On Ice • Simon Strantzas
The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward • Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
All My Love, A Fishhook • Helen Marshall
The Doom That Came to Devil Reef • Don Webb
Momma Durtt • Michael Shea
They Smell of Thunder • W.H. Pugmire
The Song of Sighs • Angela Slatter
Fishwife • Carrie Vaughn
In the House of the Hummingbirds • Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Who Looks Back? • Kyla Ward
Equoid • Charles Stross
The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft • Marc Laidlaw
Singing Her Scars: Damien Angelica Walters
Damien Angelica Walters’ short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Apex. “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu, is on the 2014 Bram Stoker Award ballot for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.
Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of her short fiction, is out now from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming from Dark House Press. You can find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or online at http://damienangelicawalters.com.
What do readers need to know about Damien Angelica Walters, and which story of yours would you recommend to a new reader?
DAW: I fear I’m much like most writers—an introvert, a bookworm, a drinker of too much coffee, and a fan of dinosaurs and Alien.
For those unfamiliar with my work, Like Origami in Water would be a good story to start with, I think. It’s an older story and while my authorial voice has matured a bit, I think it showcases the tone of my short fiction well. It’s short, too, at just about 1,500 words, so it’s a quick read.
Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?
DAW: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Jacqueline Carey, Gillian Flynn, Cormac McCarthy, Kij Johnson, Catherynne Valente, Kelly Link, Laird Barron, John Langan, and Ken Liu are some of the writers who’ve either inspired me or influenced me or left me in awe of their skill. Genre fiction holds a jaw-dropping wealth of talent.
Where did the inspiration for Sing Me Your Scars spring from? 
DAW: Do you remember all those hateful memes about real women? Real women look like this, no, they look like that… For a time it felt like I saw a different one every day (mostly posted by men), all with this perceived ideal of feminine perfection and each time, my frustration grew. That frustration turned into a sentence – This is not my body. – and then into a paragraph and then into the story itself.
What was the story/book that made you think ‘I want to write!’?
DAW: I don’t think it was one specific book, but a cumulative effect of everything I read, both genre and non-genre, both good and bad. I remember creating illustrated books when I was in third grade and trying to sell them to the other kids in the neighborhood. While I’m fairly certain the books were about ghosts and other creepy things, sadly, none of them survived my childhood.
Name five fictional characters you’d invite over for coffee and cake?
DAW: Phèdre nó Delaunay de Montrève from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, Offred from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the nameless main character from Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, Rose McClendon from Stephen King’s Rose Madder, and Ludwig Von Sacher from Kirsten Bakis’ Lives of the Monster Dogs.
Are there any of your own characters that you think you’d like to revisit in longer form at some point?
DAW: I’ve been toying with the idea of turning The Floating Girls: A Documentary into a novel, but at this point I’m still jotting ideas down to see if it’s viable or not. My fear is that even with the addition of new characters and a larger storyline comprised of events that occur before and after the events in the short story, the central story won’t translate well to a longer work.
What first drew you to write horror rather than any other genre?
DAW: It wasn’t a conscious choice, to be sure, but I grew up reading fairy tales and Lois Duncan and when I was eleven, I read Stephen King’s The Shining. Given that my tastes as a reader always skewed to the dark, it was a given that what I wrote would follow suit.
Who’s your favourite villain in fiction?
DAW: That’s a hard question to answer. I think it’s a tie between Coleman Collins from Peter Straub’s Shadowland and the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. Uncle Cole should be all magic tricks and letting the boys stay up too late with ice cream for dinner and cake for desert; he shouldn’t be crucifixion and mermaid girls and glass birds.
And the Overlook should be rooms and ugly carpet and a big kitchen; it shouldn’t be blood on the walls, fire extinguishers that become snakes when you’re not looking, and it most definitely should not be able to exploit your father’s greatest weakness and turn him against you.
What’s your favourite short story ever and why? 
DAW: Another tough question, and I’m going to cheat a bit and give you two. As far as the classics go, I’ll say The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. It’s masterful the way it draws you into a seemingly normal village, even if the gathering of the stones is disquieting. But the townspeople don’t seem worried overmuch, so it’s easy to brush that off. The story pulls the rug out from under you by slow degrees and then at the end, it leaves you suspended in the air and ready to drop with Mrs. Hutchinson. The slow burn coupled with keeping the carnage off-screen works beautifully.
For newer fiction, Spar by Kij Johnson is brilliant. If you read it quickly, you might be inclined to dismiss it as vulgar or tentacle porn, but if you read it closely, you see the true story underneath. It’s about communication, or the lack thereof, and how destructive, how paralyzing, that can be. It’s masterful.
What’s next for Damien Angelica Walters?
DAW: I have several short stories and a portmanteau novel currently in the works. I’m also trying to plot another novel about monsters, love, hate, and revenge. I’ve never plotted a novel before so I may or may not be successful, but my novel first drafts are always a mess and I’d love to find a way to make them a bit cleaner.
Publication-wise, Paper Tigers, a novel, will be out later this year from Dark House Press, and I’ve short fiction forthcoming in several anthologies and magazines, including Cassilda’s Song, edited by Joe Pulver, a King in Yellow anthology of all new stories written by women, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, edited by Paula Guran, and Black Static.
March 22, 2015
The Bitterwood Posts: Now, All Pirates are Gone
Art by Kathleen Jennings
In Sourdough and Other Stories, there is a tale called “The Navigator”, about ships and sirens and men with wings who act as navigators for said ships. There is a nameless narrator who may or may not die at the end, and who may or may not be a pirate … but there are definitely pirates in that world. I had the title, “Now, All Pirates Are Gone” scribbled down for another story that never made it into Sourdough.
When I was writing Bitterwood, I went back to my Sourdough notes and found that title and knew that it belonged in the new collection. I wanted a pirate story that was a bit more than seeking lost treasure and run-ins with the authorities. I thought about how Royal Navies were always trying to wipe them out, and I wondered about how someone might succeed. I found the tale of the ghost ship Caleuche in Chilote mythology and that gave me the name of the mysterious island. I knew I wanted to connect this tale with the action of “By My Voice I Shall Be Known”, and the unknown protagonist’s line ‘How long before she, too, chooses the water?’
I love my pirates. I love Maude and Sancha and Hieronymus the cat. I’m very fond of Edine, though she’s both stupid and dangerous.
Now, All Pirates are Gone 
The sea is strangely silent tonight and this makes Maude and her crew nervous.
Beneath their collective worn canvas shoes, bare feet, and thick soled boots, the brig’s deck is steady as Astra’s Light moves through the waters with nary a noise, and only the slightest shhhh’ing as the bow splits the flat mirror of liquid salt. Ahead of them, the island lies low, relaxed, a dark hunched thing against the blue-black sky, seemingly boneless as those chickens Maude’s aunt sometimes bred, the ones that weren’t quite right. But from the centre of Isla Caleuche rises a tower, straight and tall as a luring finger, saying Come hither.
The breeze that pushes them toward their goal is strong, warm – indeed, hot – and the night air is humid. Maude wipes at her face with an embroidered kerchief. The thing was not meant for such rough use and is frayed, discoloured after five hard years. Soon it will be little more than a rag, but she won’t discard it for it was a gift from the mute woman with auburn-rose hair they’d plucked from the sea, back when the oceans were kind and full of bounty. When the business of piracy was at its peak and all but the worst captains could afford to, and did, display some compassion and a reasonable degree of generosity. The folk of the Astra’s Light didn’t know how long the woman had floated, and they couldn’t figure how she hadn’t drowned, but her skin had turned as furrowed as a crone’s frown and it took days of pouring fresh water into her mouth and applying rich unguents (from Maude’s own stock, thank you very much) to make her even begin to look human once more.
Grateful, the woman had made herself useful – darning ragged pants, shirts and skirts, socks and stockings. Making serviceable bunk-blankets for the whole crew out of the worsted wool, calico and felt from an Argosy they’d “lightened” but days before; and a fine coverlet of green and gold brocatelle for Maude and Sancha’s bed. Men and women all began to regard her as something of a mascot, a pet to replace the cat that had disappeared in a storm a week earlier. The woman couldn’t write or speak, so Sancha had begun teaching her letters. By the time they’d set her ashore at Cwen’s Reach, she’d made a silken shawl for Sancha and the fine cambric kerchief for the captain, Maude’s initials embroidered in one corner and cleverly stitched now-mermaids-now-maidens gambolling around the edges, tail to feet and back again. Maude, who had the full complement of sailors’ superstitions to give her ballast, came to regard the piece of fabric as something of a lucky charm. In her career, she’d had her share of accidents – a shoulder dislocated from hanging out a window, stab wounds from any number of ill-wishers and naval men, powder burns from unexpected and inconvenient explosions – but from the day the kerchief came into her possession she’d been unusually incident- and injury-free.
When they’d made harbour at Cwen’s, Sancha had accompanied the woman, and left her with one of the Little Sisters of St Florian at the Citadel – which was the closest thing to a charitable institution the port town had. It seemed like the best place, Sancha later said, as she showed Maude the new ship’s cat she’d acquired, a black and gold kitten five months or so old, standoffish and wise as it sat on the bed beside them, observing their state of undress with a kind of disdain. Or perhaps the distaste was for her name: Hieronymus.
It was only some time after she’d gone, the woman, and the seas seemed to change their tenor, that they wondered if she was the beginning of their ruin.
***
Year’s Best Horror Volume 7
Full ToC reveal and final cover! Squeeeee!
“The Atlas of Hell” by Nathan Ballingrud (Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow, ChiZine Publications)
“Winter Children” by Angela Slatter (Postscripts #32/33 Far Voyager, edited by Nick Gevers, PS Publishing)
“A Dweller in Amenty” by Genevieve Valentine (Nightmare Magazine, March 2014)
“Outside Heavenly” by Rio Youers (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, edited by Mark Morris, Spectral Press)
“Shay Corsham Worsted” by Garth Nix (Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow, ChiZine Publications)
“Allocthon” by Livia Llewellyn (Letters to Lovecraft, edited by Jesse Bullington, Stone Skin Press)
“Chapter Six” by Stephen Graham Jones (Tor.com, June 2014)
“This is Not for You” by Gemma Files (Nightmare Magazine, September 2014)
“Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” by Caitlín R. Kiernan (Sirenia Digest #100, May 2014)
“The Culvert” by Dale Bailey (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2014)
“Past Reno” by Brian Evenson (Letters to Lovecraft, edited by Jesse Bullington, Stone Skin Press)
“The Coat Off His Back” by Keris McDonald (Terror Tales of Yorkshire, edited by Paul Finch, Gray Friar Press)
“the worms crawl in” by Laird Barron (Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow, ChiZine Publications)
“The Dog’s Home” by Alison Littlewood (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, edited by Mark Morris, Spectral Press)
“Tread Upon the Brittle Shell” by Rhoads Brazos (SQ Magazine, Edition 14, May 2014)
“Persistence of Vision” by Orrin Grey (Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Exile Editions)
“It Flows From the Mouth” by Robert Shearman (Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 6)
“Wingless Beasts” by Lucy Taylor (Fatal Journeys, Overlook Connection Press)
“Departures” by Carole Johnstone (The Bright Day is Done, Gray Friar Press)
“Ymir” by John Langan (The Children of the Old Leech, edited by Ross E. Lockhart & Justin Steele, Word Horde)
“Plink” by Kurt Dinan (Postscripts #32/33 Far Voyager, edited by Nick Gevers, PS Publishing)
“Nigredo” by Cody Goodfellow (In the Court of the Yellow King, edited by Glynn Owen Barras, Celaeno Press)
March 19, 2015
The Norma!!
Norma K. Hemming in costume in 1956 – http://www.asff.org.au/hemming.htm
Gods, but I love that Australia has an award called the Norma!
That’s the Norma K. Hemming to you. 
The exciting news is that The Female Factory has been shortlisted! Look at our teeny-tiny collection with all those awesome novels! *much Snoopy dancing*
“The following works have been shortlisted by the judges for the 2015 Norma K Hemming Award for race, gender, sexuality, class and disability in speculative fiction sponsored by the Australian Science Fiction Foundation:
Collection: The Female Factory’by Lisa L Hannett and Angela Slatter published by Twelfth Planet Press in November 2014
Novel: Nil By Mouth by LynC published by Satalyte Publishing in June 2014
Novel: North Star Guide Me Home by Jo Spurrier published by HarperVoyager in May 2014
Novel: Razorhurst by Justine Larbalestier published by Allen and Unwin in July 2014
Novel: The Wonders by Paddy O’Reilly published by Affirm Press in July 2014
The award will be presented to the winner at Swancon 40, the 54th Australian Science Fiction Convention in Perth, on Sunday evening 5th April 2015.”
March 18, 2015
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2015 Edition
Utterly delighted to have my fourth outing in Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, this time in the 2015 Edition (Prime Books) – and to share it with Lisa Hannett in her first appearance there makes it even more special!
Our title story from The Female Factory collection (Twelfth Planet Press – Twelve Planets Series #11) is making a cameo alongside the likes of Helen Marshall, Laird Barron, Caitlin R Kiernan, Brandon Sanderson, Jeff VanderMeer, Lavie Tidhar, and the excellent Kaaron Warren.
For the full ToC and pre-order details, go here!
And, should you wish to buy the original Female Factory collection (and let’s face it, you know you want to), go here!
March 16, 2015
QWC Short Story Clinic
In just over three weeks I’ll be teaching the Short Story Clinic at Queensland Writers Centre. What I aim for is for students to come out of the course with at least one short story that’s fit to begin the process of submitting to magazines, journals and anthologies.
What can you expect during the course? Firstly, critique on what does and doesn’t work in your tale from myself and your fellow student-scribes. Secondly, story development suggestions and solutions, as well as some structural and line editing. Thirdly, market and submissions advice whenever appropriate.
Testimonials required? Have a look here.
Contact QWC to book in.
Dates:
Tuesday April 7
Tuesday May 5
Tuesday July 7
Tuesday August 4
Tuesday September 8
Tuesday October 6
Time:
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Venue:
The Learning Centre, QWC, Level 2, State Library of Queensland, Cultural Centre, Stanley Place, South Brisbane.
March 15, 2015
The Bitterwood Posts: The Night Stair
Art by Kathleen Jennings
In 2012, my Significant Other and I were travelling around the UK and we visited Battle Abbey where the Battle of Hastings had taken place. We wandered through the ruins and one of the signs pointed out the night stair that the monks had taken when going to early services. I just loved that name and thought it sounded positively sinister. Where might it really lead?
I carried that around in my head as a title for the better part of a year until I started thinking about a vampire tale for Bitterwood. I could see Adlisa standing in the selection line, waiting, hoping to be chosen, not for a perceived better life, but so she could act, find the truth, and, with any luck at all, get revenge. But, as always, there’s a sting in the tale. She’s another character I want to revisit later, as Adlisa the Bloodless – she’s already got a mention in the new collection, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, and I hope to expand on that some time in the future.
The Night Stair
Art by Kathleen Jennings
The Steward is a tall man, entirely bald, gaunt in the face, yet rotund in the belly. His legs in their loose fawn linen trews, look like a scarecrow’s, sticking out under the awning of his gut – perpetually in shade perhaps they don’t get enough light to grow. His tunic of padded green silk, his sable wool coat with its thick fur collar, are too warm even for the end of summer, but as marks of his office, must be seen, just like the yellow crystal hanging about his neck. Called the “Steward’s Gaze”, it’s the size of the top joint of a man’s thumb, and has passed from incumbent to incumbent for as long as anyone has the will to recall. He puts it in his mouth and sucks hard when he thinks no one is watching. It’s worth a king’s ransom, and I’ll warrant the gold chatelaine belt around his waist could buy the city’s food for half a year.
His finery makes me aware of the state of my black dress – not that it’s poor or made shiny by age, but it belonged to others before me. Both my sisters – my only full-blood siblings – wore it to their own choosing. I am certain I can smell them, their scents imprinted into the warp and weft of the fabric despite washing. The colour makes my skin paler, my eyes bluer, provides the perfect background for the tresses, which pour down my back like gold fresh from the smelter. I was careful, so careful with my toilette: brushing my hair, one hundred strokes; rubbing the cream that was my mother’s (comfrey and rose to soften and plump, a little lemon balm for lightening) into my skin; drops of eyebright to ensure my gaze is clear. I refrained from pinching my cheeks – pale is best – but I did nip gently at my lips, to carmine them a little, so it seems as if all life is concentrated there. I will not be found wanting.
I stand in line with seven other girls who have been presented this day. We are of an age, none more than sixteen springs, and there is only one of them, perhaps two, who might outdo me. To my right is Essa, with her milky skin and eyes like the sky reflected in ice, hair bright platinum; even her nails seem to have a silvery sheen. She watches me from the corner of her eye, just as I watch her.
To my left is Dimity, whose eyes are bright green, her cheeks with the tiniest hint of pink. She keeps her regard firmly fixed upon her own feet. Our Lady best likes girls who resemble herself; that is not Dimity for all her snow-washed whiteness – the eyes are all wrong and the eyes count.
So, Essa. Essa is the one to beat – the Steward will surely select between the two of us.
Filling this large room in the city hall are parents, including my father, who’s left the running of the mine’s smelter to his deputies so he can see what deals might be struck. Behind him are three of my younger half-siblings, those not yet old enough to be exhibited, but deemed mature enough to watch proceedings in order to learn how to behave when – if – their time comes. Another ten still wait at home; not all will be offered, only those whose appearance is right, those whose behaviour does not mark them out as more trouble than they’re worth. My father has twice made a small fortune from this process and I imagine he hopes to again – his tendency for taking new wives, sometimes before the old one is done, and his proclivity for procreation, his personal fecundity, constantly require more funds than his well-paid position provides.
Steward Oswain walks slowly up and down our line, as if inspecting troops. His brown eyes are considering, patient, although a little uncertain, as if offered several courses at a banquet and told he might only have one. He stops in front of the Toop girl and shakes his head (anyone can see she’s too fat), then the Ansible twins (hair too dark), and then Mistress Garran’s girl (whose neck is smudged by a red birthmark); a dismissal for each. At the back of the crowd I hear a woman crying; she is shushed and hustled out – I cannot tell if her weeping was of relief or despair. The desperate whirring of my own thoughts is far too loud.
I straighten my shoulders, lift my head a little higher, blink quickly so that tears of fear do not start and cause the coal-mascara on my lashes to run. The Steward takes one more pass; another. He stops in front of Dimity – Dimity! – puts a finger under her chin and makes her look at him. Her lips tremble; he smiles kindly and nods. Essa makes a noise, and this one I know for relief. The Steward steps back, turns away. All scrutiny has left us. Parents mill around the tall stork of a man to strike bargains; Dimity’s mother to get the highest price, the others to find out when there might be another choosing – as if the Steward can predict Our Lady’s moods to a day and date! Only my siblings still watch, their eyes fastened onto me as if by hooks.
Dimity takes her first step forward as a chosen girl and I trip her. Essa’s intake of breath is sharp. The green-eyed maiden falls so fast, is so surprised, that she does not put her hands out to save herself. Her face meets the floor with a satisfying crunch of bone and cartilage. There is that tiny broken moment when nothing happens, no one moves, when time is divided into before and after, then, as if a clock’s hands click over, everything starts again, and the girl on the floor wails. I do not move.
Dimity sits up, blood pouring from her ruined nose. She stares at me all uncomprehending, hands twitching as if to point me out, but she catches my glance and I can see her crumple inside. She sobs a little more quietly and when an adult asks what happened, she answers with ‘I fell’.
She will thank me; or rather, she would if she thought about it.
***
James Bradley’s Clade
Sydney author James Bradley’s new novel Clade has recently been released into the wild. His three previous novels, Wrack, The Deep Field and the international bestseller The Resurrectionist, have all been widely translated, and won or been shortlisted for major literary awards. He’s also written a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and edited the anthologies, Blur and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. Not only that, he’s been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Horror Short Story category for his tale “Skinsuit” (which originally appeared in Island Magazine #137).
Clade is a multi-generational saga about family, love and loss in a world 
irrevocably warped by environmental change. Gary K. Wolfe of Locus online has said: “[Clade] is among the most literate and humane contributions to that slowly emerging tradition of what is sometimes called ”slow apocalypse” fiction . . . It’s his astute management of chronology, as each section leaps years ahead of the preceding one, that generates the novel’s haunting and elegiac feeling, making it a near-epic of loss, remembrance, and steadily diminishing hope.”
So, what do readers need to know about James Bradley?
I’m never quite sure what to say when people ask me that! I guess the answer is that I’m a writer who’s published four novels (Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and, most recently, Clade), a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and a fair number of shorter things. I’ve also edited a couple of anthologies, the most recent of which was The Penguin Book of the Ocean, and I write and review for newspapers and magazines, as well as running a blog, and in 2012 I won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year. I live in Sydney with my partner, the writer Mardi McConnochie and our two daughters.
Where did the inspiration for Clade spring from?
I’d been trying to find a way of writing about climate change for a long time, but although I’d managed to get at it tangentially in a few short stories (in particular ‘Visitors’, which was published by Review of Australian Fiction) and non-fiction I’d always found the subject too complex and unwieldy to really get a grip on. But after we had kids I found the whole subject started to take on a different edge, as it began to become clear to me just what a disaster we’re leaving them.
Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?
So many. Le Guin, Ondaatje, Gibson, Dickens, George Eliot, Margaret Atwood, Tolstoy, Lorrie Moore. Just lately I’ve been blown away by Helen MacDonald’s astonishing H is for Hawk, and I’ve been rereading Auden and Heaney, who remain as astonishing for ever. And Clade takes some inspiration from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books, as well as a lot of recent nature writing.
You wrote a novelette Beauty’s Sister for Penguin a couple of years ago – how did that come about?
I wrote ‘Beauty’s Sister’ as a sort of experiment – I’d just abandoned a novel quite a long way through the editing process, so I wanted to try something completely different. And one day I woke up with the narrator, Juniper, in my mind, and a series of questions about what it must have been like to be Rapunzel’s parents. After I wrote it I really had no idea what to do with it, mostly because it was so long, and then, out of the blue, Penguin approached me to say they were setting up a digital publishing initiative called Penguin Specials, so I sent it to them and they liked it. Interestingly they later republished it as a physical book, which was great, because it meant it found a whole new audience. Since then I’ve written several more fairy-tale themed stories, partly because I’m so fascinated by the weirdness of fairy tales, their psychological elisions and strangeness, partly because I feel like there’s something in them I haven’t quite got at yet.
How does Clade differ to your previous novels? 
Because my books bounce around so much in time people tend to think they’re very different to each other, but I’ve always thought they share quite closely allied interests, and that there are some strong commonalities binding them together: if nothing else they’re all interested in time, and mortality, and continuance (they also all tend to explore questions about unsettled identity).
Yet at the same time each one is written as a reaction to the last, which means they tend to diverge quite violently stylistically and in terms of subject matter. With Clade I was reacting to The Resurrectionist, which was both a very difficult book to write and ended up being a deliberately disordered and stylistically dense novel in which the voice does a lot of the work, and at least partly as a result of that Clade is a much sparer and cleaner novel. That contrast is on purpose, partly because I couldn’t face the thought of writing a book as unsettled (or unsettling) as The Resurrectionist again, partly because when I began Clade I’d developed an almost visceral distaste for writerly writing. But I also wanted it to be a more hopeful book, because at the end of the day I feel like we need to find ways of thinking about the future which allow us the possibility of changing it.
When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer?
I started writing in my early 20s, when I began publishing poems. Before that I’d always felt like I saw the world slightly differently from the people around me, but I’d never really known how to express that. After a year or two I decided I wanted to try and write a novel that did the things with language and form I was trying to make poetry do, but on a much larger scale. I suspect in some ways I’m still trying to do that.
Which book would you say taught you the most about writing?
I suspect the book of mine that taught me the most about writing was The Resurrectionist, although sadly a lot of it was about what not to do, or not to do again. But I think all of them have taught me things, and each new one is about trying to do various things better than I did the last time. In terms of books by other people I’m not really sure – in recent years I’ve been fascinated by the way Alice Munro’s stories manage to do cover such big spans of time without ever seeming truncated, so a story feels as full as a novel, and I love the incredible acuity of Hilary Mantel’s representation of psychology. There are also writers like Ondaatje who have taught me a lot about structure, and writers like Rachel Kushner and Don Delillo and others who have taught me about language.
Do you find it difficult, shifting gears between short and long fiction?
I love the scale of novels, their thickness and variousness, but I also love the narrative concision of short stories, the way they can turn you 180 degrees in just a few pages, so the pleasures of writing each are slightly different. But having said that I don’t usually find shifting between thema challenge, although if I’m working on a novel I find it almost impossible to do anything else, so convincing myself to stop for a week or two to write a short story can be difficult.
What’s next for James Bradley? 
The $64,000 question. I’ve been writing a trilogy of YA SF novels which I’m halfway through, although I still don’t know what I’ll do with them. I’m working on a couple of novels as well: one with graphic elements, and another which is historical, and I’m slowly mapping out a couple of collections of shorter fiction. But I’ve also got a new adult novel slowly coalescing and feels increasingly interesting. Which of them gets finished first is a bit of an open question at the moment, all I know is I want whatever comes next to be new somehow, denser, more alive, and for it to feel urgent to me.
March 13, 2015
New novella: Fitcher’s Bird
Art by Arthur Rackham
I’ve started a new novella today, Fitcher’s Bird, a modernisation of the old fairy tale mingled with a serial killer story. Because I’m cheerful like that, me.
Once upon a time there was a girl who lost her sisters, but she found their bones long after the flesh had fallen away.
She took those bones, they were hers, after all, who else had such a right to them? She planted these weird seedlings in the eventide, down at the bottom of her garden. She fed them with water and blood and dead things that no longer minded the uses to which they were put. She watched and tended the strange beds she’d sewn.
She waited. She was patient as good sisters are. And then one night when the moon grew full and fat in the sky, she saw the soil begin to tremble, small avalanches of dirt trickling from the raised plots until, at last, pale thin fingers broke the earth and glowed beneath the midnight light.
***
