Obligatory Ditmar and Stoker Awards eligibility post.
It’s award season again and when this time of year comes around there’s always varying degrees of discomfort in how we make our eligible work known without acting like car salesmen or insecure hermits. And everything in between. However, I’ve long since come to be comfortable with the idea that writers should make clear what their eligible work is and where to find it. I wish more writers would do it in order for me to not forget good stuff I’ve seen, or for me to find good stuff I may have missed. And I always encourage more people to get involved so the awards are a better reflection of fandom, as they should be. The juried awards look after themselves, but the fan awards need loads of participation. So get on board.
The Stokers can only be recommended by HWA members and they know who they are, so anyone reading this with the ability to get involved there can skip straight down to the stories I’ve listed. Stoker Awards rules and etiquette can be found here: http://www.horror.org/awards/stokers.htm
The Ditmars can be nominated by “natural persons active in fandom”. That means we can’t just get all our family and friends to nominate, as the committee will check who’s nominating. But if you are a fan, you can use the online form to nominate and to give a referee for you eligibility to nominate. If you’re a blogger, a convention attendee, an avid reader, active in any way in fandom, you qualify. The nomination form is here and all the relevant details are on it. So if you’re allowed to, please get involved. There’s a massive (though not exhaustive) list of eligible work here. I have two things that I think are my strongest works of 2015, and that I’d like to see attract more attention. They’re listed below and I’ve made a PDF of each available for you to read and consider. If you think they’re worthy of your nomination, I thank you in advance.
In the Best Short Story Category, I think my best this year was “The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner” (6,500 words), from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2015 issue. Click here (or Right Click and Save As) for a PDF of that story: http://bit.ly/1JUyVCY
In Your Face – the genesis of my story, “Bodies Of Evidence”
One of the best things about slowly and steadily building a writing career is that you get to a point where editors come to you and ask for stories, based on their experience of your previous work. It’s incredibly cool, and really helps to remind a writer that all the hard work is worthwhile. Of course, there’s no guarantee that said editor will buy the story you send them – you still have to write something that blows their socks off. Well, in 2015 I was commissioned by three editors for stories, and I managed to sell to all three. I couldn’t be happier! In this post, I’m going to talk specifically about one in particular, a story for editor Tehani Wessley of Fablecroft Publishing, for her forthcoming anthology, In Your Face. A bit further down I’m going to talk about my story, but first you need to understand the idea of the book.
In Your Face will be made up of original and reprinted speculative fiction stories that deal with very provocative themes. These stories will be provocative and/or confronting but with a firm purpose – they are pieces that will perhaps make readers uncomfortable because they are a bit too hard-hitting or close to the bone, but which interrogate these themes and ideas, and make a point about the world we live in.
The book is happening hopefully by April, and it’s going to be amazing. There’s a pozible campaign though, which aims to raise more money in order to buy more stories for the anthology and then, if it meets its stretch goals, pay its authors more. So that’s pretty awesome. The modest original target was met in less than twelve hours! But you can still get involved and use the campaign to pre-order your ebook or print copy at a discount, and claim other rewards. All the details here: http://www.pozible.com/project/202670
Now my story that will appear in In Your Face is a very personal one. When Tehani explained the book to me, I realised this was the opportunity to write a story dealing with something I’d avoided until now. I had an older brother, Steven, who was a great guy. But he was born with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, the most aggressive form of this progressive neuromuscular disorder, and he died when he was 18. I was 16. My entire youth was one where disability was front and centre of my life.
I knew I would address disability one day in a story, but not simply the nature of disability itself – I knew I needed to explore parallels between disability and deliberate body modification. The things people willingly do to themselves and the things people wish they could do. I knew it would be a difficult story to write and a difficult one to sell. When In Your Face came along, I realised the problem of selling it might be taken care of if I could do a good enough job of writing it. So that’s what I did.
It was one of the hardest things to write I’ve ever taken on. The framework is a cyberpunk noir story, with a protagonist who’s a career detective on a strange murder case. Her brother has a debilitating disease and not much longer to live. I don’t specify in the story that he has MD, but that was my model for the character’s situation. I’m not going to say any more about it, but now you know the genesis of the story. It’s called “Bodies Of Evidence” and I really hope people enjoy it. Well, maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word. It’s an uncomfortable story to read, I think, but that’s the point really. I just hope I’ve done the subject justice. Time will tell. Tehani, at least, thinks I have, as she bought the story, so I’ll take that encouragement. And I really want to thank my friends Rob and Julia for their invaluable help beta reading this story for me.
There are some amazing writers lined up for In Your Face, so get over to the Pozible page and reserve your copy now. I think it’s going to be a very important book.
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Some writing facts and figures for 2015
As much for myself as anything else, it’s nice to look back on a year and see what’s been achieved. Given that I’m always striving for more, it’s good to stop and remind myself what I have managed along the way. So here are some writing facts and figures for 2015.
I had no new books out this year, but I wrote some – more on that below.
New short fiction publications this year were:
“How Father Bryant Saw the Light” – Blurring the Line anthology (ed. Marty Young, Cohesion Press, November 2015)
“Reaching For Ruins” – Review of Australian Fiction (ed. Matthew Lamb, Vol. 16, Issue 3, November 2015)
“Old Promise, New Blood” – Bloodlines anthology (ed. Amanda Pillar, Ticonderoga Publications, October 2015)
“In Vaulted Halls Entombed” – SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest anthology (ed. Geoff Brown & A J Spedding, Cohesion Press, September 2015) (Novelette)
“Beyond the Borders of All He Had Been Taught” – Insert Title Here anthology (ed. Tehani Wessley, Fablecroft Publishing, April 2015)
“The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner” – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ed. Gordon Van Gelder, Jan-Feb 2015 issue)
That last one, selling to F&SF, is a real career high point for me. It’s my holy grail of sales and I finally nailed it. I’ve loved that magazine since I was a kid and seeing my name in one was mind-numbing. Plus, it’s just been listed on the Tangent Online Recommended Reading List, so that’s a nice bonus. Now to beat my best by selling to F&SF again.
As for the business of submissions, I made 37 short fiction submissions in 2015, so fewer than normal. But I got 8 acceptances, a couple of them pro, which is a higher ratio than normal. A few of those were solicited, so the strike rate is always higher that way than cold subs.
As for new writing, I wrote about a dozen new short stories, all of which are either sold or (four of them) out on submission.
I finished a novel that I started in 2014, which is now with my agent.
I wrote a whole new collaborative novel with David Wood which is now out on submission.
I wrote a novella of about 30k words that’s also out on submission.
And I’m halfway (about 50k words) through a new novel that I hope to have finished in first draft by the end of Feb.
Also in 2015, I won an Australian Shadows Award, for “Shadows of the Lonely Dead”, and was nominated for a second one for “Mephisto”, both short stories. And I was nominated for a Best Novel Ditmar Award for Bound, a Best Novella or Novelette Ditmar Award for “The Darkness in Clara”, and a Best Horror Novel Aurealis Award for Obsidian. And the Shadows Award winning story was reprinted in Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror. Not actual writing stats, but fucking significant writing achievements in the year.
So while there’s only been six new stories published this year (my lowest count since 2011), and no new books, I have nonetheless been very busy. That’s the business – nothing happens fast. But you have to work like a pro 100% of the time to see results. And they do come if you never quit.
Hopefully I’ll land a new book deal or two in 2016 – cross your eveythings for me.
How was your year? Productive, I hope. Let’s all try to beat our best in 2016. Happy new year!
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Blurring The Line: Rena Mason
Blurring The Line is the new anthology of horror fiction and non-fiction, edited by award-winning editor Marty Young, published by Cohesion Press. You can get your copy here or anywhere you normally buy books (the print edition is coming any day now).
To help people learn a bit more about it, I’ve arranged for each fiction contributor to answer the same five questions, and I’ll be running these mini interviews every weekday now that the book is available.
Today, it’s:
Rena Mason
Rena Mason is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® winning author, as well as a 2014 Stage 32 / The Blood List presents: The Search for New Blood Screenwriting Contest Finalist. She’s a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and The International Screenwriters’ Association. She writes a column for the HWA Monthly Newsletter, event write-ups, and occasional articles. Rena has served as a Literary Chair Committee Member for the Las Vegas Valley Book Festival and Co-Chair on the StokerCon2016 Event Committee.
A Registered Nurse, and an avid SCUBA diver since 1988, she has traveled the world and enjoys incorporating the experiences into her stories. She currently resides in Reno, Nevada with her family.
For more information about this author, visit her website: RenaMason.Ink
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
Because of the shortage for nurses, as an R.N. I often found myself working side by side with traveling nurses from abroad. It takes a strong personality type to come from another country and be able to provide such a diverse range of care in a foreign land. Travelers who specialize in medical/surgical care get scheduled to work on whatever floor they’re needed, which can span from specialties such as cancer to post-op patients. It’s something I personally wouldn’t want to do.
A few traveling nurses I’d worked with told me that life in the states wasn’t what they thought it would be like, and that they’d return home after their contract was up. They complained of being homesick, missing their families, the people, and familiar foods. So I took the culmination of all those things, amplified them a notch or two with locale, added more distinctly mixed cultural diversities in a city’s population, taking the horror to a level that would push my main character over the edge.
2. What does horror mean to you?
It’s anything that makes me feel fear, uneasy, unsettled, or disturbed.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell. A classic, chilling ghost story.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
Hell House by Richard Matheson.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
The Loch Ness Monster.
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Previous posts in the Blurring The Line interview series:
Marty Young
Tom Piccirilli
Lisa Morton
Tim Lebbon
Lia Swope Mitchell
Alan Baxter
James Dorr
Peter Hagelslag
Gregory L Norris
Steven Lloyd Wilson
James A Moore
Alex C Renwick
Lisa L Hannett
Kealan Patrick Burke
Brett McBean
Kaaron Warren
Paul Mannering
Charles L Grant
Patricia Esposito
Rena Mason
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Blurring The Line: Patricia Esposito
Blurring The Line is the new anthology of horror fiction and non-fiction, edited by award-winning editor Marty Young, published by Cohesion Press. You can get your copy here or anywhere you normally buy books (the print edition is coming any day now).
To help people learn a bit more about it, I’ve arranged for each fiction contributor to answer the same five questions, and I’ll be running these mini interviews every weekday now that the book is available.
Today, it’s:
Patricia Esposito
Patricia J. Esposito is author of Beside the Darker Shore and has published numerous works in anthologies, such as Main Street Rag’s Crossing Lines, Anna Purna’s Clarify, Undertow’s Apparitions, and Transmundane’s Distorted, and in magazines, including Not One of Us, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Rose and Thorn, Wicked Hollow, and Midnight Street. She has received honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Find her at: http://patricia-j-esposito.
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring the Line?
My story “A Distorted and Holy Desire” came out of my need to explore the mystery of music’s deep effect on us. Sometimes we experience art that transcends, that takes the pain of life and lets us experience it and yet, through art, come out of it. Art as catharsis. In the few times I saw the band Beautiful Collision (BeCo) play, I felt that transcendence, and yet the singer/guitarist would say, almost shyly, a very simple, “Thank you.” Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that so much passion and beauty can come from a mortal human form. Sometimes emotion is so great I wonder how we survive it. I wrote to see how I survive it, though I’m not sure I do.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Horror can range from stories that elicit heart palpitations to cringing and nausea to an unease that won’t let go. Horror that makes me jump and then laugh at the adrenaline rush can be fun, and I can appreciate the imagery of a well-done slasher scene—both designed to shake us, give us a quick thrill?—but I generally seek out horror that evokes that unnameable unease, that makes me think and wonder and try to establish how the horror might fit in myself or the world I’m part of. I think the unknown plays into most horror; however, I’m drawn to horror that remains a bit of a mystery, that entails the ambiguous, something that might lie within us if not without, or that we finally perceive with a sense of near awe because it is beyond our control and yet part of this world, not to go away.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
I had trouble with this because I’ve read a number of excellent short stories from recent years, in magazines and anthologies, and I always wonder what will stand the test of time. I’m a fan of Michael Kelly’s work, which combines the imagistic language I love with the psychological aspects of our inner fears. I’ll offer one of his, “The Woods,” because I think it’s an example of how subtle horror can be most powerful at times. Two old men sit across from each other in a cabin that’s suffocated in snow. We never learn of the crime and no one is accused outright, and yet the tension that builds from what is not stated and from the images of isolation that Kelly conveys so well left me more uneasy than if we’d learned the truth. The chill is in what we know is potential!
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
Here I turn to my personal taste for psychological horror and recommend a classic, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. I first read the novella in high school, and it remained with me ever since, obviously influencing my own horror. I like when barriers between worlds seem to be breaking, and yet it could be what our own minds and distressed subconscious have done. How often and easily we scare ourselves by letting the imagination go; yet usually something keeps us over the edge. I like to explore going over that edge. (I’d also always recommend Ray Bradbury for the experience of his imagery that makes us thoroughly feel the world and the characters and for the elevated nature of what he proposes we can be.)
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
When it’s quiet and I’m absorbed in my writing, I wonder if all that had faded around me was ever real, or if we design the tangible in a collective effort for sanity.
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Previous posts in the Blurring The Line interview series:
Marty Young
Tom Piccirilli
Lisa Morton
Tim Lebbon
Lia Swope Mitchell
Alan Baxter
James Dorr
Peter Hagelslag
Gregory L Norris
Steven Lloyd Wilson
James A Moore
Alex C Renwick
Lisa L Hannett
Kealan Patrick Burke
Brett McBean
Kaaron Warren
Paul Mannering
Charles L Grant
Annie NeugeBauer
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Conflux 12 Guest of Honour!
Now this is a big one! Certainly a career milestone for me, and I’m chuffed to be able to talk about it now: I’m going to be the Special Guest at Conflux 12 in Canberra next year, across the long weekend September 30th to October 3rd, 2016. The official site is here: http://conflux.org.au/
I’m stunned that I’ve been invited to be a Guest of Honour at a con. I’ve always seen it as something famous people do! Conflux was the first convention I ever attended and it’s always had a special place in my heart. To go again in 2016 as the Guest is just mind-blowing. So I hope that any of you who can get to Canberra next year will come along!
The Red Fire Monkey theme should be pretty cool – I’m still not entirely sure what that entails, but I know that among many other things, I’ll be running my Write The Fight Right workshop there. The first place I ran that workshop was Conflux many years ago, so there’s a nice synchronicity there. I need to get myself a Monkey Magic costume organised for the ball.
I’m still pinching myself. More news on all that as it gets more organised over coming months. But put the dates in your diary!
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Blurring The Line: Annie Neugebauer
Blurring The Line is the new anthology of horror fiction and non-fiction, edited by award-winning editor Marty Young, published by Cohesion Press. You can get your copy here or anywhere you normally buy books (the print edition is coming any day now).
To help people learn a bit more about it, I’ve arranged for each fiction contributor to answer the same five questions, and I’ll be running these mini interviews every weekday now that the book is available.
Today, it’s:
Annie Neugebauer
Annie Neugebauer (@AnnieNeugebauer) is a short story author, novelist, and award-winning poet. She has stories and poems appearing or forthcoming in over fifty venues, including Black Static, Fireside, DarkFuse, and Buzzy Mag. She’s an active member of the Horror Writers Association, the webmaster for the Poetry Society of Texas, and a columnist for Writer Unboxed. She lives in Texas with her sweet husband and two diabolical cats. You can visit her at www.AnnieNeugebauer.com for blogs, creative works, free organizational tools for writers, and more.
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
A few years ago I read the nonfiction book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. In it, the author very briefly mentions The Mellified Man, or human mummy confection, a purportedly true practice in ancient Arabia cited by sixteenth-century Chinese pharmacologist Li Shizhen. This was the custom of elderly people sacrificing themselves by consuming only honey until death, so their bodies could be turned into a medicinal substance believed to heal all sorts of ailments when ingested.
The claim was bizarre enough to catch my fancy, and off I ran. When Cohesion Press announced this anthology asking for stories that blurred the line between fact and fiction, I knew “Honey” was the perfect fit. I took the supposedly true legend and put my own spin on it, bringing it into modern times.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Do you want the 1,000 word answer or the 50,000 word one? Kidding, sort of. This is a topic I’m incredibly passionate about. I’ve blogged about it several times, both for the Horror Writers Association and on my own website. “Thoughts on IT by Stephen King, What it Takes to Enjoy Horror, and Why I Write It” is my most popular, thanks in large part to Anne Rice sharing it with her followers. I also have “What Is Horror?,” “Why Horror Should Be Its Own Genre,” and “Reclaiming Horror.”
But I’ll give you the shorter answer. Defining horror, for me, comes down to fear. Fear is subjective, so it doesn’t have to scare me personally (although that’s ideal), but it does have to be written with the intent of unsettling, unnerving, frightening, or disturbing the reader. There are a lot of politics and prejudices that go into labels, so some of horror’s best works often evade the descriptor “horror,” but at the end of the day, that doesn’t change what they are. Horror is an emotion, and to me, anything written with the intent of creating that emotion is horror, from Mary Shelley to Jack Ketchum to Franz Kafka.
But maybe you mean what does horror mean to me, personally? That’s tricky to answer, because it means so much. Horror is the nostalgia of staying up late on Sunday nights to watch The X-Files with my dad. Horror is hearing “The Raven” read aloud after looking up all the vocabulary words and allusions. Horror is seeing Halloween for the first time with my best friend in high school. Horror is the thrill of walking through a haunted house. It’s trick-or-treating. It’s scaring my friends with my own stories. It’s the first short story I ever had published. It’s what inspires me to sit down every day and work until my wrists are sore and my eyes burn. Horror is the torch and the darkness both – it’s the unconquered nightmare I walk through to prove to myself that I can. It’s my livelihood, my passion, my boogie man, and my friend. Horror is my life.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
My first answer is “everything by Poe,” but since most people have at least read Poe’s classics, I’ll go for something I think less people are familiar with. One of my favorite horror shorts is “The Tooth” by Shirley Jackson. It doesn’t have the big bang ending that her more famous story “The Lottery” boasts, but it has a subtlety and quiet eeriness that left me absolutely unraveled. I think Jackson is a master of literary horror, and I’m honestly not sure why more people don’t talk about her.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
Stephen King’s The Shining is famous for a reason, so I always suggest people start with that. It’s my personal number one as far as “scary” goes. Less known and more modern, Bird Box by Josh Malerman absolutely knocked my socks off. And I’m a hardcore fan of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, but it’s admittedly not for everyone. You really have to love literary fiction and long, complex, experimental works, but if you do, this one might just become your favorite book. It’s one I know I’ll reread many times in my life.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Hm, that’s hard. I’m a pretty grounded realist; I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits or anything supernatural. (Ironic, I know.) So I guess for me the “might or might not” things are those which we haven’t disproven but that we also haven’t discovered, like aliens or various animals living in the few underexplored parts of our planet. The unknown creatures that swim in the deepest parts of the ocean inspired my poem “The Hadal Zone,” for example. My fancy is always captured by the real, unknown things that might still be out there, waiting.
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Previous posts in the Blurring The Line interview series:
Marty Young
Tom Piccirilli
Lisa Morton
Tim Lebbon
Lia Swope Mitchell
Alan Baxter
James Dorr
Peter Hagelslag
Gregory L Norris
Steven Lloyd Wilson
James A Moore
Alex C Renwick
Lisa L Hannett
Kealan Patrick Burke
Brett McBean
Kaaron Warren
Paul Mannering
Charles L Grant
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Blurring The Line: Charles L Grant
Blurring The Line is the new anthology of horror fiction and non-fiction, edited by award-winning editor Marty Young, published by Cohesion Press. You can get your copy here or anywhere you normally buy books (the print edition is coming any day now).
To help people learn a bit more about it, I’ve arranged for each fiction contributor to answer the same five questions, and I’ll be running these mini interviews every weekday now that the book is available.
Today, it’s:
Charles L Grant
Unfortunately, Charles died in 2006, but it’s a real treat to have one of his stories in Blurring The Line. In lieu of an interview, here’s his bio, and follow the links to find more of his work.
Charles L. Grant was well known for his “quiet horror” and for editing the award-winning Shadows anthologies. He received the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award in 1987 for life achievement; in 2000, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. Other awards include two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards for writing and editing. He wrote in many different genres under assorted names (many with a water reference). His numerous novels are being brought out in e-book format from Crossroad Press and Necon Ebooks.
Charlie died from a lengthy illness on September 15, 2006, just three days after his birthday. He lived in Newton, NJ, and was married to writer/editor Kathryn Ptacek for nearly twenty-five years.
Here are some links to some of Charles’ work:
Symphony (The Millennium Quartet Book 1)
The Pet
The Bloodwind – An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels)
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Previous posts in the Blurring The Line interview series:
Marty Young
Tom Piccirilli
Lisa Morton
Tim Lebbon
Lia Swope Mitchell
Alan Baxter
James Dorr
Peter Hagelslag
Gregory L Norris
Steven Lloyd Wilson
James A Moore
Alex C Renwick
Lisa L Hannett
Kealan Patrick Burke
Brett McBean
Kaaron Warren
Paul Mannering
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Blurring The Line: Paul Mannering
Blurring The Line is the new anthology of horror fiction and non-fiction, edited by award-winning editor Marty Young, published by Cohesion Press. You can get your copy here or anywhere you normally buy books (the print edition is coming any day now).
To help people learn a bit more about it, I’ve arranged for each fiction contributor to answer the same five questions, and I’ll be running these mini interviews every weekday now that the book is available.
Today, it’s:
Paul Mannering
Paul Mannering is an award-winning writer living in Wellington, New Zealand, where he lives with his wife Damaris and their two cats.
Author of the Tankbread series, published by Permuted Press and the Drakeforth Trilogy, including book 1 “Engines of Empathy” published by Paper Road Press
Stalk Paul on Facebook at his author page https://www.facebook.com/
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
‘Salt On The Tongue’ came about from so many inspirations. I grew up in a rural farming community in New Zealand’s South Island. The west coast of the South Island was a place we visited regularly and the coastal bush is a primal and dark temperate rain forest. Wet and lush, the Coast is a place that can be incredibly rugged and wild. Inspiration came from thinking about outsiders coming into the remote and isolated communities that can exist in such places. People who live normal lives and yet find themselves in places and situations that they can’t quite comprehend.
Motivation was that unending compulsion to explore an idea or a feeling and see just how a story will play out when it is dragged into the light and autopsied.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Horror is the stories that I can never forget. Novels, short-stories, films, radio-plays – that all come flooding back in perfect detail when I know it’s perfectly safe to walk down the dark hallway to the bathroom in the middle of the night. At the same time knowing that I wouldn’t walk that dark passage for a million bucks.
Horror is the thrill of the unseen and the arrogance of reminding ourselves that it’s just fiction. It’s the fairy tales where the witch eats Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood dies screaming with the wolf’s hot breath on her throat.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
“The Strong Will Survive” by John Everson (published in his outstanding collection, “Needles and Sins”.) It is a story that you read once and then realise that you need to read it again, just to understand what you have witnessed. It is the most poignant, moving, and utterly horrific story I have ever read. The remarkable thing is that this is a very gentle tale in a collection with stories containing graphic violence and horrific scenarios.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
“The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Barker.
In terms of length it is more a novella, but on a scale of epic – it’s greater than King’s Dark Tower series.
What totally clinches this novel as the greatest horror novel I’ve read is the beautiful poetry of the prose. Barker is a master of really disturbing horror and yet he delivers it in a way that makes it seem like a Shakespearean sonnet.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Amazon royalty cheques – I mean I’ve heard of them but I’ve never seen one.
Seriously though, ghosts are the one thing that I can’t entirely dismiss. I’m quite certain that 99.9% of ghost sightings and photographs are either pareidolia, or simple wishful thinking. I have only had two experiences with what might have been ghosts but they were so entirely impossible that I’m pretty sure they were legitimate.
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Previous posts in the Blurring The Line interview series:
Marty Young
Tom Piccirilli
Lisa Morton
Tim Lebbon
Lia Swope Mitchell
Alan Baxter
James Dorr
Peter Hagelslag
Gregory L Norris
Steven Lloyd Wilson
James A Moore
Alex C Renwick
Lisa L Hannett
Kealan Patrick Burke
Brett McBean
Kaaron Warren
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Blurring The Line: Kaaron Warren
Blurring The Line is the new anthology of horror fiction and non-fiction, edited by award-winning editor Marty Young, published by Cohesion Press. You can get your copy here or anywhere you normally buy books (the print edition is coming any day now).
To help people learn a bit more about it, I’ve arranged for each fiction contributor to answer the same five questions, and I’ll be running these mini interviews every weekday now that the book is available.
Today, it’s:
Kaaron Warren
Bram Stoker , twice-World Fantasy Award Nominee and Shirley Jackson Award winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She’s sold almost 200 short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and five short story collections including the multi-award-winning Through Splintered Walls. Her latest short story collection is Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren
You can find her at http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and she Tweets @KaaronWarren
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
A New Scientist article and elsewhere, about a ‘grave-sniffing device’ that helped investigators locate graves. I wondered if it worked like a metal detector, and how it would feel to hear the device beeping in ordinary places.
New Scientist 7 August 2010
http://lists.asc.asn.au/pipermail/asc-media/2010-August/004159.html
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/hand-held-detector-sniffs-out-hidden-grave-sites
2. What does horror mean to you?
I recently heard someone saying that horror began with the invention of fire, because that’s when flickering shadows appeared in the corner of your eye. To me horror is the shadows; movement, concealment, the unexpected. It’s the irretrievable and the irreversible.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
Norman Prentiss, “In the Porches of My Ears”
4.What horror novel should everyone read?
Alan Ryker, “Dream of the Serpent”
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
That we live another life while sleeping, and in that life our moral compass shifts.
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Previous posts in the Blurring The Line interview series:
Marty Young
Tom Piccirilli
Lisa Morton
Tim Lebbon
Lia Swope Mitchell
Alan Baxter
James Dorr
Peter Hagelslag
Gregory L Norris
Steven Lloyd Wilson
James A Moore
Alex C Renwick
Lisa L Hannett
Kealan Patrick Burke
Brett McBean
.