Guest Post – Donna Maree Hanson, Dragon Wine
Dragon Wine Book 1: Shatterwing by Donna Maree Hanson is free in e-book for a short time. As part of spreading the word about Shatterwing, Donna is doing a blog tour and offering a give away of a hard copy of Shatterwing. Winners will be drawn from people who comment during the blog tour. So leave a comment to be in to win.
Dragon wine could save them. Or bring about their destruction.
Since the moon shattered, the once peaceful and plentiful world has become a desolate wasteland. Factions fight for ownership of the remaining resources as pieces of the broken moon rain down, bringing chaos, destruction and death.
The most precious of these resources is dragon wine – a life-giving drink made from the essence of dragons. But the making of the wine is perilous and so is undertaken by prisoners. Perhaps even more dangerous than the wine production is the Inspector, the sadistic ruler of the prison vineyard who plans to use the precious drink to rule the world.
There are only two people that stand in his way. Brill, a young royal rebel who seeks to bring about revolution, and Salinda, the prison’s best vintner and possessor of a powerful and ancient gift that she is only beginning to understand. To stop the Inspector, Salinda must learn to harness her power so that she and Brill can escape, and stop the dragon wine from falling into the wrong hands.
Dragon Wine Book 2 :Skywatcher, the follow on book is also available in ebook and print.
http://momentumbooks.com.au/books/shatterwing-dragon-wine-1/
Thank you for having me on your blog, Alan. You asked me to talk about my inspiration in world building for Dragon Wine.
The inspiration behind the world building in Dragonwine (Shatterwing and Skywatcher)
Dragon wine was probably the first book I worked on where I did quite a bit of deliberate thinking , planning and worldbuildiing. One of the main things I did was have a good think about the fantasy novels I loved and why I loved them. What came to me was that I loved the backstory and ancient technology in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I liked it more than the front story. So I knew then that I wanted to create a world steeped in history, in old machines and mysterious people who are only known by their relics. I also wanted something alien in there too, like a people who were legend but still existed. I love fantasy stories that have magic and bravery and love so I knew my story had to have those elements. At the same time, things were happening in this world that made me question life, people and what it means to be human. Those things joined in with my creativity to establish a nasty, dark element to the story. Sad that it is reality that gives Dragon Wine its dark focus. Those things like terrorism continue on to this day and I still don’t know how it will all end in reality and in the story. I think the resolution hangs in the balance.
The other consideration for me is that I wanted to create an unusual world something different from the norm. That meant moving away from a pastoral, medieval type setting. I also love science fiction so I created a world that has strong science fiction setting with some SF tropes. The world is dominated by a fractured moon that is in now a dispersed field called Shatterwing. As the people are living in a post-apocalyptic world and have lost their technology and sciences, Shatterwing dominates their mythology. It seemed to me that this thing in the sky would be a source of wonder, fear and superstition. This is further strengthened by the fact that bits of Shatterwing fall down to the planet on a regular basis.
Of course, Dragon Wine has dragons. I can’t really explain why I did put dragons in there. They were just a result of the workings of my mind. I didn’t read other dragon novels and I guess that helped me create something a bit different in the dragons. I did some research into dragons and how they are represented in a number of cultures. My influences for the dragons would have to be film and in my formative years, Godzilla! Also, there is some technology on Margra but it’s a remnant of a former time. Going further back, I have alien technology that’s quite unfathomable and then there is the Hiem. I guess they are kind of space elves when you think about it, but maybe not. However, I love that abandoned city, lost civilisation trope immensely. I remember reading Alan Dean Foster’s Flinx novels when I was young and that’s what I loved about that. The sense of the alien and its impact.
Dragon Wine also has three different distinct forms of magic. There is the magic of the dragons. Their life force is so strong that when grapes are grown in their dung the magic seeps into the wine made from the grapes. It is that wine that keeps the humans from dying off completely. The second type of magic is the magic of Salinda’s cadre. The magic grown from the minds of people that has been passed down since the time of moon fall. It is likely that that magic has a technological basis that has grown over time into something more. The third type of magic is that used by Skywatchers, particularly Garan, to shoot down meteors. The Skywatchers use crystals to focus their power which gives off powerful heat beam to blow up meteors. Why three different types of magic? For me they all represent different things. The dragon magic for me comes from their majesty as beasts. There is probably more to it than that, but that’s the inspiration. Salinda’s magic or the magic of the cadre is something that has evolved over time and it comes from the bearers of the cadre and what part of their essence they contribute to it. I consider this more a ripening of power over time and it’s just coming into its own. The power of the Skywatchers is more earthy. It’s something in them although they think it’s a talent that’s in the crystals themselves.
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Blurring The Line: Brett McBean
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:
Brett McBean
Brett McBean is an award-winning horror and thriller author. His books, which include The Mother, The Last Motel and Wolf Creek: Desolation Game, have been published in Australia, the US, and Germany. He’s been nominated for the Aurealis, Ditmar, and Ned Kelly awards, and he won the 2011 Australian Shadows Award for his collection, Tales of Sin and Madness. He is a member of the Australian Horror Writers Association, where he has twice been a mentor in their mentor program. He lives in Melbourne with his wife, daughter and German shepherd. Find out more at: brettmcbean.com
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
My story deals with the horrific crime of child abuse and murder, specifically about a fictional children’s entertainer who’s at the centre of a paedophile ring. The idea stemmed from the various cases that have recently come to light of well-known public figures who have been accused of child molestation. These are entertainers I grew up watching on TV and it’s shocking to learn about the monster lurking behind the seemingly innocuous facade.
I also based my story largely on ‘The Family Murders’, a group of socially-elite men who kidnapped, sexually abused and murdered an untold number of boys during the 1970s and ‘80s in Adelaide (other than Bevan Spencer von Einem, an accountant charged with the murder of a 15-year-old boy, none of the other men have been named).
It’s often terrifying what goes on behind closed doors; worse when it involves children. Especially when those perpetrating the crimes are people in a position of trust. I wanted to write a story that deals with that kind of betrayal of trust, of a man responsible for inflicting both joy and pain in children; someone capable of using his hands to create as well as destroy. So, in a way, it’s about the destruction of innocence.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Horror is life. Every horror story, whether it be short story, novel or movie, is a reflection and examination of our fears. We didn’t make up the bogeyman; the bogeyman already exists in our collective and personal fears under various guises. We use storytelling merely as a vehicle to help us come to terms with these fears, to better understand why we’re afraid of the dark, death or spiders. Also as a way to deal with these fears in a safe way. Reading a horror story or watching a horror movie is a catharsis. So you could also say horror is comfort.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
“The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Zombies. In Haiti there’s a long-standing belief that the dead can, and often do, come back from the dead through the power of witchcraft. There are many tales that supposedly confirm the existence of zombies, including a famous story told by American adventurer and writer, William Seabrook. He claimed to have met three zombies working in a cotton field in the 1920s. He observed: ‘The eyes were the worst. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man.’
Then there’s the account of well-known anthropologist and author, Zora Neale Thurston, who said, after travelling to the Caribbean country in the late 1930s: ‘I saw the case, and I know that there are zombies in Haiti’. If you’re curious about the case she’s referring to, look up the name Felicia Felix-Mentor. There’s even a photo of the alleged zombie, and if you’re not convinced about the real-life existence of zombies after reading the story of poor Ms Felix-Mentor, then surely seeing the unnerving photo will.
Or maybe zombies are really just people whose minds have been badly distorted through use of the zombie cucumber, coupled with an ingrained fear and belief of local superstition…
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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
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Blurring The Line: Kealan Patrick Burke
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:
Kealan Patrick Burke
Born and raised in Dungarvan, Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of five novels, over a hundred short stories, seven collections, and editor of four acclaimed anthologies. He has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a grunge band, and, most recently, a fraud investigator. He also played the male lead in Slime City Massacre, director Gregory Lumberton’s sequel to his cult B-movie classic Slime City, alongside scream queens Debbie Rochon and Brooke Lewis.
When not writing, Kealan designs covers for print and digital books through his company Elderlemon Design. To date, he has designed covers for Richard Laymon, Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, Bentley Little, William Schoell, Tim Lebbon and Hugh Howey, to name a few.
In what little free time remains, Kealan is a voracious reader, movie buff, videogamer (Xbox), and road-trip enthusiast.
A movie based on his short story Peekers is currently in development through Lionsgate Entertainment.
www.kealanpatrickburke.com
www.elderlemondesign.com
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
I have a peculiar fascination with door-to-door salesmen, having done the job myself for a whole day before quitting in absolute misery. I don’t think we always need to refer to the supernatural for our horror. Sometimes it can be found in the awful things we are asked to do as humans in order to survive, and as far as I’m concerned, being a door-to-door salesman is a job that should be listed in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Take that fascination, add in a dash of Glengarry Glenross, and now imagine the worst kind of house to find yourself in while trying to ply your wares, and you have “Hoarder.”
2. What does horror mean to you?
I’m going to quote myself on this one, as I don’t think I’ve ever put it more succinctly than I did on this occasion:
“[Horror] tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it’s there to be seen.”
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
“Sticks” by Karl Edward Wagner.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
“Bird Box” by Josh Malerman.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Aliens.
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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
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Blurring The Line: Lisa L Hannett
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:
Lisa L Hannett
Lisa L. Hannett has had over 60 short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantas
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
The main inspiration — though it makes the story sound much more political than it really is — was the recent and continuing (appalling) treatment of asylum seekers in this country. That was the spark (which, I can pretty comfortably guarantee) isn’t a theme blazing across the narrative. Instead, it launched my mind into other directions, which included thinking about how some people’s intentions are good (in their minds, at least) but the outcome of these intentions can be horrifying. How in trying to “protect” some people we can end up hurting others. How opinions and behaviours — good and bad — are initially formed not on a nation-wide scale, but much closer to home..
2. What does horror mean to you?
For me, horror isn’t gore or murderous revenge narratives or films with nasty surprises that make you jump or creepy clowns living in the drain of your shower. (Okay, maybe that last one counts…) Horror is “normal” made uncomfortable. Horror is unrelenting dread. Horror means not pulling punches in fiction: it’s going there, where things are awful and often hopeless, and leaving your characters to deal with it, and maybe not coming back for them. Horror is putting people in situations where magic can solve everything except what they want solved. Horror is not knowing. Horror is getting unwanted answers. Horror isn’t unfathomable mysteries cloaked in darkness and occult trappings. Horror is made up of regular, everyday miseries that hold your face so tight you can’t look away.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
There are two I come back to time and again, so I’ll cheat and mention them both: ‘Apotropaics’ by Norman Partridge, which was (I think) published first in the early ’90s but was subsequently reprinted here: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2008/fiction_apotropaics_by_norman_partridge; and ‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
It’s a tie between The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Ghosts. Maybe. Maybe.
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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
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Blurring The Line: Alex C Renwick
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:
Alex C Renwick
Alex C. Renwick is a dual Canadian/US writer living down the street from a volcano in an Edwardian home filled with fossils, broken shells, dried willow branches, and other very pretty dead things. Her stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s & Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazines, Machine of Death Vol. 1, and The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir. Find her at alexcrenwick.com or on Twitter @AlexCRenwick.
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
I’m intrigued by thoughts of what scares us, and more specifically, why we seek it out. If it’s true we writers write about what intrigues us, then I find the concepts of nihilism and self-destruction fascinating — why are we so drawn to that which has the power to destroy us? Anyone who’s ever experienced serious injury or disease, or chronic pain or depression or similar challenges, might recognize the internal teeter-totter my character goes through in “A Peripheral Vision Sort of Friend.” Think of Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Broken Column,” in which the artist’s torso is cracked open to expose her crumbling spine, her body held together with surgical straps and studded with popping nails as if it were a failing scaffold.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Hah! When I first noticed my work selling to self-described horror markets I went on a quest to discover what “horror” meant to anyone. I asked other writers, readers, editors, but when no clear defining characteristic emerged like it did when asking people’s thoughts on historical or science fiction, fantasy, western, crime, or even romance (all very broad genres with lots of variety), I decided it was an overlay, a flavour and approach to storytelling intended to elicit a particular sort of response rather than a distinct, much less complete, genre definition (humor falls into this category too). For me, the most horrifying stories leave one with a prevailing sense of bleakness.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
This has two insanely different answers, so I guess it depends on what you’re seeking from your reading experience. My favorite dark fiction has lots of pathos, imparting an intense and overwhelming sense of loss rather than dread, like so much beautiful short fiction by Shirley Jackson or Joyce Carol Oates, or the haunting K.W. Jeter story “The First Time,” or Raymond Carver’s “Tell the Women We’re Going” and “So Much Water So Close to Home” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But the stories that horrify me most I never want to read again and would be hesitant to burn into anyone else’s brain — that’s how powerful fiction can be! How traumatic! (Okay fine: “Ted’s Collection” by Claude Lalumière or “The Phone Woman” by Joe R. Lansdale.)
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
“Horror” being such an elusive and malleable concept, I’m not sure I’d know how to classify a “horror novel.” My faves that might fall into this category would be Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Patricia Highsmith’s The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder — both of which are personal favorites precisely because they do not leave me with a sense of bleakness. For that I’d have to turn to something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. No sense of hope at the end of that one, not on my reading of it.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Well, living in North America’s beautiful and mysterious Pacific Northwest, I’d be practically a traitor to the region not to mention Sasquatch. But personally, I’m terrified and intrigued by what might be at the deepest crevices of our vast and undercharted oceans. I mean, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the ocean floor. That’s scary — and amazing!
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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
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Blurring The Line: James A Moore
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:
James A Moore
James A. Moore is the award winning author of over twenty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, Blind Shdows, Homestead and the soon to be released Seven Forges. He has also recently ventured into the realm of Young Adult novels, with his new series Subject Seven. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has also edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, the British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications.
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
I’ve lived in Louisiana, and I have absolutely no problem believing that a swamp monster could live there and never be caught on film. The bayous and swamps will likely never be properly explored.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Horror is an emotion. It’s a gripping, heart racing jolt of adrenaline in some cases and a deep and abiding sense of unease in others. I think the finest horror can get to you with the implications of a deed rather than with the deed itself.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
Stephen King’s THE MONKEY. Brilliant and something that I don’t think could ever be properly translated into film because of the narrative. It’s intimate and disturbing in the best possible way.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
That’s a list that could go on for hundreds of pages, but because you only want one, I’ll go with Christopher Golden’s SNOWBLIND. There is a pervasive sense of dread and loneliness that is delicious. Definitely a case where the chills are worthwhile.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Ghosts. There is a lot of evidence to say that sometimes something is left behind when a person dies and we know that energy never fades. It can merely change…
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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
.
Blurring The Line: Steven Lloyd Wilson
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:
Steven Lloyd Wilson
Steven Lloyd Wilson discovered reading at a dangerously young age and writing soon thereafter. He has been writing science fiction stories since age eight when he realized that he could make Kirk and Spock do what he wanted in Word Perfect. It took fourteen years of misfires for him to finish writing his first novel, which was a magnificent disaster that should never be published. A second and third followed in short order and in 2009 he independently published Katorga, a dark yet humorous dystopian novel of a totalitarian future of brutal space colonization via gulags. He is chief film critic at Pajiba.com, where you can find his assorted non-fictions on a daily basis. In his spare time, he works as a professor of political science and is painfully close to completing his PhD in that field.
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
I’ve had stirring down in the depths of my mind this idea of a Lovecraftian story set at the South Pole during a white out ever since, well, I read several of Lovecraft’s novels on a trip to Alaska. I know, Lovecraft himself has several such stories, there’s The Thing, and a dozen others. So, real original, but I had this feeling about it. And then there was that XKCD strip (https://xkcd.com/1235/) pointing out that sightings of UFOs and other such phenomena have plummetted since the ubiquity of cell phone cameras. But what if shining the light into the darkness doesn’t show that nothing was ever there, but simply that the room is empty when you’re looking.
2. What does horror mean to you?
Horror to me as always been about the fear of the unknown. It’s about the darkness that lurks beyond the flickering fire, and what our imaginations invent as reasons for the unexplainable terrors that lurk there. It’s a primal thing, an appeal to the reptile brain, enhanced by all the creativity of the mammal brain. Science tells us how the world works, but horror tickles the back of our brain, questioning whether we really have any control or understanding in the least.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
The Terror by Dan Simmons. Not exactly traditional horror, but that’s what makes it defy all expectation so that you can’t get an angle on why you’re uneasy, so the discomfort and fear builds and builds.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Hope.
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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
.
Blurring The Line: Gregory L Norris
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:
Gregory L Norris
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
A few years ago, my sister’s car went in for repairs and my partner Bruce and I took her to work, several miles down the road from our old apartment. She worked the third shift in a rural part of our town. It was winter. Out there, the highway cut through long swathes of pine forest. The turn off to her job was defined by a traffic light that seemed to have a mind and will of its own. It would stay red on us even though we were the only car on the road. We dropped her off at work for the better part of a week. On the last night, after the insufferable wait for the light to turn red, we made the turn, traveled up the hill to her job, only to slam on the brakes as the largest buck deer I’ve ever seen clomped across the pavement in front of us, eyeing us with contempt and snorting loudly through its nostrils. It was such a haunting, unforgettable encounter, I knew it had to be written out as a short story, which I did. “1-2-3 Red Light” is the result.
2. What does horror mean to you?
I grew up on a healthy diet of creature double-features and classic SF/Horror TV, the dreamy gothic daytime soap opera Dark Shadows a staple among them. I love the elegance of a quietly creepy moment attained by reading an author’s words, suggesting the cause of the shiver teasing the nape of the reader’s neck. And I also appreciate the unapologetic spatter of a well-written, gory scene when it’s done properly. When the writing is crisp and the delivery effective, Horror can be a beautiful thing.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
I recently reread “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Poe to prep for an appearance on a show to discuss the short story. Stunning writing, truly — and as much a work of horror as the defined beginning of the first modern detective story. A classic and an experience!
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
This past summer, I read and devoured Roxanne Dent’s novel, The Janus Demon (from Great Old Ones Publishing). It’s the tale of a gumshoe named Mick Grimaldi caught up in a complex series of crimes perpetrated by underworld figures from a supernatural realm. Roxanne is, to me, one of the finest writers around, and her novel kept me captivated. For days after finishing the novel, I struggled to find anything as good to read among my unread books, and in fact picked hers up again and read it for a second time cover to cover.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
I was recently asked to write a real-life ghost story for a publisher, and was forced to decline because all of my ghost stories have come from my imagination, not real life. When I was a teenager living in a small New Hampshire town, I saw an object in the sky skimming just over the tops of the tall pines and to this day wonder of the truth behind that one or two second fragment of time, which haunts me to this day decades later. So, yes, I wonder about alien visitations to our fair Earth, and whatever sinister plans are taking place without our worldwide knowledge.
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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
.
Blurring The Line: Peter Hagelslag
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:
Peter Hagelslag
Peter Hagelslag is a retired sailor who now works for an offshore company in the Black Sea. At day he maintains equipment, at night he tries to maintain his wild imagination. His stories have been published in Apex Digest, Premonitions and Rudy Rucker’s Flurb; and the anthologies New Writings in the Fantastic, Hysterical Realms and (the multiple award-winning) Qualia Nous.
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
The–IMHO–very mistaken idea that mass shootings can be prevented (or lessened) by even more guns and mass surveillance. It leads to a downward spiral of paranoia, fear and–inevitably–even more violence and bloodshed. Some of the scenes in the story where the über-guardians try to prevent a mass killing resemble actual events but all too closely, unfortunately.
2. What does horror mean to you?
I prefer psychological horror and horror that brings something extra to the table. Something that illuminates why there is fear, why we fear, or why the root cause for fear has changed for different cultures, across the ages and after technological developments.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” by Harlan Ellison. When I bought his collection Deathbird Stories I was already aware of his several of his famous stories like “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick Tock Man”, “Along the Scenic Route” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, but these did not fully prepare me for “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”. It’s brutal, it’s voyeuristic, and it strongly suggest that the greater evil may not be the act of (very gruesome) murder, but the people witnessing it *and doing nothing*.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
The Trial by Franz Kafka. The epitome of existential dread and paranoia.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
Your sense of security: is it real, or is it just a pipe dream?
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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
.
Blurring The Line: James Dorr
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:
James Dorr
James Dorr’s career may have peaked last year when THE TEARS OF ISIS was named a Bram Stoker Award® Nominee by the Horror Writers Association for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Not to worry, it didn’t win (which undoubtedly would have gone to his head), and so he plugs on writing short stories and poems, five of the former of which can be found lurking in the archives of DAILY SCIENCE FICTION (http://dailysciencefiction.com — just search on his last name) with others in similarly nice places if perhaps less accessible. Other collections are STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE and DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET and his all-poetry VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE). An Indiana (USA) resident, Dorr also harbours a cat named Wednesday whose hobbies include playing with toy spiders.
Blog: http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/james.dorr.9
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/James-Dorr/e/B004XWCVUS/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1380306038&sr=1-2-ent
1. What was the inspiration/motivation behind your story in Blurring The Line?
I had read somewhere that the Christmas card image of happy Dickensian children spreading holiday joy from house to house singing Christmas carols fails to give the whole story. Actually the caroling urchins may have been engaging in a form of extortion, continuing to sing, loudly and badly, in front of each home until the residents gave them some money to stop. But suppose some children were more ambitious? With “The Good Work”, I asked myself what might happen if a group of Victorian children upped the anti to include deception, wholesale robbery, and murder, preyimg on the superstitions of the day.
2. What does horror mean to you?
From a reader’s point of view, not so much fear as an uneasy feeling – a feeling that something is out of kilter. Fear, if it’s there, is momentary; but the queasiness, the feeling of wrongness in what the reader has experienced should, ideally, persist. From a writer’s point of view, horror is an exercise in putting characters under stress. This can be true, too, of non-horror fiction, but in horror the stress is more intense, sometimes going to or even past the breaking point.
3. What’s a horror short story that you think everyone should read?
I’ll go with a classic, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Here, in a sense, a character has already gone past the breaking point – the man is insane. Of course he denies it as we do too in failing to realize, as we become engrossed in the story, that the man is us.
4. What horror novel should everyone read?
Keeping with classics, Bram Stoker’s DRACULA. This has everything, fear of the unknown, disease, mystery, even an invasion of England – opening the possibility that what we don’t know, in some cases, possibly could hurt us very much. But, interestingly, the technique used is almost the opposite of Poe’s in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Where Poe put us right in the protagonist’s head, Stoker deliberately puts distance between us and what’s happening in the novel. We read, instead, pages from a diary, or clinical notes, or letters between people caught in the action, or even articles in a newspaper. Written documents that, if an inquiry were to be made of the story’s events afterward, are exactly the kinds of things that would be brought forth as evidence. So what might be lost in terms of immediacy – as we, with the characters, try to assemble these proofs together – results in a gain in verity, that however absurd some individual item might seem, as it’s added up with the others our feeling grows that what the conclusion will be must be true.
5. Name something that you think just might be real, or might not…
I started off as a science fiction reader and, between that and the real-life space program, by the time I was of high school age I was fascinated by UFOs. And although mostly a horror writer now, I’ve even used them in occasional stories, such as “Waxworms,” reprinted in THE TEARS OF ISIS. However I never became fully invested in the idea of government cover-ups, as plausible as such theories might have seemed given the inadequacy at times of official explanations, and, years later, as moderator on a panel on “Flying Saucers” at a science fiction convention, I found myself confronted when question time came around: Did I or did I not believe in UFOs myself? My answer was weasely, but I think true. I believe UFOs, defined as some sort of intelligently-driven spacecraft not of this Earth, could exist in principle. However, I’ve not yet been convinced of the truth of any specific example.
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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
.