KRIS ASHTON

Unlike most of my stories, which begin when a high concept hits me square in the chops, ‘Dead Men Can’t Climax’ arrived quietly and started to spread like mould on an agar plate. I don’t recall what planted the first spore – maybe one of those trashy click magnets you see on news sites with headlines like ‘Women who love porn explain why’ – but the opening scene played out in my head and then the two protagonists began to do more and more obscene things to one another.

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It got to the point where the story almost seemed beyond my control, and I had to prune back a couple of intended scenes before the word count – and the narrative – got ridiculous. (There was to be another vignette on a plane...)

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When I was finished I knew I had never written anything quite like it before. Perhaps for that reason, I found myself scratching my head when it came time to submit. ‘Dead Men Can’t Climax’ is really one of those blackly comical twist-in-the-tale stories that Roald Dahl was famed for, but the necessarily graphic sex scenes limited potential markets. It didn’t help, either, that mainstream markets were almost totally foreign to me (the closest I had come to selling a mainstream story was a cosy mystery, ‘The Best Laid Plans’) and the story wasn’t ‘literary’ enough for the more highbrow journals.

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In the end I opted for McSweeney’s because it seemed to accept the right mix of ‘mainstream’ and ‘out there’ without wanting experimental or impenetrable prose. You can read how that went here. Then, after much searching, I happened upon Infernal Ink. Editor Hydra M. Star evinced immediate interest but, bless her, asked me to make the ‘necrophilia’ scene more graphic. Which I did.