While I can’t seem to give away a short story at the moment, I’ve been having much more success with my non-fiction writing.
An essay ‘Suffer the Little Children: An Analysis of Parental Horror in Stephen King’s Early Fiction’ was published in Aurealis #119 and, as the never-ending title suggests, it looks at how parental anxieties tend to worm their way into an author’s fiction. Here’s a short extract:
During an interview in the 1980s, horror writer Stephen King was asked to name the most horrible thing he could imagine. “The worst thing I can think of,” King said, “is going in to check on my kids and finding one of them dead.”
To teenage me, this was the most disappointing answer in the world. What about flesh-eating zombies? Radioactive monsters? Being buried alive? Evisceration by a werewolf? The master of horror is asked the ultimate question and that’s all he can come up with?
More than 20 years later, in 2013, I became a parent for the first time. A short while after, I approached my daughter’s bassinet one morning and my imagination offered up a hypothetical: I would look in the bassinet to find her still, peaceful… and dead. This vision – as vivid as reality – was appalling beyond explanation.
It had been at least 15 years since I last watched that interview in Stephen King’s World of Horror (1989), but my teenage scorn about King’s answer came back at me like a ricocheting bullet. Flesh-eating zombies? I’d take fourscore over finding my daughter dead. King was absolutely right. It would be the worst thing in the world.
Meanwhile, Andromeda Spaceways #74 features two book reviews authored by yours truly, Firstborn by Tosca Lee (the sequel to The Progeny) and Collision by J.S. Bruekelaar (a collection of weird fiction). You can grab your copy of that here.
Last but not least, I have contributed an essay that will serve as an introduction to an upcoming anthology of apocalypse stories, one of which is my novelette ‘Blood and Light’. More on that soon.