KRIS ASHTON

This was my first story written to order. The now defunct Asylett Press, which published my novel Ghost Kiss, issued to a call to its stable of writers to contribute a pro bono story to a Christmas anthology. The genre was open, provided it had a Christmas theme.

 

The idea came almost right away, but I didn’t really trust it until the title arrived shortly after. Then I got straight to work. It’s a fairytale in the traditional sense: fantastical, frightful and designed to impart a moral. It’s also one of those simple campfire yelp yarns that everyone except horror buffs (like me) seems to loathe.

 

I’ve written one or two other stories that tried to capture the alternating exuberance and terror of childhood as I remember it. They were far more complicated and self-conscious in wanting to ‘achieve’ an effect. That this unassuming scare story should succeed where they failed is another deposit in the bank of evidence showing genre fiction can have just as much power as so-called literary fiction.