KRIS ASHTON

I’ve always loved the horror trope that Stephen King, in the notes to Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1992), calls “the peculiar little town”. That short fiction collection contains one of my favourite peculiar little town stories, ‘Rainy Season’, in which a hapless couple falls victim to a storm of carnivorous toads. One of my first short story sales, ‘Trouble with the Locals’, was a peculiar little town story.

The centre of any little town in Australia is its hotel, and shortly after publishing ‘Trouble’ I tried to write a peculiar little town story set in a country pub. The publican at this hotel would insist out-of-town visitors make a donation to charity – and anyone who refused was fed to his pet crocodile. It grew from a real-life incident, where a mate and I turned up at a country pub and felt instantly unwelcome. But as a piece of fiction, it didn’t work.

When ‘The Midway Hotel’ came to me, I had just reread ‘Rainy Season’ (and King’s thoughts on the peculiar little town) and my mind wandered in that direction again. This time, the experience mentioned above meshed with a few other elements to form a publishable story.

The first element was Jon’s saying, ‘No one ever regrets going to the toilet’, which occurred to me during a week-long trip through outback NSW in 2009. That led to the scenario of a commercial traveller on a remote road busting to take a piss and arriving at a pub only to find the locals quietly hostile. From there the story began to flower on its own, as the best ones do. I imagined Jon watching his own rolled car on live television, I realised the barflies were hostile because they were trapped in purgatory and not in the mood to help new arrivals, and with that revelation the story’s ironic title popped into my head.

At a macro level, the ‘The Midway Hotel’ is just a hybrid of two well-worn horror conventions. What actually powers it, I think, is the very human fear of urinary distress. The story seemed an excellent fit for the first market I sent it to, the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild’s Next anthology, and they obviously thought so too, describing it as “excruciating to read (in a good way!)”.