KRIS ASHTON

Nothing ‘happened on tour’ at my own brain-frying buck’s night (the Australian term for a stag night), but afterwards I got thinking about the permissiveness surrounding this male rite of passage and started to imagine a soon-to-be-married man kissing an attractive stranger. It was mildly arousing, until she bit his lip off.

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My favourite example of the ‘intimate embrace gone bad’ is in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, when a woman seeks the comfort of her husband’s arms only to have him take a big bite out of her shoulder. Man, I’ll never forget the first time I watched that scene. Now that was horror. The imagined lip-chomping affected me similarly, and I got to work on a story the next day.

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When I revisited my first novel, Ghost Kiss, a few years after it was published, I was surprised to discover that what was supposed to be a horror novel was in fact a tragic romance with supernatural accoutrements. More recently, my story ‘Night Feeds’ ended up in a group of extreme horror stories, even though it isn't an extreme horror tale per se. The problem, I believe, is that I’m a pulp writer with literary sensibilities. It’s an uneasy union. 

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‘The Stag Night’ is another example of this genre no-man’s-land I sometimes stumble into. When I sat down to write it I thought it would be a horror story, and it does have horror elements, but in truth it’s a semi-literary piece about the consequences of infidelity.

 

Subsequently, no one wanted it; the literary types turned up their noses at its pulpy violence, while the horror folks didn’t find it horrifying enough. It took a quirky market like Blood in the Rain 2, an anthology of vampire/erotica crossovers, to see its merit.