Horror Tree Q&A: Angela Slatter and Australian gothic
Horror Tree Q&A: Angela Slatter and Australian gothic
Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, a Shirley Jackson Award, three Australian Shadows Awards and eight Aurealis Awards. She is the author of All The Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns,The Briar Book of the Dead and the forthcoming The Crimson Road – all of them gothic fantasies set in the world of the Sourdough, Bitterwood and Tallow-Wife collections. The hardcover collected edition of her Hellboy Universe collaboration with Mike Mignola, Castle Full of Blackbirds, from Dark Horse Comics was published in July 2023.
Angela is also the author of the supernatural crime novels Vigil (2016), Corpselight (2017) and Restoration (2018), as well as ten other short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, A Feast of Sorrows: Stories, and The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners and Other Stories.
Angela has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. In 2016 Angela was the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has been awarded career development funding by Arts Queensland, the Copyright Agency and the Australia Council for the Arts.
PSM: You won a Shirley Jackson Award as well as a series of other awards. How close to the Shirley Jackson tradition of somewhat enigmatic, detached weird fiction do you think your own work comes? What are the important differences?
ANGELA: I suspect my gothic novels don’t have a huge similarity to Jackson’s work, but I think my short stories probably do. And the novella that won the SJA, The Bone Lantern, probably fitted a bit better because it’s actually a story told in 3 parts, there’s an element of the jigsaw puzzle to it. I think there’s a similarity in the way we both pull a reader into a story in an unlikely way – there’s something of a spider’s web stickiness to our writing that’s hard to pull away from. However, I also think my writing’s less enigmatic that Jackson’s – of course, I could be kidding myself.
PSM: Do you see any distinction between your Verity Fassbinder series and your more recent works from 2022-24? Do the latter represent an evolution, or are they all very much carved from the same wood?
ANGELA: The latter ones are different for sure – the Veritys were firmly urban fantasy/supernatural crime, the new ones are gothic fantasy with horror elements. Both have their roots in fairy and folk tales but the latest ones are a definite evolution in style and the writing skill. I think of the Veritys as my ‘prentice work, I learned a lot from them about writing and being edited. I think the gothic fantasies that Titan have published are a step beyond the Veritys while also having their roots firmly in my early fairytales short stories published in the mosaic collections Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales.
PSM: A similar question on your work for comic books and graphic novels. How do you see these relating to prose?
ANGELA: The graphic novel set in the Hellboy Universe has a lot of the same connection points using legends and myths and witch lore as the basis of the story, but then jumping off from that point and (hopefully) doing something new. Castle Full of Blackbirds was an interesting experience in terms of writing in someone else’s sandbox, using the world they’ve developed over the years and trying to bring something new to it. Again, a learning experience and really fun to do. I learned a lot about how little prose you need in comics – that the words need to be the right ones – and how much heavy lifting the artwork has to do. It’s not merely ornamental, it’s critical to the storytelling. I learned a lot about working with an artist in a different way. I’d also say that my experience in writing short stories – that art of choosing the right words – stood me in good stead with the comics.
PSM: If witches and the fey (or fey-adjacent) are strong mythic strands in your work to date, are there are other supernatural tropes or traditions you’d care to explore in future?
ANGELA: I’d like, at some point to start revisiting and reworking some of the older gothic stories – like make Wilkie Collins-esque stories be actually supernatural. Next year’s novel, The Crimson Road, plays around with vampire lore. The next novel I’m working on now, A Forest Darkly, explores quite specifically the mythology of forests and trees, and how witches fit in them. The novella I’ve just delivered, The Cold House, is very much contemporary folk horror – so something I haven’t done at a length beyond short story really. It’s got a lot of call-backs to The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby, Satan’s School for Girls, among others… those really solid horror movies I watched as a kid, which have clearly left their mark.
PSM: What’s your writing practice, in terms of initial inspiration, plotting and research (if any), writing routine, etc?
ANGELA: Sometimes a story will come from reading something random, a phrase or a story that gives me a spark. Or an obsession with a particular branch of folk or fairy tale, or a word will trigger something. I might get an opening line or a final scene and that can lead to something larger. I scribble things down in notebooks or send emails to myself. I use a spreadsheet to plot the story out – as long as I know the major turning points, I can write the bits in between. The Crimson Road is a novel that was sparked by my obsession with the word “anchorhold” – so clearly I’m capable of intense and sustained obsessions! At least 110,000 words’ worth.
PSM: Does an Oz base make much difference to you as a writer, both in terms of the market and the audience, and your concerns?
ANGELA: It makes it difficult in terms of getting to cons and getting in front of publishers and agents when you’re at the start of your career. It’s hard to get traditional publishers in Australia to look at speculative fiction – mostly they don’t buy home-grown talent, they just import the latest bestsellers from the US. I write things with a more European bent. I guess Zoom has had the unexpected benefit of being a way to be in an editor or agent’s line of sight – harder to ignore than an email, and it makes you feel like an actual person rather than a distant concept.
PSM: Where do you think your work lands in terms of horror, versus the other genre labels that have been or could be applied to it?
ANGELA: I think my work has mostly fallen in dark fantasy – I don’t tend to write body horror or slashers so some people will say I’m not a horror writer, but I deal with some very horrific aspects of life, so I think it’s definitely horror. I think I write about some very horrific stuff, so personally I always claim to be a writer of horror and dark fantasy.
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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish author, poet, journalist, games writer, and media professional. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently lives in France near Geneva.
Paul’s first collection of short stories, Black Propaganda, appeared from H. Harksen Productions in 2016. His second story collection, The Echo of The Sea & other Strange War Stories, was published by Egaeus Press in 2017. His short novel The Three Books was published by Black Shuck Books in 2018. His short story “The People of the Island,” in Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales, from H. Harksen Productions, received an Honorable Mention from Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year Volume Two list for 2009.
Paul’s acclaimed first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Publishing in 1997, and reissued on Kindle in 2013. His second poetry collection, The Musical Box of Wonders, was published by H. Harksen Productions in 2011. His sonnet cycle The Great Arcana: Sonnets for the 22 Trumps of the Tarot, and his ballad cycle Black Ballads, based on traditional Scottish myths and legends, were both published in 2022.
Paul’s Lovecraftian and dark fiction, and criticism, has appeared in numerous formats and journals worldwide, including Occult Detective Magazine, Weirdbook, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, the Financial Times, the UK Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, Arts of Asia, Strange Horizons, A Broad Scot, and elsewhere. His co-translations from the Japanese, done with Maki Sugiyama, include The Poems of Nakahara Chuya (1993) and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1995) by the 1994 Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, which won a Japan Festival Award. He also co-translated Superstrings (2007) by Dinu Flamand from Romanian with Olga Dunca. Paul is a former Executive Committee member of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors of Great Britain. He was rated #1 of “The 12 Publishing Shakers You Should Be Following” by The Independent Publishing Magazine. He is also the official clan poet of Clan Mackintosh.
