REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Paul Mannering
REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Paul Mannering
In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October).
Today, we welcome award-winning author Paul Mannering, whose short story “A Throatful of Flies” appears in the anthology.
Tell us about your story in the anthology.
I grew up on a small farm outside of Kaikoura, New Zealand.
Often, during those endless summers of childhood I would go and stay on a sheep station, a sprawling farm in the hills that covered 3300 acres and bred a few thousand Drysdale sheep for wool. On these working holidays, we did everything from mustering stock, to planting trees. Farm chores at home were a drag, here it was a fun holiday adventure.
It was during one hot summer when I was there for a couple of weeks that I was tasked with helping the current farm hand with butchering some old rams. These were elderly sheep, long past their useful lives and now they were to be killed, cut up and fed to the pack of working dogs.
We got the job done and as the story told, somehow a prize stud ram – worth an eye-watering sum, got in the stockyard with the elderly rams. We killed him too.
The offal pit was real and since I was young enough to remember seeing sheep guts and heads being sucked into that ragged hole in the centre of the sheets of roofing iron – it has haunted me.
I had an anthropologist’s education in religion – all observation and curiosity but no actual faith or ritual other than the token church visit at Christmas so the idea of a portal to hell was not that realistic. If someone asked me to imagine such a gateway, I would see that black hole, fringed with the bloated bodies of massive blowflies.
The pit has appeared in several story ideas in various forms, though this is the first published story to go into details.