REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Bryce Stevens 

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 author and editor Bryce Stevens, whose short story “The Spaces Between” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

Finding I was of Māori Heritage later in life and my growing up in Auckland and Hamilton, attending predominantly Māori/Pacific Island schools was the main inspiration for the tale. I’d always had Māori friends at schools and in the workplace. During my twenties I had Māori friends teaching me the language. Of course, being a young man, I had been most interested in the naughty words. 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Tracie McBride 

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 author Tracie McBride, whose shocking short story “Her Ghosts” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

My short story writing process usually takes one of two paths – either I have the entire plot and concept in mind from the beginning, or I start with a seed and have to write my way through to something approaching coherency. “Her Ghosts” fell into the latter category. It took a few months for all the ideas to coalesce, and they came to me in dribs and drabs. 

The idea for my protagonist Callie, a reluctant psychic, came first. My mother and stepfather have been doing a lot of genealogy research in recent years and uncovered some interesting legends about Māori priestesses in my whakapapa. I got to thinking about how their reputed power might have been suppressed over generations of colonialism, and how that might affect someone trying to reconcile such abilities with twenty-first century life and ideas. 

The seismic activity came next. In my early brainstorming, playing around with the premise for the anthology, the phrase “uncanny disturbances” stood out, and earthquakes were the first thing I thought of. I wasn’t sure what role they would play at first, only that there had to be some. There is a theory that the low frequency, inaudible to the human ear, at which earthquake waves travel can cause unusual reactions in living creatures, from feelings of dread and fear to optical illusions. I had forgotten about this until my daughter reminded me after the story was finished; perhaps that knowledge had been working in my subconscious throughout the writing process.  

Finding a suitable antagonist was trickier. Just having a garden variety lunatic running around kidnapping kids felt inadequate. Like Callie, anger does not come to me easily, so I put some thought into the kind of person who really pisses me off – and then I had him.  

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author and poet Tim Jones 

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 author Tim Jones, whose tragic poem “Guiding Star” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your poem.  

In the late 1960s, when I was around 8 years old, I was sent with my classmates to a school camp at Omaui on the south coast of Murihiku / Southland. 

Omaui is a low-lying headland south-west of Invercargill. To reach it, you take State Highway 1 out of Invercargill towards its final destination: Bluff, where my father then worked as a fisheries inspector. You turn off at Greenhills and wend your way along narrow roads, past Mokomoko Inlet, and south to the little settlement and the YMCA camp, which still stands, like a she’ll-be-right version of Hill House. 

To the north, the treacherous, shifting New River Estuary, bane of many a barque and steamer, including, in September 1862, the SS Guiding Star. To the south, the southern tip of Rakiura / Stewart Island, and beyond it, the Southern Ocean stretching cold and lonely to Antarctica. Omaui is a little oasis of reforested green on a bleak and southward coast.
 

That camp, tucked hard against the fringes of the bush: the forest has regenerated greatly since the 1960s, stewarded by visionary locals, but in recent photos, the camp looks much as it did back then. The walls are strangely angled: there’s some seriously Lovecraftian vibes about the geometry of the bunkrooms. But it wasn’t eldritch horrors from beyond space I was worried about, it was the boys I was pitched into the bunkroom with. 

I don’t think those boys did me any physical harm during that week, and completely contrary to the scenario in my poem, Dad was actually on the camp as a camp parent. So the facts are different: but I remember feeling alone, I remember feeling scared, I remember feeling different. I remember the feel of wet mānuka scrub slapping my face as we went for an interminable route march in the Wednesday rain. And I remember the noise of the other boys after lights out, as I turned to face the vast, indifferent silence and darkness that began just outside the bunkroom window. 

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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. 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An Interview with Kiwi author Nikky Lee 

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 author Nikky Lee, whose dark dystopian story “What Bones These Tides Bring” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

This is one of those stories that started with a scene in my head, and not much else. When I sat down to write it, I had a clear idea that I wanted the story to begin in a post-apocalyptic future with a woman collecting trinkets on an unnamed black sand beach. Auckland’s Muriwai Beach with its gannet colony was the primary inspiration behind this. However, it wasn’t until I wrote the line ‘The best bones’ did I start thinking about ghosts and making this character into some sort of bone witch.  

Once I’d decided on ghosts, another influence came to the fore: Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season series. In this series, ghosts are wielded as tools and weapons by the series’ clairvoyant characters. I figured my bone witch would have a similar power over ghosts, but I wanted her power to be a necessary evil in this post-apocalyptic world. I thought, what if ghosts were actually a source of electrical energy in a world that didn’t have electricity anymore? How might humanity use them? How would they trade them? Transport them? Thus the world and tension of “What Bones These Tides Bring” started coming together.  

Going in I wanted to make this story subtly set in Aotearoa without dropping a pin too firmly on a specific place. So I drew on the things that are, to me, distinctively Kiwi. Black sand beaches to Mable’s hut (inspired by our Department of Conservation huts), local wildlife in the likes of Gannet, and a couple of nods to Māori culture and mythology, such as the mention of the fantail (an omen of death).  

As for our ghost Riley’s point of view, she was actually a bit of a surprise! I initially planned to tell the whole story from Mable’s point of view, but when I got to the second scene, my gut (muse maybe?) urged me to explore the ghost’s viewpoint. So, in true panster fashion, I went with it. 

Last of all, living in Auckland, the recent floods and Cyclone Gabrielle are still relatively fresh in my mind. It seemed right to imagine Riley’s world—our world—ending in a catastrophic storm and flood. I think my subconscious was trying to process it all! 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Kathryn Burnett 

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 author Kathryn Burnett, whose short story “Hook” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

Years ago I read about an American guy with terrible asthma who travelled to a third world country to infect himself with hook worms. Apparently, dear reader, the results were life-changing. As I’m an asthmatic, my ears kinda pricked up and I idly considered whether that was something I would ever do. I should point out that I am quite repulsed by worms and slugs – so the thought of infecting yourself with said creatures made me feel uncomfortable. And that squirm of ill-ease has been sitting in the back of my mind for years just waiting for the right story.   

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Jacqui Greaves 

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 author Jacqui Greaves, whose historical short story “Fires of Fate” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

One of the walls of the Āpiti Tavern used to feature a blown-up photograph of a settler woman doing her washing. It was taken some time in the 1890’s, and the subject was Angela Jacobs. Behind Angela is a rough wooden fence, rumoured to hold ghostly faces. In the background is a glimpse of remnants of a burnt forest.  

My inspiration for “Fires of Fates” grew from that photo. Very little is known about Angela, or most other women settlers. Women gained the vote in Aotearoa in 1893, around the time the photo was taken. By that time, large swathes of the country had been cleared for agriculture by fire. Āpiti was one of the last remaining pockets of virgin forest left in the Manawatu.  

One of my favourite books growing up was a collection of myths and legends. It intrigues me how myths and legends from around the world share similarities. They are stories, which explain fundamental truths.  

I also love things being out of place: whales swimming in the sky; historical characters in the wrong time; elves in space. So, I introduced powerful women in the form of the Fates and Furies from Greek mythology into the ongoing conflict between Tāne-nui-a-Rangi and Tāwhirimātea.  

In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods and gifted it to humans in the form of a fire-drill. In Māori myth, Māui did much the same thing. In the process, he required the assistance of Tāwhirimātea, and fire ended up being stored in Tāne’s trees–to be released using a fire-drill.  

Brownie is the voice of so many men I’ve met. By the simple biological accident of being born, and recognised, as men, the Brownies of this world have rights and privileges never afforded to the Angela’s. The Brownies are not clever and they’re not brave, but they think they are. In “Fires of Fate”, despite the evidence of his own experience, Brownie believes he is a master of fire. The Gods disagree, and as for Prometheus, his punishment is meted out by birds of prey. 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Helena Claudia 

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 author Helena Claudia, whose historical short story “I’m a Gemini” appears in the anthology. 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

I was interested in writing about the “horror” that manifests in the heads and actions of people who have an incredibly negative reception of the world, such as our unnamed protagonist, who suffers from PTSD, drawing on my own experience. New Zealand is in the midst of a mental health crisis, and accessing help is particularly difficult for younger people and students who rely on overburdened university services. Our protagonist has suffered a great personal loss and is deeply combative and critical of everyone she encounters, yet still holds a deep desire to be appreciated by them. She generally wants the same things as the people around her, but her desire to protect herself prevents her from trusting them. The only way forward she can see is back.  

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