E. Saxey is an ungendered Londoner who works in universities. Their fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction and in anthologies including Tales from the Vatican Vaults and The Lowest Heaven. They live in London and tweet at @esaxey.

Firstly, Unquiet is a stunning book. Thank you for sharing it with the world. It already means a great deal to me personally. What do you want people to take away from it?

 

Ideally I’d like people to find it enchanting and excruciating, a bit of a balance. There are some eerie and agonizing parts, and it would be great haunt readers and generally put them through the ringer, but there’s also art and love and hope.

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Leah Ning: Breaking Out and Managing Apex

By Angelique Fawns

 

Leah Ning’s writing career is like shooting off like a circus performer out of a cannon. She has stepped up as managing editor at Apex Book Company and is selling stories like hotcakes. Her short fiction has been picked up by some of the top markets in the speculative world, like Podcastle, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Dark Matter Magazine, Factor Four, Apex, and Air and Nothingness Press to name a few. This Virginian has cats, a dog, and a sugar glider. If you don’t know what they are, google them. Super cute.

She took the time to talk to me about her path to success and future plans. 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An Interview with Kiwi author Marty Young 

 

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 Marty Young, whose haunting short story “Redwoods on Te Mata Peak” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

This story, “Redwoods on Te Mata Peak”, is loosely based on a regular weekend for me as a kid – albeit without the terrible ending! But a bunch of us used to cycle up Te Mata Peak on our BMX’s on the weekends – although I’ve no bloody idea how!! I’ve driven up that peak as an adult and I can’t fathom cycling up it on a bike, let alone a bike without gears! But yeah, that’s what we used to do, and one day, we did discover a wrecked car at the base of a gully, and we found a cave next to it, too. We didn’t have any torches with us that day, so we came back the following day, armed with torches and rope, and we went exploring. I remember crawling through spaces only just wide enough to crawl through with one arm held out front, then entering giant hourglass-shaped caverns. The cave system went on for several hours with no end in sight before we decided we had better return before we got lost. And for some reason, we never went back again. I don’t know why. So my story is based around that, only I didn’t want to write a standard cave story. I always felt there was something far more horrific waiting to be told with that set-up.  

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Del Gibson 

 

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 Del Gibson, whose classic haunted house story “Buried Secrets” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

A house has four walls, and within those walls, sometimes ghosts and ghouls lurk. Those ghosts live with us, mess with our minds, they can turn our entire lives upside down and inside out. You can feel their presence, see their shadows, sense them all around you. But you can’t see them. That is what makes ghosts so interesting, somewhat dangerous, and insidious.  

 

I chose the setting for this story in a 120-year-old homestead that my dad purchased for his retirement, in Rawene, in the Far North of New Zealand. It was a house where things would go bump in the night. The crawling, creeping feeling of being watched. Having to leave a light on when going to bed, for fear of being in the dark. Running down the long hallway, always sensing something chasing behind. The bathroom felt the heaviest, for some reason or another. Note, my dad passed away in there a few years after he’d brought the homestead.  

 

The hotel mentioned in the story, I worked at for a year, while I was living in Russell in the Bay of Islands. The hotel had a resident ghost, his name was Jack. He’d haunt the upstairs area, where the rooms are located. From downstairs while working, we’d hear him walking along the hallways, sometimes he’d stomp, run, move things about. The story goes, that he was an elderly man who died in one of the suites, from a heart attack.  

 

I wanted to weave a little of my own history into the fabric of this ghostly tale. I endeavoured to mash my love of horror, with a bit of history and a whole lot of freaky occurrences. My love for the macabre came from growing up in a haunted house. I’ve been able to see ghosts, apparitions, since I was 5 years old. I am an avid watcher of true paranormal investigations. So, I thought it would be a great idea to add an investigation of the hotel into the story. The cult aspect, comes from mountains of research into this phenomenon and I thought it would add to the plot. 

 

My main focus was to create a horror with a Kiwi flavour. Adding an old Māori man to push the story along was a great idea. It also helped to leave a massive cliffhanger at the end, for the reader to ponder on for a while. I hope I have pulled this off. I had heaps of fun writing this story and I hope that shows in the writing.  

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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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Kickstarting a Book Series! A Chat with Dean Wesley Smith

By Angelique Fawns

 

Dean Wesley Smith has an online course which I studied before launching my current Kickstarter for the Horror Lite Series. I’ve gathered up some of my best dark tales and compiled them into three collections called: Cursed & Creepy; Peculiar Pets; and Mythical Monsters.

You can check out the campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1629319559/the-horror-lite-series-by-angelique-fawns

My stretch goals focus on adding other authors to my anthologies and paying them for their stories! I am hoping to include 3 guest tales per anthology.

 

Dean Wesley Smith’s workshop is a fantastic way for authors to learn about using this platform to get more eyes on their new ventures. Dean Wesley Smith has built 33 successful Kickstarter campaigns and is working on his next one. Learn more at www.deanwesleysmith.com.

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Spooky House Press Author Series

“Frickity Dizzle,” An Interview with Kathleen Palm 

Author of Into the Gray (Middle Grade)

Spooky House Press LLC (February 13, 2023)

By: Jacque Day

INTRODUCTION

As a bonus to the main interview with author Kathleen Palm, we bring you this mini-Q&A with Spooky House Press publisher, Robert P. Ottone, who discusses what distinguishes middle grade from young adult fiction, and why Kathleen Palm’s book, Into the Gray, resonated with him. 

 

Jacque Day: Into the Gray falls into the middle grade (MG) category for readers ages 8 to 12. How differently do you approach MG-rated books versus YA fiction for readers 12 to 18?

Robert P. Ottone: The major key, from what I’ve learned over time, is that middle grade and young adult fiction differ only in the way you present some material. For example, middle grade likely won’t have explicit cursing, sex, or drug use. That said, you can get as bloody or dark with the material as you like. 

 

JD: Why is it important for you, as a publisher, to be open to MG work like Into the Gray? 

RPO: My intention wasn’t to specifically find a middle grade book, but when Kathleen’s novel came through, I loved it. It hit every touchstone good middle grade should touch, and most specifically, spoke to the idea that it’s perfectly okay to not be okay. I don’t know any middle grade kids who are perfectly fine. Kathleen taps into that in a meaningful, very real way, and by the way, we’re delighted to have her. Spooky House, as a whole, exists to publish new authors, or newer authors, whatever you want to say, and we’re hoping that Kathleen feels at home and confident in us with projects going forward.

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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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