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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