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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I’m taking tea with Dr. Rachel Knightley in a green room as we talk all things theatre (I practically grew up in one as I have a family member who’s an actor and, yes, it was a complete coincidence that I chose a theatre theme for my October horrorscopes: https://horrortree.com/october-2023-horrorscopes-how-youll-die-in-a-theatre/), the chimerical David Bowie, and navigating the truly terrifying world…of writing!

Dr. Rachel Knightley is a fiction and non-fiction author, presenter, lecturer and writing and confidence coach. Her background in directing and performing for theatre formed her fascination the power of the stories we tell ourselves to shape our identity. You’ll find these themes of performance and reality in her upcoming short story cycle, Twisted Branches (to be published by Black Shuck Books on 26 October), and her first collection, Beyond Glass, published in 2021 (Black Shuck Shadows), along with her stories in anthologies such as Great British Horror 5: Midsummer Eve, British-Fantasy-Award-nominated Dreamland (Black Shuck Books), and Uncertainties vol. 3 (Swan River Press). Her non-fiction includes WJEC/Eduqas’s GCSE Drama Study and Revision Guide (Illuminate/Hodder Education) and Your Creative Writing Toolkit.

Rachel has written and presented documentary features for blu-ray extras and YouTube channels including Starburst magazine, Indicator Films, Second Sight Films, Severin Films and Green Ink Writers’ Gym’s Write Through Lockdown programme. Her articles have appeared in magazines including Writing Magazine, Jewish Renaissance, The Dark Side, Starburst and Fangoria. Rachel is a qualified business and personal coach (Barefoot Coaching/Chester University) and, in addition to her PhD, holds a LAMDA diploma in Speech and Drama Education, a PGCert in Teaching Creative Writing (Cambridge University). She works with writers and speakers of all ages and levels of experience, building communication and performance skills – from confidence building, auditions and interview technique to fiction, memoir and brand voice to audition and interview technique, speechwriting, public speaking and reading for performance. She has taught LAMDA Exams since 2007 in addition to working with adults in creative confidence building for life, work and art. She lectures in Creative Writing at Roehampton University and works with private clients online and from her home in southwest London.

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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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Mike Jack Stoumbos & his Unhelpful Encyclopedia Series

By Angelique Fawns

Mike Jack Stoumbos is putting the fun back in short fiction with his Unhelpful Encyclopedia Series through WonderBird Press. A writer and curator of fantasy and science fiction, this Writers of the Future award winner is putting his unique stamp on our industry. I took one of his workshops at Fyrecon 2022, and found his approach to outlining a novel easy and understandable. 

The first anthology in the Unhelpful Encyclopedia Series was Murderbirds, “a fascinating, dangerous, and often irreverent romp through the most bizarre aviary ever encountered.”  

He’s currently running a kickstarter for the second installment, Murderbugs, which you can check out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mikejackstoumbos/wonderbird-press-2024-anthologies-murder-bugs-and-monsters

Or at his website www.mikejackstoumbos.com

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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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