Instead of trawling through the supernatural in fiction canon to produce a greatest hits package of better known writers and stories, or even great stories by lesser known writers from the past, I saw this piece as an opportunity to evangelise what is going down now, in the contemporary literary world of fear, unease, and the weird, but with stories and authors that might not yet be pressed against the windshield of horror fans. Writers that should be on your bonnet because there has been something of a resurrection afoot in the world of horror, even if these new treasures have yet to surface in most high street bookshops or public libraries.
While these are more direct influences the comic Hack/Slash has always been a big influence on my comic writing since I first read it. It was something I had never seen before in the medium and showed me that these stories could be told in comics.
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AP2HYC: Considering this is an anthology of only 24-pages divided amongst four tales, how did you and the artists strive to find balance between the artwork and narration to make sure the story was effectively scary?
Wheatley: I think in comics the key to keeping things scary is the atmosphere and the page turn. With only a few pages for each story it was very important that the artist use the space they had to create this sort of creeping feeling as their story was told. It all starts with the fantastic cover by Natasha Alterici. The focal point is the fire, front and centre, but behind it lurking in the dark are these eyes looking out at you, making you uneasy about what lies ahead and on the pages within.
Throughout the anthology I kept the narration minimal as each story begins with it but shortly after it is gone. I wanted to give the reader the feeling that they were there, listening to the story. So engrossed in the tale that they no longer hear the words but instead have a beautifully realised visual in front of them. Its the benefit of the comics medium.
Alongside this, I meticulously planned out page turns. Within a horror comic, the page turn is the equivalent of a jump scare. It catches the reader off-guard while at the same time being built up by the pages preceding it.
Previously, this story was behind a password for people who had donated in support of urgent causes. I have now reposted it for all to read. If you are able, please continue to do anything you can to protect trans kids. Links for suggested donations can be found at the bottom.
This story is nearly ten years old now, and I stopped trying to find a home for it after a few false starts over five years ago. The root of this story feels like a fever dream: someone named Ben emailed me to tell me that his friend Lachlan had been hit by a cab in Brisbane, and would I consider writing him into a short story to him. It was such an oddly forward request that I said yes without much consideration. Months later, when I completed it, I sent him a draft and wished Lachlan well on his recovery. He never responded, and that was the last I heard of it.
On the morning of the incident, Lachie woke to the gentle trills of impossible birds, nestled in his bed in the boughs of the world tree of Ur. The cool breeze licked his face and ruffled his shaggy hair as he stretched, arching his back and feeling each joint pop with pleasurable release. He sat up and the branches and broad leaves of the world tree unfurled, revealing a glorious vista of the fields of Ur.
The world tree stood on the peak of the tallest mountain of Ur, a mountain still without a name. The craggy peak, modeled on the fearsome heights of the old Alps, but in miniature, rose only a few thousand feet above the plains below. The world tree was half again as tall, a wooden spire of red and green, perpetually wreathed in clouds, and Lachie slept most nights nestled in a bed of felt-textured leaves.
Lecho summoned the vilest curses he could and spat them in a circle at his feet. Not for the first time, he damned the blind, hateful luck that had brought him to the foot of the greatest city in the East, ready to grind his flesh into the unbreachable walls until there was little but dust and blood.
If you enjoy this blend of Mythos and Mayberry, then check out the rest of collection, featuring stories from Nick Mamatas, Gary Braunbeck, Lucy Snyder, Josh Malerman, and more. The second edition is available at Amazon, and many other booksellers.
Last Light sits right up there with my favorite short story collections. What a variety of horror/thriller stories, each one so different when it came to characters, the themes and the focus points. It felt like I was able to read multiple super interesting books in a really short amount of time and I felt really excited!
I was raised the son of a writer. My father wrote plays, films and novels. He was successful and suffered constant wanderlust. I was born in America when he was there writing Vertigo for Alfred Hitchcock.
Writing is difficult. Writing in the hopes that you will be read and your works appreciated is terrifying. In my case, the fear of failure kept my ideas and stories buried in a back closet within my brain.
Waters looked at story and gender, but Emelumadu looks at colonialism and gender, the place and power of ownership. These are subversive stories, stories of temptation and threat and how to deal with each, but most of all they are stories of transformation. Of the assumption of personal power, of reclaiming what has been stolen.
Because genetic control is only a part of it. Social control is the real goal, the diminution of human dignity to factory farmed spores remarkable only for their reproductive capacity. Individual elements are to be weeded out in service of the whole. In a sense, the mushrooms are afforded more consideration.
The stories are images of each other (all stories are the same!) and the girl sees one younger brother born, and then another. This youngest child is taken away soon after birth, taken by the witch or rescued by the Mother, and the little girl, believing in the stories, sneaks out into the woods and brings the witch back with her:
Octavia Cade has recently graduated with her PhD in science communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos Magazine, and Aurealis. Her most recent novella, The Ghost of Matter from Paper Road Press, tells of New Zealand's greatest scientist, Ernest Rutherford, as he navigates through grief and atoms and ghosts...
The frustration with Existentialism as a philosophy is that there is no easy or agreed upon definition of what exactly it is. The most honest appraisals direct us to read the works of those who have been labeled as such (Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Kafka) and take their themes as a proxy definition despite the many contradictions that exist (sometimes even within the same author). So in that spirit, here is a listing of some of my short (and free) existential horror stories that can be read online (click titles for links).
Sometimes I forget that I'm also a fiction writer, so I thought it might be a nice change of pace to share one of my stories with you. I wrote this piece awhile ago for an anthology that never came together and I'm tired of just sitting on it.
It's one of the more odd stories I've written, and it's in something of a stilted style because I was trying to capture the "feel" of 1860's writing without making it inaccessible to a modern audience.
The end began with the cry of, "he's alive!" by the reclusive Dr. Nebo on a warm afternoon in the Spring of 1862, at his manor on the outskirts of London. The "he" in question was a young man who had until only recently been dead before his time, whom Dr. Nebo had illegally and immorally dug up from a nearby cemetery. After a transfusion of living blood and a jolt of electricity, Dr. Nebo successfully returned the dead man to life a scant three days after his death.
The formerly dead man in question, a Mr. Eliot, retained all of his prior vitality, cognition and personality, seemingly none the worse for wear despite his quick stint as a corpse. After an exhaustive day of testing his patient, Dr. Nebo, finding nothing amiss, proclaimed to the world that he had conquered death and could return the recently dead to life, thus beginning what he hoped would be a new era of peace and understanding for humanity.
The news spread like a wild fire. Before word had even been printed in the papers, people nearby were bringing the corpses of their relatives to the doctor so that he might instill new life in their dead bodies. And instill new life he did, working around the clock to resurrect those who had once lived. One of his first patients was an Eloise Darby, brought in by her son, Richard Darby.
Richard, at thirty-two years old, was one of the most successful accountants in England. When Dr. Nebo's announcement had come a mere day after his mother died, it seemed almost like a message from God himself that Richard was to take his mother's body to the doctor. They had, during life, been quite close and so despite his misgivings on the subject, he seized the day and took her to see the doctor.
Richard brought his mother in a wheelbarrow and he saw that the other clients had used all manner of conveyance, from carrying the dead over their shoulder to bringing a fine carriage with a filigreed monogram. Waiting was the hardest part and Richard took to studying those who went in and came out, leery of some sort of trick or scam. However, as more and more people came out significantly more alive than they had gone in, Richard slowly began to believe that the treatment was a reality.
It wasn't until later in the afternoon that the first sign of trouble arrived. Richard had been waiting all day by that point and while he was next in line to go into the house, the queue behind him had grown to colossal lengths, traveling down the road and disappearing off into the distance. An enterprising young man had even taken to selling food, drink, and perfume to those in line. And yet from away in the distance, a lone figure walked past the row of the living and the dead and, gesticulating wildly, slowly made his way toward the manor. It was some time before Richard could actually tell who it was and what they were saying, but word spread quickly up the line that it was the local Bishop, come to condemn to hell those involved in this blasphemy. Soon enough, Richard heard it with his own ears. 152ee80cbc
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