eShort Review of Edie Investigates by Nick Harkaway

Title: Edie Investigates
Author: Nick Harkaway
Published: 14 February 2012
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday
Genre: short story, mystery
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 7/10

Old Donny Caspian has been found dead, and Tom Rice, “recently appointed Under-Nobody in charge of sod all”, has been sent by his organisation to oversee the investigation with firm instructions that the death be attributed to natural causes. But the corpse is missing its head, and Tom cannot do as told. Is it possible that his true purpose in the investigation has been concealed from him? He goes to a little tea shop called The Copper kettle to await further instructions.

Also in The Copper Kettle, “locked in combat with tea apparently made out of sump water”, is Edie Banister, retired spy, now a single old lady trying to avoid falling into the single-old-lady stereotypes (although she’s not averse to using them when it suits her). Donny was a good friend and she’s in town to ensure that things are done right. If not, “[s]he would arrive, spot the hidden clue and read the scene in the light of her knowledge of the secret parts of Donny’s life, and pronounce gravely that these were matters to be dealt with at the highest level”. Edie imagines it will be “like a bit of a last bow, a sort of Edie Rides Again”. In the meantime, she sits in the tea shop, seeing herself “reflected in the mirror as a cake-eating, gossipy Old Lady Detective” and thinks back about her first days as a spy, when she met Donny.

When Tom comes in however, her attention is inexplicably drawn to him, and it’s in The Copper Kettle that both of them realise that there really is something suspicious going on.

This short story has a lot going for it in terms of writing – it’s funny, charming, and full of detail. So much detail in fact, that once or twice the story meanders into arguably unnecessary territory, but it worked for me, so no harm done. I highlighted quite a few passages that I found amusing, most of which were related to Edie, who I think is a fantastic character. I couldn’t help but worry about her – she is in her eighties, after all – but she’s defied expectations of being a weak little female since the start of her career and she continues to do so in retirement.

The downside is that this eShort is essentially a way of introducing Edie, who plays a major part in Harkaway’s novel, Angelmaker. As a result, Edie Investigates feels incomplete and the plot is decent at best, particularly since the it’s largely preoccupied with Edie’s past, and deals rather briefly with Tom and Donny Caspian’s death. This wasn’t too problematic though – the writing and characters were enough to keep me interested in this short read.

Included in the eShort is the first chapter of Angelmaker, introducing us to the main character Joe Spork, the son of an infamous London criminal. Joe hasn’t followed in his father’s footsteps but spends his quiet life repairing antique clocks. Edie is one of his clients, and he repairs a little clockwork toy for her. According to the novel’s blurb, the clockwork gadget turns out to be a 1950s doomsday device. Having triggered it, Joe finds himself and Edie on an insane adventure featuring “mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight” (Goodreads blurb).

Frankly, I didn’t need the first chapter of Angelmaker. I didn’t find it particularly intriguing, and like the eShort it’s got loads of tiny details, only this time they felt a bit more like hard work than quaint amusements. Edie Investigates was enough to get me interested enough in Edie to read a whole novel featuring her, and I already wanted to read Angelmaker thanks to a positive review and the rather enticing blurb. But hey, the first chapter’s there if you want it – read it, don’t read it. Edie Investigates is worth a look either way (you can buy it on Amazon) and I still think Angelmaker looks like a great book.

Review of Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House

Title: Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House
Editor: Rob Spillman
Published: 26 July 2011
Publisher: Tin House
Genre:  short stories, magical realism, folklore, mythology
Source: eARC from publisher
My Rating: 6/10

Fantastic Women is a collection of short stories, all written by women, that have been gathered together because they’re “peculiar”. In the introduction, Joy Williams mentions how she once “got spanked by the doyenne of the literary establishment” for using the word ‘peculiar’, despite it having such wonderful meaning – “special, distinctive, different from the usual or normal or ordinary. It even means exemption from the power of an authority to interpret or control” (vii). And that is an excellent description of the tales you’ll find in this anthology. They’re nothing if not unbound by convention. Don’t imagine that this means you can pigeonhole them as fantasy, because you certainly cannot. Fantasy may not be mainstream, but much of it nevertheless bows to the conventions of storytelling and genre. Not so here.

In Fantastic Women, you’ll encounter such odd stories as Lucy Corin’s The Entire Predicament in which a woman finds herself dismembered, gagged and suspended from ropes in a doorway of her home. From the window she can see her children playing with soldiers, and when her husband comes home he holds her hand while he eats a sandwich as if nothing is out of the ordinary. In Beast by Samantha Hunt, a woman wonders how to tell her husband that she turns into a deer at night – “If I tell him, though, maybe he could build a special door for me. He’s handy like that. A door that doesn’t require opposable thumbs”. In Abroad by Judith Budnitz, a couple go on holiday to a third world country, but the man keeps inviting people to their hotel room, until it

“is just a mass of bodies, cookstoves, tents, shanties, music, dancing arms and bobbing breasts, boys pitching pennies, stray dogs, the burned smell of someone curling her hair, a bazaar of stalls selling rugs and copper kettles, laundry hanging on lines overhead, the endlessly overflowing toilet. The walls are grease-stained, the bare-bulb a small-sun”

The narrator refrains from complaining about any of this because she doesn’t want to offend the locals.

Don’t expect to be given reasons for how any of this is possible. It can’t simply be said that it’s all magic. You can’t use the excuse that the stories take place on another planet, an imaginary world or in another dimension. No one is going to wake up and claim that it was all just a dream. What happens, happens, so just go with it.

You could, perhaps call this magical realism, that blurrily defined genre where mainstream literary fiction goes to a tea party with folklore, mythology, and all things fantastical, and leaves in hallucinogenic bliss, full of fresh, bizarre ideas for depicting life’s conundrums. These stories certainly have a very literary feel to them – they abound with metaphors and they’re beautifully written.

It all sounds so lovely, which is why I was so disappointed to find that there was only one story I actually loved – Aimee Bender’s Americca (misspelling intended), in which 10-year Lisa narrates the story of how objects keep appearing in her family’s home. Each object is a duplicate or imitation of things they already own. There’s nothing malicious going on, but the family naturally finds this very unsettling, and the objects themselves suggest discomforting things about their lives.

I can’t quite explain why I enjoyed this story so much, but I was surprised that it was the only one to evoke such a strong reaction. There are a few others I liked such as Snow White, Rose Red by Lydia Millet and The Wilds by Julia Elliot. Abroad (mentioned above) resonated with me because I’ve been living in a country much poorer and less developed than my own and I found the narrator’s sense of being overwhelmed, coupled with her patronising fear of offending people disturbing.

But unfortunately most of the stories in the collection did nothing for me. In the anthology’s defence, these stories aren’t particularly easy to appreciate, so they’re not necessarily bad, just… peculiar. You may find their weirdness enchanting or simply odd. The metaphors might resonate with you, or just leave you confused. Perhaps the most difficult thing to get used to is the fact that many of the stories don’t have a traditional narrative. It’s not clear where it’s going or why and the characters are often too strange for you to understand their motives. These stories seem to be luxuriating in their own oddities, and whether you can do the same is up to you. Joy Williams’s interpretations is that “their take on the psychological viewscape is that it’s endlessly curious [...] They are fictions neither moral or immoral. Rather they are involved contrivances, preposterous in conception, logical in presentation, quite delightful and askew”.

Consequently, even though I didn’t enjoy most of the stories, I nevertheless found this collection to be full of exquisite little details – a character’s quirk, a touch of humour or pathos, a beautiful sentence:

“my dog caught two rabbits in the backyard, finally, after years of failure. He slung them in a bundle over his shoulder and went packing.” (The Entire Predicament by Lucy Corin)

“I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people, our limbs are bound, our intestines and mouths stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great, despite the pain.” (Hot, Fast, and Sad by Alissa Nutting

“I read the newspaper in bed at night, propping it open on my bare belly, my boobs falling off to either side as if they were already asleep” (Beast by Samantha Hunt)

The little details are in themselves rewarding especially if you appreciate good writing. And if you’re a short story reader who thinks “peculiar” is a lovely word, you might enjoy this anthology.

Buy a copy of Fantastic Women at The Book Depository

Review of Voices edited by Mark S. Deniz and Amanda Pillar

Title: Voices
Editors:  Mark S. Deniz and Amanda Pillar
Published: 9 March 2011
Publisher: Morrigan Books
Genre: horror, short stories
Source: Review copy from publisher
My Rating: 6/10

Impersonal and unknown, surrounded by strangers and desperately lonely – these are the most unsettling characteristics of hotel rooms and while hotels sometimes carry connotations of holidays and pampering, they also lend themselves very easily to horror. Voices is an indie anthology of horror stories set in a sinister old hotel.  The authors have imagined what you might hear in those rooms, and behind the locked doors are voices that whisper, plead, threaten and scream. Some reveal dark secrets; some are the ramblings of insane minds; some might be the voices of ghosts or other paranormal beings. Hotel rooms are so impersonal and alienating and yet, as this anthology often suggests, they bring out deeply personal, often deeply disturbing aspects of the people who occupy them.

The stories play around with the various characteristics and uses of hotel rooms. One of the most common uses is as a space for lovers. Several of the stories use this theme, although in this case the relationships are stained by obsession, loneliness, tragedy and violence. In “His Only Company, the Walls” by Brad C. Hodson (one of the collection’s best stories), a man waits with demented tenacity for the arrival of his lover, Julia. The narrative is composed of the voicemail messages he leaves on her cellphone. The days and weeks go by and he becomes increasingly unhinged, missing Julia then hating her, while worrying about the thing lurking in the hallway. He’s managed to puzzle out the language in which the walls are talking, he tells Julia: “I wish they would shut the hell up. I don’t believe a thing they’re saying about you.”

In “Paris” by Todd C. Edwards, a junkie ODs in the hotel room she shares with her drug dealer boyfriend. She can hear and see but is completely paralyzed and has to watch, helpless, as the lover who promised to take her to Paris deals with the body in his hotel room.

Hotels can often provide an escape from normal life, but since this is a horror anthology, the characters in Voices aren’t having happy holidays. In “Mirror” by K.V. Taylor, Max and Luca are hiding out in a hotel room after some unknown crime that Max committed. He stares constantly at the mirror in the room, while his mind is warped by the loud, chaotic music only he can hear. The unnamed woman in “Sanctuary” by Carol Johnston is trying to find some relief after a failed relationship and the last of a long series of hospital stays, but instead of finding comfort she’s ravaged by nightmares, the tortures of her own dysfunctional body and the otherworldly nature of the room itself.

Hotel rooms offer more permanent escapes too. According to author Paul Kane, anonymous hotel rooms are favoured places to commit suicide, so in his story “The Suicide Room”, a man who has been lonely all his life checks in with a suitcase full of things with which to kill himself; he just has to decide which method to use. Anonymity presents a different kind of suicide in “The Man Who Wasn’t There” by Rodney J. Smith. Ash, a man whose job has turned his life into a miserable journey from one lonely hotel room to the next, one day hears a voice that tells him that if he wants to escape his life he can give up his name, his existence and simply cease to be.

The privacy of hotel rooms allows for another common theme – murder. “Just Us” by Pete Kempshall is my favourite in the anthology – a police procedural that begins with a brutally hacked body in a hotel room and goes back a few hours to witness the murder. Another police procedural – “A Picture of Death” by Shane Jiraiya Cummings – also begins with a body in a hotel room, this time hanging from the ceiling. It seems that this killing had something to do with witchcraft, and no matter where the detective stands in the room, the corpse turns to stare at him with dead, bulging eyes.

Cleanliness is a worrying issue in dodgier hotel rooms and “Bedbugs” by Martin Livings takes a psychological and supernatural approach to the idea of a bed swarming with disgusting, biting bugs. “Sentinel” by Sonia Marcon has a surprisingly optimistic approach to the idea of something living inside the walls, watching the people who come and go from the rooms. Another room haunted by a paranormal presence is found in “Faking it” by Siobhan Byford, where a con artist who pretends to be psychic finds her act being taken over by the real thing.

The anthology also contains a series of six shorter stories by Robert Hood that act as an overarching structure for the theme of the collection. The idea is that the narratives are all set in the same hotel, and Hood’s tales (which include the prologue and epilogue) give us glimpses of the hotel across the decades, from 1928 to 2008. Unlike the other stories, which are all set in rooms, Hood’s take place in the lobby and corridors, the public spaces of the hotel. Each story features a creepy porter – possibly the same porter, a man who’s just as much a part of the hotel as the masonry.

I like the premise that all the stories take place in the same hotel and the implication that there is something sinister about the building itself. The creepy, haunted building is a standard horror trope and it’s one of my favourites. Unfortunately this presents a flaw in the anthology, as the stories don’t feel like they’re taking place in the same building. Of course, you could argue that the specifics of the hotel change over time and some differences and contradictions could be explained by the supernatural nature of the building, but that’s a very weak explanation. It may have been better if the editors presented the authors with specifics about the structure of the hotel for the sake of thematic consistency.

On the whole it’s a nice collection, if not great. Quality varies from very good to average to dull, but it’s an enjoyable, easy read – a bit of light horror for a quiet evening. At its worst the stories are forgettable (as opposed to being badly written or schlocky, which is much worse), while at its best it’s punchy and unsettling. Many of the narratives are deliberately ambiguous about their supernatural elements (is the character insane or is there really something weird going on?) but there’s a very fine line between being mysterious and being vague. Some authors find that sweet spot of creepy intrigue; others feel like there’s something missing.

I’d looked forward to Gary McMahon’s story simply because he was the only writer whose name I was familiar with, but his piece, “Constance Craving” was boring. It’s about a therapist who tries to treat a young girl who’s convinced she’s a vampire (they meet in a hotel room, in keeping with the theme).  The story doesn’t tell you whether or not the girl is really a vampire, but instead of being mysterious it was melodramatic and dull. Which also goes to show that you shouldn’t judge a story on the name of its author; chances are you will not have heard of the authors in this collection, but that’s no reason not to read it because there a few gems.

Among those are a few features that scored points with me. Each story is accompanied by a bio of the author and a personal note about their writing process. I particularly like the latter, and it makes the anthology that much more interesting for writers and anyone else who enjoys hearing about the creative process.

I also appreciate is that the collection favours more subtle psychological horror over blood and broken bodies. Gore and other gross things are often a major part of the horror but do not overwhelm the far more interesting things that make these stories disturbing – insanity, cruelty, revenge, misery, loneliness and of course, the paranormal. I’m glad I got the opportunity to read this little collection, and although I’ve never felt weird about hotel rooms, I certainly will now.

Buy a copy of Voices

 

 

Up For Review: Anthologies from Morrigan Books

Morrigan Books is an independant publisher describing themselves as “specialists in dark fiction”. I’ve been chatting with them and they’ve sent me some great short story anthologies to review – wonderfully weird, surreal stuff with cool cover art.

 

The Whisper Jar by Carole Lanham

“I do not know what you have done, but put your mouth right here. Confess your crime to this fruit jar as though it were God’s ear.” ~ from The Whisper Jar

Some secrets are kept in jars — others, in books.
Some are left forgotten in musty rooms — others, created in old barns.
Some are brought about by destiny — others, born in blood.

Secrets — they are the hidden heart of this collection. In these pages, you will encounter a Blood Digger who bonds two children irrevocably together; a young woman who learns of her destiny through the random selection of a Bible verse; and a boy whose life begins to reflect the stories he reads…

Most importantly, though, if someone should ever happen to offer you a Jilly Jally Butter Mint, just say “No!”

 

How To Make Monsters by Gary McMahon

Since the dawn of mankind, we have always made our own monsters: the terrors of capitalism and corruption, the things between the cracks, the ghosts of self…terrible beasts of desire, debt, regret, racism…of family ties, and the things that get in the way of our aspirations…the familiar monsters of our own faces, of tradition, rejection, and the darkness that lives deep inside our own hearts…

Can you identify the component parts of your own monster?

Can you afford to pay the dreadful price of its construction?

 

Voices edited by Mark S. Deniz and Amanda Pillar

In every room, there is a story.

In this hotel, the stories run to the wicked and macabre.

Well crafted psychological and supernatural horror offerings await you, each written by a master storyteller. Whether you are looking to be shocked, disturbed or out-right frightened, Voices will have something to titillate your nerves and make your hair stand up on end. Leave the lights on and brew a strong cup of tea, the voices in the room plan on keeping you up all night.

Reading Tiptree: And I Awoke and Found Me Here on on the Cold Hill’s Side

Note: this is a detailed discussion of a short story, not a review, so expect spoilers.

And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side was never one of my favourite James Tiptree jr. stories, which is to say that it’s a great story but she has even better ones. This very short tale about human beings’ fateful obsession with aliens was just a little too weird for me. But one of the things I love about Tiptree is that the more you read her stories, the more you discover about them, the more you come to appreciate and love them. So in re-reading and re-reading And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side for The Women of Science Fiction Bookclub, I found the story more and more impressive. In addition, the bookclub discussion revealed a few important details I hadn’t known about, namely the origin of the story’s title, and the parallel Tiptree draws with the faery mythos.

The title of the story comes from a John Keats poem - “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (The Beautiful Lady without Pity). It’s a ballad about the seductive danger of faeries. A knight is found “Alone and palely loitering”, “haggard and woe-begone”. He explains his sorry state – he met a beautiful woman, “a faery’s child” who enchants him, tells him she loves him and takes him to her “elfin grot” where she lulls him to sleep. He dreams of starved, pale kings, princes and warriors, who have presumably succumbed to their longing for the beautiful faeries. The knight awakens alone, “on the cold hill’s side”. His pale, haggard state is an effect of his experience with the faery, but you also get the sense that he’s “woe-begone” because he he loves or is obsessed with the faery even though he realises how dangerous she is. When I first read And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side, I’d assumed the title was painting an image of abandoned lover, and that certainly comes across in the poem.

In Tiptree’s story, the knight is replaced by a station engineer at a space port and instead of faeries we have aliens. Having made contact with other sentient species, humans are now hopelessly, desperately attracted to them. As Julie Philips puts it in her biography of Tiptree, “[h]umans meet aliens – and abandon their very souls for the chance to sleep with them” (2).

The station engineer recounts his first visit to an alien bar. He’d been “craving it, dreaming about it, feeding on every hint and clue about it” (35) and he sees his first ‘Sellice’ perform an exotic dance that is both intensely arousing and a “personal introduction to hell” (37):

“She was fantastically marked and the markings were writhing. Not like body paint – alive. Smiling, that’s a good word. As if her whole body was smiling sexually, beckoning, winking, urging, pouting, speaking to me… Her arms went up and those blazing lemon-colored curves pulsed, waved, everted, contracted, throbbed, evolved unbelievably welcoming, inciting permutations. Come do it to me, do it, do it, here and here and here and now… Every human male in the room was aching to ram himself into that incredible body. I mean it was pain.” (38)

The engineer’s experience with the Sellice characterises the human experience with aliens – it evokes intense, unbearable desire that’s constantly frustrated because almost every alien is as disinterested and distant from humans as the Sellice is from her audience. The Sellice’s movements aren’t even intentionally sexual – it’s just their normal movement. None of the aliens make any attempt to entice humans; the simple fact that they’re alien is enticing enough.

Sexual relationships in Tiptree’s stories often have this dark, complex mix of love, lust and obsession and here she conflates those things in a particularly haunting way. Throughout the story, the station engineer mocks the idea of love – every time he uses the word he twists it into something sick. “My loving wife” (34, 35) is how he refers to his spouse, who he doesn’t want to have sex with and who flinches when he touches her. There is no love or pleasure in their relationship, only (perhaps) a modicum of comfort in the face of their shared pathology. “The station only employs happily wedded couples” (41) precisely because they can provide support for each other, and it’s quite possible that the station engineer and his wife married just to be close to the aliens. He refers to the aliens as “those lovely, loveable aliens we all love so much” (35), but the humans’ pathological attraction can hardly be called ‘love’, and the aliens certainly do not love them or even care about them. It’s only the most perverted, degraded aliens who are willing to stoop so low as to have sexual contact with humans – it’s akin to beastiality, perhaps. And yet the station engineer has traded “everything Earth offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me” (40).

In the same way that Keats’s knight is left “haggard and woe-begone” by the faery, so human beings are physically and emotionally damaged by their lust. Sexual encounters with aliens – when physically possible – leave humans wounded, scarred. Sex with a pair of Sirians is supposed to be “the total sexual thing for a woman, if she can stand the damage from those two beaks” (39). When the station engineer’s wife appears, she has a limp and one of her shoulders is “grotesquely scarred” (41). The humans who chase after aliens are disgustingly pathetic: a girl in the alien bar behaves like “a goddamn dog that wants you to follow it” (37); when the station engineer spots a rare alien he “dropped everything and started walking after it like a starved hound” (38); an old woman cleans up a defective alien’s vomit “as if it were holy water” (40).

The journalist assumes that this is merely some kind of fetish, but it’s not that simple: “Sex is only part of it – there’s more… Man, it’s deep… some cargo-cult of the soul.” (40). Cargo cults are religious practices that sprang up in many pre-industrial societies when they first encountered technologically advanced societies. The cult was an attempt to obtain the material wealth (cargo) of the advanced societies through magic and ritual. During World War II, the Japanese and the Americans used islands in the Pacific as military bases, and in the cargo cults that arose there, the followers made crude imitations of landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment to use in their religious practices. In rituals, followers mimicked the military personnel’s use of the equipment, believing that this would get the gods and ancestors to send the valuable cargo to them, rather than to the foreigners.

In Tiptree’s “cargo cult of the soul”, humans want alien sex so badly they’re sacrificing themselves for it: “Our soul is leaking out. We’re bleeding to death!” (40). They’re “[l]ike the poor damned Polynesians… gutting Earth… [s]wapping raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols” (39). The Polynesians, besides having their own cargo cults, were also the people who created the famous statues on Easter Island, but to erect those statues they cut down every tree on the island, wrecking the ecosystem and wiping out most of their population as a result. The human race in And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side seems to be on the verge of doing the same blindly destructive thing, not for a religious cult as the Polynesians did, but for an uncontrollable sexual obsession.

It’s notable that we get the story from the journalist’s perspective – he’s naive, excited to meet aliens, and, most importantly, dismissive of the station engineer’s warnings. He occupies the position the reader would have, in this story. The journalist assumes the engineer is a xenophobe, bitter, self-pitying, drunk, drugged, and thus can avoid taking him seriously. He takes absolutely nothing away from the engineer’s anecdotes and when he spots an alien at the end of the story he rushes after it. The horror is that the station engineer’s warnings are always going to be pointless – humans are doomed by their very nature to be fall into this trap:

“Man is exogamous – all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw and we’re about to die trying… Do you think I can touch my wife?” (40).

So making contact with aliens might actually cause the extinction of the human race, although not in the ways typically feared. The aliens couldn’t care less about humans and aren’t interested in colonising or destroying humanity. But they’re going to do it anyway because once humans catch sight of aliens they’re so hooked they lose interest in their own species. “Go home” the station engineer warns the unheeding journalist, “Go home and make babies. While you still can” (34). But he doesn’t resist his fateful curiosity; he can’t, and we’re doomed.

A.M. Harte: A Conversation and a Giveaway

A.M. Harte is a London-based, chocolate-addicted, passion-fuelled webfiction enthusiast and indie author. My first encounter with her work was a postapocalyptic biopunk story in the webfiction anthology Other Sides, and I recently relished and reviewed her collection of zombie love tales in Hungry For You. You can (and should) check out most of her fiction online, as she publishes it on her blog where you can read it for free.

Anna graciously subjected herself to my curiosity about her writing, the world of indie publishing, and the grossness of zombies. She’s also giving away one of the brand new print editions of her book, so without further ado, I give you the talented Anna Harte.

Zombies and love are a rather… strange combination. What possessed inspired you to write on that theme? Especially since you don’t actually like zombies?.
Funnily enough, I’ve actually included an afterword in the print edition of Hungry For You musing on the inspiration behind the collection. To cut a long story short, it’s all thanks to fellow author Lori Titus for introducing me to the Zombie Luv Flash Fiction Contest last summer. I thought it would be a fun challenge to take part in and it would push my limits as a writer since zombies terrify me; I never realised I would end up possessed by the idea.
I don’t particularly like zombies because of the gore factor (I have a weak stomach). But writing Hungry For You pushed me into thinking about zombies differently, as metaphors for loneliness, obsession, lust and desire. They stopped being mindless, terrifying machines to me, and I think that really shows throughout the collection.

Hmm, I actually found the intimacy just as gross as gore! Decaying people kissing, the zombie boner in the title story… shudder.
I thought the zombie boner was hilarious when I wrote it. The bit that grossed me out the most was Michael’s nail ripping in “The Perfect Song”. Yuck!

The stories in Hungry For You and on your website are all on the shorter side of short story. What is it that you like about this writing style/format? What are the challenges?
I’m a commitment-phobe. If you compare writing to a relationship, short stories are the hot summer flings and novels are the long-haul relationships.
Writing a novel can be pretty lonely and frustrating; at some points you’re certain you’ll never finish writing and you begin to wonder why you’re bothering. On the other hand, writing a short story is very intense, exciting and inspiring, because it’s all crammed into a very small space. And, of course, in today’s world of instant gratification, it’s addictive to get that satisfied sense of completion so quickly.
Not to say that writing a short story is easy. It’s tough to cut down, to tighten your prose and make sure only the essential elements are included. In fact, writing short stories has improved my writing far more than any other format.

I’ll confess that “Arkady, Kain and Zombies” was my least favourite story. I was intrigued, but I also thought it was the one story that really did need a bit more development, as I didn’t understand the connection between the two main characters. However, I noticed that a book entitled Arkady and Kain is listed among the upcoming releases for 1889 Labs – are you planning to turn the story into a novel?

Argh! I was worried about that. As a matter of fact, my fellow 1889 Labs author MCM wrote Arkady & Kain (a full length novel) last year – the story follows longtime CIA agent Kain as he is assigned to protect and control air-headed celebrity Arkady, who is affiliated with a terrorist organisation. The novel was available to read online for several months, and was then taken down for revision/editing and eventual re-release. It was actually supposed to come out February, at the same time as Hungry For You, but the plan flopped somewhat!

I assisted MCM on the editing process, so his characters took over a small part of my mind. I began to wonder how Arkady and Kain would be affected by a zombie apocalypse, and that was that. So what you have left is… Err, well basically a piece of fanfiction with added zombies, for a novel no one can read yet. Oops?

I feel the story stands well enough alone to be enjoyed by those unfamiliar with MCM’s novel, but in either case the revised edition of Arkady & Kain will be coming out this year and I highly recommend it!

You have several other writing projects going on at the moment – the Above Ground postapocalyptic fantasy series, the Darksight horror serial novel, and various short stories, all of which are published on your blog. Can you tell us something about those?
I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve been neglecting my other writing! Eep.
The Above Ground series is set in a world where humans live underground and monsters live on the surface. The story follows Lilith Gray, a human girl who is trapped above ground and must learn to adapt… or die trying! DarkSight is a horror serial set in London about a small-town Irish girl, Maeve, who discovers that she can see demons, and they can see her. It’s a haunting, gory tale about possession, loneliness, and fighting against evil.

I’m an active member of the online fiction (or webfiction) community, a great group of writers who post their work online, often in instalments. Both Above Ground and DarkSight are serial stories in that way, posted chapter-by-chapter over on Qazyfiction. It’s a wonderful way to connect with readers — and many times the comments readers leave on each chapter influence the storyline! Of course, what is posted is very much raw and unpolished; I will eventually re-release the serials as edited ebooks.

I’m also a member of the #fridayflash community on twitter. On Fridays, authors post short stories (under 1000 words) on their blog and tweet about them using the hashtag. I don’t take part every week, but I do love the creativity of the community as well as the chance to test plot ideas in a small format. It’s also a great way to meet new authors and procrastinate at work on lazy Friday afternoons!

You’re an indie author, which basically means you do everything yourself, not just the creative stuff, but the business side of it too – selling, marketing, etc. According to your guest post on The Inner Bean, it’s a labour of love. I find that amazing – it shows such incredible commitment to your craft! But how do you manage it? And do you ever feel that “being a business” as you’ve said, can disrupt the creative process?
Oh, most definitely! Every now and then I realise that I’ve neglected my writing in favour of doing marketing work or admin jobs like formatting. Then I start feeling frustrated and become cranky, until eventually I realise what the problem is. It’s a constant juggling act, really — I write and write until I realise I’ve neglected my marketing, then I focus on that until I realise something else is slipping, and so on. I rather enjoy the challenge and variety, to be honest — I work best under pressure.

You’ve obviously found some kind of cure for sleep – are you willing to give up the formula/spell/recipe? Please tell me it’s all in the chocolate…
My cure is just oversleeping ridiculous amounts on weekends! And having no social life, ha. I always notice that the more I go out, the more my writing suffers, so I tend to write less during the summer when the weather is good. Oh, chocolate definitely helps too!

Most of your fiction is available for free online, and Hungry For You costs only $0.99. Clearly you’re not in this for the money, but that’s not a decision most writers would be willing to take; they’d want some kind of financial compensation for their efforts. So how is that you (and other webfiction writers) have had the determination to do it?
As you mentioned, writing is a labour of love. Whether or not I make money, I want to write — and for me the more important thing is to be read. I’d rather have thousands reading my books for free than ten people paying me to read it. Webfiction also has its own rewards: direct communication with readers, instant feedback, flexibility, a strong online community….
From a business point of view, however, offering free samples of my work is a great way to hook in readers and create an audience willing to eventually pay for something - Hungry For You is my way of testing the waters.

Hungry For You was published by 1889 Labs a publisher with some unusual initiatives, like Livewriting and allowing people to read all their publications for free online. Can you tell us more about them?
1889 Labs is an independent publisher dedicated to producing the best strange fiction conceivable by the human brain. Catering to a specific demographic of men and women between the ages of 3 and 97, they print everything from kids books to serious stories for adults.
I believe 1889 Labs is one of the most cutting-edge indie publishers around, willing to try new business models and experiment with the online format (livewriting being a prime example). I highly recommend checking out Dustrunners: Typhoon!

Hungry For You is being released in print this month – are there some extra stories exclusive to this edition?
Yep! As I mentioned earlier, there is an additional afterword which includes a little more insight into the stories, plus three extra stories which are all broadly more on the humorous side. We’ve also included a non-zombie story by 1889 Labs author MCM, which is drawn from his short story collection Kidney Disease Gave Me Brain Damage. So oodles of extra content!
It’s lovely to see my work in print. As much as I am a big fan of efiction, there are some things that only work in print, such as having cool stylized chapter headers and other formatting flourishes. I am actually holding the proof copy in my hands right now – it’s very surreal to have tactile evidence that I’m an author!

Congrats Anna, you certainly deserve the pleasure of seeing your work in print! And thank you so much for taking the time out for a chat

If you’re keen to see the book Anna’s so excited about and with which I was suitably impressed, then don’t miss your chance to win a copy of her unique zombie story collection. To enter, subscribe to Violin in a Void using either the email subscription or the WordPress one and leave a comment on this post. This giveaway is international, and entries will close on 28 March. Good luck!

Hungry for You by A.M. Harte

Title: Hungry For You
Author: A.M. Harte
Publisher: 1889 Labs
Publication date: 5 February 2011
My Rating: 7/10
Source: ARC provided by author

Buy Hungry For You

if there’s anything a zombie understands
it’s desire
-  Gabriel Gadfly

Who would have thought zombies could be so… tender? To me zombies are gross and scary, sometimes funny, but not much else. Then webfiction author A.M. Harte surprised me with Hungry For You, her collection of short zombie fiction which transcends the typical zombie mythos and uses the hungry, decaying monsters as metaphors for love and obsession. It makes zombies less scary, more revolting, but also morbidly fascinating.

The premise for this collection is that

Love is horrible. It’s ruthless, messy, mind-altering, and raw. It takes no prisoners. It chews you up and spits you out and leaves you for dead. Love is, you could say, very much like a zombie.

In Hungry For You couples are faced with the dilemma of what to do when the zombie apocalypse comes – do you part at death or stay together forever in decay and dismemberment? One lucid zombie takes the latter option, biting his wife so that he doesn’t lose the love of his life: What was it we had promised? For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health….Together forever. I’d made sure of it.

In one of the quirkier stories – “A Prayer to Garlic” – a very mortal zombie is faced with the existential angst of losing love to decay, as well as the amusingly mundane problem of what to serve a conservative mother-in-law for dinner:

Mog had known about my alternative eating habits for months. But it was something we’d hidden from his mother, who was a traditional zombie to the core. She scoffed at the mere suggestion of pork. Not to mention how she’d react whenever she met the chicken-eaters down the road.

“Vegetarians, the lot of them,” she’d say. “I survive on human and marrow pie, and if it’s good enough for me then it’s good enough for them!”

Then there are obsessed-lover zombies, ready to kill (and sometimes feed) for love:

She’d been chasing them with typical zombie hardheadedness for days, her previous lust and love transformed to hunger.

Zombies also act as apt metaphors for depression, loneliness and addiction. A lonely girl living a dead-end life lets infection consume her, perhaps because her existence is already zombie-like. A grieving musician shuts himself in his apartment, writing lyrics, missing his dead girlfriend and getting addicted to some rather dodgy tea.

These imaginative tales take place in a variety of contexts, from isolated incidents, to apocalyptic plague outbreaks, and post-apocalyptic scenarios where zombies rule. Because these scenarios are so familiar now – the outbreak of infection, the dwindling human resistance – that Harte is able to toy with convention and manipulate your assumptions about zombies and human beings. In addition, she is able to focus on her characters without being held back by explanatory details.

With the freedom to explore character, Harte has several different takes on the zombie. Among the classic mindless, flesh-eating creatures, are zombies who think, love and lust, a zombie who manifests as a monstrous rose, even killer zombie swans. In fact, symbols and concepts typically associated with love and romance – roses, swans, promises, hearts, kisses, sex – all get twisted, mutilated, devoured.

Because of the theme, the gross-out factor is pretty high, although in a manner different from normal zombies. There isn’t that much gore, but there’s a lot of intimacy – zombies kissing, implied sex, sexualised descriptions of zombie bodies. But then again zombies are supposed to be really disgusting. Plus, I think the ick-rating of kissing someone with a rotting tongue prevents these stories from degenerating into romance. When I read the blurb of Hungry For You I was worried it would be a bunch Twilight stories with zombies instead of vampires. It’s anything but. Instead it’s smart and spunky, bringing together horror, tragedy, romance and dark humour.

It’s a lot to pack into this very short collection (a mere 84 pages) of short short fiction, but Harte does it admirably and playfully. I enjoyed all the stories, except the last – “Arkady, Kain and Zombies”. It’s a more conventional zombie story and feels underdeveloped; perhaps more like the seed for a novel than a complete story in itself. But other than that I was happy. The stories are so short and punchy you devour them quickly, decide to read just one more, and before you know it you’ve read the whole book.

Hungry For You is recommended snacking for zombie fans, especially thrifty ones – you can buy the Kindle edition for $2.99 on Amazon, £0.71 on Amazon.co.uk, or choose from a selection of digital formats for only $0.99 on Smashwords. And if you’re spending every cent on preparations for the zombie apocalypse, or you just want a good quick read, check out Harte’s fiction for free on her blog.