Category: Horror

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Chickenfoot

OJ

I have a new story out! It actually came out a couple of months back, but I’m still playing catch-up here. “Chickenfoot” is available to read in the anthology Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga, edited by Lindy Ryan from Black Spot Books.

When I saw the call for stories for this I knew I had to send something in. Not, I have to admit, because I’ve got any great love for Baba Yaga. But her house… that’s different. I’ve always found the house fascinating! The way it stalks about on its chicken legs. Any why a chicken? Let’s face it, hens have many marvelous qualities, but if I’m going to stick bird legs on a house a chicken is not the animal that immediately comes to mind. (What does come to mind? I’m not even sure. I suppose it depends what kind of environment the house is traveling through. If it’s swampy you’d want a water bird, and so on.)

That’s what inspired the story. The chicken in “Chickenfoot” is dead, and Baba Yaga’s looking for a replacement. She keeps a diary of her experiments, and they do not go well.

“Chickenfoot” isn’t a very long story; it’s not that much bigger than a flash, I think. I’m tempted to keep going with it, however… add more birds, and more creepiness, and bring out the backstory of the chicken. A project for the future, maybe.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Breathless in the Green

OJ

I have a new story out! “Breathless in the Green” is available to read in the latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s the second story I’ve sold to them, and very pleased I was to do it.

“Breathless in the Green” came about because I was looking to write a story about a water monster, possibly using folk tales to do so. And I came across the figure of Ginny Greenteeth, a sort of water hag that hangs round the ponds and stagnant waters of England, pulling kids into the water and drowning them. Now, I’d heard about Ginny before, in the very vaguest sort of way, but what I didn’t realise – and what caught my attention, and made me want to write a story about her – is that “Ginny Greenteeth” is also used to describe duckweed, which is that small, scummy-looking green plant that covers over ponds. You can see where the connection came from. Duckweed could hide how dangerous a body of water is, and a curious child might not take enough care and drown. Over time, such a thing is attributed to the water hag, which is interesting in itself, but duckweed has one particularly stellar property. It’s great for bioremediation, which means it can filter pollutants out of the environment around it.

It’s a very environmentally friendly weed, is what I’m saying… which leads to a very environmentally friendly monster. Oh, the Ginny Greenteeth of my story still wants to drown things, but this time she’s found a friend… a little girl who is sick of going on climate marches because they don’t achieve anything.

There’s a water hag who just might be able to remedy that inaction.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Tidemarks

OJ

I have a new story out! “Tidemarks” is available to read in Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World, edited by Eric J. Guignard from Dark Moon Books.

When Eric contacted me to ask if I were interested in writing a ghost story for the anthology, there were only two restrictions. First, whatever building was being haunted, it couldn’t be a house. Secondly, it couldn’t take place in any real building. I’m embarrassed to say that I forgot the second condition twice, and my haunted aquarium ended up being dumped further along the Otago peninsula coastline than any similar building which may or may not have inspired the story.

My sole defence is that I was so excited at the prospect of writing a story about ghost penguins that I promptly forgot anything else. Yes, penguins. There was nothing in the brief that said my story had to be about human ghosts so I went straight to the ecological uncanny. Anyway, there are penguins on the Otago peninsula and I would like for them to stay there, so this is a future-set ghost story in which red tides have taken the place of penguins, and those poor extinct birds reappear late at night, suffocating under algal bloom. (Yes, ghost penguins of tragedy, don’t read this for a happy ending to hauntings.)

But still. Ghost penguins!!!

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Seedling

OJ

After seven years of submissions, I’m delighted to say that I finally, finally, have a story in Fantasy & Science Fiction. It has taken a long time, and some of the stories I sent there were very good and were published in other markets, but F&SF is one of those bucket list magazines for speculative writers, and they get a heap of excellent stories every single day, so it’s no surprise that it takes persistence to succeed there. Well, persistence I have.

The story that finally got me there was a flash piece about fairy tales and cake. “Seedling” was inspired by the Hansel and Gretel story, which has the dubious distinction of being one of the fairy tales that has typically interested me the least, as well as being the fairy tale that most inspired every childhood birthday cake. My parents had the old birthday cake book from Women’s Weekly that every New Zealand family had at one point, I’m sure, and there are a lot of delightful cakes in there but, as a kid, nearly every year I picked the gingerbread cottage because it had a roof covered in Pebbles and the whole thing was just marvelous. That’s about the only thing I care about in the Hansel and Gretel story: that cottage made of cake, like a sugary angler fish in the middle of the forest.

Except in this story, it’s not the cottage that’s made of cake. Because if you’re trying to camouflage predation in a forest, surely a better option is baumkuchen…

I never had baumkuchen for a birthday cake. It’s on my baking bucket list, though.

Horror, Papers, Science, SFF

Inoculation and Contagion

OJ

I have a new paper out! Something very appropriate for the times, too, in that it deals with infection and disease. The paper’s called “Inoculation and Contagion: The Absence of Vaccination in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and it’s free to read at Supernatural Studies. If you go to the table of contents for the issue you can also download a free pdf of the paper, which is great.

I love Dracula. I really do. It’s one of the great horror stories of all time, and yet when I reread it again a couple of years back, I began to wonder. Why is there no mention of vaccination in it? Two of the main characters are doctors. They treat vampirism as a contagious disease, and vaccination was, at the time of Stoker’s writing (and at the time the novel was set) an accepted medical practice. It was even a compulsory practice when it came to smallpox. And yet… nary a mention. Not even to say that it wouldn’t work so no use trying. Now, Stoker is long dead and so can’t be asked, but still… can a bit of research find a reason for this curious omission? It just might, I thought, and it has. Without verification from Stoker we can’t be sure if it’s the right reason, of course, but it’s certainly a plausible one.

And honestly, for me, plausibility is enough. My curiosity is satisfied. I would say, however, that just because you can’t vaccinate yourself against vampirism doesn’t mean you can’t vaccinate yourself against a number of other diseases. You can, and you should.