horror

Going backstage – how a Heart album inspired the vampire novella Cruel Nights

Cruel Nights cover @ Brain Jar Press

Ever since I first heard the Brigade album by Heart, sometime around 1990, I reckoned there was a story in it. Not just the micro stories of each song, but a bigger narrative.

I wrote a short one, melding tracks All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You) and The Night*. Didn’t much like it, too simplistic, one note. It’s still in the drawer.

Then, in 2019, emerging from four years of PhD in climate change fiction, I felt ready to take a shot at a longer treatment of the Brigade project. But wait. Just around the corner, in March 2020, the Queensland Writers Centre was having a weekend novel-writing ‘boot camp’ with Kim Wilkins. Perfect. Stop writing, get some ideas together, work on something else to fill in the time**.

(Kim, by the way, ran the first QWC workshop I attended after I moved to Brisbane in 1998. It’s where I met my tribe. To a large extent, that workshop set me on this path.)

Brigade, Kim reckoned, probably wasn’t Heart’s best album, when I said during our introductions that my project for the weekend had been inspired by it. I was too slow to add that it might not be their most lauded, but it is the one with the vampire!

It was a fun weekend, bouncing around story ideas and character arcs with each other, emerging weary but also energised, with a note book full of trajectories and ideas that lit a fire under the project. Needless to say, I played a lot of Heart writing the book, especially Brigade, tapping the moods and themes. Cruel Nights (yep, from a song on the album) is still anchored around the meshing of those two key songs, but the entire album is in there.

I did check in with the rights holders about using a stanza for an epigraph*** but it was a bit pricey for this project. Still, I like the compromise of using Heart song titles as chapter headings. Picking appropriate ones from across the catalogue reminded me again of how diverse and accomplished this band is, what a set of pipes Ann Wilson has.

So yes, the long wait between books is finally over, and yes, it’s another vampire story. Also a kind of love song. With Heart.

  • Cruel Nights is available for pre-order at Brain Jar Press and will be out on 21 May.

* funnily enough, All I Wanna Do is not one of my favourite Heart tunes. The Night, it’s right up there, though.
** still working on it.
*** there are some lyrical Easter eggs in the text, but I had to wrap them carefully to avoid any copyright issues.

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rec160: Dream Scenario

MOVIE

Title: Dream Scenario

Director: Kristoffer Borgli

Stars: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson

Studio: A24, 2023

This is being pegged as a comedy, but a laugh fest it ain’t. It serves its chuckles with a strong side of pathos, physical violence and creepiness; a seduction scene is one of the most uncomfortable in recent memory. Zebras, Jung, social media, and marketing are all in the mix as a dull, moribund college professor, played convincingly by Nicolas Cage amidst a superb cast, finds his sense of ineffectiveness manifesting in the dreams of many around the world. Empathy for Paul will vary, as he has been coasting along with his ambition of writing an academic book based on a decades-old theory still trailing behind him. When the dreams burst into viral celebrity, he eagerly snatches the sudden popularity, but the two-edged sword bites hard when his dream self goes Freddy Krueger. Moments of genuine discomfort take a science fictional turn as the ramifications of the bizarre outbreak play out, a truly horrifying concept worthy of early Black Mirror.

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rec160: Godzilla Minus One

MOVIE

Title: Godzilla Minus One

Studio: Toho Studios, Robot Communication, 2023

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Starring: Kamiki Ryunosuke, Minami Hamabe

Japanese with English subtitles

If you want to know how to invest a creature feature with heart, you could do worse than turn your attention to this Japanese kaiju film. While it taps the lore of the long-running Godzilla movies and rewards the big screen with sound and visual effects, it invests its story with a surprising degree of emotion for the genre. Pilot Shikishima is struggling with the aftermath of World War II, during which he encountered the yet-to-be mighty monster in a prelude to the core story. For Shikishima and his fellow veterans, especially being on the losing side, the war is hard to shake. Add the bold Noriko and an orphan baby to Shikishima’s world, and the three make an unconventional unit of survivors. Then, of course, there’s the monster and its offer of redemption amid the destruction. The anti-war theme is pointed but not overblown, the final salute to a vanquished foe speaking volumes. A fabulous addition to the canon.

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rev160: Zombicide (2nd ed)

BOARDGAME

Title: Zombicide, 2nd edition

Company: Guillotine Games/CMON

Year of release: 2021

We were introduced to this board game recently, albeit a different version in which the action took place in the Wild West, and it was a hoot. Zombicide is collaborative, which is what we’re looking for in games these days, pitting the players as a team against the game itself. Here, up to six players run characters through a variety of maps that are plagued by different kinds of zombies. Each scenario has its own goal, and failure is as easy as a dead character away. The mechanics were easily picked up, with teamwork and tactics the key as the characters negotiate the board while dealing destruction with a broad array of weaponry. This one even has a car! The pieces are also very cool. While the price tag is towards the hefty side (~150AUD), the amount of material and quality build, plus extra scenarios and expansions available, mean there should be enough variety to provide plenty of bang for the buck.

Addendum: Having played the game for two days in a row, it is utterly enthralling fun. Note that the times given to complete missions is likely to be a bare and unlikely minimum, and many of the missions use all 9 map tiles, so you need some real estate. Mount up!

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rec160: The Fall of the House of Usher

TV MINISERIES

Title: The Fall of the House of Usher

Year: 2023

Stars: Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Mary McDonnell

This miniseries follows on from creator Mike Flanagan‘s impressive efforts in The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass, among others and a bunch of movies to boot. This outing mines the works of Edgar Allan Poe, with episodes tapping particular works and featuring plenty of nods; The Raven is influential throughout. Among the new faces joining Flanagan returnees is a delightfully menacing Mark Hamill. The Usher family has built its wealth on painkillers (the semifictionalised docuseries Painkiller, also out this year, makes compelling complementary viewing) but now the, ahem, ravens are coming home to roost, with gruesome murders culling the family tree as a landmark court case unfolds. Flanagan knows how to set up his mood pieces and mix tension and gore, and Usher hits just the right mix of horror and camp as two old adversaries provide a narration of events leading up to the unfolding tragedies. Takeaway: I need to refresh my Poe.

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rec160: Her Perilous Mansion

NOVEL

Title: Her Perilous Mansion

Author: Sean Williams

Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2020

A dream and time spent in Ireland form the foundation of this gentle middle-grade adventure from Adelaide-based Sean Williams. Orphan Almanac and Etta, a twelfth and put-upon daughter, receive offers of employment in a mysterious mansion, a golden opportunity for a step up in station and comfort. But they quickly realise all is not as it should be. As they investigate the sprawling home and grounds and get to know the largely unsighted and enigmatic inhabitants, the titular peril is gradually unveiled. Almanac and Etta strike a fractious friendship as they seek to uncover and decode the clues they need to solve the puzzle of the house and escape the deadly trap in which they have become ensnared. The pair are likeable heroes, the world — with just the right amount of magic — is well realised, and the danger, while grave, is not too unsettling for younger readers to handle. A fine, fun addition to Williams’ already broad and accomplished repertoire.

A version of this review was previously published in the Herald-Sun

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Getting published … a blog series

the darkness withinNicole Murphy (also writing as Elizabeth Dunk) is running a series of posts at her blog about how writers were first published. It’s yet another reminder of how diverse the routes to getting that first book out are, and how varied are the reasons that people want to get published.

One of the bumps in the road my first novel, The Darkness Within, suffered was a switch of editors between the structural and the copy edit. I enjoyed working with Dmetri, found his advice and feedback highly useful, and would’ve liked to have seen the project through with him. I’m chuffed to be working with him again on my next novel, The Big Smoke, coming out mid next year. It’s also worth noting Dmetri is running a workshop on horror writing later this month for Writers Victoria, encompassing general techniques as well as the peculiarities of the genre.

You can read more about The Darkness Within‘s detours, as Nicole so nicely puts it, at her blog.

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From the rabbit hole, a Midnight Echo …

midnight echo 8The cover of Midnight Echo 8 has been released on to the unsuspecting public — it’s rather shiny, ain’t it?

The magazine is due out at the end of November — egads, that’s this month already! — and features some very fine writers, some from overseas even. And there’s me, with a story about a cat.

This story sprang out from behind a bush near a bus shelter and found full form during the heady, sweaty hours of Rabbit Hole at the Emerging Writers Festival earlier this year. There was a tweet at one stage about ‘the cat’s gonna get it’ — this is that story. It’s called ‘Hello, Kitty’. It’s not nice. Not at all.

I almost didn’t finish it, because it’s not nice. At all. But then I thought, ‘what would Haines say?’, and so emboldened, I said fuck it. And wrote it. And the triumvirate of editors of Midnight Echo 8 bought it. And now it’s rubbing shoulders in good company, and you’ve got to be happy about that.

There are a few of my stories that I wish certain people could’ve read, who never got the chance to.

This is one of those.

Fuck that, too.

Midnight Echo 8 is available to order: here.

And I’d be remiss not to point out that Queensland Writers Centre is again running Rabbit Hole, November 9-11. Free. Fun. Get words written. Just watch out for the cat.