There’s an air of From Dusk Till Dawn to this Southern-drenched period piece that strikes me as one of the best battles of the bands ever – everyone is getting down to the blues in a 1930s juke joint, but then the vampires arrive and the jig is up. Jordan plays twin brothers who return to their home town after having schooled up as soldiers and criminals. They’re trying to pick up where they left off as a gang of two, encountering the friends and lovers left behind as they muster musicians, including a talented guitarist (Caton), and helpers for the opening of their club. Has anyone tallied the number of tracking shots, and how long they go for? They certainly add to the feeling of immediacy. The acting, the sets, the cinematography – there are fabulous transitional edits between scenes – and, yes, the music, whether Buddy Guy’s guest spot or a touch of Riverdance, makes for an immersive experience worth revisiting.
I’m very chuffed to report that Kirstyn and I will be guests of honour at Conflux, Canberra’s festival of speculative fiction in October this year.
Conflux has always been a fabulous convention, offering plenty of information about the craft and business of writing as well as a great opportunity to hang out with writers and readers, united in their love of all things spec fic.
It’ll be challenging and fun to be taking part as a guest, especially as a double bill with Kirstyn (others are yet to be announced), and I’m looking forward to meeting old friends and making new ones.
I expect I’ll be banging on about the enduring allure of vampires, the Gothic, and climate fiction, and whatever else pops up.
Attending conventions has been a valuable element in my journey as a writer, and I’ve always appreciated opportunities to give back to that. This will be next level, though!
I encourage genre writers to investigate such opportunities, to get insights into the industry, meet like-minded souls, and be part of the community. So come on down, the water’s fine. Memberships are now open.
It is a two-vampire-story year, with a short story following hot on the heels of my novella, Cruel Nights.
Sounds like a good reason for a party! Friday the 13th? Even better!
Nosferatu Unbound invites an international cast of writers to revisit the world of its namesake, the marvellous 1922 film.
As it happens, co-editor Steven Paulsen, illustrator Dillon Naylor and a certain Kirstyn McDermott are all fellow Ballaratians (or perhaps more fittingly, Ballarodents), hence: party!
Nosferatu Unbound will be celebrated at a release party, part of Collins Booksellers’ After Dark series, on 13 September at Collins Booksellers in Bridge St Mall, Ballarat, kicking off at 6.30pm. Also on the table will be Cruel Nights, still waiting for its official raising of the glass since its May release. There will be minimal official words, mocktails with a vampiric flavour, and books to buy, get signed, and chat about: as well as the anthology and Cruel Nights, Dillon’s fabulous vampire yarn Batrisha, and more dark tales from the four contributors.
As a further local connection, my story, ‘The Late Stage’, ships the undead off to Ballarat during the gold rush – not all gold diggers are after money, are they?
Kirstyn, meanwhile, has a familiar character of her own hot on the trail of the movie itself. Ooh!
Nosferatu Unbound is officially released on 16 September – keep an eye on the publisher’s website for purchase options.
Pera lives alone in a rural mansion, one she has rebuilt on the wreckage of her childhood home. She is the only survivor of a tragedy that claimed the lives of her immediate family, the visiting prime minister and others besides. On this day, she is running a ghost tour, only to have interlopers impose themselves. The 60-odd-year-old must deal with the threat they pose to her paying guests, the home and herself – Pera is not one to yield easily. The tour is a clever wav to lead the reader through the eclectic rooms of the house and its grounds, each revealing elements of Pera’s life and personality. The delicious claustrophobia is perhaps undermined as the intruders’ malevolence is revealed in a few breakout sections, but these also flag the key plot and looming danger – I am conflicted! Warren is a leading light in dark fiction – this may well be the book that introduces her to a deservedly wider audience.
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.
I’m very pleased to share the news that I have a new book coming out! The novella Cruel Nights is slated for release through Brisbane’s Brain Jar Press on 21 May 2024.
Says the publisher:Brain Jar Press is pleased to present Jason Nahrung’s Cruel Nights, a vampire novella which harks back to the vampire novels of Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice while also asking what might have happened to those characters once the nineties were over. It’s an extraordinary read for anyone with fond memories of the grunge era and the horror which sprang up around it.
And the blurb:
…a grunge-soaked tale of love and vampirism in ’90s Seattle.
Charlie died in Nevada, 1973, after seeing Led Zeppelin live on stage and making the wrong choice on the long drive home.
Corey meets him at a TAD gig seventeen years later and feels an immediate attraction. They both swear their night together will be a onetime thing, but neither can stay away.
Corey and Charlie spend two decades building a life together, a mortal and vampire in love, but there are some things Corey’s not willing to give up. She can move cities when Charlie’s eternal youth raises suspicion and she can rebuild her career as a music journalist after every disruption to their life, but as she gets older, it’s harder and harder to be satisfied with their nocturnal existence.
Then a moment of weakness delivers Charlie and Corey the one thing they never expected to have…and their relationship gets more complicated than either of them ever dreamed.
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.
In which the extremely personable and knowledgeable host George Penney chats with yours truly at Bohemiana about locating vampire fiction in Australia, the importance of fiction in the climate crisis, and some of our favourite goth rock.
I also name drop the superb albums Lotus Eaters by Wendy Rule and Crater Vol.1 by Android Lust, which were on high rotation when I was writing my island Gothic Salvage.
I note quite a few familiar names from across the literary spectrum on George’s interview list – a valuable opportunity to get behind the scenes in the writing process.
In which I have a story, my first in two years. One of 24 from writers from here and overseas.
The invitation to submit a story for The Art of Being Human came during a period of Covid-induced turmoil – restrictions and lockdowns, broken supply chains, working from home. Deaths.
At a time when live entertainment and the arts were among those sectors especially suffering, they were also elevated: online performances and gatherings became a lifeline, as well perhaps as a reminder that, like the natural world around us, these pursuits were too easily taken for granted. As were their practitioners.
And so ‘Exposure’ came to light, a combination of some of my favourite subjects as I tried to find a way to address the anthology theme: the place of art in our society, what it means to me, and what it can offer in a time of cataclysm, whether it be the short-term upheaval of a pandemic or the ongoing catastrophe that is climate change. I find it hard these days to write anything that isn’t touched by climate change – it is, as we are finding as a society and as a species, ubiquitous.
The story developed from a mental image of a Polaroid camera in a box in a dusty, warehouse-like room. You can read the result for yourself, with the Kickstarter now available – this is the only place to go if you’d like a print copy, and digital copies are also available.
What a wonderful title for an exhibition — how can you resist? For the University of Melbourne has prepared just such a show, running 1 March to 31 July.
It features artists, body snatchers, and some of the renowned writers and poets, and trick photography and magic lantern slides to get a little ghosty.
As well as wonderful art, there will also be some events, such as a curator’s talk, a workshop on writing horror/Gothic with Dmetri Kakmi (he knows his stuff, people!), lectures by Mary Luckhurst and Ken Gelder (on vampires!), and an “in conversation”.
