Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories edited by Doug Murano and D Alexander Ward

Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, edited by Doug Murano and D Alexander Ward, most certainly gave me a little of everything to enjoy, though there were a fair number that I felt weren't necessarily horror so much as simply dark fiction. The mood is apt to change – some tales are quite literary and magical, while others give more of that visceral gut punch one expects from a good horror tale. While I'm not going to go into exhaustive detail with every story, I will highlight those that stood out for me.

"Arbeit Macht Frei" by Lisa Mannetti isn't a story I'd necessarily classify as horror in the traditional sense – though I feel it delves deeper into the horror that we ourselves are capable of rather. Our narrator is a Jew in a death camp with her mother, acting as a nurse's aide. And it's how she copes, atones for betraying her mother even for fear of repercussions.

"Water Thy Bones" by Mercedes M Yardley is a glorious riot of gore – as a victim and killer fall in love and express their devotion in the act of dismemberment. It's not so much that the trope is new – but the writing is lush.

Something that I'd not expected to find in an anthology was a choose-your-own-adventure style story. "A Haunted House is a Wheel Upon Which Some are Broken by Paul Tremblay offers the suggestion that the true horror of the story lies in the way that it loops – you, as reader, are incapable of escaping.

"Repent" by Richard Thomas is darkly rich... A corrupt cop makes a deal with the devil to save his son from cancer. The price is his surrender to the corruption in order for the son to live and for him to be expunged from their lives forever. What I liked about this was the ambiguity. Unsure whether we're dealing with madness or supernatural agents.

There is a reason why Clive Barker is considered a master of this genre (and I'd argue that he crosses genres effortlessly and subverts them at will). "Coming to Grief" is lyrical, evocative. Miriam's mom has died, and she returns to pack up her home. As the title suggests, this is all about facing death personified in the Bogey on the walk above the quarry. I love the ambiguity – you're never sure whether the Bogey is real or an imagined personification of grief.

As with all anthologies, I suspect different readers will like stories for their own reasons. Not all the tales collected here impacted me, but if you're looking for an eminently readable anthology of dark fiction that will do the job of unsettling you, then I figure the editors have certainly done their job right.

Guns & Romances author Kim Murphy

K Murphy Wilbanks wrote a short story that we included in the Guns & Romances anthology that bit me quite hard, in all the right spots, and I'm more than pleased to welcome here here today for a little Q&A. Pick up your copy at Amazon, Kobo or Smashwords.

Welcome! Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is K Murphy Wilbanks, and I'm from Chicago. Once upon a time I was a freelance court reporter, but these days I'm a stay-at-home parent. My story "Heavy Things" from the Guns & Romances anthology is my first published piece of fiction.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.

While brainstorming a song to use for inspiration, my husband was talking about all the different musical acts he met while working as a bartender on Beale Street in Memphis. He happened to mention Phish. I have a friend who's a big fan of theirs, who was always encouraging me to check them out, but I just never got around to it. I decided what the hell, now's as good a time as any, and Googled them. The first song that came up on YouTube was "Heavy Things." I listened to the lyrics and thought the mordant, madcap irony of the whole thing would fit well with the kind of story I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to set it in Chicago, and I thought about that title and how it could possibly relate to the general idea I had of this woman bartender who was romantically involved with her boss and finds out he's got a secret. The title brought to mind a memory of a strange tragedy that was big news back when I was working in downtown Chicago back in the '90s. Bingo! I had a climax, the nature of that particular news story gave me the season, and everything else just sort of fell together after that.

Why do you think short fiction is important? 

The broader answer is that human beings like to tell stories. It's hardwired into our brains, and the earliest form, oral storytelling, was by necessity short fiction – you know, acting out around the campfire how Glargh the Unfortunate got his ass handed to him by a saber-toothed tiger while out on the tribe's big hunt.   So I think we're born with a hunger for short stories, and that whets the appetite for longer, more immersive forms, like novels.

In a more personal sense, short fiction has helped me learn how to get my point across in fewer words than is my habit. And while laboring on my first novel, each short story I've written has become a message to myself, repeated over and over, that, yes, I really can finish stuff. If you've been at it a long time, you start to wonder after a while whether you're kidding yourself, so it's good to have some kind of concrete proof, however small.

What is your favourite short story? 

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. I remember reading it my junior year in high school, and  the line "I prefer not to" just grabbed my teenage attention in a big way. The story was written sometime in the 19th century, and it still generates relevant questions about how work and individuality are looked upon in society, as well as how the poor are viewed. When I read it in the 1980s, the United States was in the midst of a recession and I was wondering what was in store for me once I got into the working world. With the prevailing economic conditions and corporate models of the world today, I think these questions are critical to ask ourselves going forward.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?

I'm hoping by the end of the year I'll have finished the first draft of my urban fantasy novel going by the working title of The Lesser Evil about a woman whose twin brother, thought to be dead, resurfaces after twenty years to recruit her to join a secret society of people with psionic abilities.   I'm also writing a collection of twenty short stories, each one inspired by a different letter of the Irish Ogham alphabet, set in different eras in Ireland, written in various styles and fantasy genres; and I'm currently working on the eleventh.

Twitter: @kmurphywilbanks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kmurphywilbanks

Guns & Romances: Five Minutes with Marc Nash

Some of our Guns & Romances authors have agreed to sit in the hot seat here on my blog, and today I introduce y'all to Marc Nash. Don't forget that you can pick up your copy of Guns & Romances for your Kindle or download a copy from Smashwords. 

So, Marc, who are you? 
Marc Nash, literary Molotov cocktailist, bringing narrative conflagration to a book near you. I like to push the boundaries of narrative form and language to try and reflect our contemporary world and get away from dusty old Aristotle's "Poetics" of beginnings, middles and ends. Human life doesn't follow character arcs, nor is our brain linear in function.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.
I worked in the music industry for 19 years and so this project gave me the chance to bring together two of my passions, texts and tunes. I suppose it was inspired by Charles Whitman's Texas clocktower shootings, but I wanted to plot my sniper's emotional tenor through the mixtape he'd put together for ordering his mind for the shooting spree ahead. It seemed like a curious juxtaposition worth exploring. I had to keep the songs fairly mainstream in case readers hadn't heard of the more obscure titles I have taken to my heart.

Why do you think short fiction is important? 
Because it's much easier to mess with expectations of story, narrative, language over a short form than trying to sustain any of these across a novel. I write flash fiction (stories of 1 000 words or less) and it allows me to be way way more radical than anything in my novels. Stories without characters, stories composed entirely of endings, stories made up of 100 single word sentences, etc.

What is your favourite short story? 
Kafka's "Metamorphosis". so rich in imagery and expertly plots the family dynamics. Ben Marcus' "First Love" is pretty neat, what he does with language is extraordinary, like stripping down a car and rebuilding it to be an entirely different vehicle.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?
My 5th collection of flash fiction "Extra-Curricular" - tales told out of school is published September 18. I'm also really excited to be working with a video designer to turn one of my flash stories into a kinetic typography video. I've had one done, but this one is going to a whole new level.

Follow Marc on Twitter.

The Sea

There is no denying the sea’s allure—and perhaps I can be accused of taking the ocean’s appeal for granted, as I grew up in a seaside village and even now reside within walking distance of the coast.

When I was little, my mom used to tell me to watch out for the white horses in the bay. Being the imaginative child I was, I strained to see the sea horses of my dreams, with nacreous hides and foamy manes. All I saw, however, was the turbulent Atlantic with its dressing of whitecaps, and I grew quite irate.

“There aren’t any white horses!” I’d yell at her (and we’d had this argument on more than one occasion).

In hindsight I realise she must have found my stubborn denial and literal interpretation rather amusing.

I’ve always wanted there to be more to reality than what we see on its surface. What lies beneath the ocean is largely a mystery to us unless we own diving gear or can access some sort of submersible. A whole other environment exists there that is hostile to our very being, as land-walking, air-breathing mammals. Seventy percent of the planet’s surface is hostile to us, in fact.
Yet many creation myths speak of our birth in the primordial ocean and I suspect, on a deeper level, we still hear that siren call luring us back. The sea connects all things, is shaped by that which is known and transmits that which is unknown.

Often I’d go for early morning walks with my parents or grandparents, during that wonderful magic hour before the sun was properly up and the rest of the world was awake. Only at these times, with the tide out, would we discover a few of the sea’s secrets: slick, gleaming mermaid’s purses; a delicate paper nautilus, still whole; sea urchins like green buttons; and sea glass polished to smooth teardrops.

The trek fishermen would be bringing in their catch, mostly mullet and a few mackerel and the odd skate, but sometimes stranger fish, like gurnard or cat sharks.

Even now, my daily train journey follows the False Bay coastline for part of the way, and I’m privy to the ocean’s many moods. There are days when I stick my face out the window so I can breathe deeply of that salt-sweet air.

The sea finds me in my dreams; sometimes she is a benign mistress. Other times she is a destructive force. Those who love her are captivated. She flows through our veins and we can never escape her.

I'm proud to announce the line-up for The Sea an anthology of short speculative fiction: 
Lola and the Sea Lion by Alex Hughes; Songs of the Sea by Camille Griep; Dead Shark Dawn by Don Webb; Sirens by J.C. Piech; The Setting Sea by Patrick O’Neill; Up She Rises by S.A. Partridge; The Something in the Sea by Amy Lee Burgess; Dredge by Wayne Goodchild; Kajsa’s Curse by Steve Jones; Deeper Creatures by Andrea Jones; A Cruel, Intemperate Sea by Barry King; Canyon by Martin Rose; The Wire Bird by Simon Dewar; My Name is Legion by Diane Awerbuck; Pins and Needles by Benjamin Knox; A Drought of Tears by Rob Porteous; Salt by Toby Bennett; and Choiceless Beach by Anna Reith.

Purchase your copies at Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords and Nook. Print will follow shortly.

Formative Reading Experiences

I've been tagged by Short Story Day Africa about my formative reading experiences, so here goes...

What is your earliest memory of books and reading?

The house where I grew up was filled with books, and one of my earliest memories involves pulling books down from the shelves and being frustrated because I couldn’t read the stories. The whole idea that someone might have the wherewithal to sit down and write an *entire* book seemed magical to me. I couldn’t wait to read, and was able to do do so from a young age – I was way ahead of my peers in that regard.

By the time I was 12, I’d read through The Lord of the Rings in its entirety, and I was completely smitten. I knew then that one day I wanted to write my own stories, in my own made-up worlds.

Second only to that was my voracious reading habit, of up to a book every two days, which meant I was constantly at the library. Wherever I went, I’d lug at least one or two books around with me. I also managed to avoid getting invited to all future family weddings, because I once took a book into the reception after the ceremony. What can I say? I was bored and books were (and still are) far better company than people. And I was never invited to family functions with *that* side of the family ever again. Achievement unlocked!

As a small child, what book/s were your favourites?

I absolutely adored my Story Teller tapes and listened to them until they were stretched. My favourite story was about Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat by Ursula Moray Williams, that was one of the stories that had been adapted for the Story Teller format, but I remember crying my eyes out at the Oscar Wilde stories about The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince. Looking back now, I realise what a treasure trove this collection was, because it instilled a love for storycraft and introduced me to a wide selection of tales from around the world.

But I loved The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, and CS Lewis’s Narnia books also captivated me. Charlotte’s Web by EB White was another favourite, but I also obsessively read anthologies of animal stories, especially if they had to do with cats.

Where did you grow up? Do you have a particular memory of a library, bookshop or other place of books in your hometown?

I grew up in the seaside fishing village of Hout Bay in the Cape Peninsula. Back then we were an isolated community. My family used to farm there, and I suspect I was of the last of the locals to eventually leave once the valley became fully yuppiefied. Nowadays Hout Bay is nothing like it used to be, which makes me sad. My mom used to teach at Kronendal Primary School and I’d have to hang out there and wait for her to finish. Bored out of my mind at the age of six, I started volunteering at the local library – just packing away the children’s books or sitting in a corner hunched over a book paging through pictures. Consequently, I’d spend large chunks of my time at the library, a place that was often a sanctuary for me, as I was often bullied by the “cool” kids.

Even during high school, I often spent more time in the library at Wynberg Girls’ High School than I did hanging out with my peers. I’d while away hours paging through old copies of National Geographics or even the high school journals. Even now, I’m able to digest facts at a glance and often surprise myself with some of the bizarre stuff I remember. Books are time capsules too, and offer fascinating glimpses into the past or possible futures.

I miss the time I had as a kid to just get lost between the shelves. When you’re young, you really live under the illusion that your time is limitless, and when I stepped into the pages of books, I always returned with the sense that I could go out and do anything.

As an adult, in the role of parent or caregiver, what has been your experience with children?

I don’t have children, but when young ones visit my home, I always go find a pile of books for them to look at. Some kids are like me when I was that age, and we don’t hear a peep from them for the entire time that their parents are visiting. I like those kids, and I get what they’re experiencing when they get lost in those books. And they’ll definitely be invited over again. If they’re reading, it means they’re willing to discover new worlds.

And as an aside, all these questions relate to my most recent release, The Guardian's Wyrd, which is exactly about a kid who loves libraries a little too much... (But he's no Bastian Balthazar Bux)

Demonologia Biblica edited by Dean M Drinkel

Title: Demonologia Biblica
Edited by Dean M Drinkel
Publisher: Western Legends Publishing, 2013

So far as anthologies of speculative fiction go, this one’s a mixed bag; not all the stories were quite to my taste, but I’ll touch on the ones that did stand out for me, and also share a little bit about the one I wrote.

C is for Chordewa: Pet Therapy by Jan Edwards tells of a demonic cat that feeds on the lives of the terminally ill in a hospice. I think it’s the grinding inevitability of death that gave me a chill for this one. Especially how some of the patients still try to make a stand against the death-dealer.

Tracie McBredie’s E is for Eisheth stands out for me mostly because I know that whenever she’s at the pen, I’m in for a treat. This was no exception. The story oozes a brooding, oozing dark sensuality; the demon Eisheth seduces humans and slowly steals their vitality. They are addicted to the very thing that is slowly killing them.

Simon Kurt Unsworth is a master of horror, and with his H is for Hrace, he’s certainly in top form with the creepiness factor. I’ll never quite look at a circle of standing stones in quite the same way again. Also, yikes, the oppressive atmosphere … it was a relief when, well … The totally unexpected happened.

My story is S is for Sitakh: Old Scratch will be a treat for those of you who’re familiar with my Books of Khepera. This little tale features my favourite unrepentant black magician, Jamie. The premise is simple: what if Christians who failed to exorcise a demon turned to a demon-possessed occult practitioner to do the job?

Of course things don’t quite according to plan for Jamie, and he has some unintended results. His solution to the problem is, well … inventive.

W is for Wolf: Urban Wolf by Sam Stone had an unexpected twist that I appreciated. Maybe it’s because I’m intimately acquainted with the advertising industry that I found this tale to be particularly nasty and delightful.

Granted, there are 26 stories collected here, so other readers are bound to find some that stand out more for them than others. Pulling together any anthology is no joke, and a lot of work goes into a project of this nature. (I’m speaking from personal experience here.)

So, if you’re looking for infernal entertainment of this kind, then this collection of brimstone-laced may offer you what you’re in the mood for. Even better, you might discover new authors who appeal to you (and that’s always good motivation to dip into a short story collection).

Six of the Best with David Griffith #books

Today I welcome one of my fellow Bestiarum Vocabulum authors, David Griffith. And sticking with the theme of the anthology, we're talking about creatures. So, David, what's your story in the anthology called and what seeded the idea for you?

My story falls under I Is For Imp, titled Ma’s Good Boys. It features an imp named Beazo, a mischievous character I had created in the past, but never knew what to do with him. In my historical research on folklore and religion on the topic of imps, as typically found in hidden in stone carvings in European cathedrals and such, I got the sense they aren’t so much evil as they are just head strong pains in the ass. And that’s precisely what Beazo needed to be.

The next big question was what to do with this imp. Sitting in my loft staring at my bookcase, I glimpsed a book title containing “peripheral” and the opening line of the story was suddenly born: "In the periphery of his sight he caught something he knew was wrong.”

That person needed to be someone mundane and a step above stupid, a kind of a regular Joe living in the US state of New Jersey not far from the Jersey Shore and New York City. He needed to love his dearly departed Ma more than any other son could possibly ever love his own mother – he owned that title in his mind. And he needed to come from an Italian Catholic family that emigrated from Italy a century ago to tie the religious history elements and traditions into the story and clash with the gross absurdism that ensued. And, keeping family tradition alive and strong, he tended to his late mother’s beautiful garden filled with tomatoes, peppers and other magnificent produce used for home cooking.

So there were my two completely separate ideas that needed to somehow cross paths – stolen form Stephen King’s writer’s toolbox – and turn them into an ultimate showdown of man versus beast. Albeit, filled with dopey, if not comical, and horrific moments.

What got you writing in the first place? What excites you about stories?

I started writing in high school, roughly at the age of 15. I was always an artist of some sort, generally a visual one involved in painting and photography. One day the idea of writing just clicked and I started some early story attempts. nothing great, but the motivation was there. By my junior year a creative writing course became available, which I took in a heartbeat, and joined the school literary magazine.

This continued into to college where I studied fine arts. In addition to illustration and design, I was able to make creative creative writing part of my fine arts degree. Even though I won my university’s award for Creative Writing Excellence years went by where I had done little with the discipline, focusing primarily on developing my profession as designer. In later year years of my career, as communication became the central focus of my visual design, writing became an equally important part of my job. I had since enrolled in a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative and Professional Writing, which I will complete this coming May.

Creating characters, living out their strange lives in fictitious representations of the real world excite me. Part of it is living vicariously through my characters getting involved in situations I would never dare do in real life, part of it is simply an escape from my own reality, something I need at times to maintain my sanity. Really no different than reading another author’s story.

Ultimately, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve always considered myself an artist for as long as I have been able to speak and draw circles with crayons. I love to create and invite others into these worlds that stem from my brain. I love to affect emotion, whether the audience laughs, cries, feels fear, gratitude, excitement, anger, sadness, or greatness. That’s hat excites me. Just as long as their responses are not indifferent, that’s when I know the work has failed and must be revisited.

Have you got any real-life stories involving animals that scared you?

A few times in my childhood I have been attacked by dogs. Fortunately, no major physical injuries, though I was bitten hard. Threatened almost daily by a neighborhood dog while delivering newspapers, to the point I hightailed it away from the neighbor’s house on my bike as fast as I could go each day. It sucked. To this day I carry a permanent distrust of dogs. Nowadays, lawsuits would fly and those dogs that attacked me would have been euthanized. Back then it was the kid’s fault for getting too close to a nasty aggressive dog, never mind that the dogs could outrun a kid and knock them down with minimal effort.

As for all other animals – nothing scares me. I will approach reptiles, cats of all sizes and shapes, whatever – in terms of protecting others around me. Not to harm them, but to keep them at bay, and fight back if need be. Though I’d much prefer to befriend a wild animal.

Have you got any favourite animals stories?

I recently read an odd novella (or short story, ho knows these days) by George Saunders called Fox 8. It was an environmentalist sort of parable whose protagonist Fox #8 of his pack, managed to learn English by sitting outside a bedroom window at night and listen to parents reading stories to their child. The foxes' woodlands were being encroached upon my a mall developer. This innocent animal decided that the humans must be friendly and would welcome their presence in the mall. Things didn’t turn out so well for the fox pack sadly, and Fox 8, a lone survivor of his pack, managed to find a new pack to live with deeper in the woods.

I liked the story for its metaphoric representation of how the industrialized human world is corrupting the rest of the natural world. But I also appreciated the writing style, written entirely from Fox 8’s perspective, using odd spellings, misused words that eventually make sense based on context, and his naive perspective of the atrocities he witnesses, like his buddy being beaten to death for fun by some cruel construction workers.

Both an innovative and a sad story.

Do you have pets? Do they have any quirks?

Yes, two beagles and two American domestic short hair cats – all rescues. The beagles are kind of crazy, I’ll leave it at that. My wife is responsible for the dogs. Our older gray tabby cat is polydactyl: she has six fingers on each front paw, and five toes on each rear paw. She looks like she’s wearing boxing gloves. Very sweet cat, probably my favorite of the pets. The other cat is an outright panther, even though the term isn’t really applied to small cats. He gets into trouble a lot, but friendly with all guests.

And, as a taste, here's an excerpt from Ma's Good Boys.

It was the last thing he expected to see on earth, on this particularly warm spring day in Ma’s old garden, grooming the heirloom tomato and pepper plants whose seeds were passed down for generations by long forgotten ancestors from Newark. Something that George D. Giovanni would have to research before the sun went down, before he landed in the overstuffed recliner for the game. A devilish looking thing with a cow’s head – sort of – his mind wandered and obsessed over what it could possibly be.
A Jersey Devil? Nah, those things aren’t real. There was that story Joan from down the street heard about another neighbor’s cousin who tried to breed a raccoon with a bobcat out behind his garage last summer. Landed the idiot in the hospital, not sure any babies were born though; but this could’ve been one of ‘em. Anything’s possible, he surmised.
After another five minutes of studying the slight movements and shadows in the rose bushes he picked himself up from the soil and traipsed over to the plants to see what might be staring back at him. Hissing broke the stillness of the investigative moment, which was a highlight of his day, his week, really.

Links...
Blog, Twitter @dtgriffith, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon Author, Goodreads

Call for submissions: Bloody Parchment

One of the projects that have successfully kept me out of much mischief over the past few years has been Bloody Parchment, an event and short story competition/anthology brought out under the auspices of the South African HorrorFest.

This year we're once again being hosted by the Book Lounge, on October 26, and the brief that has gone out to the writers is "drabbles". If you don't know what a drabble is, then go read this... The evening looks to be fun, and I have some of South Africa's top genre fiction authors participating, including the likes of Sarah Lotz, Cat Hellisen and Louis Greenberg, among others. If you're a local author and would like to participate, mail me at nerinedorman@gmail.com

But the real reason I'm putting up this blog post is that I'd like to offer all aspiring and existing dark fantasy and horror authors a chance to be part of the Bloody Parchment short story competition. We're busy with the third one, and now have the backing of eKhaya, the digital imprint of Random House Struik. So yes, this is a big deal if you're looking to garner a publishing cred.

Our judges are all publishing professionals, either authors or editors, who have a love for dark fantasy and horror fiction, and if your story makes it into the list of finalists, it will be considered for the next anthology. But wait, there's more. The winner of the short story competition also receives a detailed assessment and round of content edits for a novella- or novel-length work.

VITAL DETAILS
What do you need to know? We're accepting short stories in the dark fantasy and horror genre of up to 3 500 words in length. The closing date is October 31, and if you need to know more, go check out the page on the Bloody Parchment blog or email me at nerinedorman@gmail.com 

Guest blog: Benjamin Knox

Good Things Come in Small Packages

by Benjamin Knox

Short stories are where most authors begin. The starting point in the craft of weaving a tale. For the early author it is a standard goal.

However they have been heavily marginalised by publishing trends, which I find weird, as there are thousands of magazines out there (both print and online) that publish short fiction. But such magazines are out of the public eye. Gone are the days of Weird Tales and the such pulp magazines, where Asimov, Clark and even Lovecraft cut their teeth.

Many established and famous authors talk openly about their love of short fiction. Stephen King in his foreword to his collection Just After Dark talks about the massive amount of time that went by without writing a short and how much he loved doing them once he started up again.

Similarly the late great Richard Laymon wrote many short stories (such as the fantastically creepy Dreadful Tales) and also professed to love write short fiction, yet still acknowledging the lack of a medium for them.

I think people like short stories just fine. It is publishers, back in the day, that didn’t see the potential. Even with big names like Clive Barker making a career for himself with his eight volumes of short fiction Books of Blood.

Reading habits are changing and changing quickly. I don’t just mean with the advent and popularity of ereaders, I mean in what and how we choose to read. We are quite lucky in the fact that we have such a wide selection of work available to us, and the internet and ebooks are making that easier every day.

We’re spoiled for choice.

Be it vampire-erotica to the surreal and often disturbing depths of Bizarro, chances are that no matter what you’re into, someone is writing it and it’s available. Even filth-master extraordinaire Edward Lee has a respectable publisher and a cult fan base.

It seems, to me at least, that people are reading more frequently yet in shorter bursts. In London where I live, people read whilst commuting or on a lunch break. Fewer and fewer people are settling down at night for a good couple of hours to really sink their teeth into a story.

Hence shorter, faster paced work is on the rise.

I feel it might even lead to a rise in short story reading (something that has always supposedly had a relatively minor audience). There are anthologies and collections from authors people know and trust, but it is becoming more acceptable and common place to read a single short story. A bite sized piece of easily digestible fiction.

Joe R Lansdale is re-releasing his benchmark short stories individually online. The very stories that catapulted his career into action.

There is a wonderful challenge in this for writers as well. Short stories are often harder to write than longer work. Less time to develop characters, theme and plot. Therein lies the skill; creating something shorter that still has a lingering impact. After all, that is what an author wants, to have you thinking about a story or an idea long after you’ve finished.

A peculiar form of haunting.

The same seems to be happening with novels as well. Which always struck me as odd in the first place as there are many classics that are quite short. Look at Hemmingway, Hunter S Thompson, Roald Dahl and Joe R Lansdale, as well as the truly awesome Jack Ketchum (who often included a novella or long short to make up pages). In the 1970s and 1980s there were many popular series of novels (like the McBain’s 87th Presinct police procedurals) that clocked in around the lower limit of what is considered a novel: 45 000 words, sometimes less.

This doesn’t mean that the standard length of the novel is going anywhere. Not at all. As an avid reader and author I like to get a book I can really chew on. But I also like ideas, and some ideas are just fun to share, quickly and in a manner that does them justice. Not all stories lend themselves to novel length.

I also predict a rise in novellas as well.

I certainly hope so too, as at the moment those are primarily what I write. They are a length I find very comfortable (25 to 50k words) to work with. Big enough to have substance and complex ideas, yet small enough to keep things succinct.

Such stories are like candy for me. I love them. I love reading them and I love writing them. Sure I have my longer work, purebred beasts of novels, but I prefer the fun-size package that is short fiction.

If you need any proof, just look at flash fiction! It’s taken off like crazy and the good ones stick with you, leave you thinking. You’ll be just about to fall asleep or on your way to meet friends and suddenly it’ll pop in your head.

Short doesn’t mean bad, or less adept. It just means short.

Ideas are like fairies captured in a jar, to be carefully examined and then released. Each marvellous in its own way.

What is really important, the MOST important thing in fact, is that the story, indeed that the writing, is good.

After that, size does not matter.

Just make sure your content is smoking hot.

I believe this trend in reading habits will lead to a mutation of the television style format. You’ll get a serialised tale, short stories coming out regularly that are in the same setting or have the same characters. Much like TV you’ll be able to jump in and enjoy the story on its own, but you’ll have much deeper insight if you’ve read the previous entries.

A series of episodic adventures that lead on from one another; like watching House MD: A new case each week with the slow push of the season’s main plot.

After all even Charles Dickens’s work was originally released in serial format.

Anyway, that’s what I think. Whether it happens or not, only time will tell. I’m interested in it enough to throw my own hat into the ring. Until then you can read my other short stories (such as A Keeper of Secrets which is already available), read my web-comics, pick my brain etc at my website or blog.

Thanks for reading.

(Finally, to quote Tigger)

Ta-ta for now

B

A Keeper of Secrets: a short story

by Benjamin Knox

she’s waiting for you...

Amidst the clutter and gloom of the attic little Anna has the strange feeling that she is not alone...

A Dark Fairy-tale for grown-ups.

* * * *

Benjamin Knox wanted to be a super-villain when he was little. Instead he grew up to warp minds with his creepy fiction.

For further strangeness visit www.benjaminknox.net or his blog benjaminknox.tumblr.com

A Pearl for Anel

The collection of mudbrick homes encircled by their wattle-and-daub palisade looked dirtier; smaller somehow than when I’d departed. The thorn trees I remembered climbing as a child were but stunted stumps with no sign of the spreading green canopies where laughing doves nested. It seemed like only last season but one glance at the numerous scars standing out in pale streaks on my sun-browned forearms was all reminder I needed that I’d been away for years.

“I’ll be back and I’ll bring you a pearl,” I’d told Anel as we kissed one last time before I followed the recruiter. “The mercenary forces are rich. Wait for me. I’ll return and we can leave this place and buy ourselves a farm in the highlands. We can keep a few cows and raise a family.”

My dreams had been simple then, and had been all that sustained me when one year had become two, then three. A dozen had passed since the callow youth I’d been first gained blisters from wielding a sword.

I’d known other women over the years that I’d been gone; sloe-eyed courtesans in Ashdiri ports and garrulous Delrochian tavern wenches had all shared the pleasures of their flesh, but one woman drew me here. In my mind’s eye Anel was still the dusk-skinned beauty with a fall of mahogany hair she kept in a single braid. I still recall the feel of her small hand in mine and the way she used to twine the wild loves-me-not into flower crowns for us. We’d be the summer king and queen, and the whole world was ours for the taking.

A fierce yammering of hounds started as we began down the ridge and my grey gelding snorted and pricked his ears but held steady. The beast was possibly one of the most phlegmatic I’d owned—a seasoned destrier I’d purchased off a knight who no longer sold his sword to the mercenary captains. Such were the times. A dozen years of warfare and I too was considered an old man, though I was one season shy of thirty summers.

Children’s screams of excitement sounded with the dogs, and a ragged band both four-legged and two burst from the palisade gates to greet me halfway across the hard-baked ground. They were covered in the same ochre dust that rose in puffs with each footfall, so much so that their clothes carried the same yellowish hue as their skin.

Then the youngsters crowded my mount, the tallest among them daring to lay his hand on the stirrup. “Milord! Do you bring coin?”

I laughed and reached into a pocket for a handful of copper bits. This small change would hardly buy a decent meal with a drink at most respectable inns but to these children I must hold a considerable fortune. “Share it with your friends.” I tipped the coins into the lad’s grubby hands. He couldn’t be older than eleven summers and it was sobering to see someone who’d been born and had grown so much in the time I’d been gone.

Momentarily distracted by my generosity, the children fell behind as I continued riding. The gelding quickened his pace, no doubt under the assumption that this outpost promised a meal of soft hay. “You’ll be lucky if you get muddy water, old man,” I muttered beneath my breath.

What had I expected? The sheer poverty of my home struck me with an almost physical blow as I reined the horse in before the well. The thatched roofs were badly in need of repair and numerous walls sagged dangerously. While the palisade had been whole at the entrance, an entire section had been burned down at the back, with three of the homes no more than tumbled ruins--fire-blackened mudbrick and beams that stood up like ribs. I knew the signs well and my heart contracted. Raiders had passed through here too.

A few scrawny chickens clucked about but the place appeared deserted.

“Is there anyone here?” I called. “I mean no ill.”

The children boiled into the compound behind me and I made eye contact with the eldest. “Where’s your mother?”

“Inside, milord.”

“Call her, please.”

Movement at the doorways of several of the huts snagged my attention. Women. They hung back, raggedy shawls pulled tightly around their shoulders. Where were all the men? Uncle Shem with his bushy beard and booming laughter? Dorrick, who could carve horses out of wood that were so lifelike one could almost see them prance about? Experience informed me coldly I should be the last to wonder about their fate.

One by one the womenfolk approached, faces pinched with fear and hunger so that I could see the skull beneath the skin. I thought one was Aunt Shel, but I wasn’t sure. She had lost a lot of weight and favored her right leg. Her hair stuck out in wild white wisps on either side of her face. For some reason my tongue cleaved to my palate and no words formed on my lips.

My gaze darted from one to the other. Seven women remained, and not one of them was Anel. That was until I caught sight of one who hung back. Her belly was distended in the advanced stages of pregnancy. I think I only recognized her because of the way her hair was braided. But those sunken cheeks... Her tremulous toothless smile greeted me and I gripped the reins tighter.

“No,” I whispered then dragged the gelding’s head around. I didn’t care that the horse thirsted. I dug my knees in so that he spun with a squeal of outrage. There had been a small watering hole an hour’s ride back. Once this had been a deep pool shaded by willows. Now there’d be enough water to sustain us on the ride back to Ysul. If I rode hard, I’d meet up with my old mercenary company before they departed for the war in Abdur.

Short fiction: On An Empty Shore VIII FINAL

Only Forward

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

I was stupid to think that things would last. I was a fool to imagine that I would remain the unofficial lord of the city. It had to change, and change it did. They arrived during the late afternoon so I wasn’t around to see the convoy of trucks pull in. I was so sound asleep in my lair I didn’t hear a thing but I knew things were different the moment I got up.

It wasn’t easy to pin what the difference was until I heard a diesel engine and saw the sweep of headlights as the vehicle swung down Buitengracht Street. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was an old Land Rover Defender and it had been heavily reinforced with bars over the windows and big-ass bull bars on the front. The thing was dented and dusty but there was no mistaking the power in its engines.

I got goosies just listening to the growl as it powered past.

At first I was excited. I mean, people! Strangers from upcountry! We were saved. Estelle was really happy. They were packing their things, getting the children ready when I arrived.

“They’re coming to fetch us,” she said. Her eyes were bright with tears.

That’s when it struck me. I’d be on my own again.

“Where are you going?” I asked her and tried to sound casual.

“They have a new city they’ve made, on the banks of the Orange River. There are no zombies there and they can defend it easily.”

Oh my god. That was more than a thousand kilometres away.

“Why there? Why can’t they build closer to home?” I asked.

I don’t think she picked up on my disappointment because she didn’t stop smiling. “It’s a new beginning. There’s water and the place is clean. The children will be able to play because there is a fence.”

I knew then I wouldn’t go with. I didn’t belong there. It wasn’t just the fact that the men who’d come wore military-style uniforms and carried the biggest guns I’d ever seen. I could smell it. These weren’t just survivors. These men were hard. I could see it in their eyes. They’d not ask questions about me. They wouldn't listen to explanations. They’d shoot me.

Part of me wanted to argue with Estelle but I couldn’t. I knew they’d be safer though I worried about the strangers’ motives. They were making a big deal about asking after the women and children. Why would they want the women and children?

I thought about crazy Gerrit Smuts in the Castle. He’d not wanted to open the gates, or so Estelle told me, but when he saw the strangers had bigger guns, he let them right in. I heard then they shot him. Just like that. They went in then one of the guys pulled out his pistol and shot Gerrit right between the eyes.

Then I thought about the lions, how the big males sometimes banded up and went into another male’s territory. They would fight and occasionally the rogue males drove off the older male, killed all his cubs then mated with the females.

Estelle, Betty and the kids didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Or maybe they forgot about me. I hung back when the truck came to fetch them and I think Estelle was so busy trying to round up the last of the little ones she completely forgot I was still there.

The dude driving the truck was a big, dark-skinned man who spoke with a French accent. His companion was as large, but spoke with an American accent and I didn’t like the size of his rifle, so I stayed in the shadows. They noticed a lot of stuff around them, their gazes roaming about so I didn’t want to take the chance that they’d spot me.

A younger couple I recognised from Mouille Point was in the back of the truck already. They were talking and laughing, and helped pull the others’ stuff into the vehicle.

I stood like a statue, hardly daring to believe this happened. Even when the big black guy slammed the tailgate up it didn’t feel real. Then, in an angry roar of fumes, the truck lurched down the road and the last I saw of my warmbloods was their pale faces peering out at the world they were leaving behind.

And now?

Not everyone left with the convoy that went north. There were people, wild ones who never spoke to the others, who decided to take their chances with the zombies. The gangs moved in and I didn’t stop them. I became a shadow again, slipping between other shadows.

I killed a warmblood three months after my people left. He asked for it because he was walking around at night. I stalked him so that he knew he was being hunted. I chased him so that he thought he’d get away. And then I killed him. I ripped his throat out and I drank my fill.

Why?

That’s what vampires were supposed to do. I didn’t feel like pretending to be anything but that anymore. My game had been nice while it lasted, but it had only served to remind me that it was in my nature to hunt, stalk and kill. It didn’t help to dull that horrible ache in my chest, but if I let it take over, I didn’t have to think about why the ache was there.

Sometimes I climbed Lion’s Head when it was full moon. Warmbloods often used to do that in the old days. I guess someone had to continue with the ritual. The moon rose big and orange over the Hottentot’s Holland mountains, like a big eye. To me it was as bright as day. Even warmbloods could see well in this light. How many more times would I climb this mountain to watch the moon rise over a dead city? Would I stand sentinel for five years more? A hundred? Would the warmbloods return?

I didn’t have an answer to these questions but I’d keep climbing that mountain to watch the moon rise. I knew that much.

* * * *

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Short fiction: On An Empty Shore VII

On an Empty Shore

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Estelle showed me a history book not so long ago. Normally I didn’t bother looking at them but this one was interesting. It was about boats and the history of Cape Town. This place used to be called the Tavern of the Seas and over hundreds of years people used to stop here to pick up supplies.

I didn’t tell her that all I remembered was occasionally helping Korean or Filipino sailors find less than legal narcotics while they were on shore leave. They sometimes helped me out with cash which I could use to buy more heroin.

It blew my mind when I saw pictures of Woodstock that used to be a beach. The area today was just a wasteland of old industrial buildings and no one went there much because of the gangs. Guess some things didn’t change much, with or without zombies. All that land got reclaimed. I had no idea that most of the Foreshore used to be under water. Amazing stuff.

I never went down to the sea when I was a warmblood yet for some reason I was drawn there after my change. Some evenings I’d walk through Green Point to the promenade. There was a slipway that the fishermen sometimes used to launch their boats in the old days. The doors at the bottom were never locked, and the cove was sheltered and a perfect place to poke around in rock pools.

The sea had all sorts of moods. When it was winter, it got really exciting because then the surf would be big and sometimes the breakers would explode against the concrete in a huge wash of foam. I got soaked plenty like that. I didn’t feel the cold but there was something very cool and scary about not knowing whether the next wave would drench me.

The Atlantic was like a hungry beast, big and powerful. I liked playing with the danger that it could devour me, suck me off the rocks. One night the only reason it didn’t was because I got wedged in a crevice. Had to wait between rushes of water before I got to a safer distance from the worst of it. The rocks were like black teeth sticking out of the tidal pools. Death to both warmbloods and vampires if you got mashed on them. Many times zombies washed up there and got stuck and I chopped them into bits just for the hell of it.

At low tide I sat and the rock fish nibbled at my toes or I poked at the sea anemones. It felt weird but kinda nice the way they contracted over my fingers. It made me think of times when I’d been a little kid full of sand, only it was hot and ma made me wear a hat. I could almost taste the ice cream.

But there was one night I walked a lot farther along the rocks to where the sand started. I didn’t know what had drawn me out until I saw the long black shape lying on the sand. It was a whale―a very small whale but still a whale. The first I’d ever seen. Once I’d heard on the radio that they beached themselves and I suppose this was a similar situation.

When I looked I saw it wasn’t just one but seven of them and they lay there on the sand, their skins drying out. I could almost feel their sadness and their pain. They were dying and there was no one to help them.

I didn’t want to leave them there. My eyes felt very tight and so did my chest, though I didn’t need to breathe. Moving them wasn’t an option. They were too big except for one that was only slightly longer than I was tall.

I tried, okay? I really tried. I managed to shift the little one closer to the water. It helped also that the tide was coming in and I loved the way its black skin glistened the moment it got wet.

It was slippery in my arms and started to struggle when the waves broke over it. I don’t know for how long we fought each other and the waves. Eventually I was waist deep in the breakers that kept washing over my head. It’s okay, it’s not like I could drown but it was difficult keeping my footing.

We got out quite far and it was almost impossible for me to hold onto it.

“Go back to the sea,” I told him.

For a while he just flopped about in the water. I had to hold him so his blowhole pointed above the surface otherwise he just sank. Then he started swimming. Wow! I whooped and clapped then a wave knocked me over.

The little whale swam a short way along the shore.

Then I swore. He turned himself back at the beach and another big wave came and he just swam with it to beach himself on the sand again. I screamed at him, tried to tug him back out to the water. I tried another five times and it was close to dawn and I was as cold as the sea when I realised there was nothing I could do. The little whale was as tired as I was.

I couldn’t tell if it was the sea that was so salt in my mouth or if I tasted my tears. I hadn’t cried in a very long time but I got out of the water and stood there for a long while and stared at the terrible scene. Three of the whales had already died. Two were close to death. If I’d a gun I could have shot them so they wouldn’t suffer. Instead I did what I could. I went back to where I’d left my things and got my blade. I finished the whales so that they wouldn’t hurt anymore. Dark hot blood gushed onto the sand and bathed my hands and feet in great, iron-rich fountains.

I couldn’t bring myself to drink it.

* * * *

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Review: Uneasy Tales

What a lovely collection of short stories to land on my desk. Or maybe "lovely" is the wrong word. Creepy, yes. Discomforting, definitely. Simon Kurt Unsworth delivers a tight collection of macabre tales. There isn't always rhyme or reason why events unfold as they do, but what is certain is that each tale leaves you feeling scratchy behind the eyes.

In Button, Bruno catches a button that adheres to his left hand, with unfortunate consequences. This story still leaves me feeling phantom pains on my palm.

Dog was perhaps the only story that didn't resonate with me. Slightly reminiscent of the Cube films, it left me uneasy for reasons I won't go in that will spoil the tale. It's suitably horrible, even if one never discovers the raison d'etre for the viewpoint character's predicament.

My phobia for hospitals, needles and scalpels were next on the list when I read Excision. What I liked the most about this one was that the horror is implied and the truth ambiguous. Thank goodness for general anaesthetic, is all I can say.

The grim vision of a sterile future for planet earth is explored in Plastic. Once again, Unsworth plays with medical themes gone wrong in this broody and rather tense story.

Overall, Unsworth is a master of mood and suspense. The true horror lies not in the end result but the growing sense of inevitability so often lacking in horror fiction nowadays. Well done with this anthology, sir. You've definitely succeeded in giving me my sick thrills for a gloomy Sunday afternoon.

Buy Uneasy Tales here.

Short fiction: On An Empty Shore VI

It’s Eat or be Eaten

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

I saw my first lion two years after the zombiepocalypse. Doesn’t matter that technically I was already dead, I still just about wet myself. Whether the lions escaped from that fancy lion park near Paarl or if they got out of one of the wildlife reserves I don’t know. I expect they were pretty quick to multiply and stake out territories because not long after that I did encounter a female with four cubs.

By then there were people farming close to the city, so the cows, pigs and sheep were easy pickings and I shouldn’t have been too surprised the night I came face to face with one. The southeaster was blowing like mad, and I was upwind from the beast. Guess it couldn’t smell me―not that vampires smell much like anything except dust―so both of us were totally clueless up until the last moment.

Our chance meeting happened not far from Lion’s Head, actually. Though I wasn’t laughing at the time. There was a quarry near there and I think the animal had gone there to drink. It was already quite dark and, on top of it, it was new moon.

Sure, I saw pretty good at night but I was preoccupied. Estelle’s girlfriend, Betty, had gotten sick and I was supposed to see if I could get antibiotics from the hospital, but the place was already picked clean. Not nice going back empty-handed.

I’d also seen the remains of a fresh zombie kill. It had been a young woman because I saw most of her face had been untouched, her expression one of horror. Her bones had been scattered and very well chewed. It grossed me out big time so ja, for once I didn’t look where I was going and I almost stomped on the big cat’s tail.

Fuck me, the lion moved fast. Almost as fast as I could run. Its claws whispered right past my back. It’s like I could feel them almost in my spine. I screamed like a little girl and fucking ran. I didn’t stop until I was almost at Estelle’s shelter.

At first they laughed at how freaked out I was but then it must have sunk in. Lions in the city centre meant they had more to worry about than zombies. By then Estelle and Betty had more people to living with them. Three small kids, and no one knew what had happened to their parents, so the ladies took them in. What if the lions got the kids? They were easy targets.

With every month that passed the city got more dangerous. Simply being able to run faster wasn’t always all that helpful. After a few more close shaves with local wildlife I took to carrying a weapon. I found an old samurai sword in one of the houses up in Camps Bay. Smart-looking thing with a carved ivory handle. Of course I was no swordsman but it would but it still made a bit of a difference. Now the skinny vampire had a steel claw.

But it wasn’t just the lions, and later bears or tigers. Yes. And wolves. It was also small stuff that could kill, and there wasn’t a doctor a phone call away who’d be able to help.

Snakes came down into the city: puff adders, Cape cobras. There were scorpions too. One of the kids got stung and almost died. I got bit once or twice but the poison only gave me a headache. It was the warmbloods who were really in trouble here.

People forgot that Africa used to be a very wild place. Estelle asked me to go to the library to get books for the kids and during the day I’d listen to her teach them about history and stuff. I never had teachers when I still went to school who told me stories with so much love.

I learnt stuff about South Africa, about its past. I sometimes wondered if the zombies hadn't done us all a big favour in a way. If it wasn’t the one group who stirred kak it was the other. People did some pretty horrid things to each other. What makes one man better than another? Coloured, black or white, they all bled the same. They tasted the same too. No diffs.

Sometimes I sat and wondered whether the zombiepocalypse wasn’t the earth’s way of wiping most of the warmbloods off the face of the planet. My uncle used to keep pigeons. He had hundreds of them, these big white fantail pigeons that used to preen and strut all over the roof of the house. And when they flew, their wings made a wonderful whirring sound.

My auntie always used to complain that he had too many pigeons and although they were white and quite pretty, they used to fight, the males, I think. One day the birds started dying. My uncle tried everything but he found out it was some sort of bugs that were attacking the birds. The vet told him it was because he had too many of them in the Wendy house out back.

Nearly all the pigeons died, almost to the last one. The ones that survived were clever enough to go live in the neighbour’s roof. They never came back though my uncle put out food for them.

Maybe the zombies were meant for the warmbloods. Maybe the vampires weren’t doing a good enough job keeping them in check so the zombies came to do the job properly.

But what do I know? I just gotta try figure the stuff out after the fact. Nothing out there would want to eat me, that much was for sure, but I still had to watch my back. Survival of the fittest, Estelle often said. I don’t think I was ever fit, but I kept correcting her and telling her it was survival of the fastest. She’d laugh at me and just shake her head. Guess it’s good to see the humour in these things.

* * * *

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Short fiction: On An Empty Shore V

Under the Radar

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

I mentioned there were the warmbloods who had guns, right? They were the ones who’d always been a bit twitchy even before the zombies arrived. Some were your average Afrikaners who’d always kept a stockpile of weapons despite the change in gun laws. A few others were the opportunists who grabbed what guns they could when the shit went down.

I didn’t like guns. I knew a bullet to the brain would kill me just like the next person―or a zombie, for that matter. A shot gun made a very big mess. While I didn’t need antibiotics or bandages, and my body healed pretty good once I’d had a dose of blood to speed up things, it still hurt like shit.

Also, if I was down and trying to heal up, it also meant that some lucky bastard could get closer to deliver that killing blow. I didn’t want to take that chance, so I generally stayed the hell away from warmbloods who pointed guns at me. I may not be alive in the true sense of the word, but I wasn’t stupid.

A gun often meant the difference between life and death after the zombies came. Once ammo ran out, it definitely levelled the playing field, if you catch my drift. And ammo wasn’t always easy to come by, since those who had sources protected them fiercely. After all, it wasn’t like there were factories producing the stuff anymore.

But ja, there was still more than enough live ammo in circulation to keep guns in action for years to come and I wasn’t about to take my chances. One man armed with a rifle could take pot shots and thin out a mob of zombies without breaking a sweat. Or flatten a lone vampire.

So I was always a bit more careful to go into territories where known gunmen lived. It was almost like the Wild West, Clint Eastwood and all. Unarmed vampires like me had to be careful.

I considered finding me a gun but I never did learn to shoot one. Something about handling a lump of metal that looked dangerous made me uneasy. Guns just scared me.

The gun people were total nutters. There’s this crazy dude who’d taken over the Castle of Good Hope. He kept himself a harem of wives and some animals in the place. Gates were locked almost the whole time. It took me three attempts to convince him that I was there to trade and bring news.

Gerrit Smuts almost squeezed in a head shot that first time. Bullet grazed my cheekbone and clipped my ear. Like getting burned. The next time he got me in the chest. Smack! Punched me right over and I lay there for about five minutes trying to figure out how to make my body work again.

Can you imagine his amazement when I got up again? But I had a letter from a woman who lived in Sea Point. She’d spoken to someone who’d heard they’d seen her sister near the Castle and she wanted to tell her she was still alive.

And it was worth the effort for me to be in as many good books as possible. Supply and demand, and all that. It’s not like I had any competition for my services, and payment in blood was a necessary evil, as far as the warmbloods were concerned.

There were also gangs. Fucking tsotsis who went about taking what they wanted from other people who couldn’t defend themselves. Fucking rapists made me angry enough to go after them.

People can point fingers at me and say I’m a monster, but I wasn't like these beasts who hurt others just because it made them hard. Waving a gun around in the air didn’t make you a man.

These assholes thought that just because they had guns they were safe. But a gun didn’t help against a death that could move silently and see better than you in the dark.

They raided a bit too close to home one night. Two of Estelle’s friends were raped, the one beaten so badly she died the next morning. I was near enough to hear the screams when it happened. Five guys were too many for me to take on but I followed them.

They made so much noise it was impossible to miss them. Their kicked litter and joked and laughed all the way back to where they stayed. What zombies they saw they shot. Overconfident stinking bastards. I got the first one when he went off by himself to take a slash. His buddies made the mistake of splitting into pairs to track me down.

Thing is, those guns did no good once I got close enough to rip out their throats. I didn’t feel bad about taking my fill of their blood. Scum didn’t deserve to breathe.

I’m no fucking Lone Ranger, but for once in my existence I’d got something to be proud of. It’s just a run-down city but it’s mine. No one told me what to do and the same went for the warmbloods under my care.

Granted, the day Estelle and her neighbour, a grumpy old sod who kept chickens, almost came to blows, I did tell them to cool it. For fuck’s sake, it’s chickens, damn it. There were worse things to fight about than worry about the price of eggs.

The zombies, man. They don’t just go away. It’s like that whole suspended animation vibe. If they didn’t have fresh meat they sort of went to sleep, lay there pretending to be a piece of furniture. I expected they could last almost forever like that.

I’d seen it with my own eyes and the damn things could move so quickly when the promise of fresh meat was near. One minute the dude just walked then next long rotted arms reached out from under a car to grab his ankles. Next he was dragged under and you didn’t want to think about what it sounded like. The crunching carried on long after he’d stopped screaming.

I hated hearing about new horror stories. Just like we South Africans used to complain about the crime in the old days, now it was zombie stories. The problem was there weren’t enough new warmbloods being born. Or they got sick and died because doctors were hard to come by or too expensive. It’s sad, man, and it broke my fucking heart because they’re so fragile.

I gotta look after them. Who else was gonna look out for them? My life depended on their survival.

Short fiction: On An Empty Shore III

The Anatomy of a Junkie

Part I

Part II

A vampire isn’t all that different from a junkie. Kept away from a regular supply of fresh blood we get sick.

In the old days, when I was still scoring brown, there were times when I couldn’t get any. Could be that the cops intercepted a big shipment, or there was a delay somewhere along the line. The price would go up and either you made a plan to get money or you got sick; sweating and half shitting yourself to death going cold turkey.

If you were desperate, you scaled paregoric from the pharmacy. That was until the pharmacists cottoned on and started keeping the shit behind the counter. Paregoric is a tincture of opium, and prepping to shoot it was a mission. Even if you got it right, it burned like shit and the taste of camphor lingered in your mouth.

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

Being a vampire had one advantage. I never needed heroin again. While I got nostalgic-like about some of those old days, I can’t say I missed that never-ending worry about where I’d get my next portion.

My unlife revolved around a far more terrifying addiction. It wasn’t that I found blood disgusting. Far from it. It’s just the idea of hunting people freaked me the fuck out because I never was the sort to go out looking for trouble. To have to approach someone to bite them, although it felt like the right thing to do, still scared the crap outta me.

Most people were bigger and stronger than me. Guns and knives could still hurt me, though I healed a helluva lot faster. Once I got blood. But it was the getting blood that wasn’t easy.

Laugh all you want. I don’t care. Just be glad you’ve never fiended bad for the one thing that keeps you from turning into a fucking wild animal, foaming at the mouth like a dog with rabies, and go around biting people.

Biting people isn’t cool. Vampires that went around biting people in the old days got put down. They had to be sneaky. The warmbloods must never know. As much as I didn’t ask to be turned into a vampire, I was still attached to existing. No one likes the idea of dying. Even if God existed, I wasn’t prepared to take the chance that I really was damned.

It took about two nights to come to terms with what I’d become. By then, I was starving. My veins almost clawed their way out of my skin to throttle me but the more water I drank the more I puked. I’d holed up in my digs I shared with a buddy who put up with me because I scored him weed.

Food was the last thing on my mind. I was thirsty, like I could drink out a swimming pool and never kill the need for liquid. I spent those two nights sicker than ever before. During the day I was dead to the world, but at night I shivered and shook. It’s only when I looked in the mirror on the second night, and saw what had become of my teeth, that it sort of sunk in. A big WTF moment. I had great big fucking canines. I smelled my buddy, asleep in his bedroom.

I mean he smelled really good, like I could eat him.

I wasn’t quite all there. I was tripping off my tits from the thirst and I did what any vampire in my condition would do. I let my thirst ride me.

Maybe I spared Sean a worse death. I wasn’t very good at being a vampire and I bit him a few times and it must have really hurt before I got it right and drank him up like he was the best wine ever. But it sure beat what the zombies would have done.

And I think he kinda got into it near the end. That’s the thing with vampires. Warmbloods sink into the whole vibe of being sucked on. Maybe it’s something in our spit. They go limp the moment the fangs sink into the skin.

It’s better than sex. It’s better than junk.

I got beaten up a few times until I learned to be clever about stalking my prey. I always took out the ones that would have died anyway. At least I keep telling myself that. I didn’t always kill, but often then ones I drank from were so weak, I don’t think they survived every time.

Some of the other vamps said we were the apex predators. Whatever that meant. Just fancy words. Still didn’t change the fact that we killed and that didn’t always sit right with me.

Nowadays I don’t kill at all. They’re so scared, the warmbloods. Their blood is thin and bitter. I look into their eyes and I see fear. Real fear. In the old days they could pretend they were immortal, like us. That illusion’s been stripped away. There’s no pretend-pretend now.

Maybe if I work hard at it, I can somehow show that I’m better than the mindless flesh junkies roaming the street. I don’t want to be like that, just eating and eating and eating. I want to be something better, and I’m not quite sure if I am.

I’ll never kick this habit unless I greet the sun. And I’m too chicken shit to do that. Some small part of me wants to make up for what I was when I was still a warmblood. It’s all bullshit anyhow. I don’t know what I really want anymore. I can’t change anything.

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Short fiction: On An Empty Shore II

They Always Ask This Question

Part I

Before the zombies ate nearly all the warmbloods, there was one question people always asked. Sometimes I’d be hanging with another vamp and he or she would be curious.

It’s the thing a lot of vamps get asked. Kinda like when the warmbloods sometimes wanted to know where you went to school or what job you had. Or where you were born or where you came from.

So, Dracula, who made you?

I’m not a complicated person. I was born in Cape Town, grew up in Cape Town, and died in Cape Town. Plain and simple, and not very exciting. The way I was living at the time I should have pegged a lot sooner but some fucking demon watched over me. The smack shoulda gotten me a hundred times over.

Fuck, I ODed so many times it was a joke. And every time my buddies, other junkies, would get me breathing again. Once night they were even driving me to hospital when they got me breathing after I shot up too much smack. We turned round and went home to shoot speedballs.

So it’s sorta funny, now that I think about it, that it wasn’t the brown that got me dead. It was a vampire.

I remember that it was summer because there was a drought, in more ways than one, and there was a whole bunch of us smack-heads left high and dry. We were all scratching and sweating, five of us in a row by the call box there on Kloof Street. All of us waiting for The Man.

We were so damned obvious I’m surprised the pigs didn’t come and pick us up and lock us away for the weekend. May as well wave a big red flag and scream “spot the druggies”. We were all pretty terminal. In it for the long haul. In and out of rehab fuck knows how many times.

A car pulled up―a resprayed Honda with tinted windows like the gangsters on the Cape Flats always drive. You know, the 2 Fast 2 Furious types? Car even had those dinky blue lights in the undercarriage that I guess was supposed to make it look like a UFO or something. Really styling. Not. Even we knew this vibe was so not cool. Our dealer drove a VW Polo, gunmetal grey.

Soft music spilled out, and it was fucked-up weird. Whoever was in that car was listening to some symphonic stuff that had like this horrid eighties beat to it with a synth-pop vibe my uncle sometimes played when we were there for Sunday lunch.

The others all looked to me to go check it out, so I got up real slow to take a peek. It was almost night and the interior of the car was dark. When I leant in, I could barely make out the driver, some coloured guy. I remember he smoked one of those mini cigar things and it smelled like vanilla.

That’s all I can recall.

Next thing I knew, I’d lost a chunk of time and it was almost dawn. I came to in a pile of rubbish in a side street in the Eastern City Precinct. A rat had bitten me. That’s what woke me up. That and the fact that my skin was smoking and I could smell burning meat. And it was me that was cooking.

I’ll never know who turned me into a vampire. Or why. The dude didn’t do me a favour. I went from being a scum-of-the-earth junkie to being a bottom-of-the-pecking-order vampire. No diffs, really. I exchanged my drug problem for a blood problem.

I had nothing to offer the guys at the top unless they needed some idiot to do their dirty work and almost get killed in the process. I didn’t owe them anything. They deserved what they got when the zombies came and ate nearly all the warmbloods.

Rats like me got to slip between the cracks. Guess I’m a survivor.

I should count my blessings, my mother would say. My parents are dead. All the people who said I’d turn up dead in a gutter with a needle in my vein, are dead. For all I know, the vampire who turned me is dead too.

I’m the one who’s left roaming the streets like one of those starving dogs not even the walking dead will touch.

I can only laugh when I think of those vampire movies that I watched when I was still living with Ma and Pa. Tom fucking Cruise, Gary Oldman, that glittery Edward boy. It’s all shit. There is no glory to this life. It’s dirty and, if you’re unlucky, violent and short.

In all the time since the zombiepocalypse I saw only one other vampire―a stranger. We both crossed Strand Street and it was close to dawn, and what caught my eye is that we both hurried. He kept looking over his shoulder, like me, to the east, where the sky got lighter.

Like me he was dirty, his clothes ragged. His eyes bulged slightly when he recognised me for what I was. No human would walk in the open like that. Unarmed. I knew what he was, right off.

I wanted to stop him to speak to me, to tell me his story, of where he came from but he slipped sideways into the shadows and was gone. Just like that.

I’m kak lonely. There’s nothing fun about being a vampire. But I’m a survivor. Tomorrow might get better.

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Short fiction: On An Empty Shore I

For Once We Weren’t the Greater Evil

Where were you when the zombiepocalypse happened? Nasty piece of work wasn’t it? They didn’t see it coming, the dumb fucks. One moment everyone went on like the world wasn’t going to come to an end, chasing their daily lemming-grind. The next boom! neighbour ate neighbour and everything just ground to a standstill.

Me? I noticed the shit was going down when I came out at night to see the streets were all but deserted. Lots of sirens. More than usual for Cape Town by night. And, of course, the other weird factor. No street people. Doorway after doorway was empty of bodies wrapped in blankets or makeshift cardboard shelters. No easy snacks for nocturnal lurkers like me.

At the time I was doing what any self-respecting vampire would do at night—prowling and keeping an eye out. For what I wasn’t quite sure. No acting like the big dude like those snooty bastards in their penthouses, who got their food brought up to them all discreet like.

Being all high and mighty didn’t help them when things turned to shit. By the time the warmbloods called in the army, it was too late. Damn zombies pretty much chewed their way through everyone who put up a struggle. What a waste of perfectly good blood. Zombies were only after one thing: meat. And they weren’t too picky about the condition they found it in, so long as it filled the gap.

This kinda left us vamps at a loose end. The clever warmbloods who survived were armed to the teeth and extra freaked out, which made it tricksy for the rest of us to get a meal. In the end vampire turned on vampire, and this is where it was better to be streetwise.

No one ever paid me―Joost Brink―any attention when I was alive. They paid me even less once I was undead. Small, skinny ex-junkie. Not important in the grander scheme of things, hey? This saved my bacon when the almighty papaya hit the proverbial fan. The old ones at the top were the first to go, if they weren’t clever enough to go into hiding. Which they weren’t.

They expected their loyal lieutenants to keep them safe. The lieutenants did what any self-serving creature of night would. They looked after number one, and number one wasn’t the boss man. Who knew?

The things I saw during those first nights of fire, blood and terror I don’t want to remember. I am glad vampires don’t dream because if that were the case I’d have daymares. Or whatever you’d call it. Dunno.

It’s kinda twisted that a monster like me would want to puke after seeing stuff like kidlets all ripped into bits, the horrible gnashing mouths chomping onto tender flesh. Lips blue in death smacked as fat dribbled between the gaps where teeth had been knocked out. Even I never killed kids, okay.

An old man made his last stand, cornered in his driveway. Armed with only a nine-millimetre pistol, he fought off a mob of walking dead. He took out one with a head shot at almost point blank range but by then it was too late―too many of the rotting things clawed and moaned at him.

The truly fucking hysterical thing about this whole drama was that the zombies simply weren’t interested in other undead. Not that I claimed any relations to the shambling rotten things. As far as they were concerned, we belonged among their ranks.

The night I discovered this I would have pissed myself if I could. I’d walked straight into a pack of the beasts, and bumped into a creature that may once have been a secretary or a sales rep, had half her skin not hung off her in loose sheets. Grey meat gleamed in the low light. We bounced into each other and I staggered back half a step then froze, half expecting her and all the rest to fall upon me the same way they’d dismember warmbloods.

To my fucking disbelief they shoved past me, as though I were just a lamp post or some other obstacle in their path. They did not even pause to sniff in the air. Bully for me. I should have smelled them but there were parts of the city where the overall stench of rotted meat was so strong I sometimes overlooked the obvious. I tended to go on sight rather than smell. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

It still didn’t help that my food was in short supply. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn to zombies for a Happy Meal. Their blood, such as it was, was viscous and black, and smelled like they looked―days-old road kill.

I preyed on the lost, the hopeless, much as I had before the zombies took over, but somehow now, despite my hunger, I simply lacked the taste for the kill. I used to see myself as an angel of death, wouldn’t drag out the inescapable shit. The warmbloods who cowered in their nooks and hidey-holes were even more pitiful than the dregs I used to cull. I just couldn’t do it. They clung to life like kittens drowning in a bucket. Often, I slunk back to my lair hungrier than when I awoke.

Mind you, a starving vampire was about as frightening as a horde of zombies. I stalked the deserted streets, stepped around cars discarded like oversized toys. I stooped to feeding off feral dogs, of which there were many and, besides, the infernal things tried to hunt me of occasion. I may have been the runt among the vampires, but I wouldn’t allow mere dogs to make me roll and show my neck.

Cape Town was weird without the cheery bright lights or the low rumble of traffic. From time to time I’d see the flicker of candles from some of the high-rise buildings, tenacious warmbloods barricaded from the gore-fest in the streets below. For the most I let them be. It’s almost as if for once, they deserved a break, the poor bastards.

Warmblood or vampire, we were in this mess together. I didn’t know where those zombies came from any more than the warmbloods. We were equally fucked.

The silence was louder than a siren.

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