Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite
‘Behind the Scenes’ – Part Three


KILLER CREATURES DOWN UNDER: HORROR STORIES WITH BITE, conceived and edited by award-winning author and anthology editor Deborah Sheldon, will be released worldwide by IFWG Publishing Australia on 15 May 2023. From creepy-crawlies to crocodiles, you’ll have plenty to fear in this anthology penned by Australian authors. Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite offers disturbing tales that range from the action-packed and visceral, through the historical and futuristic, to the phantasmagorical and supernatural.

In this four-part series exclusive to Ginger Nuts of Horror, the contributors have agreed to pull aside the curtain and reveal the inspiration behind their nightmarish tales.

PART THREE includes insights from writers Renee De Visser, Charles Spiteri, Robert Mammone, Paula Yates, and J.M. Merryt.


Renee De Visser on “Twisted”

Oh boy! That sounds like a bit of fun. I was thinking great white sharks. I was thinking rabid pigs and muscled kangaroos. Swooping magpies and writhing snakes. Oh yeah. I was here for that, as the cool kids say. If there is something uniquely Australian, it is the number of animals we have that like to bite.

“Write what you know,” someone famous once said, and I knew this beastie. I’ve watched it move around humans many times, so casually menacing and opportunistic. We Australians tend to take them in our stride. We acknowledge them. We are not scared of them, for the most part, but we certainly don’t fuck with them, either. We know what they are capable of, and there is something quietly disconcerting about running into one unexpectedly. “Oh shit, that’s a big one,” we’d say with a nervous laugh. And we’d watch it closely until it moved way. There’s no scaring them, no shooing them away. To approach one is to challenge it in its territory, and one thing you need to acknowledge in Australia is that you are always in an animal’s territory. You just might not know it’s there.

Writing about a killer animal, by its very nature, is always going to be quite a physical tale. I might be writing about a creature I knew, but fortunately I had never been in quite the same position as my protagonist. Which meant that I had to put myself in that position, quite literally.

Anyone who happened to glance through my office windows on the days I was writing my story was in for quite a sight. Often, I would leave my laptop and get down on the floor, enacting the movements to ensure they were just right. I wanted my readers to be in that moment, to feel the sheeting rain that we experience so often in the tropics of Australia, to feel the pain and the desperation mingled with the utter disbelief about what was happening. Mostly, I wanted readers to understand that it could happen. To them. And so, I acted and wrote, and acted and wrote some more. I had a resident Huntsman spider on my ceiling at the time, and I wondered how much he saw of this crazy human shuffling along the floor.

By the way, the Huntsman spider doesn’t kill people. I don’t particularly like them in my house because I don’t like running into one at 3am when I am sleepily making my way to the loo. But this one was smart enough to stay up high and out of my reach, and so it stayed there, a witness to my poor acting ability.

But I digress. To the readers that take the time to read my story, I hope my efforts come through the pages. I hope I am able to put you in that place, at that time, cold and wet and feeling so ridiculously helpless in such an ordinary situation.

And I hope that, if you ever do find yourself in that situation, your story ends very differently.


Charles Spiteri on “A Pack Apart”

I never dare analyse the meaning behind my stories; I leave that to the reader. In the case of “A Pack Apart”, I can certainly remember what was going through my mind when I wrote it.

I arrived in Melbourne at the age of eight, not sure what I was in for. I was a thin, imaginative child from a tiny island in the middle of Europe coming to live in a vast continent that took six hours to fly over. I didn’t know anything about Australia, but I wanted to fit in.

However, I was the kid with the weird accent, the nerdy glasses, who was terrible at sports and couldn’t stand up for himself. It was the eighties, a time of ‘the Aussies’ versus ‘the Wogs’ and I was living in a rough neighbourhood. It was made clear to me by all the kids (the girls and the boys) that I should just go back to where I came from. I was too ‘wog’ to be Australian, but when I went to Malta in my twenties it seemed I had become too Australian to be Maltese.

My dad couldn’t decide whether he wanted to stay here or go back, but whereas he was caught between two worlds, I felt that I didn’t belong to either.

I have met a lot of people who, for one reason or another, hovered at the fringes. Like attracts like I suppose. For a while this troubled me, but as I reached my forties, I began to realise that not belonging can be a shared, unifying experience. It can strip away preconceptions and stereotypes and reveal points of view I never could imagine.

And, by now you’re probably wondering where the killer creatures come into the picture?

Well, I guess you’ll just have to read the tale...


Robert Mammone on “The Seaside”

H.P. Lovecraft didn't like the sea, or seafood. He was also a terrible racist. I, on the other hand, love my fellow man, and absolutely delight in scoffing down as much seafood as I can force into my gob. For all of H.P.’s numerous failings, his horror of the sea helped influence my little tale for Killer Creatures Down Under.

Whether it is Christmas lunch, or a night out at the restaurant, or just a barbie with some mates, if there is seafood – any sort of seafood – I'm all over it. Hell, I'll even have a seafood pizza (though the Gods surely have damned the man who first came up with the idea). Which is why my short story “The Seaside” exists. The little blighters, whether they be crabs, lobsters, oysters, octopi or mussels, or anything else thrown up by the sea, are, in my story, having their moment of revenge against an uncaring, and frankly hungry humanity. Which would no doubt make good old Howard shudder in nameless dread in whatever Stygian gloom he now resides...

My story, like I imagine a lot of the stories in this collection, was born during the dark days of the Covid 19 lockdowns. When the world is spinning out of control beyond your hermetically sealed doors and windows, how better to regain some measure of influence than to inflict an even more dire punishment on the world through frightful thoughts put down on paper? Horror is like that; a safe space to explore humanity's darkest fears and emotions, and then to close the book on them (literally) and return to the disaster that is life.

I banged out the first half of the story during lockdown on a whim and a fancy; I just liked the opening image of a gourmand shovelling seafood down his throat in a restaurant on the beach, while a family at play on the sand discovers something utterly horrible has drifted ashore. Those opening images cemented themselves in my brain, and when I took up the story some months later, after the submission call, I absolutely knew how the story would end – in catastrophe!

The writing of it was easy, even taking into account the break. I wanted it to be as matter of fact as possible, so there is minimal dialogue, as the imagery and story do all the heavy lifting. If there is a theme, it is, ironically (waves to Howard), that in the face of nature, man is but a puny speck before its awesome majesty and fury.

So, as you sit down to a plateful of delightful spaghetti marinara, or a scrumptious soft-shell crab burger, or lobster mornay dripping with so much butter your cardiologist would turn white in horror, remember, beneath the ocean, nature waits its final vengeance...

You can catch me on Twitter @DreadSinister or experience the full terror of my witterings on my rarely updated blog found at

https://robertmammone.wordpress.com/


Pauline Yates on “Hell Gully”

I almost didn’t submit to this anthology. I was busy with other writing commitments, and thought the submission call was out of my league. But I’m immensely proud of the fact that Australia is home to some of the world’s most deadly creatures, so when a deadline reminder popped up on my social feed, I thought I’d give it a go. Luckily, I work best under pressure because I only had eight days to submit a story. I’m so glad I did. Deborah Sheldon, the editor, loved it and accepted it in her anthology.

My story, “Hell Gully”, is about an America army unit participating in ‘friendly war games’ with the Australian army in a remote North Queensland region. I wanted to showcase my chosen deadly animals through the eyes of foreigners who were not familiar with our country’s hazardous fauna and flora. One of the animals I chose is perhaps the least likely you’d expect to cause harm. I chose this animal because I live in its habitat, and during summer, we cross paths every day. Everything I know about this animal, I backed up with research, and was pleased to discover even more fun horrific facts which I’ve weaved into the story.

Because of its vicious bite, I have high respect for this animal. However, from our interactions, I’ve learned how intelligent this critter is. Since our first (painful) meeting, we’ve developed an understanding, and I’m happy to say we now peacefully coexist.

I hope you enjoy reading “Hell Gully”, especially if you’re the adventurous type who likes bushwalking in Australia. You never know, this story might save your life.
https://linktr.ee/paulineyates


J.M. Merryt on “Myiasis”

I decided that the real main character, the hero and villain, was to be the animal and I needed an Australian native animal that was interesting or bizarre enough to sit at the core of a medical horror story. I scoured books and YouTube top ten lists, looking for any animal that was truly odd or dangerous, from deep sea fish to cassowaries.

I didn’t want to go with something cute and cuddly, nor did I want to further damage the already abysmal reputation of sharks, and I’ve always been fond of snakes. I didn’t want to write slapstick horror (killer numbats are a little too close to killer bunnies), and I wanted something realistic: I’m always most afraid of what is feasible so I try to stick to truth as close as I can. Few people earnestly fear the boogie man, but helplessness and death are common things that can and do strike anyone and everyone.

This meant I needed to think of an animal that was commonplace but weird, and I decided to use my childhood fears of the worst thing an animal could do to you. I abandoned the top ten lists, and I started reading medical journals. I’ve not written medical horror before and this was quite a journey, requiring a lot of research, and I’ve seen a lot of photos that I can’t unsee. That said, I loved being able to indulge my passion for forensics and mycology. This story was also very much inspired by the bushland near my home, and the scenery is actually based on a real hill I pass every day on my way to work.

More than anything, it was great fun designing a character who would be guided by hubris, and because of their choices would allow me to explore worst case scenarios. I’m a fan of 1000 Ways to Die and the Darwin Awards, and I had both in mind when writing this.

Ultimately, I am interested in cause and effect and narrative consequences, and I wanted to see what would happen if someone afflicted by serious self-indulgent pigheadedness fell into a disaster of their own making. A disaster that they refused to remedy. This was very much a character study and an opportunity to really get into the motivation of my main character, which is partly why I chose the setting I did: no distractions, just choices and consequences.

I truly enjoyed working on this story over several lunches of rice bowls, and I hope you like it too. It is a cautionary tale in several ways and I wonder what you’ll make of it.

Welcome to Letting the Eldritch Seep, a column where we disinter and dissect artistic artifacts of popular culture that smack of the dark, fucked up, gory, grotesque or weird. Letting the Eldritch Seep is a celebration of those rare occasions where the specter of horror and the camp of the bizarre managed to jump the turnstile and hitch a ride on the Establishment's own gravy train.

I should apologize in advance to Mr. Houellebecq's legion of fans, many of whom may get annoyed by my repetition of certain “facts” about the French author and his notoriety. In conceiving of today's column, I chose to consider the experience of those unfamiliar with the best-selling cultural curmudgeon and his work.
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Michel Houellebecq is a world-renowned and much-scorned novelist whose books are typically filed under General Fiction or Literary. If you find yourself in a brick-and-mortar book store, you're just as likely to find his latest novel on a Bestseller table or New Releases rack as you are to find them anywhere else. Because they sell. A lot. But I contend that they sell for the same reason Stephen King's books sell—because they speak to the fears and inadequacies in all or, at least, most of us.
From the very start of his career in fiction, Michel Houellebecq walked a tightrope between popular fiction and genre fiction. His first long form novel, Atomised (released stateside as The Elementary Particles), tells the tale of two brothers, one a sexless, shiftless school teacher, and the other a solitary molecular biologist (cleverly named Michel in an early example of the author's flirtation with autofiction) whose solitary toilings give scientists the ability to clone humans. 

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In addition to its obvious riff on the concepts of doppelgangers, eugenics, shadow selves, and the misery of the human project, Atomised plays with the familiar trope of the abusive parent producing sociopathic offspring. It also has fun teasing ancillary elements that would take center stage in straight horror. For example, the object of the protagonist's affection is seduced by a Hippie commune luminary who later proves to be a Satanist and a serial killer.

The novel is brimming with darkness, including abortions and diseases galore, seedy sex orgies that would make Caligula blush, and not one but two principal characters committing suicide. It's kind of like the literary equivalent of a late cycle Lars von Trier movie, except much more antiseptic and far less fun.

By the time Atomised arrived on the scene, Houellebecq was already the author of a little-read poetry collection, myriad essays in French, a book-length work of non-fiction, and one significant short novel (Extension du domaine de la lutte, released in America and the U.K. as Whatever). But it was Atomised that made him the enfant terrible of international letters as if he were some overnight sensation. Soon, everyone from the Independent to the Paris Review were profiling this strange creature whose books were selling faster than heroin.

Over the ensuing twenty-five years, the enfant terrible may have matured into a slightly more distinguished version of himself. Or, maybe, he's just fucking with people when he keeps company with wealthy politicians and accepts their dubious awards; the author who has repeatedly excoriated his
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birthplace in book after book after essay recently accepted the Legion d'honneur, France's highest honor. 

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Although his success in the United States is negligible compared to the reputation he has garnered in other countries (Croatia, France, Georgia, Germany, and Italy count themselves among his most avid readers), the American press has spilled more ink (and tea) about the man than almost any other place save for his native France. Unsurprisingly, his work has served as petrol powering outrage culture.

It doesn't help that the man is as inflammatory as his books. Houellebecq has insulted Islam, kept company with far Right radicals, praised the actions of America's first President to be indicted, formally denounced euthanasia (as if anyone was asking for his opinion on something so personal), and even performed in an avant-garde Dutch porno before threatening to sue the producers if they released the professional Triple X film with his unsimulated sex scene intact.
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Regardless of what you make of his personal life or political views, Houellebecq the author has been nothing if not wildly popular. His novels transcend age, gender, and sexual orientation, even as they lampoon all three. Despite narratives overflowing with age-related decline, misogynistic observations, and sexual dysfunctions, Houllebecq has managed to connect with young readers, female readers, and LGBTQ+ readers. 

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In The Art of Struggle, Houellebecq writes:

“He's walking at night, his eyes full of death, The wind in the streets lashes his bones Already a year without making love: Humans brush past and slip round his body.

He's walking in the city with his own secret thought, How interesting to see others live,

To look at life like reading a book

And even forget the taste of regret.

He punches the buttons and lets himself in An icy breath settles on his soul
There must be a mistake, surely there must, And the radio is getting him down.

Now he's alone and the night is immense

He skims over his things with a tentative hand Yes they are there but his reason is not

He uses the night to look for a way.” 

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“The most corpulent one seemed in difficulty, he had lost a lot of blood. On a signal from the chief, the fight resumed. The fat one staggered to his feet; without wasting a second, his adversary leaped onto him and plunged his dagger into his eye. He fell to the ground, his face spattered with blood, and the scramble for the spoils began. With lifted daggers, the males and females of the tribe threw themselves screaming onto the wounded man, who was trying to crawl out of sight; at the same time, the drums started to beat again. At first they cut off bits of flesh that they roasted in the embers, but as the frenzy increased they began to devour the body of the victim directly, to lap his blood, the smell of which seemed to intoxicate them. A few minutes later, the fat savage was reduced to bloody residue, scattered over a few metres in the prairie. The head lay at the side, intact except for the gouged eye. One of the assistants picked it up and handed it to the chief, who brandished it under the stars, as the music was silenced again and the members of the tribe sang an inarticulate threnody, slowly clapping their hands. I supposed that it was a rite of union, a way of strengthening bonds within the group—at the same time as eliminating weakened or sick members; all of this seemed to conform to what I had been taught about mankind.”

In one long paragraph, the literary novelist managed to eschew his entire reputation as an author of bourgeois dramas, while simultaneously besting some of the greatest western-horror writers working today. If this section doesn't showcase technical and aesthetic prowess, then I'll pack up and leave. Fuck you very much! Good day, sir!

But this isn't even Houellebecq at his bloody best.

In The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq creates an acidulated satire of the modern art world that devolves into a funereal police procedural, one revolving around the brutal death of a hermetic author named Michel Houellebecq. This novel, which owes a debt to the whodunits of Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith and the who-cares of Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, may well be Houellebecq's masterpiece.

The author uses the third person omniscient narrator (for the first time in his novelistic career) to Kubrickian effect, staging his own grisly murder to push the distanciation of Brechtian theater to its literary conclusion. The effect is one of being told one's own story, experiencing your sad failures and ultimate demise through the glacial but oddly empathetic voice of a ghoulish septuagenarian.

Houellebecq has (almost) always chosen the first-person narrative device when writing fiction. This choice has often caused the voice of his main characters to be confused with the authorial voice. Some would contend that this is a deliberate choice on the part of the impish novelist, the stylistic flourish of a born provocateur who relishes in misleading critics, interviewers, and those who would read his books merely because of something scandalous they heard about him in the media.
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To be sure, Houellebecq's droll style and meandering essayistic novels are the consummate revenge against the pseudo-literate, especially those who would only read something with the intention of disapproving of it. To read one of his novels from cover to cover is to suffer, to be challenged, and to be confronted by the greatest horrors of all—our inexplicable birth, our hideous existence, our grotesque sex, and our unfortunate (or fortunate) mortality. 

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Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite
‘Behind the Scenes’ – Part Two


KILLER CREATURES DOWN UNDER: HORROR STORIES WITH BITE, conceived and edited by award-winning author and anthology editor Deborah Sheldon, will be released worldwide by IFWG Publishing Australia on 15 May 2023. From creepy-crawlies to crocodiles, you’ll have plenty to fear in this anthology penned by Australian authors. Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite offers disturbing tales that range from the action-packed and visceral, through the historical and futuristic, to the phantasmagorical and supernatural.

In this four-part series exclusive to Ginger Nuts of Horror, the contributors have agreed to pull aside the curtain and reveal the inspiration behind their nightmarish tales.

PART TWO includes insights from writers Steve Paulsen, Helena O’Connor, Antoinette Rydyr, and Fox Claret Hill.


Steven Paulsen on “The Warrigals”

I had fun writing “The Warrigals” for Killer Creatures Down Under, but I had even more fun researching it. In fact, it was my reading about the Ballarat goldfields in Victoria that sparked the story. When the open call for submissions was announced by Deborah Sheldon and IFWG Publishing, I wracked my brain for ideas but nothing bubbled to the surface. So, reluctantly, I gave up on the thought of submitting a story.

Meanwhile, totally unrelated at that point, I was engrossed in reading about the Ballarat goldfields. I first visited Ballarat for a holiday with my family when I was 12 years old, and have been fascinated by the place ever since. I was reading documents of the era such as original miners’ diaries, books of the period including A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53 by Ellen Clacy, studying old maps and newspaper articles, as well as reading more modern historical accounts of the time.

When gold was discovered in Ballarat in 1851, it sparked Victoria's gold rush. At its peak between 1852 and 1853, when the events in my story take place, Ballarat was the richest alluvial goldfield in the world, and during the following decade Victoria accounted for more than a third of the world’s gold production. Some sources say around 6000 diggers arrived from all over the world every week to seek their fortune. And most of them were young men. In an attempt to avoid trouble, the government prohibited the sale of alcohol on the goldfields until 1854 when the law was repealed and hotels sprang up everywhere. But prior to that, illegal sly grog shops selling all sorts of rot gut could be found all over the goldfields.

My subconscious had obviously not forgotten the Killer Creatures call out, and three characters formed in my mind: Archie Douglas, the protagonist who runs a cook shop (because there were a lot of hungry miners to feed); his drunken friend and hatter (a lone digger), old Hugh McIntyre; and Jack No-Nose, a murdering villain drawn by the allure of easy pickings. As soon as they popped into my head, the story and the horror that drives “The Warrigals” unfolded on the page. The reading I had been doing helped me make these men authentic to the period, and helped me represent the goldfields as they were. Hopefully, their story makes for a ripping yarn.

The only problem writing the story was that I has been so caught up in the research I almost missed the deadline. Thankfully, I made it with hours to spare and Deborah Sheldon liked the tale and bought it. I hope readers enjoy “The Warrigals” as much as I enjoyed writing it.

And in case anyone is wondering, there is still gold being unearthed in Ballarat today.

https://stevenpaulsen.com/


Helena O’Connor on “Quoll Season”

My writing process is rather haphazard. I don’t plot much ahead of time, as I enjoy watching characters and vibes emerge organically from an initial idea. When I first started writing, this meant I often got stuck part way through a story. These days, I try to have a few key points and an ending in mind – whether this ends up in the finished product tends to vary.

The tone of “Quoll Season” emerged immediately from the thought of a jeep full of teenagers, bouncing along unsealed roads, drinking in the smell of eucalyptus, on the way to a holiday cabin in the wilderness. The character interactions practically wrote themselves, based on people I knew at that age. An image in my mind of one particular object at the cabin sparked the storyline. The object is not something I’ve encountered in real life, so I’m not exactly sure from which dark crevice of my mind it scuttled.

I usually need some serious thinking time to shape a cohesive story after I’ve drafted the initial pages. However, “Quoll Season” leaped from my brain fully formed, across a two-day writing period. Once it was done, I sat on my sofa, examined the narrative start to finish, and fixed the plot holes retrospectively. Killer Creatures’ wonderful editor, Deborah Sheldon, also worked tirelessly to make this story the best it could be.

It was fun to take a well-worn horror trope – high school kids in a cabin in the woods – and make it quintessentially Australian, highlighting the countryside, idioms, and including a creature you’d be unlikely to ever hear of, outside Australia. This animal is even an inside-joke with an overseas friend of mine, who needed pictures of a creature that people couldn’t identify for a research project. As a rule, the creature is not particularly fearsome, but a horror anthology is the perfect excuse to double down on teeth and claws.

I’ve experienced a decent amount of Australian scenery, and it was easy to draw on a few different places to create the backdrop. I put the fictitious cabin near real towns in Queensland, after researching places where my creature could be found. Setting my story in the 1990s was cheating slightly, to part my characters from any pesky mobile phones. But this story was also very much an homage to the style of 80s/90s horror I was raised on, so it felt like the most authentic setting.

This is my first Australian creature-feature, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. There is so much potential for horror writers here, with the wild and wonderful creatures, and beautiful natural landscapes that lend themselves as canvases. Australian horror anthologies, like Killer Creatures, showcase the potential of our Land Down Under to inspire a rich variety of stories. I hope to read (and write) much more Australian horror in the future.

Helena O’Connor can be found occasionally on Twitter: @HelenaFiction. A list of her published and forthcoming work is available at:

ttps://helenaoconnor.blogspot.com


Antoinette Rydyr on “Every Part of Her”

Upon hearing about the opening of submissions to the Killer Creatures Down Under anthology, the first thing I did was consult my library of animal books. I’ve always enjoyed nature documentaries such as those by David Attenborough and others, and have various books about animals, insects and marine creatures.

But there were so many animals, especially the smaller critters, which have strange habits and abilities, that I got bogged down and found it difficult to settle on just one creature. More as a writing exercise rather than embarking on the actual story, I began to write short vignettes on various creatures to see if one had the potential to develop.

During this initial period, while walking along a street I’d walked numerous times before and since, I was swooped by a magpie. As I turned around, it was already flying away. There was no harm done, but I was a bit shocked, more because it was unexpected. The magpie only gave me a gentle tap of its talons on the top of my head, almost as if to say, “Hey, don’t forget about me,” and so the magpie made a cameo appearance early in the story.

I continued writing the vignettes with no particular plot in mind except that I wanted to explore parallels between the creatures and the human characters. As the vignettes began to grow, I found that they were interconnecting and a story was taking shape.

As a fully-fledged story evolved, the bones of the vignettes still remained while the characters fleshed out the rest of the narrative to form a journey into crime and revenge.

https://www.weirdwildart.com/


Fox Claret Hill on “The Best Omelette in Australia”

Something I genuinely miss about my pre-Australian life is my ability to say I love all animals. It used to be true! I spent the first decade of my life as a wild-haired, barefoot tomboy in rural West Virginia, building snail hotels, catching lightning bugs, and looking for bears. Then I moved to England and was surrounded by an adorable variety of woodland creatures and farm animals. I really did love them all, even the bullocks that tried to trample me, the horse that threw me, and the yappy terrier that maimed my favourite jeans (and my favourite shin).

In 2017 I met my would-be husband and was put in a situation where we could try the whole long-distance thing (see: 10,650 miles), or I could follow him to Australia once his visa ran out. Being a romantic and slightly insane sort of person, I decided to embark on an adventure, but two weeks before my flight, somebody showed me a picture of a Huntsman spider. I regret to say that alone gave me cold feet. I could quit my job, move out of my parent's house, put all my belongings into a single suitcase, say goodbye to all my friends and family, get on a plane on my own for the first time, and get married at twenty-one, no problem, but I couldn't live in a country with that.

Of course, I made the move anyway, telling nobody about my sudden, intense, and focused arachnophobia. I felt ridiculous, and I still do, that a spider species nearly derailed what turned out to be the best decision of my life. Fortunately, my run-ins with them are infrequent due to my tactically arranged, clutter-free home and the host of daddy long-legs (a Huntsman's favourite snack) that I keep around as a natural alarm system. However, when we do occasionally meet, I have to stop myself from buying a plane ticket and fleeing to England in the dead of night.

So, when I saw the submissions callout for Killer Creatures Down Under, I was delighted to finally put my phobia to good use as a terrifying plot device. If I could scare myself, I could undoubtedly scare others. So, I wrote an unusually pulpy tale – I'm more of a flowery, gothic-romance guy – checked it twice, got some feedback, changed the title, chose a different animal, and rewrote the whole thing.
As it stands, “The Best Omelette in Australia” doesn't feature a single spider. It's all the better for it, and luckily, come May 15th, I'll have the guts to read it.

I write about plenty of other nightmare-inducing things, which you can find on my Amazon Author page: shorturl.at/ejwyX, by following me on Twitter & Instagram @foxclarethill, or by visiting my website http://foxclarethill.com

****This review contains some mild spoilers****

If you are still in two minds about whether or not to accept that drug dealer’s offer to smuggle his product across the border, maybe pop Swallowed on before you make your decision… it might just help make up your mind…

Benjamin (Cooper Koch) just got his big break. He’s moving to LA to star in gay porn movies and is out drinking and dancing with his friend Dom (Jose Colon) for what may be the last time before he moves away. Dom is going to miss Benjamin. There is an air of, as yet, unrealised love between the two of them, and Dom is keen to do something nice for his friend before he leaves.

While most people would arrange a collection at work, or perhaps get some IKEA vouchers to help furnish a new flat, Dom arranges for them to smuggle what they believe are hard drugs across the border into Canada. Dom wants to send Benjamin to LA with enough cash to set himself up well and nothing says, ‘I love you,’ more than an illegal get rich quick scheme!

It’s a lucrative job, but I think I would still go for the vouchers.

When they meet with dealer Alice (Jena Malone) and she forces them to swallow several packages at gun point, even Dom begins to think this might have been a mistake.

At the rendezvous point for the drop off, an altercation leads to one of the bags in Dom bursting and he reacts, badly, to the contents, which don’t quite turn out to be the expected Columbian snorting powder. Dom and Benjamin have been tricked into smuggling hallucinogenic worms across the border. Worms that, if processed correctly, can provide an amazing high but, if they bite you, can be fatal.
Having one loose in your intestines is going to be a little worrying.


Rescued by Alice, they are taken to her boss’ remote cabin where they try to save Dom’s life, retrieve the packages and avoid the amorous advances of dealer Rich (Mark Patton).

What started out as a fun night in the club, turns into a nightmare of body horror, fear, threat and worms.

Or at least it should have been.

The poster for Swallowed is unpleasant. It shows Benjamin as submissive, crying, likely being forced to swallow something he doesn’t want to. Thoughts of ALIEN are invoked by the lump in his throat. It’s a classic trope of body horror, having something alive inside you, and that concept should strike terror into the hearts of your viewers. The poster tells us we should expect gore, ickiness and stomach-churning body horror. David Cronenberg would be proud of a poster like that.


Sadly, Swallowed didn’t quite reach those heady heights for me. While the premise is good and the idea of swallowing living bugs is unpleasant, the film never quite capitalises on that promise of nauseating body horror.

Swallowed starts well and doesn’t waste any time getting into the story. Just a few minutes in and we are sat with Dom and Benjamin in their car as Alice pushes them into swallowing what they believe are the drugs. We are then on the road, getting into a fight and then racing to save Dom’s life. However, around the 1-hour mark, when Rich shows up, the film slows down dramatically. While there is an attempt to develop growing tension between the two men as Benjamin tries to figure out how to escape from this nutter and Rich plans to protect his investment, it ultimately ends up as twenty or so minutes of very little happening, and the intended tension just wasn’t there for me. There is a final flurry at the end and a suitably karmic resolution, but the film fell a little flat by the time the credits rolled.

Which was a shame as there is a lot to like in Swallowed. The two leads are great, and Koch puts in a good turn as Benjamin changes from the meek, crying drug mule, to a hard ass saving his own skin. Colon has less to do in the film overall, but still gives a good performance. Malone does bitchy drug dealer well, coming across hard as nails, but with a vulnerability beneath; there is always someone above you in the pecking order! And Patton is gloriously over the top and camp, but with an underlying menace of unpredictability and ruthlessness. Director Smith does a great job with his actors and the film is shot well. The overall quality belies, what I assume, would have been a lower-than-average budget.


In the end though, I just felt that the film didn’t quite deliver on its premise and there are logic and plot issues that don’t quite make sense.

The whole smuggling operation seems a bit off and even a bit elaborate for what they were doing. There was very little resistance at the border and the whole act of swallowing seemed to be for no purpose. The two friends were told the bugs had to be kept at a certain temperature, so maybe the stomach was the right place for them to be but, when they got them out, they were told to put them in a temperature controlled container; so why swallow them in the first place?

While the idea of a scene involving Benjamin retrieving the remaining packages from Dom’s arse using a rubber glove and lube is perfect body horror fodder, it just didn’t make any logical sense. I am no doctor, but I am pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to pull packages in that way just a couple of hours after swallowing them. And, for body horror, it wasn’t nearly as horrifying as it should be.

In some ways it felt too well embedded in the real world to allow the right amount of suspension of disbelief for the plot and story to work overall. Ultimately, this damaged the film a little for me.


With a poster that brays ‘body horror’ the film was sadly lacking in the gore and wince inducing visuals you would expect from such material. The growing bugs in their balloons are disturbing to look at, but you would expect more gore and unpleasantness once you get into the realms of retrieving them.

If you go in with this knowledge and lower expectations around the body horror side of things, you do get a solid enough gay horror exploring the dangers of drugs and what you put in your body. Just don’t think too hard about the plot and logic and you’ll be fine.


Swallowed is a well-directed and acted gay horror that didn’t quite deliver on the premise for me. If you are willing to eschew the body horror expectations that the poster promises and don’t think too hard about the plot, there is enough to enjoy. If you’re a big Cronenberg fan and are looking for a gory, body horror fix, then this isn’t the film for you.

Swallowed currently scores 5.5 on IMDB and I wouldn’t go any higher than that, but that is still a decent score for horror. There are some very low scores, but I figure those are from people that were shocked to see penises in a gay horror, bless ‘em.

Swallowed is available digitally on 24th April from Blue Finch Films and is worth a watch.

Playlist of the Damned will be a collection of stories from the place where music meets the macabre featuring such authors as Philip Fracassi, Lisa Morton, Mercedes M. Yardley, V. Castro, Gemma Files, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito, Craig Gidney, Maxwell Gold, Linda Addison, Tim Waggoner, SP Miskowski, and Sofia Ajram. 

Cover art is being developed by the innovative surrealistic horror artist, Frank Walls, who has done a number of covers for award-winning authors. 

This LIMITED-EDITION run (both paperback and hardcover) is a Kickstarter exclusive and are limited to 200 copies of each. Backers will receive the book in September,  nine months before it is released to the general public in summer of 2024. 

​The book will be edited by Jessica Landry and Willow Dawn Becker, both of which have been nominated for Bram Stoker Awards® in the category of Excellence in an Anthology. (Landry, Jess. There is No Death, There are No Dead, 2021)(Becker, Willow Dawn. Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, 2022)

I grew up in the 1980s, a rough time for queer people.


Granted, all of queer history in this country before the 1980s had been rough, but immediately preceding this time there seemed to be some progress. The hippie movement of the late 60s had helped lower some people’s inhibitions toward sex in general, and the Stonewall Riots in 1969 had created a strong push for pride and activism among the queer community. In 1973, the APA voted to finally declassify homosexuality as a mental illness. We seemed to be on a positive trajectory.


Then came the 1980s. They ushered in an ultra-conservative period in this country, almost in direct response to all the progress that had been made by queer people, and people of color, and women. At the same time came the AIDS crisis, and growing up in that time period, it felt as if almost the entire country turned against us.


AIDS is a disease, and as such cares nothing for sexual orientation. However, because early on the disease manifested most prominently in the queer community, people thought of it as a queer disease. Early on the  media called it “the gay plague” and the first name given by the scientific community was GRID, which stood for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. So we became the scapegoats, blamed for the disease while also declared deserving of it. According to the many, it was God’s punishment, proof being queer was dirty and wrong and deviant. So many seemed to delight in this, and what it made clear to me growing up was that a large number of this people in this country wanted queer people dead.


I grew up in that atmosphere, and it definitely had an effect on me. And when I say people wanted us dead, that isn’t hyperbole. That doesn’t mean everyone in the country was capable of murder, they wouldn’t go out and beat a queer person to death, but I suspect they didn’t mourn too deeply at the cases of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard. They didn’t even try to hide this, because their ultimate goal was to eliminate us from society.


However, the queer community is strong. We fight back, we do not go quietly into that good night, but we rage. We have fought, gained allies, and seen more progress than I would have ever imagined when I was young. And odd as it sounds, I think much of that progress has come from getting our images out there in popular media. Not to discount anything else, but books and television and movies have helped a great deal. It has humanized us for people who did not know any queer people in their everyday lives, and didn’t think they wanted to. It has brought us into people’s homes and thus their minds and ultimately their hearts. Advances like marriage equality might not have come when they did if the visibility of queer people hadn’t been raised by pop culture.


And the opposition knows this, and that is why censorship is their bread and butter.


What I see now with the push to remove queer-positive books from libraries, the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, the tossing around of the word “groomers,” and the attack on trans people is all part of a deliberate campaign against the queer community. And what I find most disturbing is how few people who call themselves allies are taking it seriously. They dismiss it as an annoyance but don’t realize how dangerous it truly is. Because the bottom line in this campaign is they don’t want queer people to exist. I don’t mean just in literature and movies, but in life. And getting us out of popular media is just the first step for them.


There is a quote from Heinrich Heine that goes, “Wherever books are burned, men in the end are burned.” And I believe that. People who want to ban queer representations from literature and movies would not be sad to see us dead. That’s the plain truth people don’t want to face. The reason these representations bother them so much is because it reminds them we not only exist but we are thriving.


These people want to go back to a time when the queer community at least had the decency to mostly stay hidden in the closet, trying to “pass” and living in quiet suffering. Our joy, our pride, our progress offends them, I suspect, because it highlights how dull and empty their own lives are when they harbor such hate in their hearts. Instead of looking inward and healing their own wounds they lash out at those of us who refuse to live under such oppression.


If they can’t wipe us from existence, they at least want us tucked away where we aren’t seen or heard. And that starts by removing us from books and movies and TV shows. They say they want to protect their children from discussions of sexual orientation at too young an age, but I call bullshit because they aren’t calling to remove any reference to the heterosexual orientation. They aren’t questioning children’s books with cishet mother and father figures.


I have long suspected even most conservatives recognize being queer is inborn, not a choice. So the real reason they don’t want their children exposed to queer-positive representations is because they want queer children to be ashamed and to hide in the closet. They want a return to the fear and hatred of the 1980s that kept us “in our place.”


That’s why it’s more important now than ever to continue fighting, to continue pushing, and for us storytellers to keep putting representations in our work. That means making work that is innately queer and speaks to the queer experience, but also simply showing that we are everywhere, even in stories that don’t revolve specifically around being queer. My upcoming novella Septic probably could have been told with two heterosexual characters, but if the sexual orientation doesn’t matter (which is an argument many critics make when queer characters show up in a story) then it’s just as valid for them to be queer as not. And I loved putting queer characters in a story set in the 1980s to show that we were there even when the world was acting as if we weren’t.


So I call for more queer creators, more queer content, more queer representations, more drag queens reading to children, more exposure, and more visibility. Because no matter how hard the opposition tries, we will not be erased.