KILLER CREATURES DOWN UNDER: HORROR STORIES WITH BITE ‘BEHIND THE SCENES’ – PART TWO

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

Check out Part One of This Series below 

KILLER CREATURES DOWN UNDER: HORROR STORIES WITH BITE ‘BEHIND THE SCENES’ – PART ONE

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KILLER CREATURES DOWN UNDER: HORROR STORIES WITH BITE

Australia: the land where everything wants to kill you. A continent filled with some of the deadliest animals in the world.
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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.
Prepare to confront your animal phobias... And perhaps develop some new ones.


Featuring work by:
Geraldine Borella – Tim Borella – Renee De Visser – Anthony Ferguson – Jason Fischer – Fox Claret Hill – Robert Mammone – Ben Matthews – J.M. Merryt – Helena O’Connor – Steven Paulsen – Antoinette Rydyr – Deborah Sheldon – Charles Spiteri – H.K. Stubbs – Matt Tighe – Keith Williams – Pauline Yates


Curated by Deborah Sheldon, editor of the multi-award-winning and multi-award-nominated anthology, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies.

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Amazon 

​https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Creature-Down-Under-Stories-ebook/dp/B0BLYQWSXS

Book Depository (free postage worldwide)

https://www.bookdepository.com/Killer-Creatures-Down-Under-Deborah-Sheldon/9781922856241

DEBORAH SHELDON 

DEBORAH SHELDON is a multi-award-winning author, anthology editor, script editor and medical writer from Melbourne, Australia. She writes across the darker spectrum of horror, crime and noir. Latest titles include the anthology Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite, novelette The Again-Walkers, collection Liminal Spaces: Horror Stories, and novella Man-Beast.

Award-nominated titles include Body Farm Z, Contrition, Devil Dragon, Thylacines, and Figments and Fragments: Dark Stories. Her collection Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Collected Work’ Award, was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, and long-listed for a Bram Stoker.

She has won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Edited Work’ Award twice: for Midnight Echo 14 and for the anthology she conceived and edited, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. Her short fiction has appeared in respected magazines, podcasts and ‘best of’ anthologies, been translated, and garnered numerous award nominations.

Other credits include TV scripts such as NEIGHBOURS, feature articles, non-fiction books (Reed Books, Random House), play scripts, and award-winning medical writing. Visit Deb at http://deborahsheldon.wordpress.com

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IFWG PUBLISHING AUSTRALIA

IFWG PUBLISHING AUSTRALIA and its sister-imprint, IFWG Publishing International, are based in Queensland Australia and has been operating for 12 years. They specialise in speculative fiction for middle grade, young adult, and adult readers, with a strong leaning toward horror and dark fantasy. Both imprints are distributed through Chicago-based IPG, world-wide, including their Spanish language titles. The Australian website:
https://ifwgaustralia.com/

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