 Kiwi horror-thriller writing duo Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray discuss collaborative writing, explosions, cow paddocks, moral ambiguity, and their newest release Blood of the Sun What made you decide to collaborate? DR: Lee and I had collaborated on a couple of anthologies as co-editors, and it turned out we worked fairly well together as a team, managing to find a line down the middle of her likes and mine to produce something that readers thought worthy of getting behind. We then threw around the idea of collaborating on some punchy novellas, something blending crime and mystery and humour, and from that brainstorm came Penny and Matiu Yee, and Hounds of the Underworld was born. The novella part of the plan got mislaid along the way, but the rest of it hung in there. LM: I’d been a fan of Dan’s writing for some time; his prose is so sharp, with keenly observed imagery, authentic characters, a profound sense of place, and frequent use of the word ‘spooling’. We’d already proved we could work together, so I sent a nervous email to test the waters. He said yes, and I may or may not have punched the air with excitement. We started small, with a novella, figuring it was easy enough to step away if the whole thing came to fisticuffs. But, as so often happens when you work with Dan, the project exploded. How does your collaboration work when you don’t even live in the town? DR: The world is a really small place when you have the internet in your pocket. While we make the most of any opportunity to put our heads together when we’re in the same place, the advent of email, instant messaging, shared documents and Zoom conferencing means we have a wide arsenal of tools at our fingertips—literally—to draw on to keep the work, the ideas, and the communication flowing. Late-night Facebook chats are a common occurrence... LM: We might have used telepathy on occasion. As collaborators, do you ever disagree? DR: Writing is all about letting the story take us where it wants to go, right? And if that means there’s a monster around the corner as they run away from an explosion, which hadn’t been discussed at any point prior to Lee handing the document back to me to write my next section, what can I say? The characters are more in charge of telling the story than any silly plot outline. I’m sure you agree, right Lee? LM: What’s a plot outline, anyway? Just a map to your destination. So what if we chose another route? Those digressions have paid off creatively, resulting in some great plot events like chop shop explosions, forklift car chases, and a dramatic rooftop tussle in the midst of a thunderstorm. Whenever Dan’s latest chapter would land in my inbox, I’d read it immediately. I couldn’t wait to see where he’d taken the story. The surprise was half the fun. And because we’ve adopted this big-sister, little-brother relationship, both in real life and on the page, if there had been a disagreement, as opposed to a digression, I would have used my bossy Lucy-van-Pelt big-sister voice, and that would likely have been the end of it. I’m sure you agree, right Dan? Where do you write? DR: Once upon a time I had a nice writing office all to myself, but I gave that up when my daughter came along and needed a bedroom, so nowadays it’s what I like to call an agile writing environment. Most often, I write at the kitchen table, sometimes (like right now) sitting on the couch, occasionally lounging in bed, or in the car. I also carry a journal most places and have been known to scribble furiously in places like the backs of boats, cozy cafés, and airport lounges. Not so much the airports lately, for obvious reasons. The one consistent answer is this: invariably in the vicinity of a cup of tea of some description. The rest is fluid. The tea is also fluid, but of a different sort. LM: Even before the pandemic, my husband and I both worked full-time from our home-office, our desks facing one another Victoria & Albert-style, in what was once the front living room. My husband is a software engineer, using two and sometimes three screens simultaneously, and, over time, they’ve got larger and larger, so now I can barely see the top of his head. Or perhaps, the point is so he can barely see me. Which might explain how we’ve managed to stay married for thirty-one years. Very often, I share my office chair with Bella, our Jack-Tzu terrier, who likes to squeeze into the space between the back of the chair and the small of my back. When I need to do some reading, the room also has a comfy couch and a couple of large leather armchairs, all with views over the neighbour’s cow paddock, including two white-faced Herefords and a red tractor. How do you manage your time and what or who suffers? DR: Time is a precious thing. I steal it where I can find it. Mainly this means getting up at Ridiculous O’Clock every morning (that’s about 5.20am to those of you who don’t use the Adjective System to reckon time) to carve out half an hour or so of writing time before the need to walk the dog and go to the day job gets in the way of the words. Writing is quite literally the thing that gets me up in the morning. I’m the one who suffers because I’m really not a morning person. Then there’s a small window late in the evening after the kids are off to bed when I can catch up on the business stuff, and I make sure I get some reading in there too. And as much as I enjoy getting to the kids’ football on Saturdays, I also secretly hope for rain some weekends so I can delay all those jobs around the house and steal some more time to write instead. LM: Time management? I have a masters’ degree in management, and yet I am incapable of organising my time. With the pandemic shifting conferences and literary events online, I’ve scarcely slept since March; it hardly seems worth the bother going to bed if I’m scheduled to appear on a 4am vlog hosted in the US, for example. I don’t like to let anyone down, so mostly it is my solo writing that suffers, squeezed in around my literary community-building work, where I juggle mentorships, award juries, and guest editing gigs. Tell us about the new release. What’s the premise behind Blood of the Sun? DR: Blood of the Sun is the epic third instalment in our supernatural-crime noir Path of Ra series, although it also works as a stand-alone, so readers who are new to the world needn’t be concerned about diving right in. In Blood of the Sun, our brother and sister sleuths, Matiu and Penny Yee, find themselves assisting with the processing of bodies left behind in the aftermath of a gang shoot-out on Auckland’s wharfs, only to discover that their own family dealings may be the reason for the slaughter. Family secrets start to unravel, both worldly and supernatural, leading to a truly explosive endgame which will light up the Auckland skyline in shades of apocalypse. The book is once again written in our Rabarts-Murray trademark he-said/she-said style, full of dark witty banter and the constant tension between the real and the eldritch. Penny remains determined to find a clean, logical solution to the mysteries that defy rational explanation, while Matiu braces himself for the veils between the human realm and the domain of gods and monsters being torn apart. LM: Here’s what our friends have to say about it: “A gripping excursion into supernatural New Zealand where the landscape is as much a character as the two leads, further cementing Lee Murray and Dan Rabarts as masters of Māori folk horror.” —Heide Goody and Iain Grant, authors of Clovenhoof. “I’m constantly amazed when two writers can work together as well as Rabarts and Murray. They knock another one out of the park with Blood of the Sun, putting Penny and Matiu in harm’s way once more. A killer addition to the genre!” — Matt Betts, author of Odd Men Out. What attracts you to the horror-thriller genre? DR: Dark supernatural forensic crime thriller fiction? Right there, that combination of elements. It gives the writers so many opportunities to lead the reader down the increasingly twisted paths the story needs to go. The opportunity to unsettle the reader with understated horror, while holding them locked within the pages because they must know how the mystery will be satisfactorily resolved using none other than science. And a little bit of magic, maybe. But don’t tell Penny. She wouldn’t believe you anyway. LM: It’s no secret that I suffer from anxiety, and the horror-thriller genre allows me to lay bare the things that steal my breath away, those shadowy shapes that twist and flutter and taunt me from the darkness. Somehow, straightjacketing those demons into straight lines on the page gives me a measure of distance, a means of processing those fears. Like a lot of horror fiction, your work contrasts themes of light and dark. Does your writing ever deal with moral ambiguity? LM: In Blood of the Sun, Dan’s character, Matiu, with his dubious parentage, is a matakite, or seer, able to glimpse beyond the mortal realm into the underworld. This straddling of light and dark is a powerful metaphor for the character, who is a slightly unhinged former gang member not long out of prison. Matiu’s seen some shady things. Done some stuff that isn’t entirely legit. He’s trying to put all that behind him, but if he needs to, he won’t hesitate to call in favours from his cellmates. After all, the ends justify the means, right? But actions don’t always speak to a person’s moral core, and deep down Matiu’s loyalties are never in question. He’d sacrifice everything for the lives of his sister, his mother, even a stranger, and nearly does on more than one occasion. It’s this moral ambiguity that gives the character his depth, and makes him so recognisable, since who among us hasn’t grappled with that blur between right and wrong? While Dan and I each write both characters, Matiu is mainly Dan’s creation and so cleverly complex that I sometimes wonder how much of Dan’s own demons have been poured onto the page. DR: I think it’s fair to say that for both Lee and I, we stray quite deeply into ideas of moral ambiguity, particularly in our short fiction. I’m thinking of some of Lee’s stories in her collection Grotesque: Monster Stories, notably Dead End Town (which was a Stoker Award finalist) and Lifeblood, published in Grimdark Magazine. Both are stories of essentially good people forced into situations where the only choices they have left to make are bad ones, landscapes where there is no right or wrong, only awful and worse. Stories where the rot at the core of our inhumanity has spread so far that it can’t be cut or burned out, has become so much a part of who we are that we can’t even see it anymore: It’s like in Beauty and the Beast, where Belle has to choose to love the beast if she’s going to rescue everyone from the witch’s curse. If I tell her the truth about Uncle Bradley, it won’t count. “Mum, please, just make him go,” I gibber. But she doesn’t hear me, and after a while I can’t hear her either. (Dead End Town; Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol 2, 2018) Any sneak peeks about BLOOD OF THE SUN that readers won’t find on the jacket blurb? DR: Many of our supporting characters from the first two books return in this final chapter to the series, and the time has come for some unexpected secrets to be revealed. Where did mild-mannered politico Craig Tong get such quick reflexes, and who is Matiu’s mystery father? LM: So many secrets still to be uncovered. Why does Penny—with a doctorate in research science and her own consultancy business—rely on her baby brother to get her from A to B, anyway? What business do Craig Tong and Dad have being so chummy? And where the heck are Matiu’s hunches leading them this time, because, honestly, if he thinks she’s buying into his crazy ideas again… What questions do readers typically ask you about your Path of Ra series? DR: I love it when people ask about the influence that New Zealand, our landscape and culture, our sense of identity as New Zealanders has on our work, and how that impacts on the drama of the work we create. The answer is that there is an intrinsic link between the place we call home and this series of books, from the city harbours to the farm paddocks, from the volcanic skyline to the myths and legends carved into our souls. LM: It’s uplifting when devoted readers ask us to write more Penny and Matiu adventures. For the moment, we haven’t planned to extend the series beyond Blood of the Sun, but never say never! The audio version is on its way, and Dan and I are talking about adapting the series for screen, so watch this space.  Lee Murray is a multi-award-winning author-editor from Aotearoa-New Zealand (Sir Julius Vogel, Australian Shadows), and a three-time Bram Stoker Award®-nominee. Her work includes military thrillers, the Taine McKenna Adventures, supernatural crime-noir series The Path of Ra (with Dan Rabarts), and debut collection Grotesque: Monster Stories. She has edited sixteen anthologies, her latest projects being Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women co-edited with Geneve Flynn, and the AHWA’s Midnight Echo #15. She is co-founder of Young NZ Writers and of the Wright-Murray Residency for Speculative Fiction Writers, HWA Mentor of the Year, and an NZSA Honorary Literary Fellow. Website: https://www.leemurray.info/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MonsterReaders Twitter: https://twitter.com/leemurraywriter Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leemurray2656/ Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/lee-murray Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Murray/e/B0068FHSC4  Dan Rabarts is an award-winning author and editor, four-time recipient of New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award and three-time winner of the Australian Shadows Award, occasional sailor of sailing things, part-time metalhead and father of two wee miracles in a house on a hill under the southern sun. Together with Lee Murray, he co-writes the Path of Ra crime-noir thriller series from Raw Dog Screaming Press (Hounds of the Underworld, Teeth of the Wolf, Blood of the Sun) and co-edited the flash-fiction horror anthology Baby Teeth - Bite-sized Tales of Terror, and At The Edge, an anthology of Antipodean dark fiction. His steampunk-grimdark-comic fantasy series Children of Bane starts with Brothers of the Knife and continues in Sons of the Curse and Sisters of Spindrift (Omnium Gatherum Media). Dan’s science fiction, dark fantasy and horror short stories have been published in numerous venues worldwide. He also regularly narrates and produces for podcasts and audiobooks. Find him at dan.rabarts.com. Website: http://dan.rabarts.com Facebook: facebook.com/rabarts Twitter: twitter.com/rabarts Instagram: Instagram.com/dan.rabarts Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Dan-Rabarts/e/B00NH91DAC%3F  There’s been a gang massacre on Auckland’s Freyberg Wharf. Body parts everywhere. And with the police’s go-to laboratory out of action, it’s up to scientific consult Pandora (Penny) Yee to sort through the mess. It’s a hellish task, made worse by the earthquake swarms, the insufferable heat, and Cerberus’ infernal barking. And what’s got into her brother Matiu? Does it have something to do with the ship’s consignment? Or is Matiu running with the gangs again? Because if he’s involved, Penny will murder him herself… Matiu can taste the chaos in the air. All they’ve done so far is keep it at bay, but now the streets are shuddering in protest. Things are pushing up against the veil like floodwaters. The coming days promise to be dark, but there’s a bright side. He’s got this flash new car, Penny’s been too busy working to bug him, and Erica keeps scheduling their probation meetings over her lunch hour… Join Penny and Matiu Yee for the family reunion to end all family reunions, as the struggle between light and dark erupts across Auckland’s volcanic skyline. “The threads of the siblings’ disparate plots weave together much more tightly than it first appears. Rabarts and Murray write with characteristic verve, injecting the noir atmosphere with dark humor. Series readers will find much to enjoy.”—Publishers Weekly    Comments are closed.
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