I started this blog as a means to keep my creative juices flowing in between the more serious business of penning fictional work. That and because I’m pretty lousy at self-promotion and I am told this is a way of getting myself out there into that mysterious world of the Internet, which those of us over the age of 30 have no hope of understanding.

Perhaps the best place to start is with my peripatetic journey into the horror genre itself. I am currently a proud long standing member of the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA), an eclectic bunch of authors who have, through the force of their collective will, driven me along the path toward becoming a decent writer. They have cajoled, critiqued, damned, praised, prodded and shaped me into the thing I am today.

It wasn’t always this way. I was once a regular straight edged Bachelor of Arts and Master of Philosophy graduate, a well-rounded reader with a wide range of literary interests. My very first publication, penned as an undergraduate, occurred in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Volume 13), on the late boozing, womanising and all round carousing Western Australian author Gavin Casey.

Yet even then, the darkness was always calling. The odd Stephen King novel here, a late night zombie film there, and a general obsession with those things that slip through the cracks and dwell in the shadows of life. I’m not sure how it happened. One disastrous love affair too many or perhaps just bumping into a work colleague who was a member of the AHWA, but before I knew what I was doing I was penning nasty tales of death and dismemberment, and now I’m hooked on horror.

One of the questions often asked of the horror writer is: why horror? Or as an ex-girlfriend of mine once remarked before she mysteriously disappeared: ‘Why do you focus all your creative energy on all that negativity? Haven’t you got anything nice to write about?’

On the face of it, it’s a fair question. The obvious response is that the journey through the horror narrative is a cathartic experience. It is the literary equivalent of a roller coaster. We step on at the first page (or opening scene) somewhat tentatively, knowing that it’s going to be one hell of a ride, but gee the adrenalin rush it gives us and the sheer exhilaration, the relief of surviving the adventure makes it all worthwhile. Oh thank goodness, I survived. I went through all that, I manned up and I came out the other end, older, wiser, and still in one piece. I know all literary genres do this in their own way, from crime fiction to romance, but horror does it in an altogether more visceral manner.

For me, the attraction started as a child, watching programs like The Evil Touch, The Night Stalker and my all-time favourite, The Twilight Zone – the original 1960s version. It would be many years later that I would learn the names and appreciate the quality of the storytelling of writers like Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, and subsequently seek out their other works – particularly Matheson with his expositions on the apocalypse (I Am Legend) and the afterlife (What Dreams May Come).

As a child of the television age, my early forays into the horror genre came almost exclusively through television and later video. The extent of my literary forays went as far as exploring the seemingly vast range of horror comics available in newsagents and second hand bookstores. My early experience of the genre was very much more visual than cerebral.

As a Western Australian, my diet consisted largely of American movies and television shows. The concept of SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service – an Australian government funded radio and television broadcasting service with a view to spreading the cause of multiculturalism to a casually racist mainstream audience) and art house cinema being many decades away. As a consequence the voice I found in my first literary musings in the genre tended to be an American voice. It was always American girls who suffered the attentions of psychotic slashers and American houses that experienced visitations by the demonic and the undead.

The power of the AHWA has been to give antipodean horror writers a voice, and as a result we are now seeing the flowering of the Australian horror story. Local characters in local settings battling Australian demons. But that is a tale for another day. Thanks for reading, I hope you will join me again for more musings on horror matters and other things that keep me up at night.

Fergs