For Better or Worse Families in Horror, by Alan Baxter

Families are a blessing and a curse. Whether they’re our blood kin or the people we choose to surround ourselves with, they can be a source of both great love and great torment. Maybe even at the same time. It can be easier to get rid of chosen family than blood family when relationships sour. But it can also be blood family we rely on most. Some would say family is nothing but trouble and the friends you choose are worth more. Some would put equal value on all.

The degrees of variation in all of this are, of course, legion. I know people who have the most wonderful relationship with their parents and siblings and I know people who have cut off all contact to protect their mental health. And, in some cases, even their physical health. I know people who would love to have a strong family but, for many and varied reasons, don’t or can’t. But they’ve surrounded themselves with found family who fulfill that role perhaps better than any blood kin ever could.

The point I’m making is that family means many things to different people. Arguably, family means something different to everyone. Certainly there’s no such thing as a “normal” family and that idea is perhaps responsible for more heartache than any other. People missing out on so much while striving after some strange notion of normality that doesn’t exist. Embrace your weirdness, friends. Every family is a unique and bizarre snowflake.

I also know there are some people who maintain that “family is non-negotiable”. This idea that because you share some percentage of DNA. There’s an obligation to stand by those people, to be a part of their lives and allow them to be a part of yours no matter what. Which is absolute bollocks, of course. That idea is incredibly damaging too.

Blood is thicker than water, right?

No way. Not only wrong, it’s not even the entire proverb. The whole thing goes, “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” Which means the exact opposite of the commonly accepted interpretation. Family isn’t all important because of blood, but in fact, the relationships you make yourself (in a blood pact or through spilling blood on a battlefield. For example, or simply by mutual agreement) are far more important and stronger than the ones you had no choice over.

And before people get upset with me, I know there’s little evidence for any of these claims or sayings and we can spend all day discussing the likelihood of any one of them being original or correct. These aphorisms exist to help us make sense of life. The truth is that language, like the idea of family, is an evolving thing. And that’s what makes it so ripe for fiction, especially horror fiction.

In my latest novel, Blood Covenant (see what I did there?)

I explore family in some depth. There are two families in the book. The Moore family are blood kin, close-knit, supportive, loving. They run the Eagle Hotel in an isolated mountainous region west of Gulpepper in Australia. They arrive early to open up for the season and, not long after they get there, another family arrives. This second family is altogether different and altogether dysfunctional.

After messing up a bank robbery and going on the run, brothers James and Paul Glenn, and their friends Deanna and Rick, arrive at the hotel thinking it’ll be a good place to hide out until the heat’s off. They expect it to be empty. But instead of finding a bolt hole, they create a hostage situation and blood is spilled. And when blood is spilled, something out there in the bush notices. And it’s hungry. Both families find themselves at odds with each other and equally threatened by whatever entity has awoken.

But for all their dysfunction and lack of a blood connection (outside of Glen and Paul), the gang are no less a family than the Moores. I deliberately leaned hard into what a family is in this book. Whether found or born, and what people will do for each other in extreme circumstances. Where will lines be drawn? What lengths will people go to?

Our idea of obligation to family, both blood and found, is powerful and difficult to see clearly from the inside. What might be obvious to observers would never occur to the people involved. In Blood Covenant, two characters in particular butt heads about this idea – Leigh from the Moore family and Deanna from the criminal gang. There’s good reasons why the gang are the way they are. Not excuses, but reasons. And the Moores have a significant degree of privilege, despite their own personal and internal struggles and issues. “There’s nowt so weird as folk” as the old saying goes, and there’s no folk so weird as family.

Think of some of the stuff that’s normal in your family or in your close-knit friend group that would seem weird or downright bonkers to outsiders. We’ve all got that stuff. The in-jokes, the shared history, the mutual trauma. It’s the rich soup of our social lives. There’s a lot to be said for remaining alone, avoiding all that potential, but then we get the problems of loneliness and isolation instead. Not that you can’t feel lonely among a crowd of good friends, or in the warmth of the family home, of course. Just another facet of the convoluted state of existence.

All these things are rich character development traits for stories. The clashing families in Blood Covenant have many things to confront throughout the course of the story. Not only the ravenous entity they disturbed. And so it is with many great horror stories. I tried to think of the best examples of family, both kin and found, in horror stories and came up with a lot. And when you start to really think about it, there are so many types of family explored in horror novels and films. Take this quick cross-section:

The cannibal clan in Jack Ketchum’s Off Season and the Merrills in Kealan Patrick Burke’s Kin.

The birth of Damien in The Omen and the plight of Regan MacNeil and her mother in The Exorcist.

Ed, Bobby, Drew and Lewis in Deliverance.

Norman Bates’ unique relationship with his mother in Psycho.

The Graham family in Hereditary.

The Ina in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.

Wen and her fathers in The Cabin at the End of the World.

The Caskeys and all their relatives in The Blackwater Saga by Michael McDowell.

Jack, Wendy and Danny in The Shining, Roland et al in The Dark Tower, and The Losers Club in IT.

Obviously I could go on and on. When you start to look into it, family as a catalyst for horror is everywhere. And that’s because family can be horrible. And family can be the most important thing ever when we’re experiencing danger, trauma, stress, even monsters.

I think one of the things that really puts families at the centre of good horror is the raised stakes. We’ll do a lot more for the people we love than we would for strangers or casual acquaintances. And there’s a lot of shit we’ll take from family that we never would from people without that historical bond.

Like it or not, most of us are burdened with a variety of family ties and it’s easy for those ties to lead us into horror. And I’m here for it.

Blood Covenant by Alan Baxter

Whatever happens, don’t bleed.

What should have been a breeze of a bank heist for James Glenn and his crew goes violently wrong, forcing them to flee, blood-stained and angry. They stumble onto a remote lodge that doesn’t open for another month – a perfect place to lie low until the heat’s off.

Except it’s occupied.

The Moore family, just arrived to prepare for the season, are taken hostage by the criminals, but not without bloodshed. And when blood gets spilled, something ancient notices. Something malevolent. Something ravenous.

Their only hope is the youngest Moore, teenager Rueben, outside and unseen when James and his gang arrive. It’s up to Rueben to get help and save his family, but the influence of the ancient evil is taking a toll on him as well.

Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World meets Adam Nevill’s The Ritual with a monstrous reinvention, out in May 2024 through Cemetery Dance Publications.

(Cover art by François Vaillancourt.)

Alan Baxter

Alan Baxter is a British-Australian, multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers and dark fantasy liberally mixed with crime, mystery and noir. This Is Horror podcast calls him “Australia’s master of literary darkness” and the Talking Scared podcast dubbed him “The Lord of Weird Australia.” He’s also a martial artist, a whisky-soaked swear monkey, and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among the valleys of southern Tasmania where he lives with his family and other animals.

Alan Baxter is the author of several novels, including the Alex Caine trilogy, Bound, Obsidian and Abduction, The Balance duology, RealmShift and MageSign, the urban horror noir novel, Hidden City, and the horror/crime thriller Devouring Dark, and the small town folk horror story, Sallow Bend. His latest novel is the folk horror thriller, Blood Covenant, published by Cemetery Dance.

He’s also written several novellas, including the cosmic horror thriller The Book Club, the supernatural noir Eli Carver novella series, Manifest Recall, Recall Night, and Ghost Recall, the wildly popular gonzo horror novella, The Roo, the occult thriller, The Leaves Forget, and a mosaic novel across two novella collections of weird Australian cosmic horror, The Gulp and The Fall. Alan Baxter has had more than 100 short fiction publications in journals and anthologies in Australia, the US, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. Including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and many others. Alan has two award-winning volumes of collected short fiction, Crow Shine and Served Cold. Alan’s work has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Taiwanese.

At times, Alan Baxter collaborates with US action/adventure bestselling author, David Wood. Together they have co-authored the short horror novel, Dark Rite, four action thrillers in The Jake Crowley Adventures, and three giant monster thrillers in the Sam Aston Investigations series.

Alan Baxter has been a fifteen-time finalist in the Aurealis Awards, an nine-time finalist in the Australian Shadows Awards and a fourteen-time finalist in the Ditmar Awards. From those shortlistings he won the 2021 Aurealis Award for Best Collection for The Gulp, the 2014 Australian Shadows Award for Best Short Story (“Shadows of the Lonely Dead”), the 2015 Australian Shadows Paul Haines Award For Long Fiction (“In Vaulted Halls Entombed”), the 2016 Australian Shadows Award for Best Collection (Crow Shine), and the 2019 Australian Shadows Award for Best Collection (Served Cold). He is also a past winner of the AHWA Short Story Competition (“It’s Always the Children Who Suffer”).

Alan’s work has made the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards three times (Crow Shine, 2016 Bram Stoker Award (TM) for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection, The Gulp 2021 Bram Stoker Award (TM) for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection, and Sallow Bend 2022 Bram Stoker Award (TM) for Superior Achievement in a Novel). Alan’s 2015 Australian Shadows Paul Haines Award-winning story, “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”, was adapted for Season 3 of the Netflix Original Series, LOVE DEATH +ROBOTS.

Alan Baxter is also a martial artist, having spent his life since childhood learning a variety of fighting styles. He’s now an International Master of Choy Lee Fut Kung Fu, and a Fire Dragon Disciple of Grandmaster Chen Yong Fa.

Read extracts from his novels and novellas, and find free short stories at his website – www.alanbaxter.com.au and find all this social media links at https://linktr.ee/alanbaxter

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