Interview with John Hornor Jacobs

Interview with John Hornor Jacobs

By Michael Botur

I first became aware of JHJ’s work when in 2022, my friend – who has excellent literary taste – pushed a copy of the short story collection Murder Ballads into my hands and told me that John Hornor Jacobs is as worth reading as the other authors we were discussing – Cassandra Khaw, China Miéville, Nathan Ballingrud.

I did some quick research about JHJ online and my initial impressions were 1) This guy has moved around a lot of publishers, 2) Southern Gods seems to be the work he is best known for and 3) God damn – this guy has published 12 books in 10 years. Where to begin? 

After being blown away by the audiobooks of My Heart Struck Sorrow and Southern Gods while hiking around Australia, my fourth impression was 4) Boy, Southerners drink A LOT of whiskey. 

Probably the fifth impression would be that some of Jacobs’ work ties in with increasing global expectations to be mindful of Black people, with at least three of his works concerning protagonists who are considerate enough to get interested in the African American underworld – not that it used to be a good world. 

You could describe John Hornor Jacobs like this: rooted in the American South, but able to go anywhere, including to fantasy lands. Not surprising his two key influences are The Lord of the Rings and Dracula. Balancing two worlds with little in common is one of the things likely to impress you about Jacobs actually, and the author did something extremely unusual in 2020 when he published two very long novellas – really, short novels, one set in the American South, the other South America – combined in one collection, A Lush and Seething Hell – which was acclaimed and has become one of his best-known works – a personal high water mark, considering he’d been sent into what Jacobs himself calls “a creative depression” after two fantasy series weren’t as successful as he had hoped.

Reading his work, you might imagine John Hornor Jacobs is like a grizzly bear. His characters can be tough, manly and brutal- sometimes they’re thugs, racists, or torturers – and Jacobs himself is a large man with a beard and powerful command of words. He’s super-friendly though. Gingernuts of Horror was lucky to chat to the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker-nominated author about NaNoWriMo, unfairness and what his career is up to. 

Gingernuts of Horror : 

How would you describe The John Hornor Jacobs Experience to your readers – ie, what do you think your flavour is? What can noobs expect, when cracking open one of your books?

John Hornor Jacobs: 

I hope the experience is one that my audience finds something to take from it, an experience of exhilaration, of dread, of joy. I mean, that’s the goal, right? To spark in others some sort of emotion. Beyond that, I hope that I offer stories about relatable if not sympathetic people in conflict with themselves and the whatever overt antagonists I throw at them; I try to offer enough style and a unique voice and perspective to keep things interesting. Hey! Sometimes I even succeed.

GOH: 

Forgive me for being blunt, but you’re one of the best horror writers working in English right now – yet, as far as I’m aware, you’re not selling huge amounts, and while you’ve probably sold some film rights, your work doesn’t appear to be on screen yet. This doesn’t seem fair. What’s going on?

JHJ: Imagine me saying this with a very Arkansas country accent: Life ain’t fair. Errbody knows this. As far as sales, of all my books only three have earned out their advances, but those seem to be selling pretty well over time. At least, I receive royalty checks regularly, but I couldn’t support my wife (and kids) on that money. If I ever do have a book that connects with a wider audience, hopefully that backlist will be invigorated.

I’d like to act like I’m unaffected by the lack of traction I get with audiences, but I’d be lying. Laboring in obscurity is disheartening and I feel keenly for those other authors I see struggling with it. However, it’s what I signed up for, open-eyed. All I can do is keep writing and maybe someday I’ll have one that goes a little bigger if only due to tenacity alone. The great Patti Smith said something I think about almost every day. It’s this:

“Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work… And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.“

I forget that sometimes.

GOH: 

You spoke to the This Is Horror podcast about your “creative depression” around the publishers of your Incarcerado series and the Incorruptibles series. You also said “It’s the easiest time in history to be an author but the hardest time to make money from it.” Unpack that for us – and comment on adaptation to film and audio and selling movie options on your work

JHJ: Back, oh, fifteen years ago when I first started publishing stories and began seriously pursuing writing novels, it was a different world. The legacy publishing prejudices were still prevalent – self-publishing had a stigma and its name was vanity. But in an outrageously short amount of time, self-publishing became quotidian and went from being a red mark on your history (to publishers at least) to a non-issue if not a benefit. After all, self-publishers are smart folks who know what it takes to write, produce, take a book to market, and then promote their work. All due respect to those authors who choose that course. 

That being said, there are a shitload of writers who don’t take all that effort and care releasing their books into the world, and so we have a glut of books. I’m old enough to remember when I could – for the most part – read or be aware of almost every science fiction, fantasy, and horror novel, movie, or comic being published. Now, that’s impossible. It’s not just supply exceeds demand, we’re living in a time of “content” production that’s like a biblical deluge. Because of the surfeit of stories (and so many of them amazing), it’s harder now to reach an audience. I feel like I’m talking about this too much, the industry of publishing. 

For the most part, I’m happy! With my nose to the grindstone, writing stuff – I’ve got a book in revision (a big one), a novel on submission. I’m working on a novel for a huge IP (I can probably tell you but I should wait until the publisher announces it, but it’s a BIG IP and one I’ve been emotionally invested in since I was a kid). I’m writing a narrative podcast, short stories for anthologies, and screenplays. I’m working on adapting a couple of screenplays I wrote with my bff Jason Murphy – Modern Rogue, The Strangerous, Hacking the System – into comics. My cup runneth over, truly.

I’ve got a couple of works either optioned or in development (hell?) but everything has come to a standstill due to the WGA and SAG strikes. 

GOH: 

Your prose, to me, is very strong and compelling. There are plenty of splashes of poetry and creative solutions to sentences, and the plot never lags. The dialogue is almost always realistic, lively and strongly characterised. So: how did you learn to write well – and was your talent a consequence of waiting until the age of 38 to begin writing? Before NaNoWriMo in 2011, were you a competent fiction writer? Has it all been successes? Has there been trial and error and have you hit some bum notes? And tell us about the Bennington College writers workshop you undertook when you were younger. 

JHJ: First off, thanks for the compliments. I appreciate that. How did I learn to write well? How well someone writes is one thing, how well someone tells stories is a whole other ball of wax, as my dad would say. On a sentence by sentence level, I’m a good writer, I think. I am always struggling with telling stories, though. I’m fascinated by subversion, and that means I often don’t meet expectations.

But to the main question, how did I learn to write? I read thousands of books. In the Gladwell rule – 10k hours to mastery of something – I think reading counts as writing, to a certain extent. I was lucky to have come of age – hell, reach my mid-thirties – without having a pocket computer demanding my attention. I filled all my down-time as a young person reading. Watching tv and movies too, of course, but reading was the go to entertainment for me. When I was in high-school, I’d read a novel a day. That stayed pretty much the same during college. It tapered off when I was older and life got in the way, but for the most part, I consumed outrageous amounts of written material. When I was in college, I decided to start writing and I wrote a cycle of not very good stories about a family who raised dogs to fight and other sorts of criminal endeavors. During that time I attended Bennington Writer’s Workshop – I was 20, I think. I remember not being able to buy alcohol and having to get the cool poets to go into the store for me. Liam Rector, may he rest in peace, was a great guy and ran the writer’s workshop. It was my first entry into a literary social world. I studied with a very little known author named Arturo Vivante and poetry with a guy named Dana Gioia who later became the head of the National Endowment of the Arts, I think. I loved Arturo Vivante. John Irving came to speak and that was cool.

GOH:

You wrote at least 12 books in 10 years (2011-2021). Many people would argue that is a prodigious output. What are your thoughts about your own productivity – is it impossible to not-publish these stories, ie. Do you struggle to contain these stories? And am I right in thinking you are now pitching novels to publishers with just a sample and an outline, so that you don’t lose time and money on novels?

JHJ: I don’t know about being able to not publish stories. I write for an audience. I want that connection. Maybe it comes from being a musician and having the audience, the listener, bring energy to the relationship. It’s harder to play when you’re playing to an empty room. That’s not what my writing career is by any means, but it can feel that way sometimes. Like, I think most authors I know have a story about doing a reading somewhere and either no one or only a single person shows up. I’ve had that happen more than I care to admit. But, hey, this is what we signed up for. For all its vagaries and trials, writing fiction is still the greatest game on dirt.

I’m not in a position right now where I can write a proposal and a sample and send it off and get a deal. For me, I have to write a novel in full and then my agent will sell it. We tried it once with a sample and it was immediately rejected. I just don’t have the sales track record for that sort of deal, currently. Maybe someday in the future.

GOH:

Call me rude, but am I right in thinking that your output of books has slowed down 2020-2023? Is this because you’re putting time into screenplays and artwork? Is it also because you’re sending pitches and outlines to publisher, rather than writing entire novels which the publishers might not market maximally? 

JHJ: Rude. Goddamn man, you’re hitting me in all my sore spots. The reason I’ve slowed down – other than a lot of personal business and health issues I don’t intend on going into in detail here – is that there was a pandemic and during that time I wrote a large novel with some glaring foundational cracks which took me a year and a half to write. It is in the revision phase. I wrote a few screenplays which, as you probably know, have the odds stacked against getting produced or bought. I’ve spent some time developing and pitching television series with some directors and screenwriters – all connections I made on the success of A Lush and Seething Hell. Got a gig writing some for-hire stuff that I can’t talk about because of an NDA. I wrote another novel that is tentatively titled The Night that Finds Us All that’s out on submission now. It’s my “nautical nonsense cosmic horror” novel. 

I think we should normalize chrysalis periods for writers. I’ve been going through a lot of changes and I need to find things outside of writing that make me happy. I’ve been focusing on learning printmaking and, you know, finally buckling down and practicing all the modes of the major scale on the guitar, all the pentatonic, hexatonic, harmonic minor scales. Why? Because that makes me happy. Writing makes me happy – having written, at least – but I’m taking myself too seriously in regards to it. So I have to find things that I can release my ego and just… be present. And there’s no large public that’s clamoring for another John Hornor Jacobs novel, so at this point in my career, I can take as much time as I’d like. And that means exploring other writing forms and other creative outlets.

GOH:

In a podcast interview in 2020, you talked about writing A Gentleman of Carpathia, exploring the pre-Dracula epoch. What’s the news on that project? 

JHJ: That’s the novel with foundational cracks that is in revision. On the brightside, all the research and work that went into it has been used in the IP novel I’m working on. But I’m still pretty stoked on the concept. Elevator pitch: Dracula meets In Bruges.

GOH: 

You seem very effective at telling stories you haven’t personally lived – fantastical lands; 1980s Latin American dictatorships; the stories of ethnomusicologists, Black people, Southern Segregation, old-timey radio – plus, your favourite Murder Ballads short story is about Vikings. Do you have to do any research, or just read a couple of books and let your imagination do the work? Or maybe you consult real people? 

JHJ: I read outrageous amounts of non-fiction in research. I do real world research – for example, for The Night that Finds Us All, I spent a month crewing on a 2000 nautical mile sailboat delivery. I’ve grown up in the south, I’ve worked construction with people that were outside of my race and upbringing. I worked for an all black (and short lived) television station called Soul of the South where I was the only white guy in the room and I had a great time and made life-long friends with a ton of brilliant people. That is not to say I’m not heir to prejudice but that’s learned behavior and what one can learn, one can unlearn. When researching, I contact experts – I worked with the head of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress to develop the research and get the granular details right in the writing of the short novel “My Heart Struck Sorrow”.

On the post-production side, I have sensitivity readers to make sure I’m not doing anything in the kind of myopic racial centrism that a lot of white people exhibit. Privilege makes one blind. That’s not to say I’m perfect. But I work at it, and I work to understand the issues. In addition to my lived experience, I’ve learned so much about other cultures and peoples and perspectives and their righteous grievances and just outrage through Twitter (as fucked up as that place is) and consequently, it’s made my writing stronger. And more successful.

GOH: Do you love any of your book-babies more than others? Which books are you most emotionally-invested in?

JHJ: I really love my protagonist in The Twelve-Fingered Boy and the Incarcerado series. Shreve Cannon. He’s a cooler version of me but that’s pretty much my real internal voice. I think the work I put into A Lush and Seething Hell will stand up over time. Another curious thing about the world and life is that as artists we come up with ideas and every idea holds a promise, right? But the production and expression of the generative idea gets passed through the creative mental and emotional grinder, what it looks like upon completion is often a distance away from the initial promise of it. A Lush and Seething Hell is the closest I’ve ever gotten to the initial generative ideal.

GOH:

You’ve been doing lino cuts and adding illustrations to your books to increase your ‘value proposition’ to readers. How’s that going? 

JHJ: God. I must’ve used the phrase “value proposition” in some interview you listened to. I sound mercenary in this interview. I am not that concerned with the financial aspects of writing, or printmaking, really. I put a lot of work into creating and I want those things to reach a larger audience. When I imagine myself successful, I don’t imagine myself in a larger house or even driving a nicer vehicle. I like my truck. What I do imagine as success is being a more recognized voice in the larger horror (and sf and f) literary discussion. I pursue printmaking mostly because I need to produce stuff more quickly than the average life-cycle of a novel, which can be for a long time. As I said before, I’m really trying to find things that make me happy.

GOH: Tell us about the role of Dungeons & Dragons in your formative years – and the role of video games such as Skyrim in your current life. 

JHJ: I bought the starter set at a hobby-shop in 1983 when I was twelve. It pretty much consumed most of my nights and weekends – when I wasn’t reading – for the next four years. Then I turned sixteen, got a car, got a job, and fixated more on chasing girls and trying to be a musician. I didn’t have as much time for D&D then, but I still had the books and would buy countless modules and read through them. This is Arkansas, I could find a few folks who might want to play D&D but they were few and it would always be me as the GM. I explored other gaming systems – Aftermath, Palladium (which later became GURPS), Top Secret, Champions – but none really sparked in me the wonder and thrill I had initially felt when I discovered D&D. But it was sadly a solitary pursuit. As I mentioned, I was a latch-key kid and while I have a sister, she was the popular one and I was mostly left to my devices.

GOH: 

One reviewer of ‘The Incorruptibles’ observed the book contains “an alternative world with numerous echoes of our own, set in a loose ‘wild west’ parallel with an eclectic mix of cultural references…. There’s a variant steam-punk vibe … The natives are inhuman and fascinating.” So, how do you achieve the ability to write about diverse cultures? Have you interacted with lots of cultures in your life, do you study, is the town where you live culturally diverse or what? 

JHJ: Little Rock, at least where I live in it, is pretty diverse. My neighbors are Indian and African American and Chinese. There are four old nuns who live across the street, though they’re white. I’ve traveled some, but not as much as I like. I really enjoy experiencing new cultures and when I can, as far as Arkansas permits (not being a metropolitan or especially urbane area), traveling to different countries.

But when it comes to writing about other cultures or lived experiences outside my own I try to adhere to a few guidelines. Research, Respect, Empathy, Review. Research is important, obviously. On a purely informational level, research is probably what I do the most, reading countless books and reference materials followed up by whatever real world experiences I can find time for or afford. I’ve started including bibliographies in my books of sources and inspirations, which I think is important. Respect is coming into something with the understanding that you’re learning, you don’t know everything, and allowing yourself to absorb the differences but more importantly find the similarities between your culture and the one you’re writing about. Empathy is, on a character level, denying stereotypes and trying to tap into the essence of a character without falling into cliche because they deserve it and so do you. Review is, of course, having editors and sensitivity readers and people whose opinions you respect offer some commentary with an eye toward targeted things. If I’m writing something in the Jim Crow south, a black sensitivity reader is necessary. I was lucky to have Kwame Mbalia as a reader of “My Heart Struck Sorrow” and Eduardo Arias and Monica Ramón Rios as readers for “The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky”. 

If I changed empathy to Rapport, it would be the RRRR approach.

GOH: 

The most impressive prose I have read of yours is the scene in The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky in which the hero – a dissident in a mythical Latin American country – gets his eye hacked out during a military torture session. It’s a prolonged and extremely vivid scene which must have required astonishing literary skill to make it feel real. It’s jaw-droppingly good writing, and truly connotes what one might call ‘eyeball-popping horror.’ The same Incorruptibles reviewer said of your prose style, “Jacobs’ prose is lean and to the point but touches on poetry in places.” So, what would you say to a reader who isn’t sure how to write with poetic beauty? Are there any useful hacks which can turn a Wannabe Writer into a writer who’s actually doing it?  

JHJ: He gave the world the idea that if you show a gun in the first act, it has to go off by the third but Chekov also said something that stuck with me which was (and I paraphrase because I can’t remember it perfectly) the more emotionally intense something is, the more dispassionately one must write about it. I’ve always thought that advice provided pretty amazing prose, but it’s a sort of subtextual style which appeals to me. This isn’t a hack really – but every writer needs to figure out their unique voice, stylistically or tonally or even syntactically and that’s what they offer as writers that’s new, in my opinion. That and finding original characters. When folks say “there’s nothing new under the sun” or “there are only three stories” or some other reductionist bs, they’re just talking about plot. It’s unique characters that make stories new, and everyone has unique characters in them. And so the world is teeming with new stories with familiar beats.

GOH: 

Have you had any disasters/failures/misfortunes with your writing you want to share – whether it’s months wasted on a manuscript that went nowhere, or a publisher screwing you over, or a publisher failing to market an excellent manuscript, something like that? 

JHJ: The Gentleman of the Carpathian isn’t a disaster but it’s not ready for prime-time and I don’t know when I’ll get back to it since other work has pushed it out of my immediate awareness. It might end up being my sole trunk novel.  In my mind, it’s somewhat done and dusted. Story told. Unfortunately, I might not have the attention span to get back to it for a while.

GOH: 

Southern Gods came out of NaNoWriMo. Are you aware of many other books from NaNoWriMo which became successes? Seems rare to me. For anyone who has never given it a go, is NaNoWriMo worth doing? 

JHJ: I don’t know any other NaNoWriMo books but I’m sure there are quite a few out there. I do think it’s worth doing. When you write fast without looking back, you access parts of your creative psyche that you don’t when you’re laboriously going over each sentence.

GOH: 

Do you feel that you are most-widely known for your most naïve book (Southern Gods)? It was published when you were least-experienced – so what does that mean to you?

JHJ: I think A Lush and Seething Hell is probably a bit more popular than Southern Gods, at this point. With The Incorruptibles a distant third. What does it mean to me? I guess when you write long enough, you become a sort of ship of Theseus. All your instincts look the same, but they’ve all gone through testing and experimentation and the rigors of the artistic process so that when I return to Southern Gods, it feels very familiar but as though someone else wrote it. The book itself is a perfect encapsulation of my sensibilities at the time. An amalgam of horror, crime noir, southern history, and music. When I wrote “My Heart Struck Sorrow” and “Murder Ballads” I knew I was going back to that same well for water.

GOH: 

Which of your books has been hardest to write, and why?

JHJ: The hardest one to write is always the one in front of me. All the finished books were pieces of cake.

GOH: 

Racist segregation is horrifying and a huge waste of Americans’ time… but it’s also given us the Blues and the world of Southern Gods and My Heart Struck Sorrow. What are your thoughts about the unique combination of conditions that has given us the American South with all its pluses and minuses? 

JHJ: Faulkner said, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” All the ignorance and deprivation and scarcity and desperation of the American south need to be examined, unpacked, and discussed. This is what all the GOP jabronis are trying to quash, the examination of our heritage, our foundations as rotten and carious as they are. They also happen to make for engaging fiction.

GOH: 

How would you rank your biggest achievements? This may not be sales. Perhaps your biggest achievement has been getting an accolade from someone you revere? 

JHJ: Of all my graduating high school class, all the pretty girls went on to do whatever the fuck pretty girls do when they grow up. But I was the person who went on to have my picture (and a short story) in Playboy magazine. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

GOH: 

What do you think is going on in horror around the world in 2023? Can we ever get back to the golden age of well-paying horror books described in Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix? 

JHJ: No, I don’t think so. Too much horror being produced. And Sturgeon’s law isn’t accurate when it comes to what’s out there now. So many great writers. Cass Khaw, Eric Larocca, Alma Katsu, Livia Llewellyn, Hallie Piper, Richard Kadrey. These are just a few I’ve rattled off the top of my dome, as all the freestylin’ kids say. Oh! Victor Lavalle, Chuck Wendig, Clay McCleod Chapman, Michael Moreci, Jason Murphy, Cherie Priest, Delilah Dawson, Phillip Fracassi, Brian Evenson, Nathan Ballangrud, John Langan, Laird Barron. Sheesh, it’s a heyday for horror, to be sure. But it’s a crowded space. I might be siloed away from all the dross of the literary world. We create and curate our own little pockets of reality. I don’t consider myself solely a horror writer, by the way. I’ve always been interested in fantasy, crime noir, mystery, and regional fiction.

However, economically it’s a different world. The 80s horror boom, driven by the success of Stephen King, really, can’t happen again. Or at least not as things stand now. Any company that deals with the fickleness of the public’s tastes are a thousand times more risk averse than they were then. Advances are smaller proportionately. I don’t understand the economy, but I know it’s in the toilet, people have less money than they have in the last hundred years and this lack of affluence seriously hits the entertainment industry which is ultimately what fiction is though it can be more. In the 80s, the American public was more flush and there were fewer ways to spend your entertainment dollar. When you have 50 bucks a month for entertainment nowadays? You buy two, maybe three books? You buy multiple self-published ebooks? You go to a movie or two? You buy a single video game? Or you don’t do any of that. You spend all your nut on streaming services? There’s just so much more available for less available resources. A glut of media and a dearth of income.

GOH: 

Your day job is as an art director. What is life like? Tell us about your schedule and habits. Are you able to adjust your work hours to get writing done? Do you use certain tools, tricks and support to sustain your steady flow of work? Is it all fingers on keyboards? And what about family – kids and a wife and a golden retriever? 

JHJ: It’s comfortable. When it comes to advertising, I work on projects 8 hours a day until they’re done, or more, just to get them off my plate. I walk in the morning and I nap every afternoon. I stay up too late every night. I dote on my cats. We have a small garden. On Monday nights, I go to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts for an open studio printmaking class. Even though I’ve played guitar for thirty-eight years, I’ve started taking guitar lessons again to try and nail down all the music theory I never really took the time to learn, and that’s gratifying. I live and work from home. But I’ve left advertising except in a freelance capacity, sold my share of the advertising agency I was a partner in. So, I guess I’ve quit my day job but I wouldn’t have been able to if I hadn’t spent the almost decade helping to build the agency up from the ground and then got some of that sweat equity out of it. My wife and I downsized houses now that our kids have moved out, and we’ve focused on living frugally. I’ve had some Hollywood money come in and of course the small amount of money I make through publishing and the agency sale. My mother died, leaving me a little more money, so for a couple of years at least, I have enough breathing room to pursue writing more aggressively and filling out the edges and corners with freelance work before I have to go back to a daily gig which I’m sure I’ll have to do eventually. Sheesh, I’m talking about money a lot in this interview despite stating it’s not my main consideration. It is a consideration, though. Anyway, I am constantly looking for work, I’ve got my resume and animation demo reel up to date and always ready. Unfortunately, there’s no retirement for artists. Did I say “unfortunately”? I mean fortunately! I’ll be making art, writing stories, making music until I die, hopefully a long time from now. It might be just for myself, or a small circle of people who are interested in what I do because you can’t really expect more than that and if you do, if I do, I’ll more than likely end up disappointed. Better to not expect much. But I’ll keep on writing and making art, in some capacity.

Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales

“It’s time to declare John Hornor Jacobs as a major author: every sentence he writes feels drawn from a pit of fire and hammered into a sword.” –Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling co-author of

A terrifying collection of horror and crime noir from the author of Southern Gods and A Lush and Seething Hell.

Featuring ten tales, two never before in print, Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales is an exciting glimpse into the dark territories of the human heart.

These are coming-of-age stories. Stories of love and loss, grief and revenge. Survival and redemption. From old gods to malevolent artificial intelligences, vampires to zombies to ghosts, Jacobs exposes our fears and worst imaginings.

CONTAINS THE SEQUEL TO SOUTHERN GODS

“Jacobs demonstrates masterful control of his eclectic themes and frequently propels them into unexpected and pleasingly original territory… Offers plenty to keep genre fans hooked.” –Publishers Weekly

Michael Botur

Michael Botur was the first NZ winner of the Australasian Horror Writers Association Robert N Stephenson Short Story & Flash Fiction Competition. https://nzshortstories.com/ Botur is crowdfunding for his second horror collection and would really appreciate your donations https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/lets-raise-dollar2500-to-launch-the-best-horror. 

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