Spawn 2 Behind the Scenes PART TWO
SPAWN 2: MORE WEIRD HORROR TALES ABOUT PREGNANCY, BIRTH AND BABIES, conceived and edited by award-winning author and anthology editor Deborah Sheldon, will be released worldwide by IFWG Publishing on 25 November 2024. This second volume follows the multi-award-winning and multi-award-nominated anthology of Australian dread, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies.
Penned by established Australasian authors and fresh new voices, these stories range from the folkloric and phantasmagorical, through sci-fi and cybernetics, to historical and the occult. Spawn 2 interprets and reinterprets pregnancy, birth and babies in a myriad of unexpected ways that will frighten, shock, disgust, horrify, surprise, and move you.
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 Dmitri Akers, Carole Kelly, H.K. Stubbs, Matt Tighe, Ben Matthews, and Robyn O’Sullivan.
Dmitri Akers on “Punch in Hell”
From conception, in utero, to whatever we may call birth, “Punch in Hell” for Spawn 2 developed in a connecting of dots. A sperm goes to an egg, but I do not know when it truly comes to be. The timeline, if we must draw one, was always blurrily indistinct. If there is such a beginning to this rabbit hole.Then it began with the UNIMA World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts.
Do you know Pulcinella, Petrushka, or Kasperle? They are likely analogues to Mr Punch, however foreign. They come from that periphery beyond the Channel. Blimey, not the Continent… Pulcinella spread out from the Boot (or heel) of Italy. Petrushka haunted the Russian bazaar. Kasperle plodded along the Rhine.
The Italian defied nobility for noble aims and stamped on the commoners for what is common. The Russian lampooned mercantilism and slapped away the invisible hand commanding market forces, for Tsar and Party alike. The German smote the wicked, and even delved into the wicked, until he was heading the Reichsinstitut für Puppenspiel.
There must have been a puppet before Mr Punch, a distant father that gave rise to countless other bastards.
If this ghostly progenitor shook some stage, for the crowd to howl with mad laughter, would it be too hilarious? This question forced my hand to write a weird tale about Mr Punch. To be forced to inhibit laughter is to be forced to inhibit dread.
I can give you locations and names. Project Gutenberg, Archive Library, and Google Images were common hangouts for Mr Punch. The culprits? Pinocchio, Punch Magazine, and even Mr Punch’s Book of Love. And a screamer about fishing in Albion, somewhere. But old illustrations of Mr Punch – drinker’s nose, humpback, mischievous smile – was all I needed to point the bugger out in a lineup.
Mr Punch does not disguise people. He frames them in all their obscene and grotesque splendour. An unlikely anti-hero one day, a drunken brute the next. What British Patriarch is not also Mr Punch? The puppet-character abuses every dualism ever, overlapping and looping into an ungodly mess. An archangel, a devil, a beast, a crocodile hunter, a possessed man, an exorcist, a hangman, a jailbird, a healer, a patient.
Horror and comedy are inextricably bound in some knot. Some view it as a Gordian Knot. Others only see a simple noose. But it is an Ouroboros. It eats itself as it unwinds to expose the horrible innards. Deep down, puppets just contain fingers and hands. These are parts, or wholes, of a body.
The hand puppet is still a sleight of hand, wowing and wooing and wisecracking. And when you critique this denuded story, then remember Punchy’s refrain before a great, old slapstick breaks some poor numpty’s skull right open.
Beyond the fabric and stuffing, there are no thespians. No mask hides a face that dares not see itself in a mirror.
Carole Kelly on “Respect”
As a psychotherapist who specialises in relationship counselling, I have long been fascinated (and occasionally horrified) by the decisions infertile couples make to deal with their childlessness. Women in particular are sometimes prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to become mothers. When I was thinking about concepts for this submission I wondered if all female creatures.Whether human or mythological, would be prepared to reach such levels of desperation and even deceit as I have encountered in my professional life.
Myths and legends have always been a creative source for my writing.And I immediately visualised my female characters and how they would interact across their divide of humanity and other.
As a ‘seat of the pants’ writer I wasn’t sure where my journey was going to take me. But I was certain that there would be a positive outcome for at least one character.
Having counselled relationships falling apart as couples go through the pain and disappointments of multiple IVF treatments. I have wondered how even a loving couple would be able to stay together once they accepted that they could never have children. What sacrifices would they be prepared to make for their relationship to continue? Would they seek out new partners in the hope that their dream could still be realised, and to what lengths would they be prepared to go?
It appeared that my female characters, as they developed, had the strength and determination to achieve their goals no matter what obstacles were presented. And maybe they even shared an understanding that reached across the divide of human and other.
Having the opportunity to explore a topic that had fascinated me for some time, allowed me to use my skills as both writer and psychotherapist in a manner that was new. I can foresee that the topic of pregnancy and birth. Whether alien or not, is one to which I will return.
H.K. Stubbs on “Latch”
Women are consumers and we are products, consumed by larger entities—companies, institutions, our own communities. This is the thesis at the heart of “Latch,” examined through a feminist lens. The process of recreating life makes women vulnerable to commodification, where consumption occurs at a commercial level (both by and of) women.
“Latch” is a story that was a long time coming; an idea sparked when my first child was born. The story remained in the larval stage for 17 years, until Spawn 2 came around, providing the incentive to flesh it out and breathe life into it. It wasn’t my go-to story for the first Spawn anthology. Because at that time I needed to explore the concepts treated in “Motherdoll”. The struggle of early motherhood, the need for help, the difficulty in getting the help you need; the risks you take, the compromises you must make when you allow external forces into the domestic sphere, combined with threats of automation; a micro robot apocalypse.
Honestly, I still struggle to get enough help and, now that we have a robot vacuum cleaner, it might be the beginning of the end.
“Latch,” I would say, is more whimsical and fun. While also very dark at its core, exploring the ethics of consumption and greenwashed manufacturing, exploitation of lower classes or vulnerable people; power, systems and, in a sense, social cannibalism. John Wyndham’s work was definitely on my mind as I worked on “Latch.” His stories have stayed with me long after reading them, especially Consider her Ways and Others. The Orchid Nursery by Louise Katz was also on my mind, although this story is not that dark. I don’t think I actually finished reading that one—it was very well done, but horrific.
I’m delighted to be a part of Spawn 2, and very grateful to Deb Sheldon and IFWG for providing a platform to explore the darker side of the fascinating and important topics of motherhood, birth and babies. I can’t wait to read the other stories in Spawn 2 because they’re sure to be amazing.
Dear reader, I hope you enjoy Amber’s struggle against the system in “Latch,”. As she finds herself trapped in a strange system. She grows closer to her friend, Maree, who is also pregnant, but remains determined to escape from the unusual asylum, home to hundreds of pregnant women.
Thank you for being a reader and a thinker. You make it all worthwhile. If you have any thoughts about the anthology or “Latch” drop me a line at https://helenstubbs.wordpress.com/ or @superleni on X.
Matt Tighe on “Envelopes”
For a while now I have been wanting to write a financial horror story. Stephen King touches on this category of horror in Danse Macabre, and in particular where he discusses the scene from The Amityville Horror film where Brolin writes a cheque for a caterer and then unsuccessfully searches his evil house for the cash that went missing earlier.
I didn’t get the true horror of that scene when I watched the movie. And the first time I read King’s take I found the characterisation of ‘economic nightmare’ interesting as an exercise but not something that fuelled my engine. Cue the montage of a few years—kids, mortgage, job changes, health changes, and so on and so forth—and sometimes, thankfully very occasionally, I found myself thinking of Brolin screaming in frustration about the missing money. Forget the axe—true horror lies in the void between income and expenses.
Despite this realisation, my attempts at writing a short story that had a desperate need for money at its heart kept falling flat.
I started with a lowly-paid office worker, something I know a fair bit about, but I couldn’t find their drive. It wasn’t their need for money that was the real issue, I slowly realised. It was the desperation in the situation. STAKES, to be brief. I lacked ’em, and I wallowed in the third paragraph of the first draft.
And then the call-out for Spawn 2 came. I really wanted to be a part of it, but I was reluctant to write directly about pregnancy. Yes, I had a story in Spawn, but it was told through the eyes of a child observing a pregnancy. I worried I could not do a direct telling justice, but at the same time, that was the reason I felt I should. Maybe I’d botch it, but I wouldn’t know unless I tried. In the words of a friend, “Shut up and do the hard thing.”
In the midst of my fretting, I realised that my flat, one-dimensional office worker would never have the financial strain of a heavily pregnant young woman on her own. What choices would someone in such a situation make to try and cover that gap between income and expense? What might a series of such choices reveal of character? The story itself went through several iterations, and I got great feedback from my critique group as well as my wife. I hope I did the POV justice.
Ben Matthews on “Flesh of My Flesh”
Not all tales about birth are horror stories. But all horror stories are tales about birth (or rebirth). It can be as simple as a monster being born into the world, think Frankenstein’s monster, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, or an ‘ordinary’ human serial killer. The idea could relate to rebirth; Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees were both born (or reborn) of atrocities committed against them when they were mortal. Then you have supernatural rituals that summon demons into the world, meddling scientists who create killer viruses or murderous robots.And ‘ordinary’ people transformed by horrific events. The relationship between birth and horror, or horror and birth (what came first, the horror-chicken or the birth-egg?) is an interaction that cannot be separated.
An anthology collecting more weird stories about pregnancy, birth, and babies is not limited to pregnancy, birth, and babies. We are not asked to write solely about those three things but to reconsider what makes horror scary. And what the relationship between horror and birth is. This refocusing of the lens made me appreciate the structure of traditional and modern horror and challenged me to add my work into the mix.
When the Spawn 2 anthology was announced,
I was writing a story about cannibalism, based loosely upon the Rotenburg Cannibal, Arman Weiss. I realised there were many similarities between cannibalism and pregnancy. A cannibal cannot be created by any less than two people, you become a cannibal through another’s body parts entering you, and cannibalism and birth occur very frequently in the animal kingdom. Dozens of animal species devour their mates and/or their young in order to survive. Life is born of birth and death. You cannot separate the two. You can try, although it did not work out very well for Victor Frankenstein.
With cannibalism as my theme, my story, “Flesh of My Flesh”, was born. Be warned; like the umbilical cord attaching the placenta to a newborn, it is very, very chewy.
https://www.facebook.com/bjcmatthews
Robyn O’Sullivan on “Two Sides of a Coin”
A couple of years ago, I visited my daughter and her family in London, and we holidayed together at a Tudor farmhouse in rural Hampshire. I was fascinated by the history of the house and intrigued to discover symbols carved into the lintel above the door of my bedroom: they were witches’ marks. At the time, when I ran my fingers over these symbols. I had a strong feeling there was a story to be told.
Over the next few days, I thought about the witches’ marks and the scenarios that could have been associated with them. But I was on holidays, so I tried to push the thoughts into the back of my mind. However, they kept prodding me. In the end, I had no choice. Giving them my full attention, I actioned their demand to be given a voice. I wrote a first-person recount of a witch’s dunking, then put it aside.
However, the thoughts continued to plague me. Relentlessly. When the Spawn 2 opportunity arose, and because I’d had a story in the first anthology. I committed to revisiting my witch piece and developing it into a full story that would fit the criteria of weird horror tales about pregnancy, birth and babies. Bizarrely, whilst writing, I found myself almost reliving the event I was describing. The process consumed my life almost completely. When it was finally done, I was exhausted.
Then my story was assessed.
The total lack of dialogue was pointed out to me, along with the suggestion that I rewrite because this omission distanced the reader from the story. I said it had not been done deliberately, nor even consciously, but I absolutely could not revisit the piece. I didn’t have it in me.
When I told a fellow writer, she wondered if by writing it without dialogue I was really distancing myself from the story.
It was at this point I began to feel it was not merely a fictional scenario I was writing. I had the strange sensation I was actually channelling someone from long ago, a woman whose ordeal must be documented. So, I opened my mind to the possibility, rewrote the account, and resubmitted it. Thankfully, my story was accepted!
I do not necessarily believe I could be the scribe for a long-dead woman. And yet I have no explanation for my apparent encounter with the past. Perhaps a reader can enlighten me…
SPAWN 2: MORE WEIRD HORROR TALES ABOUT PREGNANCY, BIRTH AND BABIES
A selection of the darkest Australasian fiction.
Curated by Deborah Sheldon, this second volume follows the multi-award-winning and multi-award-nominated anthology of Australian dread, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies.
Spawn 2 interprets and reinterprets pregnancy, birth and babies in a myriad of unexpected ways that will frighten, shock, disgust, horrify, surprise, and move you.
Penned by established authors and fresh new voices. These stories range from the folkloric and phantasmagorical, through sci-fi and cybernetics, to historical and the occult.
Prepare for an intimate, anxious, eviscerating read.
Featuring work by:
Dmitri Akers— Emma Rose Darcy—Matthew R. Davis—Rachel Denham-White—Jason Franks—Rowan Hill—Samuel M. Johnston—Carole Kelly—Ben Matthews—Lily Mulholland—Anthony O’Connor—Robyn O’Sullivan—Leanbh Pearson—Kat Pekin—Deryn Pittar—Dani Ringrose—Carol Ryles—Deborah Sheldon—Em Starr—H.K. Stubbs—Matt Tighe—Pauline Yates
DEBORAH SHELDON
DEBORAH SHELDON is an award-winning author and editor from Melbourne, Australia. She writes poems, short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum of horror, crime and noir. Her award-nominated titles include the novels Cretaceous Canyon, Body Farm Z, Contrition and Devil Dragon; the novella Thylacines; and the collections Figments and Fragments: Dark Stories and Liminal Spaces: Horror Stories.
Deb’s collection Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Collected Work’ Award, was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, and longlisted for a Bram Stoker. Her short fiction has been widely published, shortlisted for numerous Australian Shadows and Aurealis Awards, translated, and included in various ‘best of’ anthologies.
She has won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Edited Work’ Award three times: for Midnight Echo 14; and for the anthologies she conceived and edited, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies, and Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite.
Deb’s other credits include TV scripts such as NEIGHBOURS, AUSTRALIA’S MOST WANTED and STATE CORONER; magazine feature articles; non-fiction books (Reed Books, Random House); stage plays; and award-winning medical writing. Visit Deb at http://deborahsheldon.wordpress.com
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IFWG PUBLISHING is owned by Australian company SQ Mag Pty Ltd (which also manages IPI Comics) and has been operating for nearly 15 years. It is a publishing house that is passionate about all dimensions of speculative fiction. But is partly keen on supporting underrepresented writers and themes/styles. The company is globally distributed by IPG Books, based in Chicago.
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