Spawn 2 Behind the Scenes Part 4
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 FOUR includes insights from Rowan Hill, Rachel Denham-White, Matthew R. Davis, Carol Ryles, and Kat Pekin.
Spawn 2, Behind the Scenes Part 4
Rowan Hill on “Leach/Leech”
You know why I like science fiction? Because it is speculation of the future. Possible futures, what could be. Horror science-fiction, the twilight zones, used to be ideas and stories that were so far out there, so far in the future, their possibility was still only an imaginative nightmare. Event Horizon, luckily, is still a while away. But some futures are drawing alarmingly near. The Handmaid’s Tale has been referenced way too much as a roadmap for the current state of abortion rights. And remember when the CIA confirmed aliens last year? Nope, forgot already? I haven’t.
For my piece, “Leach/Leech”, I chose a setting there are too many of these days. The front line of a war. The character, a new mother to twins. Could you imagine? That right there is already horrific (and also common for too many mothers these days). I have big feelings regarding refugees and wars. To be pushed from your home, children losing their childhoods? Terrifying. But let’s throw in some aliens, and the new reality that sometimes a woman is forced into giving birth, that she is not in control of her body or the creations it can make.
Unfortunately, my ‘behind the scenes’ expose is a hard truth and ugly truth. Many of the elements of this horror sci-fi piece are taken directly from our now reality. Being a woman, a mother is not easy. Emotions war with one another. To love something that literally feeds and steals energy and sleep from you. And you want it to, we rejoice when a baby is a good eater, a big eater. To nurture something meant to replace you. Being a mother is not easy. Being one in this world, even less so.
Rachel Denham-White on “The Green Woman”
The story exists thanks to Alex Garland’s 2022 film Men.
As a massive fan of his 2018 adaptation Annihilation, I was pumped for Garland’s newest offering. I watched all the teasers and trailers, searched for hashtags on Twitter and ate up all the early reviews I could find. I was especially excited for the ending, after I found an online Guardian article that described a “plasma-pool of Cronenbergian horror”, an “orgy of physical mutation.” After reading that, I started dreaming about the film before I even saw it; strange, technicolour visions of twisting foliage and mutated genitals and heaving, contorting, green flesh.
When I eventually watched it, I had a good time. But the movie didn’t in any way live up to my imagination.
When I began “The Green Woman”, I had all the horror imagery pre-planned in my head, thanks to my particularly helpful nightmares. So, I thought, “This story exists in my dreamscape, and since you never have to explain anything in dreams, how does the story naturally flow? If I was this particular character, what would I do next?” This worked great, until I started on the ending.
The difficulty I find with writing Lovecraftian fiction is that the reader is supposed to be overwhelmed by the eldritch horrors, but as a writer plotting out the story, you still have to “conceive” the inconceivable, even if it’s just figuring out where your monster has come from. I had firmly maintained a “no thoughts, just vibes” attitude when I was constructing the main narrative, just a vague inclination of where I wanted the story to go. But I was going to have to bend own rules a little bit.
In figuring out the “who, what, when, where, why” and “how” of my story, I went back to what I had enjoyed most about Men: the imagery of the sheela-na-gig. She’s only briefly referenced in the film, but I found her absolutely mystifying. I read and researched, and all I found about the sheela-na-gig was a history painted by secularisation, turning this mischievous and slightly raunchy figure into a symbol of evil. Reading that, I knew I had not only my ending, but the whole underlying direction of my story figured out. And the rest was easy.
https://www.instagram.com/raes_readingcorner/?hl=en
Matthew R. Davis on “Water is the Womb of the World”
I missed out on the first volume of Spawn. The story I submitted took a rather oblique angle to the pregnancy theme, and Deb Sheldon noted in her rejection email that my submission read like “the opening of a kick-arse novella.” Fair to say, that story did indeed benefit from expansion and now works much better at its new length, but I was disappointed not to make the grade for that anthology. Not because I have any deep connection to babies.
I don’t and won’t have any children of my own, though I find them delightful and seem to bond with them quickly – but more because I’d long wanted to publish something with IFWG. With this story and my contribution to Claire Fitzpatrick’s A Vindication of Monsters: Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, which was listed on the preliminary ballot for the 2023 Bram Stoker Awards, we can consider that box comprehensively ticked!
I’d been kicking around a few strange ideas for Spawn 2, but nothing had clicked with me by late September of 2023.
Fortunately, inspiration came squalling when my partner Meg and I attended our second baby shower of the year, which leaned into a spookier theme than such events usually do. Our friends Emily and Kayla were weeks shy of welcoming their first child; lovely people they are, conventional they are not, which is just the way we love it. (Emily, a burlesque dancer, has a giant back tattoo depicting two devil-horned women kissing outside a burning church!) After the shower, I went to see Melbourne doomsters Ghostsmoker at the “I Am Not A Burden” metal festival, and all the while, my mind was turning the day’s event around, looking for angles I could use.
I immediately understood that I wasn’t going to write anything involving a bloody miscarriage or a failed birth – I’m not superstitious, but that would’ve felt like a jinx. I ended up using a lot of broad details from the actual shower, including the general appearance and demeanour of the hosts, though I made both wives pregnant, blended in some details from other people I know, and changed their life stories considerably; a Crowleyan angle appeared out of nowhere but just felt right, as such things often do.
The aquatic theme presented itself by way of the title, a phrase that popped in my head like a bubble right at the start, and “Water is the Womb of the World” was born. The narrator isn’t directly based on anyone, but reading back, she reminds me of Meg in many ways – hardly the first or last time she’s bled through into my work. But lest you think my stories are always this derivative of my surroundings – just literal reality with some spooks and blood tossed in for cheap effect – there’s a twist here that resembles nothing I’ve ever even heard of, and some imagery that I believe has never quite been done this way.
Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Stories About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies isn’t due until November 2024, which means that technically, it hasn’t even been conceived yet. But mark the date on your calendar and make sure you’re stocked up on baby wipes – this one’s going to be loud, and it’s going to be messy…
https://matthewrdavisfiction.wordpress.com
Spawn 2, Behind the Scenes Part 4
Carol Ryles on “In War with Time for Love of You”
Thanks to modern obstetrics, childbirth is relatively safe for anyone with access to quality healthcare. As a former registered nurse, I’ve assisted with a number of caesarean sections, sparing mothers and babies from what in previous centuries would have ended in terrible and painful deaths. In contrast, natural births remain tainted by an awareness of what can go wrong. Will this joyous occasion turn into horror? No one can truly predict, not even for the healthiest of mothers.
When writing “In War with Time for Love of You,” I created a science-fictional scenario where medical expertise, pain relief, and the “luxury” of gravity were suddenly lost. I then asked: how far would a mother be prepared to go to ensure her newborn’s survival? If she rightly or wrongly believed her baby’s life was ruined by a mistake she’d made in the past, and if it were possible to reverse that mistake – regardless of the horrors she’d be forced to endure – would she?
Back in the 60s, my family watched home movies on a Super 8 projector. Sometimes we’d play segments in reverse.
We’d laugh at ourselves effortlessly regurgitating ice creams into their original shapes. We didn’t have sound, but when our mouths moved, we’d repeat what we’d said because we remembered saying it. I used to imagine real life playing out that way. I could return to the beginning of school holidays, relive the fun, anticipate problems, and erase my mistakes.
The concept of challenging the past by rewinding time has appeared in a number of different genres. For example, the song, “If I Could Turn Back Time” (Warren, 1989), is a soft rock lament over a lost lover, made famous by the singer/actor, Cher. In his novel, Time’s Arrow (1991), Martin Amis imagines the life of a Nazi war criminal as if it were a movie unwinding in reverse. The resulting paradoxes defamiliarise what readers already know about the horrors of war and genocide. Similarly, science fiction is no stranger to temporal reversals. One of my favourites appears in Star Trek’s, “Timescape” (Nimoy, 1995), where time must be rewound in response to a deadly warp-core breach.
An earlier example of rebelling against time is poetically expressed in “Sonnet 15: When I Consider Everything that Grows” (1609), where Shakespeare observes how youth is stolen by the passing years, and can only be preserved in memory. Words from the sonnet’s final couplet form the title of my story.
Science fiction is more about what if than what will be.
The idea of manipulating time is one that has endured over centuries from as far back as Greek mythology and no doubt before. In my story, most interesting are the characters’ responses to the repercussions. Add an audacious corruption of quantum physics and, as one of my characters warns, “when we mess with the quantum, how can we be certain it won’t mess with us?”
Kat Pekin on “The Stranger in My Yard”
Since I was lucky enough to be included in the first Spawn anthology, I desperately wanted to be a part of Spawn 2 when it was announced. It helped me get out of a writing slump and I managed to get this one done pretty smoothly in comparison to my other work.
“The Stranger in My Yard” serves as an amalgam of my plot bunnies that are yet to find a forever home. I love writing about zombies (and post-apocalyptic worlds in general), but I struggle to make these stories unique in some way. I have a fear of my stories being too similar to other works, or too out there to reach the target audience. But there is a zombie story in my head somewhere, and with short stories like “The Stranger in My Yard” I get to explore possible ways to write it. (Also, do you call them “zombies” or give them a name that might come off pretentious? “Nonbeaters” was one I culled as soon as it came to my mind.)
The Spawn themes of horror paired with motherhood/pregnancy/babies is one that immediately appealed to me
So when the callout was announced, I decided I had to A) write something, and B) write about zombies. The backdrop of Covid is a nice event to be able to refer to in any sort of pandemic fiction.
But I have always wanted to explore the storyline of a character who, in an apocalyptic scenario, finds herself unable to attempt to save any children she comes across. Could someone leave a screaming baby who was in a zombie’s path? If not, why not, and what does that mean going forwards when they don’t particularly want to have children of their own? And what if they keep stumbling upon kids who need help?
I paired this idea with another plotline: of someone living safely off-grid during an apocalypse who has their life changed when someone from the outside finds their hideout. What does the woman do? Is the safest thing to just unalive this person, or help them?
I like my stories to move, and not get bogged down in description or detail. As a reader, I prefer those stories where you kind of jump in as it’s going and catch up as you go along. I try to emulate that in my work, but it’s a skill I think will always need honing.
“The Stranger in My Yard” was one of those stories I had somewhere in my brain that just needed the right prompt to bring out. I hope you enjoy delving into this horrific but hopeful little world I created.
https://www.facebook.com/kat.pekin
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
***
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.
Further Reading
Author
Discover more from Ginger Nuts of Horror
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You must be logged in to post a comment.