Postscripts to Darkness

Michael Rowe’s “Wild Fell” was nominated for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award.

Michael Rowe is an award-winning Toronto journalist, essayist, and novelist. He was the first-tier Canadian correspondent for Fangoria for seventeen years. In addition, Rowe created and edited the Queer Fear series, which changed the landscape of horror fiction. The stories (predominantly written by het writers, ironically) spotlighted queer protagonists. Some big names in the horror field took note, notably Clive Barker, who hailed Rowe in 2002 as having “changed forever the shape of horror fiction.” Rowe published his first novel, Enter, Night, with ChiZine Publications in 2011, garnering critical praise and a Sunburst Award nomination. Rowe called Enter, Night his unabashed 1970s vampire novel. He published his second novel, Wild Fell, in 2013, also with ChiZine, to further acclaim. Wild Fell was a finalist for this year’s Shirley Jackson Award as part of a lineup which included Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Pyper. Contributing Editor James K. Moran, who once interviewed Rowe for Daily Xtra, chatted with him by email earlier this summer. Moran describes Rowe as a “gentleman of the highest order” who “wields a darkly wicked sense of humour and a rapier wit.”

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Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Danse Macabre” (ed.) won the Paris Book Festival Award for Best Anthology.

Nancy Kilpatrick, Canada’s reigning queen of Goth and vampire lore, proves a fount of knowledge about being an author in these shifting sands. She’s accomplished a prolific trifecta as author, editor, and teacher, and has won numerous awards as both writer and editor, from the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Mystery to Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year. From zombies to vampires, short-story markets, nonfiction, and the state of traditional dark fiction publishing, her thoughts as a Canadian female artist of dark design who’s had an online presence since the dawn of the internet are unmatched. She and Lydia Peever spoke just before Women in Horror Month, 2014.

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Tony Burgess is the man behind “Pontypool.”

This interview first appeared in Postscripts to Darkness Volume 4, a companion to Tony Burgess’s masterful short, “Soft Shell Story.” Tony speaks with PstD editor Aalya Ahmad about the writing process, language and character, and adapting his work for film. His latest novel, The n-Body Problem, is available from ChiZine Press.

AA: Can you tell us a bit about how and when you started writing?

TB: I started writing pretty much when I could spell. I used to tell stories to my family on car trips and do plays for the neighbourhood in my basement. Make short Super 8 films. My main focus, up until my 20s, was visual art and the rest was a kind of sidebar. I believed, as a child, that pretty much everything was worth altering. I was less about showing than the private route. I still have that feeling. The beginning of anything for me is stepping outside and turning rocks, finding things on the ground, painting grass…I am an aging finger-painter.

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Glen Hirshberg (L) and Peter Atkins (R) founded the Rolling Darkness Revue in 2004.

Fresh from the PstD vault! The following is excerpted from a transcribed interview with Glen Hirshberg and Peter Atkins, conducted by Sean Moreland and James Greatrex on October 24, 2010. Atkins and Hirshberg had just performed as the Rolling Darkness Revue at the Mayfair Theatre the night before, as part of that year’s Ottawa International Writer’s Festival. This interview originally appeared in our inaugural issue, Postscripts to Darkness Volume 1. We owe a great deal to these gentlemen for the inspiration. Read more about how the Rolling Darkness Revue helped ignite our project.

Peter Atkins was part of Clive Barker’s The Dog Company in 1970s Liverpool. He is an actor, composer, and novelist, and is perhaps best known for his work as a screenwriter. Credits include the Hellraiser and Wishmaster series. He has twice been nominated for a British Fantasy Award. Glen Hirshberg is author of The Snowman’s Children (2002) and The Two Sams (2003). His latest novel, Motherless Child, is due out spring 2014. His work has earned him a Shirley Jackson Award, several International Horror Guild awards, and has been nominated twice for a World Fantasy Award. Hirshberg and Atkins founded the Rolling Darkness Revue in 2004.

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