Why horror fiction?
As Stephen King once said, “Why do you assume I have a choice?” I just always seemed to slant that way, right from early childhood. My first-ever story was about decapitating giant chickens with a sword and by the age of ten the fictional version of me was time-travelling back to the 17th century to confront Elizabeth Bathory. My writing features elements of fantasy, comedy, SF, romance, lit-fic, slipstream and what have you, but the widest seam has always been horror.
What inspired you to put this collection together?
Well, I saw that Brain Jar Press was looking for chapbook collections, so it really was as simple as that! However, I had been keeping a running list of flash fiction, micro fiction, drabbles, poetry etc with an eye to compiling a bumper volume at some point, so I was already primed for this concept. There was a 10k cap, so I assembled twenty stories to suit and submitted the collection to BJP, who accepted it on the condition that they reduce it to thirteen stories in order to best fit their chapbook format.
What can people expect from this collection? What themes do you touch upon?
Oh, there’s all sorts. Unfortunate children, grieving ghosts, undefined entities – surprising pathos, sick jokes, existential horror – groanworthy punchlines, explicit sex and violence, excursions into the surreal… all in about eight thousand words! It’s interesting that children often pop up as leads in my very short fiction, since I don’t usually include them in my other work, and that their stories often include gleefully dark humour. I don’t have much interest in YA or middle-grade fiction apart from sentimental memories from my past, but based on this evidence, I could make a good fist of it.
A lot of your fiction is rooted in the traumas/vices people struggle with – where does this come from?
It’s interesting that you would note this, so it’s probably more obvious than I realised – but yes, my characters are often struggling through life in one way or another, dealing with past traumas and leaning on emotional crutches to cope. I think this strand is becoming more apparent in my recent fiction, though perhaps not so much in Bites Eyes. There is a personal angle to this, of course, although I think I’ve come through life relatively unscathed; the same cannot be said of many people dear to me, and I suspect I use my writing partly as a way to try and understand why horrible things happen, partly as a way to shine a light on the silent heroism of the survivors, and partly because we’re all bearing our own heavy crosses and pretending we don’t (sometimes out of some misguided attempt to avoid politics in fiction, as if that were remotely possible) is contemptibly ignorant. As awareness of people’s struggles grows, so does our artistic response to it, and if that doesn’t include empathy then that creator is probably just a fucking hack. As for the vices, well… many of my characters drink and smoke and toke, but that’s probably down to the same old saw: write what you know.
Naturally, you’d be proud of all the stories in the collection, but is there one that you feel defines the work, or your “voice” as a horror writer?
Not really, no, for the simple reason that flash fiction requires a different discipline to the more involved pieces I prefer to write. In short fiction, I like to stretch out into the novelette range so I can include lots of detail and colour and tell a well-rounded story; the pieces in Bites Eyes don’t have that luxury – they have to get in, make their point, and take a bow. It’s an important skill to harness as a writer and I would recommend all scribes take the time to master it, whether it’s in your usual wheelhouse or not. This discipline can help with longer works – my story “Visitation Rites”, which you accepted for Midnight Echo 17, would normally have grown out to be at least seven thousand words if I’d given myself free reign and would’ve featured a lot more lyrical content, but keeping it at five thousand meant having to be very selective. There was no room for digressions or detailed descriptions, and since I had to cut the comfortable first draft down by eight hundred words, the discipline acquired through writing drabbles helped me to ensure that every single word could justify its presence. Which is not to say that longer works use unjustified words and simply waffle on because they can, more that a novel needs less of its content to be, shall we say, load-bearing sentences, and can install entire chapters as feature walls if the urge takes one. Let me cap off that tortured metaphor by saying that my authorial voice is clearer in my longer works, whether they be novelettes like “Flights of Fractured Angels”, novellas like The Dark Matter of Natasha, or novels like Midnight in the Chapel of Love.
Photo by Red Wallflower Photography
Which authors, living or dead, inspire you?
So, so many! Seriously, there are hundreds and many of them are friends of mine, but let’s list a few and break them into those two categories, shall we? The living authors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Laird Barron, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tamsyn Muir, Alan Moore, Kaaron Warren, Catriona Ward, Dennis Lehane, Neil Gaiman, Philip Fracassi, Kirstyn McDermott, and J. Ashley-Smith. As for dead authors: Richard Laymon, Dennis Etchison, H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, Tanith Lee, Shirley Jackson, Karl Edward Wagner, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Terrance Dicks, Melanie Tem, Robert E. Howard, and William Burroughs.
What’s a recent work you read and enjoyed?
I can’t focus on just one, so please indulge me as I regale you with a list from the last couple of months: in anthologies, Alan Baxter’s Damnation Games and Ellen Datlow’s Screams from the Dark; in collections, The Ghost Sequences by A.C. Wise and Cut to Care by Aaron Dries; in non-fiction, A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber & Andrea Janes and Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst; and in novels, 36 Streets by T.R. Napper and White Horse by Erika T. Wurth, not forgetting Zachary Ashford’s forthcoming Faustian death metal opus Polyphemus.
What’s in the pipeline for you?
I have a non-fiction book about The Cure coming out this year, or whenever they finally release that bloody new record! I also have stories in the forthcoming anthologies Where the Weird Things Are Vol. 2 (Deadset Press) and Unknown Superheroes vs. the Forces of Darkness (Ghastly Door Press), plus an essay on Mary Shelley in Claire Fitzpatrick’s A Vindication of Monsters (IFWG Publications) – as you’re no doubt aware, Greg! And as usual, I have a ream of short stories, novellas, collections, and such out on submission that will hopefully soon bear rich fruit. I also have approximately eighty ideas clamouring to be written all at once, including a new novel, and other potential projects to sort out.
On a slightly different note, I’ve set myself the goal of writing a new piece of flash fiction every day in February, which is going quite well – the tales are unrelated but stitched together into a kind of mosaic, in the vein of Harlan Ellison’s “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet” but with days instead of letters. I don’t know what I’ll do with an unwieldy beast like this, but I’m open to suggestions.
Where can people buy a copy of Bites Eyes?
You can buy it direct from the Brain Jar Press shop (www.brainjarpress.com/product/bites-eyes/), which also contains a number of links to other sites where you can order the book.
Links to your website and socials?
I don’t get into this as much as some people do, or as I perhaps should, because I don’t have the time or inclination to fawn for attention and so will probably languish forever in obscurity as a result – but I have a blog at www.matthewrdavisfiction.wordpress.com and you can find me on Facebook.
