GK I like to jump between both formats. I normally turn to short stories between drafts of novels. A novel is a long process and can take years to complete to a publishable standard, so writing a few short stories between drafts means that I can work through some of the ideas I’ve had while writing the novel. It also allows you to feel the satisfaction of fully completing a project, which helps with the motivation when you’re in the middle of a long project like a novel.
AW A lot of authors have told me they avoid short stories because they are too confining. I love the challenge the constraint of the number of words presents. How about you?
GK I’m the same. Having a word count to hit really helps to challenge my writing abilities as every page, paragraph, sentence and word has to work. You can’t afford weak writing in short stories, so you have to tighten your prose, find better ways to say what you want to say but in fewer words which means exploring variations in sentence structure, using strong verbs and then editing ruthlessly to make sure everything works. This then helps to feed into my novel writing as it improves your writing craft.
AW I could not agree more! Your novels are crime/crime thrillers, so why choose horror for the anthology.
GK My writing roots lie in the Horror genre. The very first story I ever wrote and completed was inspired by The Craft and the Lost Boys. I’d seen The Craft in the cinema and loved it, and afterwards, I started asking myself what would happen if the witches in The Craft met the vampires in the Lost Boys and the story rolled out from there.
Reading-wise, the first writers I binge-read were James Herbert and Shaun Hutson. I loved their books not only because they were scary but the settings that they used also reflected the world around me. Anne Rice’s vampire novels were a massive inspiration for me also.
Over the years my reading and my writing diversified, and I’ve written across a wide range of genres with varying degrees of success, but I always gravitate back to horror. Even with my novels, Badlands and Bleak Waters, while they’re predominantly thriller/mystery stories, there is a streak of the supernatural running through them, particularly in Bleak Waters.
AW What about research for your horror stories? Was any required or was it all imagination?
GK A lot of the ideas, themes and settings came about because of things that interested me already (archaeology, music, vampires, witchcraft & paganism for example) so the only real research was fact checking the topics that interested me and featured in the stories. I tend to write what I know, albeit dressing it up with a large dose of the supernatural or weird.
Place inspired a lot of my work too and it was the same with some of these stories. Cornwall features again in a couple as well as the London Underground.
The title story, The Mistress of the Crows, was inspired by walking along a normally busy road near where I live and finding it deserted in mid-winter (this was way before Covid lockdowns). That just got my imagination firing and the story rolled from there.
AW And finally, you find yourself in a crumbling old house and one of your own evil characters from your short stories appears and is about to kill you. Tell us who that character is, and if you are able to escape, how do you do so?
GK If they’re supernatural, they probably wouldn’t have to do much to kill me to be honest! The minute a vampire or ghost turned up I’d drop dead with fear!
For me, the scariest villain in the stories in the anthology is probably Jared from Beast of Bodmin and he is definitely human. And a nasty one too. In those circumstances I’d probably kick him where it hurts then run like merry hell and hope I was faster! Lol!
about the book … A young girl wakes up in a world of perpetual winter, a world with no adults, ruled by a strange changeling boy and haunted by a shadowy figure flocked by a murder of crows...
An impulse buy leads to an encounter with a vengeful ghost and a steampunk pixie intent on taking back what is hers...
A team of archaeologists uncover a neolithic tomb containing a creature from their darkest nightmares, a creature whose curse is already working its way through their veins...
Featuring new takes on the classic horror staples of vampires, witches, ghosts, the weird and the paranormal, The Mistress of The Crows and Other Tales of Horror, Darkness, Love and Redemption contains nine stories PLUS the bonus short story, the Ballad of Jonny Pheonix and the Hellcat.
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