The Black Beacon Book of Horror will be released on Friday the 13th of October; the Kindle version is available for pre-order at just $1.99 instead of $3.99 and you can add the anthology to your Goodreads list today. To get you in the mood for a particularly spooky Halloween this year, we’re interviewing the contributing authors. The first Black Beacon Book of Horror is bound to give you the creeps!
Hi Kev,
Why do you write horror?
I grew up with irresponsible parents who let me watch horror movies and raid my dad’s library of novels by Herbert and King, and a whole collection of The Unexplained magazine at a too young age. I first wrote a scary story for a talent show on a school camp at the end of middle school. Lots of the other kids stayed up all night, refusing to turn their lanterns off. The teachers were furious, but I was delighted. That really flicked a switch in my head.
The Choir is a story I wrote a couple years ago now. It was one that, when I sent it to beta readers, they all came back saying it was perhaps the best short of mine they’d read. But the length and the fact it has a lot of central themes meant that it wasn’t a good fit for a lot of venues. So, I’ve been waiting for the right home for it to come along. I’m delighted I now have done.
Do you have an all-time favourite horror tale?
My favourites tend to change almost as often as my socks. One which always sticks with me is Michael Griffin’s short novella, Hieroglyphs of Blood and Bone. Something about the weird and the mundane meeting, symbols for the reader to decode (or not), the ambiguous nature of so much of it just hits exactly the right spot for me. I think about how I felt when reading that story often.
What books did you grow up reading?
My first horror novel was The Rats by James Herbert, followed by Salem’s Lot and It. I was young enough that some of the nuances were doubtless lost on me. But I also liked fairytale-like stories such as Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of Nimh, or the grotesquery and dark humour of the work of Roald Dahl.
Do you have any writing rituals?
I used to have a few, but life changes in response to the pandemic meant that I really had to ditch them and learn to write in those pockets of time I had, whenever they cropped up. I still prefer to be sitting in my Poang chair in my lounge with a cold drink and some instrumental mood music playing, but if thirty minutes on a rickety train is all I have, then I’ll pop my earphones in and do what I can with that.
Would you share something about yourself that your readers don’t know yet?
When I was at university in the West Midlands of England, I worked in a Poundstretcher store selling cheap products as a way to earn beer money. While there, I learned that a ghost lived in the attic storage area. It would open bottles of knock off buttercup syrup cough medicine and throw it all over the walls when there were only two of us in the building, both downstairs. The smell was awful.
Where can we find you online?
My Twitter/X handle is @LisboetaIngles, my website is www.kevharrisonfiction.com – do reach out, I’m very friendly.
Thanks for answering our questions.
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