Among the Headstones - Interview with Pamela Turner

I’ve interviewed fellow contributor to Among the Headstones: Creepy Tales from the Graveyard, Pamela Turner, as part of the preparations for the release of the anthology early next year. Full details about the haunting anthology are provided at the end of the interview.

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How do you feel about cemeteries? Do find them creepy?

When I was growing up in my hometown, I believed the local cemetery was haunted. No one had told me it was. I believed it because I read horror anthologies in elementary school, and it fed my imagination. I remember thinking how scary it must be for those living near the cemetery, especially after dark. Now cemeteries are some of my favorite places to visit. I like learning about the different symbols, looking at the statues, and even discovering a unique headstone.

How would you like to be buried?

Since my husband was a veteran, I will probably be buried with him in the veterans’ cemetery. On Veterans Day this year, I met a veteran who told me that when a spouse dies and is buried with the veteran, his or her information is engraved on the other side of the veteran’s headstone. Next time I go to the cemetery, I’m going to look for this.

What scared you when you were a child?

Dolls. Believing my dolls would steal my soul, I made them face the wall before I went to bed. And one was a Raggedy Ann doll. At the time, I didn’t know about the infamous Annabelle, which was probably a good thing. I’ve since read Algernon Blackwood’s short story and watched the Night Gallery episode.

What’s your favourite horror book? What do you like about it?

The Shining by Stephen King is my favorite horror novel. A family is trapped in a hotel during the winter with the father/caretaker slowly going mad and threatening his wife and son. But his wife fights back to save her family.

Who is your favourite Gothic author? Why?

Shirley Jackson is my favorite Gothic author. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House is, along with The Shining, one of the creepiest stories I’ve read. It impresses me how she made the house itself a character and a sinister one. Also, I’ll never forget the ending. What I’m curious about is what happened in Hill House to cause the haunting, although I don’t think that’s ever explained.

For readers who are new to your fiction, which of your books would be a good start?

My novella The Ripper’s Daughter, which takes place ten years after the Ripper’s murder spree. Prostitutes are showing up dead in Louisville, Kentucky, and a former detective inspector turned vampire/tavern owner fears Jack is responsible.

ABOUT PAMELA TURNER

Pamela Turner’s love for the paranormal began in elementary school, where she discovered anthologies filled with ghosts, witches, vampires, and other creatures that go bump in the night. Then there was Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and that creepy doll. Fearing her Raggedy Ann doll would steal her soul, Pamela made the doll face the wall before she went to bed.

Despite this, her interest in the supernatural continued. In middle school, she penned her own tales of terror. Fellow students enjoyed them, and she dreamed of becoming a published author.

After a short stint as a freelance magazine writer, she decided to return to writing fiction. She's also an award-winning screenplay writer.

Currently, she writes paranormal suspense featuring vampires, dragons, angels, and demons. Just don’t expect her angels to always be good or her demons to always be evil.

Many of her stories are set in Louisville, Kentucky where she lives with her daughter and herds three rescue cats. When not writing, she enjoys anime and manga, weaving, aviation, cemeteries, and abandoned buildings.

You can find her at https://pamturner.net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PamelaTurnerAuthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pamturner97/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pamelaturner

ABOUT THE BOOK

AMONG THE HEADSTONES: CREEPY TALES FROM THE GRAVEYARD

This anthology, edited by Rayne Hall, presents twenty-seven of the finest - and creepiest - graveyard tales with stories by established writers, classic authors and fresh voices.

Here you will find Gothic ghost stories by Robert Ellis, Lee Murray, Greg Chapman, Morgan Pryce, Rayne Hall, Guy de Maupassant, Myk Pilgrim, Zachary Ashford, Amelia Edwards, Nina Wibowo, Krystal Garrett, Tylluan Penry, Ambrose Bierce, Cinderella Lo, Nikki Tait, Arthur Conan Doyle, Priscilla Bettis, Kyla Ward, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul D Dail, Cameron Trost, Pamela Turner, William Meikle and Lord Dunsany who thrill with their eerie, macabre and sometimes quirky visions.

You'll visit graveyards in Britain, Indonesia, Russia, China, Italy, Bulgaria, Thailand, USA, Australia, South Africa and Japan, and you can marvel at the burial customs of other cultures.

Now let’s open the gate - can you hear it creak on its hinges? - and enter the realm of the dead. Listen to the wind rustling the yew, the grating of footsteps on gravel, the hoo-hoo-hoo of the collared dove. Run your fingers across the tombstones to feel their lichen-rough sandstone or smooth cool marble. Inhale the scents of decaying lilies and freshly dug earth.

But be careful. Someone may be watching your every movement... They may be right behind you.

Purchase Link: mybook.to/Headstones

The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2022. (After that date, the price will go up.) The paperback is already published.

Among the Headstones - Interview with Kyla Lee Ward

I’ve interviewed fellow contributor to Among the Headstones: Creepy Tales from the Graveyard, Kyla Lee Ward, as part of the preparations for the release of the anthology early next year. Full details about the haunting anthology are provided at the end of the interview.

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What are cemeteries like in the country where you live?

The main things that differentiate Australian cemeteries from those in Britain or other British colonies are the dangers of heatstroke and snakes. And spiders - really large spiders that live in holes. The cemetery of Rookwood covers 314 hectares and large tracts have gone quite wild. I know whereof I speak.

What gives you the creeps?

Let’s see – if it’s not graveyards, snakes, spiders, or nightfall, then it must be people. Not all people, but certainly some. What people can do to each other and the scars it leaves, sometimes in the very walls.

What do you like about the Gothic Fiction genre?

To me, the Gothic is about coming home. That’s one of its key tropes – the young outsider who enters the crumbling mansion, discovering its secrets and those of their own heritage. Think of Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour and Tanith Lee’s Dark Dance. Finding a place where you belong, even if it is stained with murder and full of ghosts and bats. Especially if it’s full of ghosts and bats, and people behaving very, very badly. That’s history - the present is just a tiny, shiny ticket booth at the entrance to that old pile. You can’t understand who you are until you enter.

What’s the scariest story you’ve written?

Oh goodness, how do I answer this? The two Stoker nominees, “And In Her Eyes The City Drowned” and “Should Fire Remember the Fuel?” must be considered officially good as well as officially scary. The former has been translated into Japanese, which may give it an edge – but that story of mine which has been most reprinted is a very short and wry piece titled “The Loquacious Cadaver”. It is also included in The Macabre Modern and Other Morbidities.

How do you go about research for the fiction you write?

I read a great deal of history, myth and legend, custom and tradition. Past endeavours have found me in the Special Collection of the Mitchell Library, teasing out a description of Memphis written by a Persian adventurer in the 12th century, from a book printed in the 19th century, in my extremely shaky French – now that I think about it, there had to be an easier way. But when you’re dealing with a place that still exists, there is no substitute for having visited it yourself. I have been privileged to travel and find that some places present me with stories on platters, while the memory of others may lurk for years in the back of my mind before the right tale presents itself.

Another fine method of research is visiting museums (always take a sketchbook and make notes about every photo you take) and engaging in historical re-enactments. I am a part of the medieval re-enactment movement in Australia, and I assure you, it is much easier to describe the sensation of moving in armour once you have done so.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a dark fantasy novel and pulling together the material for my first full story collection. I have written substantial new work for this, including a novella concerning necromancy and the French revolution that makes extensive use of the Paris catacombs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kyla Lee Ward is a Sydney-based creative who works in many modes, that have garnered her Australian Shadows and Aurealis awards. She has placed in the Rhyslings and received Stoker and Ditmar nominations.Reviewers have accused her of being “gothic and esoteric”, “weird and exhilarating” and of “giving me a nightmare.” Her latest release is The Macabre Modern and Other Morbidities, her second collection of dark and fantastic poetry after 2011's The Land of Bad Dreams. Her novel Prismatic (co-authored with her partner as "Edwina Grey") won an Aurealis Award for Best Horror. 

Her short fiction has appeared in the likes of Weirdbook, Shadowed Realms, Gothic.net and in the anthologies Oz Is Burning and Gods, Memes and Monsters: a 21st century Bestiary. Her work on RPGs including Demon: the Fallen saw her appear as a guest at the inaugural Gencon Australia. An artist and actor as well as an author, her short film, 'Bad Reception', screened at the Third International Vampire Film Festival and she is a member of both the Deadhouse immersive theatre company and the Theatre of Blood, which have also produced her work. In addition, she programmed the horror stream for the 2010 Worldcon. A practicing occultist, she likes raptors, swordplay and the Hellfire Club. To see some very strange things, try http://www.kylaward.com

ABOUT THE BOOK

Among the Headstones: Creepy Tales from the Graveyard edited by Rayne Hall, presents twenty-seven of the finest - and creepiest - graveyard tales with stories by established writers, classic authors and fresh voices.

Here you'll find Gothic ghost stories by Robert Ellis, Lee Murray, Greg Chapman, Morgan Pryce, Rayne Hall, Guy de Maupassant, Myk Pilgrim, Zachary Ashford, Amelia Edwards, Nina Wibowo, Krystal Garrett, Tylluan Penry, Ambrose Bierce, Cinderella Lo, Nikki Tait, Arthur Conan Doyle, Priscilla Bettis, Kyla Ward, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul D Dail, Cameron Trost, Pamela Turner, William Meikle and Lord Dunsany who thrill with their eerie, macabre and sometimes quirky visions.

You'll visit graveyards in Britain, Indonesia, Russia, China, Italy, Bulgaria, Thailand, USA, Australia, South Africa and Japan, and you can marvel at the burial customs of other cultures.

Now let's open the gate - can you hear it creak on its hinges? - and enter the realm of the dead. Listen to the wind rustling the yew, the grating of footsteps on gravel, the hoo-hoo-hoo of the collared dove. Run your fingers across the tombstones to feel their lichen-rough sandstone or smooth cool marble. Inhale the scents of decaying lilies and freshly dug earth.

But be careful. Someone may be watching your every movement... They may be right behind you.

Purchase Link: mybook.to/Headstones 

The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2022. (After that date, the price will go up.) A paperback will follow.

Into the Woods: An Anthology of Sylvan Stories

"Forgotten Falls", a sylvan story about a German metaphysicist on a personal journey to a haunted waterfall in remote Australia, is out now in "Into the Woods". It joins a host of atmospheric tales set in forests from the likes of Ramsey Campbell and Tracy Fahey. Hannah Kate, the editor, has kindly answered a few questions about the anthology, forests, and her publishing project, Hic Dragones.

 1. The title of the anthology, Into the Woods, is very evocative. What inspired you to choose this theme?

A lot of our favourite fiction has a distinctive sense of place – from Stephen King’s New England to Agatha Christie’s country houses – and so we do tend towards publishing stories that have a strong connection to particular spaces (real and fictional). The novels we’ve published all have this – with the seaside (Blood and Water), the city (Aimee and the Bear and Psychic Spiders!) and the forest (The Tattooed Wolf) – and our anthologies also tend to have this focus. A lot of the stories in Hauntings focused on uncanny and unsettling inside spaces, so it made sense that our next collection would be outside. The woods were an obvious choice, because there are just so many different types of forests and woodlands, and they evoke so many different types of response.

2. Do you have a favourite forest, and what draws you to it?

I have a soft spot for those ‘forests’ that are called ‘semi-natural woodland’ in the UK. These are patches of woodland that have mostly grown up naturally – often on the site of ancient forests – but which may only be a few hundred years old and may be the result of replanting. As a child, I lived near Inglewood Forest in Cumbria and then next to Blackley Forest in Manchester, so these are the sorts of woods that I’m used to. What fascinates me about these woodlands is the way the history of trees interweaves with the history of people. Trees are felled and houses built, but then houses are demolished and a forest is planted. I think people often overlook this complex history, because they assume that a forest is either ancient woodland or a new cultivation, and that once a forest is cut down that’s the end of the story. I like the places in between, the places that aren’t ancient but aren’t new either. My story in Into the Woods takes place in urban woodland spaces – those places where the trees came back. Officially, these woodlands are created and maintained by people… but maybe the forest also finds its own ways to exert control?

My current favourite examples of urban woodland spaces are all in North Manchester: Bowker Bank Woods (in Crumpsall), Baileys Wood (in Blackley) and Boggart Hole Clough (also in Blackley).

3. Forests have always had a deep-rooted effect on the human psyche, whether as places of refuge or of danger. Why do you think this is? Has this changed over time as the world’s forests dwindle?

I think our fascination with forests goes hand-in-hand with our project of deforestation, to be honest. In Britain, ancient forests began to be systematically cut down during the Anglo-Saxon period (it’s not a new phenomenon!), but a kind of folk memory of the forest has persisted. For instance, despite the fact that it hasn’t been true for over a millennium (if, indeed, it was ever true), it’s still reasonably well-known that once upon a time you could cross the entire country without ever touching the ground. On the one hand, I think there’s a nostalgia about the forest – it’s part of the ancient landscape, and so it’s a romantic and imaginative place. On the other hand, there’s a sort of buried guilt about its destruction – it’s something natural and powerful that was destroyed (is still being destroyed) by the relentless march of human progress. In a way, it’s a bit like our relationship with certain wild animals, like wolves (in the UK particularly). We don’t have to live in the forest with the wolves anymore, so we’re free to idealise and romanticise them – but we also know it was us that killed the wolves and uprooted the trees, and there’s always the fear of being somehow held to account one day.

4. What are your aims for Hic Dragones?

Hic Dragones is a micropress with ambitions of becoming a small press – we’re not after global domination just yet! At the moment, we’re focusing on publishing a small number of new books each year, and on publishing our new editions of Victorian penny dreadfuls. As well as Into the Woods, we have another anthology coming out this year (Nothing) and then we’ll be opening submissions for our next project. We’re currently publishing instalments of our edition of George Reynolds’s Faust – an early Victorian penny dreadful about the man who sold his soul to the devil. We’re really pleased to be able to publish Faust, as this is the first modern edition of Reynolds’s serial, and we’ve been able to include the original illustrations as well. Once Faust comes to the end of its run, we’re going to be announcing the publication dates for Spring Heel’d Jack. In a nutshell, I guess our aims are pretty simple: we just want to keep publishing stories that we like and encouraging people to read them!

5. You chose to include my story, Forgotten Falls, in the anthology. Thanks, by the way. What was it that appealed to you?

For me, the story’s appeal lay in the way that all-important sense of place was combined with a sense of character. Without any heavy-handed exposition, we get to know the protagonist Schenker and the things that have brought him to where he is at the start of the story – but Schenker’s history (and his future) are completely bound up with the forest in which he finds himself. He believes he is completely in control of his surroundings – in fact, he’s so busy thinking about people that he barely gives the forest itself a second though – but is he really in control?

Another thing I liked about the story was the type of forest that you chose. As I said, there are so many different types of woods and forests, so we were keen to reflect this in the stories we chose. ‘Forgotten Falls’ takes us to a subtropical rainforest, a place that’s very different from the ancient forests, urban woodlands and patches of wilderness found in other stories in the collection. One of the real pleasures of putting together Into the Woods came from seeing the ways in which writers evoked such an interesting array of settings.

6. Lastly, where can we buy a copy?

The book is available in paperback and eBook from our website and from all good online retailers, including Amazon. For readers in the UK, the paperback edition can also be ordered by local bookshops and libraries.

Bio: Hannah Kate is an editor and writer based in North Manchester. She is the founder and editor-in-chief at Hic Dragones, and has had stories and poetry published in a number of anthologies and magazines. She also presents a weekly literature show on North Manchester FM, imaginatively entitled Hannah’s Bookshelf, and she is currently the treasurer of the Friends of Crumpsall Park.

Links: Hic Dragones – www.hic-dragones.co.uk (FB: hicdragones, Twitter: @HicDragones) Hannah Kate – hannahkate.net (FB: HannahsBookshelf, Twitter: @HannahKateish)