World of Horror: Interview with Marty Young

  Marty Young is a Bram Stoker nominated and multiple Australian Shadows award-winning writer and editor, and sometimes ghost hunter. His fiction and anthologies have been nominated for and won numerous awards, while his essays on horror literature have been published in journals and university textbooks across the world.  Marty was also the founding president of the Australian Horror Writers Association from 2005-2010, and one of the creative minds behind the internationally acclaimed Midnight Echo Magazine, for which he also served as executive editor until mid-2013. As of 2023, Marty is the co-chair of Asylumfest, an all-new annual Australian horror…

World of Horror: Interview with J. Ashley Smith

J. Ashley Smith is a British-Australian author of dark fiction and co-host of the Let The Cat In podcast. His first book, The Attic Tragedy, won the Shirley Jackson Award. Other stories have won the Ditmar Australian Shadows and Aurealis awards. He lives with his wife and two sons beneath an ominous mountain in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires. You can find him at spooktapes.net, performing amazing experiments in electronic communication with the dead. His debut collection, The Measure of Sorrow, is out now from Meerkat Press. What was it…

World of Horror: Interview with Kyla Lee Ward

Kyla Lee Ward is a Sydney-based creative whose work has garnered Australian Shadows and Aurealis awards. She has placed in the Rhyslings and received multiple Stoker and Ditmar nominations. Reviewers have accused her of being “gothic and esoteric,” “weird and exhilarating” and of “giving me a nightmare.” This Attraction Now Late (2022) was her first collection of short fiction, after two poetry collections and the co-written novel, Prismatic. Those That Pursue Us Yet, a dark fantasy novella set in Paris and . . . other places, is due for release in 2023. Delve deeper at http://www.kylaward.com/ or come chat at…

World of Horror: Interview with Kaaron Warren

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren has published five novels and seven short story collections. She’s sold over 200 short stories to publications big and small around the world and has appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best anthologies. Her novel The Grief Hole won all three Australian genre awards. She has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Fiji and Canberra and her most recent books are The Deathplace Set in Vandal, and Bitters, a novella from Cemetery Dance. She won the inaugural AsylumFest Ghost Story Telling Competition in 2022. What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? Even as…

World of Horror: Interview with Greg Chapman

  Bram Stoker Award® nominee and multiple Australian Shadows Award nominee Greg Chapman is a horror author and artist based in Queensland, Australia.  Greg is the author of several novels, novellas, and short stories, including his award-nominated debut novel, Hollow House, and collections, Vaudeville and Other Nightmares and This Sublime Darkness and Other Dark Stories. His next book is the collection, Midnight Masquerade, coming this Halloween from IFWG Publishing. He is also a horror artist and designer and his first graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times, (McFarland & Company) written by Rocky Wood and Lisa…

World of Horror: Interview with Alan Baxter

Alan Baxter is a multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy liberally mixed with crime, mystery, and noir. He’s also a martial artist, a whisky-soaked swear monkey, and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia. Find Alan online at: https://www.alanbaxteronline.com/. What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? Honesty. I’ve said many times that horror is the genre of honesty. It doesn’t shy away from harsh truths, it follows the rabbit hole all the way down. No manufactured happy endings, you find truth…

World of Horror: Introduction to International Horror Month 2023 by Alan Baxter

By Alan Baxter It has long been recognised that the USA is the main focus of attention when it comes to horror fiction. If that hasn’t been noticed by people in North America, it most certainly has by everyone outside the country. But there is a growing interest in horror set beyond America’s shores, and for stories written by authors from other countries and other cultures. One of my most successful books is The Gulp, an unashamedly Australian collection of horror stories set very much in rural New South Wales, Australia. We’ve seen a surge of successful horror from European…