They had some wonderfully horrifying radio shows in those days, too - Suspense, Escape, and Quiet, Please. I've always loved a good scare, perhaps because the "Oz" and "Alice" books, the first things my mother read to me, are pretty scary stuff for a toddler. I spent a lot of time crawling around beneath rusted machinery and through barbed wire looking for the Bogeyman, but no luck. When I was three or four, an older kid tried to scare me away from a barn full of dangerous junk by telling me the Bogeyman lived there. Do you think of yourself as a horror writer now? And what drew you to write horror? You might say I try to make death a bit scarier than it really is.Įd Bryant and others identify you as a horror writer from way back. Unlike some of the people in my tales, I don't expect to know it when I'm dead. It's always fascinated me, but I can't say I fear it. Death, of course, is the ultimate manipulator. Madness, disease, addiction, imprisonment - all of these can take control of you. The ghouls who infest The Throne of Bones have the power to possess the personalities of the corpses they eat - often to the point where the "subsumed" persons believe they are still alive and acting normally. His critics may find fault with it, but I think "The Thing on the Doorstep" is his scariest story. Lovecraft's work so much is because that fear is central to so many of his tales. The things we fear tend to attract us, don't they? Although I have been known to drink too much and will probably do so again, what I fear most is losing control of my words, my thoughts, my life. What do you most fear - and how does it work its way into your fiction? McNaughton was kind enough to discuss writing and his book with me via email.Ĭlive Barker clearly fears (or at least is fascinated by) bodily decay, and that fear is hard-wired into his work. It's little wonder, then, that McNaughton's collection was picked up as a featured selection by the SF Book Club and has made the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award. Even more startling, especially considering the normal fare offered by the horror genre these days, there is a tenderness to McNaughton's stories which creates a unique sense of pathos. Shades of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, yes, but updated and renovated with a wit and style particular to McNaughton. McNaughton's ability to create a fresh and different face for a genre of work many readers and critics have considered long since mined out is almost as impressive as the ingenious storylines, the compelling characters, ghoulish and otherwise. Brian McNaughton's The Throne of Bones, published by Terminal Fright Press, was without a doubt the best dark fantasy collection published in 1997.
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