“Catastrophic Destruction of the Head” by Margo Lanagan will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Erin Stocks interviews her on the story.

The soldier veers back and forth from being brutally violent to almost naive and desperate for love. What was it like to write those two opposing sides of his personality?

Well, neither version of him is terrifically intelligent or self-aware, and his veering is part of his lack of reflection. He doesn’t have an awful lot of control over himself; he just reacts to whatever circumstances present to him, from his gut and from what childhood lessons he’s remembered. In a way that makes him easier and more colorful to write: put an irritant in front of him and off goes his temper or his terror, so he shoots someone or destroys something, or takes a lot of drugs to avoid what he’s seeing; put a woman in front of him and he’s torn in four by mixed lust and scorn and mother-love and fear of the unknown.

Quite a lot of the story is simply presenting this veering, without him realizing how horrendous he’s being or how pathetic; it’s only at the end that he begins to feel a faint whisper of developing conscience, a realization that things don’t have to be this way. So it was exhausting, primarily. I could only watch this fellow for so long, and I was glad of any pause I got between drafts, and it was always a matter of taking a deep breath and steeling myself before plunging in again. There was very little compensatory beauty or sweetness in this story; it was a relief to be done with it, I have to say.

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At the Edge of Waking, a collection of short stories from Sunburst Award-winning Holly Phillips, with an introduction by Peter S. Beagle, to Sean Wallace at Prime Books by Sally Harding of The Cooke Agency  for publication in September 2012.

“The Lake” by Tananarive Due will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. T.J. McIntyre interviews her on the story.

“Still” by Tia Travis will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Erin Stocks interviews her on the story.

There’s a sort of quiet foreboding to this story, almost a freezing of time, which is also reflected in the title. What inspired this tale?

I grew up on the prairies, in the provinces of Manitoba and Alberta. I lived on a farm where my dad tried (and failed) to make a living growing grain; in trailers in the middle of nowhere (including my uncle’s pasture); in a series of small towns; in a mining community in Northern Manitoba where family friends lost their lives before we moved on. We were always moving, but one of the constants of that semi-nomadic lifestyle was the beautiful, melancholy, often harsh reality of the rural Canadian landscape. Some of these memories—running through endless fields, catching wind in empty jars—infuse this story. One memory stands out as inspiration for “Still”: that of racing home in a panic to inform my mother that my brother (I was four, he was three) had hooked his snowsuit on a barbed-wire fence that ran through part of frozen Snow Lake. I was too small to unhook him, though I struggled as much as a four-year-old could. (This was the 70s, pre-helicopter parenting, probably the last decade when kids ran wild and unsupervised until the streetlights came on.) I recall the guilt: the dread knowledge that I failed in my responsibility as protective Big Sister. I was sure when I returned with my mum that it would be too late: my brother would have fallen through the ice and drowned or bled to death from puncture wounds. And it would be all my fault. Lafe was cold, wet, scared, but no worse for wear except a rip in his snowsuit. We had preternatural luck in those days. And I shudder when I say that. But yes, there’s a little personal experience blended with this story’s imaginings.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!

“Near Zennor by Elizabeth Hand will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Andrew Liptak interviews her on the story.

Dread is the theme that pops to mind most readily while reading this: it’s almost more terrifying than an actual horror. How important is the buildup in a story?

I’ve long wanted write a Robert Aickman-style story — his work is so brilliant and utterly sui generis, and no matter how often I read his work, I can never figure out how he does it. It’s like trying to figure out how a master magician performs a seemingly impossible sleight-of-hand. I think that genuine dread is a more difficult emotion to evoke and sustain than horror, so I set myself the challenge of trying to write something that relied on a burgeoning sense of unease, culminating in the horror vacuii that Jeffrey experiences at the end. It’s a long slow build, and mostly I just drew on my own recent memory of wandering the moors on the cliffs surrounding Treen, looking for ancient barrows and standing stones with the wind tearing up off the ocean, and grieving for my friend.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!