Kris Ashton

Home renovations, family commitments and my day job have left scant time to update my website. But the silver lining is I now have plenty of news to relate about upcoming publications.

First off, the recently released Aurealis #150 features my essay, ‘The slow-burn brilliance of Midnight Mass‘ – a dissection and appreciation of Mike Flanagan’s exceptional Netflix series. Here’s a short excerpt:

Like many Gen X/Y writers, [Flanagan] suckled at Stephen King’s creative teat and King wrote the rule book on character-building in a small town setting without boring the reader. This means the reader invests in the characters and feels more keenly the misfortune that befalls them later. Flanagan uses this as a blueprint for Midnight Mass, often devoting two-thirds of the early episodes to character development and garden variety drama before bringing the supernatural element to bear.

A later edition of Aurealis will play host to another essay, ‘Individualism in 20th Century dystopian fiction’. This one delves into four landmark works in the genre published between 1930 and 1970: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. Rather than simply reheat the same old thematic discussions, I approached each book from an individualist perspective and, I hope, put a new spin on titles that are nearly threadbare from decades of critical evaluation.

Things are no quieter on the fiction front. On the way shortly is Sci-Fi Lampoon’s unforgettably-titled The Fuckening, which will contain my longish story ‘Imaginary Murder’. The Fuckening is an anthology dedicated to humourous speculative fiction about everything going wrong, and that’s an apt description of ‘Imaginary Murder’.

I’ve also just signed a contract with Vanishing Point, a new fiction magazine, to publish my short story ‘Bloodborne’ – a creepy, nasty, skin-crawling tale of isolation and infection.

Third up is another project I’m not at liberty to speak about, but it’s perhaps the most exciting – a very Australian novella that will appear under the auspices of a small-press Australian publisher. More on that when the time comes.