Usually my stories come out of nowhere, but now and again, if things have gone quiet, I actively try to make one happen. Such was the case with ‘The Bowels of Hell’. I was changing my son’s nappy one morning and thinking that it had been a long time between horror story ideas. So I prodded my imagination it promptly served up an image of a tiny devil emerging from my son’s backside.
The best ideas always kick off a chain reaction of additional ideas, and within a few minutes I had conceived almost the entire plot of ‘The Bowels of Hell’, including the title (whereupon I cackled with delight).
It arrived at a time when work on a novel had stalled, and I was relieved to set that aside and get started on ‘Bowels’, which (pardon the pun) came out in three joyous sittings.
It was also the pulpiest thing I had written in years and, while its events serve as a metaphor for more mundane parental anxieties, that’s about as lofty as the story’s pretensions go. This is a 1980s-style horror-comedy, pure and simple.
Kris Ashton 