Nothing ‘happened on tour’ at my own brain-frying buck’s night (the Australian term for a stag night), but afterwards I got thinking about the permissiveness surrounding this male rite of passage and started to imagine a soon-to-be-married man kissing an attractive stranger. It was mildly arousing, until she bit his lip off.
My favourite example of the ‘intimate embrace gone bad’ is in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, when a woman seeks the comfort of her husband’s arms only to have him take a big bite out of her shoulder. Man, I’ll never forget the first time I watched that scene. Now that was horror. The imagined lip-chomping affected me similarly, and I got to work on a story the next day.
When I revisited my first novel, Ghost Kiss, a few years after it was published, I was surprised to discover that what was supposed to be a horror novel was in fact a tragic romance with supernatural accoutrements. More recently, my story ‘Night Feeds’ ended up in a group of extreme horror stories, even though it isn’t an extreme horror tale per se. The problem, I believe, is that I’m a pulp writer with literary sensibilities. It’s an uneasy union.
‘The Stag Night’ is another example of this genre no-man’s-land I sometimes stumble into. When I sat down to write it I thought it would be a horror story, and it does have horror elements, but in truth it’s a semi-literary piece about the consequences of infidelity.
Subsequently, no one wanted it; the literary types turned up their noses at its pulpy violence, while the horror folks didn’t find it horrifying enough. It took a quirky market like Blood in the Rain 2, an anthology of vampire/erotica crossovers, to see its merit.
Kris Ashton 