The female authors of the 'Never Again' Anthology, benefitting the Sophie Lancaster Foundation

Never Again is an attempt to voice the collective revulsion of writers in the weird fiction genre against political attitudes that stifle compassion and deny our collective human inheritance.

The imagination is crucial to an understanding both of human diversity and of common ground. Weird fiction is often stigmatised as a reactionary and ignorant genre - we know better. The anthology is published by Gray Friar Press and edited by Allyson Bird and Joel Lane. The Sophie Lancaster Foundation is one of the three organisations which will benefit from the proceeds of Never Again. It is just over three years since the brutal slaying of Sophie Lancaster, a girl who was murdered for simply being different. I hope that people will pre order the anthology so we here at FanGirlTastic can help, too. Other organisations which will benefit from this anthology are Amnesty International and PEN (PEN is an international organisation set up to promote literature and human rights, encouraging translation and campaigning against political censorship).

The editors, authors/artist and publisher will receive no fees for this work. Any profits made from sales will be donated to anti-racist or human rights organizations. The anthology is a non-profit initiative aimed at promoting awareness of these issues among readers and writers of weird fiction. The anthology is a mix of original stories and reprints from Lisa Tuttle, Joe R. Lansdale and Ramsey Campbell. Because FanGirlTastic is a site created by women for women in the horror, sci-fi and fantasy genre I interviewed the female contributors. The male writers who contributed include
R.J. Krijnen-Kemp (Volk), John Howard (A Flowering Wound) Tony Richards (Sense), R.B. Russell (Decision), Mat Joiner (South of Autumn), Rhys Hughes (Rediffusion), Simon Kurt Unsworth (A Place For Feeding) Joe R. Lansdale (The Night They Missed the Horror Show) Steve Duffy (The Torturer) Gary McMahon (Methods of Confinement) Rob Shearman (Damned If You Don’t) Andrew Hook (Beyond Each Blue Horizon) Ramsey Campbell (The Depths) Simon Bestwick (Malachi) Stephen Volk (After the Ape) and David Sutton (Zulu’s War).

Lisa Tuttle was born in the United States, but has been resident in Britain for almost thirty years. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. She is the author of eight novels (most recently the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough) and many short stories, in addition to several books for children, and editor of "Skin of the Soul", an anthology of horror stories by women. Her short story ‘Closet Dreams’ won the International Horror Guild Award in 2007. Ash-Tree Press is to publish a multi-volume collection of her short fiction, beginning with Stranger in the House: Collected Ghost and Horror Stories, Volume 1.

"In the Arcade" follows a ‘what-if’ alternative time-line. Can you tell me a bit about the origins of the story?

It's hard to remember exactly, but I've always been fascinated by the idea of alternative histories and, as a science fiction writer "what if" was a favourite question. I had been reading about Nazi Germany as research for another story (never finished) so although I didn't actually use, or need, any actual research to write this story, reading that history was an obvious trigger. But as much as the horror of genocide was an influence, there was another -- the ever-popular question "What is reality?" Or, to put it another way, how can we ever be sure that we really know the truth about our existence? I wrote several stories around that idea at around the same time (early to mid-1970s) that I wrote "In the Arcade."

The futuristic dystopian Hell presided over by the Nazis is a vision I will take to my grave with me. A highly original concept that echoes Orwell at his bleakest. Where there any literary influences you had in mind while writing the piece?

I'm very pleased you found it so powerful. I must admit, it never occurred to me it was a particularly original idea -- it seemed to me like something that might have appeared in a somewhat different form on The Twilight Zone - although I must admit I can't point to a specific TZ episode, if somebody told me they'd seen Rod Serling introduce one that had the same basic premise (but obviously featuring different characters, etc.) I would not be astonished. I think that the original series of "he Twilight Zone had a huge influence on me as a writer -- not just the actual shows that I watched, but my feelings about it, the excitement at something so different from everything else on TV, and the general atmosphere and idea of it -- those were my kind of stories.

Away from TV and back to literature, I suspect that Philip K. Dick was a major influence -- not just because of The Man in the High Castle (a great book) but all the other stories and novels he wrote about some ordinary person (usually, if not always, in his work a man) who suddenly found out that reality was something totally different than he thought -- that what he thought was real life was really a dream, or a game, or a drug-trip, or someone else's dream, or... you get the idea. And you mentioned Orwell -- 1984 was one of THE major, powerful books for me --ever. Although I have not read it in over 20 years now, after I first encountered it in my teens (and I just happened across it in the library -- I had no idea what it was, didn't even read the title as a date) it made such an impact that it immediately became my favourite book, and I reread it often. So I think it almost HAD to have been an influence, conscious or not.

Do you think we still have far to go combating fascism and racism?

Yes, alas. Although there is much more general, public awareness of the evils of both those things -- and so many more laws in place to combat racism -- whatever there is in human nature that makes people hate and fear whatever we perceive as "other" still exists, and continues to be expressed. But I'm optimistic that we can continue to improve as a society and as individuals, as long as we have the will to do so.

Thana Niveau lives in a crumbling gothic tower somewhere near a place called Wales. She writes horror and shares her re-animated life with the mad surgeon who stitched her together from pieces of fallen women.

"The Death of Dreams" is a story focused on tabloid persecution, when the ‘Witch-hunters’ discover a device that enables them to find a way into the darkest corners of people’s minds, what first inspired this story?

Two things. A few years ago, friends of mine had their lives invaded by the British tabloids (and by extension, the British public). I’ve always despised the practice of exposing and ridiculing people’s private lives for entertainment. Today’s headline is forgotten tomorrow and the readership of these tabloids aren’t privy to the aftermath and the very real damage caused by such violation. It’s easy enough to breathe a sigh of relief and say “Glad it’s not me!” when it happens to celebrities and politicians, but to see it happen to friends was truly awful. We live in a goldfish bowl and our lives can be wrecked so easily. All just to sell a few smutty papers.

The second inspiration was my lifelong fascination with dreams. As a child I wished it were possible to film them. Naturally, if capturing dreams were possible, we all know how horribly wrong it could go. I also liked the rather cynical idea of something like the Dreamcatcher having been used to help someone, but then being usurped and used to its most lurid commercial end. So I pictured a worst-case Britain with no right to privacy, where any and everything was fair game to publish, and I combined that with my naive childhood wish.

Journalism, or what passes for it at least is a form of fascism which hasn’t been touched on by other writers and I felt this was an outstanding and subversive slice of story-telling which you could run far with. Will you be following similar themes in your future work?

I don’t have big political ideas but I do have a lot of fear. I write about what scares me, so I come back to paranoid ideas like this one again and again. When I wrote the story I did think it was a concept that could be taken further, so who knows? I’m still obsessed with the idea of dream capture and would love to explore the possibility more. As for the gutter press – well, the horrors we see in life can’t help but shape the horrors we put in our fiction, so I suspect that that one hasn’t been fully purged yet.

Do you feel personal privacy is something which is slowly slipping out of our reach? That there is a demand on people to give up their secrets?

The real problem in this case is the exploitation of private lives under the guise of the public’s alleged “right to know” and the lack of legal protection in the UK when it happens. The tabloids defend their actions by perversely claiming the moral high ground when we all know the real agenda: scandal sells papers. The victims can sue, of course, but only after the damage has been done. We, the public, have a right to know things that directly affect us, but private details of private lives are none of our business. There is currently a case waiting to be heard by the European Court of Human Rights that, if successful, would give us more protection. An impartial high court judge is better qualified than a tabloid newspaper editor to decide whether or not an individual’s privacy should be breached in the name of public interest.

Alison J. Littlewood lives in West Yorkshire, England, where she hoards books, dreams and writes short fiction—mainly in the dark fantasy and horror genres. She is currently working on a novel. Alison has contributed to Black Static, Murky Depths, Dark Horizons, Not One Of Us and Read By Dawn 3, among others. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk

"In on the Tide" was an especially resonant tale for me. A boy wanting to transcend the collective hate that is often pervasive in insular areas, are these things you’ve encountered in your own experiences?

I did grow up in quite a small town – I remember when I was very young there was a single Asian girl in the school, and yes, sadly, she was called names because of it. I don’t think such things are unique to such places, though. I’ve seen examples of more intense hatred in a large multi-cultural city. Racial conflict there had solidified some people’s attitudes into outright hatred of people they didn't even know and had never really spoken to.

You said something which really struck a chord with me and I imagine it will with many others. About the possibility of great friendships being destroyed by peer pressure. Do you believe these are still things we must overcome as a society?

Oh, absolutely. And it isn’t only about friendships between individuals; it’s symptomatic of wider issues that affect society as a whole. It’s just that in fiction you can express what is being lost at the human level, instead of looking at issues. But we’re living in a world where people can be stoned to death for loving the wrong person, have their homes and their persons attacked because they look different or because of their colour. It’s so sad, and so frustrating, that it’s overwhelming. How do you begin to tackle that? As individuals we can at least try and understand, to be open to other people’s point of view; to empathise.

I love fiction because it’s all about empathy. It doesn’t just tell us about the things that can hurt – it makes us feel it.

What do you hope for with the publication of Never Again?

I wish it could change the world! But, although I’m an idealist at heart, I know that the kind of mindless thug who attacked Sophie Lancaster or who carries out racist abuse is unlikely to be reading it. What I do hope is that it will raise issues, bring them to the fore; make a statement. And I’m really happy to be part of something that is demonstrating support and raising funds for the Sophie Lancaster Foundation.

Kaaron Warren's short story collection "The Grinding House", CSFG Publishing (published as The Glass Woman by Prime Books in the US) won the ACT Writers’ and Publishers’ Fiction Award and was nominated for three Ditmar Awards, winning two. She has three novels with Angry Robot Books. The critically acclaimed Slights was nominated for a number of awards and won the Australian Shadows Award. Her short story collection from Ticonderoga Press, "Dead Sea Fruit", was published in 2010. Kaaron lives in Canberra, Australia, with her husband and two children. Her website is kaaronwarren.wordpress.co

In the story notes over at Simon Marshall Jones you said you where inspired by a block of flats in Suvi, Fiji and you wrote this piece on censorship. Can you tell me why you picked the setting and the subject matter?

I drove past these flats quite often when we were living in Fiji. The buildings had been condemned for a decade or so, and everybody moved out. As time passed and the buildings weren’t demolished, people moved back in. There is a strong culture of squatting in Fiji; some squatter communities have survived for over fifty years.

They were horrible buildings; seriously dangerous looking in places, with massive cracks and bricks scattered at the base. The contrast of my easy life there, and the life of squatting in a demolished building, made me feel guilty every time I passed it. However, as I say in my story notes, the people who lived there always seemed to have a strong attitude to life. Washing hung on makeshift lines, children played, young men played volleyball.

Near the end of our stay, the buildings were finally demolished and all the people transported. Left behind was rubble and, before long, weeds and grass.

The buildings struck me so powerfully and I’m sure I’ll be writing other stories about them.

The central idea of censorship and of propaganda came from the media environment in Fiji at the moment. Although there is ostensibly no censorship, the media are asked to ‘be positive’ and not to report anything negative. Stories are removed. Bloggers are questioned. And the Fiji Times, a 150 year old media institution, will likely shut soon as a decree as been passed to say that only locals can own the media.

I find this a great shame, because for all of that time the newspaper has been an outlet for the people to speak, most often in the letters page. I still remember a taxi driver telling me a story of something which had upset him, and he said, “They better fix it or I’ll write a letter to The Fiji Times.” I loved that there was a real place he could voice his displeasure and, perhaps, cause something to be resolved. The idea that this venue will be taken away is upsetting to say the least.

Your character is scarred, both physically and psychically and in a way psychologically trapped in a dreadful moment from her past. The idea of a Ghost Jail, an act or a place holding on to is an extraordinary narrative device and quite chilling. When did you come up with the premise and how long did it take you to construct the story?

I wrote this story when we were still living in Fiji. It was an intensely creative three years for me. Living in such a new place, so vivid and inspiring, meant I wrote a lot of stories. “Ghost Jail” probably took two months to write, but two years to think about. I had the idea that gravestones, cemented in a circle, could trap the living, and the fact that cracked concrete slabs ran around those decrepit flats meant the setting presented itself to me.

I wanted there to be a stark contrast between the liveliness of Serena, the DJ, and the awful greyness of the ghosts.

Did you feel that tackling these themes that a writer can become so heavily emotionally involved that is can skew their perceptions, that the weight of such things (historical, terrorism, fascism) could be potentially detrimental to a writer getting started?

You know, it really can be. I felt a lot of pressure writing this story, both about capturing the true nature of those buildings and in capturing the sense of propaganda and censorship.

Rosanne Rabinowitz lives in South London and earns a crust as a freelance sub-editor. Other forms of toil have included stints as a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker and full-time dole claimer. She has a story in NewCon Press’s Conficts anthology, and her novella ‘In the Pines’ appears in the award-winning anthology "Extended Play: the Elastic Book of Music". Other published fiction includes stories in "The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers", Postscripts and Midnight Street. ‘Survivor’s Guilt’ first appeared in Black Static 14 and is part of a recently completed novel, "Noise Leads Me". Rosanne is now putting the finishing touches on a novella and working on a novel about a woman leader of the Adamites, the radical and free-loving faction of the Hussite revolution in 15th century Bohemia.

Your entry to "Never Again" is part of a bigger story. Can you tell me about the genesis of ‘Survivors Guilt’ and where you plan on taking it next?

I’ve always been fascinated by history and the nature of time. Fantastic fiction offers a prism to explore the stream of history through a continuous viewpoint. It can be in the form of long-lived beings, the mechanics of quantum weirdness, assorted gadgets… take your pick! I had this in mind when I wrote "Noise Leads Me," a novel that features a vampire protagonist who strongly identifies with the have-nots and discontented. "Noise" follows Mara’s path from 18th-century Montenegro and Vienna to the Luddite uprisings of 19th-century England to squatting in Brixton and Reclaiming the Streets in the 1990s. Mara’s experiences have given her a very personal perspective on 300 years of conflict between the dispossessed and those who wield power. She has lived through the rise of the system we call capitalism, and aims to do what she can to help bring about its end.

“Survivor’s Guilt” is based on a short interlude after WWI in Noise, when councils (räte) of workers and ordinary people saw off the Kaiser and strived to create a society based on cooperation and freedom. The repercussions of the bloody repression that followed were profound. The Freikorps, an elite paramilitary grouping used by the Social Democratic government to suppress the workers councils, later formed the nucleus of the Nazi Party and the SS.

Some historians have particularly derided the Bavarian räterepublik as the ‘coffeehouse republic’ because a lot of writers and artists were active in it. I often encountered the view that its concern with art somehow rendered this movement trivial. But revolutionary artists of this period engaged practically with how their vision and skills can contribute to rebuilding a shattered world. People need places to live – so they asked what kind of homes should be built, and how do we design the city that must rise from the wreckage left by the war? People need food, so how will we cultivate the land that provides it and organise this work in a better way? And why should the enjoyment of beauty and ‘culture’ be restricted to the rich? I got very absorbed in these questions as I wrote “Survivor’s Guilt”.

“Art is bread”, quotes Mara in the story. The slogan of striking textile workers in the US also expressed similar values: “We want bread and roses too!”

"Noise Leads Me" finishes in the late 1990s, with a glimpse of what could be in store for the 21st century. Unfortunately, the concerns of the 1990s are very much with us again – austerity, punishment and near-slavery for the workless, continuing threats of war and ethnic cleansing. But we can also look towards the vision of the 1999 ‘Carnival against Capital’ in the City of London and anti-capitalist convergences in Seattle and Prague; the Mexican Zapatistas, the actions of Argentine workers and unemployed in response to their banking crisis in the early 2000s. And there’s also the ongoing refusal of Greek workers to pay for the current crisis and submit to austerity.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of a very different book that will take some of the events in “Survivor’s Guilt” as a starting point. This will be an alternate history set in a world where the German revolution of 1919 had more success, the Nazis hadn’t come to power, and large swathes of people live in a libertarian socialist society. Perhaps this book will explore the same contradictions as Ursula LeGuin’s The Disposessed, but it will take place on a recognisable Earth. Some characters from “Survivor’s Guilt” will appear in this, though Mara herself will stay in the background. I imagine this story will unfold into the near-future.

Your protagonist is someone who has witnessed generation after generation of genocide, yet at the stories core are clear messages of hope. Do you think when we are amongst atrocity it is a very difficult thing to hold on to?

Well, yes it is! But ultimately, I feel there isn’t a lot of choice. The alternatives would be retreat into despair or pure hedonism. Though the latter has its temptations, I’ve found it can wear thin very fast.

Then, for many it’s a matter of survival. Things would be far worse than they are now if people had never taken action and dared to hope for something better. Grassroots movements have successfully forced through concessions and brought about better conditions. And resistance also has its intrinsic rewards. Struggle has often brought us joy, friendship and solidarity and enriched our lives – even when we don’t entirely ‘win’.

When I think about questions like this I find myself coming back to a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, Inspired by the work of Kathë Kollwitz, a German socialist artist who lived through two world wars, Rukeyser writes: “I am in the world to change the world”. Kollwitz had lost a son and grandson to both wars and faced persecution by the Nazis towards the end of her life. Yet she also found happiness in her work and with those she loved.

I love the setting, the musicality of your writing and the solidity of your characters. Was it a difficult story to pen?

I wanted to show an expanse of history in a 5000-word story through some specific, vivid moments. So yes, it was difficult but I enjoyed the challenge. I was satisfied with the result in the end and felt I learned a lot from the research and writing.

I did need to do some digging. I found that the revolutionary events in Berlin in 1918-19 had coverage because prominent people like Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg were involved. But there was much less in print (in English) about what had happened in Bavaria.

However, PM Press has recently addressed this shortage with books about two participants, Gustav Landauer and Erich Mϋhsam: www.pmpress.org/content/index.php

The Ernst Toller Society will also be reprinting Toller’s work, and aims to make more material about his life and times available: www.ernst-toller.de/eng/gesellschaft.htm Still, I’ve not seen much about women in this movement. I found a book devoted to the subject, but it’s available only in German.

Carole Johnstone's first published story appeared in Black Static #3 in early 2008. Since then she has contributed short stories to numerous magazines and anthologies including Grants Pass, Dead Souls, Close Encounters of the Urban Kind and PS Publishing's forthcoming post-apocalyptic anthology, Catastrophia. 'Dead Loss' (Black Static #13) was recently reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 2. Her first novella, "Frenzy", was published by Eternal Press/ Damnation Books in August 2009. Her website can be found at www.carolejohnstone.com.

You’re story "Machine" is set in the not-to-distant future. Do you feel as a society we are quick to capitalise on the suffering of others?

The quick answer is yes, but I don’t think that it’s as simple as that. At least I hope not. The idea that human nature is quick to capitalise on anything and everything, particularly that which has caused suffering to others is maybe too cynical a take on the optimistic ‘every cloud has a silver lining’.

I think instead that this form of capitalisation is often no more than a reflexive attempt to distance ourselves from tragedy; perhaps even to reassure our own selves that we are immune to such things. People make fun out of death and disaster as soon as it happens. After 9/11, there were as many tasteless jokes floating around in cyber space, as there was genuine grief. It’s a form of defence. If I show that it doesn’t affect me – in fact if I show utter contempt and/or indifference towards it – then the world will know for certain that I AM NOT BOTHERED.

Of course, there are people only too ready to make like vultures in any kind of situation, but beyond simple motives of greed, I think that these people too – whether subconsciously or not – are still trying to shout ‘I DON’T CARE!’ a little too loudly. Because I think that almost all of us do. Some show it; some don’t – or in ways that are construed thus – but I believe that society as a whole finds it easier to dismiss events than the individual does. Because people are only too willing to jump on the bandwagon collectively, and thereby banish their personal responsibility. The more something – or someone – that we fear can be reduced, be it through scorn, greed or bad jokes, the less they frighten us; more importantly, the less they are seen to frighten us. To capitalise on suffering is to show contempt not just for those involved, but also for the event itself. Perhaps that’s thinking too much of people – or perhaps not enough – but I just can’t bring myself to believe that anyone could be motivated only by greed and a complete lack of empathy. I think it’s more likely that they are selfishly afraid and driven by little more than the insecurity that plagues us all.

When did you come up for the storyline for "Machine"?

In a dream. A quite enjoyable one; certainly not a nightmare by any means. I was a child, waving candyfloss and running about occupied France, screeching at the bombs and fireworks, giggling at the crap MDF sets and the people hiding behind them. I played tag in a muddy maze of trenchworks, chased by Heil Hitler-ing baddies with matching moustaches, and I bunked down in a concentration camp dorm; my friends and I packed together like sardines. It was brilliant fun.

When I woke up, I started writing it down (I’m fortunate enough to remember almost every detail of every dream, and many stories have been born this way). However, halfway through I stopped writing. What had first seemed like a brilliant idea for a story now seemed a little off. Tasteless, certainly – but also unlikely. What reader would believe that a Nazi-themed amusement park could ever successfully exist, particularly in the not-too-distant future?

But the idea wouldn’t go away. It pestered me, and usually that means it won’t stop until I write something. Usually it means that it’s worth writing something. When I decided to be honest with myself, the reason that it took me so long to write Machine was not because I thought that the premise was unlikely at all. It was because I didn’t want to accept that it was just the opposite. I didn’t want to believe that anyone would go to such a park. But why wouldn’t they? There is very little that’s considered bad taste these days. Anything goes. For a child, a park like that would be paradise. Cowboys and Indians with bells on. And for an adult, there’s that I DON’T CARE! insecurity just begging to be assuaged. Perhaps the only fly in the ointment would be that it would be politic to wait until the last of the veterans of such a war were dead before embarking on such a project. The public can be so sensitive about that sort of thing. Hence the setting in the not-too-distant future. After that though, anything goes. Sad but true.

What do you hope to accomplish with "Never Again"?

It’s really easy to see people like Brendan Harris and Ryan Herbert (the killers of Sophie Lancaster), as mindless, ignorant, prejudiced thugs hellbent on finding any reason, however tenuous, to vent their innate aggression. Don’t get me wrong, they are all of these things. And there is no excuse good enough to justify anyone doing what they did. But in the same vein as my answer to Q1 & 2, the minute you label people that way, yes, you diminish them, but you also caricature them. You don’t change anything; in fact, what you’re effectively doing is giving them an excuse. By calling them names, dismissing them as sink-estate, bigoted ignoramuses driven by bad TV and too many bottles of Merrydown, you are saying that these are the reasons that they did what they did. That somehow they were powerless to do anything else. Even worse, in trying to demonise them, you run the risk of others (who perhaps fear that they too could be labelled ‘sink-estate, bigoted ignoramuses’), creating an idol out of them, as in the recent case of gunman Raoul Moat.

All but the most confident of us are unnerved by change and by difference. All but the most selfless of us are self-preserving before we are empathetic. Anger is a defence against the unknown and the unwanted, and the inference that who we are and what we do is somehow not good enough – that this other may be better. And so often, that anger seems bizarrely misplaced. There has been more fuss about someone chucking a cat in a wheelie bin – the world over, if you can believe it – than there ever was about the mindless murder of a girl for being different.

Again perhaps I am only seeing the worst in people here; I hope so but I don’t think so. In my own experience, I can be as tolerant as the next person, provided that tolerance goes unchallenged. A few days in a city like London, for example, and I become as bigoted as everyone else: because people are being difficult; because they are not doing things as I want them to; because I’ve gone there with the express expectation of being mugged or murdered. Not just because we are crammed into a city that is too small for its population and their needs. Cultures are not that different. For the main part, rude is rude in any language – and we’re all guilty of it one way or another.

But I’m going off on a tangent. I hope that no one will perceive my story as smugly satirical; or worse, trying to make light of what is a serious and often senselessly tragic issue. I wanted people to read Machine and think: ‘a Nazi-themed WW2 amusement park, as if!’. I wanted them to be angered by manager Rick’s blasé indifference to a war’s tragedies. And then I wanted them to come around. To start believing that not only was it possible, but to understand the reasons why.

If more people were willing to try to understand the motivations behind the prejudice and ignorance of others, perhaps they could see the potential to be that way in all of us. If nothing else, that’s what I hope Never Again will achieve. An introspective examination of ourselves, rather than an easier condemnation of others, often labelled nothing more insightful than ‘evil’.

Nina Allan's fiction has appeared in the magazines Interzone, Black Static and Midnight Street, and in the anthologies Subtle Edens, Catastrophia, Strange Tales from Tartarus and Best Horror of the Year Volume 2. Nina won the Aeon Award in 2007, and has twice been nominated for the British Fantasy Award for best short fiction. Her first story collection, "A Thread of Truth", is published by Eibonvale Press. She lives and works in London

Grief is a theme in "Feet of Clay". I thought you perfectly captured that wounded stillness with your story. What life experiences did you draw on, if any?

The theme of grief is certainly important to the story, but equally the isolation that grief causes. All the main characters in ‘Feet of Clay’ are isolated by their losses. Allis has lost her grandmother and split up from her partner. Jonas is still grieving for his dead wife and feels isolated from his daughter because the secrets of his childhood have made him unable to properly express his feelings. Hanne spent her life feeling isolated and angry, both for the loss of her past and because no one in her present was ever fully able to grasp what she had been through. As you say, there’s a stillness about grief, a stasis, with each character locked in their own situation. This stasis is only broken when Hanne dies, and Jonas can finally begin to build a relationship with his daughter Allis.

I think that when I wrote this story I was not thinking so much of specific events in my own life but more about universal ideas concerning empathy and the lack of it, how difficult it is for us sometimes to see a situation from another’s point of view, and how important it is that we try. Hanne’s behaviour towards both her son and her granddaughter could be seen as dangerous or even abusive – but in her way she was simply trying to reach out, to make sense of what happened to her and to warn against it happening to any more of the people she loves. Jonas feels inadequate to protect his own daughter because he is suffering from a kind of misplaced survivor guilt, the sense that he can never criticise his mother because of what she suffered at the hands of the Nazis. (This phenomenon is described perfectly and from personal experience by Anne Karpf in her memoir The War After, a book I stumbled upon quite by chance a couple of weeks after finishing work on ‘Feet of Clay.’) Allis herself is torn between wanting to explore the past and wanting to escape it. In the end the defining relationship in the story is that between Jonas and Allis as they begin to reach out towards one another, to talk about the past and as a result to move beyond it.

My own grandmother was adopted as a baby at a time when adoption, when it occurred, was hardly talked about. She never knew her own birth parents, and always felt ashamed of her indeterminate past no matter how much or how often we reassured her that it was she who mattered, and not where she might have come from. My grandmother died twenty years ago but I still think of her most days. She told amazing stories, making them up in her head as she went along. For her, perhaps not surprisingly, the ghost story was a completely natural form of expression.

"Feet of Clay" is a story full of painful echoes, the echoes of terrorism, of ancestry, family and folklore. When you set out to write it, did you know it would end that way?

Oddly enough, yes I did. Normally when I start work on a story I do so chronologically, beginning on page one and writing a complete first draft all the way through to the end at page twenty or wherever. I usually have at least some idea of the ending at the outset, but this can shift, evolve, and sometimes even change altogether as I learn more about the story through the process of writing it. In the case of ‘Feet of Clay’ though I did something I’ve never done before and wrote it from the middle outwards. Some of the scenes were extremely clear in my mind, and I wanted to capture these straight away and use them as a kind of anchor for the rest of the story. The final scene, Allis’s thoughts there and the image of the golem destroying the city was the core image for me, and remained completely unchanged throughout.

I had golems on the brain rather, the result of some research I conducted earlier in the year for another story entirely. I ended up not using any of it for that piece of work, but when Joel asked me if I would like to contribute something to Never Again it all came surging back, full force. I guess ‘Feet of Clay’ was the story I was researching all along, only I didn’t know it at the time!

Do you believe people will walk away from "Never Again" with their eyes opened?

It would be nice to think so, but history is against us rather. Writers have been decrying fascism in its various guises since the world began, and yet tragically it is still here, even after Auschwitz it is still here, and I guess it is always going to be here so long as we have ignorance, jealousy, fear and greed. I gave up on Marxism some years ago, so I no longer believe in the perfectibility of man. I am forced to conclude that our struggle against fascism will be a long one.

However, what I do believe in is freedom of speech, with the process of writing for me at the very heart of that, its central embodiment. When Shelley said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world I believe he was speaking an important and beautiful truth that every writer should hold in his heart and in his mind. Writing is a serious business. When Stalin and Hitler set out to establish their dictatorships it was the writers he silenced first, by burning their books and putting them in concentration camps. Dictators do this because they know writers, artists and freethinkers pose the greatest danger to their perverted ideals.

I believe that what we are doing with "Never Again" is what writers have been doing for centuries: passing on the torch. I hope that people will read this anthology and have their eyes opened not only to the evil that can rise up when good men do nothing, but also to the richness and diversity of artistic response to the threat of oppression. As writers, the one thing we can do is speak out. It would be good to think that for some readers at least the stories in this book might act as a stimulus and encouragement for them to look beyond the headlines and into their own hearts and minds.

NEVER AGAIN is available here.