Knoxon – Page 3 – Elizabeth Knox

Why Horror?

This essay first appeared, in a slightly less finished form, in Canvas. I sat on it awhile before posting. Horror has been called the most moral of the genres, perhaps because it deals in calamity, in inexorable events and the experiences of small human victims, witnesses, collaborators. Because human existence is prone to repeated visitations from monstrosity in the shape of war, disease, and natural disasters, we have deep feelings about these things, and some of those feelings are about appeasement, and come from the same instinct that prompts us to pray. If asked, most of us could make a list of things we know the characters in horror film and novels should avoid doing – or being, as in the case of the unchaste blond girl. Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods plays with all those expectations and, at the same time, makes them the guiding evil secret behind the fate of everyone in the story (the great gods of chaos are being appeased by ritual sacrifices where the rituals are a series of variations on horror narratives. The hero, whore, fool, and virgin are what the sacrifice requires; human stand-ins for story). Whedon really gets the connection between horror stories and

My History with Horror

I will begin with withered leaves blowing through an empty fairground, tent canvas gulping and gulping, and the seats on the dark Ferris wheel creaking, rocked by ghostly fairgoers. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. My first encounter with horror was a book of ghost stories I sneaked from the bookcase in my Uncle Keith’s bach, and a story which kept me feverishly awake as one of its protagonists was also up all night, disturbed by whispering, a breath blowing on his ear through ‘the chink in the wall’. I write ‘his bed’, but want to write ‘the bed’, smudging the story’s shades into my own, because, more than any other kind of reading, ghost stories work that way. They chase you when you’re alone and undefended, as we all are when worn out by wide-eyed, wakeful terror, when we’re only eight years old, in the top bunk, and the hot lights of the poultry farm hatchery on the other side of the hedge are crawling on the ceiling and bedclothes like larvae of daylight, while dawn is still hours away. I wish I could recall the title of that book. An omnibus

Where Wake Came From

Note As a blogger’s introduction to Wake I’ve decided to transcribe what I wrote in my journal some months into my writing the novel. I had returned to it after a break, finally seeing what it was doing and what it might be for. I have used letters or a long dash to replace some names that naturally appear in full in the journal. I’ve fixed my spelling but have left the language as headlong as it tends to be. ‘Duncan’ is my husband’s brother Duncan Barrowman, who was deliberately hit by a truck in Rarotonga in May 2009 and died some hours later, leaving behind a wife and four children. The man driving the truck was convicted of manslaughter. My mother was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease in June 2009. She died in January 2012. There was more in the journal about the biographical ‘madness’ connections, but I left it out because it all needs a fuller context. From my journal. 14 September 2009 I’m writing something new that feels by turns completely unfitted to my talents and like going west in a plane, chasing daylight, when the light stays ahead and the night is a

Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries

This is my speech for the launch of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries at Unity Books in Wellington, 3 August 2013. ‘Fergus’ is Fergus Barrowman, my husband, and Ellie’s New Zealand Publisher. I was honoured that Ellie asked me to launch her novel. I have a habit from my student days of writing page references and brief notes on the flyleaves of books when it’s a book I have to say something about. When I first started reading The Luminaries I was conscientiously doing this with my launch speech in mind, but, once I came to write the speech I discovered I’d left off my note-taking at page 262 with a brief ‘very funny’. This was the point where it completely slipped my mind that I had to react in any articulate way to what I was reading, and probably began to either annoy—or possibly please—Fergus (on the brown couch reading manuscripts) with my Ah Ha! and Oh No! and the Bastard! and my general squirming around finding comfortable positions so that I could keep on lying there hour after hour, balancing the book on its edge and tormenting its spine. Thus proving two things: Victoria University Press’s hardback edition is

My Interview for YALSA

This is an interview I did for The Hub website. Julie Bartel provided the questions. It is mostly about my teenaged self. One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Elizabeth Knox

Letting in the Ghosts: Why certain things are in Mortal Fire

I keep producing blogs that are highly finished pieces of writing, like essays. Which isn’t to say I labour over them, more that I keep feeling each has to be a thing in itself. But that’s not what blogs are for. So this one is just a few thoughts about how I came to write Mortal Fire and why some of the things in it are in it. And if it does happen to organise itself in composition then yay. To coincide with Mortal Fire’s publication in the US I’ve been writing a few guest blogs. They’ll appear over the next few weeks, and I’ll post links. Those guest blogs talk about stuff I won’t cover here. So that you know it is covered – or at least addressed – I’ll give you the subjects. 1) My kind of Heroine 2) Invisible Monsters 3) How using an exotic – to Northern Hemisphere readers – location in a fantasy novel creates ‘two levels of invention’ in the work. And 4) How, when writing, to get out of your own way. Since I’ve promised blogs on those topics I will try not to stray into them here. The keywords websites use when

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