The lovely folk over at She Never Slept have interviewed me … Marc Nocerino had some questions that made me think!
SNS Minion – Marc Nocerino: Welcome to She Never Slept, Angela, and thank you for taking some time to spend with our readers. My love for the weird and darker side of storytelling started when I stumbled across Lovecraft, Poe, and Stoker in elementary school. Many of your stories are horror-slanted interpretations of childhood fairy tales and folklore. Was it these that initially sparked your interest in the strange and terrifying, or does that come from elsewhere?
Angela Slatter: (I have to say I’ve been mulling over this question – I went and answered all the other first to give myself more time and I’m not sure I’ve got a good answer. :^) ) Fairy tales were definitely the spark of it, but I don’t know when I first realized these were the original horror stories – getting eaten by wolves, being abandoned by your parents, having witches curse you in your cradle. I’d say that as I outgrew fairy tales in my teens, I shifted to horror from writers like Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Henry James, Le Fanu then again to Clive Barker, Graham Masteron, Kim Newman, Stephen King, and the like. I came back to fairy tales in my late thirties and then I worked out what they’d been saying all along: the world is dangerous place so keep your wits about you.
The rest is here.