It’s scarier when it can’t hide from you. That’s the idea behind Prairie Gothic, the new anthology of psychological and supernatural horror from Prairie Soul Press. Gothic tales, set in decaying, abandoned settings and characters with dark secrets mingle on the high Canadian Prairies. Something wicked this way comes…
When editor, Stacey Kondla, told me she was going to be putting together a collection of gothic horror set on the prairies I could not wait to read it. When she invited me to submit I was ecstatic. But also terrified.
This was one of those projects that I really put a lot of pressure on myself about. The kind of pressure that can be paralyzing but, when it isn’t, helps me produce some of my favourite work.
In this case it did both. I was absolutely paralyzed for weeks but thankfully I came out of that and started writing just in time to beat the deadline. And I really like the resulting story, “Grasshoppers and Mountain Cats”.
One of my favourite things about it is that in order to give myself a tool to get over my inability to write anything for this, I just submerged myself super deep in the setting. And I made that setting one of the farms I grew up on deep in the Alberta prairie. The story is 100% fiction. The farm, however, is 100% real.
Or was.
It has since been destroyed.
But that’s another story.
