Just signed off on the proofs for the reprint of my story “Consent” for the new anthology Fright into Flight.  I’m very happy that this story will have a new life and share space with such incredible writers as Gemma Files and Nadia Bulkin.  You can preorder your copy at the link.

Here’s my intro to the story for the Discovering Japan short story collection.

The original idea for this grew out of the controversy surrounding the publication of American Psycho. While I’m not in favour of censorship, there were elements of horror fiction with which I was never very comfortable. The writers of the time were predominantly male though women were beginning to become a more important force in the genre. Many of the anthologies I was reading featured a steady stream of stories written by men about the murder of women. In many cases, the stories were from the point of the view of the killers, who had no trouble justifying their actions. I could never quite escape the awareness of my own vulnerability, both in the real world and in the universe these stories inhabited. I found myself profoundly ambivalent about the issues surrounding depictions of violence – and I still am.

 The story never quite hung together until I found out about the upcoming Horror Writers Association anthology called Deathport, which was about a haunted airport. Then it just clicked. They accepted the story but I never felt it fit in very well with the rest of the stories in that anthology and I’m happy to have another chance to present it to the world. Sadly, the issues I was trying to deal with don’t seem to have gone away.