The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

GEMMA FILES is a former film critic/film history teacher. She is now probably best-known for either her 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction Award-winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, or her Weird Western “Hexslinger Series” trilogy (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones) from ChiZine Publications.

She has stories upcoming in the anthologies Magic, A Season in Carcosa and A Mountain Walked, and is currently hard at work on what she hopes will be her first contemporary horror novel.

“I wrote this piece very quickly,” explains the author, “in a sort of frenzy, while deep in the middle of putting together my second novel. I’d agreed to contribute something to Conrad Williams’ anthology Gutshot, a collection of ‘weird west’ tales from PS Publishing, and this was what came out.

“At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure if it fit the bill, but Conrad liked it enough to pick it up, so who am I to say?

“As for influences: I’ve been a Greek mythology buff from childhood on, so I’d always wanted to do something about Medusa and her sisters, the Gorgonae.

“I’m also a huge fan of HBO’s sadly defunct Dustbowl Gothic series Carnivàle, which probably shows, but there’s some input there as well from Robert Jackson Bennett’s first novel, Mr Shivers, and even Peter Crowther’s Depression-era werewolf tale ‘Bindlestiff’, which I read in his collection The Longest Single Note.

“I also stole the title from a line in a Barbra Streisand song, ‘Prisoner (Theme from Eyes of Laura Mars)’.”