What's New? (Mr and Mrs Edition) Part One: John Llewellyn Probert

1) So, what’s new from you?

I've got a short story coming out in Cemetery Dance magazine called 'Healing Hands Beneath a Swann-Morton Sky'.

2) How did it come about?

I was at the gym, which is the only place in the world I might even consider watching daytime TV. There was a piece about bacterial antibiotic resistance and the fact that no new antibiotics have been developed for many years because it's not of sufficient financial interest to drug companies. That's the sole reason. So people are dying of infections right now simply because drug companies don't see sufficient profit in researching new ones. I had been aware of this before, of course, but for some reason at that moment it focused my mind perfectly.

3) Tell us about the process of how you created it.

I got incredibly angry about the state of the world we live in, came home from the gym, and wrote the whole thing straight down in a notebook.

4) What was your favourite part of the process?

Realising I'd created something of a nature and style that I'd never done before, and done it to my satisfaction.

5) What was the toughest part of it?

People have often commented in the past about how successfully I blend humour with horror. The thing is, I don't ever actually try and do this - that's just how the stories come out. I didn't want this one to have a trace of 'funny' in it and once it was written I spent a lot of time going over it to make sure it wasn't the victim of 'inadvertent wit'!

6) Is there a theme running through it?

We are all truly doomed if we keep living the way we do now.

7) If you had to sum this story up in three words, what would they be?

Angry. Political. Downbeat. Three words I never thought my fiction would be. And who knows? It may never be again. Because you see I don't actually enjoy writing this kind of thing, it doesn't make me feel better and if anything it just makes me feel worse, whereas the whole point of my fiction is that I want it to be a pick-me-up, both for me and the reader. But every now and then you just can't help what comes out, can you?

8) Where can we get hold of it?

It got picked up by Richard Chizmar's Cemetery Dance, which I was both pleased and bewildered by, as it's the first major sale I've had to a US print magazine. God help people who like this and seek out some of my other stuff, because it won't be what they're expecting at all! Although I will add to that something Joel Lane (one of my writing heroes) said about Robert Bloch (another one), that people who thought Bloch was just being funny hadn't realised that beneath his entertaining approach was actually quite a bleak and bitter view of humanity. So maybe it's been there all along. I promise I'll keep it lighter for next time, though.

Probably.