The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

Though she recently betrayed her Gothic roots by beginning to wear colours, Gemma Files still often invites all and sundry to, as Susan Musgrave puts it, “bite into [her]/and open [their] mind to blood.”

Previously a freelance film critic, she now teaches Screenwriting and Canadian film history at the Toronto Film School, and has adapted two of her own stories for The Showtime Network’s The Hunger cable TV series. Her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999.

“Kissing Carrion” is the title story from her first collection of short stories, available from Prime Books. A second collection, The Worm in Every Heart, is currently available from the same publisher.

“I first got the germ for ‘Kissing Carrion’ back in 1993,” Files remembers, “when I’d just quit my job as Vibrator Room floor attendant at Lovecraft, Toronto’s most upscale sex shop. The virulent combination of having an eighty per cent employee discount but no significant other to share the spoils with had already begun to screw with my ideas about ‘healthy’ sexuality. I also spent a fair amount of time listening to early Nine Inch Nails while reading underground comics and ‘zines, simultaneously jealous and admiring of their creators’ capacity to self-publish material which seemed to come straight from the same vein of icky, suppurating, intensely private darkness I was becoming somewhat afraid to tap into myself.

“The turning point came when I discovered an article in one of said ‘zines about those wacky folks down at Survival Research Laboratories (whose self-destructive industrial antics would later inspire NIN’s ‘Happiness in Slavery’ video), which led me to rent their performance tapes from Suspect Video — I was particularly struck by the infamous “rabbot”, a rotting bunny corpse hooked up to a system of rods and pistons and technical what-have-you which puppeted it around, making it parade itself back and forth until it started to fall apart. Mix well with the Pixies, and Pat Calavera’s Bone Machine was born.

“But things soon slid to a halt, as they often do with me, and the story lay fallow for years… I had vague ideas of submitting it for a zombie anthology, like John Skipp and Craig Spector’s The Book of the Dead, which is how the whole ‘triangle between a man, a woman and a corpse splits apart when the corpse objects to the arrangement’ theme came into play.

“Still and all, it took until 2000 for me to finally realize that the narrative perspective should come from Mr Stinky, rather than Pat or Ray. A deadline was proffered by Ellen Datlow, for which I’ll be eternally grateful, even though the story itself didn’t turn out to meet her needs for the anthology in question. And the rest is history.”