What drives your art? What forces you, rides you, hustles you, controls you until its latest needs have been met? What really drives you to create speculative fiction art, be it words or images?

Depends on the kind of story – usually with sword-&-sorcery type matter, it’s an image; with ‘lighter’ less intense kinds of writing it can be an idea, sometimes just a piece of wordplay. But when the thing is underway this initial concept combines with others. My soon-to-be-anthologized story “A Footfall of Stars” began with a play on the phrase ‘seeing eye dog’ which became ‘seeing mind dog’ – then my blind detective with his telepathic pooch ended up on a world with such extreme cloud cover that it was impossible to ever see the stars.

If there was the possibility of becoming any speculative fiction character ever created (except your own), would you? Who? Why?

Maybe Adam Adamant – obscure UK TV hero of the sixties: an Edwardian adventurer finds himself frozen and emerges in swinging sixties London. I just like the clothes, especially the cape! My fatal stumbling block about being John Steed from The Avengers has always been that bowler hat and umbrella.

If you could only take one author’s works compressed on an e-book reader on a “one-bag-only” one-way trip to another galaxy, whose works would it be and why?

Robert E. Howard – still – after all these years. So many points of resonance and a variety of genre with his prose, poetry and correspondence. And maybe on that one-way trip I’d have the time and peace to finally figure out what it is that makes him unique and uniquely powerful – at least I could try… And since he’s been translated into other languages I could learn those as a bonus.

Why ‘The Carnage-Lord’? What initiated his story and made you complete this particular tale?

I wanted to push the envelope as regards the classic sword-&-sorcery protagonist – both to extend and subvert his (or her) potential and motivation for violence. I think his characterization was as much MY motivation to write the story as any other element.

In the privacy of your favorite writing nook, do you act out your protagonist’s actions? Do you know how to use his weapons? Do you wear his clothes? Do you talk like him?

No, no, no, and no – and I wouldn’t admit to any of the above if I did.

Quick: List your first thought as your answers to these questions about the future of genre fiction:

Printing Methods: Offset or Print-on-Demand?

I’m too shy and retiring and English to demand anything – though my novel is print-on-demand so I guess I have to hope that my potential readers are braver and less old-fashioned than I . . .

Reading Formats: Electronic or Print?

Print – for all the oft-quoted reasons. There’s just something about a book.

Book Tours: Physical or Virtual?

Probably a combination – both have a lot to offer and both have pretty obvious advantages and disadvantages.

Reading Habits: Dead, Dying, Alive, Growing?

For reading in general, certainly alive and well – but I think that at some point the very idea of ‘genre’ reading will parody itself; the present situation kind of reminds me of that quantum theory of bifurcating realities where every possibility becomes a new universe. The combinations and categories seem to be becoming totally fluid.

Length: Flash, Short, Novella, 1970’s novel (60k), 1980’s novel (80k), 1990’s novel (120k), 2000’s novel (150k)

As with genres above, I suspect that all these will flourish except the novella – and then one day, after it’s languished moribund for a few generations, lo it shall arise again to tread the jewelled thrones of the publishing world beneath its awkwardly-sized literary feet. Oh Crom, there I go again . . .

Robert E. Howard, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Louis L’Amour, Frederick Faust, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rafael Sabatini . . . the list could go on. Some lived long lives, some flared and burned out young. All lived life hard. All wrote pulse-pounding action-adventure, often dipping into the many different genres they share, yet each eventually establishing their name within a specific one. What do you believe you havein common with these authors, and what makes you so sure speculative fiction – heroic fantasy fiction to be precise – is your genre? Or is it?

Don’t get me going on genres again – oh all right: I’ve enjoyed most of the authors you’ve cited and one thing that for me they have in common is that they’re Wagner or Fleming or Chandler first and genre second. Some of them actually were the ‘ur-text’ for a genre that grew from them. They’re all originals in their ways, and their work is unmistakably theirs – if I could say that about my own writing I’d be well pleased.

Thank you for your considered replies, Phil — and for writing one of the most striking short stories I’ve had the pleasure to read.

A brooding middle-aged writer and creative-writing lecturer with a moody suggestion of Celtic blood lurking in his veins, for the most part the curmudgeonly Phil Emery shuns the internet as far too accessible and friendly a medium – for the most part . . .

Review Praise for “The Last Scream of Carnage”

“…Alas, our courageous barbarian, who laughs at death and has no fear of physical injury, encounters a little more than even he can handle. I thought I had it figured out, but there’s a nice little twist at the end. I do love surprises.” ~ Janice Clark

An excerpt

…They obeyed without protest. Even here word of the unconquerable Valac had reached. Word of warriors riding horses huge and hard and wild as themselves, plunging from warships and surging out of the seafoam, ravening across the land. Word of army after shattered army sent reeling by those who rode with carnage in their eyes and in their scabbards.

And the Carnage-Lord was their eyes.

The Carnage-Lord was the one who scouted ahead of the main force of the Valac, looking not for danger but prey. And if he should be slain the Valac would simply shrug and choose new eyes for their war. For the Valac only paused in their bloodquest to spit upon death. They held their souls greater than the souls of others, for they swelled them with slaughter.

That night screaming echoed out of the hills. In the fallen quiet in the hearth-hall where everyone had gathered, where hearth had been lit and food readied, where only the youngest children’s wide, wondering eyes met his, where even the snarl of a dog toward him was wary, the Carnage-Lord broke the hush like a neck – without care…

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