When Fear Front offered to publish my first horror novel, The Cabin Sessions, a few days ago, something in my personal universe shifted, as though a cog turned and I was moving forward again. Fear Front are an America-based dedicated horror imprint publishing top notch literary horror. Their offer was a rock solid stamp of endorsement, telling me that I had, in fact, pulled off a work in a very special genre.

All the genres in fiction have their rules. Bend them as you wish but break them at your peril. Every author knows it’s hard to attract a publisher if your work is not an easy fit or straddles two genres, not quite ticking the boxes of either one. I knew this when I started writing The Cabin Sessions so I read up on the ‘rules’ of horror and fixed them in my mind. Plenty of dread. Lots of mini-horror moments along the way…

But what is horror? There are so many kinds and I had to choose my specialism. I was never going down the path of gore and neither was I drawn to the supernatural. Alien predators or military horror were not for me either. I was drawn to psychological horror and to the horror of perversion, and I ran with both concepts as I plotted a story.

Whatever I had in mind was soon distorted by an apparently minor character that I inserted to give a bit of backstory to one of the protagonists. Straight away she took over the narrative and my imagination along with it, and The Cabin Sessions is what it is because of her.

The Cabin Sessions will be released this spring (that’s autumn in the southern hemisphere). Meanwhile, I’m feeling so inspired I’m now at work on my second horror novel.