Snapshot 2014: Jason Nahrung

Jason Nahrung grew up on a Queensland cattle property and now lives in Ballarat with his wife, the writer Kirstyn McDermott. He works as an editor and journalist to support his travel addiction. His fiction is invariably darkly themed, perhaps reflecting his passion for classic B-grade horror films and ’80s goth rock. The co-author of the novel The Darkness Within (Hachette Australia), his most recent long fiction title is the Gothic tale Salvage (Twelfth Planet Press), with his outback vampire duology Blood and Dust and The Big Smoke coming soon through Clan Destine Press. He lurks online at www.jasonnahrung.com.

Your novel Blood and Dust and the sequel The Big Smoke are soon to be released in paper form for the first time by Clan Destine Press (and ebook as well). Can you tell us a bit about the series and when we can expect to see them around?

(2012 digital-only release)

Publishing is a funny old game, isn’t it? Blood and Dust came out originally in 2012 as a digital-only release, but we got the rights back and now Clan Destine is putting both it and the sequel out in both paperback and digital formats. I’m incredibly happy about that, because the original idea for the story first saw light of day more than 15 years ago – a vampire story that wouldn’t die!

In Blood and Dust, Kevin, a mechanic in an outback town, has a major spanner thrown in the works when a vampire gang comes to town. In The Big Smoke, he has to travel to Brisbane to finish off some outstanding business. Central to the story is the idea that these vampires need blood not just to keep going physically, but emotionally as well – they feed on memories. Opposing Kevin is a rather nasty city vampire by the name of Mira, and her worn-out sidekick, Reece, a former cop who investigated one case too many, back in the day. I manage to tear up most of Queensland over the course of the two books.

Lots of landscape, lots of action, lots of angst.

As for the books’ release date, well, Blood and Dust is largely sorted, but The Big Smoke still has edits to come, so we haven’t set a date yet.


You’ve written a mix of short stories and longer stories (novels, novellas). Is there a length you prefer to work with or does it depend on the story you’re telling? What are some of the pros and cons?

It totally depends on the story, although I’ve noticed my stories tending towards the 5,000-word-plus mark in the past few years. The joys of the short story are that you can get in, hit the yarn, and get out pretty quickly (though not always, some just don’t behave at all!); they have a relatively speedy turnaround from completion to rejection (or acceptance!) compared to novel submissions that can take months and months; and you can play with voice and form without it costing you too much time if it all goes awry. For example, I’ve just written two shorts, less than 3,000 words each, based on the same core idea but starring different characters. Fascinating to see how the story changes!

It’s quite a morale boost to get a story accepted – kind of keeps you going while you’re beating your head against a longer work.

Novels give a hell of a lot of satisfaction, and kudos, when they hit the shelf, but it’s a long process. You’ve got a lot of terrain to play with, so you can have a lot of texture with all those subplots and minor characters muddying the pool with their own wants and needs. Juggling it all is a headache, but a fun headache, and I do find the marathon nature of it tiring at times, especially if you want to go back and change something that then causes ripples through the rest of the story. And then, of course, you’ve got what can be inordinately long wait times to hear back from (legacy) publishers, and then the lengthy production process as well, before the book hits the shelves.

The ideal compromise is the novella. I enjoyed writing Salvage so much – enough length to introduce some complexity and indulge in some scene setting and character development, but not long enough to make edits onerous.


Will there be more books about Kevin the Vampire or is The Big Smoke the end of his story?

I’m not planning any more stories about Kevin, although there’s room for them. I’ve spun a short story out of the novels’ world (‘The Preservation Society’, published this year in Dimension6), and at the end of The Big Smoke, there’s a nod to my first book, The Darkness Within. There’s a sequel to that at the back of the hard drive, somewhere – I’m actually thinking it might make a novella …


What Australian works have you loved recently?

Firstly, it was awesome to see Kirstyn’s Perfections released in paperback, and such a beautiful paperback, too. I love that story: the perfectly timed reveals, the lingering conclusion.

It terms of new reading, Marianne de Pierres’ Peacemaker was a most enjoyable ride this year, Chris Bongers did a great job with (non-spec fic) Intruder, and I got a lot out of Tony Birch’s (non-spec fic) The Promise collection. And I finally caught up with The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, by Amberlin Kwaymullina – wonderful.


Have recent changes in the publishing industry influenced the way you work? What do you think you will be publishing/writing/reading in five years from now?

I don’t think the way I work has changed, although I have become even more aware that the chances of making any kind of living out of the stuff I write is rather remote. What is heartening is that with print on demand making publishing cheaper, and digital also making it easier to get work out, there are more markets for what I write, even if there’s also a lot more noise for readers to negotiate if they are to find that work once it’s published. I try to focus on writing the best yarn I can and let the chips fall where they may.

In five years, I expect I’ll still be working in the dark end of fiction. I’ve got a suite of short stories floating around at the moment, all set in a near-future flooded Brisbane, that might have risen to the surface by then – less fantastical than my usual work – and a couple of novels kicking around on the hard drive in all sorts of disarray that I’d like to get into some kind of order within five years.

As for reading, I’m trying to keep my reading base as broad as possible while supporting my fellow Aussies as much as I can; I’m expecting yet further genre blurring and genre pushing from them. I’m hoping they can keep setting their stories in Australia, with Australian characters, in Australian English – I don’t want to see our literary culture, or indeed our broader culture, succumbing to cultural and economic imperialism. Words – language – are important to cultural identity; that’s worth defending, not so much against evolution, but against supplantation.

 ~

This interview was conducted as part of the 2014 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’ll be blogging interviews from 28 July to 10 August and archiving them at SF Signal. You can read interviews at:

http://tsanasreads.blogspot.se/search/label/2014snapshot (here)
http://fablecroft.com.au/tag/2014snapshot
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/tag/2014snapshot
http://bookonaut.blogspot.com.au/search/label/2014snapshot
http://www.davidmcdonaldspage.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/tag/2014snapshot/
http://randomalex.net/tag/2014snapshot/
http://jasonnahrung.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://stephaniegunn.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://helenstubbs.wordpress.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://ventureadlaxre.wordpress.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://mayakitten.livejournal.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://benpayne.wordpress.com/tag/2014snapshot/ 
http://www.merwood.com.au/worldsend/tag/2014snapshot
http://crankynick.livejournal.com/tag/2014snapshot

Dimension6, Issue 1

Dimension6 is a new ezine being put out by Coeur de Lion Publishing. It's free to download (and can be downloaded here) and the first issue, edited by Keith Stevenson went live earlier in April.

I decided to give it a read because it was a new Aussie speculative fiction magazine, and because, with only three stories, it was a very manageable length to read on a whim. Happily, it contained three strong stories that took me from the past to the future and then to some vampires. As usual, I've made some comments on the stories below. I look forward to reading the next issue in a few months.

~

"Ryder" by Richard Harland — a story set against WWI rural Australia, following a girl who becomes interested by the unusual comings and goings of a local boy. What does he do up on the ridge with girls that aren't from around here? Who does no one ever see them again? I liked it, especially the ending.

"The Message" by Charlotte Nash — an odd tale about quantum possibilities. I felt like there was enough worldbuilding there for a novel, and that the short story didn’t explore it all in full. I wanted to know more. What we did learn was interesting but also a little confusing. The kind of story you have to properly pay attention to.

"The Preservation Society" by Jason Nahrung — vampires, blood, memories, that's what this one is about. A group of vampires gathers for an auction of a volunteer; the right to end her life. But our main character bucks the expected outcome. Although it started a bit mundanely (for a dark vampire story), I liked where it ended up.

4 / 5 stars

First published: April 2014, Coeur de Lion Publishing
Series: There will be more issues, yes. It is a magazine.
Format read: ePub
Source: Publisher's website

Salvage by Jason Nahrung

Salvage is a novella by Jason Nahrung, put out by Twelfth Planet Press, and the first longer work of his I've read (I think I've read a short story before, just don't ask me which one).

Salvage is set on an island near Brisbane, where a couple take their first holiday after a miscarriage. Melanie is the main character and the story primarily follows her continuing journey in coming to terms with the miscarriage, the coldness that has crept into their marriage since, and her husband, Richard's, distraction with work.

While on the island, she meets Helena, a somewhat mysterious waif, with a medical condition that prevents her from fully enjoying their surroundings. She is also holidaying there with her husband. The two women strike up a friendship, but it turns out to be not entirely what Melanie expected.

I liked Melanie as a character but I'm not sure I'd want to be friends with any of the other characters in real life. Richard, while not positioned as an antagonistic character per se, was central to some of Melanie's issues. I'm not sure that I would have put up with him as much as Melanie did.

I found Salvage to be quite dark. I'm inclined to classify it as the horror version of magical realism. The fantastical elements didn't come to the fore until near the end and would have surprised me if I hadn't been expecting them (since Twelfth Planet Press do primarily publish speculative fiction). The publisher is categorising it as "Australian Gothic" which I think is fairly apt. As far as the horror element goes, there was a bit of ickiness and a bit of violence, but nothing which is likely to give me (most people?) nightmares.

I recommend Salvage to people after a quick, dark read. (It's definitely not a cheery story.) I think people who are into contemporary/mainstream/whatever-you-want-to-call-it books would also enjoy Salvage as, like I said, the fantastical elements are relatively minor. I'll certainly be on the look out for more books/stories from Jason Nahrung.

4 / 5 stars

Published: June 2012, Twelfth Planet Press
Format read: Paperback
Source: Publisher giveaway due to minor printing error (which it took me a while to locate)