Matthew R. Davis is an accomplished author and musician based in Adelaide, South Australia. His story, YOUTH TOOTH TEETH was the very first piece of micro fiction published in Nightmare Fuel Magazine. Matthew’s novelette Heritage Hill was shortlisted for a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award and in 2019 he took out the win for Best Short Story (Steadfast Shadowsong) and the Paul Haines Award for Long Fiction (Supermassive Black Mass) at the Australian Shadows Awards.
His latest book, Bites Eyes: 13 Macabre Morsels is a collection of sinister and terrifying vignettes and is out through Brain Jar Press from February 28, 2023.
Tell us a little about your new book, Bites Eyes and how it came about.
I saw that Brain Jar Press had an open call for flash fiction chapbooks, and since I dug their roster – great writers like Angela Slatter, Kaaron Warren, Alan Baxter, Sean Williams, Lee Murray, Joanne Anderton – I thought I’d give it a shot.
I’d been toying with the idea of collecting all my short fiction, flashes, drabbles and poems for a while, and I already had a list compiled, so I went through and selected twenty stories, carefully sequenced them, and submitted the result. BJP dug the manuscript but chose to cut seven stories in order to fit their chapbook page count. They also wondered if I could come up with a better name than Shadows, Vignettes, and Silhouettes, so I obliged.
I can be a stubborn beast when it comes to collaborating or changing my work, but Peter M. Ball presented a thoroughly reasoned and intelligent argument for his sequence as opposed to my own, so I went with it.
It’s been a very positive experience working with him and BJP and I can’t wait to see how it’s received – the early reports I’ve had, including blurbs from Kaaron, Alan, and Jason Fischer, have been quite impressed.
Art and ambition meet sublime moments of dread in Matthew R. Davis’ Bites Eyes, a collection of sinister and terrifying vignettes from the award-winning author and rising star of Australian horror.
Can you tell our readers a little about yourself and some of the major influences on your writing?
I guess I was always one of those morbid, melancholy kids who liked to wander alone and make stuff up in their heads, so I naturally gravitated to storytelling.
Early influences included Terrance Dicks, Ray Bradbury, and Greek mythology, and then I went through a fantasy phase where I devoured AD&D tie-in novels, Raymond E. Feist, Terry Brooks, things like that, before I discovered Stephen King and dove headlong into horror.
I quickly discovered Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, Dan Simmons, Richard Laymon, and so on. These days I would say that, for simplicity’s sake, the most recognisable flavours in my writing would be King and Campbell, with the occasional dash of Laird Barron, Caitlin R. Kiernan, or maybe Neil Gaiman for taste – though what I do is wholly me, and hopefully doesn’t come across this way in a literal sense! One of my friends loves my work and yet she can’t stand King for some reason, so I guess I’ve found my own voice.
I take some little influence from everything I experience, I suppose, and I read very widely – just recently, I’ve been enjoying John Skipp, Nancy A. Collins, Muriel Gray, Lawrence Block, Erika T. Wurth, Bret Easton Ellis, Quentin Tarantino, A.C. Wise, and Zachary Ashford.
You’ve got an impressive list of published, award-winning short stories as well as longer fiction. What’s the appeal of writing short fiction for you, and how does it differ from writing a novel?
It’s interesting that I’ve pivoted to short fiction of late, because I always fancied myself a novelist! I suppose the attraction of short fiction is the immediate gratification you get from finishing something fairly quickly… although, that said, I’ve completed a novel in three weeks whilst taking years to finish a short!
Also, it’s easier to break into the writing game with short fiction because there are always so many anthologies looking to fill themselves, whereas the novel market is much harder to crack. Most writers these days will try to establish themselves with short stories whilst they seek a deal for their own books.
The discipline of short fiction is different to that of a longer work, but not so much, really. You have to tell your story in a much more condensed fashion, but the tale will tell you which format suits best when it occurs to you – not every idea can be explored at novel length, and a short story can cover a concept quickly as a vignette or in more depth as a novelette. I find I do my best shorter work in the 7-12k range, because I can stretch out a bit, explore my characters in depth, allow more details to accrete so I’m presenting a fully formed world rather than a thumbnail sketch.
I like to go back to flash fiction now and again, because that’s a good discipline to master and I encourage all writers to try their hand at it – if you can tell an actual story in a drabble (100 words exactly), you can master any length or form.
Music obviously plays a huge role in your life. Tell us a bit about how you interweave music into your storytelling.
I’ve been a hardcore music fan since the age of 14 and that will never change. I know the stuff inside out, in a literal sense since I’m a songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist.
Because it’s so important to me, it just keeps popping up and demanding to be written about – kind of like sex, if there’s even a difference. I’ve had many band experiences but there are so many more I would have liked to know, so I get to explore them in fiction now – the way writers tend to create lead characters who are authors, I do the same with musicians, because they can articulate some of my own views on the world, creativity, and so forth.
In a less involved sense, mentioning the music a character loves is a great shorthand for their personality and interests – you can walk into someone’s home and get a solid read on them by checking out their books, movies, and music, and that works just as well for made-up people!
In another sense altogether, I think music has made me a much better writer because rhythms and melodies have become a part of the way I express myself, lending a flow and mellifluous tone to my work. If you break down any page from my books, you’ll be able to pick out internal rhymes, assonance, sentences that ebb and flow like riffs or raps, and a gleeful sense of wordplay.
All of this has long since become entirely reflexive, rather than some contrived and self-conscious effect, and it goes both ways because the lyrics in my songs moved away from standard structure and became more like prose as time went by.
More writers need to pay attention to the length of their sentences and paragraphs and the way they fit with each other; more writers need to listen to great rappers and understand the way they make words work for them. Prose is much more like music than many people understand.
Out of all the stories you’ve written, what one would you love to see made into a film, and why?
I think my first novel, Midnight in the Chapel of Love, would make a great independent feature. It was inspired by movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Beautiful Kate, and if it was produced by an Australian company and kept that local flavour, it would make a great rural Gothic.
The settings and landscapes are unique and beautiful – get someone like Ivan Sen behind the lens and you couldn’t miss. I’d love to script it and have a hand in the score, too.
That said, any and all of my works are open to adaptation, so indie filmmakers – get up in my face!
Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative, that have stayed with you? (and bonus question – what advice can you give emerging writers on how to deal with feedback?)
Like any writer, I love positive reviews and can’t get enough of them. A few that stand out are the thoughtful takes on my work by Adam Selby-Martin at The Sci Fi and Fantasy Reviewer and Eugen Bacon’s recent championing of The Dark Matter of Natasha, though every piece of pleased feedback is enormously welcome.
I’ve only had one really bad review so far (lucky sod!) and that was of a single story in an anthology – the reader marked every tale and gave mine the lowest score of D-, which hurt until he admitted he didn’t understand the plot, and since it seemed pretty straightforward to me – and since he gave A’s to stories I thought were mediocre at best – I recalled the advice of Something for Kate (“you can’t please everybody, Rockwell”) and let it go.
My advice to emerging writers? Try to keep a clear eye on what you’re doing so you know how seriously to take bad reviews. Some people are just mean and/or thick and their opinions shouldn’t shake you because they probably didn’t get what you were trying to do. Some people say, in all seriousness, that Stephen King is shit! That is empirically false – whether you like it or not, the man knows his game inside out and backwards and he writes a good stick, always – and so it comes down to personal taste.
If you read widely, can understand where your own work fits in with the broader discourse, and can be objective enough to see the true strengths and weaknesses of your own work, then you’ll know how much truth lies in any review, good or bad, and you can let the invalid ones bounce off you. They’ll still sting, but not for long. And hey, most reviewers don’t write fiction anyway, so you’ll always have that over the bastards!
The horror genre has always challenged the status quo. What do you like most about this genre, and do you like to push at its boundaries? If so, in what ways?
Oh, I love this genre more than any other because it’s the most flexible, the most durable, the most honest. I love that it’s been at the forefront of transgression, and I love that it refuses to become hidebound by convention, and I love that it welcomes voices and views from every conceivable creed with their own unique tales to tell.
I’d like to say that I push some boundaries, but I don’t honestly know how true that is… all I can do is what feels right, and yeah, sometimes that means abusing the technicalities of English, and sometimes that means working outside of horror altogether, but ultimately, I’m not creating a new paradigm here. What I’m aiming for is a sense of substance and sincerity within the falseness of written narratives, a feeling of truthfulness and vulnerability, a raw and aching hurt that can sometimes be healed but must always at least be recognised.
Some of my work wouldn’t even be called “real” horror by some readers, because it’s often more allusive and pensive and implied than it is violent and gruesome, but you’d have to be a total idiot to believe that fear is just being chased by a monster when our every waking hour is filled with dozens of tiny terrors that add up to our own worst nightmares. I don’t know… some might say my Shirley Jackson Award-nominated story, Heritage Hill pushes a few boundaries, because it’s uncomfortably real and political in its approach to institutionalised Australian racism – it doesn’t set up some nasty racists to meet a brutal EC Comics comeuppance, with a right-on punchline to make the liberal gallery cheer, it looks at things from an outsider perspective (the narrator is black but African-Australian rather than indigenous, and queer to boot) and then explores the culpability of everyone involved, criminal to witness to future historian, and the ability of everyone to experience the same irrational hatred of another kind. All the while seething with righteous anger at the moral and intellectual indefensibility of bigotry. But fiction with an axe to grind is nothing new.
Look, I’m a punk in spirit, always will be. I love to read new takes on things, fresh voices, bold truths, and I seek to avoid the obvious and old in my own stuff, and if any unsuspecting boundaries happen to get nudged in the process… well, all to the good.
What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?
“Keep going.”
Read Matthew’s story Youth Tooth Teeth here or find out more about Matthew on his website at matthewrdavisfiction.wordpress.com
Cover photo by Red Wallflower Photography