Author Interview: Martin Livings

Ah, the eternal question. Who am I? Where did I come from? Well, I live in Perth, have a beautiful wife and a precocious guinea pig, love horror movies, and for twenty years this year I’ve been publishing short stories in as many different places as I can possibly manage, with over seventy acceptances so far. My first novel, CARNIES, was published by Hachette Livre in 2006, and was nominated for both the Aurealis and Ditmar awards, which was really gratifying. “Rope” is my first eBook, and I’m excited as hell to see it in the wild!

 “Rope” was originally written for a proposed Western Australian horror themed four-novella collection, with stories written by three WA horror luminaries and, er, me. The collection didn’t end up happening, though, and I believe all three of the other stories have since found good homes and critical acclaim, but “Rope” went in my bottom drawer until Craig from Dark Prints started asking for novellas. The rest, as the cliched say, is history. A good part of the inspiration for the story itself came from the fact that my mother actually went to school with Eric Edgar Cooke, the last man to be hanged at Fremantle Prison. That sparked the idea of looking at all of the executions that occurred there, so I dove in to the research and read detailed accounts of all forty-four hangings that took place in the prison. I realised that people always talked about the crimes and the aftermath, but very little attention was paid to the act of the hanging itself, probably because it’s not a very nice subject. Reading newspaper accounts of forty-four hangings, then writing about them, wasn’t necessarily the healthiest of things to do to my poor brain; I had bad dreams for weeks, which probably helped in the creative process in the end! I just wanted to explore what it would be like to witness so many deaths, to be responsible for them, and yet to believe yourself to be a good person. How it would change you. The story wrote itself from there, pretty much.