Kaaron Warren has a long list of honors to her name, including the Shirley Jackson Award and the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award. She has published five multi-award-winning novels and seven short story collections. Bitters (Cemetery Dance) is her newest title.

Many American readers are less familiar with you because you make your home in Australia. Can you introduce yourself?

I’m an Australian writer and longtime obsessive reader. From the age of five, when my grandmother caught me reading The World’s Best Fairy Tales long after lights out, I read everything I could lay my hands on. My dad was and is a great reader of science fiction, so I read Nebula Award anthologies, loving the sheer imagination and the possibilities there. Dad would take me to the library and let me borrow anything on his card, including James Bond books, which the librarians weren’t so sure about!

I wrote my first real short story at 14 and finished a novel at 16, inspired by S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. That was never published, although I received encouraging feedback from the publisher I sent it to.

It wasn’t until I was 28 that my first short story saw print, in a horror anthology called Shrieks. That story received good reviews and got the attention of editors in Australia and made me believe I could actually do this.

My first short story collection, The Grinding House, was published in 2005, and my first novel, Slights, in 2009. Since then, I’ve had four more novels, six short-story collections, a novella, and over 200 short stories in print. Sometimes it doesn’t quite seem real!

You are vocal about having wanted to be a writer from a very young age, but why did you choose horror as your genre?

I didn’t really choose horror, but horror chose me! I’ve always been drawn to the darker stories and prefer my fiction not to have a happy ending just for the sake of it. The fairy tales I enjoyed, along with the scary ones, like “Bluebeard.” For me, horror has the ability to surprise me. There’s an element of freedom in storytelling in speculative fiction that doesn’t always exist in other stories. Ghosts exist, the afterlife is real, monsters do live under your bed. I love that anything is possible.

From a young age, I managed nightmares by lying in bed upon awakening and taking control of them, turning them into stories that I could direct. I taught my kids to do the same thing; spend five minutes or so remembering and utilizing your dreams.

All of my early influences, and writers who influence me to this day, are those who delve into the darker side of life. They explore human behavior and interactions sharply and with full honesty. A major influence is Daphne du Maurier. I re-read Rebecca and The Scapegoat every couple of years, drawn in by what I know is going to happen, and how beautifully she tells her story. I also love Celia Fremlin, Rosemary Timperley, Agatha Christie (in particular the non-detective stories), Kathy Acker, Harlan Ellison, William Golding, Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, Dylan Thomas, and Ray Bradbury. To name a few! I believe that everything I read, good and bad, beloved or disliked, influences me as a writer.

Your work also often deals with the space between life and death. Bitters is an excellent example of this. Can you tell us a bit about where the idea for this story came from?

I was reading about the ancient condiment garum, a fish sauce which Pliny the Elder called “the exquisite liquid.” Fish sauce today is made in a similar way, and I think it is delicious! But oh my goodness, the description of how it is made! The many months of fermentation, the smell, the transformation from fish guts to that “exquisite liquid,” it obviously set something off in my mind, because I had almost like a vision of the giant metal man in the story, standing tall and hollow. I wrote a detailed description of him, imagining the steps winding around, his head tilted back, and through this, the story started to develop.

I wanted to explore the nature of healing and health, and the industries built around them. There’s also a cultish feel about the Bitters liquid and its believers, a sense that they are better than everyone else.

Hierarchy of power, the importance of many jobs that are not respected, and the crushing nature of responsibility are all other themes I explored in the story.

Since you have had success writing horror at various lengths, why did you choose the novella format for Bitters?

I absolutely love the novella length, both as a reader and a writer…. But as a writer, it means I can explore more of the pathways in a story without needing to go right to the end of each one. I can focus on the horror while layering in some background and worldbuilding but still having the shocking elements remain the central focus. I didn’t choose it deliberately, but as I was taking notes and working on the story, it grew organically to this length.

I cannot let you go without asking what authors you are most excited about right now—peers you want to share with our library workers, especially great authors from Australia that we might be missing out on?

We have a great community of excellent writers over here! I’d love your librarians to take a look at T.R. Napper, Joseph Ashley-Smith, Aaron Dries, Cat Sparks, Robert Hood, J.S. Breukelaar, Angela Slatter, Kirstyn McDermott, Lisa L. Hannett, Daniel O’Malley, Lee Murray, Alan Baxter, Matthew R. Davis, and Paul Mannering.