Around the same time (far too young!) I read King’s Carrie, and although I didn’t understand most of it I loved that too. I think ‘The Mezzotint’ by M R James – I saw it being performed as an illustrated monologue on TV when I was about 7 or so, and I loved it. What’s the first horror story you can remember making a big impact on you? The rest of it, I’m glad to say, kind of fell from my fingers as I typed – it was one of those stories that came out pretty much fully formed, with little conscious plotting or intervention on my part. The truthful answer to this is, I’m not completely sure! I’d seen one of those short news article pieces about travelling the seas around Somalia and the private security the shipping companies use and another about the militia’s in Somalia, and how all its members tended to be young and male, often orphaned and using drugs, how the militia became a kind of replacement family (albeit a fucked-up one) and the two things kind of gelled in my head. What inspired your story “Little Traveller”? Determined to outdo us all, he has not merely a to-be-read pile but a to-be-read house. His work can be found hiding (waiting to jump out and scare the proverbial out of you) in a variety of anthologies such as At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Postscripts, Gaslight Arcanum, Gaslight Grotesque, and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth.

He’s been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Collection prize. Simon Kurt Unsworth is the author of the recent release The Devil’s Detective as well as the short story collections Quiet Houses and Lost Places.

Quiet Houses by Simon Kurt Unsworth