Angel of Ruin

She writes horror and dark fantasy; she has porcelain skin, dark hair, a black cat and she carries a black parasol...but that doesn’t make her Poppy Z. Brite, or a goth for that matter. You don’t have to be a cliché to be a horror novelist as Kim Wilkins explains to Michelle Smith.

In the late 1990s I frequently saw Kim Wilkins at the University of Queensland or making her way around the nearby Brisbane suburbs. Writers were mythical creatures (academics, although they authored books, didn’t seem to count), and I found her – a published horror novelist – compelling. While sun-worshippers strove to develop the perfect tan, Kim sheltered under a delicate black parasol that shaded her pale skin from the sun.

Yet I never actually did speak with Kim, and it seems my creative powers may rival her own, for she is not the goth that I imagined. The parasol, for instance, has a perfectively prosaic raison d’etrê: “I have a scar on my right thigh, twelve centimetres long, nearly two centimetres wide, from surgery for a melanoma in my twenties. I’d prefer not to have one of them on my face,” Wilkins says, surprised by my assumption.

Even Wilkins’ black cat came into her possession for practical rather than aesthetic reasons. “I suffered a severe depression in 1998, and I’d read that animals were great therapy,” she says. “Because we lived in a flat, the only pet that would fit was a cat. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her, not because she was black, because she was spirited and had eyes like planets.”

I was not entirely wrong, however, for although she is most certainly not a goth now (“no card-carrying member of that sub-culture would recognise me as one of their own”), Wilkins admits to being a ‘swampy’, as local terminology had it, during her teens in the 80s. “I listened to Sisters of Mercy, The Mission, The Cult, I hung out in Morticia’s and the Tube Club. I tried to look like Patricia Morrison from The Gun Club. But I was a teenager, so all that is part of finding your identity.”

Proving that there is no right way to go about securing a book deal, Wilkins did not have a history of publishing short stories prior to the publication of her Aurealis award-winning novel The Infernal. “I can’t write short stories,” she says. “If I get an idea, I want to write the whole bloody novel. I need to spend time with the characters, which short stories don’t really allow.”

Intriguingly, Wilkins wrote ten other novels prior to The Infernal, which she never submitted to a publisher. “I knew they were awful. I’d finish them, put them aside, get on with the next one. I felt very much that I was doing an apprenticeship.” Despite her success, Kim still largely perceives writing books as a hobby. “I still do it in idle moments and on weekends and when I get insomnia.”

In the tradition of lumping female writers of horror or dark fantasy together regardless of their differences, Wilkins has been compared with Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite. In the instance of Brite, Wilkins believes that their writing is wildly different: “She’s very edgy and cool, and I’m so daggy. I don’t write vampires, but I understand the Anne Rice comparison a bit because of that sort of overripe style that we share.”

Worse than the automatic comparisons based on gender, are the questions about genre choice. “The whole ‘what’s a nice girl like you doing in a genre like this?’ thing is a bit depressing,” she says. “Like we’re supposed to be off writing books about child-rearing or something.”

Funnily enough, Wilkins probably could write about parenthood; she is now a mother to a baby boy, Luka, who has affected ever aspect of her life. She describes parenthood as “profoundly transformative”: “Of course it affects my work in that it’s harder to get to the computer some days; but I’m sure it also gives my work a texture that was not available to me when I hadn’t experienced that deep and ancient love. Anyway, that’s for my readers to decide I guess.”

Wilkins has written a chapter book for boys called Space Boogers which young Luka will no doubt read one day. “I like the idea that my little boy will actually be able to read one of my stories and not be ashamed!” As if their mother’s horror and dark fantasy novels would embarrass any child!

Wilkins also writes a series for younger readers, the Gina Champion Mysteries, which has reached its third instalment. The methodology for writing these books is different to her adult novels: “I don’t need to do anywhere near the research, the books are short and have a clear structure, I know the character already so there’s no need to spend time getting to know her.” Of course, this isn’t to say that writing for younger readers is not an art: “...I still try to write them well, and I’d never write down to younger readers. I can still remember what it was like to be a teenager, so I try to be sympathetic and respectful.”

Although Wilkins’ fans may be curious about her days as a ‘rock pig’, as her biography in Grimoire alludes to, her days of musicianship are over. She will deign to sing to Luka, and admits: “if you get me really drunk I’ll happily perform any song from the Xanadu soundtrack.”

Given that her partner is a musician, Wilkins’ home is never short of music anyway. “We have very eclectic tastes. At the moment, we’re obsessed with ambient music, like the stuff on the Projekt label or Relapse; Vidna, Steve Roach...still can’t go past Eno for ambient. But I also love Richard Strauss, Norah Jones, Cocteau Twins, Tori Amos, George Winston, Mendelssohn...” she says, struggling to limit herself. “For every book I write, I burn a CD of appropriate background music to play while I’m working. It’s food for the soul, music.”

Unsurprisingly Wilkins has accumulated a legion of devoted fans in several countries. Yet even after numerous novels she is still incredulous about her success: “Me. A writer. Me. It’s stupefying,” she says with genuine modesty.

Just as many aspiring writers dream, the reality of writing as a profession is wonderful, yet at time laborious. Conducting the research that informs the intricate detail in each of her lengthy novels is hard work: “Finding all the sources, looking at pictures, watching videos...all that is fun. But sitting down with a 900 page book on the history of Russian magic (as I’m about to do), that ain’t fun by any stretch of the imagination.”

Another repetitive, never-ending task is writing a PhD thesis, which Wilkins is also currently undertaking as well as working on her next novel – the second instalment of her Europa Suite Trilogy. The Autumn Castle, the first in the series, which draws on European fairytale tradition, is her most recent release, published by HarperCollins.