WELDON BURGE

Husband and wife team, Bram Stoker Winner L.L. Soares and Laura Cooney, having written some truly incredible and entertaining horror fiction over the years. L.L.'s stories have appeared in a number of Smart Rhino anthologies ("Sawbones" in ZIPPERED FLESH, "Seeds" in ZIPPERED FLESH 2, "Sometimes the Good Witch Sings to Me" in SOMEONE WICKED, and "What the Blender Saw" in INSIDIOUS ASSASSINS). Smart Rhino also had the pleasure of publishing their SF/horror novella GREEN TSUNAMI. The two of them took some time out of their busy schedules for a few interview questions.


Most of your writing tends toward horror, but GREEN TSUNAMI definitely has a science fiction flavor as well. What sparked the idea for the novella?

LL: Well, a lot of it had to do with the initial concept. Our first short story collection, IN SICKNESS, had just come out from Skullvines Press (which featured solo stories by both of us, and a novella called "In Sickness," which we wrote together). A couple of writers we knew were starting their own small press, and they wanted another collaborative novella from us. The only stipulations were that: 1) it had to involve the end of the world, and 2) it had to be told in correspondence format between a husband and wife (letters, emails, etc.). At this point, apocalyptic fiction had just started to really get big, but we didn’t want to do anything that had been done before. No zombies or cannibals or stuff like that. In fact, the entire idea of the end of the world can instantly bring to mind ruins and barren spaces and death. And we wanted to do something the complete opposite of that. Where, instead of death and desolation, there was going to be life. It just wasn’t necessarily going to be human life. Not as we know it.

And that’s how the science fiction flavor evolved. There are also elements of bizarro fiction in there, since both Laura and I are big fans of surrealism, and the idea of a constantly evolving, mutating landscape seemed to tap right into that. Unfortunately, once the novella was completed, the small press that asked for it closed up shop. Here we had a novella we really thought came out great, but the place that had requested it was gone. That’s when Smart Rhino swooped in and came to the rescue. Which we’re both grateful for.  Read More