Nova Scotia Vol 2 anthology, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, is now available to order! It celebrates the depth and breadth of Scotland's dazzling science fiction and fantasy landscape from its haunted islands to its transformed cities and everything in between. Jenni Coutts created the gorgeous cover art.
You can order the book on its own, or buy the bundle anthology deal - both from the Luna store.
Today we'd like to introduce you to CL Hellisen and the story "Sugar Teeth".
About the author:
CL Hellisen is a South African writer living in Scotland. Their stories and poems have appeared in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Tor.com, Apex, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Shoreline of Infinity and others. Their novel Cast Long Shadows was shortlisted for the Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2023.
CL on the story:
I cut my baby writer teeth on the horror novels that my dad brought home from the library, and one of the things that drew me to these stories was the concept of transformative bodies. In horror, transmutation is mostly presented as, well, as something horrific. The Fly and other movies depicted the loss of humanity as the body turns bestial – the soulless end.
But if you were born female, or if you are trans, body horror takes on whole new layers of meaning. It can be literally an act of creation – and it can also be something immensely freeing. Instead of fearing the transformative, we carry it in our blood like longing. I think it’s not surprising that so many of horror’s Bright New Things are Femme, Queer, and Trans Voices.
I’m not a horror writer, but those early stories fed into my view of the universe and how I approach my own stories and themes, and the images that I find most striking. My words are distilled from fairy tales (which have their own particular horror), from the pulp SF of my childhood, from the lush, gothic fantasy of Tanith Lee and Angela Carter, and served with salt on the rim.
While my story is included in this anthology of Scottish speculative fiction, as a South African who has lived in Scotland for eight years, my work is inspired by both countries. There will always be thistles, and there will always be witdoring.
Sugarteeth is horror as hope; it’s the immigrant’s sly and fantastical view of the curtain-twitching ‘good neighbours’ of Scotland, science fiction gestated in the long slow aftermath of a pandemic that changed nothing. It is a reaction against being constrained – by bodies, by fear, by an alien culture – and the transformative cicada-cycle of death and renewal.
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