Red Spikes (21 page)

Authors: Margo Lanagan

BOOK: Red Spikes

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The author acknowledges the following sources of ideas, images and references for these stories:

‘Baby Jane’ probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t read Lynne Reid Banks’s Indian in the Cupboard series, or gone to Jo Creagh’s birth classes in 1988 before Jack was born.

‘Monkey’s Paternoster’ was directly inspired by a documentary about the Hanuman langur monkeys in the Indian city of Jodhpur, probably
Warriors of the Monkey
God
, directed by Phil Chapman (1999).

‘A Good Heart’ came about after I went to two classes in February and March 2005: Gillian Polack’s weekend course ‘Understanding the Medieval World’ at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre, and Sybil Jack’s WEA class ‘Medieval Forests in Fact and Myth’.

‘Winkie’ and ‘Mouse Maker’ were both inspired by my reading Marina Warner’s
No Go the Bogeyman:
Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock
(Chatto & Windus, 1998). Warner only had to mention Wee Willy Winkie in the context of bogeymen and I knew there was a story there; when I went back to check the reference I realised that the picture on page 35 by ‘Dicky’ Doyle, from around 1890, of a very tall bogeyman carrying a basketful of children down a hill towards a thick miasma must have also imprinted itself on my mind. Warner also quoted a caption Goya wrote for a sketch of a heretic he made some time around 1820, when he was preoccupied with the Spanish Inquisition: ‘They put a gag on her because she talked . . . [and hit her about the head . . . because she knew how to make mice].’ Robert Hughes also quotes this caption in
Goya
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004), and adds that mouse-making was ‘a not uncommon charge in witch hunts at the height of the Inquisition.’

‘A Feather in the Breast of God’ comes from owning the budgies named in the dedication; the Leonard-Drummond family’s cat, Manga, who disappeared for several months, but came back and took up residence again, was another trigger.

‘Hero Vale’ is about a place that is very like the Wood Between the Worlds in C. S. Lewis’s
The Magician’s
Nephew
.

The foundation for ‘Under Hell, Over Heaven’ was laid during my Catholic primary school education in the 1960s, in teachings about Limbo. The new Pope is about to revise the Catholic Church’s beliefs regarding this place.

My first notes for ‘Forever Upward’ read: ‘An island community. Colonised by churchpeople who give all the power to the men. All the religion, too. The Free Church is a church on a string, made of paper, unreeled from the top of a cliff, occasionally, for the use of women, curmudgeons and solitaires.’

I never would have written ‘Daughter of the Clay’ if I hadn’t first read ‘Remember Me’ by Nancy Farmer, in Sharyn November’s
Firebirds
anthology (Penguin, New York, 2003): ‘She spent hours sewing weird dresses that made her look like she ate whale sandwiches for lunch. They were in really dead colors – mud, algae, pond scum. That kind of thing. Once she made a pair of hot pants in
toad
.’ And I never would have thought of the title without having read about the Clayr in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy.

Also by
M
ARGO
L
ANAGAN

WINNER
Victorian Premier's Literary Award,
Young Adult Fiction
Ditmar Award,
Best Collection
World Fantasy Award,
Collection
Michael L. P nntz Honor Book,
American Lib rani Association

Black Juice
is a book of breathtaking stories that defy
boundaries. They are dazzling, ruthless, tender,
fierce, unique - ten deeply moving stories from an
exceptional author.

‘A good short story, a really good one, is deceptively difficult to write. Which is why
Black Juice
is such an outstanding collection. Because every single story in it is, quite simply, perfect. That's what I said: perfect.’
OUTLAND, UK

W
INNER

Aurealis
Best Young Adult Short
Story Award
, ‘The Queen’s Notice’