Bray Mattheson

I’ve always been drawn to music with strong lyrics—Bobby D, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Townes Van Zandt. From there, I started writing songs for bands, and eventually moved into poetry around the age of nineteen.

In my mid-twenties, I began writing short stories—observations, more poetry, fragments of thought. Then, in my mid-thirties, I found myself sitting on a boat in the Philippines for the umpteenth time, hours on end. I picked up my phone and wrote the first chapter of my debut novel.

Since then—I’m 40 now—I’ve been writing between 1,000 and 2,000 words a day of long-form fiction. I realised it’s often easier, and more effective, to tell a story and say something meaningful in 80,000 words than in a few lines of song lyrics.

But yeah, those folk songs that tell you a whole story in a minute, like Isis on the Desire album by Bob Dylan, are masterful!

Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian. Hemingway — A Moveable Feast, For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Have and Have Not… that’s the one that made me discover him.

Poetry by Charles Bukowski — and the novels, pretty much everything he ever wrote… except Women.

Also: Truman Capote for his dialogue. Patrick Süskind for the way he made perfume perfume — I don’t recall any other book that made me smell the way that one did. Cormac McCarthy again — The Road, the greyness of it, the darkness, the unnamed protagonist.

And of course I Am Legend by Richard Matheson — not the movie, not at all. The movie sucks.

And I gotta shout out R.L. Stine — those Goosebumps books made it all happen. Even if most of them just for their pretty covers and they sat on my bookshelf gathering dust… I still loved them.

In my debut novel, I take the reader far away—drop them onto a sun-drenched island, white sand between their toes, a piña colada in hand… and then—bang. Something comes out of the water.

You know how you sit on a beach reading about some detective grinding through the dirt and noise of a city? I wanted to flip that.

Give you the calm, the escape… then break it.

Zombies. Pirates.

And that volcano behind you?

Yeah. That’s going off too.

Probably Puaka — the Hell-Pig. She’s Casey’s pet, his closest companion. But she’s got more bark than oink… a devouring beast of a sow. Still funny, still loving. Food-driven; always sniffing for taro.

While researching megafauna and wild pig breeds, I came across the Entelodontidae — Hell Pigs… or Terminator Pigs. Honestly, the two coolest nicknames in paleontology. I mean… Hell Pig beats T. rex in the paleo nickname world, right?

At two meters tall, these bad boys had bite. They could take down cave bears, lions, whatever sabretoothed beast you put in front of them.

So yeah… what better companion to protect my protagonist when the ocean starts sending its dead ashore?

A Hell-Pig

I’ve just finished the last round of edits on The Bunyip Child—book one of a gothic Australian series set in colonial Australia. Now I’m onto book two: bad-ass gold miners, spear-wielding natives, monster hunters, cannon-lad tanks built out of gumtrees… and the bunyip. One of the most fearsome creatures down under, if not the most fearsome. The thing crawls out of billabongs at night.

Also just finished the first draft of a bizarro thriller about warring food factory workers in a small town called Greaseville.