S.L. Grey: Writing Genre Fiction in South Africa (Author Week #3)

Writing genre fiction in South Africa 

S.L. Grey (Louis Greenberg and Sarah Lotz)

The other day at a literary festival event (one of the rare occasions when both halves of S.L. Grey have been trundled out in public in the same room) the panel was asked whether South Africa should have its own genre imprint. The audience was made up of some of South Africa’s very loyal SFFH fans, and we think they expected the answer, ‘Yes, of course, it’s a scandal that there isn’t a dedicated genre imprint in South Africa.’ But we and fellow panellists, Lauren Beukes and Tom Learmont, all agreed that there shouldn’t be. The market in South Africa is simply too small to sustain one.

There’s no particular reason to have a dedicated imprint selling local science fiction, fantasy and horror. There’s still very little original novel-length SFFH coming out of South Africa, although it’s clear from District 9 (an example of South African SFF idiosyncrasy which is reaching its retirement date) and Lauren’s marvellous Moxyland and Zoo City, that there is a potential audience for them. There is a very loyal and fanatical SFFH fanbase in South Africa, which devours whatever SFFH it can lay its hands on, and most of this is British and American. Louis worked in a bookshop for years and remembers the round-the-corridor queues at a Terry Pratchett signing, compared with the embarrassing no-show at a signing by Graham Swift who had just that year won the Booker Prize.

Zoo City and Moxyland were published first in South Africa by Jacana, a publisher known for choosing leftfield novels of interest to them. ‘We publish what we like’ is their tagline, more than a nod to the title of murdered struggle icon Steve Biko’s posthumously collected writings, I Write what I Like. Jacana is not making a great deal of money.

It was barely a decision for us to submit The Mall overseas and bypass South African publishing. We had written a mainstream horror novel which we wanted traditionally published rather than going the self-publishing or online routes. As far as we knew, no general trade publisher in South Africa had published a South African horror novel before and we thought very briefly about the incredulous responses we would get from local publishers, before submitting it to Corvus. We would be lucky to sell a thousand copies in South Africa, we thought, not a compelling prospect for an industry that makes most of its money on sport, current affairs, motivational and cookery books. Nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of Penguin South Africa who distribute The Mall in South Africa, The Mall has had wonderfully enthusiastic coverage on South African blogs, and a few South African newspaper reviews: not bad for a debut horror novel and one of the advantages of this small market which is top-heavy on writers and reviewers but a little short on readership. Understandably, most South African media’s not quite sure whether space on a South African horror novel will interest its audience.

Penguin South Africa has also been doing a wonderful job promoting Sarah’s other alter ego, Lily Herne (with her daughter Savannah Lotz), whose Deadlands young-adult zombie series they publish. They’ve been getting her decent mainstream media coverage and great exposure in stores, complete with dump bins and posters. Their willingness to push genre fiction into the press and the shop windows is admirable. The Deadlands experience shows that certain South African publishers like Penguin South Africa are actively looking for a commercial genre success and are willing to put some money into it. But it certainly is not enough to warrant an entire imprint. Even better that Deadlands is a lead title on a general list, rather than being stuck in a SFFH ghetto where only dedicated fans will look.

Penguin SA also publishes Sarah’s other work, her crime novels, and this is where South Africa certainly has a burgeoning industry. Crime fiction has grown incredibly in the past decade, with writers like Margie Orford, Mike Nicol, Roger Smith and Jassy Mackenzie enjoying international publication. Crime novels by Andrew Brown and Sifiso Mzobe have won the Sunday Times Award, the country’s major literary award, in recent years. Umuzi, one of the country’s foremost literary imprints, part of the Random House Struik stable, publishes Nicol and Mackenzie among other crime writers when they have not considered commercial SFFH. It’s an interesting and open question: what is the difference between crime and SFFH in South Africa? Why is crime readily published by South African houses and not SFFH? The same could be asked about women’s commercial fiction, another genre struggling gamely for a foothold in South African publishing.

The answer lies, to a great extent, in the subject matter. South African crime fiction is set squarely in South Africa and reflects and transforms South African realities in fiction’s magical, cathartic and powerful way.  A lot of the SFFH produced in South Africa is quite generic, set in fantasy neverlands or in the States or steeped in an amalgam of already-written locales and tropes.  While some of this work still has great merit, it is South Africanness – a broad and massively disparate range of experiences – that often sets the best, most notable, of our writing apart.

South African writers still suffer from ‘cultural cringe’, the idea – derived from the time when we were the pariahs of the world, caught in the past and in cultural isolation by that bizarre retrograde apartheid government – that if it’s South African, it’s not good enough, it embarrassingly falls short of international standards, it’s not world class. So many young writers, who start out as fans of SFFH from the States and Britain, think that to write well is to emulate the styles of those international writers they admire. Many South African readers themselves still deliberately avoid South African novels because they preconceive them as heavy, guilt-ridden and boringly political, and prefer to escape into realities that aren’t so close to home. This prejudice misses the fact that so much South African writing, past, current, ‘genre’ or ‘literary’, is inventive, challenging and entertaining. It’s all an awful internal PR job concocted out of cultural cringe and bad choices for school setworks. It doesn’t help that South African fiction, be it literary, genre or mainstream, is so often lumped together and relegated to its own ‘SA Fiction’ ghetto in many of our local chain book stores. It’s as if booksellers are sending the message that South African fiction isn’t worthy of rubbing shoulders with say, Steig Larsson, Stephen King or David Mitchell, or that it needs remedial attention to compete.

Any writer wants to be published as widely as possible, and  aspirant writers often think they have no chance of being published in the rest of the world if they write about South Africa. The international success of Zoo City and the interest in The Mall reminds us, as the canon of South Africa’s literary laureates has already proven, that the opposite is true: that our exotic, unique South African setting can make our writing stand out from the crowd. Then we need to back up that slight competitive edge with top-quality writing. This is what gets South African crime writers on international shelves, and we hope it encourages South African SFFH writers to write what they like, not what they think they should write.

Original Content: Interview with S.L. Grey (Author Week #3)

An Interview with S.L. Grey

By Harry Markov

HM: I’ve read the majority of your interviews over the Internet to get a better of sense of what has been asked and try to outdo that. You’ve shared that your combined hatred for malls gave birth to “The Mall.” What about malls pushes your buttons?

S: Basically the fakeness and sameness of them all. Fake lighting, fake people (mannequins), fake music etc. And underneath all this artifice, the bare corridors and storage rooms that are the heart and soul of the mall. Louis took me behind the scenes of his favorite mall when I visited him in Joburg, and it creeped me out.

L: I don’t really mind malls. I live in Johannesburg and, despite our great weather, our city’s pastime is going to malls on the weekends because we don’t have any beaches or mountains or rivers to take the kids to. When I was a student I worked in a bookshop in a mall, though, and that gave me a different angle on malls. I got to see the back end.

HM: It’s been established that Louis wrote Daniel’s and Sarah wrote Rhoda’s chapters, while communication between the two of you happened via e-mail. In your interviews you mention how that worked for you, but I have to ask, didn’t procrastination hijack your e-mail threads into non-writing territory?

S: We’d occasionally go off on a tangent and talk crap, but the fact that I knew Louis was waiting for my chapter and vice-versa meant that procrastination and gossip was kept to a minimum, which was a new experience for me. I’m usually quite happy to be distracted and arse around when I’m writing – I think most writers are the same!

L: I also like to talk nonsense, but I reach a threshold pretty quickly. E-mail does work for us, because we generally stick to our point and purpose.

HM: Janet van Eeden likens “The Mall” to a consumerism fueled Alice in Wonderland. I can almost agree. To me “The Mall” is the twisted cousin of “Through the Looking Glass,” where everything is opposite. The ideal of plastic beauty is substituted with one of mutilation. Scars and amputations arouse; shoppers are royalty entitled to everything in the mall and money is not even mentioned. It’s obvious that you satirize consumerism and materialism, but I’d like to ask for your full intentions with this setting, the motivations left unspoken and known only to you.

S: Consumerism and advertising are based on lies or half-truths – airbrushed models, empty slogans that really mean nothing (‘because you’re worth it’, ‘Just do it’ etc), and its all designed to get people to buy a load of crap that they don’t actually need. We wanted to strip this away and peer behind this façade. In The Mall’s world, models aren’t airbrushed, they’re skinny sickly anorexics, Botox and plastic surgery are taken to the max, and slogans tell the truth. I think The Mall’s ‘reality’ is actually less disturbing than the one we deal with everyday; at least it’s honest.

L: I honestly didn’t have any broad political intentions. For me, I always focus on the specific characters and on how events affect them. For me, that’s a key strength of fiction – it brings political generalities down to a personal, affecting level.

HM: Your novel explores the conflict ‘reality versus irreality’. The monster in the halls in the back of the mall, the under-mall itself and whether what Dan and Rhoda experienced was real or delusional. Is this an intentional mind game?

S: I guess we were playing with the concept of reality which is slightly different for everyone. It’s up to the reader to decide if they want to buy into (scuse the pun) the downside mall and the journey Dan and Rhoda take to reach it. I hope they do.

L: We do like to mess with your mind.

HM: The remarkable thing about “The Mall” is the unorthodox direction the plot adopts. With a ‘hero seeking escape’ plot-line, the escape would be the objective, the prize and not the stop in the middle of the road. What prompted you to explore the story  beyond this initial plot.

S: We were adamant that we wanted to look at what happens after the traditional ‘happily – or unhappily- ever after’ ending. I don’t think this is explored enough in horror fiction or movies, or if it is, it tends to be in the form of an epilogue. We put our characters though a series of bizarre and sometimes horrific experiences and it made sense to look at how this had impacted on their lives and personalities. It was the most challenging section of the novel to write.

L: Throughout the writing, we wanted to keep our characters grounded in reality, despite their bizarre circumstances. We wanted the reader to engage with the story and ask, “What would I do if this actually happened to me?” Exploring the after-effects of the events was part of that psychological realism. I was very glad that Sarah wanted to go that route because that style is much more my writing comfort zone.

HM: Reading “The Mall” I kept thinking about the dimension of horror and fear. Pop culture has tied ‘horror’ to scream queens and cheap scares. What are the dimensions of horror for you?

S: I think there is horror to be found in the everyday. A subtle warping of reality, where the benign and seemingly normal is twisted, is far scarier than zombies or vampires or mythical creatures. Of course, true horror comes in the 1.am phone call, the car accident, sudden illness and life’s randomness.

L: Absolutely. I don’t need to make up monsters to frighten me. The thought of my family getting hurt in an accident or an attack is enough to keep me awake.

HM: Most chapters in the book end on a sort of ‘uh oh, what will we do now note.’ From your interviews, I see that these are challenges that your threw each other to write the characters out of complete peril. Was there ever a dead-end in the earlier drafts, which really did end it for the characters?

S: We did plan for Dan’s ending to be somewhat more gruesome! I actually feel guilty when I think about our initial plans for him. But as we progressed we were both open to doing U-turns and rewriting when something didn’t work. We didn’t stick slavishly to any ideas. I know it’s a cliché, but I think the characters ran the show more than we did.

L: Yes, during the writing, we had a couple of sticking points where we were like “Now what?” rather than Dan and Rhoda, but then we went back and fixed them up.

HM: If you were stuck in the under-mall, what would you be? A shopper, working for The Management or hiding in-between the cracks?

S: I think I would be hiding in the cracks. I’m not very good with authority, bureaucracy drives me mental, and I reckon I’d get bored with shopping after a while. I’m not a very good consumer.

L: Shopper. Definitely. Give me tons of money and plenty of time, I could find plenty of goodies to buy for myself and my friends and family.

HM: If you escaped the under-mall, would you return and why?

S: I think Rhoda and Dan are seduced by the fact that they have experienced something extraordinary, that is never boring, and have encountered a place where they are not judged. I think this could be seductive, but I like my current reality, so no, I don’t think I would make the choice to return. Besides, who’d feed the dogs?

L: I’d miss the sky and birds, open air, the chance to ever see the sun or the sea. As you can tell, I’ve toyed with the idea.

HM: So far, “The Mall” has been well received in the UK and South Africa. Are there plans to conquer the US and how do you think that the Mecca of Malls will react to the demonization of their favorite spot [though I tend to overgeneralize, cause malls are now global as well as the behavior assumed to go with it]?

S: I hope it hits the US soon. I have no idea how US readers will react – like you say, mall culture is global, so hopefully the people who haunt Wallmart and the strip malls will get a kick out of it.

L: We’d love to get it into the US. I think it would appeal to anyone who’s shopped in malls, whether they love or hate them. Those who hate malls would enjoy the satire, and those who love them would enjoy the sales.

HM: You’re next novel as S.L. Grey is titled “The Ward”  and will expand on your universe, but this time the setting is a hospital, which most people find terrifying as it is. Is this novel a child of your accumulated loathing of hospitals? Why hospitals?    

S: I don’t loathe hospitals at all, but I do hate medical aid and insurance schemes, which are a real-life horror here as well as in the US, and increasingly in the UK. If you have the money and the connections you have a better chance of good medical care and survival, which should be a basic human right. If we are satirising anything in The Ward, it is this. The real horrors lurk within the corporations and government agencies that play with people’s lives in order to make money. Sure, The Ward explores some visceral elements – hospitals can be scary places, especially if you accidentally find yourself in the morgue – but I hope we’ve created something fresh, new and terrifying that readers won’t expect.

L: As you say, hospitals are terrifying enough as they are, so we didn’t need to play that aspect up in quite the same way as we twisted malls. The idea of waking up, in trouble, in a vast and under-resourced state hospital served as a great starting point for our story.

The Mall reviewed by Harry Markov (Author Week #3)

The Mall

By S.L. Grey

Reviewed by Harry Markov

The Mall by S.L. Grey is horror on steroids with a PhD in psychology. It’s the smart answer to the SAW series as far as torture challenges are concerned and I estimate that even Hannibal Lector would worry entering this alternate reality. Writers Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg set out to chillingly disturb and tastefully disgust.

I admit The Mall exhibited a rather slow start. Thirty pages in and I had not caught a whiff of horror, rather atypical from I’d expect from horror regardless of medium. In retrospect, I’m happy with the pacing as S.L. Grey justify every sentence used in the introduction of Dan and Rhoda, the unlikely protagonists, who must team up in order to survive the mall’s hazardous games. Both characters are socially dysfunctional. Dan’s a mall bookstore clerk with a strong tendency to whine as consistent with his emo persona, while Rhoda’s a scarred junkie with a short fuse and a potty mouth.

It’s Rhoda’s irresponsibility [leaving the kid she’s supposed to babysit at Dan’s bookstore in order to meet her dealer] that triggers The Mall’s domino effect. When the kid disappears [Rhoda really doesn’t know his name, OK] and Dan’s ineptitude to focus on anything other than his woes causes Rhoda trouble with the Highgate mall cops, it’s Rhoda’s idea of revenge to later take Dan hostage and have the whole mall searched for the kid. This plan backfires, when the Highgate mall ceases to be the Highgate.

S.L. Grey excel at reality distortion. As the characters enter sub-basement after next, the mall dons a more sinister atmosphere and the world tilts towards the macabre. From a mannequin massacre to mortifying signs, murderous text messages [while both cell phones suffer from no reception] and glowing rooms, Dan and Rhoda have to navigate this byzantine underground, until they enter the Other Mall. The Mall that has no closing time. The Mall that has no exit. The Mall that venerates consumerism, glorifies body mutilation and robotizes its employs as mechanic slaves.

The Mall employs the video gamer logic from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, most prominent in the scene with the elevator death-trap. References to Through the Looking Glass litter the whole novel as evident from the satire aimed at consumerism and the ideals celebrated in the under-mall. The Mall is high concept in its approach as to how it presents materialism and the hunger for hoarding and the itch to own.

Shoppers function as celebrities, whose purpose is to consume as Rhoda’s skillful narration demonstrates. Body image is taken to extremes with starvation and obesity as ideals of beauty and the advertising business promotes the true face of these ideals. In the under-mall, people have accepted the damage and seek more damage. The juxtaposition between the honesty and the familiarity of the advertising methods is what makes the under-mall so startling.

Although not entirely accurate, The Mall pays homage to body horror through the use of cell phones as extensions of both Rhoda and Dan as well as the main weapons the Management of the under-mall to tease and spook. As the couple descends further down in the mall’s depths, I felt how much they relied on their phones, on the reception and the time display and how with every sub-level their phones betrayed them, stripping Dan and Rhoda from their sense of time and becoming weapons for the Management.

The Mall’s atypical structure accommodates the ‘What Happens After’ segment, where Dan and Rhoda have escaped the under-mall and are faced with the normalcy of Joburg [as normal as Joburg can be]. I risk spoiling the novel, by giving away succulent character development. I’ll say it this way, S.L. Grey answer the question ‘What if the victims enjoyed running from monsters and evading fatalities?’ The answer warped all my expectations from horror as genre and proved to me that horror is more than shock and screams.

The Mall is a catalog of horror. It’s universal as malls around the globe. It will have you look with distrust your cell phone the next time you receive a text.

 

Tuesday Fiction: “Maun of the Dead” by Sarah Lotz (Author Week #3)

Our new story this Tuesday is “Maun of the Dead” by Sarah Lotz, one half of S.L. Grey.

Maun of the Dead

Sarah Lotz

The YOU magazine is over six weeks old, but I don’t care. I grab it from its otherwise empty shelf and greedily flick through the dusty pages, pausing at a Becks centrefold and a saccharine story about a baby battling a heart condition. Weird. I had no idea there was even a market for YOU in Botswana, and I’ve never actually read one before. But right now, my limbs twitching with excess adrenaline and ears sensitive to the slightest sound, I cling to it, hungrily checking out the ‘dos and don’ts’ of celebrity fashions. It reminds me of the glossily tempting magazine aisle in the Longbeach Mall Woolworths. It reminds me of normality, comforting banality and the time before. The time when my biggest concern was whether or not I had enough cash on my card to cover the forbidden Lindt bars I’d smuggled into my trolley.

I glance at the cashier and attempt a smile. She stares at me blankly and goes back to filing her nails. The security guard leans on the door frame, yawns and rubs a hand over his face. They’re bizarrely unconcerned that the glass doors are propped wide open and that anything could wander in at any time. The security guard doesn’t even have a weapon.

The unexpected everydayness of it all is suddenly overwhelming, and for a sickening second the worn and scuffed floor seems to tip under my feet. I grab the cool metal of the magazine shelf and bite the middle of my tongue.

I hadn’t been expecting this.

As we drove out of the camp’s high gates early this morning I’d been steeling myself for a facsimile of the images we’d seen via Google Earth and News24 before the internet went down. Scenes straight out of Dawn of the Dead: suppurating corpses stacked by the side of the road, burnt-out cars, smashed shopping malls and a horde of the Infected stumbling down the main thoroughfare. But Maun looked almost exactly as it had when J. and I arrived here six weeks ago: the only sounds the occasional bird call, the only smells the slightly leathery interior of the Land Cruiser and the familiar scent of heat and dust. Sure, it was quieter. The roads were empty of traffic: the only signs of life a fleeting glimpse of a woman collecting firewood outside the community camp and a skinny, hobbled donkey grazing next to a fenced rubbish dump. Apart from the occasional charred wooden skeleton, the households flanking the road were much as before: family smallholdings made up of a collection of thatch-and-mud dwellings and rickety mopane kraals. Even the Nando’s in the town centre looked untouched and ready to sell grilled chicken. The last thing I expected to find was an open Spar and a YOU magazine.

Where is everyone?

And why is the supermarket even open? There’s very little of anything on the shelves. A few jars of peach jam (now rolling around in my basket), a lonely and tattered box of rusks, a display of Frisco and a solitary roll of one-ply toilet paper. They’ve even bothered to turn the generators on; the empty fridges whir pointlessly in the background. And it smells like every cut-price supermarket everywhere – just a faint trace of cleaning fluid undercut with a hint of spoiled meat. Apart from the denuded stock and a large Canada-shaped dark-brown stain on the floor in the snack aisle, there’s no sign that anything untoward has happened.

It’s eerie. Bloody unsettling.

I’ve been squeezing the magazine so tightly that the staples have left a painful indentation in my palm. Shit. My fingers are tingling – the familiar beginnings of a panic attack. I shake them briskly, but it’s not helping. My feet are numb and it’s becoming difficult to swallow. Time to get out of here.

I somehow make it over to the cashier’s desk and plonk my grocery basket on the counter.

‘Hi,’ I say, nodding behind her to the empty cigarette display and concentrating on keeping the panic out of my voice. ‘You got any cigarettes?’

The cashier shakes her head. ‘No.’ The boredom rolls out of her in languid waves.

I take out a hundred-pula note and push it across the counter. ‘You sure?’

The woman stares at it. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I cannot give you change.’

I shrug. I’m not sure if money even has a point any more. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Do you want a bag?’ she asks.

The laugh escapes before I can stop it. Not a question you’d expect to hear in the circumstances. ‘Yes, please.’

She tucks the note under the till and starts packing my meagre groceries into a plastic carrier bag.

‘Thanks,’ I say, mentally preparing myself for the walk across the parking lot to the waiting Land Cruiser. Even with the door wide open the Spar provides some sort of cover, somewhere to hide if necessary. But I can’t stay in here all day. I stumble past the security guard, shielding my eyes against the glare of morning sunlight.

‘Hey! Hey you! Lady!’

A silhouetted figure is heading in my direction. Then the light shifts and I see him clearly. It’s okay. He looks normal – alive at any rate. I hesitate. There’s something familiar about him.

‘Hey!’ he says again. ‘You remember me?’

I’m about to shake my head, then I remember: he’s a hawker. I’d bought an elephant-hair bracelet from him, back when J. and I stopped here forever ago to stock up for our trip.

I’m absurdly glad to see him. ‘Oh! How are you?’ I hold up my arm and wave it around ridiculously, showing him that I’m still wearing the trinket.

‘I am okay. Where are you staying?’

‘Audi camp.’

He nods. ‘Yes. I hear about this. There are many of you there.’ He means tourists, I suppose, travellers caught away from home when it all kicked off.

‘There aren’t that many.’ We were among the lucky ones, fleeing straight to one of the fenced camps on the outskirts of town when the bodies started dropping. The same place where we stayed every year before heading to the game reserves. God knows we never expected to call it home.

‘You are from South Africa?’ he asks.

I nod.

He shakes his head sadly. ‘It is bad there.’

‘You’ve heard? You have news?’ My eagerness is pathetic. It’s been weeks since the camp office’s internet went down. The last news I’d greedily downloaded was from a diehard blogger Tweeting from inside the ruins of the Canal Walk Game store. The words <OMFG they’re cumin 4 me gotta run > imprinted forever on my brain.

‘I’m sorry, all I know is that the borders are still closed,’ he says. ‘You from Johannesburg?’

‘No, Cape Town.’

‘You have family back in Cape Town?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must be worried, no?’

‘Of course.’ I don’t tell him that most of my family are in the UK. Where the worst of it is, according to the now-defunct internet. Another thought to build a wall around.

‘Where is everyone?’ I ask. ‘It’s so quiet here.’

He shrugs. ‘It is early.’

That isn’t what I meant. Besides, it’s not that early, is it? I check my battered Swatch. 8:30 a.m. That’s practically the middle of the night for Africa.

‘I hear you say that you want cigarettes?’ he says.

‘Yes! And water. Can you get water?’

He nods, holding out his hand. I give him three hundred pula. He passes one of the notes back to me. ‘You wait here. I will return in ten minutes.’

‘But … can I give you a lift? Shouldn’t you be inside somewhere?’

He chuckles. ‘Thank you, but no.’

‘Oy!’ Frikkie’s impatient voice cuts across the small parking lot. The sun bounces off the Land Cruiser’s windscreen, but I can just about make out his hulking shape in the driver’s seat. He insisted on driving. Ugh. But what could I do? J. and the others were tied up fixing the camp’s generator again, and I couldn’t have made the trip alone.

And I needed to get out of the camp. I needed to know.

The bracelet-seller wanders away. There’s a brief burst of laughter behind me. I whirl around, muscles tensed to flee. Three middle-aged men are now leaning against the bare black windows of the neighbouring Woolworths, laughing and chatting and clearly shooting the shit. The world shifts again, and this time when I bite my tongue I draw blood. Call it a nervous tic, but I have this habit of biting my tongue when I’m about to panic. I know it’s probably not a great idea to have a blood-dripping mouth in a town infested with zombies. But it helps my nerves.

I walk as briskly as I can towards the Land Cruiser, skirting the abandoned 43 4s in the parking lot, a reminder of all the families who won’t be going on their dream trip this season. Next to the Chinese shop a rusty Toyota bakkie is smashed up against the side of a khaki Land Rover, its bonnet concertinaed and distended. It’s almost comforting to see a sign that some disaster has actually happened. I was beginning to suspect that it was all a massive hallucination.

Frikkie shakes his head irritably as I climb in next to him. The car’s interior is steamy and reeks of his sweat.

‘Where have you been?’ He’s drumming his fat fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. He checks out my single bag of groceries. ‘No water?’

‘No. Can we hang here for a little bit?’ I nod towards the bracelet-seller strolling languidly down the centre of the road. ‘That guy says he can get us some.’

‘You give him money?’

‘Yes.’

He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘You won’t see that again.’

‘Well, it’s no great loss, is it?’

He rolls his eyes. I can practically see the thought bubble above his head containing the words ‘Women! Blerrie useless.’

Frikkie encompasses everything I hate about certain white South African men. Big and beefy, loud and moustachioed, full of generalisations about ‘blecks’ and ‘chicks’, his sense of entitlement wafting out of him like BO. Back in the real world he worked as a commodities broker (whatever that is). Five weeks I’ve been this guy’s neighbour, listening to his grunts and snores in the tent next to mine and J.’s. Five weeks and this is the first time we’ve had a conversation that doesn’t amount to ‘pass the biltong’. It’s patently obvious he’s not comfortable in my company. He wears a thick gold wedding band but has never mentioned a wife, and no one has asked about her. None of us really want to hear the answer. I roll down my window a few inches.

‘What did you get?’ He’s greedily eyeing my grocery bag. He reaches across my lap to grab it.

I hold it out of his reach. ‘No. Let’s wait.’

‘Ag, don’t be such a woman.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He shrugs and starts drumming on the steering wheel again. He stares out of his window.

The trio of locals has been joined by a couple of youngish women dressed in skinny jeans and identical pink-and-silver T-shirts. None of them looks even remotely concerned about being out in the open. If they’re not worried, why should I be? I’m breathing more easily again. The panic attack has crawled back to its lair.

I prop my legs up on the dashboard and try to relax.

Maybe J.’s right about this place, after all. He relentlessly insists that Maun is one of the few places in the world where you actually want to be when everything turns to shit. Mind you, he’s biased. He loves it here. According to J., Botswana is a prime example of a country that has its act together: there’s poverty but no obvious suffering, a palpable sense of community, a blatant disregard for materialism, a singular lack of beggars, violence or corruption. He still talks fondly about the time he came here five years ago and got stuck in the sand outside Maun’s only trading store. ‘This is the real Africa,’ he’s always saying. ‘Not the commercial Kruger Park kind. Not the Africa of shopping malls and Ster Kinekor and cardboard cities and corruption.’ Part of me thinks this is an astonishingly patronising statement. Part of me thinks he’s right. I suppose it does approximate the animal-populated Africa I imagined when growing up in England. It’s not uncommon to see elephants and warthogs wandering through the streets in Kasane. Being attacked by a lion is still a feasible threat.

Of course, being attacked by a lion is the least of our worries these days.

Frikkie’s been saying something.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said, that oke isn’t coming back.’

‘Give it time.’

‘Let’s get back. They’ll be worried.’

My fellow survivors. If only they knew that while we’ve been holed up behind a ten-foot fence, rationing canned asparagus and kudu biltong, the world has ticked on without us.

‘It’s so weird,’ I say. ‘Surreal. Don’t you think it’s weird?’

He shrugs again. ‘What do you mean?’

I flap my hand in the direction of the chattering group of men and women. ‘No one seems bothered. It’s as if nothing’s happened.’

It’s clear he hasn’t given it much thought. Commodities, zombies, the end of the world as we know it – it’s all the same to him. ‘Ag, let’s just go.’

Frikkie starts the engine. I put my hand on his arm. His skin is hot and slick with sweat. ‘Please, Frikkie. Just a few more minutes.’ It’s a real effort to keep the anger out of my voice.

He shakes his arm free of my grip. ‘We’re going.’ He revs the car needlessly, wasting precious fuel for absolutely no reason. Bastard.

I’m about to give him an earful when something slams into Frikkie’s side of the car. My words are sliced off as my teeth clamp down on my tongue. The car stalls. Frikkie and I sit perfectly still for a couple of seconds. I’m pretty sure neither of us is breathing.

‘What the fuck was that?’ My voice is barely a whisper.

Then I smell it. In the first week, the reek of the Infected would occasionally penetrate the boundary of our relatively remote camping site. It’s an unforgettable odour – a combination of rank putrefaction, human filth and something sweetly and uniquely medicinal.

Christ. I knew it was too good to be true.

‘Get us out of here!’

Frikkie is fumbling with the ignition again, but his hands are shaking violently, and the stench is making both of us gag. In desperation he pulls the keys out to try again, but drops them on the floor at the pedals. He leans down to scramble at his feet. A ragged, misshapen head rears up at his window and bangs into it. I shut my eyes, not wanting to see, but when I open them again there’s a hunched figure crouching over the bonnet directly in front of me. Oh God. I haven’t seen an infected person since J. and the others dealt with the last of the stragglers in the camp, and time has taken its toll. Its out-of-proportion hydrocephalic head is leathery and desiccated. Its eyes have sunk so far into its skull that they’re as dark and dead as dried peach pips. It looks nothing like a rotting, wet Hollywood zombie. Human biltong – that’s what it reminds me of. The thought makes me laugh – a hysterical, high-pitched cackle that doesn’t sound like it belongs to me. The creature opens its toothless mouth and moans in response, the sound creaking up from deep within its hollow chest cavity.

It’s impossible to tell if it was once male or female, tourist or local. It’s wearing the last traces of a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Through the dark bloodstains and filth I can just about make out the faint shape of Bart Simpson’s head. For a second it looks almost comically confused, cocks its head to one side and stumbles backwards, falling out of sight below the high bonnet of the car.

‘Quickly!’

‘I’m trying!’ Frikkie is still turning the ignition. Click, click, click. I hope he hasn’t flooded the engine. He’s muttering ‘Oh God, oh Jesus, oh God, oh Jesus’ over and over.

There’s the sound of feet slapping on tarmac and a reedy voice screams, ‘Hai! Hai! ’ A small boy dressed in shorts and blinding white trainers is racing towards the Land Cruiser.

Oh God, oh Jesus. I bang on my window. ‘No! Stay away!’

One of the men hanging around outside the Spar stands up and points towards the Land Cruiser. Thank God. But instead of hurrying towards us he stretches his arms high above his head and sits down on the curb next to one of the women.

The child pauses, grins at me and waves the large knobkerrie he’s carrying. He skips towards the front of the car and drops out of sight.

‘Frikkie! Frikkie! The kid! We have to do something!’

I fumble for the door handle, but Frikkie grabs my shoulder and yanks me back. I struggle, but he’s too strong.

‘Don’t be bloody stupid!’ he says.

‘But—’

‘Look!’

The kid reappears in front of the bonnet, swinging the knobkerrie like a discus-thrower. He’s yelling something, but clearly his furious words aren’t meant for us. My Tswana is still rubbish, but the inference is clear.

The creature crawls back into view, and as we watch, immobilised, the kid uses the stick’s round, polished handle to prod it upright. One of its ankles looks to be twisted at an impossible angle, and its bare, filthy feet are missing most of their toes. The kid starts smacking it around the legs and the back of its head, punctuating each thwack with a high-pitched ‘Hai! Hai! ’.

The creature cowers, bats ineffectively at the stick with a gnarled arm, and then starts lurching towards the road. The kid follows closely behind, using the stick to herd the creature forward.

Frikkie and I don’t speak for several seconds. The creature’s stench and the child’s voice disappear and we’re left listening to the sound of nothing. Frikkie tries the car again. This time it roars to life. His hands are shaking and juddering on the steering wheel; the sack of flesh beneath his chin is wobbling crazily.

‘We’d better follow him, make sure he’s okay,’ I say.

‘What? You serious?’

‘He’s just a kid!’

Frikkie points towards the group of men and women. ‘Let them help him.’

‘I thought you were a Christian?’

He glares at me, piggy eyes full of resentment. But it works; he pulls out and heads in the boy’s direction.

We catch up with him in seconds. The kid is shepherding the creature down the centre of the road. One boy and his zombie out for a stroll.

We follow the kid at a safe distance, cruising along behind, pausing as the thing swerves drunkenly into the window of the camping hire shop, before righting itself and staggering onwards. Frikkie pulls over to let a donkey cart pass. The elderly driver waves to us cheerily and says something to the small boy. They both laugh.

We hang back as the boy drives the protesting creature past a tumble-down tyre warehouse and into a wide clearing where a brightly painted brick house and several circular kraals are built in the neatly raked dust. As we watch, the boy prods the creature into one of the wooden enclosures and triumphantly slams the makeshift gate behind it. There’s the thunk and creak as the thing throws itself against the fence, then nothing.

A woman appears at the doorway of the house. She says something to the boy and he drops his shoulders as if he’s being scolded. She looks at us curiously, and then the two of them disappear inside.

‘So that’s where they all are,’ I say. ‘That’s what they’ve done with them!’

Frikkie doesn’t reply. A droplet of sweat wobbles at the end of his nose and plops onto his lap.

THE END.

 First published in Home Away: 24 hours 24 cities 24 writers (Zebra Press, 2010)

Author Week #3: S.L. Grey

It’s time for our third special Author Week here on the World SF Blog!

Our guest(s) this week are South African writing duo S.L. Grey, author(s) of The Mall, a big, fantastic horror novel set in Johannesburg. S.L. Grey are made up of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg, who will be contributing this week with a short story and a guest post, respectively. We’ll also have an interview with the authors, and a review of The Mall.

And, of course – we have a giveaway!

We have 3 copies of The Mall to give away, courtesy of the fab people at Corvus. For a chance to win, simply comment down below, and make sure to fill in your e-mail address so we know to contact you if you won. Competition closes on Friday! will run over the weekend and we’ll announce the winners on Monday.

About The Mall:

Dan works at a bookstore in a deadly dull shopping mall where nothing ever happens. He’s an angsty emo-kid who sells mid-list books to mid-list people for the minimum wage. He hates his job. Rhoda has dragged her babysitting charge to the mall so she can meet her dealer and score some coke. Now the kid’s run off, and she has two hours to find him. She hates her life. Rhoda bullies Dan into helping her search, but as they explore the neon-lit corridors behind the mall, disturbing text messages lure them into the bowels of the building, where old mannequins are stored in grave-like piles and raw sewage drips off the ceiling. The only escape is down, and before long Dan and Rhoda are trapped in a service lift listening to head-splitting musak. Worst of all, the lift’s not stopping at the bottom floor. Plummeting into the earth, Dan and Rhoda enter a sinister underworld that mirrors their worst fears. Forced to complete a series of twisted tasks to find their way out, they finally emerge into the brightly lit food court, sick with relief at the banal sight of people shopping and eating. But something feels different. Why are the shoppers all pumped full of silicone? Why are the shop assistants chained to their counters? And why is a cafe called McColon’s selling lumps of bleeding meat? Just when they think they’ve made it back to the mall, they realise their nightmare has only just begun…

South African SF/F Panel

The South African Mail & Guardian reports on the recent science fiction and fantasy in the city panel from the M&G literary festival in Johannesburg:

South African writers who dare to venture into the fantastical are accused of writing “untruths”, said Gwen Ansell, chairing “Science Fiction and Fantasy in the City” at the M&G Literary Festival.

Ansell and panellists Tom Learmont, Lauren Beukes, Louis Greenberg and Sarah Lotz put the spotlight on “speculative fiction”: an umbrella genre encompassing science fiction, horror, fantasy, the supernatural, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. South African Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster movie, District 9, is a cinematic version.

Ansell suggested that such fiction could instil a sense of “wonder and hope” in young readers because it explored a world of endless possibilities. She called on local publishers to promote the genre because “children need to stop reading Charles Dickens”.

Lotz, author of Dead Lands (a young-adult horror novel about a zombie apocalypse in the mountainous suburbs of Cape Town) said South African fantasy is rooted in an awareness of sociopolitical issues. Not necessarily an attractive combination for those who read only “to escape”.

Greenberg agreed with Ansell that the most successful stories juxtapose fantasy and horror with familiar settings. “You don’t have to make up environments. There’s enough in South African cities to scare us,” he said.

New landscapes

Greenberg and Lotz co-authored the horror novel, The Mall, under the pseudonym SL Grey. “We took an existing city [Johannesburg] and created a new one beneath it, one that feeds off it like a tick,” said Lotz.

Beukes, author of Zoo City, which won the world’s premier science fiction prize — the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award — said overseas recognition was not enough. She called for greater local support for science fiction — not only from publishers, but from literary scholars, parents and readers.

Beukes celebrated the “subversive nature” of urban fantasy in South African literature. “It allows writers to critique and educate about the human condition in an interesting and creative way,” she said. Beukes compared this with other countries, where the genre tends to be more “conservative”, and full of “castles, kings and princesses” — references that are “removed” from South African children.

Ansell and her panel’s vigorous presentation of the merits of the genre proved to be a pre-emptive riposte to a later festival session in which literary scholar Leon de Kock derided speculative fiction as “a cute and fuzzy thing”.

Ansell hailed the influence of social media in making books more accessible to local readers. The new technology, she said, should challenge publishers to reduce the prices of books in stores.

New African Pulp Magazine Jungle Jim Launched

Jungle Jim is a new African pulp magazine, published out of South Africa, already in its second issue. It is incredibly cool – amongst the contributors you can find Jonathan Dotse (of AfroCyberpunk) and debut novelist S.L. Grey. Check it out!

South African horror novel The Mall published

The latest genre novel from South Africa is The Mall, by S.L. Grey. S.L. Grey is the pseudonym of South African writers Louis Greenberg and Sarah Lotz.

About the book:

Dan works at a bookstore in a deadly dull shopping mall where nothing ever happens. He’s an angsty emo-kid who sells mid-list books to mid-list people for the minimum wage. He hates his job. Rhoda has dragged her babysitting charge to the mall so she can meet her dealer and score some coke. Now the kid’s run off, and she has two hours to find him. She hates her life. Rhoda bullies Dan into helping her search, but as they explore the neon-lit corridors behind the mall, disturbing text messages lure them into the bowels of the building, where old mannequins are stored in grave-like piles and raw sewage drips off the ceiling. The only escape is down, and before long Dan and Rhoda are trapped in a service lift listening to head-splitting musak. Worst of all, the lift’s not stopping at the bottom floor. Plummeting into the earth, Dan and Rhoda enter a sinister underworld that mirrors their worst fears. Forced to complete a series of twisted tasks to find their way out, they finally emerge into the brightly lit food court, sick with relief at the banal sight of people shopping and eating. But something feels different. Why are the shoppers all pumped full of silicone? Why are the shop assistants chained to their counters? And why is a cafe called McColon’s selling lumps of bleeding meat? Just when they think they’ve made it back to the mall, they realise their nightmare has only just begun…

Also check out Louis Greenberg and Sarah Lotz, aka SL Grey, author(s) of The Mall, in conversation with Janet van Eeden:

Sarah: We wrote the novel progressively – each of us writing in the voice of a different character and following on from where the other left off.

Working with Louis was a great learning experience, especially as we come from such different standpoints – he’s a professional editor and a literary novelist; I tend to err on the side of the mainstream. I think both of us were surprised at how well our seemingly different styles melded, especially as Louis is a superb stylist and is always aware of the deeper implications of what we’re doing, whereas I’m generally more concerned with pacing and making sure we have enough maggoty bits.

And finally, here’s a book trailer for The Mall to whet your appetite!