CREAM OF REVENGE SOUP by Victor Vilestone is NOT a recipe. This is a short story about a man who discovers his wife has been keeping secrets from him. He decides to take her advice and cook something organic.
The author begins with suspense, and delivers an ending so graphic and brutal, readers might want to keep a barf bag nearby. The grand finale shocked me...I don't know what I expected, but it sure as hell wasn't anything I could imagine. Vilestone has finally lived up to his name with this one.
After this story, I decided to invite him into the Lair...
How did your writing career begin?
I first had an interest in becoming an author in the late 90’s when I purchased a typewriter and enrolled in a creative writing correspondence course. As with most things in my life though, I started but never finished. For the next two decades I dreamt of being a bestseller, sitting at my desk all day working on stories, but did very little about it. The closest I got was jotting down a ton of ideas in an old notebook and getting a few letters published in a British boxing magazine. In the spring of 2020 the dream and desire came to the forefront once again, but this time I took decisive action and haven’t looked back since.
What do you think sets your stories apart from others? What can readers expect from your creations?
They say you should write what you know about, and I think that is excellent advice. The vast majority of my characters are bang average, leading dull and predictable lives. Until the shit hits the fan, that is. Another trait to my work is I don’t believe in censorship. I’m not the most gory and disgusting author out there, far from it, but I won’t hold anything back in the name of good taste if I feel it’s appropriate to help tell the story. You only have to read about real historical events like the holocaust to realise nothing my twisted mind can spurt out into a piece of fiction can be as horrific as humanity has been in the past and still is today.
Have you ever frightened yourself with your own stories?
Every evening at around 11pm I drive to an isolated wood to walk my two dogs. The location is ten miles from town and three miles to the nearest house. When I am there it’s just me, the hounds, the stars above, my imagination and whatever lies in the darkness. I often write when walking and have stumbled into bushes and bumped against trees many times when not paying attention to where the footpaths are. Once I was writing a scene where a guy was outside in the wilderness and could hear screams in the distance. As I typed, I realised where I was and it sent a shiver down my spine. I rarely get frightened by horror books and movies (real life is a lot scarier) but on that occasion I startled myself, if only briefly.
Where did the idea for CREAM OF REVENGE SOUP come from?
I’m a massive fan of the Death Wish movie franchise starring Charles Bronson, which influenced me to write violent revenge short stories. I was in the process of researching a non-bloody way to seek vengeance for my next tale when I came across poisoning. There I discovered the Roman emperor Claudius died from suspected death cap poisoning, a mushroom which that grows in the wild throughout Europe. The controversial ending to this story certainly wasn’t planned and only occurred to me during the writing process. Initially, the antagonist Geoff was going to lie on the bed and hold his wife, waiting for the fungi he had eaten to kill him, but one thing led to another, and he thought of other ways to spend his final hours with the corpse.
Why do you choose to write within the horror genre?
I recall enjoying watching Hammer Horror films as a boy with such greats as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in starring roles. Then as a teenager I read all the Stephen King, Shaun Hutson and James Herbert books available at my local public library. I’m uncertain what attracted me to horror in the first place, but I believe our characters and interests stem from both nature and nurture. My earliest memory of writing a story outside of school lessons was when I was around eight years old. I wrote it by hand in a Star Wars notebook, and it was about a pair of siblings who had to live with their grandfather after their parents were bludgeoned to death with an axe in the woods near their home. God knows what my mum must have thought when she read it, but as I said before it was always in me.
Are you working on any new writing projects? What can fans expect from you in 2021?
I have a plethora of ideas stacking up, so as long as I don’t burn out, I should have plenty of content coming out soon. My debut novella The Jinxed Juniper Tree will be released on 9th October 2020, followed by The Letterbox in November, and a Christmas themed story in December. I feel 2021 will be an even busier year for me, starting with the release of two or three more novellas. After that, I plan to complete my first novel length work, which will be a prequel to my short story The Drain. If I get any spare time between all that lot I will send out short stories to anthologies and may even target traditional publishers to see if they are interested in one of my novellas.
Thank you for stopping by!
Keep your eyes open for more Vilestone stories this year, after October.
As always,
AstraDaemon
