Emma’s dark materials go uncensored
HER WRITING MAY BE TOO RAW FOR SOME, BUT EMMA ENNIS IS NOT ONE FOR COMPROMISE. THE HORROR WRITER DISCUSSES HER WORK THUS FAR.
IT’S a dangerous time to be an author right now, say the wrong thing, create the wrong character, and you might be cancelled, damned for eternity, only your bulging bank balance to keep you company.
Far safer to censor oneself, to play it safe and not risk the ire of the masses.
Yet for Murrintown native Emma Ennis, the mere notion of toning it down, of writing something a little more palatable is anathema.
‘I don’t censor myself, it’s a matter of pride at this stage,’ she says as we discuss the contents of High Heels And Eulogies (reviewed below), a book which contains, among others, depictions of necrophilia, rape, and a priest enjoying himself at an orgy.
This unwillingness to compromise extends to all facets of her writing, regardless of the setting.
‘I took part in the Wexford Screenwriters Programme which is ran by the County Council,’ she recalls. ‘We were asked to write something for a short film, and muggins here chose the darkest thing I could think of.’
Emma’s story about a painter who has lost his mojo and can only rediscover it by drinking the blood of his muse ended up being a little too raw for the purposes of the council-run course, but, with three books under her belt and more in the pipeline, clearly someone is interested in her work.
But where does this darkness come from, to what does she attribute her fascination with all things macabre?
‘My love of horror comes from books, movies, anything scary; I’m constantly chasing the next big scare,’ Emma says.
‘ There’s something in it that’s comforting, it makes you realise life is not as bad as you thought it was. And there’s a primal thing that goes with horror that I love, it strips things down and brings it all back to basics.’
Keen to differentiate herself from writers who favour gratutious violence and gore, Emma describes her work as ‘psychological horror’ and says she has been into the darker side of fiction for as long as she can remember.
‘I always loved English in school, I can remember the teacher giving us an essay to do over the weekend and everyone complaining except me,’ she laughs.
‘ Then I’d come in on the Monday and ask for more time to finish it because I wanted it done right. I loved reading too,
I can recall reading Anne Rice books when I was probably way too young to be reading them.
’I also loved the classics, and things like The Secret Garden, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of my all-time favourites.’
This obsession with the written word led to her penning her first novel at the tender age of 14, a ‘romancey-thing’ which she ‘cringes about’ now.
Unfortunately this early foray into being a novelist proved unsuccessful and Emma drifted away from writing, taking courses in Multimedia, Commercial Software Development, as she sought to build a career for herself.
The fact she didn’t end up working in either of those fields should have given her an inkling of where her true destiny lay, but it wasn’t until she left Ireland that the writing bug returned.
‘I got back into it when I was living in Norway,’ Emma explains. ‘I’d set up a Facebook page to keep in touch with everyone back home and saw one of my friends had their short story published, and I got this feeling in my stomach, like a kick in the gut.
‘I messaged her and found out where she was submitting and wrote a short story myself, that was the first time in years I’d written anything.’
Having submitted the story to an independent publishing house she anxiously awaited a response, constantly refreshing her emails until she got a reply, one which would send her back down the path she had first trodden as a teenager.
‘It got published by Static Mount Press in a collection, and after that I wrote loads of other short stories; there was no money in it, I was doing it for the love of it.’
After years spent dormant, her love of writing returned with a vengeance, Emma became prolific, penning enough material to form her own collection of short stories, her debut work Red Wine And Words released in 2011.
She has since released two
more collections of short stories and edited another, but earlier this year disaster struck when her publisher, US-based Post Mortem Press, shut its doors.