Visceral, gritty, and unforgiving, GRIEF EATER is a zombie story like you’ve never read before.
When Kristina rises from her violent death, she’s not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She’s rageful, powerful, and hungry—for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she’s left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed?
A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, GRIEF EATER sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.
Flashbacks can work if you do it right.
When I was at Clarion West, pretty much ten years ago exactly, our very first instructor, Paul Park, dropped some wisdom into our heads that makes a whole lot of sense. He told us to “Stay in the present moment.” Keep stories in the present. Don’t jump away into flashbacks (unless, presumedly, you know what you’re doing). His reasoning was that flashbacks can end up pulling a reader away from the main narrative at the cost of momentum. I think he’s right, but I also think that sometimes you can justify flashbacks, if you can make them work for you the right way. Now, there are plenty of people who don’t love the flashbacks in Grief Eater (according to early reviews, thank you for reading, reviewers!) and some who find that they really work. I’d like to think that by and large they do!
In Grief Eater, Kristina, the main character, dies in the opening chapter and is turned into a zombie. Uh, spoilers, I guess? Anyway, her story, which becomes a revenge narrative, needed to have context if it was going to hit with any emotional weight. I suppose I could have started the story earlier and showed the reader selected scenes from her childhood and young adulthood, but that didn’t feel right. I wanted to drop you into the action, so you learn about her past while she stalks her way into her future, her teeth and fingers sharp.
Short stories sometimes birth novellas and novels.
There are many writers who try out a story idea with a short story first. My favourite is probably “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General and Their Wounds” by Seth Dickinson which became the novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant (💔) or “The City Born Great” by NK Jemisin, which became the novel The City We Became.
For me, the Grief Eater world began with the protagonist of my short story “Don’t Pack Hope”, who would later be named Josh. I put several fragments of my heart into that story and was delighted when it was picked up by Nightmare Magazine, and then reprinted in Wastelands 3: The New Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams. Still, I knew I wasn’t done with that world. I knew that Kristy, Josh’s best friend, who became Kristina, had her own story. And I knew that, unlike beautiful Josh, Kristina didn’t make it out of the city alive.
Josh is a very special character to me, so I hope you enjoy a story from his perspective if you check it out.
The lightning bolt moment is incredible.
Grief Eater is a revenge story, but it didn’t start out that way. No, the first draft had my protagonist, Kristina, being pulled towards her terrible family by an invisible compulsion, a need to find them, to stand before them, to find herself seen. It wasn’t a particularly bad book, but I knew that something wasn’t quite right with it. As I usually do, I let the idea roll around in my head for a while. The narrative made itself comfortable in my lizard-brain until one day in the shower, it hit me. Kristina shouldn’t be pulled. She should hunt. It was an oh god, eyes wide, am I really doing this moment, and it was incredible to experience. I think I literally laughed out loud.
That moment and that feeling will always remind me to look at my protagonists and make sure they’re strong and active. They should move as quickly as they can towards the things that they want. And what Kristina wants is the blood of the people who wronged her.
Music can unlock incredible things.
I generally listen to instrumental music (usually Zoe Keating, Explosions in the Sky or various video game soundtracks) when I write. For Grief Eater, I knew that I needed to play something savage while I wrote. I needed something heavy, something post-rock. And fuck, I love post-rock. I love big bold ridiculously long songs that swoop through a bunch of different time signatures (Schizm by Tool, I’m looking at you). I love songs with melody and beauty but also with droning guitars and flickering drums and distortion. Enter the incredible post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “Mladic” from their album ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND! became the theme song for the novella. If you haven’t heard it, it goes for a full twenty minutes (!!!) and changes and evolves throughout. I only did a little music theory in school, so there are people that can probably explain exactly why it’s so cool in technical terms, but all I know is that it fucking rocks. It genuinely helped me to take the story to darker and more intense places. Have a listen.
Villains are sometimes unrealistic, but sometimes their people really are that bad.
The villains of Grief Eater are Kristina’s parents and her older brother. When I was editing the novella, I had a conversation with my editor, Holly, about whether I should tone things down a bit, particularly their violence, neglect and homophobia. We decided not to go in that direction, and I am so glad that we preserved the characters as they are. I can appreciate that such horrible characters may seem a tad unrealistic, but also, people like that, unfortunately, absolutely exist. Indeed, the sins of Kristina’s family have all been pulled from situations I have personally experienced (not the homophobia, thank god!) or that my younger brother experienced, or that have been experienced by friends of mine who are also in the LGBTIQA+ community. Queer and trans people do experience violence and homelessness due to being expelled from their family homes, although we of course take care of each other in our chosen families. There are, however, plenty of villains whose violence and hate we do experience, sometimes from a very young age.
In his novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, he writes of the horrors of the Vietnam war. He talks about “story truth,” as in, sometimes real truth is so unbelievable that you need to write about it in stories to fully understand the weight of it. Trauma and villainy are like that sometimes.
While Kristina’s family are horrendous people, she also has her best friend, Josh, and a supportive Aunt, Jill. I wanted to make sure that though dark, her story still has elements of light. I hope you enjoy it.
Emma Osborne (they/them) is a queer fiction writer and poet from Naarm Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem: Tales of the Macabre and Twisted, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, Podcastle, the Review of Australian Fiction, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, GlitterShip, Kaleidotrope and WASTELANDS 3 edited by John Joseph Adams. They are a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. “Grief Eater” is their debut novella. They currently live in Sunbury with their girlfriend and three wonderful cats.
Emma Osborne: Bluesky | Instagram
Grief Eater: Bookshop.org | Amazon
