It’s no lie to say that the SNAFU anthologies from Cohesion Press have been a significant presence in my career. When Cohesion heads Geoff Brown and Dawn Roach first came up with the idea – an anthology of military horror where the remit was simple: blistering military or paramilitary action and monsters – and produced the original volume, Geoff asked me to write the Foreword. I was happy to, as it was a great book.
It did really well, so Geoff decided to publish more and make it a series of anthologies and brought A J Spedding in as editor. The second volume was SNAFU: Wolves at the Door, focusing on were-beasts. I was keen, but busy, and didn’t get a chance to submit for it. Then came SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest, and Geoff approached me again, asked if I would write a story for it. Of course, I was super keen. And the story I wrote for that has been a hell of a career highlight. That story is “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”, which did indeed make it into that book, and it won me an Australian Shadows Award, was reprinted in German, and then adapted for Netflix in LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, which is without a doubt a significant career milestone. That story has worked harder for me than pretty much anything else I’ve written to date.
And the other thing I discovered in the process of writing that story was that I fucking loved writing that story. This is why I’ve titled this article a “strange dichotomy”. Because I don’t actually write action-led, military horror. I write weird, creepy, supernatural horror. I write urban horror and small town horror. I write supernatural thrillers and crime horror. The Eli Carver books are perhaps the closest, packed with intense fight and action scenes, but nothing military. I don’t write military horror in any other capacity, except for the SNAFU books. And I freaking love it when I do. And it turns out I’m pretty good at it. After that first one for Survival of the Fittest, I’ve had stories published in SNAFU anthologies six more times. With the release of the latest one, Punk’d, I have stories in 7 out the 13 SNAFU books. So I’m in more than half of them. That’s amazing.
Here’s a full list of SNAFUs, with my contributions listed beside the volumes I’m in:
SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror – Foreword by me
SNAFU: Wolves at the Door
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest – “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”
SNAFU: Hunters
SNAFU: Future Warfare – “Under Calliope’s Skin”
SNAFU: Unnatural Selection
SNAFU: Black Ops – “Raven’s First Flight”
SNAFU: Resurrection
SNAFU: Last Stand – “The Throat”
SNAFU: Medevac – “The Demon Locke”
SNAFU: Holy War
SNAFU: Dead or Alive – “The Fiends of Turner’s Creek”
SNAFU: Punk’d – “Clean-up Crew”
I keep thinking that maybe I ought to write something a bit longer form with the military horror angle, but in truth, I think it works best in short story format. None of my SNAFU stories are longer than 10,000 words. And all the time Cohesion Press keep publishing these books, I’ll keep scratching that itch by writing for them. Meanwhile, I’ll keep writing all the other stuff I usually do. I’m no one-trick pony, I contain multitudes.
But I will always be extremely grateful to the SNAFU anthologies and the team behind them, because I’ve had so much back from writing those stories, beyond the joy of the writing itself.
I urge people to check them out, even if you don’t think you like the idea of military horror. Believe me, it’s a broad strokes description and the variety and depth of stories found in these books is remarkable. If you’re on the fence about it, consider this – to make some movie comparisons, Aliens is military horror, as is Starship Troopers, and Predator, and Dog Soldiers, The Lair, Jacob’s Ladder… there are so many more. And surely you’ve enjoyed at least some of those movies, right? So imagine short story versions of those. My Future Warfare story, “Under Calliope’s Skin”, is a shameless homage to Aliens and Predator. I guarantee you’ll find at least a few stories you love in every volume of SNAFU.
If you want a taste of my contributions and haven’t read them yet, you can find my Netflix story, “In Vaulted Halls Entombed” in my second collection, Served Cold, and I’ve collected it along with four other SNAFU stories plus one original, previously unpublished yarn, in a book called And Fire Poured Forth, which is the name of the original story in the set. So you can get a taste of my contributions by picking those up.
And keep an eye out for past and future SNAFU anthologies. They are heaps of fun, jam-packed with amazing stories by fantastic authors. Vive le SNAFU!