Rob Hood

Robert Maxwell Hood (born 24 July 1951) is an Australian writer and editor recognised as one of Australia's leading horror writers, although his work frequently crosses genre boundaries into science fiction, fantasy and crime.

He has published five young adult novels, four collections of his short fiction, an adult epic fantasy novel, fifteen children's books and over 120 short stories in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. He has also written plays, academic articles and poetry and co-edited anthologies of horror and crime. He has won seven Ditmars out of twenty nominations, and been nominated for six Aurealis Awards.

Biography Hood was born in 1951 in Parramatta, New South Wales. At the age of nine he moved with his family to Collaroy Plateau on the northern beaches of Sydney. His initial experiments in writing began in primary school, where he produced short "flash fiction" style pieces. He continued to write fiction throughout his teens, and in first year of high school commenced his first full-length piece, which he later described with retrospective humour as "a bad Dr Who-type scifi novel", featuring an eccentric professor with a beautiful daughter combating alien invaders and carnivorous plants. He wrote in school exercise books, and not infrequently during his mathematics lessons. His thesis for MA (hons) analysed monster imagery in the works of William Blake.

While at Macquarie University, he wrote 'Caesar or Nothing', a story about a madman taking over the world. With the encouragement of Thea Astley, his tutor, he submitted the piece to ABC Radio and it became his first professional sale, being broadcast on 28 February 1975. In the same year he won the Canberra Times National Short Story competition. However it was another decade before he wrote and sold stories on a regular basis.

He has otherwise worked in a variety of fields including welding, catering and in a bookshop. He worked as a journalist for the Sydney suburban Liverpool Leader local newspaper and also drew an editorial cartoon on a weekly basis for the publication for close to a decade. Additionally he has worked a research assistant in Australian political history and as a comedy writer for a 2SM breakfast show. and his work has been included in anthologies and major magazines. His short fiction has spanned a number of genres, including horror, science fiction and crime and he has also published mainstream stories in Australian Literary Journals.

Other franchise writing by Hood includes the novella "Soul Killer" in Zombies vs Robots: Diplomacy (IDW Publishing, 2013) within the Zombies vs. Robots GN universe.

Short Fiction Collections Daydreaming on Company Time (1988) A collection of horror, fantasy and crime fiction. It was a runner up for best single author collection in the 1990 Readercon Imaginative Fiction Awards.

The story "Number 7", about a couple on holiday coming across a legend suggesting Rudolf Hess survived and his double perished in Spandau prison,

Creeping in Reptile Flesh (2008) Hood's most recent collection includes one novella and 13 short stories with a cover created by his partner Cat Sparks. It reprints a number of stories first published in US magazines or small press outlets, that have been difficult to obtain since original publication. It also includes three new stories 'Creeping in Reptile Flesh', 'Unravelling' and 'Getting Rid of Mother'. The stories are centred around themes suggested by the titular novella which headlines the volume.

Hood conceived the collection as a follow-up to his 2002 ghost-centered collection Immaterial, in this case collecting some of the best of his non-ghost-related horror stories. The title was inspired by William Blake, whose monstrous imagery was the focus of Hood's MA (Hons) thesis and was intended to be viewed metaphorically, as relating to the feral, monstrous nature hidden within human beings.

The book won the Australian Shadows Award for Best Collected Work of 2015. The Awards stated: "Peripheral Visions is an ambitious project, a veritable door-stopper of a hardback comprising nearly 800 pages and 29 years of published work. Author Robert Hood demonstrates a dazzling breadth of treatments united under the overarching ghost story theme, writing with intelligence and insight".

Novels Backstreets (1999) A horrific car accident leaves Kel in a coma, and Bryce, his lifelong friend dead. When Kel awakens he cannot believe his friend is truly gone, and is wracked with guilt, fear and feelings of deep loss. When he begins to experience strange dreams and catch sight of shadowy figures, he comes to believe that Bryce is lost rather than no longer alive.

His journey towards confronting his grief becomes a descent into an often nightmarish world, as he roams the streets of his city home, searching for his friend and encountering a reality beyond everyday society, of the homeless and violence that seemingly echoes his inner trauma. Prior to writing the novel, Hood had experienced the tragedy of the sudden death of his stepson – who was of similar age to Bryce – in an accident. While the novel is not directly autobiographical, aspects of Hood's experiences in the aftermath of the tragedy and those of others around him, were significant in forming the emotional foundations of the piece.

Shades series (2001) The Shades series is a quartet of young adult novels all published in 2001. Consecutive books in the series finish with the first chapter of the following novel. The series comprises Shadow Dance, Night Beast, Ancient Light and Black Sun Rising. The novels feature teenagers who have been drawn into a shadow world feared by ordinary humans.

The first three books are set in a cliffside community based on Hood's Wollongong home, while the fourth book is set in Egypt.

Hood's original idea for the series came from a desire to explore a supernatural concept differing from familiar and frequently used tropes such as vampires and the undead. While he started with ideas relating to ghosts and the dead that are not quite dead, further work lead to him envisaging a realm of shadows, reflecting concepts more familiar to science fiction, such as alternative dimensions and dark matter. He then created an original mythology based on these ideas,

Writing Genre He is recognised as a prominent Australian horror writer, but his work is not constrained by boundaries of genre. Many of his stories contain elements of science fiction or fantasy and can be a mixture of several genres with an apparently playful sense of experimenting with typical conventions and expectations. He has extended this sensibility into his editorial work, co-editing Crosstown Traffic, an anthology collecting stories that purposely mix crime with a number of other genres. He has also written crime and mainstream fiction. and co-founded Agog! Press with his partner Cat Sparks.

Bonescribes: Year's Best Australian Horror 1995 (1996) Co-edited with Bill Congreve, the anthology was the first Australian annual collection of horror stories, showcasing ten horror tales published during 1995, together with a history of Australian horror and a recommended reading list.

The collection includes horror tales by Australian writers typically known for their genre fiction such as Stephen Dedman and Leanne Frahm, and those known for their literary fiction, such as Carmel Bird and Garry Disher. It also included one of Hood's stories, "Dead in the Glamour of Moonlight".

Daikaiju anthologies A series of three anthologies of stories about giant monsters, known as 'Daikaiju' in Japanese and familiar through cinematic examples such as Godzilla and King Kong. The volumes are co-edited with Robin Pen and comprise Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales (2004), Daikaiju!2: Revenge of the Giant Monsters (2007), Daikaiju!3: Giant Monsters vs the World (2007). All three are published by Agog! Press.

The first of the three anthologies was awarded the Ditmar for Best Collection in 2006.

While the Daikaiju genre had previously been well represented in film and comics, it was not well-established as a literary genre and there had been few examples published prior to Hood's anthologies. A call for stories on the theme brought a surprising number and range of tales from around the world and tapped a vein of enthusiasm among writers who had been waiting for such an opportunity. Submissions included stories that invoked the essence of the genre but also those that envisioned new and original ideas drawn from its sensibilities.

A number of short-listed stories were unable to be included in the first volume due to size constraints. Hood had originally intended to publish these in an e-publication, as anthologies on daikaiju are infrequently published and the stories might find difficulty finding a market elsewhere. However a relationship between Agog! and Prime Books in the US, the development of low cost print on demand technology and Prime's support in getting Agog! books on Amazon made it more cost effective to produce further volumes. For Collected Work: Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales (editor with Robin Pen) (2006) Fan Writer (2007): for film reviews published on his website Fan Writer (2009): for his blog Undead Backbrain Best Novel (2014): for Fragments of a Broken Land: Valarl Undead (Borgo/Wildside Press, 2014). He has also twice won The William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review:

Hood's tale "Escena de un Asesinato" (first published in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Postcripts #28/29: Exotic Gothic 4, ed. Danel Olson, PS Publishing) was nominated as Best Horror Short Story in the 2012 Aurealis Awards and also in the Long Fiction category of the 2012 Australian Shadows Award (Australian Horror Writers Association). It was also chosen for inclusion in "The Year's best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2013" (ed. Paul Guran).