Stephen King has been accused by professional clowns of turning a figure of fun into one of horror. Should they read Margo Lanagan's latest anthology of short stories they could accuse the Sydney author of the same slur.
Lanagan's collection,Singing My Sister Down, takes several fairytales and skews them to macabre effect, while in Red Nose Day two professional snipers, one a failed clown, knock off beloved circus chucklers, one-by-one.
''Looking at that story, it could well have been written today,'' says Lanagan. ''You have that same sort of feeling that the clowns have taken over and are ruling the world, that modern times are a circus and all sorts of things have just gone out of the window in the cause of entertainment.''
Three new stories - Not all Ogre, The Wood Queen's Quarters and Swing from the Moon - round out Lanagan's "best of" collection brought together for readers of Zeroes, a bestselling young-adult fiction series co-written with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti.
Singing My Sister Down, the collection's title short, remains as darkly moving an introduction to Lanagan's fine fiction and the elegance of her sentences as it was when first published to international acclaim in Black Juice in 2004.
Written from the perspective of a brother who watches the slow execution of his sister as she is swallowed up in a tar-pit, the story is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's equally powerful The Lottery. It won the World Fantasy, Aurealis and the Ditmar awards for best short fiction and was shortlisted for a Hugo and a Nebula.
The idea came from a television documentary. "People tend to think of the Los Angeles La Brea tar pits which are very slushy and muddy, and you can't imagine ever walking on them but this one had quite a dry surface, it was like warm cushions," Lanagan says.
"People would park their trucks on the tar by mistake and come out in the morning and find them stuck and sinking. It was just the weirdest thing to have in the middle of the town. I thought, 'Well, it's not much of a stretch to think they would get rid of criminals and other inconvenient people that way'. But I softened things by giving the family the chance to make things nice for their loved one as she sank out of sight."
Singing My Sister Down ''fell out onto the page'', needing little revision. At this juncture, Lanagan had been published for 14 years - a handful of Dolly romances under a pseudonym, two teen novels and three junior fiction titles.
She'd made the decision to concentrate on fantasy writing. ''My ultimate aim was to have a possible secondary income stream from writing,'' Lanagan says, rolling her eyes at her own naivete. ''So I had my eye on a wider audience. I was over romance, I wasn't really a crime reader. I thought, wrongly, that science fiction was probably too science-y for me. Fantasy seemed the way to go.''
Fantasy doesn't so much offer an escape from real-world troubles as a symbolic way to deal with our greatest fears, says Lanagan. ''All literature works at a symbolic level, but fantasy is just a further step into murkiness. It stirs up the silt of our deepest self, then suggests new ways of settling.''
Fairytales, myths and legends have proved a rich source of material for Lanagan, coming with a ready-made world and speaking to life's cruellest verities.
Tender Morsels (2008), is a dark retelling of the German fairytale Snow White and Rose Red; in Sea Hearts (2013) Lanagan twists an old selkie legend, Scottish in origin, in which seals take the form of women.
Not all Ogre, from this latest collection, her sixth anthology, reimagines the prince of Sleeping Beauty. ''I went back to the original story and there's a whole chunk of it about the princess' mother being an ogress and eating children, which rarely makes it into the Sleeping Beauty story. So I put it back in.''
The Zeroes trilogy is a different beast altogether, an update of the classic coming-of-age story and superhero tropes featuring six Californian teenagers with thoroughly modern super-powers to control crowds, technology and specific aspects of people's minds. Books 1 and 2, Zeroes and Swarm, have been New York Times bestsellers and a third instalment is out September.
''We were a bit envious of television writers in television writing rooms, where everybody sits around flinging ideas at one another. We were tired of doing the heavy lifting ourselves. I asked Scott and Deb [why they invited me] to join the collaboration and they said it was because I was geographically convenient,'' Lanagan laughs. ''Then they said it was because of my beautiful sentences but then they cut most of my beautiful sentences out because the emphasis was on an action-packed superhero adventure.''
Margo Lanagan is a guest at Sydney Writers Festival. swf.org.au Singing My Sister Down is published by Allen & Unwin at $19.99.
