Meet our Contributors Deborah Lee Singer’s story “The Good Girl” was an honourable mention in our last competition around the theme of Deja Vu. Deborah lives in Cork, Ireland and is a technical writer. She spent ten years as a university lecturer teaching horror literature and film and wrote her doctoral thesis on gender in horror. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? I’ve always been a huge Horror fan and started reading and watching Horror at a very young age. I completed a BA in English, I wrote an MA thesis on Horror remakes, and a PhD thesis on gender in Horror films. I also taught university courses in English Literature and Cinema for 10 years. I loved teaching courses on the history of Horror in particular as students in these classes were extremely vocal. In these courses, I covered everything from the first early Horrors, to adaptations of literature, to postmodern Horror, tv Horror, and Horror culture today. I left teaching a few years ago to start a family and now work as a technical writer. I love my day job because I get to write all day but I also spend a lot of it thinking about my flash fiction and short story writing. I’m also working on a novel at the moment when I get a chance. Flash fiction is a fairly modern platform for horror. What do you think is contributing to its growing success? I think flash fiction works particularly well for Horror because it’s the most visceral genre and I feel that it can do the most with the least amount of words. I also think it’s also the hardest genre to write as it has to evoke the biggest reaction. Your story was quite intriguing. We had a long discussion about our varying interpretations of it while we were judging. Can you tell us about how you came up with it? My story came from the conversations I have with my two-year old about her dolls. Not that they’re going to kill anyone (!) but that they have thoughts and that they are watching what myself and my daughter do. This of course started me thinking about when I bring my little girl to the park and what the doll might think of this. The madness that comes from our everyday lives is a theme across my stories and I imagined how a doll might start to go mad if they were trapped in the monotony of everyday life but weren’t supposed to react to it.
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