I have a new story out! Well, to be perfectly honest, it came out a few months back but I’m playing catch-up here. “Inviting the Hollow Bones” can be read in the anthology The Map of Lost Places, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas & Lesley Conner and published by Apex Books.

I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute to this, and the hook was appealing: write a horror story about a haunting, set in a real place. Somewhere off the beaten track. Naturally I chose something in my own country – a place called Echo Valley, in Fiordland, where a complete mummified skeleton of a bush moa was found several decades back. A bush moa is one of the smaller moa species – nothing like the giant moa, but still interesting. And sadly, still very extinct.

I’ve written ghost stories about birds before – there were ghostly penguins in “Tidemarks” – but the haunting here is less traditionally spectral. A number of artists have been employed to set their own take on the moa in different parts of the national landscape… sculptures that represent this lost element of our ecology. Two of these artists, working together, are placing a sculpture of the moa in Echo Valley.

That sculpture is made of human bones, and it requires a sacrifice…

It’s a creepy little story, but fun to write. I was happy to get it accepted, and while I don’t quite believe in the tales that come out occasionally of moa still surviving in the far reaches of Fiordland, I wish they were true. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? It would be a less bloodthirsty resurrection than this one, that’s for sure.