When my lovely American wife Marneen is here in Melbourne with me she is forever worried about leaving a window wide open in case one of our little local possums should make a leap through from one of the surrounding trees or fences and cause all sorts of untold horror. It has inspired me to write a horror fiction story about a plague of infected possums who terrorize the St. Kilda area of 1975, picking off derelicts, streetwalkers, pushers and the odd Luna Park employee.
I'm going to call it Ringtails and write it in homage to those great lurid eco-horror paperbacks pulps from the 1970/early-80s, authored by the likes of Guy N. Smith, James Herbert and Shaun Hutson.
Here's the opening paragraph:
"When they first came out of the darkness en masse, they were already rabid, ravenous, and completely out of control. No one was really sure how or why the problem first started, but it was clear that it had been festering for some time. With a random shrug of her fickle shoulders, Mother Nature had decided to mutate and descend a new horror down upon us, and used as its testing grounds the unsuspecting populace of the Melbourne bayside suburb of St. Kilda."
