About the author

Russell Fourie-Kidson

I write the darkness that lives in ordinary things.

Gothic fiction has worn one face for two hundred years: the castle, the moor, the fog, the candle in the long corridor. We know that face on sight. I go looking for the other one, the face the gothic wears at home. A house that remembers. A secret a family agrees to keep. A silence at the dinner table that’s lasted thirty years. I find it in a Pretoria kitchen at four in the afternoon, on a farm stoep in the Karoo, in a white house on a headland with the sea going up the rocks. I’m a son of southern African soil. This is the ground I know, and I write to find what’s buried in it.

I write the Things Left Standing short-story volumes — Undertow, Slack Water, and Vanishing Point — published under Dwaalspoor Press.