Tell us a bit more about you and where you’re from.
Heluk: New Jersey gets a bad rap. It’s unwarranted. We grow the best tomatoes and have award-winning corn. The beach is only an hour drive away. There’s plenty of nature and farmland, too. It isn’t called The Garden State for no reason.
I hail from a mystical spot in the middle known as Central Jersey, which some say doesn’t exist.
As for me, I’m 20 years in the horror writing game and I’ve been extremely fortunate.
What inspired your winning story? Why did that particular theme resonate with you?
Heluk: I grew up in the second golden age of horror; the 1980’s. As a child, I was weaned on classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon (who I had a crush on) and Atomic-Age films, most notably Godzilla (who I also had a crush on). My heroes have always been monsters.
My teen years were filled with Tales from the Crypt and every amazing horror movie ever made. Entire weekends were lost watching VHS tapes from Blockbuster Video, selected solely by how campy the covers were. And then came my all-time favorite movie, John Carpenter’s The Thing.
But one of my first movie memories was, THEM!, the 1954 mutant ant movie. That really imprinted on me.
For Prawn of the Dead, I thought, what would be the least of things that could do a huge amount of damage if left unchecked? Something undetected running amok with apocalyptic consequences? As I stood in my kitchen, I realized shrimp are pretty unassuming. And then the title came to me. Right there I knew I’d be writing a story about radioactive mutant shrimp.
I have a medical background, so I often lean into body horror. I find it effective, cruel, and unsympathetic. So, what would happen when these radioactive prawns were ingested? A genetic code would unlock, of course, melding both species into one horrific facsimile.
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