Welcoming Grace Chan
Flame Tree Press welcomes Australian author Grace Chan to the blog to talk about her award-winning short story “The Mark”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September in our celebrated Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.
Today, Grace Chan shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.
Excerpt:
“Things haven’t been right for a few months.
I can’t describe it exactly. The air is spongy, each molecule bloated with turgid energy. We’ve had three lightning storms this summer: dry, pounding storms without rain, purple branches crackling across a cloud-dark sky.
Several times, I’ve woken before sunrise, convinced that something has changed in the middle of the night. As though some god has reached down, and, with a colossal finger, nudged the Earth, and now everything is sitting two degrees off-kilter.
On these not-quite-mornings, I pad into the street in my pyjamas. I stand beneath the linked steeples of fluorescent streetlights and power lines. I scan above for the subtle movement of the clouds, to assure myself that the sky is not a two-dimensional poster glued onto a false backdrop."
Chan writes:
“The Mark” is one of my darkest stories, touching on heavy themes like domestic violence, self-harm, racism, miscarriage, and psychosis. Although it’s an unsettling read, I’d like to think it’s not entirely grim. My story claims power for the protagonist by embracing madness, monstrousness, and abjection.
At the start of “The Mark”, Emma is in a powerless position. As a woman of colour married to an abusive white man and a personal assistant to a white male doctor, she is constantly objectified. We notice how her husband expects her to manage the domestic mundanities (laundry, cleaning, hosting a social gathering) without a word of complaint; we cringe at the patronising nickname that her boss bestows upon her. We have a glimpse into Emma’s psyche, but it seems those around her have no curiosity about her complex internal world.”
As well as Chan’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”
"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
Grace Chan (gracechanwrites.com) is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. She writes about brains, minds, and space. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Every Version of You, is about staying in love after mind-uploading into virtual reality. It won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards. It has been optioned for a film adaptation by Cognito Entertainment. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, and many other places. She won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story in 2022. Grace was born in Malaysia and now lives on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people. In her other life, she works as a psychiatrist.
This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now
