Rick Kennett
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rick Kennett (1956 - ). Australian writer, is one of the few Australians who have written a substantial body of work in the supernatural. Kennett fell in love with motorbikes in 1975 and is now approaching his twenty-third year as a motorbike courier. He published a science-fantasy novel A Warrior's Star in 1982 and has penned a successful series of sf stories featuring female space captain Cy de Gerch; but the bulk of his output has been weird, with many stories ostensibly sf in nature also crossing into supernatural territory.
“On Sherman’s Planet”, a ghost story set on another world; was accepted for Boggle in 1977 but was not in fact published until it appeared in Crux in 1984. Kennett’s first published story was “Troublesome Green”(about gremlins heading for the stars as stowaways) in Enigma (Jan 1979). Several more stories mixing sf and ghostly themes were published there before he greatly expanded his market with other magazines and anthologies.
In 1981, twelve of Kennett’s tales featured on “The Voice in Black” show on Melbourne’s radio 3CR. From 1987 to 1991 Kennett helmed an sf show on Melbourne’s 3PBS public radio station called Pilots Into the Unknown. Radio provided the background for several of his later stories including “The Windows”, and the Ernie Pine novelette “Dead Air” (which won the Short Story Competition run by EOD magazine).
The Reluctant Ghost-Hunter (Ghost Story Society, UK, 1991) chapbook collects three Ernie Pine stories: “Alley Ghost”, about the ghost of an airman; “The Impromptu Séance” (a collaboration with Bev Lane), about a haunted laundromat; and “Time in a Rice Bowl” in which old Chinese magic involving the reanimation of corpses leads to the possession of a young girl. Kennett has described Ernie Pine as “a fair-haired smart-aleck, an ordinary sort of bloke who could barely afford a motorbike and hamburgers, but had a working knowledge of occult matters”. No complete collection of the Ernie Pine stories has yet appeared.
472 Cheyne Walk (Ghost Story Society, UK, 1992), a chapbook collaboration with A.F. ‘Chico’ Kidd; contains two stories by Kennett: “The Silent Garden” and “The Steeple Monster” (written with Kidd) and two originals by Kidd. These were the first of the ‘Carnacki Untold Tales’ sequence, which has since been issued in expanded form by Ash Tree Press. These tales constitute the second strand of Kennett’s tales of psychic investigators and successfully imitate the flavour & atmosphere of WH Hodgson’s originals.
472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories (with A.F. Kidd) (AshTree Press, Canada, 2002) consists of seven stories by Kidd alone, together with several solo works by Kennett. Particularly strong are “The Gnarly Ship”, utilising Kennett’s knowledge of maritime history, “The Roaring Paddocks” and the novella “Keeper of the Minter Light”.
Thirteen (Jacobyte Books, 2001) is about evenly divided between sf and ghost stories but does collect a number of Kennett’s best supernatural tales. “Due West” concerns a triple unsolved murder committed in a quiet country town in 1898, part of an uncompleted satanic ritual now reawakened. “Bottle Green Dreams” is the basis for the forthcoming novel Abracadabra. Other strong tales include “Isle of the Dancing Dead” (a legendary curse on a wealthy family’s mausoleum), ”Kindred Spirits” (sf/ghost); “Log Recording Found in a Dead Man’s Gut”(a revised version of “Troublesome Green”); “Out of the Storm”(a Marie Celeste-like naval mystery);“The Windows” (magic in a radio station), “The Outsider” and “The Seas of Castle Hill Road” (further tales of Ernie Pine)
Many other uncollected stories by Kennett have appeared, from “The Willcroft Inheritance”(with Paul Collins), a traditional Gothic ghost story, to “Rookwood” (with Bryce Stevens), a rather more unconventional Gothic set in Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery. Ernie Pine features in Abracadabra, Kennett’s second novel. (forthcoming from AshTree Press) An excerpt from the novel appeared as “Big Magic” (Bloodsongs 2, 1994). Kennett has numerous new ghost and horror stories slated for publication in magazines, anthologies and online.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Entries on Kennett appear in the following: Collins, Paul (ed) The MUP Encyclopedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. (Melbourne University Press, 1998) pp.103-04. [Includes bibliography to 1998]; Pringle, David (ed) The St James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. (St James Press, 1998)pp 315-16. [entry by Paulsen, Steven and Sean McMullen]. The following interviews are also useful sources of information: Blackmore, Leigh. “Finding Ghosts: An Interview with Rick Kennett”. www.Tabula_Rasa.com (Sept 2003); Ikin, Van. “From Troublesome Green to Ernie Pine: An Interview with Rick Kennett” Science Fiction No. 40 (1997) [Includes a two-page bibliography].; Paulsen, Steven. “An Interview with Rick Kennett”. Australian SF Writers News No 5 (1992) Reprint in Sirius 2 (June 1993)
