Nefarious Bat Press is a female-owned independent publisher specialising in queer horror, crime and dark fiction.
It was founded by Shauna Mc Eleney and TC Parker.
Shauna is an Irish author from county Donegal. Her debut novel was Awake in the Night, a sapphic haunted house tale. When she’s not reading or writing she enjoys painting and making strange things out of clay. Shauna’s second novel, Where the Bluebells Lie, is a serial killer thriller set in a small Irish town – out August 2024. You can follow her on Facebook and Instagram
TC is a writer and researcher based in the fox-ravaged wilds of Leicestershire. She’s been a copywriter, a lecturer and, very briefly, an academic; now she runs a semiotics and cultural insight agency by day and dreams up horror and crime fiction at night, when the kids are asleep. TC’s next release is Consequential, a darkly comic supernatural murder mystery, due October 2024. You can follow her on Facebook and Instagram
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If you could time travel to any point in history, which era would you choose, and why?
Despite the awfulness of the present… this is a pretty good time for me, in terms of my gender, sexuality, heritage, neurotype and 
tendency to shoot my mouth off. I can’t think of very many historical periods that wouldn’t have seen me, for example, burned as a witch, strapped to a ducking-stool or thrown into an oubliette somewhere.
So I’m going to stick with: now. And hope fervently we can find a way to make “now” better.
That said… I have a deep and enthusiastic (if unsophisticated) love of Mesopotamia and its early cities: Sumer, Uruk, Ur and the rest. Not sure how well I’d have fared there either – realistically, given I’m in my 40s, I’d likely be dead already if I’d been born in any of those places – but I’d love to go and check out the Ishtar Gate, and maybe a ziggurat or two. And try really hard not to piss off the goddess Inanna. – TC Parker
If you had to choose between fighting 100 duck-sized robots or one robot-sized duck, which would you pick and why?
Okay, so, initially I was thinking a duck-sized robot is fairly small and worst comes to the worst, I could just boot it away from me. BUT a hundred of the wee feckers? No, too many. What if they surround me? What if fifty of them surround me and the other fifty get some kind of height advantage – I’m only 5’1, I can’t let that happen. So, I’m going to go with one robot-sized duck. It’s big, so it can’t sneak up on me. Whilst I’m not exactly sure of the size, I’m hoping a truck or jeep, or something would do it some damage.
(100 swarming robot ducks = New Fear Unlocked) – Shauna Mc Eleney
If you were to write a book about a group of superheroes with completely useless powers, what would their powers be?
For a long time, I had this running joke with a friend of mine about what our crap superpower would be, if we had one – and we landed on the ability to summon the 90s British sitcom actor Lesley Joseph at will. (Dorian from Birds of a Feather, for those in the know).
So, I’m going to go with that one: my superheroes, all of them, will have the power to summon Lesley Joseph. Whether she grants them wishes thereafter is a question only Lesley can answer. – TC Parker
If you had to choose between having the ability to speak with animals or plants, which would you choose and why?
Animals. I love plants but they’re not moving about much, are they? Like, there’s a plant outside my door, a lovely plant, but I fear we would run out of chat fairly quickly.
If I could talk to animals, we could go places together, shoot the shit about what we see, go for meals – it would be a whole thing. Who wouldn’t want to be able to talk to their pet?
(I feel bad for the plants now – they probably know how to save the world and I’d be there chatting shite to a squirrel.) – Shauna Mc Eleney
If you could choose any real-life celebrity to make a cameo appearance in one of your books, who would it be and why?
I’m not sure exactly how… but I’d love to get Indira Varma in there somewhere. She’s mostly known for Game of Thrones, as I understand it (I didn’t watch the later series so missed the whole Ellaria Sand thing), but she recently narrated the audio versions of the Discworld Witches books, and she was absolutely incredible; I’ve never heard a better Granny Weatherwax.
And Cher too, obviously. Is there any book that wouldn’t be improved with a brief Cher cameo? – TC Parker
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Nefarious Bat Press have lots planned for the upcoming year! Our first call is open from Oct 1st – Oct 31st, 2024; we’re looking for a novella from a female or non-binary author. There are more details regarding this call on our WEBSITE. (We’ll have another call opening in April of 2025, which will be open to all genders. We’ll be sharing details on this towards the end of the year.)
We’re launching our newsletter – if people want to sign up to that, again, head to our website. It’s the best way to stay up to date with what we’re doing. The newsletter will have author interviews, writing prompts and much more.
