Featured Interview With Frank Torn
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up between the salt and dust—born in New South Wales, raised in small towns where the night sky was bigger than sense. These days I live in Brisbane, though it never quite feels like a finish line. During the COVID years, I was homeless for three months, camping my way up the coast with my two dogs, Toby and Cletus. They were my family and my compass. We slept under stars, waded through mud, and shared whatever scraps the day offered. In every sense, they saved my life.
That journey—equal parts survival and surrender—still fuels my writing. I learned then that love and fear often share the same fire. So when I write now, I write from that edge: where loss, loyalty, and imagination all blur together.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was one of those kids who read like it was an escape tunnel. Dystopian stories, ghost tales, anything that hinted at the extraordinary inside the ordinary. I started writing seriously in my twenties—not because I thought I could, but because I couldn’t stop. Words became the way I rebuilt myself, piece by piece. The more I wrote, the more I realized that storytelling isn’t about control—it’s about survival.
Even now, every book I write starts as a question I’m not brave enough to answer directly. Writing just gives me a way to sneak up on the truth.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I read across the spectrum, but I’m drawn to stories that leave bruises. Cormac McCarthy for his brutal beauty. Shirley Jackson for her elegant dread. Jeff VanderMeer for his ecological surrealism. And Kazuo Ishiguro for the quiet ache beneath every sentence.
My favorite genres are dystopian fiction, dark love stories, science fiction that asks why we build what we destroy, and horror that reveals the soul instead of just the monster. I’m inspired by authors who understand that awe and terror are twins—that the things that scare us can also save us.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest novel, The Outlands, is a dystopian thriller set in a postwar Australia where the land and the people have both been scarred by what came before. It follows several fractured souls—Silas, Ethel, Emiel, and a white foal named Felix—as they navigate a world cracked open by trauma and memory.
It’s about survival, yes—but also about love in impossible places. About the monsters we inherit, and the courage it takes to face them. I wanted to write something both terrifying and tender, where the horror isn’t just external—it’s what we carry, and what we dare to heal.
The Outlands is my debut novel, releasing Halloween 2025. It’s my way of asking: when everything burns, what do we keep alive?