The Cosmicomicon

Official Novel Release Day: I Am The River now available worldwide

2018-10-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

Cover created and designed by Ives Hovanessian

After a "fluid" official release day dating back to June (timing issues), today - October 3rd, in this the year of our blind and faceless and imaginary lord 2018 - arrives as the official release date of my debut novel I Am The River.

Aside from the joy of putting another book into the stream of civilization, this is an auspicious occasion on a personal level for several reasons, the most superficial of which is the attainment of an arbitrary delineation of accomplishment - that of completing and publishing a novel-length work of fiction. In writing that sentence, I paused to briefly rewind to the beginnings of my work as a writer, and realized that I was first published in the public sphere just short of three decades (!) ago. That's difficult for me to wrap my mind around (aging brain, and all). So the release of I Am The River: A Novel, nearly thirty years later, seems like a slow gestating sign of progress - a mark of growth and the ability to handle a longer narrative, and sustain it over the course of several hundred pages, giving it time to breathe and having the capability of keeping fresh air flowing into the lungs. From the outside, that might not seem like anything important or singular, and it certainly isn't, as the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of novelists who have come before me can attest. But it's not as easy as one thinks, as every writer or potential writer who has a novel burning inside them unquestionably knows: wanting to write a novel and actually completing a novel are two vastly different things. It's a benchmark, not unique (or novel, if you pardon the pun) to me or any other author, but a touchstone that is both satisfying personally, and easily processed by the outside world. Either way, I'll take both.

Today, I can claim the descriptor of "novelist," and half-heartedly promise to never use it in any official capacity outside of this post.

A girl and her cover

On this day of release, I'm grateful to so many for the help I have received in plotting, writing, completing, and then getting this novel into print. I'm grateful to Paul Minor for trusting me to set this whole journey into motion. I'm grateful to my wife Ivy for - as she always does - supporting the hundreds of hours of writing time, offering guidance, editing, and ideas, and for - as she always does - creating the cover that framed the book visually through her extraordinary artistic eye, which in turn inspired a key scene in the book that provided a pontoon bridge to keep the mission marching forward into the Laotian jungle. Vision boards work, and she creates them all for me for everything I do, whether she knows it or not.

I am grateful to Steve Berman at Lethe Press for backing my work, and to Matt Cresswell for making sure I was happy with the look of the final result. Packaging matters. Design matters. People do judge books by their covers, and by how the pages look between them.

I'm grateful to those fellow writers that I know and trust and admire who gave up days out of their busy, hectic lives to read an early copy of I Am The River and supply blurbs, lending their names and reputations to something I had written. That's powerful stuff, and incredibly generous. The real pros are always the nicest folks in the room. Remember that, especially when dealing with those who aren't.

A River arrives in Norway (book photo courtesy of Patrick G.P., Oslo)

And I am ever and steadfastly grateful to those individuals who have and continue to read the stories I create, and to support them however they can, in whatever form and format they appear. In a purely practical sense, books are a luxury, an idle, an entertaining distraction in an over-saturated media and entertainment marketplace that offers endless diversions for free, or in far more conveniently absorbed mediums. In tough, exhausting times such as these, purchasing (and then actually reading) new fiction can quickly become an extraneous budgetary expense and scheduling cutback. But people (and libraries!) continue to buy my books, all over the world. It's a humbling, stirring thing, met with perpetual amazement and appreciation.

I dedicated this book to Lewis Minor, and to all those who fought the brutal and tragic and complicated war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s, wishing each and every wanderer created on those battlefields - large and small, public and private - a safe passage home. And I dedicated this book to Gene O'Neill, a fellow writer of dark things, a United States Marine, and Vietnam vet who is a fantastic horror writer and a great guy. I asked him questions a few years back at Stokercon on the Queen Mary about his time in Vietnam, when the book was still in just the planning stages. What he said, and especially how he said it, influenced the story, and gave me - an entitled, American, Gen-X soft palm who was born just after the war, and thus never had to fight it or any others against my will - confidence that I could do it, and hopefully do it justice. The latter will now be for others to decide.

All that stated, and in my effort to entice you, gentle and loyal reader, to purchase this bound work of ink-printed pages, pixelated words on a glowing screen, or uttered sentences through speakers, I give you the final assemblage of blurbs for I Am The River:

“With echoes of Peter Straub’s KOKO and Apocalypse Now, T.E. Grau’s blazing, immersive novel takes us on the hell-ride of the Vietnam War’s last days as its raging waters also carry us through the first of our last days. I AM THE RIVER is a hallucinatory tour de force.” — Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

“A sense of being hunted, and haunted, hits you right from the start of I Am The River. That mood only grows in intensity as the scope of this novel’s nightmare takes shape. It’s supernatural and geopolitical and an unforgettable time. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke comes to mind, the work of Peter Straub and Tim O’Brien, too. In other words T.E. Grau is writing the good stuff. Get some.” — Victor LaValle, author The Ballad of Black Tom

“I Am The River is the kind of thing that might happen if Algernon Blackwood had been brought in to do a rewrite of Apocalypse Now. A man barely holding onto his sanity in Bangkok remains haunted, stalked by a huge hound and undone by his own addiction. His only way out is through revisiting his past in the Vietnam War and the secret PSY-OPS mission he was involved in–and which he’s been running from ever since. A haunting meditation on war, death, addiction, and responsibility, with mindblowing forays into the weird.” — Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses and The Warren

“An intelligent accumulation of inner and outer darkness.” — Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

“A lush green nightmarish journey into the dark, reminiscent of the late, great Lucius Shepard.” — Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

“I Am The River is a horror novel, yes, and it never skimps on its mission to unsettle us. It is also a book that finds horror not only in blood and shadows, but in the very real abysses that separate us: race, culture, and the manipulations of people by governments and by war. It moves quickly and intelligently from its first page to its last, evoking its nightmares in gorgeous, evocative, disturbing prose. A must-read!” — Christopher Coake, author of You Came Back

“I Am The River moves with fluid grace, flowing between times, places, and perspectives as it carries us through its protagonist’s surreal experience of the Vietnam War and his part in a covert mission which refuses to loose its grip on him. Located at the hot, humid intersection of Tim O’Brien’s classic Going After Cacciato and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, this novel plunges us into war at its most extreme and insane, when the methods employed for defeating the enemy leave reason behind for terror and myth. Ted Grau’s writing continues to move from strength to strength.” — John Langan, author of The Fisherman

"A disorienting and devastating evocation of the horrors of war and PTSD. T.E. Grau has written infused the War Novel with dark mythic imagery that sears like napalm.” — Craig Laurance Gidney, author of Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories

“Hallucinatory, gripping and haunting, I Am The River should rank as one of the best novels of 2018. The masterful point of view shifts and often stream-of-consciousness pacing makes for a riveting, oneiric read. In the author’s hands, this bleak, nightmarish and deeply unsettling tale is not only palatable… but delectable. Of course, I expect such quality from Grau. Everything he has written heretofore is bizarre, literary gold. That stated, this book represents Grau’s best work to date, and it is a must read.” — Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism

“I don’t often say this, but here it needs to be said: I Am The River is a modern literary masterpiece, and one that will be remembered long after we are returned to dust. It’s a mind-bending, soul-destroying meditation on morality and despair and conflict, on the trials of the human spirit during times of war when the line between good and evil is intangible. Impeccably written, compulsively readable, I Am The River deserves every ounce of praise it’s going to get, and then some, and marks Grau as an extraordinary talent.” — Kealan Patrick Burke, author of The Turtle Boy and Kin

“Grau is our boatman on this psychedelic journey of ghosts and guilt, artillery and atonement. More than a war story, I Am The River forces us to confront the bloody aftereffects in a way that is both powerful and poignant. A cautionary tale for the soul.” — Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted

“"I Am the River is a macabre journey through a hostile land where a soldier’s act of brutality haunts him, body and soul. With one remarkable collection under his belt, Grau now shows with his debut novel that he’s clearly at the head of the pack when it comes to compelling voices in weird horror fiction today." — Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales

“T. E. Grau’s dark tale of suffering and the quest for redemption pushes the limits of psychological horror. Deeply poetic and disturbing, it reveals that even in the darkest corners of the soul, a faint humanity can be seen glittering and it’s simply beautiful.” — Seb Doubinsky, author of The Song of Synth and White City

_________________________________________________________________________

Thus, with this my first novel set free into the current, I watch it drift downstream as blessed October overtakes the planet. There on the water, tiny candle flames dance and wink in the humid air of the Floating City, of my city, of yours and those nearby, and also those across vast oceans and gulfs. I like the way it moves, this new book, and am pensive about where it will end up, and how the journey will treat it. But either way, I'm glad it's alive, and on the move.

As I watch, my thoughts also drift upstream, to the next bend in the river, and what waits there, ready to be unearthed, studied, and documented. But that's for another day, another posting. Right now, I can't take my eyes off the river, and the flames that seem to set the water afire.

While I am otherwise occupied, please enjoy I Am The River. I'm proud of this book, what is says and how it says it, and think it shows the best of me. It shows the writer I am now, at this moment, with still so much left to learn, to polish, to sharpen, and to do.

It shows me as a novelist, and I'll take that, too.

Please order direct from the Lethe Press site here, and support small press.
Paperback and Kindle available from Amazon here.
ePub ebook available from Smashwords here.
Audiobook available from Audible.com here.

Novel News: Pre-order I AM THE RIVER, the novella that pined to be something more

2017-09-15T09:39:00.001-07:00

Cover by Ives Hovanessian

I never know how long a story is going to be when I begin writing it. I have a rough idea, based on the scope of the plot and complexity of the narrative, but that’s always vague and never completely predictive. I only truly find out when it’s complete. Maybe I don’t have the proper control over the work I’m doing, or perhaps it’s more about trusting the story to tell me what it wants to be, how it wants to present itself to the world.

Stories are organic things, and shapeless when born, only firming up and taking their ultimate form when all is finally said, and all is finally done. Then and only then do we – meaning I – know the size of the thing we are dealing with. You don’t measure the size of paws, or the diameter of bones. There’s no extrapolation equation or scaling up ingredients. Stories grow like an unknown tree, reaching full maturity when its DNA says so.

I started I Am The River with the intention that it would be a novella. My second overall, and my second book with the fine folks at Lethe Press. I was even hoping it would be a novella, as I had intended to save the “first novel!” milestone for my next project Salt Creek, which most certainly will be a novel at the very least (with plans to spin it out into other projects and mediums). How long and large that one will be remains to be seen, but I know that it will easily cross the size threshold into the vale of the proper, 100,000+ word novel.

But as I continued to write I Am The River, exploring its strange twists and turns as they were revealed to me, I watched as the book surpassed the word count of a standard novella, and flowed into short novel territory, where it quickly made itself at home and then sat down, its journey complete.

I trust this story. I like this story. I needed to change the “A Novella” to “A Novel” on the title page, which you can see covering the completed “Zero Draft” manuscript, completed on Sunday night, September 10th, 2017:

Now the careful task of editing begins. While I engage in this joyous exercise, you are free to pre-order I AM THE RIVER: A NOVEL via the Lethe Press website here. Word from the top says that if you pre-order before Halloween, you will be able to purchase the novel for a discounted novella price ($13.00), which is eight quarters less than the going rate ($15.00).

I Am The River: A Novel will be released in February, 2018 as a trade paperback and ebook, with the possibility of a hardcover edition in the works. Should a hardcover edition be made available, anyone who pre-orders a paperback copy before the release date can apply that credit to the hardcover.

From the Lethe Press website:

Coming February of 2018!

Special sale price of $13 lasts until November 1st

by T.E. Grau

During the last desperate days of the Vietnam War, American solider Israel Broussard is assigned to a secretive CIA PSYOP far behind enemy lines meant to drive terror into the heart of the North Vietnamese and end an unwinnable war. When the mission goes sideways, Broussard is plunged into a nightmare that he soon finds he is unable to escape, dragging a remnant of that night in the Laotian wilderness with him no matter how far he runs.

Five years later, too damaged to return home and holed up in the slums of Bangkok, where he battles sleep, guilt, and a creeping sense of madness, Broussard discovers that he must journey back to the jungles of Laos in an attempt to set things right and reclaim what is left of his life.

A fever dream with a Benzedrine chaser, I Am The River provides a daring, often surreal examination of the Vietnam War and the days after it, burrowing down past the bullets and battlefields to discover the lingering horror of warfare, the human consequences of organized violence, and the lasting effects of trauma on the psyche, and the soul.

T.E. Grau is the author of dozens of stories and other written works, including the books They Don’t Come Home Anymore, Triptych: Three Cosmic Tales, The Lost Aklo Stories, The Mission, and The Nameless Dark, which was nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

TC Review & Interview: Author, poet, and anarchist Seb Doubinsky foresees the future in WHITE CITY, and the future is now

2017-03-27T09:28:00.002-07:00

Some writers predict the future. Those working in fantastical, dystopian, and science fiction have been doing it for years. Jules Verne foresaw the development of advanced submarine technology. H.G. Wells saw much, including atomic weaponry, tanks, motion-sensor doors, voicemail. Arthur C. Clarke wrote about the rise of electronic media, virtual reality video games, the reliance upon communication satellites, and space tourism. George Orwell, the proliferation of NSA spying on its citizenry. William Gibson, the creation of cyberspace and Internet hackers. Ambrose Bierce concocted a chess-playing robot in 1910, a futurism completed by the prediction of an IBM computer beating the best human chess player by Raymond Kurzweil in 1990 ("Big Blue" defeated Garry Kasparov seven years later in 1997). Numerous writers, including E.M. Forster, Gene Roddenberry, and the Grand Seer Verne posited that video conferencing would be a boring reality many decades before these Skype and Facetime years of the early 21st century.

Either by careful study of technological innovations, or just a keen imagination, possibly informed by something creeping backward in time from the ether, these writers saw our present as their future, and were proven right, often when they had no reason to believe the things they saw unfurling forth from the corners of their minds. But somehow, they did. They listened. They saw.

Sébastien "Seb" Doubinsky doesn't make such grand claims of precognition, as - by this own admission - what he has sketched out in White City (Bizarro Pulp Press, 2015) is not a near-future, but a current-now. Maybe we are living our future, and many of us just don't have the right set of eyes to see it.

In White City, Doubinsky sets his novel in a Europe that has been re-segregation along class, wealth, nationalistic, and racial lines. In short, character-specific chapters (reminiscent of Faulker's As I Lay Dying), we meet a trio of citizens: VCTV 2 journalist Leila Bogossian, her boyfriend Lee Jones Jr., a writer trying to live down his father's considerable literary shadow, and Detective-Inspector Sigrid Wulff, newly arrived to her post at Kong Kristian district after bouts of insubordination at her last job. All are resident of Viborg City, both mockingly and proudly nicknamed "White City," which is a bleached-out, ivory tower Scandinavian hack of Beverly Hills sure to be an Alt Righter's dream zip code. This contrasts with New Babylon, where Leila and Lee first met, a gritty, lively cultural melting pot looked down upon by anyone privileged enough to take up residence in White City.

The plot centers on the strange murder of Niels Kepler (aka "White Power Niels"), younger brother to Marta Kepler, the obscenely wealthy heir to the Phoebus Cosmetics empire, which - we later learn - was founded by her father Hans Kepler, the personal perfumer to Adolph Hitler. Leila fights for the story, and uncovers far more than she expected, while Sigrid deals with bureaucracy and unstable balance of the entitled and the marginalized during her often thwarted investigation. Lee Jr. conducts research into this next novel that unknowingly ties everything together, loosely binding the three protagonists with a threadbare tether while they make their way through the thin societal air that remains tainted by the rot of the past. They each learn that in order to achieve their goals, to get what they want, risks and rationalizations must be made in a world that has no conscience, leaving them forever altered.

To me, the well-crafted, interwoven storylines are secondary in interest to the foundational underbelly of the overall work, and what is happening around the edges of Doubinsky's quasi-fictional Europe that is certainly grounded in a history all too real. Indeed, what I enjoyed most about White City was what the book takes on in the process of telling a solid crime tale, as it tackles topics of terrorist fear mongering, immigrant bans, racialist laws and credit obstruction, caste systems, police corruption, the price of beauty and the invoice of power, maintaining relationships across barriers of ethnicity and geography, black magic, and the sinewy reach of a slow-pumping vein of Nazi secret society that courses just under the skin of the Continent (and it's satellite land across the Atlantic - but that's for another novel). This is the tale of an outsider viewing a new, slightly hostile land from the inside and living to tell about it. In a macro sense, this is a story of what is happening RIGHT NOW in the United States, in Europe, and in other areas of our planet. As an American, I see this as a Post-Trumpian narrative conceived and written during the the Obama Administration, several years before anyone could or would have possibly conceived of a Presidential run by the clownish huckster, failed businessman, reality show hack, and running punchline since the Robin Leach 1980s named Donald J. Trump.

In that spirit, Doubinsky, a self-professed anarchist, is writing prophetic Protest Lit in the classic tradition of Orwell or Huxley. White City is a Contempo-Future Noir tale meted out through spare deconstruction down to the formatting, with elements of free-form expressionism, poetry, cultural longing and a quest for unique place in a world that will not abide it, all riding on a sea of social and political commentary. It's Burroughs without the bile. Well, without some of the bile. This isn't sci-fi (or socio-fi?), this is the present-day, with a veneer of manners peeled back by the scalpels of surgical social justice, exposing a raw wound that is growing while left untreated. Most of all, this novel is prescient and ultimately interesting, providing a darkly knowing take on current issues, which is important in these weird times. We need to see what's coming, those of us who don't have the Sight.

After enjoying Seb Doubinsky's poetry for years, given away in true Leftie fashion on social media, it is a real treat to see him sink his mind into a larger work like White City. And now that I have that taste, that glimpse of the grim future that is now, I want to see more. Fans of the dark stuff, the real stuff, always do.
_________________________________________________________________________

When did you first realize you were destined to write, and what triggered this realization? What sort of books and other media fueled these early, formative years?

I come from a very literary and political background. My grandfather on my father’s side was a Russian anarchist and on my mother’s side, an art historian. I was raised with books and ideas. I also lived as a kid in the USA in the early 60s, so a part of my native culture is American also. The desire to be a writer came relatively late, I would say when I was about 17 or 18, after reading a book by French surrealist poet and resistant René Char called Feuillets d’Hypnos (Pages from Hypnos), which are based in his active fight against the Nazis. I remember thinking that I wanted to write a book as important as that later. Then, a few years later, a family tragedy coupled with a love for punk rock turned this desire into a reality, and I wrote my two first “serious” novellas, VIX and DAYS OF LIGHT. This was in the early 80s. And both were in English. I began writing in French in parallel, but later. Some of the most influential writers for me definitely are William Burroughs, for the setting and the tight deconstruction of language, Kerouac for the sad craziness and the profound twisted humanity of his prose, and Richard Brautigan for the short chapters and novels that nonetheless carried a lot of weight and emotions. Later, I discovered Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius opuses and, of course, Philip K. Dick.

White City presents a grim outlook on humanity, and our near-future as a species, particularly in Europe, which has been divided more than ever along class, wealth, and racial lines. Does this reflect your worldview?

Yes, absolutely. I consider myself a political writer in a Pynchonian sense, that is to say as a slanted commentator of what is going on around us. Literature and culture in all its forms are the invisible architectures of our societies, and vibrate as history unfolds. Our responsibility is to both to feel and interpret these vibrations, and share them with the public. The grim outlook you are mentioning is precisely based on the vibes I have been picking for a while m actually since the first Iraq war, which inspired THE BABYLONIAN TRILOGY. When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, we all hoped for peace and a better world. But we had forgotten one thing: capitalism is a bastard. Communism out of the way, it could now be sole ruler – or, at least, try to. Culture became thus completely unimportant if it wasn’t a vector for its ideology. What struck me was we, the intellectuals, had mistaken pure, calculated propaganda for creative freedom. And since the 1990s we have experienced the backlash: bestsellers and top 40 music are basically the only culture allowed in the Big Media. The rest – which must represent 99% - is scornfully categorized as “genres” or “subcultures”, which is the ultra-capitalist form of censorship. You don’t forbid the works, you just cut their access to a larger audience. Very efficient too.

I can't help be see White City as a foreshadowing of our current political and social climate in the Western world. In a post-Trump, post-Brexit reality, with the rise of the Right in so many nations across our globe, is White City a bit of clairvoyant fiction? Did you see what was waiting for us a few years down the line back in 2014?

I think my studies in History and my own political choices as an anarchist have made me very wary of official narrations, whether in national myths or in Big Media news. I think WHITE CITY is more of a statement than a premonition, unfortunately. What I am showing in this novel is not what is awaiting us – it is where we have been for a long time.

What are you trying to express with White City, if anything other than to write an entertaining book?

WHITE CITY is a book aimed at making people feel uncomfortable politically. Its main purpose is to make the reader question his own social and historical narration, with all of its implications.

You start the novel with legitimately cheery quotes from none other than Heinrich Himmler and Leni Riefenstahl, and the book contains ghosts of Nazism. Why is this such a pronounced undercurrent in White City?

Nazism is actually the main not-so-hidden central topic of WHITE CITY. In my eyes, its fundamentals have never disappeared and still haunt our daily routines. Did you know, for example, that Nazi Germany was the first nation to try to ban tobacco? The obsession we have today for health and beauty are highly influenced by the eugenics of the 1920s and 1930s. When a political party, a newspaper or a TV show focus on the costs of some categories of citizens to our health system (overweight, smokers, etc.), they are actually following the lines of thinking that lead to the first extermination of mentally challenged patients in 1940. All the Nazi system was based on economical premises, themselves based on race and eugenics. And as for beauty, aesthetics were also central to National-Socialism. The Aryan people were not only the chosen people; they should also be a beautiful people. When Leni Riefenstahl goes to to Africa to take pictures of the Nuba tribe, she is taking pictures of a racially pure people in her eyes, of course). Aesthetics and eugenics go hand in hand. They both segregate and oppress.

White City has a deconstructionist, unorthodox style, with intermittent chapters consisting of "Dog Poems," diary entries, and recurring segments titled "What Beauty Is" and "Theory of Power." What are some influences on this book, in terms of structure, style, and content?

The biggest influence in my writing is actually not from other writers, but from art and music. I always think of some artists or film directors when I write, because I want my books to resemble their atmosphere. Robert Rauschenberg and Godard’s ALPHAVILLE were definitely there when I wrote WHITE CITY. And the soundtrack did contain Bauhaus, Sonic Youth, Ultravox and a few others.

The monstrous wars raging in the Middle East and North Africa, and the refugee crisis which has resulted, have impacted Europe in various ways. What have you seen on the ground living and moving through various countries?

Well, I live in Denmark and the Danish government and the Danish media’s radically xenophobic reactions did play a big part in the writing of the novel. What struck me was that Denmark is a filthy rich country, that could welcome thousands of refugees without it impacting its economy negatively. But most of the political parties and a shameful large number of journalists and commentators have poured out a purely xenophobic logorrhea, while insulting and threatening all opposing voices. Denmark is supposed to be a democracy, but definitely isn’t acting as one; at least in the political and Big Media spheres; Unfortunately, similar traits can be seen all around, from Hungary to Great Britain. What is interesting in this, is that this is an absolutely cynical decision with a very precise goal: to make people forget that the real problems come from the 2009 economical crisis. By waving the immigration red cloth under the noses of under-informed masses, they can lead the opinion away from the real problem of our democracies today, which is the incredibly high (and accepted) level of corruption of our politicians.

How far away are we from White City? Are we there already?

We are definitely living in WHITE CITY, and have been for a long while.

As someone who has penned poems and novels, do you consider yourself a poet, or are you an author? Is there a difference?

The great American female anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, at the end of her life, called herself “simply an anarchist”, refusing thus to categorize her commitment. Like her, I will say that I am “simply a writer”.

Does writing in different languages, including your second (third?) language, influence the writing itself? Are there some things you'd rather write in, say, French, than in English, or vise versa?

It’s a very difficult question. I think it really depends on the speed of the wind and the direction of the clouds. What I mean by that is that the paradigms leading to my choice of language both are as simple and complex as the speed of the wind and the direction of the clouds. I also translate myself (From English to French and vice-versa), but not all of my writings. There is a subconscious choice there that I have not really thought about. And then there is also a bit of laziness.

Channel Carlo from The Forgotten Shelf for a moment, and recommend five books and five authors (don't have to be related) that none of us have probably ever read, or even heard of before.

The order is of no importance:
1) Almost transparent blue, Murakami Ryu
2) Let it come down, Paul Bowles
3) Doctor Sax, Jack Kerouac
4) Tripticks, Ann Quin
5) Do Not Enter My Soul With Your Shoes, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

Where are you living these days, and what occupies your time away from writing?

Right now, I am in Paris with a group of students from Aarhus University, so I am taking walks with them and visiting museums. At night, I am meeting my old friends in bars and cafés…

What are you currently working on, and what can we expect next from you in print?

I am currently working on a new novel featuring Georg Ratner, the disgruntled cop from THE BABYLONIAN TRILOGY, and I have a novel, MISSING SIGNAL, that will come out in 2018 through Meerkat Press.

Thank you so much for your time, Seb, and for writing this book. It couldn't be more relevant as we push forward into a future that is both chillingly uncertain and predictably primal.

Thank you for having me on board, and about the future, I remember that Jewish joke that my late father used to tell me: What is the difference between a pessimist and an optimist?
A pessimist says: “This is terrible. Things can’t get worse than this!”
An optimist says: “Yes, they can! Yes, they can!”

Publishing News - New novella I AM THE RIVER coming in late 2017 from Lethe Press

2017-03-02T15:03:00.001-08:00

I am happy to announce that my newest novella, I Am The River, will be published in October/November of 2017 by Lethe Press, the same outfit that released my debut collection in 2015.

Moreover, I am proud to release the cover of I Am The River, created by Ives Hovanessian, which - as with all of Ives' covers - certainly adds an extra element of beauty and fascination to the book. I am and have been so luck to have her creative talents associated with my work.

More details as we near the release date...

2016-11-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

Trick or treating last night with Ivy and Fish was as lovely and fun as it is every year, but came with a tiny flavor of bittersweet.

South Pasadena – the only place we celebrate Halloween night – once again outdid itself, decking out historic-zoned Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets with lights and music and fog and Hollywood-grade horror props. Front doors were open, porches filled with smiling faces handing out candy and coffee, and the sidewalks were crowded with people who – like us – spend each October 31st in the most beautiful small town in the Los Angeles metroplex. No one does Halloween like South Pasadena does Halloween. Hell, the police cruisers were even broadcasting Carpenter’s theme to Halloween through their speakers. It’s just that sort of town, and was that sort of night. Wonderful from start to finish.

But it was also tinged with a bit of uncertainty, as Fish is now 12, and therefore in that odd middleground where one doesn’t know how long she’ll hold on to those childhood beliefs and activities that have marked her entire life so far. She says she’ll never stop trick or treating, and is already planning her costume for next year, but I know that’s probably as much idealism speaking as it is promise. She’s a nostalgic girl, and a bit old timey, just like her parents. She’s also going to be a teenager in eight months.

Either way, and if this was the last, we’ll always have memories of wonder and magic seen through a child’s eyes, and a little bit of Americana saved up and stored in that part of the cabinet that needs those sorts of things. And I’ll always have this photo, and each one taken in the same way in the same spot the past six years, marking the passage of time on a night that is timeless. May it always remain so.

Publishing News: Spanish edition of THE NAMELESS DARK: A COLLECTION coming in 2017 from Dilatando Mentes Editorial

2016-10-10T15:50:00.003-07:00

Language is a bonding agent, a powerful force that groups us together and also keeps us apart from our fellow human beings.

I write in English, and only English, as I have a hard enough time mastering one language sufficiently to commit it to the page in any sort of interesting fashion. As such, I do so admire anyone who can speak, think, and write in more than one language. That seems almost magical to me, like being possessed of a compartmentalized brain that is far beyond my abilities or comprehension.

Being an English-language writer, I often forget just how many people - literally billions, and a majority of this planet - cannot or will never read my work due to the language in which I write. And by "me," I mean all English-language writers. Conversely, I am missing out on so many extraordinary literary talents because of my limited grasp of language diversity. This is unfortunate, and frustrating.

So, it's on days like this that one realizes the smallness of one's immediate world, and the vastness of the real one. And by "days like this one," I mean on a day when I am incredibly humbled and excited to share the news that a Spanish language edition of The Nameless Dark: A Collection will be published in Spain at the end of 2017 by Ondara-based dark media imprint Dilatando Mentes Editorial, run by the wonderful husband and wife team of Jose Angel De Dios Garcia and Maite Aranda.

I think it's safe to say that every author dreams of having their work published in a language other than their own. It makes the work seem more permanent, and perhaps more meaningful, in some small way, to be deemed worthy of laborious translation and republication in a totally new market where the author most likely has very little sway or visibility. Or, maybe I'm just getting carried away with myself. Regardless, this is wonderful news, and something that makes me very proud.

Immense thanks to Jose and Maite for putting their hard work and company brand behind this new Spanish language edition of my collection. I very much look forward to finding new readers and kindred spirits amongst my Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters across the world, on several continents, and even in my own state and hometown. Los Angeles is very much a Latino city, so having my book available to Angelinos who primarily or only read in Spanish is a pretty wonderful thing.

Follow Dilatando Mentes Editorial on all available media platforms, and watch this space for updates. Muchos gracias, amable lector.

Cover Reveal: Upcoming release THEY DON'T COME HOME ANYMORE: A NOVELLA features cover art by Candice Tripp

2016-08-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

I'm exceedingly proud to finally be able to reveal the cover for my upcoming release, They Don't Come Home Anymore: A Novella, a 32,000+ word story published by This Is Horror.

The cover art is by the exceptionally talented Candice Tripp, a UK painter and sculptor that my wife Ives Hovanessian turned me on to a few years back. Since then, I'd been waiting for the right project to coalesce that would be an ideal pairing of her artwork with a corresponding story that suited it, and thankfully my first short novel arrived from the cranial factory as the perfect vehicle. I approached Candice for the cover, and thankfully she agreed. With the art secured, that Ives designed the cover — working with Candice's phenomenal oil painting Everything Is Lovely As Long As You Never Want To Leave (which itself sounds similar to the novella in terms of title, if not theme) and solidifying the tone through font, color, and clean space — seemed incredibly fitting, considering that she's been a fan of Candice's work longer than I have, and pointed me in that direction in the first place. Everything fell perfectly into place, with wonderful results, as you can see above.

This is the first step in working toward This Is Horror's planned mid-November 2016 release of They Don't Come Home Anymore: A Novella, a story that might, at first blush, seem like a slight departure from my previous work, as it centers on a teenage girl, and is very much a tale of obsession, loneliness, and a search for meaning, acceptance, and love in a world (and sub world) that waits, cruel and threatening, just behind the facade. It's also about vampires, but not the garden variety sort you'd expect in a mass market/network television teenage vamp story, but something that cleaves closer to the natural world, and how our planet once was, and might still be in certain darkened corners. I can't really say more, other than to invite you to pick up the book when it's available, and tell me what you think it's about, underneath, beyond that first impression.

But, that's for another day, in another season, approaching faster than you might think. Watch this space for pre-order information in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out that cover again. The devils truly are in the details.

TC Review & Interview: Brian Evenson quietly leads literary horror into the 21st century with new fiction collection A COLLAPSE OF HORSES

2016-07-15T09:24:00.002-07:00

I recently attended a Brian Evenson reading held at Skylight Books in the appropriately understated, enduringly cool east Hollywood enclave of Los Feliz. During the Q & A session after he read his latest collection's titular piece, Evenson shared a personal story that had occurred in a parking garage just days before. As he was walking to his car one afternoon, he noticed a fluttering object up ahead of him, trapped in the corner of the structure, that appeared to be a distressed bird most likely injured and unable to fly. As he drew nearer, he realized that what he was certain was a bird was actually a dead leaf, rocking back and forth in the wind. This gave him pause, and in pondering what he had just seen, or thought he had seen, he surmised that it could be possible that the bird he first saw may have physically transformed itself into the leaf that he found.

This was a quick anecdote, and seemingly innocuous, but as the discussion moved on, this visual vignette and its explanation sent my mind reeling with possibility: When we don't trust our eyes, perhaps we should. When we do trust our eyes, and what information it is relaying to our rational brain, perhaps we shouldn't. Maybe what we think we see but would never dare believe is actually what's absolutely real. Perception can be reality when reality is what we not just perceive, but truly see. Or don't. If a tree falls in the forest and you weren't there to see it, did it not fall?

Some may look upon a rocky outcropping, or a hole in the ground, or a cave, and see it for what it is in a physical sense. Some see these things as something else. Yet others can hear a sound in the woods and interpret it as the swaying of trees in the wind, or the movement of harmless animals. A different set of ears, attached to a different brain, infuse those noises with dread, and potential violence. Terror. Strips of meat hang in a cellar. What sort of meat is it? Why are they there? Is this innocuous, or is this horrific? Can it be both?

If we do not perceive something to be horrifying, it is not horrifying to us. Similarly, if we find something horrifying, ASSIGN it horror, it will be just that. We should question everything. It would be safer to question nothing.

This is heavy philosophical cargo, dealing with the heart and ephemeral soul of physical existence. But more so, these concepts examine the truth or lies of perception, shaded by interpretation, learned bias and ritualized certitude. Perception. Interpretation. Challenging rationalism through a realization of the "supernatural." A loss of control, willingly or not. Dissolution and disintegration.

Brian Evenson deals directly with these sorts of issues in his novels and especially in his short fiction, collected most recently in A Collapse of Horses, published by Coffee House Press as the fourth piece of a "cover puzzle" that also includes re-issues of Father of Lies (1999), The Open Curtain (2006), and Last Days (2009). In these seventeen tales, Evenson shows us his wide range of literary darkness, probing at all those spots that hurt and unsettle us most.

Since the mid 90's and the release of his brilliant debut collection Altmann's Tongue, Evenson's work has been widely acclaimed, celebrated within genre fiction and without, and keeping him from falling into any easily classifiable genre pigeonhole. Yet he has and continues to write some of the most vital, brutal, and unsettling fiction today. For my money, he writes horror, in the truest sense of the word.

In doing so, in writing these horrors, he rarely falls back on the easy crutch of "going supernatural," but instead sets the table with very real forks, knives, spoons, and plates, although arranging them in such a way that you'd swear some outside force was messing with the scene, re-positioning everything in such a way as to hint of a malevolent presence engaged in disorienting us just long enough to take us down.

This strain of dark fiction - let's call it the Evenson Strain - gives volume and heat to one of the central chambers in the beating heart of contemporary literary horror, sprouting a strongly pumping artery that is leading us into this new century, depositing us - we platelets - on strange, unsafe shores. Great beasts (rarely) scuttle from crypts or rise from the ocean in Evenson's stories. His horrors somehow seem extraordinarily real, and waiting for us all, fate willing. We are monsters and are surrounded by monsters that are sometimes less monsters than we.

Which brings us to A Collapse of Horses, an enviable title that perfectly sets the tone for the stories to come, which include the following standouts:

"Black Bark" ushers us into the collection, introducing us to Sugg and Rawley, two men on the run in the old horse American west. Sugg took a bullet in the leg, and is holding out hope for a cabin waiting just around the next bend in the trail. Instead, they settle for a cave, where a "good luck charm" has good missing from a bloody boot, and a story is told in the flickering light of a campfire. The story of black bark, found in the coat pocket of a man who had no idea how it got there. Then, later, another story is told. "'Doesn't matter much one way or the other,' said Sugg. Then he opened his mouth wide and smiled. It was a terrible thing to watch. Rawley began to be very afraid."

"A Report" reminds me of Kafka (which makes sense, considering Kafka's influence on a young Evenson, something I found out well after making this comparison), only better, soaked with the terror of imprisonment without reason, without end, and - possibly the worst part - without explanation. The tricks the mind plays, and the victims becoming the instigators.

"The Punish" explores the enduring power of childhood trespasses, performed in secret, away from adult eyes and rules, and how these actions can shape the rest of a person's life, for good and for ill. This is a tragic tale of never being allowed to forget the past, and the power of karma.

In "Cult," one cannot help but think of religious compounds, which include those founded on LDS teaching, that litter the western hinterlands of the United States. The weakness and indecision of our protagonist in dealing with an ex had me seconds from screaming at the page. Reads like a price of slightly spooky contemporary fiction, wrapped tight in personal lamentation and religious critique. Excellent.

"A Seaside Town" is - simply and crudely put - one of the best pieces of uncanny and weird fiction I've ever encountered. It reads like Ligotti on a Victorian holiday, and makes the mundane into something unsettling, threatening, dangerous. I have no idea why this story scared me so much, why the activities in the courtyard filled me with such disquiet, but they did. All of them. Stories don't frighten me much, but this one did. A masterstroke of the uncanny that left me scratching my head in grateful awe.

"The Dust" is realistic science fiction Noir, with the situation being very relatable to any locality on any planet. An insidious dust is wreaking havoc on a mining operation, quickly becoming the last of the small crews' problems as they deal with depleting oxygen and the death of one of their own. This is a longer work, a murder mystery novelette buried within a survival tale set on some nameless rock floating in the cold, airless reaches of space, and I couldn't stop turning the pages.

"BearHeart (tm)" is as harrowing tale of parenthood cut short, and the copping mechanisms employed by the grieving couple left spinning in the wake. You can see what's coming, but you don't turn away, because you can't.

"Scour" explores the delicate nature of life, the and the long, unending concept of death.
The drudgery of the afterlife. If death came for you, would you recognize it? Would you know that you're dead? Once again, dust and grit play a central role

"Past Reno" might be the second-best story in A Collapse of Horses, as it gins up dread in ways that you never thought possible, including through the unlikely vehicle of a diner bathroom mirror. This is Evenson at his very best, mining his past and those dry, western landscapes he knows so well, and the darker spaces just under the surface, where things hang from the ceiling that he doesn't want to know at all.

With "Any Corpse," Evenson veers into dark fantasy and body horror more associated with Neil Gaiman at his most ghastly, or Clive Barker on any given Sunday. This story shows impressive world-building in a strange, grisly afterlife, weaving a level of strangeness that I found comforting, even inspiring. A surprising tale, and by Evenson's own admission, one of the last two stories he added to the collection at the 11th hour before it went to print. I'm very glad it made it in.

"Click," confusion, injury, loss of memory, power of suggestion, at the mercy of larger forces that probably don't have your best interests, or your freedom, at heart - a theme that runs through this collection like a cold needle through flesh. Our protagonists could be having a bad dream or an hallucination, brought on by what appears to be a mass murder and near-suicide. But one can never know, if one cannot trust one's own brain, or the reality that it builds from the information at hand. Officials hover around a hospital bedside, bent on interrogation, obfuscation. They threaten, but don't actually harm or kill you, which might be worse. The waiting. The not knowing. The unreliability of perception, and what horror that surely lays just beneath this thin layer of what our eyes, our brain, tells us is real.

I could go on, but I feel like that would be doing you a disservice, and more importantly, time's a'wasting. It's now your turn to get down into the dust next to A Collapse of Horses, close your eyes, and see where it is that you wake up, and what your brain now tells you. You might be surprised. No, strike that. You will be surprised.
_________________________________________________________________________

Does this man scare you? This man scares me.

Thank you for joining us at The Cosmicomicon, Brian. I can tell by the number of staff members gathering in the hallway outside the door that we're all excited to have you here. Let's begin...

Creatives are often influenced by and, to some degree, a reflection of what they have seen, heard, read, endured, and consumed. What are some of the primary elements that have shaped you as a writer?

When I was pretty young, maybe 14, my father gave me a book of Kafka’s stories. It was unlike anything I’d read before and kind of blew my mind. But I was also reading SF writers like Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock, and I was watching a lot of horror and thrillers as well—saw Halloween when I was thirteen and it opened up all sorts of doors for me. Later, when I was in high school, I stumbled into a lot of theater of the absurd stuff that Grove Press had published—Beckett, Ionesco. Then later, when I was a Mormon missionary, I managed to talk my companion into going to see David Lynch’s Blue Velvet without either of us having any idea what we were getting into, and again that was so different than anything I’d read. That movie became a kind of touchstone for me—for many years I had much of it memorized.

It took a while, but eventually I somehow just kind of figured that if I could find all of that satisfying, my readers would too, and that those influences should be allowed to talk to one another on the page. Early in my career people would tell me that was a bad idea—one of my first reviews suggested I’d be a good writer once the macabre in me had melted down—but I’ve always been stubborn. Now, it seems to appeal to people.

So, you've seen a change in reader reaction to your fiction from earlier in your career to now?

Probably more a change in critic reaction than in reader reaction. I think when I was first writing there were a lot of critics who saw the line between genre and literature as very firm, as more of a wall than a line. They thought you should stay on one side or the other. I watched some early critics go through acrobatics to avoid mentioning the connections of my work to genre, and other critics criticize it for that connection. Now, it’s much more widely accepted that what many of that generation thought of as a wall is more like a line drawn in the sand, and that in certain places the wind has made it so you can’t even be sure where the line is at all.

It’s funny: in the early 20th century it was really common to publish collections that would have a mix of stories in them, some of them literary, some ghost stories, some detective stories, etc.—the idea being, I guess, that you trusted the skill of the author and her ability to entertain you no matter what sort of story she was telling. But in the second half of the twentieth century there was more of a tendency to divide things out, to publish a book of literary stories or a book of science fiction stories or of a book of horror stories, but not all three. Now it’s swung back the other way somewhat, partly because of how much good publishing is being done by small and intermediate presses that don’t let their aesthetic taste be guided by their publicity and marketing departments, and partly because the people reading now grew up comfortable with the idea that they could watch an art film on Netflix on Monday, then a horror film on Tuesday, then a drama on Thursday. We’re much more comfortable crossing those genre lines as readers.

Novels are considered a much easier sell to publishers and to readers, yet you still consistently work in the short form. What is it about the short story that continues to draw you back?

I think stories are such a rich form, that there’s so much you can do with them. They’re compressed and quick, and as a result every word matters, every word is either helping build something or it’s not doing its job. With novels, there are slack moments, slack passages, places where you have to let the reader rest a little or they’ll be exhausted. In a story, you can keep the tension ratcheted tightly throughout.

Thematically, you run the gamut in A Collapse of Horses, from quiet pieces of literary fiction to science fiction to dark fantasy and grisly horror. Did you aim for genre diversity in this collection, or did it just turn out that way?

It kind of just turned out that way. Originally I wasn’t aiming for it, but after I had maybe 2/3rds of the stories and was trying to decide what to include I found I had stories that touched on a fairly tight set of ideas and themes but that also felt really different on the surface, were playing with different genre elements. So I made a choice to embrace that.

Actually, originally the collection had two other quite different pieces in it which would have made it even more diverse but my editor Chris Fischbach and I decided at the last moment to take them out and save them for a later collection. And then I added in their place “Any Corpse” and “Seaside Town”, both of which were written pretty late. I added them in just before we printed the galleys. “The Blood Drip” was a fairly late addition too, but not as late. It would have been a really different collection without that.

Those last-minute additions are standout stories in your collection. Staying with specifics, with stories like "The Punish," "Cult," "Past Reno," and even to a certain degree "A Collapse of Horses," one gets the impression that many of your stories are intensely personal, reflecting either occurrences in your life or issues for which you hold strong feelings. Is this accurate? If so, do you find writing these stories to be a means of exploration, reader entertainment, or catharsis?

It’s funny, I think the moments in my story that are personal are probably not the ones that seem personal. Those personal details are there, but they’re usually hiding quietly in the story, trying to energize it in some way. So, for “The Punish” the situation is completely constructed, but the architecture of the house is a combination of my best friend’s house growing up (who was very different from that character) and a particular open staircase that was in my grandmother’s house. And the vertigo he feels going up the staircase, yes, that’s something I experienced when I was young.

“Cult” is loosely based on a story a friend of mine told me about going to pick up his ex-girlfriend at a cult. There, it was really just a question of imagining a character not unlike myself into the situation and thinking about how wrong it could go. The journey in “Past Reno” is creepily closely based on a trip we took through Nevada—all the little details of that trip are things I scribbled as notes while driving, just tweaked to be slightly (but only slightly) weirder. But the father in that story is really different from my own father—though not unlike people I grew up around.

With “A Collapse of Horses” it’s a little different: that whole story started with a moment when I was walking through Golden Gate Park with Kristen when we were dating and we came across a paddock that had four or five horses in it, all of them lying down. I’d never seen a horse lying down before, despite growing up in the West, and I wondered if they were sick or, for a fleeting instant, dead. I watched them maybe five seconds before they finally moved. I went away haunted by that, and began to wonder how a more compromised character might take it in.

It seems like the concepts of perception and interpretation pervade A Collapse of Horses, and your earlier work, where things might not appear to be as they truly are, and vice versa. That there can be more to this reality, if we are foolhardy enough to scratch a bit too deeply. If this supposition is true, are you posing these questions consciously, in an effort to express a worldview, or perhaps an observation on existence? Or is it more metaphysical than that?

I think of it first of all pretty literally: perception is pretty problematic, and we seem to have always been insulated from reality in some way or other. I’m interested in thinking about that in two ways, I guess. First, what happens when what we thought of as real or solid suddenly collapses and leaves us in free fall? Second, what happens when we break through one reality into a darker one hiding beneath? So, vertigo on the one hand, terror on the other...

But yes, I think there’s a worldview behind that, that has something to do with the impossibility of ever knowing anything for certain, of ever being in a position in which you can trust reality. I don’t think you ever can. That shouldn’t prevent you from living most of the time like you can, but if you’re attentive and have a certain amount of morbid and dangerous curiosity, I think you notice moments when your perception warps or shifts things, where you have to back up and figure out the world in a new way.

How did the recent release of the four "Cover Puzzle" books by Coffee House Press come about?

The covers were designed by my daughter Sarah, who is a visual artist living in Minneapolis, and who has done a few other book covers for other people. My editor had mentioned wanting to have her do a broadside with the release of the four books and she went in to talk with them about that, and then suddenly she was doing the covers. I was a little taken aback, though also very happy with what she did. I like the cover puzzle—though I know it can be frustrating if you already know the books. Coffee House is doing some more re-releases of mine, and I’m hoping we can continue the puzzle, keep expanding the monster.

You've probably been hounded to death about this, but for any readers who are unfamiliar with your background, how has your upbringing in the Mormon Church affected your worldview, and therefore the stories you write?

I think it had a big effect. I grew up in a culture that had a strange relationship to art. With movies for instance, as a Mormon you weren’t supposed to watch R-rated movies. But a lot of my friends growing up decided that that it was okay to watch R-rated movies if they were rated R for the violence rather than for sex, that it was okay if they were “only violent.” I think with my first book especially I was responding to that, to the way in which violence had been normalized in Mormon culture (and indeed in the culture at large). I was trying to make violence unsettling again.

But there are a lot of other things too. I think there’s a sort of tone to my work that draws on a formal, slightly archaic way of speaking that Mormons can fall back on in worship situations. Because I appropriate that language, I think my work is more unsettling to Mormons than it is to people who are not Mormon. But of course there are other ways of coming at a similar tone—that’s something I respond to in some of your work, for instance, or in some of Matt Bell’s work.

In terms of worldview, I think something about being raised Mormon and having left it has allowed me to examine some pretty dark territory, but I’m not sure why—and obviously if I was watching Blue Velvet when I was a Mormon missionary I’ve long had an odd relation to the culture. I’ve got a weird combination of ideas I’ve inherited from Mormonism and ways in which I’ve broken from Mormonism. I’m not religious at this point—I’ve formally left the Mormon Church (excommunication) and am happy to be outside of it. But it’s never easy to completely shake your upbringing, and I don’t know that I’d want to.

If we could explore your missions work a bit more... While you were working as a Mormon missionary - which, although it might be compulsory, would make you more than just a casual follower of the faith - did you find it difficult to reconcile your perhaps non-Mormon view of reality into your religious life? Meaning, was it hard to be someone who thought as a horror writer while still living as a practicing, and evangelizing, Mormon?

It isn’t actually compulsory and yes, I was a pretty active Mormon for a long time, though I always had a complicated relationship to the religion as you might guess from the Blue Velvet story I mentioned above. I think that my relationship to Mormonism gave the horror I was seeing and watching a certain intensity and resonance that it might not have had otherwise. It felt much more seriously transgressive to me than it might have in another context, and once I started writing it, it felt like I was playing for keeps.

I was actually sent home from my mission in France and Switzerland for having broken too many mission rules, and then was allowed to go out and continue my mission in Wisconsin. Eventually, I chose to leave and not complete it. But then, later, after I was married, I came back to it and served in a Mormon bishopric and so was one of three people overseeing a congregation of several hundred. And yet, even while I was doing that, I was taking classes for my PhD that challenged notions of truth and meaning, a lot of contemporary philosophy. I also took a class on the work of the Marquis de Sade. So I was reading de Sade in French during the week and then running religious meetings on Sunday. It was a very schizophrenic life, and I think I was pretty good at compartmentalizing it, and at moments there was something exhilarating about how far it stretched me. I simply didn’t reconcile it and eventually it stretched too far and broke. Having said that, I’m very content no longer being Mormon and am certain I’ll never go back.

You've recently relocated to California from Providence, Rhode Island. Do you think the change in geography will seep into, or perhaps alter your work written after your move?

I think it will. I hope it does. It’s great in any case to be back in the West. I think about writers like Dennis Etchison and what they’ve managed to do with horror and the very particular landscape of the West and I think it can’t help but seep in. But then again, I’ve never really set a story in Rhode Island, so maybe now that I’m out of New England I can write my New England stories...

You've been writing in horror and dark fiction for a long time, starting professionally with the release of Altmann's Tongue in 1994. Have you seen any recurring themes, movements, or trends in speculative fiction during that time? Is the genre different now than it was then? Weaker? Stronger?

It strikes me as much stronger overall, even though there were giants in the field already established at that time—people like Peter Straub, for instance, or Stephen King or Clive Barker. What I guess strikes me as stronger is the range and variety, and the way in which Weird Fiction has become a strong and varied genre which people give real credence to. There’s just so much going on at the moment, and such great writers—Caitlin Kiernan, Laird Baron, Paul Tremblay, Gemma Files, John Langan, Michael Cisco, Simon Strantzas, Richard Gavin, etc., etc. Even in just that list, there’s such a variety of approaches to horror and dark fiction... So I feel we’re in a period of possibility and expansion, where people are really exploring the limits and possibilities of what the genre can do. That’s healthy, and really great for us as readers, and it shows the genre is still healthy and alive.

Tells us a bit about The Warren, your recent novella published by Tor.

The Warren doesn’t come out until September, but a few galleys are floating around. It’s an SF novel, though different from “The Dust”, the SF novella in the collection. In terms of my work, it’s closest to Immobility and has a similar kind of meditation on identity and memory. It’s about a person who may not be who he thinks he is, may not, in fact, even be a person at all.

Should Trump win the upcoming presidential election, will the dark fiction and horror genres suffer, in that everyone will be facing a horrific reality each and every day, and therefore will need stories written about puppies and bunnies to soothe their tattered souls?

Yes. Even now, as we approach the political conventions, we need stories about puppies and bunnies...

What is left unwritten for you? What is a major goal, in terms of either story or medium, that you'd still like to accomplish?

I have an idea for a long novel and about 75 pages of notes. I’d like to get around to writing that. I’m always interested in new projects as well—I find it very hard to resist something I haven’t done before. For instance, a few years back I got asked if I would write fake subtitles for a Turkish sit-com. “Of course!” I said. I feel like I learn something from doing something outside of my comfort zone, that it’s good as a writer to be shaken out of your complacencies.

What's on tap? What should readers expect next from you?

Besides The Warren, I’m working toward a new and selected stories volume and a collected novellas volume with Coffee House Press, but those will be three or four years down the road...

Thanks so much, Brian. Many thanks for stopping by The Cosmicomion cafe, and we appreciate you leaving our bathroom mirror intact.

You’re welcome! (And are you sure you double-checked the mirror?)
_________________________________________________________________________

Yep, still terrifying

Order A Collapse of Horses here.
Order The Warren here.
Find Brian Evenson online here.

Nomination News: The Nameless Dark - A Collection nominated for 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection

2016-05-02T15:47:00.000-07:00

It gives me great pleasure to announce that The Nameless Dark - A Collection was officially nominated today for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection.

I count this as especially meaningful, as The Shirley Jackson Awards have always focused on those writers that I personally think are among the best working today, consistently nominating and awarding such writers, editors, and other creatives as Brian Evenson, Michael Marshall Smith, Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud, Elizabeth Hand, Joel Lane, Mike Mignola, S.P. Miskowski, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Gemma Files, Ellen Datlow, Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem, Stephen King, Stephen Graham Jones, Livia Llewellyn, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, S. T. Joshi, Steve Berman, Reggie Oliver, Michael Cisco, Kelly Link, Tim Waggoner, Lucius Sheppard, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, Stephen Jones, Jack Ketchum, Ian Rogers, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Nicole Cushing, Ramsey Campbell, Nina Allen, Josh Malerman, Robert Levy, Kate Jonez, Ross E. Lockhart, Michael Kelly, Mark Morris, and others. Those I left out I haven't yet had the opportunity to read, but always use the Shirley Jackson Award nominee list as a browsers guideline.

These are the names I regularly seek out. That these individuals have also been honored by the Shirley Jackson Awards in eight short years, while not necessarily other awards organizations, makes my appreciation all the greater that I am joining these names with my own. To say I'm humbled to be in this august company would be a disgusting understatement, but I'll say it anyway - I am incredibly humbled to be in this august company.

Also important to note, Shirley Jackson is an icon of dark fiction, and a master of the short tale. Ask me on the right day, and I'll tell you that "The Lottery" is the best short story ever written (on the wrong day, I'll tell you that it's Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"). So, receiving a nomination for a prize named after Ms. Jackson is all the more special because of her impact, and what she did to push forward the genres of horror, supernatural, and fantastical fiction.

I don't write for awards, just like I don't write for reviews. But when I receive a positive review, it makes me feel good, knowing that the work connected with a reader. That's the whole point of all of this, at least in my mind. To write fiction that resonates, entertains, possibly transports and builds something new inside the brain of the reader.

So, too, is it with awards. I never expected to receive any accolades for my debut collection, or for any of the stories it contains. But receiving an honor from an organization that I truly, truly respect, based on the people involved and the past nominees and winners, is a wonderful feeling, and provides further evidence that what I am doing - writing dark fiction - is worthwhile, and has meaning to readers and colleagues.

I'd like to take this time to again thank Nathan Ballingrud for the brilliant foreword and the recommendation, and Laird Barron for the double rec to Lethe Press. Both of these guys helped get my work on the right desk. And I'd like to thank Lethe head honcho Steve Berman for taking a chance on a collection of dark stories written by a relative unknown.

Most of all, and it cannot be understated, I want to express my profound appreciation and head over heels, cartoon-eyed love for my extraordinary wife, Ives Hovanessian, for the priceless editorial work she did on these tales, helping to hone down and lean up my writing, as well as providing important plot elements, including the ending of "The Screamer." She quite literally found The Screamer for me after I was searching for it in vain for several years. She also found the collection cover artist (Arnaud de Vallois!) and designed what became the final look of the cover. But even more importantly, she has my eternal gratitude for being the first person in my life who gave me the confidence to be myself, cut my losses (in the form of 50 billion shitty scripts), and truly write what and how I wanted to write, following a calling I first heard in childhood but never answered until decades later. I've said this before in interviews and conversations, but it truly bears repeating that I wouldn't be working in fiction right now if it wasn't for her, and so I wouldn't be here writing this to you, dear reader. So, Ivy jan, this nomination is for you, and a fitting tribute after you first read to me aloud "The Lottery" a half decade ago and blew my mind yet again.

To my fellow nominees for all of the 2015 Shirley Jackson Awards, I wish you a hearty congrats and much luck, as it seems we're all going to need it.

TC Artist Interview: The Shadowed Childhood Eternal - Artist, Author, and Filmmaker Gris Grimly Melds Innocence with Horror, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale into a Signature Dark Homage

2016-04-18T10:30:00.001-07:00

Last October, I was invited to participate in something that I count as very special, as I was asked by Steve Fjeldsted, Director of Library Arts and Culture at the South Pasadena Library, to co-present the animated film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree at the library on October 29th, just a few days before All Hallow's Eve. As a huge Bradbury fan, I was incredibly honored to be involved in a public celebration of this icon's work, especially around Halloween, as no other American writer owns this special date on the calendar more than Mr. Bradbury.

One of the co-presenters was Gris Grimly, a Los Angeles-based artist, filmmaker, and writer who illustrated the most recent edition of The Halloween Tree book, published by Knopf. There was an exhibit of Grimly's work showcased in conjunction with the film screening, and I walked with the other eager eyes and I took in Grimly's work, digging the love of the macabre in combination with the playfulness of youth. The settings and tone made me feel as if I'd known this work, these images, my whole life. This was how I've always felt about Bradbury's fiction. I came to a serious reading of his stories quite late, comparatively, but it settled into me like it has always been there, coloring my imagination and showing me things both familiar and excitingly original. Grimly produces this sort of work, art with a Bradburian warmth and magic, with an undercurrent of something looming that threatens to shatter bucolic pleasantries. A joy amidst the dread, mixed together like a perfect cocktail. He makes everyone feel young and curious and open to wonder again, unafraid of the shadows, invincible against the night. It's a special power, discovering that balanced waltz, but Grimly - like Bradbury - has found the rare rhythm.

Before the end of the event, as we sat behind our respective books and grinned at the crowded room filled with fellow Bradbury acolytes ranging in age from single digits to eight or nine decades, I asked Grimly if he'd like to participate in an interview for The Cosmicomicon, and he generously agreed. This is the result of that interview, echoing back to a perfect pre-Halloween night in South Pasadena. I hope you enjoy the questions, the answers, and Gris Grimly's superlative work.
_________________________________________________________________________

TC - Thank you for sitting down with us across this sturdy virtual table, Gris.

GG - Thank you for having me…cyberly.

For those who might not be familiar, give us a little background and context on what you do, and where interested eyeballs might be able to find your work, in print and on screen.

I spent the most part of my career trudging along a delusional road that weaved vexingly throughout frustration, confusion, and misguidance. I have come out the other side of this tenebrous backwoods, and for the first time, I can answer that question with more confidence and pride than ever before. I am a children’s book illustrator and author. These books can be found wherever fine books are sold.

We won't give away any secrets as to your true identity, and assuming that your father and mother are not Mr. and Mrs. Grimly, where did the name "Gris Grimly" come from?

My first book was about to be released, and I was feeling uncertain about beginning my career under my Christian name. This was for many reasons. Firstly, being of Scandinavian decent, my surname is not phonetic, and therefore it is impossible to pronounce, spell, or remember. Secondly, I had a vision of what kind of illustrator I wanted to be. Edward Gorey was a huge influence on me and I found his name delivered a distinct impression that was fitting to his work. I wanted a name that could represent the tone and content of my work as well as serve as my identity. I started playing with words and once it came to me, there was an immediate resonation.

What is it about the dark, the shadowed, the spooky that attracts you? Why, in the words of Joseph Conrad, do you possess a "fascination with the abomination"?

I’ve been asked this question quite a bit. I was born days away from Halloween. The zodiac predicts that I would be fascinated by the abominable. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest, isolated from cultured society, witnessing the harsh realities of life and death that surrounded me. At a young age, I was horribly burned in a bucket of boiling water, which put me in the hospital for a month. I grew up in a strict-religious environment where I was forbidden to watch horror movies, monsters were discouraged and Halloween was the devil’s day. Regardless, I consumed all of it. But with all these coincidences, I would still have to say, “it just is what it is”. For the same reason why some people are drawn to football.

In a similar vein, I have it on good authority that you grew up in Nebraska, which was also my home from late childhood through my 20's. Does coming from this particular state, or from the Midwest in general, influence your worldview and work in any way? I have my theories on this, but I'd love to hear yours.

I’ve recently noticed how much it has influenced me and I’ve become aware and sensitive to these skeletons that are buried so deep in my subconscious. A painting I did some years ago is called “The thing on the side of the road to nowhere”. This was from a dream I had where I was riding along down a country road, passing a long repetition of corn and fencepost, until the monotony was broken by a disturbing-hulking figure who I pass by. He doesn’t move or look back, and before you know it he is gone. Dreams like this one and other creative sparks have their roots in the vast countryside of Nebraska. I can’t escape them.

Much like Bradbury, you grew up in the Midwest, and feature children in a lot of your work, or more rightly, a childlike perspective on what is most commonly described as horror and dark fantasy/fable. Is this a conscious decision, this more innocent POV on often very dark things, or does it just work out that way when you sit down to create?

This is something I’m trying to figure out. Digging deep inside myself to uncover where this expression comes from naturally, and what is the cause that changes this perspective. In the past few years, my work has become more mature and structured. This isn’t necessarily bad, just different. I’m trying to find why this change occurred and looking for the innocence that came so naturally in my earlier work. Soul searching.

Music seems to play an important part in your life, and most likely your creative process. What sort of music to you enjoy most, and what are some of the bands and artists that provide the best personal soundtrack?

My taste in music is extremely vast and eclectic. If I were to put together a soundtrack for my life, the tracks would play as follow: Early sounds would consist of Christian hymns sung by a somber choir and 70s country like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Loretta Lynn. Country would continue throughout my youth until middle school where popular 80s would permeate, including The Police, Stray Cats, Bruce Springsteen, and Steve Miller Band. Late 80s would introduce a rebellion with songs from The Cure, Bauhaus, The Smiths and the Clash. Soundtracks from Danny Elfman would fill a dimly lit bedroom where I drew endlessly. Nirvana’s Nevermind and Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine were essentials. Marilyn Manson, Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, The Cramps, Rob Zombie, and The Misfits are just some of the bands that would fill the space. In the early 2000s I found interest in bebop jazz, big band and delta blues. This would bring me full circle to now, when I’m listening to a lot of Country, Gospel, folk, bluegrass, blues and roots music.

If you could do one project, in any medium, with an unlimited budge and applicable rights, what would that be?

My current interests are in focusing on children’s and young adult books. I would like to get some of my own stories written and published by top publishers and create illustrated books that will remain classics throughout the test of time. It might not sound exciting for some, but my heart is set on a simpler life, focused on family, road trips and soaking up literature. I want to move out to the country and build a sanctuary where all my dark thoughts can be unleashed as published masterpieces for children and youthful adults to enjoy.

That sounds like a little bit of heaven, right there... Before you head to the country, what advice would you give to fellow visual artists, both new and veteran (and possibly long struggling)? How can they best balance enjoyment of what they do, with a hopeful paycheck for doing what they love?

Know who you are and stay on this path. Your career is not a time for exploration. Experimentation is fine and pushing the boundaries is applauded. But do so only with a clear and confident sense of self.

Tell us a little about your recent deal with Scholastic involving your interpretation of the classic children's song Old MacDonald.

Old MacDonald is the most sincere and pure book I’ve ever worked on. In the past, I would turn down a job like this if it were proposed to me. Almost two years ago, my wife gave birth to our son. This single event has changed my life completely. As soon as he was able to communicate, it was obvious he had an obsession with Old MacDonald and farm life. I am passionately doing this book for him.

What can you tell us about the untitled picture book you also recently sold?

Scholastic purchased Old MacDonald as a two picture book deal. The second book is yet to be decided, but it will also be based on an old folk song.

What else is on the dark horizon, in terms of projects and plans?

I have a few books that are just goodhearted children’s books that I want to see published. I’ve spent the past fifteen years of my career rebelling against the industry and childishly producing material to conflict with their structure. That is not the reason to produce dark works. I want to find grace within the industry, favor among the libraries and publishing houses, and then work with them to bring my own macabre stories to the pubic with their support.

Thanks again, Gris, for stopping by The Cosmicomicon. We wish you enormous success with your many exciting projects.

Thank you for having me.

Review News: The Nameless Dark receives stellar treatment in The Haunted Omnibus

2016-03-18T15:33:00.003-07:00

After writing everything other than fiction for so many years, I still have a hard time processing the fact that people will sit down and devote hours and hours to reading stories I write, then feel moved enough to compose extensive, detailed, thoughtful reviews on these stories, with the primary purpose of helping draw more readership to certain books and authors. It's a wonderful thing.

Writer Jose Cruz did just this, and posted up one of my favorite reviews The Nameless Dark has ever received at his excellent electronic journal devoted to short dark fiction, The Haunted Omnibus, which is what The Cosmicomicon would be if I was a better reviewer, had better focus, and better taste in blog template design.

Its Mission Statement:

The Haunted Omnibus was established to recognize the long tradition and continued perseverance of the short form within the literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and the Weird.

Although websites, journals, and awards dedicated to the field and yearly anthologies of the best in short fiction continue to proliferate, the founders of the Haunted Omnibus felt that there was still a need for a space dedicated solely to the discussion of dark short stories, novelettes, and novellas.

Reviews of anthologies and single-author collections, by their nature, tend to relegate even the exemplary stories to one or two sentences of critical analysis at best, if any mention is warranted at all. The Haunted Omnibus seeks to in part turn this trend around by providing the attention and appreciation that these short works deserve.

Taking its name from the landmark 1937 anthology edited by Alexander Laing, The Haunted Omnibus provides reviews, essays, and just-plain-fun testimonials of the short horror story’s power, history, and relevance. In this spirit, our single-story spotlights strive to include tributes made by multiple contributors and, when possible, short interviews conducted with the authors to detail their creation of the stories.

It is our hope that through our efforts at the Haunted Omnibus, fans and readers will engage more deeply with darkly speculative short fiction and afford it the study that it merits.

Edward Gorey

I'll provide an excerpt of the review here, but please do head over to The Haunted Omnibus and poke around a bit:

"We live in a time of plenty.

In the last decade and change, the rise of small publishing houses and e-reader devices has opened up a doorway through which a veritable smorgasbord of dark fiction has poured forth into the hands of fans who might not have otherwise encountered them. But not even the accessibility or mass proliferation of grim literature can be held entirely accountable for the embarrassment of riches we have today. A similar wave passed during the Great Horror Boom of the 70s and 80s, but the current renaissance we live in now has granted us the gift of quality in addition to quantity.

This commitment to higher literary standards, along with a special devotion to the short story, has led to the releases of dozens of books in the last few years that all bear the craftsman’s seal of approval, a time when even debut collections hum with a vitality and talent that wouldn’t have been dreamt of in those bygone days of spinner rack terrors. With the unleashing of The Nameless Dark, T. E. Grau has cemented himself as an author whose byline should spark in readers a joyful expectancy for what surprises there are to follow.

Having spent his early days grinding away in the Hollywood dream machine, Grau has instilled the stories collected here with a cinematic beat and tenor. Many of them have the feel of miniature epics, stories of great change that course the classical arc and find his cast of rebels and hard-hearts attempting to desperately pick their way through life’s minefield before butting up against the high-powered electric fence of the unforgiving cosmos. Even at their bleakest—and many of the tales end badly for at least one person—Grau’s works satisfy with the rightness of their narratives, the feeling that the scales of the universe have attained their balance once more regardless of the insignificant lives that were overthrown to do so..."

John Picacio

(4/22/16 edit: Please also check out an author interview published today at The Haunted Omnibus here)

TC Review & Interview: Definitely Monsters - Ray Cluley wows with debut collection of short fiction, PROBABLY MONSTERS

2016-02-22T16:22:00.001-08:00

When I found out that Probably Monsters was Ray Cluley's first collection of short fiction, I was frankly a bit shocked. With the amount of times I'd seen his name included in anthologies, high end dark fiction journals, award lists (he won a British Fantasy Award in 2013 for Best Short Story and has garnered other accolades and honors), and year-end Best Ofs, I figured he had several dozen stories penned and a few collections under his belt.

But no, and so much the better, because Cluley has allowed himself time to write, ruminate upon, then cull the best work from his oeuvre, which plays to the benefit of us his readers, as he presents twenty brilliantly crafted stories that range vastly in setting, tone, subgenre, and even genre itself. Paul Tremblay recently wrote in an interview he conducted with Peter Straub for the Los Angeles Review of Books that Straub is now entering his fifth decade of "blurring genre and literary fiction." Blurring. I like that. Cluley does this, as well. I'm sure many of the great dark fiction and horror writers, or at least the ones I most admire and enjoy, do that these days.

Clulely writes British, and he writes American, and he writes as if he's a native of nowhere and everywhere at the same time. He's deft with his language, balanced, showing enough poetry to woo you while never slathering on so much cologne that you're running for the exit once you move in close. His is a strong, confident, beautiful voice, enhancing the telling while never getting in the way of the interesting plotting and characters, pulling up all the sadness and horror and guts of this world and others beyond it and laying it out for us to ponder. In short, it's the ideal voice of contemporary literature. That he happens to also write about monsters of every species is just the cherry on top. I prefer my literature topped with monsters, don't you?

Probably Monsters roars from the gates with a snarl, as the opening story "All Change" is a powerhouse start to the collection, and fitting, as it features a smorgasbord of creative and horrific beasties. You can see Cluley's mind running wild a bit, having fun creating creatures of all shapes, sizes, and textures. The boy playing monsters. I loved the big H Horror of this story, and how it shifts the mind into a particular setting for what is assumed to come.

This mindset is immediately challenged by "I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing," which is more of a quiet literary piece, taking place in Nicaragua and centering around the dangers of the free diving lobster industry, shadowed by native superstition. An excellent, interesting, melancholy story that could appear in any fine fiction journal anywhere in the world. Hemingway could have written this story if he had a bit more heart and stylistic art, or Hunter Thompson, if he remained sober long enough.

"The Festering" inspired the cover to the collection, and is a dark piece of new weird fantasy. I'm not even sure I know what "new weird" is, but it somehow seems to fit this tale of a teenager girl who whispers all of her secrets into her bedroom desk, while dealing with a desperately lonely mother and the inappropriate attention from the neighbor down the hall. This is one of my favorite stories in Probably Monsters, and is a perfect example of balancing the real with the surreal in one story, offering up brutal truth and the fantastical without sacrificing the impact of either.

"At Night, When the Demons Come" reads like the opening to a gritty, bleak-as-shit horror novel, or even a big Hollywood film. More mainstream and genre-heavy than his other tales to this point, the story is set in a post-apocalyptic world reminiscent of McCarthy's The Road, albeit a version of the story menaced by a plague of winged succubae instead of your garden variety hungry hungry humans.

"Night Fishing" was the first story I read by Cluley back in the pages of the tragically departed Shadows & Tall Trees. After reading this tale of a man tasked with fishing the bodies of Golden Gate Bridge suicide victims from the San Francisco Bay on the overnight shift, I was immediately hooked. "Night Fishing" has the feel of an instant classic, like the sort of story you're taught in university English classes, when the themes get more challenging, and the tone more bleak. Another one of my favorites in this collection.

"The Death Drive of Rita, nee Carina" is another punishing story full of sadness and horror, dealing with the survivors of cars accidents and how one deals with personal survival and the loss of loved ones; while Cluley returns to that new weird territory with "Bloodcloth," which is a dark bit of near future fantasy that puts one in the mind of China Mieville or Michael Swanwick.

"Pins and Needles" is piece of dark literature that explores broken people, and how they act out. I'm not real wild about the ending, but the main character is so fascinating, not to mention his relationship with a woman he meets on the bus, that this story stands out as a highlight of Probably Monsters.

The next three pieces stand as an exceptional trio that can survive in a supernatural vacuum, embodying the best of what true horror fiction is about while also able to draw breath in the real world. "Gator Moon" takes us to the American south, and again - much like in "I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing" - plays with local folklore while addressing deep seated issues of race, inequality, recompense, and revenge. "Where the Salmon Run" is another favorite of mine, full of melody and sadness and regret, set amid a backdrop of the brutal, raw boned beauty of Kamchatka's salmon streams in eastern Russia. "Indian Giver" brings us back to the New World (where Cluley also sets "No More West"), and explores the clumsy horrors unleashed upon the native people of the Americas, and some that are unleashed in return. This story was selected for Ellen Datlow's upcoming Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8, marking Cluley's third time appearing in this renowned series ("Bones of Crow" appeared in Volume 6, and "At Night, When the Demons Come" was chosen for Volume 3).

And these are just the standouts, the real humdingers amongst twenty quality tales. A few didn't quite make it for me, but even in the ones that missed the mark, you can see the creativity, the freshness. The natural ability seasoned by the work put in. Each one deserves a close reading, much contemplation, and an enormous amount of respect.

Ray Cluley's Probably Monsters is an important collection of contemporary horror fiction. It's a deep, complex, coffee-black book with bite and heat and fragrance and several punches to the temple, and pushpins to the soul. This is true front of table stuff, and comes highly, highly recommended.
________________________________________________________________________

TC: Your stories are definitely horror and supernatural (and several other dark and brutal adjectives), but in this era of maddeningly applied labels, the wider world of letters could certainly brand many of the stories in Probably Monsters as "literary fiction," such as "I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing," "Gator Moon," "Where the Salmon Run," and even "Pins and Needles." What are your thoughts about "genre fiction" and "literary fiction," and where do you think you fit in these comfy boxes (if anywhere)?

RC: I don’t mind labels all that much, they can be useful things, perhaps most of all for letting bookshops know where to put a writer’s work to attract customers. There are problems, though. It’s unlikely you’ll find a book on two shelves, for example, even when it fits both categories, and that’s where it begins to bother me - when labels come to define a text as a whole. With ebooks it’s not so bad as you can tag several labels to it (at least, I think so, and if not why not?) which is useful because labels on their own do come heavily loaded with assumptions and stereotypes. And there can be a kind of snobbery I don’t like, the idea that not only can a label can provide a neat little box but that one box is somehow better than another. By all means prefer something, but don’t (mis)judge the quality of something else based on that preference.

Horror suffers for this a great deal, I think, and in part a lot of that is probably due to terrible horror films rather than written fiction. People hear “horror” but they see bloody violence and/or hideous (often laughable) monsters. I must admit, I rather like these films but I don’t tend to read this kind of horror. It’s out there, and some of it is well written, it’s just not for me. Unfortunately, others who feel similarly then lump all horror together and don’t try anything else in the genre. And of all the genres, it’s actually the one least likely to be easily contained by the restrictions of a label - that’s often the point! Society is able to exist and function because of labels and rules and regulations, expectations, all of that, but horror is a genre that purposefully deconstructs this, or parts of it at least. That’s often where the horror is, the disruption of the norm. Horror delights in taking away the safety net, waving it at your face to show you it’s gone, then discarding it while you try to stay balanced on a very thin mental tightrope. Then, if it’s really good horror fiction, it shakes the rope, too.

The people that dismiss horror simply don’t understand it properly, if you ask me (which you have). They don’t recognise its strengths or see its possibilities.

Literary fiction suffers just as much for misconception, I think. It’s easy to dismiss it as the kind of fiction that deals with “real life”, that turns something mundane or commonplace into art. Again, it’s the snobbery that bothers me, thinking literary fiction is more important because it does this kind of thing. Because it addresses current affairs, politics, relatable personal traumas and dramas.

However, horror does all of this, too.

It’s also a misconception to think that literary fiction always provides strong, admirable prose. A lot of it does, but not all of it. Similarly, don’t go dismissing horror for lacking this quality because it doesn’t. I love (some) literary fiction. I love (some) horror. I’d really love to think I’m doing both with my writing, but even that suggests falling for the label trap, ‘I write horror stories but in a literary way’ is just as bad as those literary writers who tell you they don’t write genre stuff when they do.

Personally, I tend to think of ‘literary’ as writing that does more on the page then you may at first think. Writing that in fact offers a non-literal reading as well through the use of figurative language, symbols, silences. In this sense it’s more technique than genre, an approach rather than a category.

We're quite sure you had your choice of publishers for Probably Monsters. How did you get hooked up with Chizine?

Probably Monsters was a long time getting to people. It was set to be published back in 2011/12, with a limited run of 13 lovely deluxe copies, 100 hardbacks, and then trade paperbacks and ebooks, all of that, and all very exciting. Then there was a restructure within that publishing company and the submission process had to begin again. It was still with several other publishers too, thankfully, as I didn’t want to pull it from consideration until contracts had been signed, and one of those was ChiZine.

Ray & Hardware

Michael Kelly of Undertow was very helpful in bringing Probably Monsters to their attention (he wasn’t publishing collections at that time, just the marvelous Shadows & Tall Trees). He set up introductions for me and championed the book and I’ll always be very grateful to him for that. At World Fantasy 2013 he introduced me in person to Sandra and Brett and I was lucky enough to win the British Fantasy Award at that same event and very quickly after that received my acceptance email. I was thrilled, not only because they produce gorgeous books but because they’ve published many of my favourite writers, such as Robert Shearman, Gemma Files, and Helen Marshall. I still have quite a wish list of ChiZine books I want to buy and it keeps getting bigger, so I’m very happy to be in such company.

Many of these stories, while fully fantastical, also seem intensely personal. How much of yourself did you put into Probably Monsters? Do you find it difficult to write about circumstances that are close to you, no matter how well they are disguised in a story?

I find it difficult to write personal stuff into my fiction, and I rarely do it on purpose, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen anyway. There are plenty who will say that all writing is autobiographical, and I suppose there’s an element of truth in that, to some degree, but I’ve always been reluctant to set myself down on paper in any obvious or intentional way. ‘Night Fishing’ is one exception, but only regarding the theme. I do write about my own fears and anxieties, the emotional issues I find troubling, only I address them through others. As with ‘A Mother’s Blood’. There’s some of me in ‘I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing’ though, and ‘Shark! Shark!’ is closest to my actual voice, probably, but otherwise my stories are definitely filters rather than mirrors.

It’s something I would like to change, though. I have a lot of admiration for the work of Steven Dines, he writes stories of beautiful intimacy where the heart pumps the words to the page, and if those aren’t personal then he does a wonderful job of making it seem so. I’d like to try to do the same because stories like that really resonate with me. There’s a kind of emotional echo to them that makes the story feel like it’s greater than the sum of its parts, there’s none of that disconnect between the reader and character you sometimes get that makes it seem like you’re just watching things happen via printed words, rather than feeling them, too. I’m not saying you can only get this by writing something personal, just that there’s a lot to learn from the process. I always feel like there’s a lot to learn from other writers. If I ever stop thinking that then please kill me as it’ll mean I’ve become an arrogant asshole.

"All Change" seems like a great way to start out your collection, considering the title of the book, and the content of the story. Was this an intentional move?

Yeah, that one had to go first. I had my doubts because it’s pretty full-on as to the number of traditional monsters it contains, or the attributes of them, but it was also an acknowledgement of the genre. ‘All Change’ is my love letter to horror (and to Ray Bradbury in particular) so it had to go up front. It also acknowledges horror fans with a few references they’ll recognise (Carcosa, Innsmouth, Endsville, old hoss) which hopefully helps form a relationship with the reader right from the start.

That said, it was also a way of saying, here are the monsters you’re used to, but from here on in I’m going to do things a little differently. Bit pompous, really, thinking about it now. Like I’m trying to claim originality or establish a place in some New Wave. It wasn’t meant to seem that way, more a sort of enthusiastic rubbing together of the hands while exclaiming, “right, my turn…”

I also like the idea of ‘change’ in general when it comes to horror fiction, especially when it’s change for the worse, and especially when it’s a person who changes. In that respect, ‘all change’ sounds mildly like a threat or at least an unpleasant promise. Which isn’t a bad way to begin a horror collection.

A sense of loss permeates this collection, and those who want to perhaps take from others what they have themselves lost. In my review above, I mention a visceral sense of sadness in these stories, which is something you don't hear much about when discussing horror fiction. First of all, do you think this makes sense in terms of how you view your own fiction? And secondly, do you think sadness is a worthy topic of discussion in horror fiction?

Yeah, absolutely, there’s definitely a sense of loss and sadness to many of my stories. In fact, looking at Probably Monsters, I think every single story in there is about loss. My partner still doesn’t think I write horror, really (those bloody labels again, huh?) but that I write sad stories that are usually a bit weird. There’s some truth to that, I think. But loss is one of the most horrible concepts imaginable, and it belongs firmly in the horror genre. The threat of loss can drive entire novels - loss of life, of a loved one, civilization as we know it, sanity, take your pick – or it can permeate in more subtle ways. With only a few exceptions, such as losing your virginity (but come on, that’s scary too, right?) loss is usually associated with something negative. It suggests the absence of something once treasured, or a missed opportunity. And the idea that something once valued is now gone takes us back to the concept of change discussed in the last question. Change is scary, and change for the worse, which is what loss suggests (at least at first) even more so. Loss is a blue-grey word that darkens to black the longer you think about it, and in that black is where you’ll find the sadness.

There are several stories set in the American west, and the American south (in addition to a half dozen other far flung locales). Do you find creative inspiration in these geographic - and cultural - settings? Did these stories grow out of these regions, or did the regions take shape within the story?

Yeah, I’ve always felt drawn to other places, America in particular. Part of that is undoubtedly because I never feel quite at home where I am, not yet, but mostly it’s because the world’s a huge place and I want to experience as much of it as possible, even if it is only through research. America, though, has always been a big one for me. I think because I read a lot of American fiction growing up and it became the way I experienced the world. I’ve possibly, probably, been sold a lie that way, but it doesn’t matter, it’s too late, the damage is done.

One editor said of my early work that I had a strange transatlantic voice that was like some blurring of British and American. It was tricky to fix, and it’s a shame, in a way, that I even tried to fix it at all. Some people get quite upset over here about Americanisms finding their way into the English language, but the English language has always been like that, stealing from other ones. And American English is actually just English that went a different route, so it’s not even stealing really, more a taking it back after you’ve played with it for a while. But I’m digressing now, so sorry old chap, tickety boo and splendid.

The England that Cluley hates so much

Britain has a lot to offer horror fiction when it comes to landscape and history, of course, and I really really like the sort of folk-horror we have, but I also like the far ranging scope of the American landscape, from mountains to canyons, arctic conditions to deserts, vast open spaces and then the claustrophobic sprawl of the cities. There’s such a variety that it seems silly to turn my back on all that to write only about my own country. I hope that doesn’t sound anti-British, just as I hope I don’t seem an impostor when I write about American places and cultures. I’m always sure to do a lot of research first. I’m a firm believer in know what you write rather than write what you know, and I have a pretty low tolerance for people who believe otherwise. Write what I know? That’ll be British white male working class stuff then. All the time. And pardon me, but fuck that.

From another point of view, and to be rather blunt, there seems to be a lot more to be scared of in America. From something as simple as some of the wildlife you have or the extremes of weather, to something more complex and human like issues of gun control and a buried nuclear arsenal that could turn the planet into a new asteroid belt. I once read a description, quite unkind, that compared America to a baby with a hand grenade. That’s a pretty volatile metaphor to try to unpick, but as an image, for a horror writer, it’s pretty useful.

The baby pulled the pin

Mostly, though, what draws me is the variety of landscapes and people. With only a few exceptions, my stories grow out of those things.

You reference many authors throughout the collection in various ways. Which writers do you count as serious influences, and which ones did you set up as the rabbit in the dog race? Which revered writers do you not connect with as a reader?

Oh, so many inspirations. Usually I skim over them when asked as there are a lot of the same old names you’ll see from other writers but for once I think I’ll go into a bit more detail.

There are a few who inspired me to want to write. The three most responsible were Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and H. P. Lovecraft. King I stumbled across in my school library. It was The Shining, and it opened my eyes wide to what could be done with a book. I was already a keen reader, but this was disturbing stuff and serious and grown up and though I obviously missed a lot of the meaning and significance at that age I could still tell there was something else going on under the story, something important. And how great to realize that books don’t have age certificates on them (give it time…) So I devoured King, and he mentioned Bradbury, and Bradbury was another one of those who said look, come on, look at what words can do. Here were stories that were wildly diverse and deceptively simple and did so much in such a little amount of time. Plus the absolute joy of storytelling is clear in every single one of Bradbury’s stories. I personally can’t read one without coming away wanting to write something myself, and he’s quite possibly my favourite short story writer for that reason: his imagination and skill and enthusiasm inspires me every time. As for Lovecraft, I came to him in a roundabout way via roleplay gaming, actually. I’m not overly fond of the writing style, but the ideas were huge and terrifying and sometimes even a bit silly yet treated with utmost seriousness. Lovecraft showed me a whole load of new things to be frightened of and opened the gates, so to speak, to a terrifying nihilism.

As for who inspired more directly to actually consider writing professionally, that was Michael Marshal Smith. I’d loved his novel One of Us and I followed that with his collection What You Make It and that was when I thought, yes, this is not only what I want to do but what I’m going to actually try to do. I committed to turning my writing hobby into something far more serious having seen how one of the best did it. I wasn’t tricked into thinking it was easy – great writers only make it seem that way – but I had a standard to strive for.

Bad writers inspired me a lot too, around this time. I won’t name names because one man’s junk is another man’s treasure (and writer-bashing just seems unfairly nasty) but there were a couple I read whose work was mediocre and somewhat formulaic and I thought, man, if this guy is getting published I can totally do the same…

As for the rabbits I’ll forever be chasing, those are people like Annie Proux, Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, Angela Carter, writers at the top of the food chain. F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the first novel I read that I thought was as near to perfect as a book can be. I felt the same for Close Range, The Road, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Bloody Chamber.

There are a few writers whose reputations confuse me, who receive praise bordering on reverence but only leave scratching my head thinking, really? Again, each to their own. And there are some where I get it, I see the appeal and the skill, but they just don’t do it for me personally. James Ellroy, for example, leaves me cold. I can admire the writing (sometimes) but there’s no emotional heart in it for me personally. To be fair I’ve only read two, LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, but one was a first go and the next a second chance and after that, sorry, there are too many other writers to try.

Do you see a difference in the approach to horror by British writers and readers compared to those in North America?

I don’t tend to think of the writer much other than to note whether they’re any good. No doubt some aspect of national identity plays a part in how they define themselves, and then maybe some of that gets into the writing, but there’s so much other stuff in the mix that it just seems a bit daft, to me anyway, to try to determine what is British and what is American. I dare say if you take a wide enough sample of British and American writing you’ll see certain similarities and differences, but again you’d need to consider other things as well, like when it was written, and the fact that countries hold a great diverse mix of people, so race and culture too.

Personally, I feel that thanks to the media, to the internet, to combinations of the two, thanks to the ease with which we can travel, boundaries are become less distinct anyway (but hey, I’m that guy with the weird transatlantic voice so what do I know?). And this doesn’t just apply to boundaries of place but also other aspects of identity, like gender and sexuality. What I find incredibly encouraging these days is the recognition that a lot of what we used to use as definitions are in fact more fluid than was first thought, that there are fewer distinct ‘this’ or ‘that’ categories but rather a continuum to which they belong.

In terms of style, medium, genre, size, what haven't you written yet that you're absolutely dying to try?

Well I’ve turned one of my stories into a graphic novel ‘script’ that I’d love to see done. It’s ‘At Night, When the Demons Come’ which appeared in Black Static. Ellen Datlow reprinted it in The Best Horror of the Year and has just announced it’ll be in Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror as well. It’s had a couple of artists interested in the past (who provided some wonderful sample panels and character mock-ups) but it’s a lot of work to do on spec (for them – my bit’s done) so understandably it fell by the wayside. Maybe if I secure a publisher first it’ll happen.

I’d love to write for a computer game. I think that would be a great challenge and a lot of fun. I like the idea of multiple plot strands and different possibilities regarding structures and resolutions, depending on the player.

I also like the idea of trying to write something set in an existing world, tie-in novels for a favourite television series or additions to a favourite film franchise. Again, it’s all about the challenge and wanting to try new things, though in this case it would also be for the chance to pay homage to something I love.

If you could give one bit of advice to horror fiction as a monolithic entity, that would be followed to the letter by each and every individual working in the genre, what would it be?

Do it with passion. If you don’t, it’ll show. In the quality of the writing, in the uninspired themes, the unoriginal ideas, the heavy-handed ‘message’. It’s advice I’d have liked early on – I’ve churned out stuff I knew was substandard simply because I didn’t rate the venue it would appear in or because the payment (or lack thereof) barely justified the effort. That’s terrible, and I’m ashamed to admit it. Now I simply don’t submit anything if that’s the case - better that, than write something I can’t be proud of entirely.

What would you like to say about horror fiction to those who either haven't come across it in a while, or never bothered to take a look in the first place?

Try it. It might not be (and likely isn’t) quite what you expect.

What are you working on at the moment, and what can readers expect in the near term?

Something new that I’m doing and enjoying right now is putting together a resource pack for GCSE English students (high school English?) which is all about how to write for different audiences and purposes, only each one is built around the idea of a zombie apocalypse. So they write a newspaper article, a short story, a speech, things like that, all linked to a bigger connective plot. I’d have loved doing that when I was at school. Hell, I’m loving it now.

I’m always working on a few things at once, though. At the moment I’m also finishing up a few new stories, a couple for anthologies and some just for me as I’m hoping to get another collection together this year. I’m also writing a short ‘mosaic’ novel of four interconnected stories (sort of) based around Marilyn Monroe (sort of). If that sounds a bit confusing it’s because it is. I owe someone a novella, too, so of course I’ve started three.

Thanks so much for spending some time at The Cosmicomicon. We're big fans, and wish you much continued success and prosperity heading into 2016.

Thank you very much – it’s been my pleasure.

TC Review & Interview: Paul Tremblay turns the possession story inside out with A Head Full of Ghosts, one of the hit horror novels of 2015

2016-02-03T15:40:00.001-08:00

I'd imagine it takes a lot to scare Stephen King. Not that horror writers are fearless. Far from it. I've found them to be - and they've told me that they are - some of the biggest scaredy cats on the planet. People often obsess over what bothers them, and horror writers are no different. But all that aside, and going on Mr. King's own words ("I'm pretty hard to scare") when Stephen King, the unrivaled sitting Monarch and Standard Bearer of Horror and someone who deals with spooks and frights on a second by second basis, declares in a Tweet that a book "scared the living hell" out of him, it's a really big deal. Like, a huge friggin' deal.

The book Mr. King was talking about - as you may have guessed by now, courtesy of the title of this piece and the huge cover image above - is A Head Full of Ghosts, written by Paul Tremblay, long a well-regarded and highly respected writer of horror, crime, and the bizarre, who broke into the big leagues with his latest novel, and threatens to rise even higher with his forthcoming book (Disappearance at Devil's Rock).

By all markers that count, A Head Full of Ghosts is a full-on critical darling and commercial hit, a Platinum Record in the horror genre that will live on in coming years on bookshelves, and - dark gods willing - on the silver screen. Like every writer, every book longs to be immortal, and A Head Full of Ghosts has already achieved immortality as an important work of contemporary horror fiction in the most unassuming way possible - by being fresh and well written, without resorting to cheap tricks and bugling. This is the solid stuff of horror, not the sordid stuff. This is shoulder blade material, on which others will gain strength, and someday perhaps stand to cast their view to new dark horizons. Freshly minted foundation literature of a genre that needs new bedrock bricks as the older ones show their age.

In A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay shows his admiration for horror fiction, and even his warm affection for it. But he also shows that he's not slavish in his regard. He treats it with the respect that it has earned, not handling it with kid gloves, nor treating it like a special needs genre that will stumble more than it achieves. He expects a lot, and he gets it. Must be the teacher in him. The father. The expert horror writer.

He also shows his love of pop culture, skewering it whilst having fun with the whole concept of instant media covering instant media. Blogs that now serve as our glowing newspaper replacements. Personalities with opinions rather than grizzled reporters. Reality shows becoming our own personal reality, in an age where it seems that everyone will star in their own show at least once in their life. In this case, exposing a strange and growing mystery that might be a demonic possession to the heated gazes of camera lens and insatiable television viewer more out of necessity than narcissism, which makes it all the more tragic when things start to go South. And boy do they ever...

In short, A Head Full of Ghosts is a post-irony exploration of the horror genre, social media, reality television voyeurism, and the inner workings of a seemingly normal, working class family that has fallen on hard times and harbors secrets from each other, and the world. Simple right? Tremblay makes it appear so, as he's just that deft of a writer.

But Tremblay is sly about it. He doesn't show his cards, nor shake his tail feathers. He's modest about what he has, what he's doing, giving a knowing grin rather than jumping up on the table and shouting about it. This is quiet, confident, seamless writing that allows the reader to corkscrew down into a story and remain there until the bitter, bitter end.

This is clear from the rather straight-forward set-up of the novel, which begins with a young woman, Merry Barrett, recounting the horrifying events of her childhood to an author interested in writing a tell-all expose about the supposed possession, and exorcism, of Merry's older sister Marjorie, an experience which was filmed by a camera crew and made into a reality television series titled "The Possession."

But through these flashbacks told from Merry's POV, juxtaposed with a episodic breakdown provided by snarky horror blogger Karen Brissette, the reasons behind the exorcism, and the invitation to the intrusive camera crew into the lives of the Barrett family, become more murky, and more difficult to either cheer on or discount, as each undertaking has the power of logic and reasonable desperation behind them. Even the smallest details and potential pitfalls are worked out ahead of time by Tremblay, making the supernatural or possibly unbelievable easily authentic, and layering each character and their motivations. Narrative is bent, and narrators are biased according to their own unique universes, often rendering unreliable what we assumed as fact.

What all of this melds into is a fascinating examination of personal motivation, selfishness, vanity, and the erosion of mental stability, layered within a classic horror story. A Head Full of Ghosts is all of these things, as well as a commentary on the supernatural, religion, the power of myth, and the sometimes watery nature of truth. And it's a hell of a thrill ride, with a gut punch ending. Just ask Stephen King. Poor fella hasn't slept right in months.
________________________________________________________________________

TC: From where did the initial germ of A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel originate? Did its general plot and themes surprise you, or was it planned to deal with these elements all along?

PT: In February of 2013, I was spinning my tires, 100 pages into a novel that satirized the state of publishing through a boy obsessed with ending the world. The writing was very slow going but I was reading anything and everything I could get my hands on that might be related to apocalypse and end-of-world scenarios. I stumbled up a book of essays on the film The Exorcist. Bad Religion’s song “My Head Is Full of Ghosts” was ringing in my head too. It occurred to me then that there had been recent and successful literary updates of the zombie, vampire, and werewolf, but not many possession novels, even though Hollywood has continued to pump out the PG-13 exorcist-light fare.

I keep all these little notebooks around (and too often misplace) to jot down ideas, characters, and the like. I wrote “Horror Novel” at the top of page one in a notebook I hadn’t used yet. I imagined a family in dire financial trouble dealing with a maybe-possessed child, and that clicked with me. Soon after I had my two sisters, Merry and Marjorie and I knew the story would be ambiguous in its treatment of the supernatural (is she or is she not possessed?). I got lucky and the rest of the themes and structure were in place quickly too. I didn’t write a summary or outline, but before writing word one of the novel, I knew there would be an author interviewing Merry, a reality TV show, and a blog commenting on the action, and I knew what I wanted to happen to the family in end. All I had to figure out was how the me and the Langans Barretts would get there.

(In my first draft, the Barretts were the family Langan, with John and Sarah as parents. I changed the last name at the end figuring that would’ve been too much winky wink. And I was right.)

The reaction to the novel has been incredibly positive, and a joy to watch, for many reasons. Did you know at the time of either the start of the book or the finish that you had a legitimate hit on your hands?

Thank you, Ted.

I felt really good about the novel at the start. I mean, really good. No Sleep Till Wonderland had come out three years prior in 2010, and the sting of its lack of success and lack of publisher support (by lack, I mean less than goddamn nothing) for the book really shook my confidence as a writer. I didn’t feel good about myself, my writing, and was second guessing everything I did. But when I had the idea for AHFoG, I felt energized again and I knew as long as I didn’t get in my own way and muck it all up, I’d have a good novel.

That’s not to say I never doubted myself. Doesn’t matter if I’m writing a novel, short story, or an essay, there’s always a moment where I think the work is going terribly and the do-I-quit-or-keep-going? doubt/questions arise. For novels, it tends to happen around page 100. Also, my agent, after reading those first 100 pages of AHFoG was initially skeptical of the book’s POV and structure, which kind of threw me for a loop. But after a few days of self pity, I said screw it and forged on because I really believed in what I had and what it would be. To my agent’s credit, once he read the full final draft he said he was wrong and loved the book. It’s always okay to admit when you’re wrong, kids.

I had no idea if it would be a hit or even if it would sell (especially given my previous sales track record), but I believed in it. I really liked this book. Loved it, even. It was something that I would want to read. Ultimately, that’s my measuring stick. I can’t forecast the market well enough to make predictions about sales and the like; therein lies madness. The book was as close to being what I’d hoped it would be when I started, so I was pleased, and nervously excited about its possibilities.

What do you and Stephen King talk about when you take walks together?

There’s no talking allowed. He’s trying to teach me to communicate via telepathy. I worry though. Our walks are getting longer and longer.

With you being the father of a tween girl, was it difficult writing the more graphic scenes of possession involving Marjorie?

When I wrote the novel, my daughter was essentially Merry’s age (8 going on 9). I had her (and my son) as models for Merry. For Marjorie, I extrapolated, and I’ve been teaching teens for longer than I care to admit. My hope is that when my daughter is old enough to read it, she’ll identify and empathize with both sisters. I hope that people view Marjorie not as a monster/devil/demon, but as a compelling and sad character. I feel terrible for Marjorie. Whatever is happening to her is not her fault, and the adults attempting to intervene make it all worse.

In general, I find it’s always difficult to write graphic scenes because I want them to have an impact beyond the ick factor. That’s not easy to do, or do well. Hopefully those scenes work. Throughout the novel, I operated under the idea or mantra that the actions of the family members, of what they do to themselves and to each other would be described realistically and in great detail, and those scenes, the ones less likely to be supernaturally enhanced (shall we say), would be the most disturbing scenes in the novel.

Utilizing such zeitgeisty elements as reality television, blogs, and a bankrupt blue collar job market, what do you want to say with A Head Full of Ghosts? (if anything other than just wanting to tell a gripping tale)

I wanted to SAY ALL THE THINGS!!!! If I’m being obnoxious (which, let’s be honest, is most of the time), I describe the book as a secular, postmodern, feminist exorcism novel. The opportunity was there within the story for all sorts of commentary: how girls/women are often portrayed in possession stories, commentary on organized religion and its treatment of women, media and the information age and their cumulative effect on us, the disappearing blue collar class etc. Hopefully all of it becomes this monstrous mass crushing the Barretts, making everything worse, and the horror of the novel is witnessing what happens to them under all that if not familiar then frighteningly plausible pressure.

Any news on the cinematic front? Are you involved in the adaptation of the novel to a screenplay?

There are two screenwriters (Benjamin Davis Colllins and Luke Piotrowski) working the adaptation as we speak. I am not officially or contractually involved, but they’ve been great about keeping me in the loop and answering questions about the development process. Ben and Luke and the producers all are very excited and hopeful about the project. Go team!

In your forthcoming novel, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, you again center on the lives and consequences of teenagers, and the danger they can attract. What about that age group interests you as a writer of dark or horror fiction?

Who among us can’t remember how exciting, mystifying, and terrifying it was to be kid/teenager? Being that age is one of the few transformative, universal experiences we all share.

I think writing young characters is a strength of mine because I still feel like a confused teen most of the time. I’ve been a teacher most of my adult life and I have two kids of my own so I’ve either been a kid or been around kids, and I almost always have my summers off.

Unreliable narrators or confessions play a role in both books, as well. Is this a literary construct that you enjoy using and intentionally employed, or has it been intrinsically essential to both stories?

AHFoG had to be first person. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise. We needed to have Merry’s story be ambiguous because it was ambiguous for her. It had been changed and filtered by time, by media, by what other people told her, and by her own faulty memory. Plus, first person narrators are inherently unreliable. It’s a biased POV, and any first person account, if done well, takes advantage of that. I love me first person, yes I do.

DaDR is a third person limited novel with a little first person sprinkled in here and there. Instead of the unreliable narrator, we have a whole cast of unreliable characters. It’s about your friends and loved ones being unreliable. How can you possibly know what they’re thinking, what kind of decisions they will make, are they telling the truth, do they know if they’re telling the truth?

With A Head Full of Ghosts making such waves, has there been any early cross-media activity with Disappearance at Devil's Rock in terms of film or television?

No, nothing yet. It's still early. I only just sent the book to my film agent a few days ago. So, we'll see.

My son is planning on helping me film a little book trailer for DaDR, though. I think it’ll be good. Or unintentionally funny. Which would still be good.

How has working with major publishers differed from working primarily in small press? In your experience, how is horror fiction viewed in the larger publishing world, outside of closely knit genre fiction circles?

My first experience with major publishers wasn’t so hot. I had two wonderful editors for the Mark Genevich books, both of whom helped those books be the best books they could be from an editing standpoint, and I’m eternally grateful to them for that. But, without getting into too much woe-is-me detail, the support of the publisher overall just wasn’t there, particularly with the second book.

Working with Jennifer Brehl and William Morrow has been an absolute dream come true. Jen is an amazingly intelligent, insightful, and creative editor, one who always asks me the right questions with answers that have lead to the two best books I’ve written. The publicity and marketing team have been incredibly supportive, creative, and enthusiastic as well.

I’ve certainly enjoyed working with Brett and Sandra and Chizine Publications as well, and how much creative control they allow their authors. Their books are beautiful and original and I’m very proud to be in the CZP stable. I would certainly work with them again.

As far as how horror is viewed in the larger publishing world? I’m still trying to figure it out, to be honest. There seems to be more excitement and acceptance of it, particularly with readers. My experience is somewhat anecdotal, but I can’t tell you how many times I see an online reviewer who isn’t clued into the small press horror community talking about wanting to read more horror and they’re pleased to stumble across my book. Readers want the kind of stuff we (the royal we) want to read and write, it’s just a matter of getting those books into their hands. Here’s hoping that many more authors crossover from the smaller presses to the larger ones. I want all of you (the royal you) talented folks to have access to more readers. This includes you, Ted, my handsome doppelganger….

Okay, now The Cosmicmicon is blushing, which isn't easy for a non corporeal cyberspace presence... Now fully recovered, we'd like to ask what's next for you? What are your short- and long-term goals now that you've taken that next step in your writing career?

Survive the school year gauntlet of January and February. I owe some editors a few short stories, so those need to be written. Both part of my short term and long term goals: I plan on pitching a couple of books to my publisher very soon. If they go for it, then well, I’ll be busy in the short term and long term. Happily so.

Thanks so much, Paul. We very much appreciate you taking the time to hang out at The Cosmicomion, and wish you boundless success in your future endeavors.

Thank you, Ted!

Nomination News: The Nameless Dark - A Collection nominated for Short Story Collection of the Year at This Is Horror Awards 2015

2016-01-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

Image used as example, not an indicator of reading the future

Due to several deadlines, I've been unable to complete my Year in Review posting that I had planned for just before the dawning of the New Year. I have SO MUCH to be thankful for over the last twelve months, and wanted to encapsulate it all into one cuddly, gushy mega-piece, but haven't had the proper time. I shall attempt to rectify that before the month comes to a close.

In the meantime, it's coming up upon awards season in all areas of entertainment, including publishing, and specifically dark and horror fiction. The first to lead the charge with a complete nomination list is the This Is Horror Awards 2015, which has somehow seen fit to include The Nameless Dark - A Collection on the docket for Short Story Collection of the Year. I'm deeply humbled by this nomination, and look with hopeless trepidation at my fellow nominees. Still, I count it as a wonderful honor, and one for which I am extremely grateful, as it means that a few people outside of my home enjoyed the book, which makes it all worth it.

If you haven't already, follow this link to vote. Massive thanks to those who suggested The Nameless Dark for nomination, and best of luck and hearty high fives to all nominees!

Publishing and Interview News: T.E. Grau signs publishing deal with This Is Horror for new work in 2016, sits down for This Is Horror Podcast interview

2015-11-23T16:19:00.002-08:00

Now that the cat is well out of the bag and skittering down the street, I may as well formally announce that I recently signed a publishing deal with This Is Horror for one, and possibly two, novellas to be published in mid 2016.

As for my reaction to the news, I think my quote available in the article says it best:

"I’m incredibly excited to announce my commission by This Is Horror to write a new work of fiction under their proud banner.

In writing this book, I get the opportunity to work with Michael, Dan, and the whole This Is Horror crew, an outfit that seems to have exploded onto the scene with world-class works of contemporary horror fiction. Joining a roster that includes such names as Nathan Ballingrud, Ray Cluley, Gary McMahon, and Stephen Graham Jones is quite the honor, and I’m delighted by the opportunity.

This will be my first release of new fiction after my debut collection The Nameless Dark, and I’m hoping my new work lives up to the incredibly high standard set by This Is Horror, with the aim of entertaining – and hopefully unsettling – the hell out of their readership."

In related news, I conducted an interview with Michael David Wilson and Dan Hovarth of the famed This Is Horror Podcast a few weeks back, and it just went live this afternoon. Follow this link and give a listen.

We covered a lot of ground, including my journey from fantasy to dark fiction, the horror of screenwriting, judging a book by its cover, the state of speculative fiction, my recent collection and upcoming works, the pros and cons of technology, why wives make the best editors, simplistic writing advice, the importance of reading Lawrence Block, Flannery O'Connor as literary Azathoth, and my unabashed love for most things British. And maybe a couple of other bits.

Give it a go if you have a spare hour, seven minutes, and forty-four seconds.

I'm excited and grateful to be hooked up with This Is Horror in 2016, and hope readers dig the new work. Stay close for more details as they become available.

In this podcast T.E. Grau talks about The Nameless Dark, screenwriting, technology, dark fiction and much more.

Show Notes:

[01:50] Interview start
[02:15] Initial interest in horror
[06:35] Screenwriting’s influence on fiction writing
[08:22] ‘Expat’
[10:10] Crossing genres
[15:00] The release of The Nameless Dark
[17:45] Cover art
[35:50] Writing process
[38:10] Best piece of writing advice
[43:50] Best things happening in dark fiction today
[53:20] Advantages and disadvantages of technology for writers and readers
[56:50] British scene
[58:10] New T.E. Grau release in 2016
[01:02:25] Connect with T.E. Grau
[01:03:00] Writers that intimidate Grau
[01:05:50] Competition time

Punktown Goes Ultra Graphic - The signature world of Jeffrey Thomas to be adapted into comic book anthology VISIONS OF PUNKTOWN as we enter final days of Kickstarter campaign

2015-11-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

As I've written about before (so pardon my redundancy), I very much appreciate an author who gifts the universe with brand new real estate, carved out of the void and made real, then populated with a proprietary DNA all its own. Distinctive laws of nature, history, creation stories, creatures, physical laws, etc. This sort of hard won creative conjuring makes the space around us a wider and wilder place, and is one of the highest forms of literary achievement.

Acclaimed horror writer Jeffrey Thomas has given us the gift of Punktown, a far flung, interstellar outpost where Mythos and madness, crime and punishment, and no end of horrors collide amid a fragile society built up from the rock of the planet Oasis. Human colonizers have thrown in with strange aliens races, mutants, androids, and replicants to fashion a megalopolis balanced precariously on the cusp of understood space. This is a seedy, violent, universe that shows Thomas' love for cosmic horror, cyberpunk, Noir, science fiction, and the dankest of dark fantasy. This is Punktown, and it's a place like no other, where anything - and everything - is possible.

Dozens of stories and at least six novels have been written in the Punktown universe, and now, thanks to the vision and efforts of writer Christopher Taylor (Creepy, Eerie, Hellraiser: Bestiary), Punktown will soon be realized as a comic book anthology, and I couldn't possibly be more excited.

The eight stories and their respective artists for VISIONS OF PUNKTOWN: VOLUME 1 are as follows:

THE REFLECTIONS OF GHOSTS -- Rafa Garres
THE LIBRARY OF SORROWS -- Hüseyin Özkan
WILLOW TREE -- Sinclair Klugarsh
FORGE PARK -- Eric York
THE PALACE OF NOTHINGNESS -- Frank Walls
MONSTERS -- Dug Nation
PRECIOUS METAL -- Stéphane De Caneva
THE UNBEARABLE BEING OF LIGHT -- Steven Russell Black

This is the melding of singular fiction with world class artwork from eight different sources. This is a goddamn exciting project.

Jump on this Kickstarter, right now. Immediately. You only have a week left to support the project. You truly don't want to miss this special project, and those pledge rewards.

Hüseyin Özkan

From the company press release:

Adapting the critically acclaimed Punktown stories of author Jeffrey Thomas.

Writer Christopher A. Taylor (Creepy, Eerie, Hellraiser: Bestiary) and eight phenomenal artists have taken to Kickstarter to raise funds to complete the first volume of Visions from Punktown. The campaign runs until November 20th, 2015.

Jeffrey Thomas’s Punktown stories have spawned several collections and novels. Here is what some peers and critics have said about his Punktown works:

“For a wild ride...readers will be hard-pressed to find a better vehicle than Thomas's bizarre multiverse; fans of cyberpunk noir and Lovecraftian horror will find much to enjoy in this messy, bravura hybrid.”
– Publishers Weekly starred review of Jeffrey Thomas’ DEADSTOCK

“Punktown is searing and alien and anxious and rich, and it is humane, and it is moving. Jeffrey Thomas has done something wonderful.”
-- China Mieville, author of EMBASSYTOWN

“A dazzlingly complex and detailed future vision as poetic as it is horrifying, full of insights and images that cling to the mind.”
-- Ramsey Campbell

“Jeffrey Thomas sounds like no-one else precisely because he writes of a place no-one else has been, yet which can feel like home.”
– Michael Marshall Smith, author of ONLY FORWARD

Dug Nation

________________________________________________________________________

The city known as Punktown is a melting pot of alien cultures on the planet Oasis. Cloning is an art form; creatures straddle dimensional rifts; robot musicians deal drugs at a jazz club; buildings hum with souls; trees do not stay rooted to the earth; and many more bizarre and terrifying scenarios

In adapting Thomas’ popular creation, Christopher Taylor handpicked a group of eight artists who could uniquely capture the variety of characters and setting. The stories of Punktown are not limited to any one genre, stepping comfortably from cyberpunk, to horror, into science fiction, noir and more. Each artist reflects a unique quality in translating these stories from Taylor’s scripts, to mirror the diversity of Punktown’s citizens and settings.

Dug Nation

Those artists are: Rafa Garres, Hüseyin Özkan, Sinclair Klugarsh, Steven Russell Black, Eric York, Stéphane De Caneva, Dug Nation, and Frank Walls. Please click on their names to see their art. Also see below for some artwork from Visions from Punktown.

The artists, along with Taylor, are working closely with Jeffrey Thomas in order to faithfully adapt his work. In eschewing producing the project with major publishers, all the creators have complete control over the work, allowing for more flexibility and freedom.

This is what Kickstarter allows creators to do: work unhindered by the rigid structure of corporate and editorial oversight that can often stifle creativity and the free flow of ideas and communication.

Visions from Punktown needs your help in bringing this project to life. Please see the Kickstarter, and the Facebook page. Jeffrey Thomas’ Amazon Author page here.

For interviews or additional information, please contact Christopher Taylor at: visionsfrompunktown@gmail.com
Twitter: @PunktownerChris
Instagram: @visionsfrompunktown

Thank you for your time!

--Chris Taylor
________________________________________________________________________

Stéphane De Caneva

Free Jeffrey Thomas fiction!

If you aren't familiar with Jeffrey's work, this is your chance to read a story for FREE, as well get a good look at the scripting process.

Link to "Precious Metal" here

You don't need a Dropbox account to view or download this file on a PC or Mac. But you will need the free Dropbox app to see it on a mobile device.

The PDF also includes some previously published work by my collaborator on the adaptation, Stéphane De Caneva! You can see how incredible the finished product will look!

TC Review & Interview: Hailed as 'Britain's answer to Stephen King,' author Adam Nevill reinforces place amongst horror elite with HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS, while new novel LOST GIRL officially released worldwide today

2015-10-22T11:44:00.001-07:00

We read horror fiction - and watch slasher films, and gruesome documentaries, and online terrorist videos, and accident footage, etc. - because of what Joseph Conrad called "the fascination of the abomination." We like to view things that disquiet us, don't we? We hope that we see something that isn't meant for innocent eyes. Death revealed - and dodged - is as exhilarating as it is horrifying. Our minds sometimes can't take it, but also can't willingly turn away. We seek out the abominations, because we are fascinated by them. We can't help it, apparently, due to a misfire in our individual development, or the natural condition of the human brain. I'm not sure which is to blame, as I'm a fiction writer, not a goddamn psychiatrist.

Abominations are on full and varied display in Adam Nevill's House of Small Shadows, and I as a reader of this exceptional novel am incredibly fascinated. It was as if Nevill was ordered to craft a contemporary Gothic novel twisted inside out - and sewn back up again - that incorporated all the things I find spooky as shit, including but certainly not limited to:

- Small forgotten towns
- Incredibly old houses, owned by incredibly old people
- Antique dolls
- Puppet shows/marionettes
- Non traditional taxidermy
- Ritualistic parades
- Secretive groups

Throw in circus clowns and unnamed creatures with impossibly long appendages (which do not, to my memory, appear in House of Small Shadows, although the lighting is pretty dim in some of those scenes, so you never know), and you've run the full gamut of my own personalized Creep List.

As it stands, House of Small Shadows contains enough of the truly terrifying to make it a landmark read, and an unforgettable exercise in horror imagery that has not dimmed since regrettably finishing the book a few months back. It's all still there, raw and vibrant, like a fresh coat of paint on a wooden puppet face. The places, the lighting, the sounds and smells are still raw in my brainpan, and threaten to stay that way. Probably more impressive still is Nevill's ability to sustain suspense and dread throughout nearly 400 pages, starting very early with the arrival of our protagonist Catherine Howard, an appraiser (a "valuer" in British parlance) for estate auctioneer Leonard Osberne, who is sent to an aged Gothic manse in the English countryside known as Red House, which lies just outside the mostly deserted town of Magbar Wood. The interior of Red House lives up to its name in terms of sumptuous decor, and Catherine discovers that each of the numerous rooms of the house serve as staging areas for impossibly intricate dioramas of World War I horrors played out by stuffed and positioned rats, as well as a bedroom populated by half animal, half human marionettes tucked into a tiny bed like sleeping children. The entire collection Catherine was sent to appraise for a possible career-making and record-setting estate sale was created by secretive genius M.H. Mason, who was once a man of the cloth until the blood and mud of trench warfare stained that holy fabric, twisting him away from God and into the arms of utter seclusion at Red House, where he devoted his sizable talents and the rest of his life to the creation of tiny, static horror shows, and the recreation of Medieval "cruelty plays" acted out by marionettes for live audiences, and eventually a BBC camera crew. Footage of the latter never made the airwaves, as the imagery was too disturbing, too bizarre even for the notoriously eccentric British.

This is the set-up for Catherine, and for us, and as we get the sneaking suspicion of what is to come for our hard luck protagonist, we can't help but sit back and watch, breathless and silent and squirming with claustrophobia, as she is forced to confront all sorts of weird, out-of-the-way, and mostly forgotten places, bringing her face to face with a litany of weird, out-of-the-way, mostly forgotten things. Old traditions, based on older knowledge of arcane wisdom blotted out of human memory for a reason. But things linger in the quiet places untouched by modernity. Eyes look out, and prayers are whispered to ears that don't belong to god or beast. Catherine has come to escape her past, avoid her present, and secure her future, and these powerful urges give her the courage to remain on site and finish her work, lest it all unravel for her. Unfortunately, as this is horror fiction we're talking about, it unravels for her anyway, in a multitude of unsettling ways.

Nevill's language is perfectly balanced, clean with a perfect dusting of melody, and his ability to build atmospherics is masterful. We're in those rooms with Catherine, dealing with these incredibly lifelike dead things. We can see the clothing and wig and skin and teeth and wheelchair of Edith Mason, the elderly niece of M.H. who now oversees Red House and the weird, multi-million dollar installations that clog the place. We can hear the heavy footsteps of Maude, the mute maid whose inscrutable expression hints at deeper mysteries surrounding this family and their strange house. And those marionettes... We're inches away from them as they are arranged in their tiny beds, facing away from us, grotesque hair covering the backs of their misshapen heads. We don't want them to turn around.

That expectancy, that impending doom, all blossom organically from the foundation Nevill lays like black soil, so fertile it literally pops and fizzes with potential life. And we as readers are caught in it up to our necks, our chins. Something very bad will happen, and happen soon. But when? And where? Will it be as bad as you imagine? Will it be worse? We scream for Catherine to leave the house, for her unfit boyfriend Mike or her boss Leonard or even her backstabbing coworker Tara to show up and wake her from the nightmare, but things are never as simple as that, and Nevill deftly spins a web that invisibly traps Catherine from the beginning, giving her just enough twine to allow her a frantic run at hope, at escape, before reaching the end of the sticky tether, and winding it back up again, slowly and determinedly, drawing the moth to the spider waiting at the center of the beautifully constructed latticework nest.

House of Small Shadows reads like one unbroken, spellbinding tracking shot capturing places that you never want to see where things happen that you that you never thought possible, Nevill's grainy camera picking up details along the way, hinting that something terrible can and probably will occur in the next frame. Martyrs will be torn to shreds, and parades will begin in the streets. A booming voice track begins, narrating the spectacle, as the images become more and more unspeakable. And we just sit and watch. Fascinated.
_________________________________________________________________________

Thank you, Adam, for taking the time to consider and answer these questions.

Thanks for having me, Ted.

I always like to start out with a bit of relevant background, to set the stage. When did you first realize that you had a talent for, and probably would be pursuing, writing as a viable undertaking? Were you a big reader as a child? What books first drew you in?

My Dad started it. He read to my brother and I most evenings when we were boys, even until we were around twelve. Hundreds of books, from Twain to Tolkien. But the author who really stirred and then directed my imagination in a particular direction was M R James. Those stories had a real impact, deep and long lasting. I feel his spirit in most of what I write now.

But I spent most of my boyhood outdoors in New Zealand, playing sports and roaming the bush and coastline with friends. I wasn't a bookworm as such. We went to the library every week as a family, though, so I did read a fair amount of adventure fiction, military historical fiction, and fantasy initially, and even my mother's Famous Five books. Plus, I lived in a house that resembled a library, so books were a constant and alluring presence. I had all sorts of reading phases and enthusiasms as an older child, with Robert E Howard's Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, even westerns. The really more intense reading for me started, oddly, when most young people drop books, around the ages of fourteen to seventeen. And that was when I started reading in a voracious way that has never stopped. I burned through Lovecraft at the same time as Shakespeare's tragedies and the modernists, and that interest in the best genre fiction and the classics continues. I've never been a reader that sticks to one thing; I've always read widely, though I have a vision for my own fiction that is quite singular and strange, at least to me.

All of my directionless imaginings and perpetual daydreaming found a purpose for itself in my mid-teens. That's when I first knew that I was going to take writing seriously, at some point. The book that actually changed my direction in life was Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I had little adult life experience. I was 16. But that book, though Joyce exercised some irony (that I missed) does include a map of artistic development from infancy to maturity, and it was the first book I read in which I was assisted in understanding what was going on inside me - most of which I'd been ashamed of and had longed to be a simpler person. But following its ideas, even guidance, I consciously decided to collect experience, to read a lot more than I had already read, and to take an English degree after school in order to further my goals formerly in an artistic direction. Besides a few early fragments, I only really committed myself to writing as a purpose for life around the age of 25. And because I'd waited so long, I just couldn't stop once the sluice was opened. I went off like a geyser.

I was not an exceptional student at school, or anything like that. There were even concerns about my attention span too, in junior schools. But I think that is key, because what was often mentioned as a cause for my inattention was my tendency to stare out of the window. As a child my imagination used to entirely consume me, and it still does. I think most of my conscious life is still spent there, daydreaming. I found routine jobs as an adult, and many subjects at school, to be near physically painful if they inhibited that need to daydream. I think my writing is just a more formal approach to daydreaming.

When and how did you first discover dark literature or material?

The need had been created by my Dad, through reading us James as I mentioned, Collier, Saki, Del la Mare and many others. But writers like C S Lewis and Tolkien and Stevenson were full of things that filled me with a euphoric dread too.

What do you consider your "big break" that ushered you into big press publishing? When did you know you'd probably be able to quit your day job?

That was my eleventh novel, Apartment 16 in 2009. I'd had ten novels published by that time, including my first horror novel, Banquet for the Damned, by PS in 2004 (though I'd finished it many years before that). So I'd been cutting my teeth for years and been a professional writer around full-time education and various jobs since my mid-twenties. But my break into the bigger international publishers arrived at the age of forty. After I'd finished Banquet I'd either fastidiously worked on Apartment 16 and The Ritual, or just tinkered with subsequent drafts for years, around life and work. But those two books ended up in a publishing auction in London at a time when horror became the new black again, in 2009. Apartment 16 had been on submission for some time too.

Two hours after the book deal was agreed, I was made redundant from my position as Fiction Editor of Virgin Books. I'd held that position for five years, so the next step was decided for me. I could have gone full time as a writer then, in 2009, and stayed full time until now. But I decided to continue working part time for various publishers because they offered interesting work, and I still do work two to three days a week as an editorial director. The rest is spent writing and living in equal parts. My wife and I also started a family around the time the first book deal happened and that's also why I keep working at two incomes. And that has often been hard, maintaining two professions as well as being a parent. I've worked part or all of every day since 2009, but it's provided a good life for us by the sea and I have additional impetus and motivation because of my daughter's future. Being in this position as a writer, and being a parent, was unimaginable for me before 2009. I don't take a day of it for granted.

No less than The Guardian dubbed you "Britain's answer to Stephen King," which - based on King's label as the king (sorry) of horror - is very high praise indeed, both from a critical and commercial standpoint. Does this level of acclaim effect your writing? Do you feel an extra layer of expectation in each new book, and more beholden to the machine, or just as creatively free as always?

It was flattering, but the King is also the benchmark that all of us in horror are measured against, in the mainstream media. That's the main reason my name was even mentioned in relation to the King; I was one of a few horror writers given a shot beyond the small presses, and who else are we ever compared to? But any critical acclaim hasn't changed what I am writing, but it has served as a huge motivational boost. Good notices still take me by surprise. Motivational, and good for morale for sure, though I remain driven by my own dissatisfaction and frustration. I think resting on one's laurels is catastrophic for writers.

I've also been extremely lucky with my editor, Julie at Pan Macmillan, in that she let me write what I wanted to, and in the way that I wanted to. She made plenty of good suggestions about what I delivered, but they weren't requests. Had I been a big front list writer with more at stake for the publisher, things may have been different. Or if the first two books had tanked. But the first two were successful and that may have bought me more trust. There has never been any pressure from my publisher, though, to write something else, or to write differently. A blessing, and it's given me an opportunity to start building a body of work at the rate of a book each year, and to even push into my own deepest strangeness with novels like Apartment 16 and House of Small Shadows, with a big publisher and a wider audience.

What I feel most acutely as a kind of unceasing pressure, is the bigger picture, and over that I have no control. This covers the business of publishing of which I am constantly aware, book selling, and the digital revolution. But I've never broken a sweat over editorial strong-arming because there never has been any.

Where did the central ideas and themes of House of Small Shadows originate? What are you trying to impart with the book?

It all came out of images I'd carried around from childhood and that continued to amass into adulthood. Curiosities and grotesque things that I'd remembered and that affected me in a particular way - paintings, objects, old television shows for children, historical artifacts, wax museums, houses I had visited, places I had worked, odd people I'd come across, all kinds of disparate things that struck strange chimes in my imagination, or little detonations. As a child, my reaction to some of these images and artifacts was a combination of terror and enchantment, and a lingering sense of that childlike imaginative state I have retained. I wanted to explore those enduring feelings and memories at novel-length, and to see if I could sustain them and preserve them as age took its toll. I began writing scenes and most of the story grew out of the act of writing. That pretty much happens every time too.

With its strange rural villages that can only be understood by a local, The House of Small Shadows seems to be partly autobiographical, if only in terms of geography. How much of your own upbringing is in this book?

I've spent most of my life in cities - Birmingham, Auckland, Worcester, London - but have often stepped outside of them and into the rural as a tourist. I think House of Small Shadows came from a sense of what was unfamiliar and incongruous to a city boy, and therefore charged with a peculiar magic. Had I grown up in the countryside I doubt I'd have written the book in the same way.

The sense of detail and historical touches relating to dolls and puppetry - and 19th century houses - is impressive in House of Small Shadows. You list the numerous resources you used as research for the book. How much actual research did you do (instead of general knowledge you already possessed), and did it involve hours sitting amongst the stacks in libraries? (I'm hoping like hell your answer is "yes" to the latter)

Yes. In a local library in London, that must have been frequented by actors, drama students and theatre designers, I actually sat beside a section on puppetry the first time I went in there to order books on fashion and Gothic Revival architecture that I'd found in an online catalogue for London libraries, and I'd needed a local library to make the inter- library loans for me. I went to order the books and also to find somewhere quiet to sit and work, because we had a baby in the house. While there, I found the stuff on puppets and theatre next to my table, and then discovered that they had a restricted section on taxidermy behind the counter ... that was uncanny. I'd wanted to include all of these things in my story and had bought some rare second hand books on animal preservation already. I had sat in the right chair in the right library. Or did small hands guide me?

You credit Thomas Ligotti as an inspiration for House of Small Shadows. What about Ligotti's writing sparked the idea, or informed the novel?

With Ligotti, it was the sense of combining a gaudy aesthetic of puppet theatre and animated false bodies, a kind of neglected, grotesque carnival that both mocked and said something poignant about existence; a commentary on fate and our insignificance. I liked the idea of something old, but childlike and damaged that was a witness to a dreadful truth. Ligotti lit a path that I walked, on my own rickety wooden legs.

In doing my own research, I couldn't find any information on the "martyrs" discussed in the book, nor the cruelty plays. Are these lost bits of historical knowledge, or something you created?

All of it is a collision of fact and my own imaginings, and what my imagination did to fact. I'd struggle to unravel it all now. But I became really interested in holy relics and Christian martyrdom while reading for Last Days, and even went to see the biggest collection of holy relics ever assembled in one place - at the British Museum - and in the same timeframe I visited an incredible museum of childhood. It was like an overdose. It all made me giddy. But I adapted what I knew of morality plays and Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies into a new form of drama - the cruelty play, but performed by puppets. At one point puppet theatre was probably the biggest form of street entertainment in England, but the dramas weren't ever written down and recorded. Some character names survived and titles of plays, but not much else. I imagined they must have been ghastly dramas, and perhaps seditious.

What is your writing routine, if a routine exists? Is consistency and ritual important - putting your ass in the chair, as Joe Lansdale espouses - or is a writer better served to wait until the Muse hits, and then follow the Coleridge interpretation of art ("a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions")?

It's changed so much as my life has changed. Being single in my twenties and not responsible for much beside myself was a very different experience to writing around a full time job as a publisher of 85 books each year, and that took over my existence for five years. That too was different to writing as a self-employed man with a family across the last six years, but the latter has undoubtedly become my most productive period - more stability, more security, and more time.

In the twenty years in which I've been going, I have had to write in many different ways and routines enforced by circumstances and situations - evenings, mornings; all day every day at times when I took breaks from careers; just when I felt like it while really stressed and mentally tired; sometimes when I couldn't stop and it was like a madness; or only during Sunday afternoons; two hours before midnight; and in all kinds of compromised environments - that has been a constant until now. So I'm never very helpful when I am asked this question. I just never gave up; if I wasn't physically writing I was mentally writing; the two things joined up often enough and consistently enough for me to finish books. I've never given up on a book but have felt like burning them all at some point during composition.

For the first time ever, at the age of 46, I now have my own office too - a dedicated work space. And in it I try and write at least four days each week. The days change, life can take over, but I'm flexible. I've had to write in so many environments. I have never had the luxury until now of being able to guarantee silence, privacy, even a proper desk. The Ritual was mostly written on someone else's computer on a kitchen table, in a noisy shared house. No wonder people not only die in it, but are eviscerated.

Keeping your head in a novel is the most important thing, even if most of your work on it is conducted in the imagination. Starting something and completely ignoring it at first draft stage can be catastrophic. Even if you are scribbling notes long hand, or thinking through possible scenes, or just imaging the characters talking, you are at work on your book. But that can't just keep on going; you do have to sit down and go. My intention is to do something every day, be it virtual or actual. At times I pull off twelve hour sprees, though only usually when rewriting these days. At other times I produce nothing new in an entire day. I don't word count. My only hard rule is to try and complete a scene if I start it on a particular day. Keep your head in it and maintain the voice and it will get written, eventually. My head is always in the current book, and working around the next one too in a side room. The next one always seems more exciting because ideas are exciting and near effortless, but in there lies a cautionary tale. Nearly everything you write will be hard work, and should be. If you think something was slam-dunked on a first draft, read it three months later and try not to self-harm.

And yet, somehow, I've completed 16 books in twenty years. The urge, the compulsion, the desire, the sense of purpose, has surmounted the many disruptions.

I've begun to ask others this question, as I have recently asked it of myself: What do you think it is about the dark, the weird, uncanny, and the horrifying that draws you/us in, that appeals to us, that almost - odd to say - makes us happy? This query is especially pointed to individuals - such as you - who seem to be well adjusted, positive, and living happy lives.

Why thank you. That's a great question about why we do it too. I'd suggest, without examining it too deeply, it is an attraction forged from a range of things. As so much is. As a rule, I don't tend to think of one explanation for anything anymore in a world obsessed with "nailing it". Everything is just too complex. Indecision and being unsure is better than being completely wrong. Uncertainty and mystification is often part of a long process of consideration that gives, at least, a half truth, or something approximating an understanding of what we are trying to figure out. It's often the best that we can hope for.

So for this question, I'd have to say it's a combination of things for me - temperament and sensitivity and formative experiences, nature and nurture, and how those things then reacted to the world and its art, and formed a kind of voice, or presence inside me, that keeps creating my version of enchantment and terror. I suspect I may be a writer of the grotesque, more than a writer of anything else that is subdivided within the fiction of the fantastic. I'm inspired by the grotesque as much as by beauty. Comfort, peace, beauty, health; all of these things I adore, but running at a constant parallel is my ability to be aghast. And I suspect most horror writers are also writers of some form of protest, even if it's against themselves, most definitely other people in my case, society, or the entire human condition, maybe of actual existence and our place within it. I am aghast and I protest and horror is the residue. Why isn't everyone writing horror?

As one of the standard bearers for horror fiction in the mainstream marketplace, how do you feel the genre is received and discussed in relation to "literary fiction?" Based on how it is viewed at present, do you ever see a time when this perception will change?

Literary fiction is an odd opponent for horror. But a common foe for many, or so I often see cited. In terms of status and respectability, the contributors to each may often look upon one another with contempt too. Though literary fiction is probably as much of an endangered species as horror fiction, and I think the fields share a great deal of other common ground. Literary fiction is full of horror and the weird; horror and the weird are full of literary stylists. Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub write horror but are great literary stylists; Ian McKewan and John Burnside write literary fiction but are great writers of horror (see Glister, A Summer of Drowning, The Devil's Footprints from Burnside).

Both fields struggle commercially and seem prey to capricious zeitgeists in commercial publishing. One has an establishment of erudition, academia, cultural respectability and specialist imprints behind it; the other has none of that besides the specialist imprints and S T Joshi as a critic, but horror fiction has a vast and enviable bedrock of popular culture endorsing and sustaining it in the public consciousness; this wider horror culture may eclipse the literary wing, but it also restores it, and draws nutrition from the books. I look upon horror as a culture now, and an ecosystem that sustains itself; the broader culture of horror still needs the literary wing to provide ideas (even if they are often exhausted into tedium in the other media). Look at Ligotti in True Detective. Who saw that coming? Horror is a very clear and powerful cultural form and force, no doubt in my mind. I am part of a vast and wriggling mass, a network.

For many, the bottom line will persist for the fiction declared to be horror: that it is pulp, juvenile, sensationalist, perhaps even unhealthy. We can all find the low hanging fruit to endorse that point of view too. But that is the view of the ill-informed and the poorly read (and of older readers and writers, I find, if I am honest). The view that literary fiction is unreadable, exclusive, pretentious, and boring is equally as ill-informed a point of view. I read as much of the literary as I do horror. I also try to combine my influences from both fields.

I think perceptions have changed for horror too. I find less disapproval these days too, because horror culture is dominant and has been for years, maybe not in books, but in comics, gaming, television and the cinema. Younger people in my experience, under thirty, rarely criticize horror. They seem smitten with it, and have embraced it in some form (television has given horror an incalculable boost in recent years). Within horror culture, horror fiction is mostly mentioned in the past tense to me by older readers - "I used to read Herbert and King ..." and so on, but not by the young in this way. But the literature is always going to be a harder sell for all generations, though, than the other pictorial media, because fiction requires a more active concentration and the gratification is not instant and immediate; it also requires time and that's in ever shorter supply. The more sophisticated the writing, the greater the demand made on the reader too.

In a pictorial age in which choice is bewildering and cognitive overload is at its peak, that is not going to change - sit down and read a horror novel or watch the new series of The Walking Dead, or play a multi-player computer game in which you shoot waves of the undead? I don't fancy the odds of books. But some, who love reading, and the comforts and confirmations and special pleasures it provides, will keep us in books and horror, at some level.

The value of any fiction to publishers is mostly monetary, because it's a business. If it sells it is lauded. The writers I tend to read, place a different value upon horror that is not dependent on market forces.

At the risk of irritating either your hometown team or your readers across the pond, do you think there is a difference in the British interpretation - and creation - of horror fiction, than that produced in the United States? If so, why do you think there is a difference?

I couldn't conclusively define the differences between the horror of the two schools, because most writers seem to be constantly expanding and diversifying. But I can offer comments on the writing I have read.

You have faucets and we have taps ... But seriously, I think both territories have produced some extraordinary work within the slough of despond the fiction suffered, and right into its recent peak, and perhaps because horror was out of vogue our respective horrors had an underground renewal. As a very broad brush stroke, perhaps, more Brits may still lean more toward the Gothic tradition, and the impact of early Clive Barker; more of the Americans and Canadians may lean more to the cosmic horrors of Leiber and Lovecraft and Ligotti. But that is a big simplification. Many of us are bonded too by the King, and to degrees by Straub, Simmons, Campbell, Herbert and Barker - there is more common ground than difference.

At the speculative end in the UK, Ramsey Campbell and M John Harrison may have given us a British DNA of the speculative that Aickman really started in earnest. Joel Lane, Nicholas Royle, Conrad Williams and others have done something extraordinary with the weird and horrific in the everyday, that reminds me of M John Harrison, early Clive Barker, and Ramsey Campbell, and that tone seems peculiarly British at times. Writers like Gary McMahon, Simon Bestwick, Simon Kurt Unsworth recently seem to be forging a social realism in their horror, that has a distinct regional Northern quality. Then you have Frank Tallis, Reggie Oliver, Sarah Waters, Mark Valentine and John Howard, who are all class acts, and may do more to maintain the spirit of the classic British Victorian and Edwardian masters than most. Sarah Lotz and Sarah Pinborough prove increasingly versatile in expanding the borders of the hellish in all kinds of directions, and through the thriller and crime mediums of which John Connolly and Michael Marshall are masters (in my eyes Connolly is one of the great modern horror writers, as well as one of the great modern mystery writers).

Across the water, you're doing the same with your own regional influences. The cosmic, occult and strange horrors of writers including Laird Barron, Simon Strantzas, Brian Evenson, Richard Gavin, John Langan, Jonathan Thomas, Linda Rucker, Paul Tremblay, Matt Cardin, Nathan Ballingrud, Gemma Files, to name a few, suggest a new movement to me in North American literary horror, with more and more of you appearing and seemingly each month, like yourself, Josh Malerman and Scott Nicolay even more recently. You are all, literally, spoiling us. Caitlin R Kiernan's vision has permeated deep, as has Kathy Koja's, Poppy Z Brite's, the genre defying Steve Rasnic Tem and also Brian Hodge.

Both sides have had key specialists in Romero's vision - David Moody in the UK and Jonathan Maberry in the US. If no one read Alden Bell's books, do so.

There are so many more writers that I should mention, and a great many I haven't even read yet; the fact that there are so many authors creating genuinely startling and refreshing work, all of the time, is a wonderful sign. I defy anyone to read deep into the modern anglosphere of horror and claim they only see pulp. What I am more keen on pointing out is the quality on both sides of the Atlantic and the special friendship we share. I think as writers we all read each other as much as we can, but the national preferences I tend to encounter more in readers, because of where the books are available and have the most presence.

What would be your advice to beginning writers eager to embark on a career in horror fiction?

Read as widely in the field as possible, from the masters and classics to the moderns. Soak it up. But make sure you read widely beyond horror too. You will learn just as much elsewhere, or you should do.

Get good advice on the craft, on your actual use of language, before you get tied up with characterization and plotting. Start with the actual language you're using and how you arrange it - that almost seems lost at times. If you don't acquire enough craft you may remain a literate adult and never become a writer ... I'd also say that unless you feel manifestly driven to write, don't bother. I've spent ten years reading slush piles.

But if this is for you, start allowing your own deeps to overflow, unrestrictedly, to find your own voice, your own thing, your own innate strangeness. Once that spring is bubbling you can find ways of creating stories out of the raw imaginative material. Looking for what to write about should be the easiest thing of all, but how you write about it is then key.

All of these things take time and application; don't rush, or be too eager to start publishing, as hard as that temptation may be these days.

In terms of music (and totally, selfishly, off topic), I know you're a big metal fan. What bands do you really dig, now and going back to the origins?

If you saw how many CDs and vinyl records are in my office, you'd understand how difficult that is to answer. Currently, I'm heavy. I'm playing a lot of Lamb of God, Slipknot and metalcore. Bathory and Sanctuary are enjoying a revival in my space. For a time before that it was doom and industrial: Trouble, The Skull, Ministry, NIN, and my punk faves.

I cut this with folk rock, classical and some ambient noise.

There's not been a subgenre of heavy rock or metal that I haven't appreciated in part.

What's next for you, in terms of releases, and those projects on which you are currently working?

Lost Girl is out October 2015. A thriller and a near future disaster scenario as much as it is a horror novel. I began that book in 2013 and delivered the book in November 2014. Since then, the story has started to become uncannily relevant.

My next novel is due for 2017 and I've been writing that since late last year, my working title is Yellow Teeth, and it's a kind of unconnected companion piece to Last Days, a move into psychic terror after bludgeoning myself with No One Gets Out Alive and Lost Girl.

I've also written five short stories this year and they should be out next year. And on that note, I may have another surprise next year too.

Thank you so much for your time, Adam, and much luck and success in your future endeavors.

Thanks for having me, Ted. I appreciate your absorption of me into the nameless dark of the Cosmicomicon.
________________________________________________________________________

Pick up Lost Girl TODAY, to celebrate it's official global launch by Pan Macmillan, at Amazon or at your local retailer of fine books that dwell on incredibly dark things. I've started reading the book, and it's a grim, dark, worrisome treat, centered around a father's desperate journey to find his kidnapped daughter amid a world reeling from the early stages of a global societal collapse, based on climate change and the resultant lack of fresh water, erosion of arable land, and general overpopulation. This is real world horror on so many levels, set in a time not so distant that it doesn't resonate, and scare the shit out of you. Grab a copy from that box below, if you don't mind losing a few fingers. Nevill's got claws.

Find Adam LG Nevill lurking just below the placid surface of his website here, listening to metal and contemplating the slow, ignominious unraveling of humanity.

Blog About a Blog: Random-Ass Interview with Sean M. Thompson now live on horror site Spooky Bloggery

2015-09-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

"Spooky Sean" Thompson of Spooky Bloggery, as well as Miskatonic Musings and From the Nether Regions fame, recently interviewed me, and took it live this morning.

Check out the Random-Ass Interview here, and tag that Spooky Bloggery joint for future interviews, reviews, news, and posts from around the weird-o-sphere. Sean is a stone cold Horror Hound, and a swell fellow, and I thank him for the interview invite.

Review News: Publishers Weekly reviews THE NAMELESS DARK, pre-orders discounted through Lethe Press site as release day nears

2015-06-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy to report that Publishers Weekly gave a lovely review of The Nameless Dark, beginning the piece as such:

"The dark fiction in Grau’s first collection is nicely twisted, with stories that play on the best of eldritch horror, creating a sense of dread and the unexplained instead of overt malevolence."

(please click here for the full review from the PW site)

It's a good feeling to know that the goal of your writing was achieved, at least in the eyes (and brain) of this particular reader. This review, combined with the truly astonishing run of blurbs the book has received, makes me incredibly happy, humbled, proud, and excited as we approach the official release date for the collection in late July.

Also, The Nameless Dark is now available for pre-order through the Lethe Press website for $15.00, which is three dollars less than through Amazon, and a pretty swell deal for 275 pages of fiction. Aside from the lower price, it's always the better move to buy direct from the publisher, which relies upon each and every order to keep operations going.

Guest Blogger: Weird Fictionista David Anderson brings us 'ELDRITCH ESPIONAGE: LOOKING BACK AT HARRISON PEEL'

2015-06-17T17:46:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since we have had a guest blogger around these parts, but as we all know too well, that is not dead which can eternal lie... Our very own The Cosmicomicon can eternally lie with the best of them.

And now, over to David Anderson, who sent TC a piece on author David Conyers and his renowned Harrison Peel book series.
_______________________________________________________________________

ELDRITCH ESPIONAGE: LOOKING BACK AT HARRISON PEEL

by: David Anderson

Out in deep space, past the distant, dancing stars of the Milky Way, there may or may not lurk horrors from beyond. However, most ‘sane’ individuals like to think that, YES, these super-powered alien gods exist (by sane I mean genre enthusiasts). Or they at least enjoy fictional stories about them, and can suspend disbelief long enough to have some fun. And that, I think, is what may have originally ensnared readers into H.P.’s imagination – it seemed somehow plausible, like the tales were an almost first-hand account at times. This isn't news to the experienced Lovecraft fan, I know, but worth talking about anyway.

For me, as a reader of Lovecraftian fiction, both of the pulpy action kind found in tomes like CTHULHU UNBOUND or the straight, Joshi laces of BLACK WINGS, I look for the writer of a particular story to pull me into the world as ‘plausibly’ as possible, providing either science or official sounding ‘made up data’, whatever sells me on the fact that these beings from beyond could indeed travel among us. But I also look to be entertained, and a scholar bumbling along or even a story told through a series of letters can get boring (mind you some are fantastic!). I’ll ashamedly admit that I like a few guns to be fired off, an exotic babe to entice me, and explosions. I like to see these punk-ass Lovecraftian entities get a taste of whoop ass directed at them, even if it is like shooting the T-1000 liquid metal terminator with small arms fire (which was comically pointless but did slow the thing down).

I’m always screaming at the TV during horror movies, proclaiming “just shoot the damn thing” or “punch Michael Myers in the face, just try it”. And along came Harrison Peel, a character which at the time (I’ll get to that) had a complete monopoly on my attention and Lovecraftian book stack. Peel, a fictional Australian intelligence operative with a complicated resume of American intelligence ties (I’ll try and tackle that later) instantly became my ‘voice’ in the Mythos Universe. “Shoot the fucking Shoggoth, for Christ’s Sake!” was now not an unanswered utterance, but something I could use as a rallying cry for future readings.

“James Bond versus the Cthulhu Mythos” has been the crude, boiler plate ‘blank versus blank’ template explanation used to sum up Peel to the masses, and it works, to an extent. Bond’s world, or his ‘fictional universe’ is a lot less realistic and candy coated compared to the harsh, ultra real world of HARRISON PEEL. In Peel’s world, sometimes innocents die. Children get killed, just like in real life. Horrible tortures are performed by cruel men, just like in real life. And horrors from beyond EXIST, which may or may not be just like real life. Peel’s cohorts can be killed at any second, and often suffer at the hands of the cruel world that David Conyers (oh yeah, he’s the author of THE HARRISON PEEL SERIES) faithfully renders out, looking to our own for the template. Essentially, James Bond would have bled out, and shit his pants after he died in literally the first paragraph of his potential ‘Peel-verse’ adventures. This isn't your Grandma’s Mythos, if you need a fun catch phrase.
Peel is often in Third World Countries, embroiled in war zones that almost, ALMOST, match the horrific nature of the cosmic entities he ultimately has to do battle with. Realistically, insane governments and terrorists alike would love to get their hands on “cosmic, violent entities of extreme power”, and naturally, use them as weapons. Most of the time, mankind ends up unleashing the very things it has to, itself, stop (through heroes like Peel).

So, how did I come across Peel, and how is this a ‘look back’? Come with me into my DeLorean and let us go back to the year 2008. I had just moved into my new house, got my first mortgage, and had just left a really crappy job for a new, better one. The one benefit of the past crappy job, though, was an ample amount of web surfing time during the job. I found a website called DAGONBYTES that proclaimed it had Lovecraftian stories, free to read. I’m not sure how I came about the site, but there I was, being exposed to Lovecraft for the first time (I was a late bloomer). I quickly, over the course of a few weeks, read almost all of Lovecraft’s works, or at least the major, popular ones. AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS was an amazing tale, and reading it unspoiled for the first time was amazing.

After emptying out my chest of free-stories, I decided to go looking for more that maybe weren’t listed online. I then discovered that OTHER authors had taken up Lovecraft’s mantle, and soon I was at the Amazon page for TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, a paperback that changed my reading world but one I also lost before I could finish. I bought that along with THE SPIRALING WORM by John Sunseri and David Conyers.

Amazon had recommended THE SPIRALING WORM to me, and the descriptions of the stories had me foaming at the mouth. I was a huge fan, as I mentioned earlier, of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, so the modern day military RETURNING to Antarctica armed with guns and bombs intrigued the hell out of me. I ordered both books to qualify for super shipper savings or whatever, and thus began the tedious wait to receive these awesome books.

After merely samplings TALES (at least I read the story STICKS, what an awesome yarn!) it was lost after a co-worker stole it from me. I’d be mad about that, but if it created a new fan of the genre, I consider it a book well lost. I ended up reading a lot of those stories in later anthologies, anyway. Warmed up from my excursion into other writer’s take on the mythos, I decided to crack open THE SPIRALING WORM. All of the sudden, I was dumped into an action packed world where the Mythos were ‘real’ and these entities were being seen, out in public, in daylight! Gone from the shadows, and snarling in our reality, these cosmic horrors take on a new dimension especially bolstered by the fact that Conyers goes into the science behind all of it. We learn that some entities inhabit our dimension and others simultaneously, allowing them to see the future because part of their bodies exist outside of our sense of time. Being manifested ‘in the flesh’ into our world means that these horrors aren't impervious to damage, and that adds to the detail.

We, the reader, learn that extreme heat from thermite or a nuclear explosion CAN ‘destroy’ the vessels used by the invincible entities from beyond, although these dark gods become merely delayed, not stopped. Conyers does a great job of conveying that you cannot STOP these things, but you might be able to send some Shoggoth back to Antarctica in a body bag though, if you have the right equipment. There are also plenty of human adversaries Peel faces off against too, and Conyers never skimps out on the relationship developments. It isn’t just mindless action, although the action written is so superb I want other writers to read some of this author’s work and take note of the fluid execution of these scenes. Conyers also has a great knowledge of military tactics and equipment, and his education as an engineer only helps further sell the realism of the dynamic situations Peel gets in.

Peel himself is a bit of an enigma, and I may pack-peddle a bit on trying to explain his backstory! Peel has worked for American and Australian military and intelligence organizations, but also has gone on personal, unofficial missions and has ‘friends’ outside the intelligence agencies. One of the fun parts about this series is that we are constantly jumping around the timeline (while still building themes that carry the overall story forward) so we get “young Peel” stories and “old Peel” stories, if that makes sense. Older Peel is dealing with stopping the end of the world, while young Peel is just encountering these horrors for the first time.

So I ended up burning through WORM, partially because it was the only Lovecraftian book I had, and partially because it was damn amazing! One of the most exciting thing that has happened to me in my newer reading experiences was when I got CTHULHU UNBOUND volumes 1&2, and found out there was a PEEL tale called STOMACH ACID. Co-authored with Brian Sammons who would go on to invent his own character within David Conyers’ universe. I had no idea that the adventures of Peel would extend beyond The Spiraling Worm, so getting to see Peel in action again was thrilling. And boy was it a great story! This ended up getting me hooked on the world of Harrison Peel, and I eventually contacted Conyers and began a fruitful string of correspondences about the next Peel tales and where they would be published. Conyers really helped Peel get around, the spy appearing in numerous publications. Eventually Conyers decided to do a ‘soft reboot’ of the series, revamping older stories to better fit in a grand, new timeline and adding in tons of new content.

The Harrison Peel files was an indie effort by Conyers and self-published to Amazon, albeit with an amazing production quality to it. Conyers released 4 volumes, collecting and polishing his work as he went along, creating the first ‘cycle’ of the Harrison peel series. Unbridled by the fact he had no publisher in the way (granted, most of the material was previously published), Conyers crafted an amazing saga that is sorely underrated. Marathon reading the series is a truly amazing experience, blowing away even the most action packed blockbuster or brainy tech-thriller.

What’s great for the prospective reader is that Conyers has collected all of this work into an omnibus called THE SHOGGOTH CONSPIRACY. With the best cover to ever grace the Peel series and an introduction by well-known author Peter Clines, it’s a great time to get into Peel. I suggest you dive right in if you’re a fan of the Mythos.

Editing News: T.E. Grau Steps Down as Fiction Editor of STRANGE AEONS Magazine

2015-05-26T12:38:00.001-07:00

It is with a heavy heart that I type this brief announcement: I have stepped down as Fiction Editor of Strange Aeons magazine.

It wasn't an easy decision, but after thinking long and hard, and weighing my professional and personal priorities with my integrity as an editor, I decided it was in everyone's best interest that I leave the magazine as Fiction Editor.

With the release of my first collection, I will be eyeing larger and more ambitious writing projects going forward, and to do them (and my family) justice, I need to focus all of my energy and available free time on writing fiction. After two years, I have found that my path in fiction doesn't necessarily include editing, although I am incredibly proud of the stories I was able to secure for the last eight consecutive issues of the magazine (exactly half of the run), which included the phenomenal, all-fiction Special Lost Issue #13 released in conjunction with the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Portland 2014.

Through it all, I've been lucky enough to have worked with some of the best writers - and people - working in dark and speculative fiction today, and want to thank them all for being so gracious, patient, and obscenely talented. Also, working with Kelly Young, Rick Tillman, Nick "The Hat" Gucker, and the rest of the SA crew has been a wonderful experience, and I cherish the friendships created while doing the work, and especially while not.

Strange Aeons will move on, as the brand is strong and the logo just a few years shy of being iconic, but can only do so properly with a Fiction Editor. As such, if you or anyone you know has an interest in the position, and feel up to the task, please contact Kelly Young at klyoung@strange-aeons.com. Bring your A, B, and C game. Make me proud. Make the magazine great, better than I could have ever done. It deserves it. You do, too.

And so, I wish Strange Aeons and its lovely readers a sweet, sad goodnight. For now.

TC Review & Interview: The Professor Is In - John Langan teaches and terrifies with second fiction collection THE WIDE CARNIVOROUS SKY & OTHER MONSTROUS GEOGRAPHIES

2015-05-14T13:58:00.001-07:00

Cover artwork by Santiago Caruso

Every insular creative scene has its personalities, its movers, its stars. It's like the cover of Tiger Beat magazine. Or a boy band... covered by Tiger Beat magazine. These personalities have labels: The Shy One. The Flirt. The Bad Boy. The Heartthrob.

As mainstream publishing occasionally—and grudgingly—accepts while also further insulates indie press Weird fiction (not an easy bit of cultural gymnastics), a brighter light is being shed on the personalities in this scene, as well. The boy (and girl) band members. While others can hash out who is who and whom is whom, I have my own labels. And in this issue of Tiger Beat, John Langan is The Professor. Or, The General. But mostly The Professor.

You see, Langan actually is a professor in his workaday life, and seems to be naturally suited to the proud vocation, as he can't help but teach us—his students—with each and every one of his layered, finely crafted, incredibly interesting stories of horror and the strange, which are on full display in his latest collection of short fiction The Wide, Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus Press, 2013), a title I muchly dig, splayed over a cover featuring art by the renowned Santiago Caruso.

When I write "teach" I don't mean "preach," as his work is not preachy in the slightest. Didactic, yes, but I enjoy didacticism, as I'm a huge fan of stylistic writing, unique voice, and guiding subtext. In the case of The Professor, the teaching comes from his deconstruction of the supernatural tale, tearing it down, showing us the parts, and then building it back up in front of our wide, wondrous eyes. There is a deftness in the way he plays with tropes, a celebration, and even at times a wink and a nudge to the reader while he turns them inside out, shining light on a new angle of something you thought you already knew. This is an expert at work within genres, archetypes, and iconic monsters that he clearly loves, and his enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious, which translates to the reader as a good professor does with an interesting, or even a complex, lecture. One gets the sense of learning while being entertained, or moved, or horrified. That is not an easy thing to do. Hence, my clumsy metaphor above. Hence, Langan as The Professor.

The analogy is set from the first pages of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies, as "Kids" takes place in a classroom, a setting to which we are returned two stories later, in "Technicolor." The former is a piece of flash fiction written from a viewpoint you'd imagine is quite common amongst teachers forced to deal with the smallish nightmares birthed into the world and hustled off into the local schools, while the former is a mesmerizing rumination on Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," in which the reader gets a glimpse of what The Professor might sound like when standing in front of his assembled students. An arcane history of Poe's famed short story and the details surrounding its creation are reeled off by an instructor in loving homage and as a bit of slight of hand, while something else is happening just outside the schoolhouse. This is a dazzling info-load couched inside historical and dark literary fiction, wrapped up by a Weird mystery tale. EAP would be incredibly proud.

In between these two pieces is the meaty, strong-limbed "How The Day Runs Down," which is a zombie tale unlike any I've previously read. Not that I've read a lot of zombie fiction, mind, but I love the theatrical, shattered fourth wall way that Langan structures this tale, and inside of this armature of a narrated stage play, his overall rendering of a zombie apocalypse touches on the often random nature of total societal collapse and those who will survive. Terrifying, heartbreaking, and boldly experimental, this is—as are other stories in this collection—a piece of meta horror fiction that evidences a writer who can look at stories in three, and sometimes four, dimensions when deciding how to tell them.

The titular tale arrives next, shifting gears into an action-packed Gulf War story detailing the decimation of an American platoon by something that swoops down from the sky, told in both the present and through flashback, as the survivors prepare to deal out some payback against a cosmic bloodsucker that apparently hasn't read any of the old, tired vampire yarns about what it can and cannot do, and when. This is grim, grisly, totally fun stuff, reminiscent of the Pulps, and reflects Langan's love of comic books and Robert E. Howard.

"City of the Dog"—in addition to being a story about canine monsters prowling the more ancient parts of 1990's Albany—struck me as a powerful tale about cowardice, and other emotional failings of selfish people trying to hold onto relationships, and ultimately save themselves, at a very selfish age. "The Revel" deals with similar beasts, but in a much different way, walking the reader through the commonplace steps of your classic werewolf film while not telling that same reader that the camera was never rolling.

At this point in the collection, we've seen the author give the Langan Treatment to zombies, werewolves, and vampires, while also discussing, in detail, the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Not many writers can jump strata with such a deft, confident touch, or with such a sense of enjoyment.

Veering left is "The Shallows," which shows us backyard Lovecraftian horror drenched in the bizarre. Dread and loneliness and grief and madness now live in a world that has changed forever, while something incredibly large is moving out in the water... The story had what can only be described as a psychedelic effect on me while reading it, as I imagined the scene dotted with colorful strobes and that weird soundtrack music of early 70's experimental film while the narrator puttered around his property and garden, accompanied by his trusty crab.

"June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris." is a quick, jarring tale of a serial killer answering to a higher calling, intent on making a spitfire named "Laird" his next victim, written for an online ribbing/tribute page to fellow horror author Laird Barron. The creep-out factor of the antagonist balances well with the reader cheering on the protagonist, who obviously knows what to do when he has a knife in his hands. Blades ain't just for slicing sled rope, bub.

"Mother of Stone" is saved for last, which is fitting, as this big, intense work of investigative supernaturalism grabs up the reader and shoves them inside a very real world where things aren't as they appear, and dark forces from outside are at play in the most common of places. This story of a headless statue of mysterious origin and the skeptical writer who tracks down the truth could have easily served as the anchor text for a full novel, so well drawn are the characters, so vibrant is the setting. The crescendo created by "Mother of Stone" struck the perfect note to finish off the symphony.

Following the fiction, I loved the story notes section, as my inner fanboy geeks out on background and inspiration info related to stories I enjoy. The early edition ARC I received unfortunately didn't include the afterword by Laird Barron, as I'm always interested in Barron's take on writing in general, and specific writers in particular. His close friendship with Langan would have made for epic reading.

Last year I read Langan's previous collection, the outstanding Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, and upon finishing The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies, I can see the growth of a writer in terms of narrative scope and guiding structure, in the confidence and audacity. One can sense newfound freedom in these nine tales. This is a powerhouse collection, large and deep, both familiar and innovative, at times heartrendingly tragic and other times giddy fun. John Langan is a writer working at the leading edge of horror fiction, tipping his hat in respect to the landmarks behind him while helping map the new terrain ahead. The genre is in good hands while The Professor is drawing up tomorrow's lesson plan.
________________________________________________________________________

What brought you into writing, and if you can recall, was there a moment of clarity in your life where you thought that you could move beyond just reading books and possibly become an author yourself?

Storytelling has always been present in my life, in one form or another. I can remember writing my version of King Kong vs. Godzilla when I was in first grade; admittedly, so I could draw the accompanying picture of the two monsters squaring off. When I got in trouble for something in the third grade (I can’t remember what), and my father told me he wanted me to write him a story as part of my punishment, I wrote my own version of the latest issue of Marvel’s Supervillain Team-Up, in which Dr. Doom fought the Red Skull on the moon. (As you might imagine, this was not what my father intended, but to his credit, he accepted it.) And when I was in the sixth grade, I wrote and read to my English class a Halloween story about a kid’s encounter with what was essentially one of Tolkien’s Nazgûl. I think that may have been my first inkling that I had some ability as a writer. I can remember the feel of the other students’ attention, the quiet that descended on the classroom as they listened to the story. My freshman year of high school, I would write a horror story that won first place in the school’s Christmas writing contest, and was published in the school newspaper, and I suppose I could point to that as the moment of clarity as regards to my writing future. But reading a story about a confrontation with a monster—a fundamentally literary monster—to my classmates may have been my first hint of the direction I’d eventually go.

Now that we've squared that away, what drew you to the darker side of the literary ledger?

That’s the question, isn't it? My childhood was punctuated by moments of trauma, from getting a sliver of metal in my right eye when I was two and a half (which required surgery) to my father suffering a pair of heart attacks pretty much consecutively when I was thirteen. That awareness of the contingency of experience, of the way in which the bottom can drop out from under you without warning, combined with a deeply Catholic upbringing, in which the supernatural, both good and bad, was an active part of existence. If you look closely enough at any writer’s life, I suppose their choice of material will seem overdetermined. Certainly, I’m aware of that in my case.

In a similar vein, who (or what) do you consider an influential force on your writing? What writers do you most (professionally) admire, and read the most?

I can’t overestimate the importance comic books had for me as a developing reader and writer, especially the Marvel titles of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Doug Moench, Chris Claremont, all played an important role in the formation of my writing, as did Robert E. Howard, to whose fiction I was led by Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian adaptation, and Lloyd Alexander and J.R.R. Tolkien. The writer who first galvanized me, however, who made me feel as if I’d been touched by the Hand of God and set on a mission to do this same thing, was Stephen King, whose Christine I read in paperback the fall of my freshman year of high school, and from which I never looked back. In the three-plus decades since then, I've encountered a few writers who have had a similar impact: Peter Straub, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Henry James, more recently Dickens and Robert Browning. These are the names that come to mind when I think about the writers I’d like to re-read once again. Heaven knows, a number of my contemporaries have evoked a similar response, too, from Laird Barron to Paul Tremblay to Glen Hirshberg to Michael Cisco.

What is your normal writing schedule?

I try to write every day, and to produce at least a page during those one or two hours. I used to get up early in the morning to do this; now, I stay up late into the night.

With echoes of the classroom throughout The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, how has your work as a teacher effected your writing and the stories you choose to write?

“Teaching,” was the answer I gave to my parents when they asked me how I intended to support myself as an adult (since “writing” was never taken seriously as an option). Initially, I planned to teach high school English, but the English professors I had when I started my undergraduate education at SUNY New Paltz convinced me that I should pursue a degree in English, as opposed to education. To be fair, I didn't take much convincing. From the start, I was infatuated with college, and the prospect of remaining in that environment, to pursue literary study and to teach at that level, appealed to me more than I could say. When I began studying for my Master’s degree, also in English, also at New Paltz, I was accepted into the English Department’s teaching assistant program. I was assigned a section of Freshman Composition 1, which I took through fifteen weeks of writing the college-level essay. At the same time, I took a class in and attended weekly meetings dedicated to teaching at the college level. Still, talk about on the job training… Since then, I've taught pretty much every year, with the exception being two semesters I took off when I started taking classes at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I did work towards a Ph.D. I've moved from teaching freshman writing to teaching introductory literature classes, then to teaching more advanced literature classes, and then to teaching creative writing classes.

All of which is to say that teaching has been a crucial, even fundamental, part of my adult life. It’s allowed me to return to certain texts and writers over and over again, and to discuss how a novel such as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier works with a room full of bright, motivated people. It’s helped me to remain aware of the possibilities of style and form available within fiction. The classroom and larger college campus have also served as settings for a number of my stories and my novel, House of Windows. There’s a great diversity of students and faculty at a public university like SUNY New Paltz, a great number of stories swirling around. There are the same conflicts of the human heart that you encounter in any community, any workplace. From the standpoint of setting and character, it’s fertile ground, one that permits me to write about pretty much any type of character or situation I choose.

What is your favorite story in this collection? What is the most personal to you?

It’s funny: I've never thought of the stories in this book in this way. There are things in each of them that I’m pleased with. I do have a soft spot for “The Revel,” because its earliest version marked my return to writing horror fiction after a long time away. I decided to pull out all the stops in writing it, to go for broke, to bring together everything I knew about writing fiction with everything I knew about horror narratives. I read it to my wife, then my girlfriend, when I visited her at Penn State, where she was completing her dissertation. It was the middle of a hot summer, and her apartment had no air conditioning and no TV. She would take breaks in her work, and I would read the next installment to her. I suppose it was part of our courtship. In any event, reflecting on that story returns me to the humid air, the voices of the golfers playing the golf course across the street, the clack and snap of the keyboard.

At 68 pages, the harrowing investigative piece, “Mother of Stone,” could have easily hopped and skipped its way to becoming a novel, and - with the general industry perception that "the novel is king" - I can see a temptation to pad it up a bit to release it as such. What led you to include it in a collection of short form fiction?

The simple answer is, I needed a new story for my collection, and I thought I’d finish this one, which had begun as my intended contribution to Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas’s Haunted Legends anthology. I knew it was going to be long, but it never occurred to me that it might be a novel—possibly because I was already thinking of it as a story. I have written things that have turned out longer than I expected—to be honest, this is true of pretty much every story I've finished. Even the short short pieces turn out longer than I’d planned. And this is how I came to write my first novel, House of Windows, and my (as yet unpublished) second, The Fisherman. Both started as stories that continued to grow. So upon reflection, I suppose “Mother of Stone” could have grown to novel length, but it would have had to do so organically, which, as things turned out, it didn't.

You wink at the true location of several of your tales set in the fictional town of Huguenot. Does the historic - and in many ways, unprecedented - nature of the Huguenot settlement in New Paltz inform any of your work?

Initially, I wrote about New Paltz and its surroundings because I was following the lead of writers like Stephen King and especially Faulkner. I figured if William Faulkner could find sufficient material for a library shelf’s worth of novels and stories in what he called his postage stamp of soil, then so could I. When I began to read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a more serious way, I recognized that he was employing setting in a similar fashion to Faulkner. For both writers, the evocation of their specific places helps to ground their narratives in a realistic context. This helps (I think) the events of each writer’s stories to seem more realistic, themselves, as if they've borrowed some of the belief their settings have evoked in the reader. At the very least, the settings give Faulkner and Lovecraft’s narratives additional resonance. For both writers, setting has a temporal dimension, too, and that sense of history really resonated with me. (My single favorite example of this kind of writing may be William Kennedy’s great novel, Ironweed.) It may be due to growing up in what, for the United States, is one of the older parts of the country. It may also be due to having parents who were from Scotland, and who took the family to visit our relatives there, several times, when I was a kid, and exposed me to a much older culture. And it may have something to do with having been raised Catholic, in a religious tradition with a long and storied history. Probably, it’s for all of these reasons, and more, besides. But even when I think back to my youthful readings of the Conan stories, I remember being fascinated by the conceit that these stories were set in an incredibly ancient version of our world (ditto Tolkien). So while I haven’t (yet) done much with the Huguenots per sé, the history of the region continues to be very important to me.

Keeping with geography, New England and areas north and east of New York City seem to have spawned a library full of supernatural fiction over the years, and most of your stories vibrate with the local topography. What is it about this aesthetically beautiful area that inspires such dark and haunted interpretations? The people? The land? The time period of European colonization?

You might answer, “All of the above.” At the risk of sliding too much into my professor voice: The northeast coast of the United States is among the first parts of the country to be densely settled by European colonists, which means it’s also among the first literary centers of the emerging country. It’s settled in part by people who have an especially grim and frightening view of the world, and who leave that viewpoint as a legacy to subsequent generations. It’s home to many of the writers who comprise the first great movement in American letters, the American Renaissance (which is the American version of the Romantic movement whose English exemplars included Coleridge and Keats). One of the greatest writers of that movement, Nathaniel Hawthorne, writes dozens of brilliant stories and a couple of novels that make use of the New England setting and bring it together with elements of the supernatural. Through an accident of geography, H.P. Lovecraft is born in roughly the same area about two generations after Hawthorne’s death. Of course, Lovecraft was born into a culture whose literature now included Hawthorne. In turn, when Stephen King was born in approximately the same region, he was born into a culture that now included Hawthorne and Lovecraft. And so on. I was born into a culture that included Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and King. There’s a kind of process of literary accretion at work, I suppose. Nor is this unique to the northeastern U.S., anymore: both the American south and California strike me as places that have developed their own considerable traditions of weird fiction.

Five years passed between the publication of your first collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, and The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies. In an impatient age where some writers put out several books a year and readers often demand new material tomorrow, this can be considered a protracted period of time. Was this break between collections deliberate, and/or do you consider yourself a deliberate writer?

It’s a little of column A, a little of column B. I do like to take my time with my writing. When I decided to write seriously, in my mid-twenties, I set myself the goal of completing one page a day. Once I started publishing, I set myself the goal of completing one story per year, which I would have accepted for publication by the time last year’s story appeared. Both of these goals were intended to keep me writing by making the process of writing manageable. They also allowed me time to linger and labor over my fiction, which I did. After I completed my third published story, “Tutorial,” I began work on a story that would become my first novel, and the writing and re-writing of that narrative occupied me for the next several years, which removed from what little audience I’d attracted. I assumed House of Windows would be my first book because, as you pointed out above, there’s a great deal of emphasis placed on the novel as the pre-eminent length for fiction. It took longer to find a publisher for the book than I’d anticipated, however, and in the meantime, Prime Books had a slot open in their publication schedule for a new collection of fiction, and both Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay gave them my name as a possibility. The result of all this was that, just as I was starting to publish short fiction, again, I had two books appear within less than a year of one another, my collection and then my novel. After this, my story writing really started to pick up, as more and more invitations from more and more editors to be part of more and more anthologies found their way to my e-mail’s inbox. Somewhat quickly, I had enough stories for a second collection, which my agent sold in 2011 but which various delays on my part kept from appearing until 2013. As this was going on, I finally finished my second novel, which I’d put off completing in order to write stories. The novel proved to be as hard to sell to the big houses as its predecessor—once again, my agent received replies complimenting the literariness of the book, and explaining that this was why it wasn't going to be published. Which is not to say we've given up on it, only that it will be a bit longer still before it appears. And while I've been focused on selling my next novel, I've continued to write shorter fiction, with the result that I now have enough stories published and forthcoming for another two and a half collections. I’m hopeful the next collection will appear sometime in 2016, and then we’ll see about the others after that.

I guess the point of all this is, I've taken a somewhat scattershot approach to book publication. I’m hoping to be a bit more consistent in that regard, especially when it comes to novels. On the other hand, years after each of my books appeared, they continue to receive notice. There’s a tendency among a lot of writers, especially newer writers, to fret over the fate of their book if it doesn't make a big splash when it’s published, or if it doesn't make year’s best lists, or if it isn't nominated for the relevant awards. I know because I've worried over all these things. Yet my limited experience thus far assures me that, if you do good work, people will find their way to it. Maybe not as quickly as you’d like, but it will happen. So I try to remember that, and keep on writing.

Was the artwork from the always excellent Santiago Caruso commissioned for Carnivorous by Hippocampus, or was it selected by you?

Santiago’s cover was commissioned by me for the book with Hippocampus’s blessing. I owe my discovery of Santiago’s work to the folks at Night Shade Books, who tapped him to do the cover for House of Windows. This led me to his website, which featured a generous sampling of his stunning work. I loved the way his art reached back to someone like Goya, while also invoking the surrealists. I wanted very much to work with him again, so when Derrick Hussey asked me if I had any thoughts on cover artists for The Wide, Carnivorous Sky, I immediately thought of Santiago. To be honest, I think he knocked it out of the park with that cover.

How did you rope Laird Barron into writing the afterword for your collection?

I've been friends with Laird longer than pretty much any other writer I know. I’m pretty sure it was Gordon Van Gelder, who had published my first story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who told me to check out Laird’s first story in the magazine, which appeared the month after mine. Laird and I started corresponding, based on our mutual appreciation of and esteem for one another’s work, and have grown to be good friends since. Laird is the real deal. He’s immensely talented, and restless to take that talent in ever-new directions. He’s one of the hardest working artists I know, and that’s saying something. Predicting the literary future is a mug’s game, but I’ll play it anyway and say that I’m pretty sure Laird’s fiction is going to stand the test of time as well as that of anyone else writing now. So, naturally, I decided to piggyback on his success by asking him to write the afterword to my second collection. Some folks have no use for such things, but I've always loved them, for the glimpse they offer into the writers’ lives, for the insights they can bring to a reader’s understanding. I’ll admit, Laird took the piece in a direction I was not anticipating, much to my delight. But his friendship means the world to me, and I’m happy he was able to be part of the book.

What is your involvement with the Shirley Jackson Awards, and explain to those who might not know how the awards were launched, and why?

With Brett Cox, JoAnn Cox, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay, I’m one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards. To describe the awards, I could do worse than quote the official webpage:

“In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

“The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.”

Basically, the awards were founded because there’s a tremendous amount of great dark fiction being published at all lengths, and it seemed appropriate to us to have another means of recognizing it. The nominations lists are up at the award website, and you could do worse than read through their contents.

As part of our fundraising efforts for the award, we've also partnered with the LitReactor website the last few years to put together a four-week, online class in writing horror fiction. It’s taught by four instructors—one per week—each of whom tackles a different aspect of writing horror.

What is you take on the modern state of horror and Weird fiction? Do you think that a proliferation of avenues to print publication - in additional to the rise of self and electronic publishing - has helped or harmed contemporary speculative fiction?

It seems to me that, in many ways, horror fiction is doing as well as it ever has, maybe even better. You have writers such as King, Straub, and Campbell, continuing to produce vibrant and exciting work. You have writers such as Laird Barron, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay, who are starting to come into their own as powers in the field. And you have newer writers, such as Mike Griffin, Usman Tanveer Malik, and Molly Tanzer, who are making a real splash. It also seems a bit easier for work in the horror field to be taken seriously by a wider audience. A lot of the fiction that has been important to the field is being brought back into print by presses like Valancourt and Tough Times. Due to the internet, it’s easier for writers working in the field to communicate with one another. If there’s one downside to the present moment, it’s that the major publishers remain cautious about publishing horror fiction in the way that they used to. From that perspective, the smaller houses have played an important role in allowing writers such as Chesya Burke, Michael Cisco, and Livia Llewelyn to find a home for their work.

I count you as one of the most inspirational figures working in Weird fiction today, as I always feel positive and fired up to create after hearing or reading one of your interviews. Not to put you on the spot, but any words of advice for writers, both new and veteran? Any advice for readers?

For writers, I’d offer two pieces of advice: write, and practice patience. Specifically, work on your fiction. If you’re doing anything else—posting on Twitter, posting on Facebook, blogging, engaging in lengthy online debates—you aren't writing fiction. Fiction takes time, and is challenging. Social media is quick, and is easy. The temptation to indulge one at the expense of the other is obvious. Resist it. You don’t want to fall into the trap of confusing having an active presence on social media with having a writing career. What’s more, it takes a while, sometimes a long while, for a story or book to find its audience. (I talked about this above.) Don’t lose heart. Keep writing. Eventually, good work finds its way to its audience.

For readers, I’d ask you to continue to try to read writers who are new to you. I know that money can be tight, and there’s already so much to read by writers you know and like, but once in a while, take a chance on something unfamiliar. And whatever you read, when you like something, please let other people know. For me as a writer, there’s still no bigger thrill than seeing folks recommending my work to other readers.

What's next for John Langan? What new projects do you have cooking, or possibly on the horizon?

My third collection will be forthcoming from Hippocampus Press in (I think) early 2016; the working title for it is Sefira and Other Betrayals. My agent continues to work on finding a home for my second novel. I’m wrapping up a number of story commitments, and hope to begin work on my next novel over the summer.

If this matters to you, and not to be morbid, but what do you want to leave behind as your legacy as a writer (or as an individual)?

I would like my wife and sons to know that I loved them, and that I tried to be the best husband and father I could be. I would like my friends to remember me as loyal and kind. I would like my readers to continue reading and talking about my fiction, and I would like it to continue to engage and entertain them, to reward their time.

Thank you so much for your time, John.

Thank you, Ted, for such fine questions, and to you and your readers for reading them.

Publishing News - 'Return of the Prodigy' to be published in CTHULHU FHTAGN!, the new Lovecraftian anthology from Ross E. Lockhart and Word Horde, slated for August 2015 debut

2015-04-28T18:01:00.001-07:00

Cover art by Adolfo Navarro/cover design by Scott R. Jones

Every story sale is cause for celebration. Every single one, every single time. How can it not be? I simply cannot imagine ever becoming jaded to the circumstance where a publisher read and enjoyed your story to such an extent that they not only want to put it in their book that will be marketed around the world, but they also want to pay you money for the right to showcase your writing, in hopes that it will earn them money in return. That's heady stuff, be it your first story sale or your 101st.

And while I have loved and felt blessed for each story sale in the past, placing a story with certain editors and publishers give one an extra thrill, due to the quality of their books, their track record and conduct in the industry, and the esteem in which you hold them.

Such is the case with Ross E. Lockhart and his not-so-new-anymore press Word Horde, which is rapidly becoming THE place for the best in Weird, horror, Lovecraftian, and just generally dark fiction. And, in what will mark my third appearance in a Lockhart/Word Horde project, I am extremely proud to announce that my story "Return of the Prodigy" will be published this August, 2015 in Cthulhu Fhtagn!, the newest anthology of Lovecraftian fiction following in that cosmic slug trail of bar-setting quality blazed by Lockhart's first two Book(s) of Cthulhu, which were released during his enviable run at Night Shade Books.

"Return of the Prodigy" follows two middle-age vacationers from Omaha, Nebraska, as they journey to the discount resort island of Walakea in the South Pacific to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary, and find more than just a bargain waiting for them on the black sand beaches. I enjoyed writing the tale, as it's pulpy, a bit humorous, and interwoven with satire of a specific type of people that I know so well. I've written a lot of comedy in my career, but not much recently. It was good to stretch those muscles a little with this story.

You can pre-order Cthulhu Fhtagn! right here in this very spot. In the meantime, check out the recently released ToC, which includes genre veterans and relative newcomers, as well as some of the finest names working in speculative fiction and horror - cosmic or otherwise - today:

Table of Contents

Introduction: In His House at R’lyeh… – Ross E. Lockhart
The Lightning Splitter – Walter Greatshell
Dead Canyons – Ann K. Schwader
Delirium Sings at the Maelstrom Window – Michael Griffin
Into Ye Smoke-Wreath’d World of Dream – W. H. Pugmire
The Lurker In the Shadows – Nathan Carson
The Insectivore – Orrin Grey
The Body Shop – Richard Lee Byers
On a Kansas Plain – Michael J. Martinez
The Prince of Lyghes – Anya Martin
The Curious Death of Sir Arthur Turnbridge – G. D. Falksen
Aerkheim’s Horror – Christine Morgan
Return of the Prodigy – T.E. Grau
The Curse of the Old Ones – Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington
Love Will Save You – Cameron Pierce
Assemblage Point – Scott R. Jones
The Return of Sarnath – Gord Sellar
The Long Dark – Wendy N. Wagner
Green Revolution – Cody Goodfellow
Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form – Laird Barron

From the publisher:

PREORDER NOW – SHIPS IN AUGUST! The Cthulhu Fhtagn! trade paperback is signed by editor Ross E. Lockhart and comes with a free eBook in your selected format. The eBook will be emailed to you when available. If you would like your paperback personalized, please include your personalization in the Order Notes box on the Checkout page.

Editing News: STRANGE AEONS Issue #16 now available, featuring comics, interviews, 'The Shunned House' film download, and new short fiction by Molly Tanzer and Lon Prater

2015-04-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

Cover by Mohloco

In addition to my writing endeavors, I also am the Fiction Editor for a fabulous little magazine known as Strange Aeons.

Through the years, we have showcased some of the best in cosmic, horror, Weird, and Lovecraftian fiction, comics, news, and reviews, and our upcoming issue is no exception.

I am honored to announce the inclusion of two new, previously unpublished pieces of fantastical fiction in our most recent edition, Issue #16. Molly Tanzer's "One Hot Chapatha" is a slice of capacious fantasy with such complete characters, creatures, and geographies that it seems ripped from a novel or book series. I really dig this piece, and is the first bit of pure fantasy that I've accepted for publication in Strange Aeons. Lon Prater's "Elder Brother" has a Kafkaesque flavor to it, seasoned with Wells and Lovecraft, its strange, totalitarian setting as futuristic as it is antiquarian. Both tales are fine additions to the Strange Aeons canon, and we are proud to bring them to you, our dear and gentle and slightly unhinged readers.

As for the rest of the issue, please see this recent release from SA Central:

We're kicking off the year in style with a truly amazing cover by the incomparable Mohloco! You can check out more of his artwork here.

56 pages of gorgeous B&W and Color Comics by Rob Corless, Brandon Barrows, Shelby Denham, and Eric York! Short Story Fiction by both Lon Prater and Molly Tanzer! Articles, Columns, Reviews and so much more can be found waiting inside, including interviews with the HP Lovecraft Historical Society and (the musical) Dr. Hill himself, Jesse Merlin!

And if that wasn't enough... for a limited time... you can watch or download your very own copy of Maelstrom Production's award-winning film, THE SHUNNED HOUSE !!!

And as an added bonus, a Lobby Card for the same film!

Issue #16, back issues, t-shirts, prints, and special editions can be purchased by prancing down this rabbit hole right here.

TC Book Review: Following up on his award-winning debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud continues dark excellence with novella 'The Visible Filth,' now available from This Is Horror

2015-04-03T12:31:00.001-07:00

Cover by Pye Parr

Very little of what is classified as horror fiction or contemporary Weird fiction scares me, and that's okay, because I don't read this style of literature to be frightened. I don't like to be frightened. Truly terrified. Who does, really, if we are being totally honest with ourselves? There are plenty of undertakings one can pursue if genuine fear (not thrills, or shock) is the end result, and I don't see me or anyone else I know heading down those paths, either in a literal or metaphorical sense.

Instead, I read this style of fiction for the wonder of it all, and while the atmospherics can sometimes be unsettling, they usually just end up being cool, or interesting, or awe-inspiring in their fantastical rendering. But in terms of true terror, that is reserved for the decidedly non-fiction realm of real life monsters that burn down villages and break into your homes and hunt women and defile children and devour innocence like they're on some sort of infernal time clock. For all but the true believers, supernatural fiction is fantasy, and fantasy is never scary, as how could something that is admittedly not real serve as a threat to the safety and well being of me and my loved ones?

But Nathan Ballingrud, who does write horror and Weird fiction as well or better than anyone else tapping the keys today, is straight-up scary. Not him personally, as he's a lovely fellow. But the people, places, and things he unleashes onto the page can often be horrifying in all the full-bodied definition of the word. And I like it. My Lord, do I ever like it.

Perhaps its the sense of authenticity of the characters and settings, both of which wear the weight of imperfection like a favorite pair of jeans. Most likely, this conjuring of discomfort from within the reader comes from the way deeply buried human flaws are exhumed, dissected, and laid bare to the humid air, then left there for all to witness, without apology. The abomination of the cut wide human soul. That's unsettling stuff, and that's what Ballingrud writes, like the Larry David or Ricky Gervais of dark fiction. Squirms coated with gooseflesh.

After wowing the horror fiction world in 2013 with the release of his debut collection North American Lake Monsters, which earned him nothing less than a Shirley Jackson Award and the fierce admiration of his peers, Ballingrud continues to build his lasting legacy of pitch black, uncomfortable fiction with his new novella The Visible Filth, published by This Is Horror (an outfit I hadn't heard of prior to ordering this book, but will return to as a customer based on the professionalism and care provided by owner and managing editor Michael Wilson). This is a taut story, shot through with suspense that binds together the strips of shapeless horror of seemingly everyday people and circumstances like a filthy quilt sew with piano wire.

The story is set in New Orleans, but it could be a slice of life in any city or small town where there are bars and college students and eroding relationships. And roaches. And cell phones. This is horror with a firm sense of place, but it is also universal enough that you can feel it churning on your neighborhood block. The evils done and the threats posed aren't ripped from a pulp mag. They could be taken from the morning paper, from text drenched in terrified mystery.

None of the four main characters are incredibly likable, nor fully happy, which seems an honest appraisal of life amongst twenty- and thirty-somethings dwelling in and around the bar scene, no matter the zip code. The leads are flighty and morose and devoted to self medication, spiritually empty in that vaguely nihilistic way of slacker narcissists. A love triangle threatens to destroy an already unstable square, but before this can happen, a random act of violence in a dingy barroom is all that it takes to link a hidden vein of depravity into the group, and plunge these players into a glistening black tunnel that unspools in front of them, the ghastly terminus unknown.

The Visible Filth, like much of Ballingrud's exceptional writing, is an exercise in indefinable - but somehow familiar - horror beyond our control, or even our explanation. Monstrous things are happening just below the veneer of normal life, and all you can do is watch. And you do watch, despite revulsion, and despite your shame. The fact that you like it unlocks something inside you, and you sit, at a bedside, the roaches gathering patiently, and you wait for what is coming.

Nathan Ballingrud is an American writer of horror and dark fantasy. His first book, the short story collection North American Lake Monsters, was published in 2013 by Small Beer Press to great acclaim, including winning the Shirley Jackson Award and being shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker awards. He lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter.