I first encountered the work of M. John Harrison in the form of “Egnaro” when it appeared in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.  I knew immediately that I had found something special, even if I was more than a little late to the party, and ever since it has served as a kind of model for what I think is meant by the term weird fiction at its most nuanced.   “Egnaro — in the beginning at least — hides itself in the interstices, the empty moments of your life.”  You Should Come with Me Now, the author’s latest collection, continues to explore similar territory with an eclectic group of stories united by a powerful imagination finely tuned to the inexplicable quiet forces that propel lives through their existence, often branching off unawares into another lurking nearby.

The collection’s subtitle is the deceptively unspecific, “Stories of Ghosts,” and ghosts in their most elusive sense are indeed a unifying element of the collection.  They’re not always the remnants of humans or other creatures that were once living, however.  Sometimes ghosts are architectures and pathways that have been or will be abandoned, hints of ideas yet to be breathed into life but which have a preternatural ability to be articulated, strange loops whose antecedents can never be traced, rootless leftovers of a deconstructed subject-object ourobouros.  The devil is in the details, as a brief flash of an image might show up that harkens to a prior story, expanding the world of each through allusion and serving to recontextualize events in profound ways.  Harrison consistently bends his prose style in service of confounding the subject-object relationship and holding a microscope to the uncertainties that come of it.  Passive voice, second-person, deliberately ambiguous referents, all are used effectively to tell tales whose effect is not only that of unsettlement but also sympathy, not merely strange but also familiar.  The story “Psychoarchaeology,” which follows workers surveying for remains of deceased British royals in parody of historical relic-selling practices, is one of the many interesting examples that purposely undermines the idea of the subject, cause/effect, and the historicity implied by such:

“It’s as if our obsession with dead Royals has in itself made them available in such numbers.  Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this?…It’s certainly not possible to learn from them.  All they mean to us is what we want them to mean.  To claim we can learn from them because they had, at base, the same emotions as us, the same satisfactions, the same fears, the same ‘needs’, is in itself a projection.  They aren’t the past in any material sense:  brought to light, they’re what they are now, not what they were then.  At best they’re a geological resource, not perhaps as valuable as coal, but more easily available…”

A Rain of Silent Objects

YSCwMN opens with “Lost and Found,” a vignette indexing items in a restaurant in a half-state of abandonment, cataloging objects that may have been left behind yet are still in use by persons unseen. A lively emptiness.  So much of Harrison’s work, particularly earlier in the 2010s with the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, has pushed the subgenre of the “Big Dumb Object” story into new territory, and the kitschy lack of obvious utility of the objects cataloged here and elsewhere hint at a history not to be uncovered but that shapes the ways the reader might uncover the selves that populate the stories. This piece and others of similar length, some a mere half-page, act as a chorus to set the tone, a kind of guidebook for a postcyberpunk hauntology through which move the stories’ human inhabitants.  Some of these vignettes feel incomplete on their own, but taken as a part of the whole collection they render more vivid the lengthier, character(ish)-driven stories.  One of the strongest, “Rockets from the Suburbs,” is a master-class in getting mileage out of each word and sentence.  It reads like a prose poem of sorts, with compact sentences describing a suburb until the author deftly shifts perspective in a way that recontextualizes not only the scene we’re reading about but also the medium itself.  His scene is set with brisk, compact phrases and directives, descriptions of noises ambient and specific, and “Against this, the tendency of things to be.”

Another vignette, “Places You Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself,” might well serve as a thematic centerpiece for the collection.  A kind of litany of missed opportunities and subjectless sentences, it kept returning to me as I was reading about the more robustly developed characters in stories like “Yummie” and “The Good Detective,” two of the strongest pieces.  “Yummie” follows the dreamlike life of a heart attack patient, Short, during his surgery and subsequent months, during which he has regular encounters with strange people who may be spirits that serve as a counterpoint to his inability to recount a cohesive narrative of his own life.  “When Short failed to answer — because this was not a past he could recognise, let alone own or identify with in any degree — he waved one hand dismissively and seemed to fade a little.”  “Yummie” is one of the more meditative pieces in the collection, and its success comes down to a quiet ambiguity that is unique to Harrison’s work and underscores many other stories in YSCwMN.

You Have to Get Away From It All

Characters living mundane lives that they’re unable to reconcile with themselves recur in most stories, but it’s a theme that does not end up feeling recycled.  “Cicisbeo,” another of the strongest works here and alluded to in “Yummie,” follows a man who gets drawn back into the life of a former romantic interest, who has since started a family while he still wishes to rekindle their passion.  Lizzie’s husband, Tim, has retreated to the attic and become steadily more withdrawn, even as a new baby arrives and the narrator is pressured into progressively more uncomfortable interventions.  As the story develops, Harrison succeeds at eliciting a sense of malaise that will show up in many other stories and which drives Tim to seek escape from the life he thought he wanted, and the author resolves this perpetual retreat in spectacular fashion.

Readers of Harrison’s blog will also find some dysfamiliar settings in Autotelia and the Ambiente Hotel, his oft-visited cousins-apparent of the Strugatskys’ Zone.  “In Autotelia” brings us what may well be a passing reference to “Egnaro” in its focus on two people seated across from one another on a train to a strange destiny/ation, a kind of alternate present divided from their England by a mysterious polluted zone that once was called Norwich. Autotelia, we learn, is populated in part by “teenagers dressed up as people who have an aching sense of how to be a teenager,” another relationship between subject and object confounded by their own verbing.  In Autotelia we find shops mostly empty, as in “Lost and Found,” save for sparse items dismissed as “kitsch” by outsiders.  In Autotelia, the narrator conducts required examinations to check for deformities and perhaps other unspecified maladies preparatory to Autotelians transitioning to “our side of things.”  But although the mysterious Autotelia is a strong presence in the background, it serves to highlight Harrison’s interest in the lives of “ordinary people” that shows up in so many of these fictions.

The most interesting exploration of Autotelia in YSCwMN is “Cave & Julia,” which concerns the relationship between a journalist and an actress whose brother was “lost” long ago at a mysterious site of significance to a culture long gone.  The brother’s disappearance at the site creates a paradox of identity that affects both of the eponymous characters, and is perhaps one of the best realizations of Harrison’s interest in the destabilization of identity.  The story’s main theme is carefully set up with a deceptively simple statement that doubles as part of Julia’s history: “They [people] knew her founding narrative — the loss of her brother and the subsequent prosecution for manslaughter.”  As she recounts seeing her brother’s apparition in the wake of his disappearance, he’s described as “just one of the fictions that lives here.”  As Cave grapples with his own inexplicable experience of ancient site, Harrison plots out a life from a telescoped point of view whose focal points now feel different from the life he was supposed to lead, and although this development stems from an encounter with something uncanny, its effects feel all too anchored to the real world.  In a sense, a new life has been constructed:

“He felt his surfaces change and soften, but detected beneath them a concreted layer of debris, an identity he could date very accurately to his struggle across the cloister, a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.”

Humor shines through more strongly in YSCwMN than in previous works of Harrison’s fiction with which I’m familiar, and it is often deployed to highlight rather than diminish the quiet strangeness that unites these stories. For all the subtlety found in these inner lives and routine pedestrian routes, we also have shocking and absurd dreams of decapitations en masse that may or may not be hilarious, and Elf Lord expats from forgotten secondary fantasy worlds flipping through cable TV channels.  Most of the time, the humor works, though on occasion it features more prominently in stories or vignettes in a way that causes them to feel a little underdeveloped in comparison to the bulk of the collection.

We Live in the Thinnest of Worlds

What interests me perhaps the most about Harrison’s fiction is his ability to craft a tale of unsettlement whose effects are rooted in processes of creation, transition, and recontextualization more so than suspense or the prospect of violence as a catalyst for change.  The architecture of a staircase of cosmic dimensions jutting into the ether, uncanny constructs exerting themselves on a person’s identity from deep in the past or future, “cultural stresses” leaping beyond the boundaries of their medium to transform the observer: such story elements all put me in mind of an Egnaro conjured into a state of probable-being by a bystander hearing its qualities uttered. These imaginative devices are skillfully written as mere half-steps from the architectures we pass without comment on the street every day, rendered all the more convincing by faithfully capturing the minutiae of human experience that we so often struggle to convey to one another but which comprise our “empty moments.”

Seldom are there straightforward problems and answers posed in these stories, but the enigmas within are rich, imaginative, and realized with a degree of precision and insight that is hard to find anywhere else.  I’ll conclude by returning again to “Egnaro” for the best summation I feel I could provide of You Should Come with Me Now:  “It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible will gall you forever.”  Each story in YSCwMN reveals another small part of the outline, leaving just enough to allow the artfully unstated to thrive within and remain with the reader.  As Lucas says in “Egnaro”: “we all love a mysterious country.”

The post The Ghosts of Empty Moments appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Cover of The Stay-Awake Men and Other Unstable Entities by Dave Felton

Matthew M. Bartlett is the author of The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities, Gateways to Abomination, and other books of supernatural horror. His short stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies, including Lost Signals, A Breath from the Sky, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 3, and the forthcoming Darker Companions, a tribute to Ramsey Campbell. He lives in a small brick house on a quiet, leafy street with his wife Katie Saulnier and their cats Phoebe, Peachpie, and Larry. This week we’re reprinting “Spettrini” from his latest collection, The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities. We recently spoke with Bartlett to find out a little more about a strange place called Leeds, some of the ideas that make his fiction tick, and a few other things.

Weird Fiction Review: For anyone who might not be aware, all or most of your fiction revolves around the town of Leeds, Mass., to which there is much more than meets the eye. What is the appeal for you of using Leeds as a central setting for your fiction?  Do stories that don’t mention a specific location also take place there?

Matthew M. Bartlett: I started out writing about Leeds, and it’s sort of stuck. Leeds started out as a thinly veiled version of Northampton, where I live, but as I went on, I added elements from other New England locales where I’ve lived and worked and visited. Williamsburg and Montague and Shelburne Falls and Fitchburg. Simsbury, Connecticut. East Hartford, where I grew up. Every story I write expands the borders of Leeds a little.

Stories that don’t mention a specific location are not Leeds, or not necessarily Leeds.

I’ve also started writing stories set in a place called Hulse, which is my version of Hull, Massachusetts, and Nantasket Beach. It’s a lovely, quiet beach south of Boston, and its boardwalk is a little run down, with shuttered shops and disused arcades. Don’t get me wrong, it also has ice cream places and clam shacks and great restaurants, but my version is a little more decayed. I still haven’t settled on what exactly is happening in Hulse, which is part of the fun of exploring it in new stories.

WFR: Decay of landscape and human-made artifice, whether urban, suburban, or rural, seems a particularly enduring theme that runs through weird fiction.  Can you share with us what you find compelling about such imagery, as both reader and writer?

MB: I guess it’s probably a cliché by now, isn’t it, but it’s hard to get away from when you’re working in horror and the weird. It’s about aging, ultimately, moving toward death. Obsolescence and entropy and the inherent instability of all objects and all systems. Impending annihilation. It’s also maybe about laziness and neglect and destructiveness on the part of humanity, born of hopelessness or baseness. Plus, on the face of it, a certain kind of decay can be beautiful. It lends a necessary atmosphere.

WFR: I can’t help but notice that, accompanying death and decay in some of your stories, there is also a tendency toward depictions of pageantry, illusion, costuming, and similar representations of the carnivalesque.  For example, “Spettrini” and “Rangel,” the latter of which was included in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 3, contain these kinds of ritualized spectacle. Do you feel there is any sort of thematic relationship between revelry and decay in your fiction, or in a more general sense?

MB: I think the two often coexist in my stories, but they’re not necessarily intertwined. Leeds is not a decaying city, or, if it is, it’s only at the beginning of the process of putrefaction. The pageantry there speaks more to the fact that the “evil” or whatever you’d want to call it, is essentially institutionalized and celebrated, and that fact is very thinly veiled. In Hulse, it’s a similar story, but that city is, let’s say, in the middle of the process of putrefaction. There, the celebrants, whether they be raucous party-goers in the houses that line the cliff-face, or audiences at the ritualistic wrestling matches in the crumbling storefront venue, are in a sense worshiping decay and dissolution and erosion.

WFR: In addition to WXXT, the possessed radio station in the Leeds of your stories, your work was also included in one of last year’s strongest anthologies, Lost Signals, which features tales revolving around the idea of the uncanny media transmission.  In your opinion, are there any ways in which the use of this plot device is fundamentally different in today’s media landscape versus how it’s used in one of the classics that relies on it, such as H.F. Arnold’s “The Night Wire” ?  What makes this such an effective device in horror fiction?

MB: My use of the strange or occult transmission has largely been limited to so-called terrestrial radio, as it’s a seeming anachronism, an unlikely survivor in the age of the Internet. It’s a still living corpse, a thing from the past that by rights should be dead. Satellite Radio sits aside it, but hasn’t supplanted it. I think the idea is irresistible and evocative because it allows for pirate radio, transmissions that are unfettered, free of manipulation by powerful entities of religion or government. The forbidden always has allure, and I think in particular the transmission of sound alone triggers the imagination in wondrous ways. You see this in horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, where a lot of the fear comes from sound. You never see the witch, but you might just leave the theater thinking that you had. It’s maybe part of my provincialism, but I also like the idea that radio has a limited reach. That horrible thing you’re hearing…it’s near.

WFR: You’ve recently had work appear in Letters of Decline: Four Tales of Job Interview Horror.  Your story, “Night Dog”, also struck me as a great example of the corporate horror subgenre.  It seems to me that one of the most potent points at which the horror of the corporate and the cosmic overlap is the significant difference in power between protagonist and corporation or protagonist and fictitious antagonizing cosmic force.  Would you agree with that characterization as it relates to the themes in your own fiction?  Could an effective weird tale be written from the perspective of the side with greater power?

MB: I would agree with that characterization, yes. The protagonist, particularly the non-management “worker bee,” is subject to the will of the corporation, and to its whims. In a lot of cases, the worker bee may encounter a sociopath of a manager, or an inept manager, or a company whose actual goal differs significantly and in sinister or corrupt ways from its stated goal. Corporate horror fiction can either magnify these (and other) scenarios or else put them in front of a funhouse mirror.

I do think an effective weird tale can be written from the standpoint of the entity with more power. Let’s say the goal of the company is a worthy one, and the worker bee begins to undermine it, either subtly or overtly. Separate from that, in any company there are difficult employees, people who don’t want to do their jobs. They can react in unpredictable ways when confronted.

WFR: There’s an apparent fondness for debauchery and excess that comes through in your work, though it’s treated with a sense of dry humor and absurdity.  Do you find it a challenge to maintain a balance and keep such matters operating in service of the story?  How do you view the role of humor in the context of a weird tale?

MB: Excess and debauchery are just fun to write. While I like some “quiet horror,” I prefer to write alarming, loud, gauche scenes of technicolor horror, which are in and of themselves absurd.

As to striking the correct balance, I wish I had an answer for this question that was more analytical, but the fact is I write largely on instinct. The humor finds its way in on the first draft, which in many cases is done almost like automatic writing. No filter, no second-guessing, just writing. If the balance works out, and it works to serve the story, it’s little more than luck. Or, more accurately, it means that my initial instincts were worth trusting. If it doesn’t work, it’s easily excised.

I sometimes like a little humor with my horror, not necessarily to provide a respite for the reader, and not necessarily to add levity, but to deepen the horror or to cause the reader to laugh when he or she would rather not. Quentin Tarantino does this with violence and humor, I think.

A lot of humor comes, of course, from surprise, like a sentence not ending quite like you thought it would. So both the reaction of laughter and the reaction of horror, or even just being thrown off-balance, are results of being forced to suddenly confront the unexpected.

WFR: Can you share with us an example of a story you enjoy that you would consider effective “quiet horror”?  What makes it stand out to you, given your own creative preferences are somewhat in contrast?

MB: Look at the title story of Michael Wehunt’s Greener Pastures. Two men, truckers, sit in a lonesome diner in the middle of nowhere, talking to one another about something that lives in the dark spaces in the world. One by one, the scant lights that illuminate the parking lot go out. There’s a little more to it than that, but it’s one of the most effective horror stories I’ve read on the “quiet” end of the horror spectrum. I like its simplicity, the slow creep of dread and disquiet. I could as readily cite stories by, say, Michael Griffin, Daniel Mills, Kristi DeMeester, countless others. I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like quiet horror. Some of my newer stories might qualify for that designation themselves.

WFR: Before your collections with Dunhams Manor and Muzzleland Press, you self-published Gateways to Abomination to favorable reviews in various places that readers of weird fiction might have come across, such as Arkham Digest.  Is there any advice you’d pass on to people trying to determine whether or not to self-publish?

MB: Someone just starting out? Don’t do it. Do anything but. Submit to anthologies and magazines first, and aim high. If you get rejected, keep trying. Try to improve. Do the basics of what those articles about writing tell you to do, like reading widely and writing daily. Learn patience. You’ll need it.

If you must self-publish, make sure it’s something unique. There’s a lot for readers to choose from right now, so standing out is vital.

Also, show your writing to people who will give you an honest opinion. A writing group, maybe. Someone who isn’t afraid to hurt your feelings.

Next, the obvious advice. Don’t skimp on cover art and design. A bad cover suggests a writer unconcerned with quality. People will reject it out of hand. And if you can’t get an editor, at least get proofreaders. Plural. Experienced if possible, not just your friend down the street. Even with three, I still found a few typos and incorrect words after publication. (With Print-On-Demand, you can fix those).

Behave yourself on social media. Writers and editors and publishers talk with one another about bad behavior, and they post about it online. Learn from them. Most of it is just common sense and basic decency. Some of it, you have to learn. But it’s not advanced calculus, you can learn it pretty quickly.

Be prepared to promote yourself. Do it judiciously on your own page, and only with permission in groups and on other people’s pages. If there’s a thread where someone asks for recommendations, holy hell, don’t recommend your own book, not even if you try to make a winking joke of it. Promote others, too. We’re in this together. If you love a book, let people know.

If you’ve got all these covered, try not to get too defensive when people blithely insult self-publishing. That’s a hard one for me, I admit.

WFR: You recently collaborated with illustrator and game designer Yves Tourigny.  Can you tell us a bit about it and how the project came about?  Were there any challenges you’ve faced that differ from working solo?

MB: In mid-December, Yves sent me a Facebook message. It read, I think we should collaborate this year on a Leeds advent calendar for next December — micro-fiction + illustrations, one a day for the entire month. A physical product. He followed up with an email with more details — a limited-edition advent calendar with perforated pages you tear open to unseal each story/illustration — and suggestions for story arcs. He’d produce the chapbooks himself, with a more standard paperback/ebook to follow a little later, available on Amazon and other online outlets.

My method for writing the twenty-five pieces actually hearkens back to the writing of Gateways to Abomination, except this time around I imposed on myself a more rigid schedule. I wrote whatever I felt like writing, unfettered. I sent the stories as I wrote them, with Yves sending back illustrations based on what I’d written. Writing this way, as opposed to writing a more firmly structured story to try to sell to this or that anthology, feels less like work and more like fun. The stories are not as thematically cohesive as Gateways, but there are a lot of ideas that link them up in interesting ways. I’m fiercely proud of the work. I think it’s some of the best stuff I’ve done. I’ve also had a great time essentially forcing Yves to draw horrifying and disgusting things. That’s a tertiary pleasure.

WFR: Last of all, what were some of your gateways to the weird that most shaped your reading and writing life?

MB: When I was young, my parents report that when the Count appeared on Sesame Street, I would slowly back away out of the room, keeping my eye on him the whole time. Not long after that, I was in a local store called Paperback Booksmith and I looked at a big, glossy book about the Universal Monsters, and I was fascinated. My parents got me the book and I wouldn’t leave it alone until the pages started falling out. When I was twelve, my grandfather, knowing I liked horror, bought me the novelization of The Omen. So there’s your foundation. The biggie, though, was reading King’s Christine, which my grandmother gave me when I was thirteen. In college I detoured through the Beat poets, Hunter Thompson, Salinger, Philip Larkin, Mark Strand, and many others. After, around the time I started writing Gateways, I was reading and rereading Lovecraft, Aickman, and Ligotti, and listening to strange radio broadcasts by Joe Frank. I’m also influenced by music: Nick Cave, The Damned, Warren Zevon, again, countless others. So all that is in the mix. After a while, I couldn’t help but start writing.

The post Gateways to the Weird: An Interview with Matthew M. Bartlett appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

WFR: What was life like in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto? What sort of influence did it have on your life and work?

Nadia Bulkin: I was only in Indonesia for three months after Suharto resigned — my father, who was Indonesian, had died suddenly two months prior to his resignation, and my mother, who is American, decided she needed to return to the United States. What I did see was an outpouring of truth-telling — my elementary school teachers would spontaneously make previously-taboo political statements in the middle of class, and I remember thinking: I thought everyone loved Suharto, but it turns out everyone hated him. It was like the entire country was letting loose a scream it had been holding in for years. And it was frightening, to go from the “safety” of authoritarian control to chaos. A lot of my academic work has focused on this period of transition, because I’m interested in national transformation and because a lot of people did not expect Indonesia to survive in one piece. There’s definitely something about trying to endure in the face of total disruption and destruction that is very close to horror. And a lot of my Indonesia-based fiction — like “Endless Life” in She Said Destroy, or “Wish You Were Here,” which was published in Nightmare Magazine last year — is about dealing with terrible long-buried truths that get upturned after a major societal shift.

WFR: What was your introduction to horror and weird fiction?

NB: I always really liked horror (more on that below) — I devoured Goosebumps, then moved onto Stephen King (Pet Sematary was my favorite). It was more of a guilty pleasure until I read Shirley Jackson, who changed everything for me (I was most moved by Hangsaman) — her work is so substantial, and unforgivingly dark. Very bold, very true to her truths, and to me that’s what writing horror is actually all about. I didn’t start reading weird fiction as it’s typically defined until I was trying to publish horror stories in the middle of the Lovecraft boom (I started with William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland), but a lot of the modern classics I grew up with had strains of the weird too. A Passage to India revolves around what I’d argue is an incident of the ultra-weird. The Sheltering Sky goes full surreal in Part III. I loved stuff like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “In The Penal Colony.” A lot of British children’s lit, like The Jungle Book and Peter Pan and The Wind in the Willows, has undercurrents of the beyond-the-beyond, and those were the parts I latched onto as a kid — Shere Khan and the Great God Pan.

WFR: What is Indonesian horror like? Is it mostly in films or are there also books or other publications?

NB: Horror is part of the cultural fabric of Indonesia, because spirits are part of the cultural fabric of Indonesia. Every house has spirits; the only difference is whether they’re good or bad. Everyone knows at least a handful of people (if not way more) who will attest to having seen a ghost. Certain places are simply known to be haunted, and avoided; there’s a lot of fear-mongering about the use of curses and nefarious witch doctors (dukun sihir). My exposure to it was mostly in film, but I sometimes read short ghost stories in teen magazines. It’s mostly vengeful and grotesque female ghosts and black magic, with some demonic evil thrown in for good measure. It’s very intense, melodramatic, almost histrionic — a lot of it is sort of comedic, or absurd; at the same time, there are a couple archetypal ghosts that I can’t talk about because they freak me out so much. There’s also a tendency to try to make fictional horror more powerful and real through urban legend — production studios push rumors that someone died of fear in an early screening of a horror movie and now the movie (or the movie theater!) is cursed.  

WFR: Can you tell us about She Said Destroy? When were these stories written? Are they all reprints or are there stories original to the collection?

NB: She Said Destroy is my debut collection from Word Horde, featuring twelve stories that were published between 2008–2015 and one original, “No Gods, No Masters.” Aside from horror, the two main threads that I wanted to braid together were female voices and socio-political issues, mostly about governance and history and the lies that communities tell themselves.

WFR: One of my favorites in the collection was the opening story, “Intertropical Convergence Zone.” Where did you get the idea for this story? How did it develop?

NB: I was reading about the psychic rituals and political machinations that both Suharto and Sukarno used to do to help ensure their continued hold on power, and decided to make the symbolic literal (because that’s kind of what ritualistic magic is all about, right, representation?). I had also been reading about General Abdul Haris Nasution, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt but lost his young daughter in the attack — six Army generals ended up murdered, Communists were blamed, and that led to the 1965 anti-Communist killings that resulted in the deaths of likely at least a million people. Despite his personal tragedy, Nasution immediately went to work helping Suharto maneuver into power — his daughter is very lovingly memorialized as a martyr, and “Intertropical Convergence Zone” spiraled out of that. The “no duh” reality of authoritarian regimes is that they aren’t as black and white as you might think — people like the Lieutenant feel that they are working toward the greater good, even if it means doing awful things sometimes, even if it means immense personal sacrifice. Even monsters have devotees.

WFR: Some of your stories feature a political or military figure that looms, often supernaturally over the lives of other characters. Is there a direct relationship for you between the political and cosmic in weird fiction? If so, how would you summarize the link between those concerns?

NB: That’s a really interesting question that I hadn’t thought of before, but I think you’re right — when you’re in an authoritarian regime you are probably about as powerless as the average human in a cosmic horror story. Power imbalance, and how different types of people respond to it, is one of the things that interests me the most about cosmic horror: do you shut down, do you try to find a way to fight it, do you worship it instead? Because in the eyes of the regime — in the eyes of some looming Outer God — you’re either fuel for the engine or an acolyte. And of course the sad thing about victimized communities — communities that have been oppressed and denied agency — is that they become accustomed to being under someone’s thumb, which is why so many former colonies become dictatorships. So I think it’s worth asking the question: does an American respond to the appearance of an Outer God the same way an Indonesian would?

WFR: “Endless Life” is a particularly complex and interesting tale of a haunting, and it seems as though it’s intentionally tweaking a number of assumptions readers might have about how such a story can work. Are there any haunted house/hotel stories that have been particular influences on you? What interests you about the tensions in your fiction between “big” figures of historical import like General Fest and “common” characters like Melanie in that story, or about similar juxtapositions in other works?

NB: I love haunted house/hotel stories (The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, and the Ju-on series have been most influential), but “Endless Life” itself was based on this absolutely hysterical Ghost Hunters: International episode that took place in some Argentinian hotel where Hitler was rumored to have died. The crew ran around berating this ghost for Hitler’s actions, and I was thinking, “Man, if that ghost isn’t Hitler — which it surely isn’t — it would be really pissed right now.” I think that’s that tension you mentioned — we often expect the ghost in your average haunted inn to be the ghost of some prominent, wealthy figure, but why? Do powerful people leave a greater psychic imprint in death than the weak and disenfranchised? Similarly, we usually expect ghosts to be created out of murders instead of freak accidents. I think we’re drawn to big narrative arcs, imbued with meaning, featuring larger-than-life characters — but reality often looks a bit different. The Stone Tape is a wonderful example of a story that plays with these sorts of societal assumptions about hauntings.

WFR: Violence often seems to exist in relation to anonymity in many of your stories, whether it’s a nameless final girl or statistics of people who have been victims of political conflicts. Do you view such erasures of identity as an inherent component of violence? And do you view violence or the threat of it as an inherent component of effective horror fiction?

NB: I wouldn’t say erasure of identity is an inherent component of violence — more like a reflection of how we as a society process violent incidents. We turn them into statistics. Sometimes it’s because we can’t handle the huge numbers involved, sometimes it’s because we can’t be bothered — and sometimes, of course, it’s the only way to reflect the gravity of the situation. But we tend to not let ourselves think about each individual that’s died in a mass casualty event, or even every missing-presumed-dead teenaged girl — their families, their aspirations. It’s overwhelming. So we hide from that truth. I wouldn’t say that violence is an inherent component of horror either — not exactly. I’d say that risk is part of horror — I call it The Price — but whether that comes in the form of physical violence or spiritual degradation or even one’s unmooring from the world, The Price has to be paid.

WFR: What’s next? Are you working on any projects currently that you can tell us about?

NB: I’m slowly working on a novel based on the Indonesian political crisis of 1965, except with government-sponsored psychics and demons — sort of The Year of Living Dangerously meets Stranger Things. But I’m always collecting projects and getting sidetracked — so I’m also playing with an idea for a nonfiction book and I owe various short stories to various venues.

WFR: Lastly, a food question: how do you like your nasi or bakmi goreng? What sorts of veggies or meat do you prefer in it? Do you add sambal or kecap manis?

NB: I’m actually not the biggest fan of nasi goreng (I prefer nasi campur and gado-gado), but when I do eat it I always add sambal. My mother used to forbid me from eating sambal when I was little, but now I add it to everything!

The post Psychic Rituals and Political Machinations: An Interview with Nadia Bulkin appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Spells

Permeating these works is a fascination with urban life—European city life circumscribes the consciousness of the protagonists in most of these stories.  In their urban wanderings, buildings and public squares become a kind of living relic of history looming over the moments of citizens and revealing that the relationship between past and present is far more complex than we often assume, and that it may be more of a two-way street than we’d like to believe.  The secrets lurking behind the 20th century European streets, tucked away in obscure courtyards, or hidden in the inventory of a forgotten shop call to mind some of the same fascinations of setting that one encounters in the New York- and Paris-set weird fiction of Robert Chambers, or perhaps Jean Ray’s “The Shadowy Street,” which literalizes this general idea and builds an entire plot out of it.

Even as there is temptation, generally speaking, to account for great evil by turning to the supernatural, de Ghelderode’s fiction takes care not to entirely remove it from human agency.  It seems safe to assume that this tendency is at least in part abetted influenced by Europe’s escalation into World War II that would have been contemporaneous with the creation of many of these stories.  Threaded through virtually all of them are persistent reminders that hell might well exist entirely independent of a supernatural order: “Why, this is hell!  It’s this monstrous city, its everyday existence. And the damned? They’re my hideous fellow men and me too in their sordid flock!.” (“The Devil in London,” 29)  The observable and rational are sufficient in some ways to account for the idea of hell, and yet the devil may ultimately put in an appearance anyhow.  The ennui that pervades “The Devil in London” and “The Collector of Relics” evokes the sense that this corporeal existence is simply not the one we were meant to inhabit, a sentiment that will strike many readers as sharing a kinship with the modern author Thomas Ligotti.  If the book stumbles on occasion, its main obstacle is an excessive reliance on the same character type that so frequently makes such observations as the one above: the lone, depressed, sick, unmoored, solitary male wanderer in search of distraction from the malaise of the mundane.  Or a “demoralized soul,” as he puts it in “Fog.”  Indeed, one might lift any number of lines from these stories and find sentiments common to both Ligotti and de Ghelderode.  In “Rhotomago,” the protagonist exclaims that he “… pursued my own journey into the unfathomable, dreaming that for once I was sleeping without dreaming!” (83)

The strength of prose and complexity of theme are more than sufficient to recommend the book despite the limitations imposed by the use of relatively unvaried protagonists, but it will likely stand out as a weakness to some and has been discussed by scholars engaged with de Ghelderode’s work:

“Voiced by dedicated solitaries, the narratives discount social or even human relationships…Women too are in short supply; Ghelderode, in a draft prospectus for a planned further collection of stories, promised that women would feature more centrally but, as it turned out, no such stories were written.” (Introduction, x).

Women characters are certainly in short supply; however, it is a mistake to view the “dedicated solitary” as necessarily eschewing the importance of social and human relationships.  It seems not just shortsighted but counterproductive of de Ghelderode to craft so many tales in which the thesis is that “hell” could consist of “this monstrous city” and “my fellow men” but then have a glaring omission of such a large demographic that could add more depth to such treatments.  However, that caveat aside, I submit that the frequent juxtaposition of supernatural and sociohistorical forces under which the protagonists labor is done precisely as a means not of discounting social relationships but of critiquing them from a broader perspective, even as de Ghelderode’s critique could be improved if it were broader still in terms of which people are represented in the story.  It is worth noting a distinction between a lack of close friendships as a “solitary” (this is certainly true of most of the protagonists) and a discounting of human relationships entirely.  Introverted though the narrators may be, there is ample direct, ground-level social interaction that forms crucial components of plot and serves as a vehicle for such critiques, particularly in stories like “The Collector of Relics, “You Were Hanged,” and “The Odor of Pine.”

Octave Mirbeau

Although both Ligotti and de Ghelderode have clear predecessors in the Decadent movement, we can see a much closer connection to the Decadents with the historically proximate Belgian fantasist.  Echoes of French author Octave Mirbeau abound in the cynical frankness and casual cruelty with which one character in the story “You Were Hanged” discusses old and new means of execution contrived by societies in different historical periods.  The characters in most of the stories commit their fair share of transgressions, but the author is careful to foreground such individual ignoble acts against a backdrop of larger systemic cruelties like executions, which comprise an essential part of the structure of sociohistorical power operating in conjunction with the supernatural of de Ghelderode’s fiction.  The hypocrisy that underlies the use of powerful institutional violence against individual transgressors of social order is a theme that one will find in many forms in such literature, and it features prominently in this collection as well.  For example, one of the strongest stories, “You Were Hanged,” takes as its premise a discussion about state-sanctioned violence and explores differing moral responses to it as its specific tools of execution change with history, and supernatural events force the protagonist to confront such horrors from a perspective uncannily removed from the present in an effort to dissect the idea of “progress.”  The recursive relationship between materialist and supernatural concerns is introduced immediately in the first story, “The Public Scribe,” which features a wax dummy “tasked” with recording the ephemera of history in the material form of writing while undergoing a transformation that could not be accounted for by material processes.  Events disembodied by time become history, and here history becomes reembodied as it reattains material form.  The animation of abstractions like time and history recurs frequently throughout the collection and reveals an underlying anxiety about the power they hold over life.

While any astute reader will undoubtedly come away with a great deal to digest from these stories in terms of philosophical discussion, the literary craftsmanship that makes them so effective is remarkable.  Returning for a moment to “You Were Hanged,” for example, one can note several details that at first appear trivial but are threaded through the story such that the conclusion renders a completely different and nuanced significance to them than expected.  The cumulative effect of this is also contingent on any number of subtleties of language that seem to have been well preserved by the translator:

“I was under the clear impression that I’d been in that place [Saint-Jacques Plain] forever, and that my existence had never extended beyond that oblong square.” (153)

In a brief sentence and with the pointed use of “oblong”, de Ghelderode and Maclennan create a complex symbol that coheres perfectly with the themes of the story and the larger collection by inextricably entwining life, death, and social constructs that precede and survive the individual.  In this story as in several others, time and history explicitly become forces alive in ways that are usually invisible to us.  One might well encounter “the breathing of clocks” (159) in an inn adjacent to a setting of historical cruelties.  Sometimes this is direct and catastrophic and at others more restrained in a manner that might remind readers of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.  In much the way that an innocuous post in a wall may in another era have been the final destination for a condemned person, de Ghelderode frequently explores the significance of the idea of the historical relic in changing social contexts: common items afforded outsized importance as a byproduct of human action, history being an amalgamation whose power becomes greater than the sum of its parts and in turn acts on its descendants.  Many of the stories here are built around a “tunneling” effect of time, with two sets of significant events set apart by a lengthy interval during which the narration distances itself from events on the ground.  The cumulative effect is a volume of weird tales that remind the reader that history asserts itself upon the individual even while quietly hiding in the background.

“The Public Scribe” serves as one of the more subtle treatments of the erosive effects of time on human existence. In it we see a plot device, the infamous mannequin, that has become a fairly commonplace fixture of the weird.  The animate and the inanimate are juxtaposed in an exploration of the ways in which the uncanny valley of the mannequin threatens to usurp the former.  De Ghelderode himself wrote plays for marionettes and was influenced by puppet theater, and he seems to have a particular fascination with exploring exactly where the border between life and not-life resides (or if it can be safely said to exist at all).  Perhaps he’s drawing on his fascination with time and asking us, “what is a mannequin but the appearance of humanity frozen in an instant of time?”  Throughout the collection are frequent appearances of masks and other similar manifestations of these themes. Their usage in a context that consistently emphasizes the degradation and horror of corporeal existence begs the question:  which is truly the more unsettling prospect–attaining human consciousness or experiencing the loss of it?  The author is careful to present both sides of the equation in “The Public Scribe.”  If from the broader perspective of history the human condition is akin to “musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed.” (“A Twilight”, 146), then it seems a foregone conclusion to de Ghelderode that neither prospect could be a clear preference, and therein lives true horror.

De Ghelderode’s sense of the fantastic exists at times within a Christian context and at others within an apparently invented, at-times haphazard one that achieves much by way of implication and subtlety, even as it remains unclear as to whether the author aspired to create a singular mythos like Chambers’s King in Yellow tales.  In Chambers, there is a constant current of madness and the incomprehensible lurking just beneath the surface of events, and de Ghelderode’s fiction has a similar quality. This is significant especially when considering the biographical data; as the author fell into ill health in the time preceding and during the stories’ creation, scholar Roland Bayen conjectures that his “stories bear witness to an ‘increasing neurosis’, indeed are ‘the fruits of crisis’” (Introduction, viii).  But Chambers is not the only fixture of the weird that we might be tempted to admit to the discussion.  The hallucinatory, landscape-disrupting visions that occur in several of the tales in Spells have a vivid, bold, and intense quality.  For an author with such an interest in place and its influence on consciousness, it is not surprising that crises of the personal are strongly linked to crises of geography and the like.  In particular, such an occurrence in “Fog” might well remind readers of Belgian contemporary Jean Ray’s story “The Mainz Psalter”, with both stories featuring conjurations of hidden worlds lurking adjacent to our own.  De Ghelderode writes:

“During this respite I entertained many such speculations, and all the more easily in that I didn’t have to deal with my usual rational self. Alas! No ecstasy goes without a reversal.  The state of grace left me.  And I felt myself in danger.  Streams of lights climbed the walls, this time coming from down below, coarse reflections of nocturnal fairs lit up with opaque red and green smoke. What I saw could only be an invention of delirium: mouths once more, down at ground level and reaching toward me.  A monstrous host surrounded me of which only the mouths were visible.  Oh! Abject mucous membranes salivating and spitting, swallowing words that I sensed were sordid and that I congratulated myself on not understanding…I was abruptly galvanized by the image of a nearby hell over which I was cataleptically suspended.” (136)

In Spells, there is a malevolence to the universe that becomes apparent whenever the supernatural manifests on the page, but the author is careful to always give the devil his due and remind the reader that human action and events play a part in that malevolence.  There’s a persistent association of social evils and the uncanny, particularly as in “You Were Hanged” and “The Odor of Pine”.  Readers will also note a more direct engagement with real-world religion than in many of the authors of weird tales to which he’s most comparable, which is perhaps not surprising given the overlapping of theme with preceding European authors like Mirbeau, who wrote nothing of the supernatural but obsessively critiqued the real-life figures purporting to be conduits to it.  De Ghelderode’s writing has been described by scholars as anticlerical, but his fascination with religious relics, churches, and other physical remnants of Christian belief systems reveals what seems best described as nostalgia made problematic and ambiguous by the ways in which he ties such holy artifacts to social ills.  Mortal sin, atonement, and many other religious constructs form the core of anxiety that plagues some of the protagonists, but they exist alongside and entwined with the materialism represented by real historical tribulations that seem to carry an equal weight that survives into the present.  In “The Collector of Relics,” for example, norms of both religious and secular life are simultaneously tested and transgressed by the protagonist as a byproduct of his own personal contrarian obsessions.  As the narrator states regarding whether or not to discover what might lurk inside a dim antiques shop: “I’ve found myself tempted to cross the threshold.” (69)  Like Bataille’s Story of the Eye, there is an animus in the character that conflates these two categories of social norms under a reactionary, impulsive, and accelerating disgust.  It becomes clear by the conclusion of “The Collector of Relics” that the reader would be advised to allow for multiple interpretations of the idea of crossing thresholds as the protagonist continually pressures the collector to pursue progressively more taboo objectives, and the preservation of this ambiguity in translation is vital for understanding the story.

De Ghelderode’s fiction has not been broadly available to English readers, and this edition of Spells will hopefully do its part to remedy that.  The consistent execution and thought-provoking, nuanced premises in these stories are enough to render them overlooked classics (at least, to non-Belgian audiences)—there are no real low points to speak of, and it seems unsurprising that the stories are among the final efforts produced by an author with a lengthy and well-developed body of work.  In short, Spells will have much to say, some of it new and some of it quite familiar, to most readers of the weird.

The post Review: “Spells” by Michel de Ghelderode appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: In The Stones Are Singing, a great deal of attention is placed on the city of Venice and its physical features.  Can you share a bit about what inspired that choice of setting?  Do you think the story could be told the same if it was set anywhere else?

R.B. Russell: I don’t think that I’ve ever stayed anywhere quite as atmospheric as Venice. Everything about the city is breath-takingly beautiful, from the impressive vistas down the main canals, through to details as small as a wrought-iron hinge on a dark door at the end of an unconsidered alleyway. A few years ago I was lucky to be able to stay (with my partner, Rosalie Parker, and our son, Tim,) in the apartment I describe in the book. It was full of antiques and original artwork, but the most sublime aspect was the view out of the living room window down a very minor, tributary canal. The jade green water, the crumbling brick and the distant bridge all demanded to be described in a small notebook I bought. That description, transcribed when I returned home, was the start of the story, although I did not know where it would lead at the time… Nowhere else could have inspired the tale that evolved.

WFR: There is a substantial amount of emphasis on physical materials—glass, stones, etc.—and their fragility or malleability in The Stones Are Singing.  Can you tell us a bit about what brought that theme into the story?  How do these ideas fit into your aesthetics of supernatural fiction?

RBR: In a previous life I qualified as an Architect, and I was always attracted to the ideas of the deeply unfashionable Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings (S.P.A.B., or ‘Anti-Scrape’). Their manifesto was that old buildings should be appreciated without any restoration, which meant enjoying the fabric of ruins and, at most, trying to stave-off further decay (even this intervention was too much for some members). Venice struck me as the ideals of S.P.A.B. brought to life in a city of perpetually deteriorating brickwork, stone and mortar—to be appreciated for the short time it remains standing. Likewise antiques, old roman glass, etc., should be left to display their history, and allowed to age (everything tends, eventually, to decay, ruin and dust).

A number of my stories have been about the perception of ‘normality’, and the subjective interpretation of the world around us. In The Stones are Singing, the fragility of ancient glass, or the permanence of stone, is not always what it appears to be. One cannot trust the most ancient or apparently eternal of objects.

WFR: As an author of both short fiction and longer forms, do you have a preference for either?  In your view, what are the potentials and limits of each as applied to supernatural fiction, whether in regard to your own work or more generally?

RBR: I have written fiction since I was a teenager (and it might be said that I am still exploring the same themes, ideas and characters that obsessed me back then). I always aspired to write novels, but about eight years ago, when I decided to write a little more seriously, short stories came naturally. (I have been lucky enough to publish most of them in collections with PS Publishing and Swan River Press.) I strongly believe that the short story is under-rated and misunderstood outside of genre fiction—mainstream writers and publishers mistake fragments and shadows for fully-realised stories. The short story is perfect for creating an atmosphere (as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘unity of effect’), and I do think one should finish a short story feeling satisfied that it has presented something meaningful.

When I sit down to write I never know what length a story will turn out to be, and some insist on a little more space to develop and come to life. I have written a few novellas—The Stones are Singing, Bloody Baudelaire (which has actually been filmed as Backgammon) and The Dark Return of Time (which might also be filmed, if certain unlikely stars align).

In the last three years, though, I have finished two novels, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the demands required (and the liberties one can take) when writing at length. The longer the work, the more difficult it is to keep up the ‘unity of effect’, of course. Plot and character development become far more important if the reader is to be kept interested, but it doesn’t mean that the essential weird or supernatural elements have to be forsaken. The trick is to not dilute them. Whether or not I have succeeded remains to be seen, but I must acknowledge the astute insight of Rosalie Parker and my agent, Leslie Gardner, in bringing my own efforts closer to publication.

WFR: Tartarus Press publishes authors both classic and contemporary.  What are the most important qualities you look for when selecting a project for publication?  Apart from the business aspects of publishing, what is the cultural and historical role, in your view, of a specialty press, particularly one with an emphasis on collectible volumes?

RBR: I run Tartarus Press with Rosalie Parker, and for both of us the quality of the writing is paramount, whether in classic or contemporary fiction. In the case of the former, we have often come across super-rare books of supernatural fiction that we know collectors would love to see reprinted, but we have declined to do so because we know that readers would be disappointed. (There is a reason why some books are never reprinted—they are just not good enough!) With contemporary fiction it is always tempting to be influenced by an author’s reputation and potential selling-power, but there is always a quality threshold. Essentially, we have to love the writing before we will consider publishing it.

You ask about the cultural and historical role of speciality presses, but beyond their ability to put into print authors who the mainstream press may overlook, I am not sure if they are much different to mainstream presses (apart from having smaller budgets). At Tartarus we have no intention to be elitist, or to wilfully delight in the obscure. Good writing deserves to be read and we are doing what we can to make it available. And it just so happens that we like printing books lithographically on good paper, with sewn sections, etc. (We have nothing against glued, print on demand paperbacks!) It is a bonus if a customer takes a risk on buying a book by an unknown contemporary and discovers that their first edition is worth a great deal of money once it is out of print. (If anyone would like to sell their copy of our edition of Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney then they might receive as much as £700 for it!) For any press the collectability, rarity, quality of binding, etc., will always come second to the quality of the writing.

Robert Aickman by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, 1960

WFR: You’ve also produced a documentary, Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales.  What about Aickman’s work brought this decision about?  Have you considered producing such short films about other authors or topics?

RBR: The documentary that Rosalie and I produced was, in many ways, a more ambitious successor to a number of short films I had previously made about book collecting. For those I interviewed Mark Valentine, Reggie Oliver, Quentin S. Crisp and John Hirschhorn Smith (as well as making a video about my own collecting.) While researching Robert Aickman’s life and work for our new Tartarus Press editions we came across a great deal of information that was visual—clips of film, photos, original typescripts, paperback artwork, etc. To make the documentary was a natural step to take.

Since then we have made a non-literary feature film about the part of the Yorkshire Dales in which we live. But more bookish documentaries will follow in due course…

WFR: Are there any experiences you’ve had as an author that have informed your work as a publisher?  Vice-versa?

RBR: I think that I am the same as many authors—incredibly thin-skinned while nursing a huge ego, and so I hope that as a publisher I treat our authors with the care that I would hope to receive myself! Luckily my main publishers, Swan River Press and PS Publishing, are run by wonderful, understanding people.

WFR: Wormwood, Tartarus’s critical journal dedicated to fantastical and decadent literature, has been published for almost 17 years.  What, from your perspective, has changed in that time with respect to critical approaches to weird fiction?

RBR: Even before we started publishing Wormwood (edited by Mark Valentine), there had started the long, slow process of the academic world accepting genre fiction as worthy of critical study and discussion, which is generally a good thing. Many working in the various non-‘realist’ genres craved this kind of academic respectability, so it is strange when some commentators now complain when academics have their say. That the academics are not necessarily coming from a ‘fannish’ background is often a good thing. There is a great tradition in genre writing, of course, and academics have been studying it for centuries without actually noticing that, for example, Beowolf is fantasy, Wuthering Heights is a ghost story, Frankenstein is science fiction, etc.

WFR: What projects are you working on now, as either publisher or writer? Can you tell us about any forthcoming projects you have slated for 2017?

RBR: With Tartarus Press we don’t like making announcements about forthcoming books because it has sometimes jinxed them! By not offering ‘teasers’ we hope that the definitive announcement of a new publication is more of an event. I can say, though, that we have a couple of traditional, classic Tartarus titles forthcoming in 2017, and also some very fine contemporary fiction by new writers.

Similarly, I wouldn’t want to say too much about my own writing in case I fail to complete it, or don’t find a publisher. But I can’t quite stop myself from mentioning that I have just signed the contract for my first novel, She Sleeps, which will be published by PS in the next 12 months…

The post Interview: Tartarus and Singing Stones with R.B. Russell appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: First off, can you tell us about how Valancourt Books came about?

Valancourt Books: We started Valancourt Books way back in late 2004.  At the time I was researching a really fascinating, though obscure today, author named Francis Lathom, who wrote Gothic horror fiction in the 1790s and early 1800s and was rumored to have been gay.  Unfortunately, most of his books were almost totally inaccessible in North America: I ended up having to drive twenty-eight hours from Seattle, where I was living at the time, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to print them off microfiche. That struck me as being totally absurd: we were in the 21st century, the technology existed to bring these rare books back into print in a cost-effective way, and I thought, “Why is no one doing it?” Then I thought, “Why don’t we do it?” Our first couple years, we focused almost exclusively on 18th & 19th-century Gothic fiction and over time we gradually expanded into the Victorian era — penny dreadfuls, the out-of-print works of authors like Richard Marsh and Bram Stoker — and then into early 20th-century fiction.  In late 2012, after realizing that a vast amount of important, still-copyrighted fiction was virtually impossible to get except through interlibrary loan, we moved into more modern works, and those have been our primary focus over the past few years.

WFR: How do you find books to reprint? Are there criteria you feel a work must have or shouldn’t have in order to invest in resurrecting it?

VB: We find books in all kinds of ways.  For one thing, we get a lot of emails, tweets and Facebook messages from our readers, suggesting books they’d like to see republished.  One of our favorite releases from last year, Philip Ridley’s In the Eyes of Mr Fury, was recommended to us by someone who visited our table at the World Fantasy Convention. There are also a lot of blogs and websites focusing on neglected books, and we take a look at those.  And sometimes we stumble upon something great just by chance while browsing a used bookstore or library.

As far as criteria a book should have, we have to be fairly selective, since there is so much more out-of-print material than a small operation like ours could ever hope to republish.  First of all, of course, we’re looking for books that are great reads and that are still enjoyable and relevant, even if they’re many years old.  We also try to focus on books that are hard to find; many books published in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s have hundreds of used copies for sale online for a penny each, and it’s pretty tough to compete with that.  And we’re mainly looking for books that fit into one of the categories we publish — weird/horror/supernatural/etc. or gay interest fiction — though we occasionally make an exception for an outstanding lost classic that doesn’t really fit one of those labels.

WFR: What books would you recommend to weird fiction fans who aren’t familiar with Valancourt Books?  

VB: We’ve published so many we love that it’s hard to choose!  By far our most popular author has been Michael McDowell, whom Stephen King once called the finest writer of paperback originals in America; if you haven’t yet read his The Elementals (1981), a very different sort of ‘haunted house’ novel that takes place under the glare of the sun on an Alabama beach, you’re missing out.  Michael Blumlein’s World Fantasy Award-nominated collection The Brains of Rats (1989) is a brilliant book that blurs genre boundaries and features some of the most unsettling stories you’ll ever come across.  A couple story collections that are a bit older but absolutely brilliant and filled with tales that are weird and sometimes horrific are The Hunger and Other Stories (1957) by Charles Beaumont (best known for his Twilight Zone scripts) and Gerald Kersh’s Nightshade and Damnations (1968).  Some of our Victorian releases are wonderfully weird as well, particularly Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Ernest G. Henham’s Tenebrae (1898).

WFR: Last year, you published a collection of works by Robert Aickman, and you included many of his lesser known pieces. Can you tell us about this collection, including how you selected works for it?

VB: We’ve wanted to publish Aickman for a long time.  Tartarus Press, of course, has done a fantastic job of republishing his works in collectors’ hardcover editions, but we wanted to make him available for readers with more modest budgets.  Unfortunately for our efforts, it turned out that the British publisher Faber holds the rights to almost all of Aickman’s material, even though they haven’t chosen to make it available in the US except for ebook versions.  Our omnibus collection contains Aickman’s sublime novel The Late Breakfasters, which had never previously been published in the US, and whose first edition copies cost many hundreds of dollars, along with all six remaining weird tales that were not available in one of Faber’s ebook editions.

WFR: Valancourt specializes in dark (Gothic/horror/supernatural) and LGBTQ fiction. I know Michael McDowell wrote Southern Gothic fiction and happened to be gay, but I don’t know if any of his books featured gay characters or themes. These are pretty disparate genres but are there any books or authors that lie at the intersection of these two? 

VB: There’s no gay content in McDowell’s horror fiction, though he did co-author a series of gay-themed detective novels that have been reprinted by Felony & Mayhem. But for whatever reason, gay authors and horror go hand-in-hand and have since the beginning of the genre. In addition to Francis Lathom, early Gothic novelists like Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk, 1796) and William Beckford (Vathek, 1786) are widely believed to have been gay, and gay subtexts abound in Victorian horror like The Beetle and Dracula.  We’ve published a number of gay horror authors, including Hugh Walpole and Forrest Reid, both early 20th-century masters of the supernatural, the fascinating bisexual writer Frank Baker, author of the avian apocalypse novel The Birds (1936) (which predated Du Maurier’s story), Michael McDowell, Michael Talbot, etc., and in 2017 we’ll be republishing a collection of weird tales by the well-known gay writer L.P. Hartley.

WFR: For your LGBTQ literature, do you feel that it’s necessary that sexuality plays an overt role in the work, or do you approach such works from the perspective that it’s part of your mission to ensure the publication of the author’s voice regardless of how prominent that component is in the work in question?

VB: Most of the gay fiction we republish is from the 1970s and earlier, so the sexual content, if any, is usually pretty tame compared to books being published today (keep in mind that Penguin was prosecuted in 1960 for obscenity for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967 and in much of the US until even later). Our republication of early gay literature is aimed at preserving that part of our history and culture, which was in some danger of vanishing, since virtually all those texts were out of print.

WFR: The quality of your books, including the cover art, is always superb. Who does your art for your books? To what degree would you say Valancourt values the integration of theme between the printed word and image/design?

VB: Thank you!  We take great pride in trying to make the books as attractive as possible in terms both of cover art and typesetting.  We think books should contain great stories but should also be beautiful objects in and of themselves. We’ve been extremely fortunate in having found some fantastic cover designers like M.S. Corley, who has done a lot of books for us (including the Aickman you mentioned, which made one list of 2016’s best book covers) and Henry Petrides, who has done absolutely brilliant work.  We also had the chance to work with Mike Mignola on cover art for two of the Michael McDowell reissues, which was a really exciting experience.

WFR: What kinds of obstacles do you encounter—legal, archival, etc.—when attempting to bring obscure books back into publication? Are there any “white whale” projects that you’d like to be able to do but for any reason have been unable so far?

VB: There are a ton of obstacles! The most common one is that sometimes it’s difficult — or even impossible — to locate the rights holder. Copyright now lasts 70 years past an author’s death, and it’s quite common to come across an author who died in, say, 1965, and whose work would thus be in copyright until the end of 2035, but the author died unmarried and childless. Who controls the estate? The choice becomes either to forgo publishing important material or to publish and hope some distant great-grandnephew doesn’t come out of the woodwork someday to sue you, an unpleasant prospect, especially for a small press. Another problem we’ve been encountering more and more often is that the original publisher still owns the rights, even if the book has been out of print for decades. Most people don’t know this, but once a book goes out of print, the author (or his/her estate) has to demand the rights back from the publisher; if they don’t, the publisher can essentially hold onto them forever.  In many cases, the book might have been originally published by an entity that no longer exists — the company was bought and sold, bought and sold again, and is now owned in some obscure way by a huge conglomerate like Penguin Random House. And getting those giant operations to respond to rights queries can be a very frustrating process.

As for ‘white whale’ projects, yes, there are a number of them, but I won’t mention any by name, as we’re still holding out hope that one day we can sort out the rights situations.  Sometimes it can take years, but we’re very persistent!

WFR: What projects are you working on now? Can you tell us about any horror or weird fiction books you have slated for 2017?

VB: We’ve got some great stuff coming out in 2017.  A paperback reissue of rare Richard Matheson stories that was originally published as a Subterranean Press hardcover and which will include an additional rare story not in their edition.  A trio of horror novels by Ken Greenhall, who isn’t a household name, but connoisseurs of horror who have read his books Elizabeth (1976) and Hell Hound (1977) rate them as masterpieces of the genre. A reissue of L.P. Hartley’s The Travelling Grave and Other Stories, originally published by the legendary Arkham House and long out of print. Eltonsbrody (1960), a very weird horror novel by the Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer, who is best known for the ghost story My Bones and My Flute. We’ve gotten a tremendous response to our first volume of The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, which included seventeen stories by Valancourt authors, two of them previously unpublished, so we’ll be putting out a second volume in October. We also have a number of other exciting projects in the works, but contracts aren’t yet signed, so I can’t say much about them right now. But keep an eye on our website — we’ll have a lot of exciting horror and weird fiction coming out in 2017!  And as I said, we’re always open to suggestions, so if there’s a book someone wishes were on our 2017 list, they should get in touch!

The post Interview: Weird Fiction and More at Valancourt Books appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

K. J. Bishop (1972–) is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her neo-Decadent fantasy novel The Etched City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and she won the William L. Crawford Award, the Ditmar Award for Best Novel, and the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her work has appeared in several publications including Leviathan 4, Fantasy magazine, and Subterranean magazine. Most infamously, her novella ‘Maldoror Abroad’ appeared in Album Zutique; the story riffed on the original Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Isidore Lucien Ducasse under the pen name ‘Comte de Lautréamont’. Her tale ‘Saving the Gleeful Horse’ (2010) shares affinities with Decadent modes of writing, including the Alfred Kubin excerpt that opened The Weird. More can be found from Bishop at her personal website.

“Saving the Gleeful Horse” by K.J. Bishop

“A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.” (Kristeva, 4)

“Saving the Gleeful Horse” presents an interesting case of a story that is perhaps suitable to categorization as fable or, more specifically, the New Wave Fabulism subgenre; perhaps not. In it are “redemption” and strange bargains, magical women, princes, Rabelaisian gigantism and moments of the carnivalesque, and any number of other traditional landmarks that one might find. Molimus, the narrator, is 8 feet tall and lives under a bridge, where he collects refuse flowing downstream to sell and make something of a living. It seems the reader is invited to at least consider the possibility that the protagonist should be seen as a troll given these converging details; at the very least he is an abnormally large entity that in many other ways appears to be human. We know little of Molimus save through inferences we might make from his compassionate act of trying to save the “life” of the injured eponymous horse via extraordinary means and self-sacrifice. To do so, he seeks out a mysterious “woman or a woman-shaped thing” (174) with mysterious powers in a mysterious and secluded cloister—the Garth of the Aorist. There he engages in ritual and magical bargaining anchored in bodily exchanges that come at no small price to himself. The White Ma’at has goals of her own following her magical imprisonment by her enemy, Prince November, who operates at the periphery of Molimus’s desires and parodies the story’s pattern of bodily exchange and expulsion by drinking “knowledge from the vein on her forehead” (176). The landmarks and stage directions of a fable are all there, but there are more profound concerns than moral lessons at play, some of which are manifest even in the use of the phrase, “Garth (suggestive of containment and limitation) of the Aorist” (suggestive of being extensible and limitless). These concepts return later in the story as Molimus undergoes a transubstantiation into “the smoke of chimneys and bus exhausts” (180) and roams the town, untethered from both his bodily limits and his paltry living space beneath the bridge and the attendant debris collection.

Punctures

Apart from its fabulist qualities, “Saving the Gleeful Horse” can be read as a subtle and complex work of body horror, through which permeate anxieties of insertion, evisceration, corporeal dispersal, and the contingencies of bodily functionality, the narrative success of which follows from the use of convincing ambiguities of plot, setting, and character. The characters are divorced (but only partly so) from “real” human bodies by the use of carnivalesque pageantry, magical powers, unusual physical characteristics, and subterfuge in order to add complexity to the story’s formulation of corporeality, but, if nothing else, the motivations of the two main characters seem all too human even if they are in fact a giant troll and quasi-human witch. Bishop juxtaposes animate but ambiguous “persons” and inanimate (or should-be inanimate) items to create tension and purposely confound the reader’s sympathies in the incarnation of Molimus (either an impossibly large human or a troll) and the White Ma’at (either a “woman or a woman-shaped thing”). (174)

Our opening image in the story is that of a horse or horse-shaped piñata of sorts being bashed open and emptied of its contents by playfully indifferent children. Bishop takes care to explicitly note the action’s brutality as it is perceived by Molimus. The perception of vitality on the part of the story’s characters becomes an ordering of value. Soon, our narrator is introduced—an 8‑foot character who resembles a human but may perfectly well be a troll as we’re invited to suspect by his impossible dimensions. But before we find out anything about Molimus, Bishop has already set up ground rules that need to be traced throughout the narrative in an opening passage that might be easy to overlook but is nonetheless essential for understanding the story:

“Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature—a rare, marvelous creature at that—to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces…until holes open in its body (emphasis added) and the prizes—caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters—rain down into their hands”. (171)

What to the children is a mere lifeless object is, to Molimus, a living being that has been subjected to great violence and warrants his sympathies. Here, cruelty is both a normative and marginalizing force: it normalizes an order in which presumably human children occupy a privileged space in the world of the story while Molimus resides at the margins, sympathetic to the piñata/creatures the children perceive as inert. What the reader might likewise consider inert objects are assigned a vitality. Internal “vital organs” fall from the piñata bodies and are commodified “prizes” that carry a value for some but not others, the creatures’ evisceration a moment of delight to the children. When our protagonist discovers the Gleeful Horse, he describes it being “as full of holes as a sieve”. (172) (Though the sex of the protagonist is withheld and obscured through first-person narration, for the purposes of this essay the construction of Molimus’s name and mention of “men’s shirts” seem to suggest that the character is meant to be read as male. Yet there is certainly the possibility of reading the character otherwise or as purposely ambiguous.) Where an author like Ligotti imbues animation in things otherwise inanimate to make them supernatural, Bishop locates that which is dead or inert within the animate to explore anxieties about our mortality. At this juncture, it seems fruitful to turn to Kristeva’s discussion of the abject. The explicit connections in the story between refuse and vitality suggest that there are perhaps not so many distinctions as we’d like to think, and that there is a power exchange between them that creates a subject-object relationship. It is important to note that refuse, or “filth”, is “not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin. Matter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. […] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.” (Kristeva, 69)

Molimus, who “has a foot in both worlds” (175), is empathetic to the horse regarded as an object of the children’s destructive cruelty, and, seeking to save its life after its injuries, which he feels will restore happiness to the area, he consults with a mysterious woman “or woman-like thing” that once held power—the White Ma’at. It’s worth noting in the context of these dual worlds that “Ma’at” refers, among other things, to ancient Egyptian conceptions of truth, balance, order, and harmony, which were often personified as a goddess regulating stars, seasons, and actions of mortals. Molimus’s desperate empathy for the horse manifests itself in a manner coherent with the structure of the story’s use of illness when he states, “I feel sick…not for my sake but for the sake of my horse.” (177) The Ma’at reveals to Molimus the secrets of the objects he perceives as living things, whose internal plastic “organs” constitute “starlike pieces” and are essential to their survival. But those secrets apply to Molimus as well. The White Ma’at is imprisoned in a cloister after being overthrown from her position of power by Prince November, and she seeks to reclaim her position, a goal into which Molimus’s desire to save the horse is subsumed. His agency is both realized but also subverted through their magical bargain.

“Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that returns to its source, its sign having been inverted? What was there in the beginning: want, deprivation, original fear, or the violence of rejection, aggressivity, the deadly death drive?” (Kristeva, 38)

By the conclusion of the story, a structural balance has been achieved in which the ignorant cruelty of the children visited upon “inanimate” creatures has been reversed and revisited upon them by Molimus in the form of a hollowing illness that he has become. Ironically, he seems just as unaware as the children did when inflicting torments on the creatures for which Molimus feels profound sympathy. Although he has achieved his own ends, the darker implication is that the sickness he inflicts on them will continue for the indefinite future—the apparent aim of the White Ma’at’s bargain.

Shame

To interpret “Saving the Gleeful Horse” as a kind of body horror fable by way of the abject, it is crucial to understand the places where the reader can identify connections between the characters’ bodily limitations and hierarchical positions within the story. For the Gleeful Horse and other inert-but-alive objects, junk goes in and junk comes out. Vital innards are simultaneously cheap plastic and starlike matter. Animate bodies are pushed into inanimate ones both in specific individuals and en masse, such as when the White Ma’at pushes her losing armies “into the chalk hills like raisins in pudding, so that they all died in the white dark” (176). The expulsion and consumption of bodily parts and fluids are a system of power exchange throughout the story that creates the hierarchies of the story’s world. As either an unusually large human or a particularly humanesque troll, Molimus is in a position of superiority to the pet / companion he is caring for; yet Molimus himself is in a position inferior to that held by the mysterious and powerful woman in the Garth of the Aorist. However, after Molimus learns of the functions of the plastic parts, he is induced to experience a shameful realization of his own corporeal limitations in a mirror of the toys he expresses concern for in an act of regurgitating a plastic piece from his own body.

“Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent—like a metaphor that would have become incarnate—the objective frailty of symbolic order?” (Kristeva, 70)

Steven Van Wolputte provides a useful anthropological overview of the history of conceptions of the body in relation to self, society, polity, and ideology that provides some insight into this reading of “Saving the Gleeful Horse” as a body horror fable. Throughout the recent history of critical analyses of conceptions of the body’s significance and modes of operation, Van Wolputte identifies a number of distinctions within the field of medical anthropology that might be applied in different ways to the story. In summation:

“The individual (note this shift from the “natural”) body is the domain of phenomenological analysis as it studies the “lived” or embodied experiences people have of their bodies. The social body, in contrast, relates to the ways the body (including its products: blood, milk, etc.) operates as a natural symbol, as a tool at hand to think and represent social relationships such as gender, kinship, and mode of production (see Featherstone et al. 1991). A third dimension states that power and control are embodied as well. This is the body politic: the human body as tool or weapon of domestication and disciplination and of identification, subjection, and resistance. These three bodies also constitute three levels of experience and analysis. What mediates between them, what according to the authors interarticulates nature, society, and individual, are emotions. As proto-symbols or proto-rituals emotions affect experience most immediately. Hence they can bridge the mind/body divide and bring the three bodies together.” (254–255)

The story interacts with all of these conceptions of the uses of the body—the ritualistic bargaining and exchange of bodily fluids, the White Ma’at’s exploitation of Molimus’s bodily transformation to exercise power and revenge on her enemies, the identification of bodily cruelty and the “lived” experience of evisceration in the context of a setting in which the inert is subjectively viewed as alive, and in the deliberate usage of bodily organs/plastic trinkets as commodity and item of transactional exchange. It is also important to note Kristeva’s own distinctions between intimate suffering [la douleur] and public horror in articulating abjection (see Keltner) and how those conceptually cohere to the anthropological perspectives outlined by Van Wolputte. Keltner summarizes Kristeva’s distinction succinctly: “abjection is the shape that the border between the intimate and the public takes; or rather, abjection is the fate of intimacy in the historical context of an unavoidable interiorization of public horror.” The description seems apt in the context of “Saving the Gleeful Horse.” Molimus’s bargain with the White Ma’at occurs at the physical site of bodily consumptive exchange that unalterably subjects the protagonist to of the Ma’at’s power; he becomes a literal public horror in the form of a sickness-inducing smoke. The agency he exerts to seek a cure for the Gleeful Horse appears to be subsumed by the Ma’at’s payment of her “debts” or revenge during this process.

Returning to Van Wolputte’s point that emotions “interarticulate” among these different levels of bodily experience, we must note that in Bishop’s story, there is a clear and explicit link between bodily mortification, emotion, and power relationships. The most readily identifiable indicators of emotional state within the story both involve bodily expulsion through tears and regurgitation, or exchanges of bodily fluid. We know little else of Molimus’s emotional life. Upon first encountering the Gleeful Horse, Molimus states:

“To see their poor empty bodies makes me cry into the water…the bodies last for very little time after they have yielded up the ghost.” (172)

Later, as he bargains with the White Ma’at for a way to save the horse and learns of the bodily fragility of both it and himself, there is a scene eerily reminiscent of the Kristeva passage that opens this essay. In this scene, Molimus encounters one of his own physical limitations, which establishes a set of conditions linked to shame and bodily expulsion under which the Gleeful Horse can continue to exist. The dual descriptions of these bits of plastic pieces and starlike matter echo the contradictions that underlie human waste as expelled (dead) matter and a byproduct of processes necessary for the continuation of life:

“I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits here with us…I am suddenly ill with a spasm that feels like shame (emphasis added). Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: a sort of ornamented sphincter. I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor…” (178)

What is shame if not a momentary realization of coerced submission to a learned order against which selfhood exists in spite of itself and that order, in this case that of animate over inanimate? Molimus’s expelled plastic toy is Kristeva’s expelled waste matter. We don’t know much about Molimus other than what we can infer from his motivations, but one of the few points at which there is an explicit statement of emotion occurs during this momentary realization of bodily limit. The discovery of the plastic ring in his mouth and its immediate expulsion induces a sense of shame, which serves as a subdued but cathartic reinforcement of his place in the story’s world just as such a private bodily expulsion serves as a persistent reminder of human limit and temporality.

“Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that returns to its source, its sign having been inverted?” (Kristeva, 38)

While an exhaustive analysis of “Saving the Gleeful Horse” from Van Wolputte’s summarized anthropological perspectives is not within the scope of this essay, it is useful to identify these connections as they relate to the Kristevan abject. We can then understand why the story elicits a subtle horror in response to its pattern of bodily anxiety. Kristeva asks, “Why does corporeal waste…represent…the objective frailty of symbolic order?” And what better illustration of abjecting the self than the case of Molimus bargaining with body fluids and organs and thus becoming disembodied, his agency actualized in the shame of the realization of bodily limit and the subsequent process of subsumption into the larger will of the Ma’at, which recontextualizes the effects of his own agency in a manner not dissimilar from that which might occur through the catharsis of cosmic horror? In the order of power relations in the story, this moment of exchange subsumes his “person-” or “trollhood,” such as it is, by recontextualizing his agency. The transactional nature of bodily exchanges within the story subject Molimus to a process of sublimation; his corporeality is renounced in exchange for continuation in the abjected form of smoke. He seems to remain partly himself while transitioning to a form subjected to an order imposed by the White Ma’at as a condition of fulfillment. What might have been written as catharsis is instead subdued and anticlimactic, for Bishop extends the story beyond Molimus’s own body and to the bodily limits of the townsfolk from whom he pillages organs in an ironic structural parody of the callousness described in the opening paragraph of the story.

The theme of casual cruelty replays from Molimus’s new perspective as an incorporeal being whose consciousness is carried on wisps of smoke. In his conversation with the White Ma’at early in the story, he cannot comprehend how the children can be so cruel to creatures he perceives as living. To fulfill his bargain to save the Gleeful Horse, he must perpetrate the same kinds of acts upon others, seemingly unaware of his cruelty) Likewise, he does not seem to appreciate or have concern for the cruelty he in turn inflicts upon others even in service of preserving another life, and this seems a crucial point to identify. “…they say the smoke gives them (the Treasure Children) the dreams in exchange for their lives. The dreams…they confide about to friends and siblings before they are seized by the silence that comes with the hollowing (emphasis added) effect of the illness…” (181) The subjectivity of bodily value and perceived validity within a particular set of rules is precisely that which produces catharsis in a Kristevan interpretation, and it is a testament to Bishop’s restraint that she subdues this catharsis to conclude the story with the indefinite continuation of Molimus’s infliction of sickness upon the children. He is “the future” and represents a new ordering of the rules of this world.

“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.” (Kristeva, 1)

Sick

Much of Bishop’s work is preoccupied with themes of disease and bodily hybridization, of “having a foot in both worlds” in some way or another. These notions ask questions common to all effective art: what is the self and its relationship to corporeality? What are the limits of existence? What are the conditions under which those limits might be tested? Often, the borderlands between differing species, living and dead, deformation and bodily integrity, sickness and health, are disputed territories entwined in transactional relationships with one another, as in “Saving the Gleeful Horse.” Disease also features in stories such as “The Art of Dying” and “Maldoror Abroad,” the latter of which suggests that illness consolidates impulses toward destruction of world and destruction of self into a united, disgusted rejection of the limits that have been prescribed by corporeality. And yet, even in a different story’s context, the bodily byproducts of illness are transactional:

“I’ve been on my knees in the toilet, vomiting all kinds of filth. These offerings (emphasis added) from my private ecosystem are flowing to the oceans of the world, and in time will enter the rain that falls everywhere. Close the entrances to your body; eat and drink nothing.” (“Maldoror Abroad,” 98)

In The Etched City, in which Raule, a healer and surgeon, encounters the transformative properties of illness juxtaposed with the transformative powers of art:

“…she had observed that in the view of the healthy, the sick often appeared as monsters. When the monstrosity was too extreme, whether in the form of disease, old age, madness, or deformity, the sufferer would be shunned regardless of whether their condition was contagious or not. She had concluded that it was human nature to superstitiously fear the transferral of misfortunate via some imagined, intangible but highly conductive medium. And now she knew that her own urge to study the frailties and failures of the flesh, and to understand their causes, was born of a primitive desire to immunise herself against them.” (61)

Sculptures such as Bishop’s Plague Doctor Bird distill the themes of human/nonhuman hybridization and illness.

Even as life has a value determined by social relationships in “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” illness and “the ill” as simultaneously a physical description and a social category are in constant conceptual flux—byproducts expelled by social and scientific process. Illness occupies an in-between borderland in a binary system of living and dead or animate and inanimate, perhaps not unlike Molimus’s bodily sublimation into an ephemeral smoke that seems to retain a kind of agency. To be ill is to be forced to directly confront, like Molimus and his plastic ring, the recursively vital and decaying conditions for life even as its embodiment necessarily moves toward death. To be ill is to be marginalized from life by being forced into a social category distinct from health and its implications of full participation, and the “hollowing” plague visited upon the Treasure Children becomes a balancing act for their own prior acts of marginalization of the Gleeful Horse and its kind. The asymmetry between the continuous flux of illness’s effect on the body and the static categories of “healthy” and “ill” is as rich a mine of anxiety to examine as any other, and the particulars of the social context in which illness exists, whether real or fantastical, leave open seemingly infinite ways in which this relationship might be presented. Even as Molimus seems not entirely aware of what his bargain means, the White Ma’at tells him, “The future will work through you.” (177) That future, for the Treasure Children, is illness and the marginalization it entails. In Dodie Bellamy’s mediations on illness, she states: “Julia Kristeva: There are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion.” (79).  As Molimus once was relegated to the space beneath a bridge, so now are the children confined to the margins as victims of the illness he brings to them. Perhaps, as Bellamy puts it elsewhere in a litany of prophesied power inversions exchanged between the healthy and ill through the mediations of language, “When the sick rule the world mortality will be sexy. When the sick rule the world, all writing will be short and succinct, no paragraphs will be longer than two sentences so we can comprehend them through the brain fog (emphasis added) the well bring to us daily.” (36)

______

Works Cited

Bellamy, Dodie. When the Sick Rule the World. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015. Print.

Bishop, K.J. The Etched City. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004. Print.

Bishop, K.J. “Saving the Gleeful Horse”. That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. Self-published, 2012. Print.

Keltner, Stacey. Kristeva. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

Van Wolputte, Steven. “Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves”. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 33 (2004), pp. 251–269. Annual Reviews. 2004.

The post 101 Weird Writers #44 — K.J. Bishop appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Since selling her first story in 1987, her works have appeared in numerous noteworthy outlets, such as Amazing Stories, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and many others.  Johnson has won numerous honors in the genre, including the World Fantasy, Nebula, Hugo, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards.  Her short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, was a WFR favorite in 2012.   To mark the publication of her new novella, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe—a modern take on a Lovecraft classic—we checked in with the author to get her thoughts on such matters as updating Lovecraft, discovering weird fiction at a young age, and how to combat unusual rodents.  More information about the author can be found at http://www.kijjohnson.com.

Weird Fiction Review: As mentioned in the Acknowledgements for The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, women are largely absent from H.P. Lovecraft’s work, which forms a major impetus for your novella.  Are there other noteworthy absences that particularly informed your book’s construction?  Are there other places in his work that strike you as still having room for modern writers to find compelling stories that build a more robust experience of his universe?

Kij Johnson: I had a lot of inspirations and starting points for this book. Everything I read drops into a sort of stewpot in my head from which I ladle at will, so the book has little hat-tips to Virgil, Wodehouse, Carrington, Nabokov — dozens of writers, most of whom had nothing whatsoever to do with Lovecraft’s work or genre. I was strongly affected by the other macabre fantasists,  especially Robert Chambers, who I rediscovered recently: he was a better writer than Lovecraft and had more tools to generate his effects. I also looked at Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night, a 1930s mystery about an Oxford women’s college. I always end up doing a lot of research, even if it’s not directly useful: this time I learned much of fungi and architectural ornamentation motifs.

WFR: You also talk about discovering Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle at a young age. Can you summarize that discovery for our readers (how you discovered the stories, your response to it, etc.)?  Was there anything about the Dream Cycle that appealed to you more than Lovecraft’s other stories? 

KJ: I think I was ten(? eleven?), when we drove from the small Iowa town we lived in to Chicago for a vacation. Kroch’s and Brentano’s was (my mother said) a famous bookstore, and part of the trip would be several hours there. My younger brother and I would be allowed to buy (I think it was) $10 worth of books each.

Kroch’s turned out to be the biggest bookstore I had ever seen: floors and floors of books. Mom set us loose at the entrance with a strict injunction to be back in two hours. My little brother and I were both well past children’s books, so Rich beelined for Science to look at all the paleontology books; and I ended up in Science Fiction. The Lovecraft paperback covers were eerie and terrible, but the Kadath one was slightly less so — so that’s the one I bought first. I read the Dream-quest that night, terrified and fascinated.

WRF: Are there other authors working in Lovecraft’s sandbox that have influenced you, both in general terms and with respect to Vellitt Boe specifically?  Were there other works of weird fiction that you discovered at a young age that have remained favorites?

KJ: I wasn’t even aware so many other modern Lovecraftian works were being created! I only noticed when Lovecraft Country came out.

I read everything I could find as a child: mysteries, romances, adventure tales, history. Weird fiction was part of that, so I also read Dunsany, Derleth, Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s uber-creepy “Yellow Wallpaper,” and on and on. These all became went into my internal stewpot.

WFR: Your prose style in Vellitt Boe differs considerably from that of Lovecraft’s Unknown Kadath; to what degree was this a conscious choice, if at all?  How do you think style relates to the kind of stories being told in each of the two Dream-Quest stories under discussion?

KJ: I am a stylist and I love to play with other peoples’ voices: in the past I’ve written fiction reminiscent of Kenneth Grahame, Fanny Burney, Laurence Sterne, and Neville Coghill’s Chaucer translation. I did some experiments with Lovecraft’s voice, but as I wrote, it was clear that it wouldn’t work for what I wanted. He is lavish in his piling on of vocabulary, but he tends toward adjectives that offer strong emotional charge but minimal detail; he also uses repetition a lot more than I wanted to, and he tends away from scenic writing and toward narrative. I wanted to tell an immediate story about a realistic woman moving through a realistic(ish) landscape that was nevertheless eldritch and strange, and that meant making different decisions.

WFR: There are a number of inversions of the Lovecraft original in your novella apart from the inclusion of a woman as protagonist, and it seems like cosmic horror as a mode of storytelling is particularly conducive to such experiments.  How would you summarize your aesthetic goals with regard to cosmic horror and fantasy, generally and with regard to Vellitt Boe?

KJ: My initial thought was: how would Lovecraft’s world play out differently if I rethink what he does (or doesn’t do) with gender? If I put a woman in the Dream-lands, what happens? She has different agendas, different concerns. If I swap out a pragmatist for a dreamer? She solves problems differently when it’s her very real world that she might if she could just wake up to get out of it. A pragmatist doesn’t make the same decisions: for instance, she avoids the black triremes instead of drinking with a passenger, getting roofied and hauled off to the Moon.

WFR: One aspect of the two Dream-Quest stories that stands out to me is a difference in terms of motivation.  Randolph Carter’s voyage seems instigated mainly by curiosity, whereas Vellitt’s is primarily constructed as a need to accomplish a particular goal with “concrete,” anticipated consequences for the characters.  Can you describe some of your thought process for arriving at this shift in motivations to form the plot trajectory?

KJ: I was flipping everything I could think of, to see what came of it. What does it mean to live in a world that has perhaps been created only by the whims of gods and dreamers, and is therefore susceptible to change as whimsically? How do you navigate that? It’s interesting to watch a character with an agenda try to navigate a floaty world, just as it is (slightly less) interesting to watch a floaty character try to get through agenda-centered world.

And remember: Carter has a clear and consistent agenda through Kadath: he is driven to find the city he has seen from the balustrades; he hungers for it. All his previous, undocumented, visits are maybe curiosity-driven, but Kadath is not.

WFR: Recently we published a story by early-20th-century writer Karl Hans Strobl. It’s an interesting science fiction tale that was written before the German author later became a member of the Nazi party.  How do you deal with a writer like Strobl or Lovecraft who may have ideas that are morally problematic when you read or teach their works?

KJ: That is always the question, isn’t it? I am still navigating this, but I have a few strategies I have worked out. One is to teach them but not to shy away from engagement with their bigotries. Part of the discussion has to be about how a creator’s and an audience’s bigotries reinforce one another, sometimes invisibly. This can be incredibly hard, but is necessary.

Another is to pair them: for instance, Strobl wth Bruno Schulz, a brilliant Jewish surrealist who was killed by a Gestapo officer in WW2 — and again, not to shy away.

WFR: Last of all, which would you rather fight if you had to: zoogs or Rodents of Unusual Size?

KJ: Zoogs! Zoogs can be cowed, which ROUSs can’t. Plus, I am pretty sure I was born with a basic zoog vocabulary. Plus, once I have (I hope) convinced them not to eat me, I can snag some of that great wine they make. Plus, I suspect they might make terrible pets, but maybe not? A zoog sidekick?

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Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love.

A demon is exorcised from a toe, a recovering addict takes on an ancient magus, an author is exposed to the strange totemic power of words, and a ruthless industrialist reaps what he sows during his foray into an unusual form of engineering.  These are some of the ludicrous and unsettling delights to be found in Jeffrey Ford’s latest collection, A Natural History of Hell from Small Beer Press.

The stories meander among “high” (in short story form) fantasy, magical realism, satire, science fiction, and horror, and Ford takes care to demonstrate that these are not mutually exclusive territories.  While they range far and wide within the general realm of speculative fiction, what shines through as perhaps the strongest unifying element is the author’s interest in received cultural narratives, such as fairy tale and myth, and the ways in which contemporary life (relative to whichever story is in question) interacts with and deforms them.  A laundry list of explicit references and subtle allusions abound throughout the collection, and Ford’s penchant for metafictional devices is deployed to great effect in order to create tension between the present and the past.  “Rocket Ship to Hell”, a piece that could be described as an apparent love letter to living science fiction fandom between the 1950s and the present, does not have a great deal in the way of plot, suspense, or character development.  Nevertheless, it manages to create an overall sense of uncertainty by rendering unclear where the division is between the inner and frame stories, reality and drunken bullshitting between sort-of colleagues.

Virtually every story in A Natural History of Hell has as a lynchpin some kind of received tale in the world of the story, and the events which unfold in the main plot are designed to reveal both the strengths and the fragilities inherent to narrative and identity, subject and object.  As perhaps the clearest illustration of Ford’s experimentation with these ideas, in “Spirits of Salt: A Tale of the Coral Heart,” a first-person scholar recounts a legend that rests upon flimsy-at-times evidence from diaries and other such artifacts, a tale which features a third-person character named “-I-” (short for Ismet, but seemingly done to provoke these questions of narrative authority) and another character of a different age and gender with the same long form of the name.  Humans in many of these short works are fragile, rendered into salt in an instant, while stories endure even if in fragmented form through strange forces of quirks of consciousness, as in “Word Doll.”  The mere title encapsulates a conflict between an inert facsimile of human form and the persistent life of the proper case Word from which human consciousness develops, and the story’s namesake is firmly entrenched in the psyche of those on whom it is bestowed, changing their interior monologues in profound ways.

“Word Doll” concerns “Jeffrey Ford,” a writer, and his encounter with a strange anthropologist who unspools a tale largely concerned with the supposed totemic power of words, but it is left artfully ambiguous whether or not in “reality” the eponymous word doll has its power merely by an inherent quality or if the listener is equally complicit in constructing the power of such utterances.  The uncertainty is made possible largely by the author’s inclusion of himself, specifically as a purveyor of words, from early in the story.  “The Thyme Fiend,” one of the strongest pieces on display, features a young Midwestern boy coming of age while dealing with frightening visions and an unsolved murder.  Ford uses playful but resonant references to a number of works, such as Hansel and Gretel and Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (which we’ve covered here before), all of which enrich the story and add appropriate tension rather than descending into overdone pastiche.  The tension and strangeness of the story is balanced by judiciously placed moments that are all too recognizable to most anyone who has made it through adolescence, and the awkward but necessary milestones of transitioning to adulthood make for a fine anchor amidst the bizarre events that propel the plot (and likewise for several others in the collection).

Ford’s stories do not shy away from their heritages, and they unapologetically make frequent use of witches, magicians, reanimated skeletons, rocket ships, and other signposts of specific genres while acknowledging that they are not entirely that same genre.  Often their function as plot devices is purposely eroded by another crucial element of Ford’s fiction: his careful use of violence. There is a kind of precise cruelty contained in the union of fictitious creatures and specifically modern (relative to fairy tale or other folklore used as reference points and context within Ford’s stories) kinds of violence, such as the calculated efficiencies of industrialization applied to living creatures and gunfire used on strange spirits from an ancient folktale.  In most cases, the violence manages to surprise in an artful and convincing manner.

Mixed in with all the elements under discussion is a fine display of humor that often appears at the most unexpected of moments.  “Blood Drive,” while both hilarious and disturbing, reads as a kind of Wayside School Is Falling Down as composed in a strange fever dream conjured by Wayne LaPierre, and although its satirical barbs are sharp and well-aimed, the story feels a bit out of place among the rest of the works in the collection.  The collection’s opener, “The Blameless,” while a fine story on its own seems a bit too absurd to function as an effective overture, even in a collection filled with absurdities.  It would perhaps have set a better overall tone if it was a bit further back in favor of a story like “The Fairy Enterprise” or “The Last Triangle” (which mashes together an ancient magic with the horrors of modern drug addiction and recovery), both of which strike a balance more representative of what would follow.  “The Thyme Fiend” encapsulates many of the ideas explored throughout and is perhaps the best, most robust example of a story that could function as a centerpiece, but it lurks near the end of the book.  In “Blood Drive,” violence itself is the context, which very much seems to be the point, and it works well as satire with a message while not being quite as memorable in terms of plot as stories like “The Fairy Enterprise” and “Mount Chary Galore”, which deploy violence (at times as intense as incidents in “Blood Drive”) on a longer trajectory of cause and effect.  To be fair, “Blood Drive” is itself a depiction of a culture with a warped sense of context and causal relationships, but its effect doesn’t quite linger as much as most of the other stories.

A few minor caveats aside, “A Natural History of Hell” is an excellent collection of stories originally appearing in diverse outlets, along with a brand new tale original to the book.  By revealing the underlying instabilities of foundational narratives and the strange worlds that they struggle to articulate, Ford breathes plenty of life into the Weird and leaves the reader with a pleasant uncertainty as to what they have just experienced, along with a desire to read it again and see what else emerges next time.  This distinctive effect could only be achieved by a thoughtful and unique voice pushing the boundaries created by work that came before even while paying homage to the same.

The post Review: “A Natural History of Hell” by Jeffrey Ford appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

In addition to this conversation, we’ll have a story from each so we can observe the dialogue from more figurative directions.  “Voices Carry” by Eric Schaller was originally published in Shadows & Tall Trees #2 and has not previously appeared online.  Matthew Cheney’s “The Lake” previously appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #21 and his recent collection, Blood: Stories, from Black Lawrence.  “The Lake” also makes its online debut this week with WFR.

We’ve spoken with Schaller and featured his artwork for numerous publications before.  His fiction has appeared in other vital outlets like The Dark and Postscripts, and his debut collection, Meet Me in the Middle of the Air, appeared earlier this year from Undertow.  Matthew Cheney’s meditations on Tainaron by Leena Krohn previously appeared on WFR, and his fiction has been published in many important outlets as well, such as Weird Tales and Conjunctions.  We’re looking forward to getting better acquainted with these two authors and editors currently shaping the landscape of the Weird.

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