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.

Weird Fiction Review: What kinds of fiction or stories did you read and watch growing up? And how have your tastes changed between what originally captivated you and now, if at all?

Nicholas Rombes: I was born in 1965 and so my growing-up reading years were in the 1970s. The first book I can remember reading that shook me (other than The Guinness Book of World Records, which had some weird and grotesque entries and black and white photographs) was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The very first line—“It was a pleasure to burn”—was so shocking to me, and I wondered what sort of person could write that line. That led me to Robert Heinlein, and then eventually to writers like Kelly Link, Octavia Butler, Shirley Jackson and others. But up until I was around 12 or so I just read the same books—mostly by Bradbury—over and over again. And the TV shows at that time that fascinated and terrified me—both new ones and ones in syndication—were Space 1999 (with the great Martin Landau), Land of the Lost, The Twilight Zone, Project U.F.O., The Six Million Dollar Man, Lost in Space and Ironside. Raymond Burr’s character was both weirdly familiar and inscrutable.

WFR: What writers or storytellers do you look up to the most, in regards to setting models for your own writing?

NR: There are so many, but a few contemporary writers would include Roberto Bolaño (I think I’ve read everything that’s been translated; Distant Star, By Night in Chile, and The Third Reich resonate the strongest), Kelly Link, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for models of how to convey tenderness in the midst of chaos, Brian Evenson (Contagion and Last Days especially), Elizabeth Hand (especially her Cass Neary novels), Rudolph Wurlitzer, Rachel Kushner (especially the last parts of The Flamethrowers), Dana Levin (for her poetry collection In the Surgical Theater), Rupert Thomson (notably Death of a Murderer), the short crime novels of Derek Raymond and also Jean-Patrick Manchette (there’s so much you can learn from Manchette about pacing and when to switch from exposition to dialog), Horacio Castellanos Moya (the most instructive are Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror, for how to handle humor and politics and sudden moments of brutality), Ellen Datlow (her editorial hand has touched so many of the stories I admire), and Koji Suzuki (the original author of The Ring novels, just for the sheer audacity of ideas, especially in his novel Spiral). And although they are not fiction writers, the theorists Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva have served as a tremendous inspiration.

But I’ve also learned a terrific amount about visualizing ideas from several graphic novels (for lack of a better term), three in particular: Black Hole (Charles Burns), and King of the Flies: Hallorave and King of the Flies: The Origin of the World, by Mezzo & Pirus.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? If someone tells you something you’ve written is “weird” is it usually a compliment?

NR: Absolutely it’s a compliment. Our house—I can safely say—is probably the only “suburban” house in Michigan that sports a gigantic Eraserhead poster that’s the first thing you see when you come in! I subscribe to the theory that the so-called “weird” is what reality actually is, and that we’ve slowly constructed elaborate narratives (political, social, scientific, etc.) to create a vital illusion of order and rationality. The Enlightenment was a hoax. Weird fiction and media are appealing because they remind us of what we’ve been conditioned to suppress or forget: the rules and niceties of civilization are important bulwarks against the chaos, but that does not make the chaos any less real. In “real life” we desperately need and want these bulwarks: they save us from our darker angels. So we turn to art—weird fiction, for instance—to satisfy our deep, primordial knowledge that, my friend, the universe itself is one very weird, improbable concoction.

WFR: Finally, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever read (or perhaps watched), and why?

NR: Honestly, I try to avoid anything that shows too much. I love the elliptical, the low-drone, the dark undercurrent, and find passages of Gus Van San’t film Gerry more unsettling than anything by someone like Jodorowsky. Having said that the strangest thing I’ve ever watched that sticks with me—and I know I’m not alone in this—is the film Possession, directed by Andrzej Żuławski. I’m sure there are far weirder films, but one of my criterion for “successful weird” is that is has to stick. And Possession sticks. Why? It’s hard to say, but one key factor is that there is no irony, no winking, no postmodern overt gestures.

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