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…

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In short, this anthology is bound to put uncanny fiction on the map for modern audiences and the only thing I think that matches its excellence is Sandor’s enthusiasm for the subject which she was happy to speak to us about. Be sure to stick around this week as we’ll also be featuring an exclusive essay on the uncanny based on the anthology’s introduction that Sandor has generously adapted for us to feature at Weird Fiction Review. Also, we’ll be posting the same translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” that is included in The Uncanny Reader.

Weird Fiction Review: Why do you think the uncanny has been around for so long and pervaded so many cultures and countries?

Marjorie Sandor: You probably already know the wonderful opening salvo of Lovecraft’s Horror in Supernatural Literature: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” If we think about this in terms of what art has always done for humankind, it’s always hovering in this intersection between the known and unknown—between the “official story” and the obliterated history that is not really gone, but suppressed or forgotten. We’ve been using this word, uncanny for hundreds of years, to describe the way we feel when something utterly mysterious happens close by—in the neighborhood, in the house-and-family, in our own bodies and sense of self. It might be supernatural. It might not. It might be fate. Or it might be chance. The crucial thing is that we can’t resolve it. The uncertainty—and what it makes us do and say—makes us uncanny to ourselves.

One cool thing to add here: the really old Scots/Gaelic word, “canny,” and its German equivalent, “heimlich,” originally meant not only safe and cozy but also private, hidden, and in old Scots, possessed of supernatural knowledge.” You might, for instance, go to a “canny man” to lay a curse on someone who’d pissed you off. This means that canny, as a word, has already secretly given birth to its eventual opposite, uncanny. That’s creepy, no?

But to go back to your question: we’ve always told ourselves stories after meeting with something inexplicable. The more we try to light up all the corners and rid ourselves of dangers, the more this primitive sensation takes root—like a seed of anxiety that will find a home wherever it can. The harder we try to expel it, the more it wants in. You can see why this is so rich and complex and unnerving when it comes to the art of storytelling, and all art forms, for that matter.

WFR: This anthology seems to be quite different from the rest of your work in that you’re the editor (not the writer) and also in terms of subject matter. Why the change?

MS: I’m so glad you used the word “seems.” I used to think of myself as a writer of more-or-less realistic stories, but there’s always been another current running beneath—in fact, I turned in a fairy-tale when I applied to MFA programs in the 1980s. Terrific timing. But now, having taught “the uncanny-in-literature” to my own MFA students for the last decade, I can see it secretly pervading everything I’ve written, fiction or creative nonfiction. For instance, in Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime, a young woman is forever trying to dig up family secrets that should have remained hidden. The final story contains the most well-guarded family secret of all: she receives an incomplete sketch of it from her father on his deathbed, and the key figure from his past might be an apparition, an invention—we never know. In an earlier story, “The Gittel,” a child on the brink of Holocaust-Germany dreams of being stuffed into a black grand piano by his mother. Wouldn’t Freud have loved that? In my recent nonfiction, The Late Interiors, weird dreams, hauntings, and strange coincidences abound. Why is this? I don’t know: I come from a family of Russian-and-Hungarian Jewish immigrants, and I think we dragged a great mystical and folkloric tradition with us to Ellis Island without quite realizing it. Add to this the fabulous ghost stories I was told as a child growing up in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California—those suburbs are miles-deep with repressed histories going back to the first inhabitants of the place.

WFR: Do you view uncanny fiction as a distinct sub-genre or more of a tradition or narrative element?

MS: What a great question. In fact, I don’t think it’s a genre or sub-genre at all—it won’t stay pinned-down. In life, it’s a sensation; so, in literature (or in any art, really), it’s an effect, and finally, it’s one that morphs from reader to reader. In fact, I think it defies genre. You might experience it in a work of total realism about an impoverished and hungry child confronting, for the first time, the foreignness that is the oyster (Chekhov, “Oysters”), or during the slow transformation of an English train-station waiting room on a dark winter’s night, as a whole ghostly world reasserts itself (Aickman, “The Waiting Room”). I titled the anthology The Uncanny Reader to put the emphasis on the reader rather than the writer: to invite other readers into this weird (and yes, idiosyncratic) library. The sensation of the uncanny is so individual, so variable from reader to reader, that there’s no telling who will be unsettled by what. It’s kind of subversive that way, and it lets us, as readers, discover just how peculiar we are.

WFR: Were there any stories you wanted to include but weren’t able to due to copyrights?

MS: Big time. I envisioned an anthology composed almost entirely of reprints, and I also wanted it to have an international scope. And, alas, I was the greenest of greenhorns when I began the process. My vision turned out to be almost comically at odds with the reality of rights acquisition on a limited budget. I was, early on, a bit like Dorothy at the great doors of Oz, confronted by the guard who yells, “Go Away! The great Oz cannot see you now—or ever!” Early on, I longed for Kawabata’s “The Arm” and Julio Cortázar’s “Bestiary.” I probably could have gotten them; I just didn’t know how, at the early stage, to pull it off without spending my whole advance. Then, too, I wrote heartfelt letters to a few very famous contemporary writers and/or their editors, and was greeted with silence—I shan’t name them here; they actually don’t know who they are. So, let’s just say that financially and spiritually, I had to let go of a few. But a lot of people in the business turned out to be angelically kind, and some of them saved me from bankruptcy.

WFR: What other works would recommend to those who’ve enjoyed The Uncanny Reader in terms of books and perhaps other media like film and art?

MS: Films: The Babadook (2014); The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). The Innocents (1961); The Haunting of Hill House (1963). The Quay Brothers’ animation of Schulz’s stories, watchable on Youtube.

Humor—in the sense of the uncanny feeling caused by “unintended repetition.” Watch youtubes of “The Great Flydini” routine by Steve Martin, and “No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Monty Python (with great thanks to the British literary and cultural critic Nicholas Royle for pointing that out.)

Visual Art: most recently, this very exciting art installation of gigantic self-propelled creatures made of PVC pipe and fabric, by Theo Jansen. As I write this, his Strandbeests are moving along Miami Beach. Going back a century, you might check out the work of the symbolist painter Odilon Redon, especially his series of “noirs” based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. If you look at just one, make it “The Teeth,” based on his story “Berenice” (which is in the anthology).

More very early short fiction: the late 18^th century Scottish writer James Hogg—I didn’t include him here because I ran out of room and was dedicated to Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” above all. But Hogg’s Country Dreams and Apparitions are a delight, as is Margaret Oliphant’s late 19^th c. novella, “The Library Window.” And The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James—uncanniest novella of all time. To leap forward to the 1970s: Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (a great example of uncanniness in photography-and-writing.

Nonfiction: Start with Freud’s very strange essay, “The Uncanny,” then follow it up with a dip into Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny, Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny, and Lawrence Weschler’s essays in Uncanny Valley. Puppet, by Kenneth Gross, is also a dream.

WFR: Have you found other works outside of the uncanny that have been influenced by uncanny fiction in some way?

MS: Ah, yes. That way lies madness—in a good way. You’ll find it in studies of architecture, medicine, robotics design, war, race relations. Nicholas Royle, says in his book The Uncanny, “the world is uncanny.” Why is this? Because it provides an incredibly valuable—and ever surprising—lens through which to look at the way we live now. I’ve discovered that if I reconsider an unsettling encounter, a disturbing work of art, or something as potentially mundane and depressing as an abandoned shopping mall, I don’t look away quite as quickly. Thinking about the uncanny forces us to slow down and consider the nature of our own “first reading” of a moment, person, or place. This could have profound implications in our political and cultural life.

WFR: What are your plans for the future? Do you plan to return to the uncanny again sometime or somehow reuse things you’ve learned while editing this anthology?

MS: I’ve been infected for life. I’ve got a novel-in-progress and new stories and I can feel them edging, of their own accord, deeper into ghostly territory. My most recently published short story is about a haunting: it’s an update of “Pomegranate Seed,” the Edith Wharton story in this anthology. As I wrote it, I found myself confronting my fear of contemporary technology—the story is called “Darkfruit.com.” What a surprising title, given that I’m practically allergic to the world of devices and the Internet. I’m also at work on a novel set in Inquisition Spain: it opens with an old man sitting in an empty palace, holding an obsolete musical instrument and invoking the shade of his dead lover. I think that “knowing” about the uncanny has heightened my sense of just how storied and haunted all our spaces and bodies are. I don’t think my material has changed. But my view of it absolutely has. There’s no going back.

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