WFR: 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?

When I was very young I mainly watched films. I loved adventure stories, anything about exploration, lost civilisations, quests, dangerous voyages, daring escapes, sword fights, living skeletons, dinosaurs, all that sort of thing, much of which had its ultimate basis in Jules Verne, Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, as well as in myths and legends. My favourites included Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island, Jack the Giant Killer, The Valley of Gwangi, The Land that Time Forgot, The Golden Voyage of Sindbad. I also enjoyed non-fantastical historical films if they featured gladiators with tridents, or knights hitting each other with maces, but the sudden appearance of a bronze giant or pterodactyl always improved matters considerably for me.

Such films were my formative influence but they gave me a laughably erroneous impression of the world, for they made physical hardship and strenuous activity seem easier than they are. I assumed that exploring unknown regions of Africa in search of forgotten magic kingdoms ruled by beautiful queens and guarded by tyrannosaurs would be child’s play, and as I was a child I decided to give it a go. I decided that I could walk to Africa, build a raft when I got there, paddle it up rivers, make my own bow and arrows, fight whatever monsters needed to be fought, return rich and deliver a lecture on my discoveries at the Royal Geographical Society that would guarantee my eternal fame.

So I filled a water canteen with orange squash, put my trusty penknife in my pocket, and set off one summer morning. For about half an hour I walked through fields before bumping into a friend. He asked me for a drink because it was a warm day and I gave him my canteen. But instead of taking just a few sips, he gulped down half of it. Realising that I would never get to Africa on half rations, I went home. But I always believed I would make another attempt one day; and maybe I still carry that belief deep inside me. It’s an uncompleted task.

So the answer to your question is: films. I did read too, mainly comics and children’s books, but the books that adults owned seemed much more fascinating, yet they remained baffling and mysterious objects. I would decipher the spines as they stood on the shelves or take them down and turn the pages without understanding anything but aware that this cosmos of secrets would reveal itself to me in time. Dickens exerted a particular allure. I know of writers who were reading adult novels when they were six or seven years old but I started later than that. I was fourteen before reading became a serious pastime for me.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was my gateway into literature. It allowed me to pass into the entire universe of classic novels. My epiphany was that reading finely-crafted fiction was not only fun, educational and inspiring, but easy too, whereas I had been expecting those enigmatic objects called books to remain almost impenetrable. My progress was rapid. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace next, then Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. I became a bibliophile, spending my pocket money on Penguin Classics. I’m still an adherent of Penguin Classics, but I hardly watch films of any kind these days, I don’t know why, they don’t hold my attention like they once did. My tastes have changed in many ways, but I suppose that deep down the early influences never entirely let one go. It’s a shame there are no dinosaurs in Tolstoy. More than anyone, he would have understood their hearts and minds.

WFR: What writers were your introduction to the “weird”, whether the Weird Tales kind of weird or something even stranger?

Poe was the first real ‘weird’ writer I ever read. I was fifteen years old at the time I discovered him and I became an instant devotee. Thanks to Poe I ended up specialising in short stories rather than novels. He was my idol and my mentor in so many ways. I desperately wanted to be a writer like him. He demonstrated how terror, panic and desperation could be handled with conscious and deliberate skill, for essentially he was an ideas writer who dealt with emotional themes, rather than an emotional writer hoping to intellectualise his material, as Lovecraft arguably was. This is not to disparage Lovecraft, but they came at the weird from different directions and Poe’s direction is more to my liking.

Poe was my model for a long time and in some ways still is. I regard him as the spiritual godfather of the modern ‘weird’ even though the best part of two centuries have passed since he lived and wrote. There’s a very odd distorted comedy in his writing too, the comedy of the absurd, which was brand new to me when I first encountered it. People often forget that he wrote ‘arabesques’ as well as ‘grotesques’. I was probably even more influenced by his weird comedies than his weird serious tales. Then when I discovered Kafka and Voltaire’s Candide I knew for certain this was the less trodden path I preferred to follow, the path of philosophical irony and menacing absurdism and offbeat logic.

A little later I discovered Ray Bradbury and he also became important to me. He’s the writer I regard as the nearest true 20^th Century equivalent to Poe, in the sense of his versatility, the fact that he wrote science fiction as well as horror and fantasy, and the kind of warped comedy that seems on the surface to be light-hearted, almost homely stuff, but is founded on quite exceptional morbidity. Clark Ashton Smith is another writer I must mention as having a strong effect on me. I mustn’t forget Saki, who was another prime influence. Jack Vance too.

These were all authors I discovered before the age of 18, as I feel that after that age the rules alter somehow, that while we may be powerfully influenced and inspired by new literary discoveries in our conscious minds, on a deeper level we are less scathed. The authors I most admire and wish to emulate, Calvino, Borges, Barthelme, Vian, are those I really only got to grips with in my twenties and thirties, and even though I always cite them as my major literary influences I suspect they float and drift on the magma of the older influences like unstable tectonic plates, ready to submerge at any moment.

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

There absolutely is such a thing as too weird. It is anything you find too odd for your own taste at that particular time. Herman Melville seemed impossibly weird to me when I tried to read his sentences when I was too young for him. Now I appreciate his genius. Salman Rushdie, no less, a wonderful writer who can be very weird, if not too weird, described some of Donald Barthelme’s stories as being “too weird” while acknowledging him as one of his favourite writers.

I can guess which stories Rushdie is alluding to, but without those particular stories maybe the remainder of Barthelme wouldn’t be as good as it is. It might be that the ‘too weird’ aspect of him was necessary for the rest to be what it was. One of my favourite short story writers, Gabriel Josipovici, can often seem too weird, although the pieces in question are still beautiful and might be so because they are too weird. When we find something ‘too weird’ it could mean not that we are not ready for it but that we fear it’s already beyond us, that we missed the opportune moment when it would have been just right, that we have lost its essence. This is pure speculation and maybe not helpful.

People are always telling me that my stories are “weird” and certainly I don’t regard it as an insult. Nor do I regard it as a compliment. It’s just a label and we have to put up with labels in this world because we have no other choice. Even the condition of “being unlabelled” is a label. The fact is that an author shouldn’t try to control the reactions of readers or be in any way upset by whatever those reactions turn out to be. A fiction is an offering to the reader and if they don’t like it that’s a shame but it’s their right and their business. And yes I have been told that I am “too weird”. I can’t argue with sincere readers because there is nothing to argue about. As for the works that I personally find “too weird”, I’ll say that Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Julian Rios’ Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel fall into this category, but I love them both. Their “too weird” aspects are rich language and rhythm resources to be mined.

WFR: How would you describe your personal aesthetic as a writer, in your own words?

“Rigour and mischief” is my motto. I ought to have these words printed in tiny letters somewhere on the title page of my books as a declaration of intention and achievement. The mischief part is my love of playfulness, tricks, games and puzzles. By rigour I mean that my stories must always be logically constructed and this logic should be competent and effective, it should be right. This doesn’t mean that the logic has to be the empirical logic of everyday causality. There are other logics. The logic of my tales can equally well be that of ideas-association or word allusion or it might be that the content is entirely determined and focussed by the form of the work, for experimentation with inspiring form seems to have sadly gone out of fashion at the present, but I still employ it to assemble frameworks that generate stories that probably wouldn’t come into existence without such a formal approach. This is the method of my ethic and aesthetic, but the question remains why I wish to write?

Why do I continue to create work after producing so many stories over so many years? Now I might say that I wish to push the boundaries and to inspire in unexpected ways, to simultaneously satirise and make a serious contribution to this kind of literature, to be amusing, original, unique, but when I began, I just had a simple urge to express creativity on the page. I wanted to exercise my imagination in order to strengthen it, and I hoped there would be readers who would read me, but that was only a hope, not an essential criterion for my writing. Yet that was the time in my writing career when I would have been most responsive to feedback or criticism, and I would surely have changed my style, my themes, anything at all, in accordance with the opinions of readers.

But I had no readers. I kept my writings to myself for years. I evolved in an insular manner, and this had advantages and disadvantages. I wasn’t shepherded along orthodox routes towards the tastes of the average reader but went my own way. I was tailored only by myself, so understanding of normal standards wasn’t reinforced but self-assurance was. I became my own motive force. I wonder what kind of writer I might be if I had joined writing groups, mixed with other beginners striving in the same way, if those early efforts had been read and commented on. I certainly wouldn’t be the kind of writer I now am, but whether I would be better, worse or differently the same, I really can’t say.

WFR: Older story forms, such a fairy tales, myths, fables, and the like seem to find their way into a number of your stories to various degrees. Can you describe what you see as the role of these story forms when they interact with the modern fantastical or weird tale? Is there a relationship between the appropriation of these older forms and your interest in using metafiction in some of your stories?

Contrary to the dictums of all, or at least most, creative writing class rules I actually prefer telling to showing, and I have always been this way, and these older forms you mention, such as fables, myths, legends, tend to tell rather than show, but do so in a special way that is very immediate, more intense than most kinds of showing, even though the point of the alleged superiority of showing over telling is that showing is more immediate and intense. Well, no, not always. It might often or mostly be on the page, but only there, not in the actual experience of the tale as it’s told, absorbed or redeemed. What I mean by this is that many of the older forms originally were intended as tools of a communal experience that took place around a campfire, for instance, or else formed part of some oral bonding, putting a child to bed with a fairy story. The mode of telling was the experience as much as any evoked in the tale itself. The person receiving the story was in two settings at the same time, aware of the environment that framed the fiction no less than events inside the frame.

This is unlike modern readers who seek and attain total immersion in a sprawling fantasy epic, who yearn to hermetically seal themselves in that imaginary world and forget about the chair they are sitting in, the room in which the chair is situated, the house, the world. Such immersion is itself a fable, a fairy tale, always an illusion. When we most feel a fiction might be true, when we are most lost inside it and it becomes most real, we lose the truths and realities of the act of reading, which are that while framed by the world, almost in parody the fiction is framed by us. This is why I say that telling can be more direct than showing, and if the old forms do still have a function in contemporary weird fiction, it’s at least partly that they give us this double existence, the superimposed awareness of the tale of the writer and our own tale, that of the reader.

This relates to metafiction in that metafiction wants precisely the same thing, for the outside world to be part of the story, for the mirrors of the outside to be facing those of the inside, to create a corridor to infinity that is really a loop. Consider the most interesting weird work coming out of Africa in recent times. I’m thinking of Mia Couto, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Dambudzo Marechera and others. With these writers there seems to be no distinction between telling and showing, no false dichotomy. When they are telling they also are showing, with a luminescent purity, and when showing they are telling in rich vibrant tones.

WFR: Are there any styles or genres that interest you creatively that you haven’t yet had the opportunity to explore? If not, what are some other ways in which you challenge yourself with respect to your work?

I ought to challenge myself more than I do. I am acutely aware that I have already reached that stage where I am failing to challenge myself every time I start to write a new story. There is always the peril for a writer of reaching the peak of their potential and then continuing down the other side without realising the summit has been attained. One of the reasons I always planned to write exactly 1000 stories and no more was to control this journey to some extent, to give it a definite destination, one I never really thought it would reach, but at least to reduce my chances of fading away like a whimper to nothingness.

But yes, there are genres I still plan to attempt. I want to write some kind of Western one day but it will be more like a displaced Welsh Don Quixote than a typical Western. When I was younger I wanted to try my hand at everything equally, science fiction, horror, adventure, sword and sorcery, avant-garde, historical, comedy. Then I acquired a reputation as a humorous writer and I did veer deeper into that definition of my own free will. But comedy is only one small aspect of life and it limits as much as it liberates, so one absolutely must resist the temptation to settle in one’s nook, on the padded sub-genre, dozing.

WFR: Are the stories in Brutal Pantomimes connected to your stated plan to create a grand cycle of interconnected pieces? If so, can you tell us a bit about how they fit in? If not, was there a particular purpose behind the departure from that cycle?

All my work is connected to my grand cycle of interconnected pieces, even though I have written and published stories that aren’t connected. What this means is that I will still find a way to work them in somehow. The whole thing must be engineered well, so there will be lots of minor adjustments as I go along, and presumably major adjustments at the end, if the very end is ever reached. The stories in this new book are part of the cycle but not in any special way. The idea is that although all the parts are connected somehow, the connections aren’t essential to the reading of the tales as they are. They have to be standalone stories too; otherwise I have failed in my intentions and duty.

I selected stories of mine that hadn’t yet been published in book form and submitted them to my publisher, who then picked the ones he liked best. My selection was nearly random, but it did contain two stories I was particularly keen to see published in a book, ‘The Jam of Hypnos’ and ‘The Impossible Inferno’, and I was glad my publisher chose these among the final pieces to include in the collection. ‘The Impossible Inferno’ was the 500^th story I wrote and I tried to make a special effort when writing it, to heighten the entire experience, so I worked very feverishly on it, and I regard it as one of my best fictions to date. But are writers the best judges of their work? Almost never, I suspect.

The post Interview: Rhys Hughes appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This year has been a fantastic year for D.P. Watt. First, his short story collection, An Emporium of Automata, was reprinted by Eibonvale Press; we printed one of the stories from this collection, “Erbach’s Emporium of Automata”. Also, Watt has a new collection this year from Egaeus Press called The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications and Watt’s fiction was collected in the Zagava/Ex Occidente anthology, Infra Noir. There’s good reason why Watt had such an excellent year: his fiction is some of the most unique and fascinating in the contemporary Weird scene. As a writer, Watt is not afraid to push boundaries as his work covers a wide range of subjects from photography to theater to philosophy while utilizing elements from everything from magical realism to dark fantasy. Weird Fiction Review recently had a chance to catch up with Watt and we asked him some questions about his new releases.

Give us a bit of information about The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications. How does it fit into your body of work? What stories are new and where do others come from?

The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications collects shorts stories and two novellas from 2011–2013 and includes two previously unpublished tales, ‘By Nature’s Power Enshrined’ and ‘14ml of Matt Enamel #61’. It continues some of my interests in the transformative capacities of matter and the nature of objects.

The stories come from a range of publications. The two novellas were both published by Ex Occidente Press. ‘The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller’ is a more experimental work, following two (or perhaps three) dead souls on a variety of journeys, and seems to be either loved or loathed. ‘Dehiscence’ was part of ‘The Last Thinkers’ boxed set, and, again explores the relationship we have to objects and the nature of caring for things and their histories.

I enjoy writing to themes and three of the tales were in response to calls. ‘Holzwege’ attempts to evoke something of H.H. Ewers work that Side Real Press have been promoting very well indeed. ‘…he was water before he was fire…’ examines ‘thin places’ and is set beside a wonderful Loch that I had visited first as a child and never forgot. ‘Vertep’ takes Stravinsky’s Petruska and a jack-in-the-box to explore classical music with a very gruesome conclusion.

‘A Harvest of Abandon’ was first published in BOOK, and it blends my interest in objects with writing, with a bloody twist. ‘Laudate Dominum (for many voices)’, a tale set in Cornwall involving musical machines, appeared in Michael Kelly’s journal Shadows and Tall Trees, which, I understand, has sadly closed until further notice. It was reprinted in Johnny Mains’ Best British Horror 2014.

The title story first appeared in Sacrum Regnum journal and synthesises many of my obsessions; performance, magic, and the world of things, mainly. It contains something of a playful manifesto.

I love the use of visual media in The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications. It reminds me a lot of 19th century literature in a way and it’s a shame that illustrated fiction fell out of favor in the 20th century. Did you select the images for your work? If so, how did you go about finding and deciding to include which images with which stories?

Mark Beech at Egaeus Press has produced a stunning book. I am so grateful to him for all the work he put into the book’s design. It is always a joy to work with a publisher who understands the material, in many ways better than you do yourself. When he showed me ideas for its layout and the use of the visual material therein it always echoed the mood, and often the setting of the stories perfectly.

We pooled our collection of images that appear within. I sent through many cartes de visite scans, and other photographs that I had gathered from here and there and Mark added a number of his own, and then set to work transforming them into a sort of decaying scrapbook that you work to piece together.

It is sad that the illustrated book fell out of favour, but I think many small presses now are producing books that focus on the aesthetic force of the book as object, which, again, resonates perfectly with the stories contained in this collection. It made the process of compiling and editing the book a real delight too.

The name “The Phantasmagorical Imperative” is a play on Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. How does that relate to the short story? Moreover, how do you come up with these rather imaginative names for your stories and how do they typically fit the stories you’re writing?

I mentioned above that it was a ‘manifesto’, of sorts. I was trying to imagine the possibility of an ethical imperative driven by change and wonder, rather than by the universal replication that one finds in Kant’s Categorical Imperative. That is not to say that it is a guiding moral principle, far from it, but instead an openness to uncertainty and the imaginary.

Titles are obviously vital, especially in a short story, and sometimes I work from them, and at others I discover them along the way. Often I find that they offer a way of re-reading the story, that (a little like the phantasmagorical imperative suggests in relation to objects) can re-make them into an entirely new tale.

Sometimes a story will sit around for quite a while with a very bland title that frustrates and annoys me up to the point that its real title emerges.

I’m interested to know more about the setting for the stories of The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications. While some of the stories seem more modern, some seem to take place at a time in our history or perhaps in a fantastical world not too different from Victorian England. How do you tend to view the settings for your fiction?

Much of what I write comes from places I have been and, again, a sort of transformation takes place as you experiment with the imagined setting (or the idealised one that memory re-crafts).

Everything is in service to the story. So, it is driven by the nature of the weird, supernatural, or strange element at its heart, and then the place in history, or in a more fantastical parallel time, appears as the planning and plotting of the tale takes place. Often a story is buzzing around my head for many months, and may go through stages of being relocated historically.

With an overtly historical setting a certain alienation occurs, and a tendency towards caricature. Sometimes this can work very well, but I often like to play with the relationship between the reader and the writer, and with a historical setting this can be difficult to achieve. I suppose the responsibility is to always be attentive to the setting, because it is the characters’ environment, and theirs are the stories (however odd they might be) that you are trying to show. It is always theatrical, of course, we know we’re not there—they’re not there—but sometimes showing a little of the construction of the setting can pay dividends back to the core fantastical element you are attempting to evoke.

I’ve noticed this dichotomy in your works that I see in a lot of weird fiction. In some works like “Dr Dapertutto’s Saturnalia”, you have this idea that the world is random — that it’s strange and inexplicable. In other works, there’s this sort of justice where one’s actions incur a payment that must be repaid. We see this in “By Nature’s Power Enshrined.” What’s the sort of inspiration behind these stories? Do you tend to believe in either worldview?

That’s funny you should mention ‘Dr Dapertutto’s Saturnalia’ presenting a ‘random world’; I think it is a good example of the tension many of the stories attempt to create between the inexplicable and the fated. In that story, the main character finds that things are not as chaotic and disordered as he first thought them to be, and, indeed, that his own words are appearing from an elaborate script over which he has no control. Yes, it’s strange and inexplicable, but certainly not random, and that creates another layer of sinister strangeness to it. The question of ‘justice’ raises an interesting point—there are debts to be paid for the kinds of creative abilities that many of the characters develop.

At the heart of all of this is not a belief in a particular worldview, as such—nor, indeed, the proselytising of any particular semi-doctrine. The tension you outline feeds back into what I mention above concerning transformation. I see fiction as an environment of exploration and experiment, where the reader and writer can use the imagination to examine modes of consciousness and creativity. If fiction were simply the replication of the world then it becomes nothing more than a dull map of a bland terrain, if it can colour the hills purple and the sky green it allows thought some liberation from an obligation to repeat and become confined by routine. It’s also great fun!

I love the variety that one encounters when they read your fiction. From elements of surrealism to philosophical and introspective prose, there’s a lot of different styles and modes of writing you incorporate into your stories. Is that a conscious decision or does it occur naturally as you write?

Style is governed very much by what the story needs to do, and often I use direct address to the reader, which I know can sometimes come across as rather didactic. It is not meant to and is there, again, to raise that possibility of some creative transaction that goes beyond the delivery of the tale itself.

Once the style has asserted itself it then becomes more consciously deployed to achieve this—sometimes it works, and sometimes I have to begin again, or rewrite within a new framework, to pursue new avenues that have arisen.

Are there any works you feel that are under-appreciated that you’d like to recommend to us? Maybe works that are weird fiction or exist just outside the bounds of weird fiction that have influenced your work?

I think there are so many ways now to get recommendations and advice on writers, from open-access journals to lively web forums, that few writers who, twenty years ago, might have been difficult to obtain, or remained pretty obscure, remain so. While I often see people state that X, Y or Z writer is under-appreciated, I wonder if that’s really the case. I think they are often read, now, by those who will really appreciate their work. We move towards a fragmented, but oddly focused, engagement with literature and that seems to have happened from the ground up, and is governed by genuine enthusiasm (not simple fandom!) and a deep critical knowledge, and long may it continue.

As for recent ‘weird delights’ that I’ve had recommended to me I’d include Géza Csáth’s The Magician’s Garden, Fyodor Sologub’s Petty Demon and The Sweet-scented Name, Vlado Žabot’s The Succubus, and an author who I’m sure is very familiar to WFR readers but who was entirely new to me—Stephen Millhauser, and his collection We Others. I am just about to start Edwin Muir’s The Marionette, which looks intriguing!

Influences can be hard to follow but I’d say my interests are more in the realm of the European fantastic rather than the Lovecraftian ‘Weird’ tradition—Hoffmann, Kafka and Huysmans and the strange tales of Aickman are very important to me, as are the works of Grabinski, Schulz and Walser. Where they all live on the weird fiction spectrum I’m not certain, but the breadth of a work such as the Vandermeer’s The Weird just goes to show what a wonderful tradition this kind of fiction embraces.

Do you have any future work or plans that you’d like to mention?

I’m currently working on a novella and a new collection of stories, called Almost Insentient, Almost Divine, which should, hopefully, be published next year.

There’s also the ever-growing list of short stories waiting to get written—perhaps, one day, they will.

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