WFR: What kinds of fiction or stories did you read and watch growing up?

Dempow Torishima: As a child, I liked stories with illustrations, like Doctor Doolittle, René Guillot’s Un petit chien va dans la lune, works by Edogawa Rampo, and so on (I was enthralled by the things that rose up between the words and the pictures), and I think that is also related to my present style of writing.

In my teenage years, I got really into strange, unique works of Japanese fiction, such as Kyusaku Yumeno’s Dogra Magra, Mushitaro Oguri’s Murder at Black Death Mansion, Shozo Numa’s Yapoo: the Human Cattle. In particular, I was strongly influenced by the word-plays, images of body modification, and so on in Yapoo: the Human Cattle.

After that, I started reading a variety of novels from a variety of countries (regardless of genre), and as you might expect, I really liked the ones with strong conceits and high levels of the absurd. These days, I like Can Xue, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Seth Fried. I’m also drawn to authors like Yoko Tawada and Yuko Yamao, who are very particular about the words they use. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Hisashi Kuroma’s translation style shocked me with its copious use of kanji neologisms and ruby text.

(In Japanese books, ruby text—tiny phonetic characters printed next to kanji characters—is sometimes used to indicate the pronunciations of difficult kanji. I use it to create wordplays, double-meanings, and so on. Still, from the time I was first published, I’ve been told those effects are impossible to replicate in English. )

As for movies, I like directors such as David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Švankmajer, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but even within that group Cronenberg looms large, and has influenced me strongly in terms of both visuals and speculation.

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

DT: So many names come to mind that it’s hard to narrow it down. For every work I write, I’m inspired by a different author. I’m drawn to authors who draw as well as write, like Edward Carey. As for contemporary Japanese authors, Toh EnJoe and Yusuke Miyauchi are always stimulating.

WFR: How would you describe your personal aesthetic in your own words?

DT: To the extent that it’s possible, I try to put myself in a state where my perceptions of beauty and ugliness, and right and wrong, are a blank slate, and write using only the subjective viewpoints and knowledge of the beings that live in the world I’m writing about. Just as novels with a contemporary setting don’t include explanations about refrigerators, as much as possible I try to use only descriptions to show the things that are self-evident about them. My ideal is to write something like a translation of a novel written in another world.

If I use pre-existing nouns to express various things in that world, somehow the impression just doesn’t gel, so I use the meanings and shapes and sounds of kanji characters (with ruby text) to coin terms appropriate to the appearance and content of those objects (and sometimes I’ll also cram a completely different meaning into a pre-existing noun). To me, neologisms are like sets, props, and special makeup effects in film art.

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

DT: At the time Sisyphean was released in Japan, I was told it was untranslatable, and the fact that it can now be read in English is itself “too weird,” which makes me very happy. I’m truly grateful that thanks to the long, hard efforts of translator Daniel Huddleston, this has become a reality.

“Weird” is of course a compliment as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes I see comments like, “It’s too gross; I can’t read it,” or “I feel sick at my stomach,” but at times like that, I try to remember the words of John Waters, who said, “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”

WFR: Sisyphean is incredibly original and surreal. Can you tell us how it came together? When did you start working on it and where did you get the idea for it?

DT: I started writing “Sisyphean,” the title story, in 2010.

I think the misery of having to work for a long time at a company that had bad working conditions, coupled with all the turmoil I’d been bottling up because of my commercial illustration and design work, just broke out all at once, like the Great Dust Plague. The barrel burst. And when I looked around me, I saw lots of people suffering from outrageous demands of their jobs, and thought that by using the techniques of SF and fantasy novels, I might be able to make that present situation apparent. So I set out to create a work where the novel itself would function as a work of installation art on the extremities of labor.

Up until then, I had created stories and pictures as separate things, but it kept feeling like something was half-baked about both of them, as if something very important was missing. Before I started work on “Sisyphean,” I realized that by putting both of those things together, I might be able to achieve a synergistic effect. It was a vague idea, but at that point I intended to put greater weight on the illustrations, and produce a work that was like a visual story.

At first, I made a lot of sketches and expanded the image in my mind, and then after drawing a number of illustrations, I started writing. Prior to “Sisyphean,” I had experimented with writing a surreal dictionary-novel that was just a string of annotations upon annotations, sort of like a hybrid of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, and that technique came in handy for describing the world of “Sisyphean.”  I was going back and forth between words and pictures, completing both with one another, and while I was writing, I started giving more and more weight to the sentences. (Rather than me writing it, it felt like I was excavating fossils buried in deep underground strata, or weaving it together from fragments of the excavated fossils as I turned them up, down, left, and right.) In the end, I went way over the page limit for the short story competition, and I believe my efforts to condense that text, paring multiple lines down to one, must also be connected to my present style of writing.

After that, using the overstuffed setting of “Sisyphean” as a base, I wrote the other stories going backward through the ages, changing things up with each one, until at last in 2013, I was able to bring it all together in one book.

As for ideas, the idea of the “Descent From Heaven” in “Cavumville,” for example, came to me while I was watching a scene of snow being removed from roofs on TV once, and imagined what it would be like if all of those snowflakes were bugs. Most ideas sneak up on me quietly, at unpredictable times and from unpredictable directions. I get a lot of ideas by attaching plausible explanations to wordplays. When I’m doing that while writing, I sometimes feel like I’m going on and on trying to keep some lies I’ve told consistent.

WFR: In terms of your artwork, what artists and artworks have influenced you? Have you been influenced by manga at all?

DT: Hieronymus Bosch, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon, Max Ernst, Max Klinger, Léon Spilliaert, and Zdzisław Beksiński…when I start listing fantastical painters I like, there’s no end to them. In terms of direct influence, though, I’ll say the paper architects, Brodsky ＆ Utkin and Albín Brunovský.

I’ve read a lot of manga, but that’s influenced me more in terms of content. As for patterns and designs, I’ve always been enchanted by those drawn by Daijiro Morohoshi.

WFR: What’s next? Is there anything you’re currently working on?

DT: After Sisyphean was published, my collection of materials on the setting was released as an e‑book. Aside from that, I’ve mainly been writing novellas and short stories.

There was a jailbreak story about a prisoner who’d been sentenced to have his body changed into an earthworm-like form, a story I contributed to an Ultraman anthology about a special cleaning company that disposes of all the monsters Ultraman defeats, one for Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! anthology about people who live in a building that keeps falling forever through a multilayered city, and one that describes daily life in a Japan where pseudoscience is a fact of life.

Presently, I’ve got an illustrated story called “One Hundred Views of a Hallucination” being serialized in Hayakawa Publishing’s SF Magazine. I’m also in the process of revising my first long-form novel, which I’m aiming to have published sometime this year. The story begins in the age that follows the human race’s extinction at the hands of murderous organisms, which are defensive weapons of formerly free-floating celestial bodies which the human race had colonized. Having lost their sense of purpose, these killer organisms have staked out turf like yakuza, and are living their daily lives when an inexplicable change begins to occur in their society, and they come to understand the human race’s scheme—it’s that kind of story. I hope everyone will be able to read it someday.

The post Sisyphean: An Interview with Weird Scifi Author Dempow Torishima 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.

This year marks the first time that The Twenty Days of Turin, written by Giorgio De Maria in 1975, has been translated into English. Its translation couldn’t be any more timely: De Maria’s novel, partly a reaction to the violent fascism that plagued Italy during the 1970s, perfectly reflects the bleak political landscape and uncertain times we find ourselves in today. De Maria was quite the visionary in many ways—his work anticipated the rise of social media and reality TV decades before their advent. We talked to Ramon Glazov, who translated De Maria’s Twenty Days, to gain more insight into the book, how he translated the text, and the author’s fascinating albeit troubled life.

Weird Fiction Review: Can you give us a brief summary of The Twenty Days of Turin? Why should people consider reading it?

Ramon Glazov: The Twenty Days of Turin is a lost gem of European weird fiction, written during Italy’s “Years of Lead” in the late 1970s. That was a very violent, paranoid time when dozens of communist and neo-fascist groups were waging terror campaigns involving kidnappings, murders and public bombings. The chilling part was that many of the fascists were backed by the authorities and were off-limits until it was too late. People were scared of being killed as soon as they stepped out of their houses and also scared that the government wouldn’t be on their side. It became a taboo-ish topic to speculate about too loudly, and to write sci-fi or fantasy about it was nigh unthinkable.

In The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio De Maria took that situation and fused it with cosmic horror. His stated goal was to write an “allegory,” but he went beyond that and ended up creating his own disturbing mythos from scratch. In his world, hateful entities feed on the sanity of Turin’s citizens and massacre them every night as they mill around in an insomniac fugue. The protagonist, an amateur investigator, tries to decipher their motives and suspects they have human accomplices.

Some of the things De Maria dreamed up seem eerier now—and closer to life—than when the book was first published. For starters, he predicted that a phenomenon similar to social media would overtake our culture. He knew virtually nothing about computers; his novel doesn’t mention them. Still, he anticipated that society would desire something like Facebook—even if his version works through pen and paper. What De Maria gives us is a creepy force that exploits people’s loneliness to suck up their private information, which is to say, their souls.

Loserdom and terrorism, of course, go hand in hand. We know that too well now, and De Maria saw it too. The rampaging demigods he creates manage to be terrifying and pathetic all at once. It’s hard to think of Lovecraft’s deities as losers, but De Maria’s entities have that added level of bleakness. They’re omnipotent, nobody dares challenge them, yet they’re losers—much like humans who carry out gun massacres, only magnified in scale. That’s the part of the novel that really shook me.

WFR: It sounds like the author, Giorgio De Maria, had an interesting albeit troubled life. Can you tell us more about the author?

RG: I’ve been told by his daughter, Corallina, that De Maria only became a novelist because of a tragic incident in his life. He started out as an enormously talented pianist, trained at Turin’s top music school, the Conservatorio. For kicks, he used to write very brutal sacrilegious songs and perform them at weekly salons for his oddball literary friends. He was also, according to his friend Emilio Jona, fond of sleight of hand tricks to show off his manual dexterity…

Then, around 1960, when he was in his mid-thirties, he developed a cramp in his hand that killed his piano career. Nobody ever figured out if it was psychological or purely physical, but it became one of his life obsessions. He would spend long hours in front of the piano trying to force his hand to play again. So when he took up writing, it was in a state of exile from a previous calling, and this pain comes up again and again in his fiction. One story of his, “The Death at Missolonghi,” imagines a situation where Lord Byron is cursed by a supernatural power that strips him of his ability to write. It explores the anguish of a character who’s suddenly cut off from his destiny and feels like a depleted shadow of himself. The Twenty Days of Turin has an amateur musician protagonist whose recorder is linked to the state of his soul.

In the 60s, De Maria moved from song writing to theatre scripts and novels. He was working for Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI-TV, and got commissioned to write a dystopian teleplay called “The Appeal” (Prova d’appello). The script described a game show where death row inmates can get pardoned if they persuade the audience that they’re charming and wholesome. Viewers at home phone in their verdicts and the inmate lives if the clap-o-meter hits 110. Basically, De Maria thought of reality TV before reality TV—with the poor condemned protagonist trying to act sociable while he’s frightened for his life. The broadcaster cancelled the program, claiming it was “not appropriate for our scheduling, though it might be a good work, insofar as it envisages a repressive and terroristic use, with apocalyptic prospects, for this very medium of television.”

After the 1970s, De Maria had a mental breakdown and turned to Catholicism. I’m told he didn’t write much literary work after that and was a bit too odd for the Church’s liking as well. He would rant about archangels walking the streets of Turin and things of that order. The last phase of his life was rather sad and reclusive.

WFR: How well known is The Twenty Days of Turin in Italy? How about Giorgio De Maria? How did you personally discover it?

 RG: When De Maria began his writing career there was still a thick line, drawn by middlebrow cartographers, between “literature” and genre fiction. Writers had to choose one or the other. Even a respected author like Primo Levi—who moved through many of the same circles as De Maria—found it daunting to get into sci-fi in 1966 after he was already famous as a Holocaust memoirist, and did it under pseudonym. It didn’t matter that some of those literary authors, including De Maria, were privately huge fans of pulpy sci-fi and detective stories. De Maria was with Turin’s literary set, not the sci-fi set, and this was hard to break past back then.

As a result, even though his fiction during the 1950s and 60s included telepathy, futuristic surgical procedures, alternate histories and ghosts, De Maria, to my knowledge, never once published a story in an SF/F magazine. Most of his work ended up in Il Caffè, which was a literary journal—Italy’s equivalent to The Paris Review.

The Twenty Days of Turin wasn’t marketed as sci-fi, nor as giallo, nor as a horror novel. You won’t find it listed in the huge Vegetti catalogue of Italian sci-fi titles, for instance. It was “literature,” but with more pulp in its DNA than was normal for Italian literature at the time.

So it was an incongruous book by the standards of its era. In 1977, a leftist author like De Maria was supposed to be didactic, to write fiction that had a “social purpose” and end the story with a left-wing moral that wasn’t too hard to puzzle out. A “serious” social issue like terrorism wasn’t viewed as a legitimate subject for weird fiction or sci-fi or pulpy mystery stories, which weren’t considered “serious.” De Maria ran against all that. The Twenty Days has a dark, ambiguous ending and it’s very obviously about terrorism—which speculative fiction at that time hardly touched.

Its cult following in Turin can be divided into two categories of fans. First, you have the literary subculture De Maria rubbed shoulders with. Some of the critics who’ve championed the book, like Pier Massimo Prosio, come from the same generation as De Maria. Then you have a second group, mostly sci-fi fans, who encountered the book as teens and became obsessed with it ever since. A lot of them are Generation Xers with a taste for Lovecraft, Ballard, Cronenberg, thrash metal, graphic novels and so forth. Luca, the friend who introduced me to The Twenty Days, belongs in that category. I’ve also stumbled upon readers younger than me—undergraduates who got the book recommended to them by their creative writing professors.

Turinese are private people who tend to stick closely to their own circles, so many of these fans went for decades without knowing how many other fans there were. Two years ago, when I was going through the process of locating the De Maria Estate, it emerged that Luca had actually met the author’s son Domenico without realising it. They’d hung out together as teenage truants and listened to Black Sabbath in De Maria’s house at the exact time he was writing The Twenty Days. Luca only discovered this when Domenico recognised him forty years later!

This September, the book will be re-released in Italy by the Turin publishing house Frassinelli. Now here comes one of those eerie coincidences that follow De Maria’s work. The Frassinelli company was founded in 1931 by the typographer Carlo Frassinelli. It turns out that Carlo’s son, Giancarlo, was murdered downstairs from the De Maria family home! He lived in the same apartment building and knew De Maria’s wife because they were both occultists belonging to Turin’s “Gurdjieff Circle”—people who followed the teachings of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. Giancarlo was regarded as a “guru” within the group, but ended up paralysed after a stroke. He was stabbed to death by his carer, a nervous young man, and people around him suspected that he’d deliberately incited the kid into doing it—a kind of suicide by proxy. This has no connection to the publisher’s decision, since Frassinelli Edizioni is no longer owned by the Frassinelli family, but it’s spooky nonetheless.

WFR: In your introduction to The Twenty Days, you make an interesting connection between the Library and social media. This is rather interesting because the book was written some 30 years before the advent of social media. What is the Library in The Twenty Days of Turin and how does it relate to social media and blogging in our current age?

RG: Try to picture an evil alliance between 4chan, Craigslist and the Catholic Church. That’s the Library.

It emerges as a type of reading room where people can submit their handwritten diaries or peruse the diaries of others. Nothing like it existed when De Maria was writing, but today it’s everywhere: crowdsourcing, amateur content, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, DeviantArt and the like.

De Maria was interested in the darker implications of such a phenomenon. The loneliness, the perversity, the rage… His Library ends up accumulating all the nastiest, most shameful things that people want to vent and purge: the true sludge of their souls. And those people find themselves with the horror that that stuff is on public display, that the Library might dox them to anybody for a trivial fee.

Even after the Library’s first incarnation leads to an epidemic of massacres, lonely citizens are still tempted to do it again. That’s the pitiable part. It’s enticing to vent your miseries, to have a place to spew that soul-sludge. When De Maria’s narrator first encounters the remains of the original Library, it’s a huge, disgusting pile of mouldy paper. Later, the book gives us garbage and human waste as a motif. It’s the most literal form of “shitposting” imaginable.

To make it doubly twisted, the Library is endorsed by the Church as a goodwill initiative. The building that hosts it is a real place in Turin, the St Cottolengo Little House of Divine Providence. It’s a charity hospital notorious in Turinese urban folklore for supposedly housing “monsters”—patients too deformed to see the light of day. The word “Cottolengo,” in the local parlance, has become a bit like “Bedlam.” An apt place to keep a proto-4chan!

WFR: What was the process like in translating The Twenty Days and what sort of challenges did you run into?

RG: Italian gets stereotyped as a “musical” language. With De Maria this is truer than usual. He began as a musician and in some of the novel’s finest scenes he still thinks like a musician. My favourite example is the chapter titled “The Voices.” The narrator visits an occult researcher who claims to have a tape recording of the book’s terroristic entities conversing over the airwaves. The scene is all about build-up—not just dramatic action but crescendo, decrescendo, diminuendo. It starts mildly enough, then an eerie soundscape develops as the recording plays. Harsh subterranean noises evolve into vowels and consonants, then syllables, then words, then sentences, until we can hear a chorus of malicious creatures arguing and plotting massacres. It’s an awful lot like an orchestral movement, and throughout it De Maria makes full use of the Italian language’s onomatopoeic potential. Translating that, finding the right-sounding English for the job, took heaps of work.

WFR: The Twenty Days of Turin was written during the 1970’s which was a time of political unrest in Italy. I believe there was a neo-fascist coup and also a radical left-wing paramilitary group. What was the political scene like in Italy during the 70’s and how did it influence The Twenty Days of Turin?

 RG: When the magazine Sipario interviewed him in April 1978, De Maria had this to say:

“I believe that the scope of the fantastic… is the most suitable one for conveying a reality as complicated as ours. […] It’s no coincidence that The Twenty Days, which seeks allegorically to portray the violence that reigns over my city, has even caught the notice of journalists, and not just literary critics.”

The Twenty Days keeps the political context implicit rather than mention it in the open—and with good reason. While De Maria was writing, people were being kidnapped and murdered on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis: judges, journalists, politicians, union figures. Terrorism was hard to discuss, except in circuitous ways. Even book reviewers who wrote up the novel for La Stampa shied away from using the ‘t’-word. The closest they got to that was through coy phrases like: “a book dipped in the stream of cruel and timely metaphors.” As late as 2009, De Maria’s obituary in the journal Studi Piemontesi praised The Twenty Days without ever mentioning the Years of Lead. It put all its emphasis on De Maria as a fabulist, an heir to Poe, an imaginative writer in the nineteenth-century mold. That’s the diplomatic way to champion something truly weird and risky: making it appear traditional.

What De Maria captured best about his political surroundings was people’s evasiveness and silence when they’re faced with a horrendous reality, the many ways they blank out and rationalise what they’re seeing. He observed how his fellow Italians reacted to the mundane traumas of terrorism and imagined how the same society might respond to cosmic threats “one cannot even mention… without feeling reason crumbling.” It’s not a reassuring picture.

WFR: What sort of literary influences played a part in Giorgio De Maria’s work? I believe you listed The Trial by Kafka as one in the intro.

RG: His tastes ran mostly towards nineteenth century romanticism and fantastic literature, plus a few German-speaking modernist authors like Kafka, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus—about a composer who deliberately infects himself with syphilis because he believes madness is the source of genius—seems to have fascinated De Maria early in his career. He said in one interview that reading Kafka was a “revelation,” so I suppose that’s where his passion for “weirdness” came from. According to his daughter, his other big loves were Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, along with sci-fi and adventure fiction in general. In the Sipario interview, though, he claimed to have a low opinion of Italian fantastic literature, calling it “a very feeble tradition.”

To answer the biggest question many readers might have: I can’t be certain if De Maria was familiar with Lovecraft, though he might’ve encountered Lovecraft’s stories in 1960s magazines like Urania, which ran translated sci-fi for Italian audiences.

WFR: You talk about Turin in your introduction and it seems like a very disquieting place. It definitely adds to the unease the reader feels when reading The Twenty Days. Can you talk more about the setting and how The Twenty Days manages to be such an unsettling story?

RG: Dozens of things collude to make Turin spooky. It’s an out-of-the-way city in the northwestern corner of Italy. Its baroque architecture gives it an odd look that inspired surrealist paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. A curious number of famous writers have either committed suicide in Turin or suffered mental breakdowns there.

The city has a long history of occultism. While De Maria was writing his masterpiece, Turin was the home of Gustavo Rol, who was either a genuine X‑Man or the greatest faker in history. His reported feats included teleportation, mind-reading, bringing statuettes to life, summoning the ghost of Casanova so Fellini could question it for film research, terrifying Mussolini by correctly predicting the date of his death and other disconcerting party tricks.

What’s important is that these Turinese occultists don’t typically look like shroom-heads or characters from Harry Potter. It’s a culture where well-mannered individuals in boardroom attire might also happen to hold séances or do even weirder things in private. Gustavo Rol’s following contained a large number of top professionals and even the town’s leading psychiatrist. Lorenzo Alessandri, a painter considered to be the “Black Pope” of Turinese Satanism, played down his notoriety and claimed he was just a regular Catholic.

In a city where so many wholesome, conservative-looking people led double lives, De Maria found a perfect backdrop for his uncanny tale.

WFR: I find the cover to The Twenty Days to be rather fascinating. Can you tell us more about it?

RG: The image is based on a lithograph by the iconoclastic Belgian illustrator Félicien Rops titled Satan sement l’ivraie or “Satan Sowing Tares.” It refers to a parable in the Book of Matthew that compares Judgment Day to a wheat harvest, where God will gather up the “wheat” (his followers) and burn the poisonous “tares” that Satan has sown in the field.

The cover of the novel’s original 1977 release used a version of the same image, but I haven’t been able to find out whether it was chosen by De Maria or his publishers.

I note in my introduction to the book that wheat harvests in Europe traditionally happen in July, and this is also the month De Maria picks for most of the supernatural violence in the story.

The post Interview: Ramon Glazov on “The Twenty Days of Turin” 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.

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.

The post Interview with Nicholas Rombes appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marian Womack

James Womack studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Chéjov, the Strugatski Brothers, Ivan Turgenev, and Sergio del Molino. His first collection of poems, MISPRINT, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He was recently selected for the prestigious PEN-Presents European Translation Project. His versions of Vladímir Mayakovsky, Vladímir Maiakovski and other poems, will be published by Carcanet in October.

Together, the Womacks run Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation.

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The translation team of Marian Womack and James Womack recently embarked on several translations for The Big Book of Science Fiction, out from Vintage this summer. Continuing our exploration of “strange SF,” we’re happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Womacks—about translation and about science fiction. We’ll also be posting their translation of “The Ruins of Granada,” an early classic of weird SF, which could not be included in the Big Book of SF for space reasons as well as their new translation of Sever Gansovsky’s classic “The Day of Wrath,” which brilliantly updates Island of Dr. Moreau themes.

What has been the hardest translation job for either or both of you—into English?

Silvina Ocampo

James Womack: I find translating SF/F particularly difficult in general. At its best—and I would say that a lot of the stories we have translated for this book are among the best—it is a genre that is constantly wrong-footing the reader, and so your work as a translator is initially affected by your being wrong-footed as a reader. If you are translating stories set in worlds that are either fascinatingly different from or interestingly oblique to the ‘real’ world, then a lot of the handholds that you have with straight-down-the-line realist fiction just don’t exist. That said, within the stories we translated for the Big Book, I found Dmitri Bilenkin’s ‘Where Two Paths Cross’ tough because of the different perspectives within the story and the deliberately ‘alien’ vocabulary.

Marian Womack: TBBOSF has given me the chance to reencounter the Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo in a new way. She’s not only an author I am in awe of, but, together with Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter, she is a part of my personal corpus of imaginative and frighteningly clever writing. She excels at surrealism, which is such a difficult type of writing, so easy to do badly. Her language is endlessly inventive, her metaphors thought-provoking. She’s not the easiest of authors to translate, but the enjoyment inherent the challenge—the possibility of achieving results above the norm—makes the process that much more enjoyable.

Do you have a philosophy or central thought about what translation should be that guides you?

James: Nothing very interesting: pragmatic faithfulness, I suppose, in a very broad sense, and depending on what I consider ‘being faithful’ to mean in any particular context. Sometimes you need to reproduce certain formal aspects of a work; sometimes the literal meaning of a passage is absolutely paramount, no matter how clunky the translation sounds in English. And to try if possible not to be led too far by convention: sometimes things that are standard speech or standard literary locutions are just what you don’t want, and you have to fight against them.

Marian: I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but translation for me implies embodying an author’s voice, appropriating it for a short period of time, and so I can see an almost mediumistic quality to it. I certainly spend a great deal of time before starting a translation studying the author’s style and idiosyncrasies, her/his use of language, and rehearsing her/his voice. The transmutation process has to be faulty, that’s the nature of the act, but one can only hope to be as faithful as possible. And feeling that you are finally ‘embodying’ an author’s voice is rewarding.

At what times do you work together and when alone on translations? For example, do you, Marian, contribute to the Russian translations, too?

James: It’s a fairly collaborative process. We both read everything we translate, and edit together, no matter who does the first draft.

Marian: We are very old-fashioned in this. I like to think about us like a wife-and-husband team. When we started collaborating in these projects, around 2008, I had ‘some’ Russian, and James had ‘some’ Spanish. We have both grown on the way, as translators, both separately and as a team. But I find that the way our brains work mean that we can almost ‘side-read’ the other person. It’s like playing a duet; we inhabit the same space when we are working on these projects.

When you’re re-translating a famous work, like Casares’s “Squid in Its Own Ink”, is your process any different?

James: The advantage of there being a history of translations of a particular work is that you can do research before starting your own version: seeing how other people have dealt with problems is a good way of giving you ideas of how to deal with them yourself. Obviously, without plagiarizing or copying previous work, but there are times when previous translators have got something right in a way that seems to you both neat and unalterable, or at least gives you a roadmap to help you find something neat and unalterable of your own.

Marian: I’m the opposite; I prefer not to look at anything! It’s the same with writing: I have to read poetry if I’m working on a short story, non-fiction if I’m writing a novel. I am very easily contaminated. To me, approaching an author of that stature does not change my normal work process. But I’m very shy by nature, and have to try hard not be overwhelmed by an individual’s literary stature.

On the Russian side, what special barriers are there when translating Soviet-era work? I know you translated Bulgakov into Spanish, and some translators of Bulgakov into English have left out the Soviet-era referents.

James: I think I’ll answer this one. There is a strain in Soviet-era work which revels in localia, in specific particularly satirical details, but the best stuff overcomes this, and may even make a virtue of the obscurity and obfuscation out of which it was forced to grow. I’m thinking of scenes like for example the theatre show in The Master and Margarita, where the fairy gold conjured up by the devil transforms into illegal foreign currency. But Soviet debates about currency speculation are a background to this scene rather than its main point, and Bulgakov can be read with great pleasure even by people with no knowledge of the context. Or else, knowing just how virulent anti-religious propaganda was in the Soviet Union helps you see how transgressive as well as original Bulgakov was being in his retelling of the story of the Crucifixion, but it’s not something you absolutely need to know. There is a great deal of what the critic Lev Losev called ‘Aesopian language’ in Soviet literature, but it is a common element to Russian literature in general: writing which tries to speak between the lines, past the censor, to a public better-skilled at exegesis. Lots of this is, yes, untranslatable, but also a lot of it is of minor importance, reinforcing the already-visible main thrust of the work. One writer whom I would be scared to translate is Andrei Platonov, for whom absolute ambiguity is a fundamental creative principle, but luckily the translations into English, largely by Robert Chandler, are amazingly good.

When faced with a choice between fidelity and sense for a modern reader, which way do you go?

James: Sense. There is a lot to be said for interpretative translation. On a basic level, when a character says ‘On a clear day, you can see for twenty versts’, I find it generally makes more sense to me to have him say ‘On a clear day, you can see for a dozen miles [or even just ‘miles’]’ rather than give a footnote to explain what a verst is or else say ‘On a clear day, you can see for 13.2 miles’.

Marian: Sense, absolutely. Although verst is an interesting example to have chosen: Spaniards are used to the term, and it is even accepted by the Real Academia, the Spanish institution concerned with the ‘purity’ of the language, so for translations into Spanish we can actually leave it as it is.

Did you have a personal connection or commitment to any story or stories in particular that you translated for the Big Book of SF?

James: As publishers in Spain, we have brought out a book by the Strugatsky brothers, and are going to publish another hopefully next year, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do some of their work into English.

Marian: I am personally very fond of Silvina Ocampo’s work, and would love to see more of her stories translated.

Were there any surprises during the translation process for Big Book of SF?

James: I didn’t know anything about Sever Gansovsky before translating his story ‘Day of Wrath’, and he is a major discovery. The story itself is wonderful: astonishingly nihilistic for a Soviet-era writer, and very visual in its description of a Winter’s Bone-style backwoods Russian countryside that hasn’t had enough focus in Russian literature in general. And I’ve gone on to read a lot more by him, and he holds up very well. Worth translating more of; worth telling the world about.

Marian: I have to agree with James. And from the perspective of a small press publisher which started specializing in Russian, I have become aware of some amazing Russian SF authors I hadn’t previously read. Russian SF, and Russian literature in general, never ceases to amaze me; you are discovering new things every day.

Are there any personal favorites not yet translated into English that you would love to see in some future anthology?

James: On the Russian side of things, there are a number of contemporary writers whom I think are worth anthologizing. To name just one, Dmitri Kolodan is a fantastic young author: his novella Time of the Jabberwock is an inspired retelling of the tropes of Carroll’s Alice in a very different context.

Marian: I will give a Spanish example, if I may. Perhaps I’m being biased, because she’s one of our authors (and, full disclosure, a good friend), but I certainly think there is no one writing as well and with such variety nowadays as Sofía Rhei. Her output is breathtaking, from poetry to children’s writing, to speculative fiction and fantasy stories which explore her interests in linguistics and meta-literature, to adult fantasy novels, and the breath of her creativity is immense. I am quietly sitting in a corner waiting for the explosion to come, when everyone realizes that she is a genius.

In your role as publishers, writers, and translators, can you explore for me what you think the future of science fiction holds? How will SF be different in ten years?

James: Very briefly: publishers are getting more interested in writing from outside a straightforward Anglophone market; more books originally written in languages other than English are being noticed; translators are stepping up to the plate in what has been seen as their secondary job—but which might in the long run turn out to be the more vital side of their work—of suggesting to publishers authors who might be interesting. The difference will come from globalization, books that are reports from the frontline rather than armchair tourism.

Marian: From a Spanish perspective, the major change that we are seeing is that women are started to be more visible than before. It is still a struggle to get women in this cultural space—the recent nominations for the Ignotus Awards, a major Spanish SFF and horror prize, didn’t have a great number of women; but the general consensus was that there were ‘a few more’ than the previous year, so we are progressing, but it’s still a very steep mountain to climb. It is still difficult to convince a Spanish reader to pick a book by a woman, even if she’s had twenty five-star reviews. I can see that the tide is slowly turning, and I’m sure than in a decade female voices will be ‘mainstreamed’, but I’m not sure it’s happened yet. Not talking now in particular about female voices, but picking up on James’s answer, SF will change dramatically when new practitioners are exposed to diverse voices in general as a normal thing, and can count them as members of their own influential ‘canon’. It will be wonderful to see.

The post Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Today we’re publishing a story called “Things Left Outside” by writer Lincoln Michel. It’s one of 25 stories featured in his 2015 debut collection, Upright Beasts. Michel is the editor-in-chief of electricliterature.com and a founding editor of Gigantic. His work has appeared in Granta, Oxford American, Unstuck, Tin House, Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of Gigantic Worlds, an anthology of science flash fiction, and the author of Upright Beasts, a collection of short stories on Coffee House Press. He was born in Virginia and lives in Brooklyn. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.

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?

As a child, I was obsessed with myths (especially the Greek myths) and unsolved mysteries. I remember having a huge encyclopedia of historical oddities, cryptids, unexplained phenomena, and so on that I read over and over. I’m not one to bemoan the internet and get nostalgic for the good old days, but I’m glad that I didn’t have easy access to Snopes.com or Wikipedia to quickly debunk all those mysteries back then.

By high school, I was drawn to gothic and southern gothic fiction (e.g., Flannery O’Connor), philosophy, and, above all, Franz Kafka. He’s the first fiction writer I remember feeling a real aesthetic kinship with—or perhaps he opened up that aesthetics inside me. Borges and Calvino soon joined him. My father was a big science fiction fan, and he passed down books to me. My favorites were Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness. (Somehow David Lynch’s Dune film was one of the only VHS we had and I watched that over and over.)

And in college, I remember being blown away by Donald Barthelme, Angela Carter, Kobo Abe, J.G. Ballard, Jesus’ Son, and Blood Meridian.

I suppose the through-line is an interest in the mysterious, the unknowable, the bizarre, and the darkly humorous. Summed up that way, I suppose weird fiction has always felt like home to me.

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

Despite my love of Surrealist art, I tend not to be grabbed by narrative fiction that’s too incoherent and loose with its weirdness. I’m really drawn to unstable, unsettling worlds, where reality is twisted into new shapes yet the story holds together through the force of its own logic. But if that logic breaks down to the point of randomness—just a series of mostly unconnected oddities—it doesn’t work for me.

More common is what I’d consider “fake weird”—work that is a collection of “wacky” things that are meant to amuse on the surface level, but which aren’t anchored by any real darkness. I’m talking about the skateboarding panda bears work at a drive-in movie theater for ghost mandolins kind of story. The whimsical and the twee instead of the uncanny and the bizarre. I need my weird to have some teeth and claws capable of digging into my heart.

Weird is a compliment as far as I’m concerned, even if meant as an insult.

WFR: In Upright Beasts, I get hints of other weird fiction authors like Robert Aickman, Kafka, etc. Can you talk about some of the influences on your work in Upright Beasts?

Kafka was my most formative literary love, so I’m extremely happy if any of my work approaches his in any way. I’ve named a lot of influential writers already, but I do think that sometimes writers focus overly on literary influences. Influences come from all over. I remember loving Marvel trading cards, weird plastic monster toys, old 80s/90s fantasy and SF computer games, and other things that I’m sure have worked their way into my work in some form or another. I probably studied more punk and hip-hop lyrics as a teenager than I did books. I find certain philosophers—Cioran, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Debord—really artistically inspiring. Films by Lynch, Leone, Fellini, and Kurosawa. Sketch comedy like Mr. Show and Kids in the Hall. It all blends together into a strange brew in your brain.

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

There were hints of the weird in some early SF and fantasy I read (Stephen King, say), but the first writer who felt terribly weird to me is Kafka. If we’re speaking of art in general, then it was probably the Dadaists and Surrealists, who I was pretty obsessed with for some time (especially Max Ernst and Rene Magritte).

I really agree with the general ethos of this site, which gives “weird fiction” a more expansive and interesting definition than just “horror stories with tentacle monsters.” I like a good tentacle monster as much as the next guy, but there really is something that connects the likes of Kafka, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Thomas Ligotti, Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, Borges, Lovecraft, Brian Evenson, and so on together regardless of whether their work is shelved as fantasy, literary, science fiction, postmodern, or something else.

WFR: Tell us about how Upright Beasts came together. When were these stories written? Is this your first published book? 

I started writing and getting some work published about ten years ago. Some of the stories in here stretch back almost that long, but the book is very much a selection of what I’ve written in that span. The majority of the stories I’ve written, even the majority of the ones I’ve published in magazines, didn’t make the cut.

I’ve always loved playing in different forms and styles, and Upright Beasts has stories in a variety of different structures as well as stories that play with different sets of genre tropes. I had a hard time figuring out how to combine all those, although I knew that I wanted to have a diverse collection. Ultimately, I decided to collect the stories into four mini-books inside the book, each that are (hopefully) coherent while still bleeding into each other in interesting ways.

Upright Beasts is my first book as an author. As an editor, or rather co-editor, I published an anthology of science flash fiction stories called Gigantic Worlds a little earlier this year. It has original work from Laird Barron, Charles Yu, Catherine Lacey, Meghan McCarron, Jedediah Berry, and a bunch of others (as well as a couple previously uncollected stories from Jonathan Lethem, Philip K. Dick, and J. G. Ballard.)

WFR: What’s next for you? Do you plan to do another collection or possibly a novel in the future?

I’m almost done with a novel called DOOM MOOD that is about existentially depressed supervillains and body horror. Other than that, I have a science fiction novel about baseball and a weird novel about a haunted southern neighborhood, as well as plenty of story ideas, that I hope I have time for soon.

The post Interview: Lincoln Michel appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Since “Orange Dogs” is Womack’s first piece at Weird Fiction Review, we decided to ask Womack some questions about her introduction to reading, her favorite stories, and where she draws her inspiration from.

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?

My parents weren’t exactly ‘bookish’ types, but our house had plenty of books; we were a working class family, and my parents decided early on that both my brother and me should go to university. From the beginning they invested heavily in our education, and part of this was the number of books and encyclopedias we had access to. They were members of a Spanish catalogue book club, the Círculo de Lectores, and through we it we acquired most of the classics and Nobel prize winners, as well as contemporary authors. They didn’t buy us lots of children’s books; we were encouraged to dig into this amazing well very early on. The first ‘adult’ books I remember reading, and that really had a big influence on me, came from this collection: they were Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a compilation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I think these two books defined my writing and my personal aesthetic from very early on (I co-run a small press with a strong Russian literature list, and write gothic/weird/horror fiction). I remember quite clearly closing Crime and Punishment and deciding I wanted to be a writer at that moment. With regard to Poe, he is still very much with me, in everything I do. I definitely had a Gothic sensibility from very early on, and one of the novels that most influenced me in my early years was Wuthering Heights. From there it was an easy walk towards the stories of M.R. James, collections of early gothic novels, novellas, and short fiction. My short fiction tastes developed a bit while at university in the UK, where I discovered the wide influence of the gothic mode (to me, one of the main characteristics of English literature) in Victorian fiction, and in C.20^th women’s fiction, from Jean Rhys or Elizabeth Bowen, to Susan Hill, who has some amazing gothic short fiction from the 1970s. I also read Angela Carter at university for the first time, and she definitely turned my world upside-down. I don’t think I could properly explain how influential Carter was for me, how much she showed me what literature can do.

WFR: What would you consider your favorite stories, and why?

I have translated into Spanish and edited anthologies of early gothic fiction, of Dickens’s ghost stories, or Mary Shelley’s gothic fiction. Those books contain some of my favorite classic short stories. Basically, English classic ghost and horror fiction, and Russian authors such as Gogol or Chekhov, whose short stories we have also published. Borges and Cortázar ought to be there as well. But if I had to compose a less general list, it would contain for sure the whole of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, ‘The Demon Lover’, by Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Clytie’, by Eudora Welty, ‘El Sur’, by Adelaida García Morales, ‘El balneario’, by Carmen Martín Gaite, ‘The arm’, by Ludmila Petrushévskaia. I admire a lot the short fiction of another young Russian author, Anna Starobinets, and of a young and talented Swedish author, Karin Tidbeck, and would recommend, anthologise, translate or teach practically any of their stories.

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

My imaginary as a writer is perhaps a little varied, coming from Spain but being educated in the UK. Gothic fiction is of course very much connected with the ‘weird’, and in a way I moved towards weird fiction from my love of gothic fiction. But the Hispanic tradition was also a fertile ground for ‘weirdness’, with its connections to surrealism in Spain and to magical realism in Latin America. To me, Borges and Cortázar are two pillars of ‘my’ understanding of the weird, and they both sit comfortably with Lovecraft, for example. I must confess I discovered Lovecraft through the role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu in my early teens. I have remained a fervent admirer of the role-playing game, and make a point of collecting add-ons for it when I come across them; perhaps I have fallen a little out of love with Lovecraft himself. But there is also some European fiction and in particular Russian literature that informed my aesthetic from very early on. I have to mention here again Gogol’s short fiction (whose complete short fiction I am in the process of editing now!), and Dostoevsky. He may not be a strictly ‘weird’ writer, but his feverish and obsessive sensibility I can clearly connect with my own understanding of weird aesthetics.

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

I would personally take it as a compliment!

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

Beauty is complicated.

What inspires you the most in your writing? Where do you most frequently draw inspiration for your stories?

Absolutely everywhere, with my son in the park, out in the streets of Madrid or Cambridge. A lot happens when I travel; I don’t mean holiday travel, which we don’t get a lot of, but the everyday metro rides, or commuting between the UK and Spain. But the first one has to be reading. We are a family who reads and writes all the time, and to me words breed words in a way. My mind opens in a very particular manner when I am reading, even if I am working on a horror story and what I happen to be reading is poetry. I am not into other kind of modern narratives such as videogames (and always have the nagging feeling that I am losing out…) but we watch a lot of series at home, and I guess television series are helping us find other narrative paths as well. I am a life-long fan of Doctor Who, and I’m sure this has laid down a sediment somehow. And, absolutely seriously, there are a number of sections in the newspaper (I read The Guardian in the UK) that do not fail to provide me with material I want to talk about, whereas is about climate change, social inadequacies, or the economic super-rich playground that London life is turning into… Frankly, Britain is becoming a very dystopian place to observe. On the other hand, Spain is a strange mixture of weird traditions and gothic cruelty, where the wounds of a dictatorship are still self-evident. Its modernity is a very new thing. We are lucky that, coming and going between places, we are capable of remaining creatively fresh in our vision over both Spain and the UK. Despite my life-long love affair with an England that doesn’t quite exists outside of books, films and TV shows (I have to include ‘The Great British Bake Off’ here…), I also have a few stories I would like to write about Spain and Andalusia, where I was born. Catherine Valente suggested me while at Clarion that I should write a gothic piece set in Andalusia. That is what I am working on right now.

The post Interview: Marian Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Were there any particular events in your life that pushed your imagination to contemplate horror?

I think the first and foremost source of horror that preoccupied my mind were nightmares. I’ve been a professional at bad dreams all my life. Hamlet had nothing on me as far as that’s concerned. Nightmares are the only realm in which we are without help and absent of all hope of being saved from the worst and most unnatural fates. But that’s all very abstract, and I don’t think it’s the response you’re looking to get from me. No doubt I did have more than my share of nightmares. There were other things, though, and I’m not sure I can put my finger on what they were or how much any one of them might be blamed or credited for my obsession with the artistic expression of horror. I was often sick as a child. Often my illnesses were accompanied by fevers and deranged perceptions that they bring about—malignant faces on the ceiling of my bedroom, shadows in corners, shapes watching me from dark places, that sort of thing. When I was two years old, I was hospitalized and operated on for an abdominal rupture. In my reading on authors of supernatural writing, I came across an article on childhood surgical procedures, focusing on one in particular that had been undergone by Bram Stoker. The person who wrote the article had a theory on what effect this may have had on the man who would later write Dracula and other tales of things that did not exist and could not exist in our so-called normal world, the real and orderly world where the substance of our lives is assumed to be played out. And of course H. P. Lovecraft recorded at length in his letters the journeys he made to a world without any rules concerning what should be and what should not be. I have to say that my destinations were more mundane but it’s the emotions aroused by nightmares affects us most. They have no counterpart in intensity and suggestion in our daylight lives. Throughout my youngest days I used to think that if I had a bad dream the night before it was less likely I would have another on the next one. I’m not claiming to be unique in the nightmares and traumas of my early life, or even that they were material to my later preoccupation with horror movies and literature. They just happened. So did night terrors, which have continued to this day, in which I feel myself awake but am paralyzed in body. Those may account for what is possibly my worst fear: the syndrome of being “locked in” your body and unable to give a sign that you’re aware of what is happening. It’s that sort of disorder that I believe alone makes anyone’s continued existence not worth the risk. Like many other potential sufferings, at least for me, it’s simply too awful to contemplate. A bestselling book was written by someone in that condition. This sort of heroic accomplishment is supposed to assure us all that we have reservoirs of strength that can get us through the most strange and terrible ordeals. That may be true for some people. But I can’t help trembling when I think of those for whom it is a lie. So many lies are told in order to keep us from collapsing into a heap should we give too much attention to the thousands of potential nightmares that threaten us both day and night.

Could you talk about your religious background?

I attended Catholic school from grades one through three and remained a theist throughout my teenage years. No incident or study on my part that I can name led to my becoming an atheist around the age of nineteen. To my recollection, I became aware of my lapse from religious belief while doing homework for a college history class. It was not a momentous occurrence to say the least. Looking back, I would have to say that my Catholicism, which was rather elaborate and obsessive for a child, was a matter of observance of ritual and private practice without being directed by emotional or spiritual feeling. Even in grade school I realized that I lacked any sentiment positive or negative for my creator. This didn’t seem strange to me. I think I assumed that everyone felt, or failed to feel, the same way. I found Jesus Christ singularly uninspiring as a messiah or useful in any way to me in my life. What I did feel was a profound sense of sympathy for others. The sound of an ambulance siren always inspired a prayer from me, though at some point this became a knee-jerk or superstitious response. Later, the sound of an ambulance siren aroused nothing but fear in me. I’ve made a number of trips in such a vehicle for problems ranging from a broken leg to emergency surgery for diverticulitis in 2012 in the early hours of April Fool’s Day. You can’t make this stuff up, as they say. While suffering an ego-annihilating pain just before I underwent anesthesia, I did experience a confused awareness that my death during surgery would not be a bad thing. This became a lucid thought and a hope without ambivalence prior to subsequent surgeries to repair my guts.

The essay “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures” reads like an early attempt at addressing the themes you would later explore in your nonfiction book “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.” Why did you feel it needed to be included in a collection of fiction?

I’ve been a didactic writer to a greater or lesser extent from the beginning. It may be deluded to think that the world simply must hear what you have to say, but I think this delusion is necessary if one is to write anything at all, whether it’s poetry, fiction, or a sermon. So didacticism is inherent in every effort to spill ink on a page. It’s more a matter of the way that urgency to tell the world what you think about it is dressed up for the reading public. Should a work of fiction be poorly garbed in its technique and manner of telling, its didactic undergarments will show through. That’s about the worst thing that can happen to a fiction writer, at least from viewpoint of readers who want to “get lost” in a narrative and not in what ideas and emotions a writer wants to express in so many words. Personally speaking, my own favorite literary forms are designed for the expression of their authors’ thoughts and feelings. As a reader, I’ve devoted myself almost entirely to essays, lyric poetry, expressionistic stories and dramas, aphorisms, moral tales, and any other form in which a writer stands at a podium or on a soapbox. It’s not really that I prefer short forms as much as I’d rather hear what someone has to say about their experience of being alive—what they like, what they hate—than listen to them spin a yarn. I like to feel close to a writer’s character more than I do to a made-up character maneuvering within a set of circumstances that is neatly resolved in the end. Admittedly, I also like those things. I can get lost in them as much as any Harlequin Romance-reading schoolgirl. But with few exceptions, I’d rather see those stories on my TV or DVD player. Reading them, especially when they reach toward the thousand-page mark, is a chore I can’t perform. There have been exceptions in my life as a reader. The detective novels of Raymond Chandler particularly stand out. Then again, the first-person voice of Philip Marlowe definitely leans toward didacticism, and one can’t avoid feeling that it’s the voice of the author speaking through him. Certain literary critics and linguistic philosophers would chortle contemptuously over such a perspective, but who really cares what they think except their colleagues and students? As far as I’m concerned, school’s out as long as my veins are still coursing with blood and not formaldehyde.

You wrote of the paradoxical nature of supernatural horror fiction, how it grants us a reprieve from the true horror of existence while also affirming it. Do you see a point where the everyday horror reaches the point of absurdity that would make supernatural horror irrelevant?

I really don’t see such a point in future. However, I don’t think that position may be argued any more than its antithesis. At present, however, it certainly seems that supernatural horror is more relevant than ever and everyday horror is more prevalent, or at least more in our minds, than it has been in some time. I definitely would argue that.

How has your style changed/evolved over the years? What have you explored more recently that you didn’t early in your career, if anything?

To revisit the matter of my didacticism, I think I evolved more in that direction than in any other. Of course, this tendency appears most conspicuously in my nonfiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. However, even though this is a late work, it’s actually the culmination of themes and thoughts that had been developing in one way or another throughout my writing life. In my chronologically first story that I thought worth preserving, “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” I portrayed a depressed narrator who discovers a cult of supernatural anti-natalists—avant le lettre, of course, but anti-natalists all the same—who inhabit a small Midwestern town. I wrote the first draft of this story, which was longer and more detailed than the published story, in the late 1970s. The story didn’t appear in a polished form until ten years later, but it was in every thematic respect the same story. I simply removed some narrative details. Something else was also there in my work beginning with “The Last Feast of Harlequin” and it later played a leading role in my purported career. In a word it was Darkness. I won’t give away the finale of “Last Feast of Harlequin,” but I will say that the darkness which is the prominent symbol and motif of the story predominates in the end, as one might expect in one of my stories.

I continued this use of darkness as a device and practically a character throughout a number of the stories I’ve written. Now, between the emphasis on pessimism in “Professor Nobody’s Lectures on Supernatural Horror” and the prominence of depression, darkness, and the rest of it in “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” which is easily my best-known story, you might think that readers would take me seriously on these matters. Yet that doesn’t seem to have been the case until I wrote The Conspiracy against the Human Race. It was as if they couldn’t wholly bring themselves to believe that the dark nature of my fiction reflected a corresponding turn of mind and set of sentiments in their author. But there it was, as big and ugly as life. And it seems to have been there from the beginning. I just wasn’t quite as didactic in those days.

Cover for Thomas Ligotti’s Grimscribe

What do you see as the distinction between your work and that of Lovecraft?

There are a few ways I could answer this question. One of them is that in Lovecraft’s defining stories, meaning such later works as “The Shadow out of Time” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” there is a sense of adventure. In his letters, Lovecraft often wrote of experiencing moments of what he called “adventurous expectancy,” by which he meant feeling oneself on the brink of some weird and hyper-exciting revelation that is always held in suspension and never known in its particulars. This is patently an aesthetic perception of existence. Borges described a similar feeling of the imminence of a revelation that never occurs as the definitive aesthetic experience. In Lovecraft’s work, unlike that of Borges, the origin of his feeling of adventurous expectancy derives from something terrible that is associated with the inconceivable spatial and temporal nature of the physical universe. I think that a great many people experience the same thing in their lives. I have myself. But it never occurred to me to express this feeling as a source of adventure in my stories.

My focus has fairly consistently been on what I have thought of as an “infernal paradise,” a realm where one wallows in something putrid and corrosive that lies beyond exact perception. In his stories, Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy ultimately has its origin in something terrible, and not the child’s picture-book wonderland you find in the work of a lot of writers of fantastic fiction. But it’s still thrilling in its own way. It isn’t purely hellish, as is the case with my stories. Lovecraft was an astronomy buff as a child and so this feeling probably stemmed from that time. I was a pathological Catholic as a child, and one might make a connection between my early life and my later writings on that basis. Ultimately, the difference I’m trying to articulate between Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy and my infernal paradise may seem superficial. I would say as much myself. But it seems to me that what captivates a reader’s interest in one writer’s work as opposed to another’s is quite often based on superficial qualities, even when there are deeper likenesses. Anyone can think of examples among both popular and literary writers. Lovecraft’s defining works portray a variety of monsters. Mine seldom do. What’s the difference? Not much on the deepest level. But monsters are a great literary hook and there is necessarily a surface adventure in dealing with them. If asked to name the definitive image in Lovecraft, one might likely say its tentacles flailing from the body of a monster. For me it would be probably be puppets, manikins, and clown-like things, even though these are more often a matter of metaphor than a literal presence of a monstrous type. Nevertheless, if Lovecraft’s tentacle monsters and my puppets and so on fought each other, I think the monsters would win.

How did you feel when Conspiracy Against the Human Race started to draw more readers and buyers over the past year or so? Are you concerned that some readers otherwise unfamiliar with your work will only know you as the author of CATHR?

I’ve said for quite a while that I’ve been luckier in the publication of my writing than I’ve had any reason to expect. I think this may be an instance of that. Either way I’ll take it, as I always have. I don’t know if it matters whether I’m ultimately known for the stories or the notorious breviary of nihilism. Oddly enough, I’ve always thought of The Conspiracy against the Human Race as a kind of inspirational, quasi-self-help book. Seriously. And for my pains, a number of readers and reviewers have blithely said that having written The Conspiracy Against the Human I would be a hypocrite and all around inauthentic being not to kill myself. Something similar was said about J.-K. Huysmans following the publication of his novel A rebours. I believe it was Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly who, in a newspaper review of A rebours, wrote that Huysmans had but two options after publishing that book: the muzzle of a gun or the foot of the cross. Huysmans choose the foot of the cross, but not until he published a novel focusing on Satanism. Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote the same thing about Baudelaire in an earlier essay, but the author of Fleurs du mal didn’t make a move either way. Naturally, plenty of critics and biographers have asserted a deathbed confession of Catholic faith by Baudelaire. They were wise to the fact that no one could prove them wrong, of course. In nineteenth-century France, Catholic writers were given considerable latitude in purveying what otherwise might be consider fairly degenerate subject matter. They were Catholic, after all, so they had license to depict the ravages of the most titillating sinfulness. Of all the French Catholics, I admire the horror writer Petrus Borel, also known as The Lycanthrope, who said he was a papist because he couldn’t be a cannibal. I’m not sure if those who said that as the author of Conspiracy I should commit suicide knew that such a statement was long famed. However, I did know the game, so their observation or demand failed to faze me.

What was your reaction upon finding out that you had joined a small cadre only ten living authors included in the Penguin Classics U.S. lineup?

I didn’t know that was the case. Now that I do know, I can’t help thinking of Steven Millhauser, whose work I admire very much for its weird imagination and superfine writing in which I hear echoes of familiar voices, including those of Vladimir Nabokov and Bruno Schulz, that moved so many of my own stories in the direction they took. I remember reading about the day he was informed in the middle of a course he was teaching that his novel Martin Dressler had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The anecdote continues that he told his class a terrible mistake had been made and that needed to excuse himself to put things right. I’m fairly sure that I have neither the reason nor the right to be nonplussed as Millhauser was that day.

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As noted in the Annual of Urdu Studies, v. 4, 1984 (p. 112.), edited by Memon, “[The author] thinks that the so-called modern modes of literary expression, like surrealism, symbolism and the absurd, and ideas like existential freedom, have always been present in a very positive manner in our mystical literature. Therefore, as she says, the debate on whether these literary styles have been borrowed from the West or are basically indigenous is mostly irrelevant. The point, as she puts it, is to make use of these modes of expression in a creative way, to assimilate them, and not to take them up merely as a fashion or, worse still, as a matter of plain opportunism.” Asghar’s “short stories can be read as serialized crises of identity, as attempts to come to terms with one’s subconscious compulsions. It is more like trying to acknowledge and relate them to one’s outward, day-to-day existence.”

According to further information in the Annual, Asghar, born in 1938, disappeared from the literary scene for many years after getting married, re-emerging much later writing under her married name, Khalida Husain. Her work has appeared in many anthologies of Urdu and Eastern literature from Oxford University Press, Penguin, and others. I, for one, will be seeking out more of her work.

As for the translator, Muhammad Umar Memon has long been active in writing and translating fiction from Urdu. He also had a distinguished career as a scholar at the University of Wisconsin. You can find out more about him from this fascinating interview at The Short Form. Also, this in-depth review provides more context about Urdu literature, in the context of an anthology edited by Memon.

Many thanks to Anil Menon for bringing this story to our attention and to Memon for allowing us to reprint it.

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For further context on fiction in Urdu, I interviewed Usman T. Malik, a Pakistani writer of weird fiction who lives Florida. His novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn is forthcoming at Tor.com in April of this year and he is currently a finalist for the Nebula Award.

Weird Fiction Review: Urdu exists primarily in Pakistan and parts of India. Are there regional differences?

Usman T. Malik: Yes. Several regional dialects exist because of seepage of vocabulary from local languages such as Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, Seraiki, Balochi et cetera. Spoken Urdu in India is called Hindi and has more Sanskrit words than Urdu spoken in Pakistan. Hindi is written in a different script, however, than Urdu, which is written in a Persio-Arabic style called Nastaliq.

WFR: Are there specific (Pakistani) literary traditions in terms of Urdu?

UTM: Historically, Urdu literature was dominated by poetry, whose early proponent was the great writer and musical genius Amir Khusro. Khusro was a mystic polymath credited with having systematized northern Indian classical music. He is also said to have invented the sitar and tabla, while at the same time produced massive amount of Urdu poetry. His influence was on both the language and its literature, and his couplets have influenced later Urdu writers tremendously.

Early prose in Urdu was mostly epics (daastan) and literary memoirs (tazkara). Short story (afsaana) and the novel came later. Mirat-al-aroos, The Bride’s Mirror (1868) by Deputy Nazeer Ahmad is usually considered the first Urdu novel.

WFR: What would you imagine are the main difficulties or issues in translating Urdu to English?

UTM: It depends on the age of the manuscript, I’d say. The farther back in time we go, the more ornate and contextual the writing becomes. For example, certain maxims that were commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth century don’t make much sense now. With time and misspeaking, they’ve changed–much like in English where a misspoken word used at large slowly becomes part of the linguistic canon.

Realistically and generally speaking, the two big hindrances might be deficiency of skilled translators proficient in both English and Urdu, and money. In Pakistan at least we’ve been watching a class divide wherein because of lack of standardization of education in the country, rich and upper middle class kids go to English medium schools while poor kids go to Urdu medium schools. This is problematic on several levels but in terms of literary loss, we’re losing the urbane literary ‘moderate’ who feels at home in both literatures and cultures.

WFR: Have you encountered fantastical or SF-nal works originally written in Urdu? Anything in particular you might recommend?

UTM: Urdu has a long history of fantastical literature. Two of the great epics are Daastan-e-Amir Hamza (translated into English as ‘The Adventures of Amir Hamza’ by Musharraf Ali Farooqi) and Talism Hoshruba (which Musharraf is in the process of translating). An incredible dark fiction/horror novel is Kaala Jadoo, Black Magic, by M.A. Rahat.

WFR: Do you have a favorite work in Urdu?

UTM: Several. Instead of one work, I’ll give you two poets and two short story writers: Mirza Ghalib and Allama Muhammad Iqbal (poets). Munshi Premchand and Saadat Hassan Manto (short story writers).

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