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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Aickman by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, 1960

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.