Weird Fiction Review: What was your introduction to horror and the weird?

Priya Sharma: I was lucky to grow up in a house where books and films weren’t censored. I’d have to say Roald Dahl in both his children’s books and short stories, Daphne du Maurier, Hitchcock films, the darkness of Thomas Hardy, Twin Peaks, Ray Bradbury, then Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s alternative fairy tale collections, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Stephen King novels.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? When your work is called weird, is that a compliment?

PS: I’m delighted for my work to be called weird. As to what is “too weird” I think that’s very subjective. Who defines what’s weird and when it crosses the line?

WFR: What inspired your story “The Nature of Bees”?

PS: I was staying with friends who used to keep bees. I went out onto their smallholding for a walk. It was early in the morning and their was a slight heat haze that hadn’t burnt off yet. I heard the swarm before I saw it. It hung in a massive ball. I remember feeling real awe in that moment. And backing away very slowly.

After that I started reading about bee society. It’s truly brutal. I also was thinking a lot at that time about attitudes towards single women who are 30+ and women who don’t have children.
 
WFR: Your work often tends to feature biological elements (bees, snakes, sunflowers, etc). Where does your interest in biology come from?

PS:  I love the science and the art of the nature. I do a fair bit of research, even for short stories, and I find that very invigorating. It makes me stop and look at the world again and it never fails to excite me. I did Medicine at university and the human body and disease processes are fascinating.

WFR: How did your collection All the Fabulous Beasts come together? How would you describe its stories?

PS: I’m very grateful to Mike Kelly, the editor, who has a real eye for putting a collection together. He stopped me from chucking in stories that would have jarred.

This is a difficult question to answer without going into specifics. The stories in ‘All the Fabulous Beasts’ concern themselves with nature and the environment, feminism, and sexuality, life, death, and rebirth. They show how the past haunts us. Place and setting are integral. We never escape where we come from. Nostalgia is powerful, but we can’t let it kill us. I don’t set out to convey a message. And hopefully the stories are entertaining, not didactic. I’m interested in people, places, mythology, and ontology. After all, we are all just fabulous beasts.”

WFR: Given that this month is Women in Horror Month, do you have any favorite women writers that have inspired your work?

PS: Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Daphne du Maurier, Toni Morrison, Katherine Dunn, Sarah Hall, Alice Walker, Shirley Jackson, Sarah Waters, Jumpha Lahiri, Isabel Allende — to name just a few.

The post Interview: Priya Sharma and the Nature of Bees appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Vivien Avery came into her summer late. She blossomed at the age of thirty-eight, a time when most women are past ripeness, their fruit sampled and discarded.

The men buzzed around her, enthralled.

***

The bee is praised by ancient Greeks and our own captains of industry for its philosophies of order and productivity. There is no self in this honeyed utopia, each member a willing sacrifice to its machinery.

As much as we would emulate its nature, we also emasculate it. The bee is reduced to a fuzzy bumbler, nectar drunk amid the blooms. We do not heed the warning of its colours. Such sweetness always comes with a sting.

***

When Vivien stepped inside the cottage she knew her choice to be correct. Built into the walls of an estate, it contained sunshine and shade, heavy oak and threadbare rugs. The manager showed her around without embarrassment at the stained hip bath beneath the dripping shower head, the tired, Formica of the kitchen and the rattling windows. Vivien was happy to endure such deprivations. It had character.

He led her through the kitchen into the suntrap yard, the stone slabs warm. There was a washing line strung across it, wearing tea towels like a row of flags. There was a rotten door in the far wall, askew on its hinges.

“I keep meaning to fix this,” for the first time he sounded like he was apologising.

“What’s through there?”

“The orchard. The estate. It’s better that you stay out unless they invite you.” He stood and looked at her. “You will remember that, won’t you? Only if they ask you to.”

“Of course. Are you in charge of the estate?”

“Good God, no. Just this.”

She followed him up the twisting stairs. From the windows under the slanting roof, she could see the yard, then hives scattered in the orchard, a kitchen garden and finally the roof of the mansion, made of crumbling ochre stone. She could see figures moving among the trees and between the rows of vegetables.

“You’re not allergic to bee stings, are you?”

Vivien frowned.

“No, but I’m not fond of them either.”

“This used to be a beekeeper’s cottage.” He nodded towards the big house. “They produce the caviar of honey.”

He did not exaggerate. The estate’s honey was a secret, kept by those who knew and didn’t want to share. Medicinal and beautifying, it was sought by kings, media moguls and entertainment divas.

“They’re very shy people. Filthy rich, apparently. Not that you’d know to look at them.”

He stepped closer.

“The honey’s very expensive. It’s an aphrodisiac, you know.”

The man lightly grasped her wrist and she pulled away. Undeterred, he went to the bed, seemingly to demonstrate the firmness of the mattress, patting the space beside him. Not looking her in the face made it an insipid invitation. He ploughed on.

“My wife. She doesn’t understand me.”

“Then perhaps you should make a better job of explaining yourself.”

Vivien was shocked and excited, despite herself. Not by him but by the possibilities of the invitation. She had tried romance and found it fragile. This man was not offering her romance, but something entirely different.

She hid her smile behind pursed lips as she ushered the manager, who was baffled by his own audacity, out of the door.

***

Long divorced, her marriage bewildering and brief, Vivien was an anomaly in her social circle. Being without husband or child, her personal and professional successes could be overlooked by her female friends. Being true friends, they never voiced their opinions that her manlessness had made her selfish and her childlessness had made her trivial. They never talked in pitying tones about her lonely nights of splendid isolation.

She became a pale shadow of herself in the company of the husbands, sons and lovers of these friends. Her failure with men blighted her side of the conversation. She was socially uncertain, diffident and eager, where another sort of woman might have become bolshy and bitter. She put them in mind of their brothers, the one’s that were young enough to need their approval and not old enough to be a rival. Her attempts at flirtation were charming. Innocent and awkward enough to share with their wives, mothers and lovers.

It was this group of men that were the first to sense a change. They noticed her fingers lingering on the stem of her glass, that she no longer covered her mouth to stifle the laughter hidden there. There was nothing bitter in the tilt of her chin as she challenged their opinions. She teased them and it made them tingle. They did not share these exchanges with their wives, mothers or their lovers.

Vivien Avery was in flower.

***

The queen is statuesque, bigger than any of her progeny who attend her. Her monarchy is two-fold. She is the only one of her tribe to reproduce and she has the power of chemical domination. Her prodigious pheromones keep the colony in supplication. The workers are her hand maidens, who clean and feed her from their own mouths with ambrosia, a viscous yellow milk that promises her abnormal longevity. So it is that for her entire life she is utterly theirs to adore, her residence a hexagonal cell that is both her throne and her prison.

***

Later in her life, when Vivien had a surfeit of leisure to reflect, those early days at the cottage were the ones she remembered most. She had memories of basking in the yard, eating roast chicken with her fingers. The crisp skin melting between her tongue and palate. There was a square of unsullied blue above her and she wondered if it could have been as perfect or if she imagined it that way. There were afternoons with a muted radio and tatty paperback. Her life before was vague by comparison, barely tasted, lost and wasted.

Vivien also recalled when this life ended and her new one began.

The encounter with the manager had reminded her that her body had its own purpose, not just functions. Its need for satisfaction disturbed her sleep. By night she stood naked before the mirror in the bedroom, studying her tarnished image and invoking the jolt of his fist around her wrist. Her hoarding ovaries now threatened to release all her eggs at once. This rampant fecundity made her shine. Her pheromones were maddening. Vivien Avery didn’t give a fig for procreation. Her state made her pleasure hungry. She longed to be a carnal adventurer.

She turned around, peering over her shoulder to view herself. The motion made one scapula take flight. There was the hollow of her back. The ample hips and fleshy bottom. Flesh on fire, she glowed in the dark.

The faint tapping startled her. It was a hesitant request for admission. She paused. It came again. Vivien pulled on clothes. The stairs creaked under her feet. She looked left to the soft shapes of the sofa. The rapping wasn’t at the front of the cottage, but from the kitchen door. This was a backdoor caller.

The knocking came again. The trespasser had come through the estate and by the rotten door into her yard. She turned the key. The prospect of the manager didn’t threaten her even though she had not decided what to do with him yet.

Vivien gaped. It was a woman. Tall and stooped. As naked as Vivien had been only moments before. Her silver hair was twisted into a rope over one shoulder. Her skin was taunt and uncreased on her aged face.

“Help me.”

The old woman stepped inside. Her abdomen was revealed. Womanhood had ravaged her. The skin sagged as though once greatly distended and then emptied. The abdomen of a mother, many times over. Her pubic hair was sparse and childish. Her breasts were like a beast’s, damaged by the dragging suckling of a large and selfish litter. Her limbs were emaciated. Yet the skin had the same sheen as her face, cosmetic, youthful and unnatural. Bony hands snatched at Vivien as she collapsed into her arms.

Vivien lowered her to the ground, cradling her in her lap. The old woman smelt of honey. Her skin was thin satin slipping under Vivien’s hands. It was as though she had been oiled to keep it supple.

“Please, help me.” She touched Vivien’s face, her fingers butterflies.

Figures loomed up from the darkness outside.

“Mother, we’ve been so worried.”

They came as a pair, one enfolding the old lady in a blanket like she was an injured animal, pulling her from Vivien’s embrace, the jealousy plain on her face.

“Mother,” said the other, “we thought we’d lost you.

They clucked and fussed with palpable concern. They were shorter than their mother, solid country girls. Squat and square rather than curved. They were dressed in simple blouses and trousers that looked homemade.

“Do you want to bring her in? I’ll light the fire and get some clothes.”

“No, that’s all right.”

The taller one was brusque but the other one seemed more inclined to conversation.

“This is our mother,” the girl said as though it weren’t obvious. “She’s never wandered off like this before.”

“Your mother’s lucky to have such a caring family.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.” The girl beamed at her, pleased by the comment. Vivien saw that she wasn’t a girl at all, but a woman. Her lack of grooming, the unplucked eyebrows and the faint moustache, made her look younger. She lingered as her stocky sister lifted their frail parent in her arms.

“Hadn’t you better help them?”

“She’s very strong.” Her hand loitered on the door frame, as if to stop Vivien from shutting her out. “We look after her. She’s very old now. What’s your name?”

“Vivien.”

“I’m Bea.” She pointed to Vivien’s arm. A bee had landed there. Insects could be as insomniac as old ladies. Bea lifted it off with care. She held it up and it took flight. “They like you.”

“Is that good?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, nice to meet you.” Vivien started to close the door.

“You’re very kind to have helped us.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Most people wouldn’t have answered the door. How much longer are you staying?”

“Another week.”

“Are you with your husband?”

“No,” Vivien hesitated, “I’m not married.”

Bea leaned in. She seemed to be deciding something.

“Will you come to see us? I think my family will like you. We can thank you properly.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Please. It would mean so much to all of us. Through there, tomorrow afternoon then,” she pointed back to where she’d come from, “and if you don’t come, we’ll have to come and get you.”

***

It is appropriate that the workers are female, their passion not for themselves, but for the greater good. They are supple creatures, young and unfeminine, relishing their roles as cleaners, guards and builders, as hunter-gatherers and factory workers.

These workers forage among the flowers, curling tongues sucking nectar from blooms into their rosebud mouths. They hurry back to the hive with this delivery, where other workers  wait with eager, open mouths.

They show blind devotion to the queen. They smother her with mother love which is touching as they are sterile.

A life of toil, doting on their queen, sweet and incestuous honeyed kisses, mass murder and the production of a spoon of honey are the best that they can hope for. 

***

Vivien pushed open the door to the orchard. The wood was crumbling splinters against her palms. There was a sound on the air, a hum between the trees, a buzz, the Om that underlies the universe. It hung before her, sound given body.

It was a swarm.

He came through the bees as if invincible. Vivien was won over immediately, enchanted by his entrance. She admired the broadness of his chest and shoulders. The sinews of his forearms made her shudder. He wasn’t pretty, which was good, as she distrusted prettiness. She’d made altars of beautiful men only to have tear them down again. Her ex-husband was one such man. She’d become indifferent to his sculpted face. By the end she found it vacuous. They was no chemistry, no urgency between them. Give her an ugly, charismatic man any day. She imagined them to be more attentive lovers.

“You’re quite safe,” his molten voice poured right through her, “they’re not interested in you.”

The man lingered in the swarm. When he opened his mouth bees flew onto his tongue. She gasped as they crowded his mouth. She imagined kisses, full of stings. Swollen tongues and bruised lips. He blew gently, sending them on their way.

“You must be Vivien. I’m Tom.”

“Hello.” She was shy. The shyness that is loaded with expectation, that showed her thoughts were giving her cause to blush. She was determined to enjoy this game. After all, it was her summer and nothing would be as sweet again.

Tom carried an enamel pail. He dipped his fingers in and they came out coated, dripping honey. Tom offered himself to her and she took them in her mouth.

He tasted exquisite.

***

“Come and join us. There’s a picnic in you honour.”

They walked together through the orchard. The boughs leaned towards them, laden with gifts. Several women were at work, harvesting the fruit. There was singing, the sound of wassailing and cider, of garlands and maidens. They were dressed in simple homemade clothes, like the women who’d come in the night. They turned as Tom and Vivien approached, eyes full of appraisal.

The kitchen garden opened up before them. Here more women were at labour, rearing rows of brassica and pulling up potatoes. Ferny carrot stalks spilled from their trugs. One woman had her face buried in a lavender bush, grasping it like a lover’s face. She surfaced, glowing with pleasure. There was that song again.

They walked around to the front of the house whose leaded panes stretched above them, winking in the sun. The doors were treble height, unassailable and carved with bees.

The lawn spread out under the sun, blankets laid upon it and men laid out upon them. They turned their heads, they smiled at her and some even stood up but were waved back down by Tom.

“Here.” Tom directed her to an empty woollen square and handed her a glass. His spoon clinked needlessly upon the glass as though he needed this to get everyone’s attention. “I’d like to introduce Vivien.”

Glasses were raised amid murmurs of welcome.

“Thank you.” Vivien would not be flustered. Be it a coven, cult or clan, she would stand her own ground. No harm had come to her so far. It was just a plate of sandwiches and drinks.

Tom lay down, reclining like a sultan on a nest of cushions. He patted the space next to him. There was nothing insipid about this invitation.

Vivien sipped her drink, musing on the order of things before her. The women worked, the men looked on. Sunshine smiled upon them. A paradise for men and bees. The women’s arms were always full: a spade, a tray, a plate or jug. Cult indeed. Subjugated, sexless women with hairy legs and industrious hands.

No wonder I’m in such demand. Vivien shocked herself with such an unsisterly thought.

Bea’s hand fell on her shoulder.

“I’m so happy to see you.” She kissed Vivien’s cheek.

“How’s your mother?”

Vivien had been so distracted by Tom that she hadn’t asked him about the old woman and Vivien now wondered if she was his mother too.

“Not well,” Bea’s face fell. “Not well at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s not been well for a while.” There was a cropping sound as Tom ripped up grass. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”

He addressed Bea as she stood over him like a servant bearing a plate of fruit in one hand.

“Are you always so rude?”

“Don’t worry,” Bea was radiant. Vivien had taken her side. “I’ll get him back.”

“Tom,” Vivien put a hand upon his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt slipped over his skin. “Don’t be so unsociable. Bea can join us if she likes.”

“Whatever you want.” Tom shrugged and looked away.

“I can’t, but thank you. I have things to do. I’ll give you some privacy.” Bea eyed Tom, her mouth close to Vivien’s ear. “My brother likes you.”

“Are all these men your brothers?” Vivien called after her. “Surely not.”

Bea did not turn to answer, leaving Vivien to be more direct.

“Are you all related?”

“Yes, we are. This is my family.”

The occupied women and men at leisure were busy listening.

“And you all live here together?”

“Our family are direct descendants of the original beekeepers that lived in your cottage. There’s always been bees, so there’s always been us.”

“So where were you born?” Vivien asked Tom. She was determined to find them out.

“Here. Bred and reared.”

“And you grew up here?”

“I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Why would I want to live anywhere else?”

Why indeed?

“But haven’t you ever wanted to get away?”

“Not at all,” he looked troubled, “it’s a simple life but I don’t know how much longer it can last, especially now with our mother being so ill. I love how we live. It satisfies me. In most things.”

He handed her a piece of apple. It had arrived already sliced. The flesh was white beneath the skin.

“Most things?” She bit into it. Tart juices flooded her mouth.

“Nearly,” he smirked at her, “but not everything.”

Vivien stifled a giggle. A colony of inbred beekeepers living in arcadia. Tom’s sauciness appealed. A simple man, a simple life, what was there not to like?

***

The drones are hedonists. These spoilt boys exist to feed and fornicate, a golden life which culminates in mating with their monarch. They have no inkling that this will herald their demise, hence their surprise when their servant-sisters, the jealous workers, rise up in pre-ordained revolution to starve, brutalise and slaughter the consorts of their beloved queen.

***

After the picnic, Tom and Vivien retraced their steps across the man-littered lawn, through the falling dusk of the kitchen garden, past the hives and trees to the back of the cottage. There was a large, yellow moon in the darkened sky. It was low enough for Vivien to draw it down and put it in her pocket.

The rotten door was as she left it, half pushed open.

“What are these?”

Vivien saw what she’d missed earlier that day. The side of the wall facing the orchard was a series of niches. Some were empty, some containing the last glimmer of candles. It looked like a shrine.

“They used to contain bee bowls.”

“Bowls?”

“Straw baskets. An early form of the beehive.”

“Oh.”

Neither of them could be still. Their bodies, one electrified by the other, were in constant motion. She twirled from side to side on one heel; he twiddled a long stalk of grass between his fingers, put it in his mouth and took it out again.

“Bee bowls,” she arched her back, “I’ve never heard of them before.”

They had moved into the yard.

“15th century.” His eyes flickered from her eyes to her mouth and back again.

“As old as that?” She unlocked the kitchen door, eager for him to continue her education inside. They came close enough to raise the hairs upon her arms.

“There’s always been bees here. That’s how we began. Wax used to be how the estate paid their taxes.”

“A wax tax?”

“As candles for the church,” he frowned, the idea displeased him, “before we were excommunicated for heresy.”

“Really?”

“Persecuted for witchcraft. As they did with anyone with knowledge of birds and bees.”

She trailed her fingers down her neck. His frown softened and faded.

“Tom, are you trying to convert me?”

They had reached the stairs. Vivien was on the first step. Tom caressed the newel post with his palm.

“Convert you?”

“To your religion. To bees.”

He laughed. She entwined a strand of hair around her forefinger.

“It’s not a religion. A way of living, maybe.”

He leaned towards her. They had reached the top of the stairs. His clothes seemed wrong on his large frame. She wanted to take them off.

“I’ve no intention of being one of your little women, waiting on you hand and foot.”

This part jest, part test made Tom suddenly tender.

“Is that what you think I want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at me. Tell me what it is you think I want from you. And more importantly, what do you want from me?”

Everything.

***

Sex with Tom, clothes half on, half off, left her breathless and invigorated. She didn’t imagine herself to be in love. She knew herself to be in lust. Desire was a means to its own end. Tom was vigorous and selfish, making Vivien claw back satisfaction with her teeth and nails. It left her sore and satiated. She didn’t chide herself for such recklessness. Her time of having regrets had passed, or so she thought. She lay back on the pillows, Tom beside her, close but not touching, nursing the feeling inside her, of wanting, of taking but not needing.

***

The lovers slept with the bedroom window open. A swarm of males stood among the trees in vigil, gazing up to where she lay. They could smell her. Her fertility was fragrant. It carried on the breeze.

They were in rapture.

***

“Vivien, wake up.”

There was a gentle voice and clammy hand upon her shoulder.

“Vivien, please.”

There was breath against her cheek. It smelt of honey. Her eyes snapped open. She was naked and chilled, the bed sheets twisted at her feet. Vivien’s hand roamed across the mattress. The space beside her, the place that Tom had filled, was empty.

It was Bea, her hair tied up in a yellow ribbon, a school girl’s decoration. It brushed against Vivien’s skin and she pushed it away, her other hand snatching at the sheets. For all her new powers, she wasn’t ready for such exposure yet.

“Vivien, it’s our mother.”

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s ill. Will you come?”

“Shouldn’t you call a doctor?”

“We have.” Bea blinked. “Tom asked me to come for you.”

“He sent you?”

“Yes,” Bea was too old to look so sulky, “but I wanted you to come too.”

Whatever for? Vivien nearly said but stopped herself. “Tom has taken such a shine to you.” It was a sly lure.

“All right.” Vivien swung her legs over the edge. “Turn around.”

She retrieved her discarded clothes that lay in puddles on the floor. Bea watched in the looking glass, a pale figure glowing in the mirror.

Vivien was luminous.

***

They were on the threshold. The carved doors were ajar, the innards of the house reduced to a long strip of shadow and greasy yellow light. Bea turned to Vivien.

“Not just anyone can come here.”

“I know.”

“Are you absolutely sure that you don’t mind me fetching you?”

Vivien looked at her with irritation.

“It’s just that I like you. So does Tom. We’ve all agreed how special you are. That we can trust you.”

“I’m not sure what it is you think I can do to help.”

“You’ve brought us so much comfort, just by being here. Come in now, Vivien, and be our willing guest.”

Vivien followed her into the entrance hall. She expected the same evidence of industry that she’d seen in the garden and orchard but in the gloom of the electric lights everything was shabbiness and neglect. The wooden panelling was dulled by dust and she could smell the mildew in the walls. The tiled floor was tacky underfoot. She could hear the wavering, nasal hum of air conditioning, a ridiculous thing in such a tatty old pile.

“Where’s Tom?”

His sudden presence calmed her. He came to her with outstretched hands. His face was tears.

“I knew you’d come.” He enfolded her in an embrace, which she returned. “Didn’t I say she’d come?”

“So did I.” Bea’s eyes were angry hollows. “Don’t make out that I ever doubted her.”

“Is she very ill?” Vivien looked at Tom, wanting Bea to leave them to each other.

“She’s dying.” His mouth was compressed. “It’s no surprise. She’s so old.”

“I’m sorry.”

Still enfolded in him, she rubbed his back, feeling the strength in his muscle and bone. His mother was dying and he pulsed with life.  The thought inflamed her. Inappropriate but an affirmation of life all the same. She wanted him again and could tell he wanted her too. Before she wouldn’t have known such a thing and it thrilled her that she knew with such certainty.

“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered in her ear, “you’re here now and nothing else matters.”

***

The corridor they walked along was kinder to the house. Lit only by candle, the dirt and decay was lost in their warm glow. Bea and Tom walked beside Vivien.

“We’ve been waiting such a long time for you.”

“Shut up, Bea.”

“No. Shut up yourself.”

Vivien halted. The corridor seemed very narrow suddenly. “What do you mean?”

“Once our mother’s dead we’d have to leave here. I’ve no idea what we’d do. Thank God you’re here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“None of us could ever replace her. We were so relieved when we met you.”

“Relieved?”

Tom had taken her arm. She shook him off.

“Vivian, we’ll take such good care of you. We’ll be your girls. You’ll want for nothing. Mother never had to lift a finger, we’d never let her. Let us show you how good we can be. You’ll have to stay then. You’ll see how much we love you.”

Her relief and sorrow paralysed Vivien. Tom put his arms around her. Holding her. Restraining her. She was overcome, overwhelmed by their love. It brought bile up in her throat and made her limbs like lead.

Not so heavy though that they couldn’t lift her.

***

Here in the great hall was the sound she’d mistaken for air conditioning. It was a buzz. A hum. An Om. The sound that underlies the universe. The hive was humming.

The sun was rising, spilling through the long windows. Vivien could see the room had been made fit for their purpose. The walls were lined with honeycomb, a construct of man sized hexagons. The honey within made the growing light liquid amber. Some of the chambers were darkened by the figure curled up, grub-like, foetal-style, within.

On the wall opposite was the old woman’s bower, where she was kept safe, even from herself. The honey light made her look jaundiced. She was a queen lying in state. The hive sensed her dying. She was withered, drying, desiccating, her chemicals waning.

Vivian saw that she hadn’t yet expired. Her ribcage heaved, erratic gasps as she tired of the task of respiration. Her eyes rolled and her heart threatened failure. The hive was in the act of entombing her in this state of semi life, of packing her in wax. She would be an effigy within her cell for Vivien to gaze upon. This was the old woman’s fate, her successor had come too late for her to abdicate.

Vivien had her own cell. Disrobed by a multitude of hands, her hair let loose, her rings and earrings were removed. She would be adored without the need of such adornments.

Bea patted her hair and then sniffed at it. As if invigorated by the smell, she did a little dance of celebration and kissed one of her sisters full on the mouth. These grinning, buzzing women were no longer comical. They were monstrous. They all wanted to be near her, to touch her.

The men hung back. Crooning, swaying, waiting creatures. Vivien could not see Tom. She’d heard his shouts and then his silence. The women swept him up and carried him off to where he wouldn’t be in the way.

She felt distant from the proceedings. They’d filled her up with ambrosia. They made her gorge on it. She would soon sicken of the taste and texture clogging up her throat. Sickened but she would wait for it, this addictive sedative, its arrival marking the divisions of her day.

It was getting darker instead of lighter as the morning became midday. Bees had lined the windows, crowding the panes, blocking out the light. The building crawled with them but they would not enter uninvited. They were excited. They wished to witness this rare spectacle. The coronation of the queen.

***

The mating flight is not polite. It is an orgy, during which the queen is serviced by the drones. This is no gentle love making, no prelude to a lifetime of tenderness together but the panicked ejaculation of the selfish gene. The drones will deposit a lifetime of sperm, distending their queen’s abdomen with thousands of fertilised eggs that will keep her hive bound and bearing baby bees, both workers and more drones, for the glorification of the hive.

***

Vivien Avery came into her summer late. As she blossomed, the men buzzed around her, enthralled.

The post The Nature of Bees appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— The Editors

***

I come to this Introduction from a somewhat strange perspective. I was one of the people who woke up on November 9, 2016—as a Canadian living in England, whose eyes were still fixed south of the border, across the pond—in what seemed to be an alternate reality.

The morning of the General Election, I remember logging on and experiencing almost a doubling of vision, as if the universe had split into two tracks that were radically diverging from one another. There was a hallucinatory space of about a week where I still felt as if I could see another world layered underneath mine. There was shock and disorientation, not a little fear—but also bewilderment at how fragile the norms and traditions which formed the bedrocks of reality—my reality, as it turned out—had proven to be.

I don’t mean to rehash politics. The tumultuous events of the last twelve months have been a shock to the system as one by one our certainties about the way things are have been cast aside. New futures have been dreamed up and rapidly discarded. Tiny bubbles of consensual realities have surfaced and burst, or gained power, grown, come to englobe more and more people. The speed of change has been rapid, disorienting. But in the wake of all this I’ve begun to think about my own experiences critically as a way of examining what literature is and what it ought to do.

I grew up in a little town in Ontario, on the border with Port Michigan, and so I’m used to border crossings. I have two passports, and this means I can pass easily, more easily than most, choosing whichever identity is most likely to be granted access. I know that liminal spaces are dangerous, and multiple identities can be useful—but they are also cause for suspicion. If you are two things—or three things, or many things—then you are not easily one thing; you can pass but you still present a risk. And increasingly, as I’ve crossed borders over the last year I’ve registered a radical sense of difference, as the cultures of three countries I’ve felt as familiar as breathing, have shifted and re-aligned.

Weird fiction is a strange beast, an eclectic genre (or subgenre). It originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James, and has since developed over the course of the last hundred years to encompass new writers such as China Miéville, M. John Harrison and others. Weird fiction is notable for its generic uncertainty; it exists at the boundary between science fiction and horror—perhaps—or between literary fiction and horror—perhaps—or between Lovecraft and whatever happens to be floating close to hand at any given moment—perhaps!

In 1933, in the lull between two world wars, a year which included the death of President Calvin Coolidge, an assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, the beginning of the Great Depression and the premiere of the original film version of King Kong at Radio City Music Hall, a middle-aged pulp writer by the name of H. P. Lovecraft began work on an article addressing weird fiction which would later be published in the June 1937 issue of the Amateur Correspondent. “I choose weird stories,” he wrote, “because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” In this article Lovecraft sketched out the parameters of a kind of story interested in using the language of dreams and fragments, vague impressions, snatches of scientific discourse, in order to interrogate the nature of reality. This work, whatever we may think of the man himself and his influence on the field now, both of which have deservedly (in my opinion) required re-evaluation, is still ongoing—and still necessary.

In fact, it would seem that in our moment this work is more necessary than ever.

***

Recently, another short story writer interested in the nature of reality had something to say about a moment of catastrophic change. In 2011, Dominican author Junot Díaz interrogated the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in an article entitled “Apocalypses: What They Reveal” in The Boston Review. He wrote of the etymology of the word “apocalypse”, which means “to uncover and unveil.” There are three kinds of apocalypses, he argues: there are those that follow the actual imagined end of the world; there are those that comprise catastrophes which resemble the imagined end; and there are those disruptive events that provoke revelation. The apocalypse, he says, quoting James Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.”

We are, by all accounts, no matter where you might fit yourself in the political spectrum, in an apocalyptic moment. We are witnessing the end of something, or an event that resembles it; we are searching for an account that can explain that end.

On the day following the announcement of the results of the American election I was teaching a group of writers at Anglia Ruskin University. It was an evening class. The students had always been a lively bunch, eager, full of questions and comments and jokes and affection for one another. But that day I didn’t know how to address them. One colleague had told me not to talk about Trump, to just leave it out of the room, but that seemed impossible. Politics, whatever we believe, is at the heart of writing; it is a vital part of living and participating in society.

I did the best thing I could think of in the situation. I cribbed something I’d heard from Ben Markovits, a lecturer at Royal Holloway: that the purpose of teaching creative writing is, on the one hand, to help students to become published (in the best cases)—but in all cases, regardless of the quality of the writing, it is to help students to become better witnesses to the world. I have thought hard on that maxim since I first heard it. We are all witnesses of the world. The tools of storytelling can help us, in this respect: they help us to understand our world, to observe it, to process it. This is a fundamentally imaginative act and it is an act with great power—the power to witness.

We are living in an apocalyptic moment and we have a duty to be witnesses. We have a duty to observe, to imagine, to speculate, and to create.

***

Weird fiction is a genre that knows about the apocalypse.

It is a genre used to dismantling the status quo and exploring what lies beyond the margins of what is known in the world. It is genre obsessed with bringing to light what wishes to remain hidden and dealing with the consequences of that revelation.

The rules of reality have changed. This is an age in which it seems impossible to count on shared assumptions. Gary Dunion on Twitter cleverly captured the zeitgeist by pulling together a number of headlines he had read recently:

• Suspect in North Korea killing “thought she was taking part in TV prank”
• Robert Mugabe could contest election as corpse, wife says
• German parents told to destroy doll that can spy on children

His caption? Season 4 of Black Mirror is coming along nicely…

Indeed.

The Twitter account for Black Mirror states: “Our job is to explain what’s happening to you as best we can.” As we have seen, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. I can only imagine the problem is going to get worse.

When Lovecraft talked about his short stories he imagined fear to be at the heart of the process of discovery and revelation. He said:

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

In this respect, weird fiction seems a perfect vehicle for exploring our present moment. For it does seem to us, I think, to many of us, anyway, that time is out of joint; are we moving back to the happy utopia of the 1950s? Are we moving toward the dystopia of 1984? Are we returning or progressing? We do not know. We cannot decide. And the possibilities are not so much divergent as layered overtop of one another. We are existing in multiple moments at most, in multiple times at once.

And it is scary.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, in their introduction to The Weird compendium recognize the murky taxonomy of weird fiction writing:

Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions.

Weird fiction then is used to this strange overlapping, this occupation of simultaneous moments at once. It is a revelatory mode of writing, an apocalyptic mode of writing.

***

This volume was edited with the assistance of a group of students from my university who read through the solicited stories, made recommendations, debated the value of individual pieces and applied—and often questioned–the definition of weird fiction to them. Though the final selections were my own, our conversations shaped my thinking. One particular definition resonated strongly with me. It came from Marian Womack, a spectacular Spanish short story writer and translator whose work has appeared in a previous volume of this series.

She said:

We have a long tradition of [the Weird] in Spain, and this only increased during the dictatorship as new symbolic ways of communicating ideas were rehearsed in narratives (cinematic and literary). This kind of fantasy, in which “something is not quite right”, lends itself very well to Gothic sensibility, with its convoluted use of language and its tormented heroes. And then there is an element of irrationality built into the rational and, coming from a Spanish background, I interpret this as surrealism, for me this is a major element I recognize in weird writing, and one that is present in my own understanding of the weird.

Her response pointed away from, not toward, Lovecraft; it sketched out other directions for inquiry, other crises, other narratives, other points of view than those in which weird fiction has been traditionally grounded. Yet her definition struck me as capturing the essence of the weird tale, the embedding of irrationality within the rational: a way of writing which uses the one to expose the other, to make the reader realize that all supposedly rational systems are inherently irrational.

In thinking about the state of the genre, I’m reminded of an article written by a provocative critic, Jonathan McCalmont, who traced the history of the resurgence of weird fiction in the twentieth century. In particular, he focused on several months in 2003 in Britain when the TTA Press message boards were alive with a great discussion about the nature of the “New Weird”. The discussion was prompted in part by the success of Miéville who published The Scar in 2002 and received critical acclaim in the British Fantasy Award and Locus Awards of 2013.

The topic under debate was the rise of a new type of writing that seemed to have links with the past—a writing to which critics had begun to apply the label “New Weird”—but the forum conversations were riven with arguments from critics and authors alike. M. John Harrison succinctly summed up the problem. A lively figure who emerged as part of the New Wave in the 60s and 70s, he had seen the dangers of labelling a movement. He felt as if the energy of the writing might well be diminished through successive waves of commercialization:

…once the New Wave parameters were codified, there was a general softening-off as second generation writers stripped out the edgier stuff. I mean, I think it’s inevitable that people seeking to understand a movement select the similarities rather than the differences between exponents. That drives you towards the mean–the main stream. New writers imitate that, & before you know it, the energy’s gone, because it lay in the creative tensions between the different exponents.

His response shows a distinct suspicion of the rise of both the conventional and commercial frameworks which have tended to define new “waves” of writing historically and which would go on to attempt to define the so-called “New Weird”. He felt that if he didn’t speak up then he would have left it to others to describe what exactly it was that he was writing. And he believed that in and of itself would enervate the work.

But in describing the discussions that took place on that message board, Jonathan McCalmont said something that struck me as a sort of remedy to this:

Every cultural entity (be it a genre, a sub-genre, a scene, a movement, or a school) is born of a particular place and time… a sudden awareness that the wider culture has changed and that the old tools are no longer up to the job.

McCalmont suggested that the New Weird encapsulated one of those moments.

But where are we now?

Much has happened in the years since those debates and there are signs that weird fiction has been codified in exactly the way Harrison feared it would be. This anthology by definition is one of those forces for codification, attempting to sum up what weird fiction is in order to assess what is “the best.” The best of what? The best of that which is mixed and hybrid, the best of that which defies easy categorization, the best of what ought to remain unnamed. So—no new labels. No New New Weird or Post New Weird. Just weird.

A year ago I would have said there was a danger that weird fiction will—or has already begun to—lose its edge, moving from innocence, to plausibility to decadence, according to the formulation of Joanna Russ, in which originally distinct ideas and voices have become assimilated to the point of stale repetition.

And yet I believe we are in one of those moments of rapid re-imagining when the old tools of writing no longer seem up to the job.

The language of weird fiction speaks to the irrationality of our present, floundering systems. Whereas these stories have typically looked outward to generate their horror, from the undeniable xenophobia of some of Lovecraft’s writing to the misogyny embraced by the slasher flicks of the 70s; but it could just as easily look inward. To be horrified by one’s self, to feel a disconnection from what is labeled “traditional” or “natural” or “essential” is a vital step toward embracing a radical empathy with what might have heretofore been labeled as Other. This is work that weird fiction can do.

The stories within this volume were published in 2016. Many of them were almost certainly written before the upheavals which I have been talking about, yet each in my mind embodies the spirit of upheaval and revelation, madness, despair, horror and also, sometimes forgiveness, accommodation and change that seem to mark our apocalyptic moment. Among these writers are many names you may not recognize, and this is, to my mind, a good thing. They are writers from different countries, different languages, and different traditions. Many of these writers may not consider themselves to be weird writers in the strictest of terms and that as well is a good thing. As the editor of a volume that sets out to define the genre I confess I have the same reservations that M. John Harrison had in 2003: that weird fiction has on the one hand become too stable, too easily recognizable, and on the other so diffuse that the term no longer has any meaning at all. There is a danger with labels, but also an opportunity.

We are living in weird times. As I write, a snap election in the UK has just shocked the nation with another upending of the pollsters’ predictions and the future seems very uncertain. In moments such as this, time itself seems out of joint. We need new tools to interrogate our present moment. We need a new language to understand it, to articulate our concerns, our hopes, our dreams—our possibilities. The writers within this volume have been, first and foremost, witnesses to their world. Their stories suggest a new language, not only for weird fiction, but for a contemporary fiction that looks for new answers in unexpected places.

Helen Marshall,
Cambridge, England

The post The State of Weird appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Helen Marshall should be familiar to fans of Weird Fiction Review—she has contributed articles on Stephen King and Kelly Link. She’s an author of fiction as well. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After (2014), won both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Marshall has a PhD in Medieval Studies and currently serves as Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.

In terms of writing, I haven’t seen much from you since Gifts for the One Who Comes After. What have you been up to since then?

I’ve been working on a novel entitled Everything That Is Born, which is forthcoming from Random House Canada in 2019. It builds on my love of weird fiction and follows a seventeen-year-old girl named Sophie who lives in a version of Oxford devastated by flooding and disease. For the children in that world who are diagnosed with a mysterious condition, death comes to mean something else—an irresistible ushering towards transformation. After her younger sister drowns, Sophie resolves to steal her body from the morgue. Yet as Sophie watches her slow transformation, she discovers that perhaps there is hope after all—if she can be brave enough and strong enough to go after it. The novel springboards off my interest in catastrophes, modern and medieval, and attempts to find connections between the various crises we’re facing now and those of the Middle Ages, when the Black Death killed close to fifty percent of the population of Europe.

I know you did a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford in which you studied literature during the Black Death. Can you tell us more about your interest in the Black Death? Since disease has often been a theme in weird fiction, do you feel like your interests in the Black Death and weird fiction are related?

I became interested in the Black Death, in part, because I had expected there to be a clear link between the trauma of the catastrophe and the literature of the period. In Italy, for example, you have Boccaccio’s Decameron being set explicitly in the midst of an outbreak, with a group of nobles retreating to the countryside in order to tell stories to distract themselves. But in English literature I found a curious absence. Certainly, it does change the way literature is produced and the way in which writers (and others) are educated but it doesn’t leave the same kind of traces in the text themselves. Disease does have a link with weird fiction, I think, because diseases change us. They remind us that we live in our bodies and of how fragile our bodies are. And so my novel is interested in ways in which disease comes to figure within weird fiction, both as a cause of catastrophe and as a cause of change.

Since you’re a teacher, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on how you would teach weird fiction if you were to teach a course on it. How would you structure the course? What pieces would you include?

In fact, I have proposed a module along these lines for the MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin, which will also be adapted for the writing module in our new MA in Science Fiction and Fantasy. The module I teach next term, called “Writing the Apocalypse”, takes its inspiration from Junot Diaz’s article “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal” which argues the apocalyptic event must “in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate ‘the true nature of what has been brought to end.’ It must be revelatory.” This module uses a number of “weird” cross genre texts to interrogate the nature of the revelations that a crisis can expose. Some of the texts we’re looking at include work by Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Margaret Atwood, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. There are other writers I’d love to teach and have put on various syllabi: Etgar Keret, Kelly Link, Aliya Whiteley, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, M. John Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Usman T. Malik, Indra Das, Nina Allan, Shirley Jackson, Robert Shearman, oh all sorts. But this gives you some indication of the kind of writing I like. I’m interested in blurring the line between realist and non-realist fiction, genre and experimental fiction, and showing the value of both modes in revealing the strangeness of our world.

You moderated a panel at WorldCon 75 called “Rise of Weird Fiction.” Can you give us a brief synopsis of this talk?

I would say that my introduction to The Year’s Best Weird Fiction lays out my thinking on this and that much of the panel explored definitions of weird fiction, its history, and where it might go now.

Kathe Koja purposely didn’t read the first volume while Strantzas did read the previous volumes. Did you read any of the previous volumes? Why or why not?

I didn’t set out deliberately to read through the previous volumes though I had read a number of them before Mike Kelly talked to me. One of the strengths of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction as a series, I think, is that each editor has space to come to his or her own definitions of the weird. There is a huge scope for personal taste in this, particularly because the weird exists at the intersection of a number of traditions, genres and modes. I would expect my volume looks quite different from previous volumes for exactly that reason.

The lineup for YBWF4 is very diverse. The stories come from authors from all different walks of life and backgrounds. This has been a somewhat controversial topic in weird fiction and I was wondering how as an editor and academic you think we should value diversity against other merits like the quality of a story’s prose.

I think it is a mistake to set up diversity as a category that seems to be opposed to quality of prose. The problem is that stories are considered good for a variety of reasons: technical skill, freshness of voice, participation in a tradition, manipulation of tropes, surprise, comfort, familiarity. Beyond a certain point, choice is about taste and so the argument that a more diverse list means lowering quality for some stories simply doesn’t hold true for me. There are more people writing and submitting stories than ever. There is no lack of quality short stories!

Some have commented on the fact that few of the names in my line-up were well-known. That’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t indicate any decline in quality in the work of the usual suspects but rather that I was interested more in writing that was on the fringe of what we consider “weird.” Weird writing is by definition marginal or fringe—or it should be—because once writing becomes mainstream then it becomes increasingly familiar. This is the problem that the horror genre has encountered. When a mode of writing is predicated on an emotion that comes in part from some element of surprise or discomfort—as weird fiction does—then it needs to reinvent itself on a regular basis. What is shocking one year can be assimilated very quickly. So the weird ought to be continually looking outside of itself for new influences and new voices.

I will say that I did need to examine my own processes pretty closely. Initially I drew up a long list that was about a fifty-fifty split between male and female writers (to the extent I could identify them based on their names). The first pass at the short list saw a large number of the female names dropped and I had to stop myself and ask why. And the answers I often came to was that the male writers were more familiar to me, I knew their names, I knew the traditions they were working in better, sometimes I knew them personally. So I deliberately went back and drew up a second short list, forcing myself to ask what elements of the story I was prioritizing and if there were stories I was veering away from simply because they didn’t fit as clearly into the tradition. Which is good, I think. Because the tradition, let’s face it, is not particularly diverse. There are plenty of women writing in non-realist modes but more of them have found success in literary or mainstream publishing. So unless we start searching out material from outside the regular stable of writers we recognize it will be hard for the tradition to change. But as new voices enter the field I suspect they’ll encourage others to follow.

Were there any trends you spotted in weird fiction while working on YBWF4? Any things you’d like to see more of or less of?

I would like to see less Cthulhu and less Lovecraft. It feels anathema and weirdly dangerous to say this, though, which says something about the depth of his influence and the commitment of writers to this tradition. When I was reading anthologies for the Shirley Jackson Awards close to half of what was submitted was Lovecraft-themed. There are many writers doing interesting and innovative things with Lovecraft at the moment—Kij Johnson and Victor Lavalle are great examples but far from the only ones!—but there’s just too much of it at present. It’s colonizing the voices of new writers. Yes, there is a test of skill in taking the themes of another writer and responding to them, innovating within a tradition, producing work that speaks back to its sources. But I do feel as if we’re in a moment where, in the words of T. S. Eliot, last year’s words belong to last year’s language. Contemporary writers need space to develop a new language and it’s difficult to do that when you’re commissioned to use someone else’s words, tropes, and themes.

That being said, I can’t fault any writer for taking a commission. Writing is hard work and anthologies can offer steady, more secure work.

Can you tell us about a couple of stories that you included in YBWF4? 

It’s a book of stories that I would happily give to anyone to say: this is what I like! Some of my favourite finds were “Waxy” by Camilla Grudova. This story was published by Granta and was included in her current short story collection The Doll’s Alphabet. It is an unpleasant, deeply confrontational piece that reminds me of something of a cross between Kelly Link and Thomas Ligotti. I really enjoyed Malcolm Devlin’s story “The End of Hope Street” which reminds me in some ways of the work of Julio Cortazar and also Stephen King in its focus on small communities. It studies the lives of a group of people in the suburbs in which houses, one by one, become unlivable and the survivors must go live with their neighbours. It captures themes of migration, which are interesting to me, but also the deep discomfort of English politeness, which can be tremendously funny and tremendously sad. “Beating the Bounds” by Aki Shilz is barely a weird fiction story at all. It’s hard to tell if it is true or not. It is an odd history of Hanwell, a west London suburb, told in an experimental style. But I loved it because it questioned my hold on reality and it made a pedestrian place come alive with possibilities. Those are only a few of the stories, and readers will find in this anthology examples of nature writing, a sentient race of dolphins, exorcisms, zombies and even a Cthulhu story or two.

In both your introduction and the article you wrote on Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit” you talked about how you felt unsettled over recent events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. You go on to connect this feeling with the Weird. Do you have any thoughts on why we as readers enjoy this feeling as a form of entertainment even when considering our uncertain times?

We live in uncertain times. We have always lived in uncertain times. I think what makes the weird inherently attractive is that it speaks to a part of us that knows, consciously or not, that the rules we play by, the realities we choose to agree to and normalize, have cracks in them. Increasingly, I think that putting realist modes and non-realistic modes at opposite ends of the spectrum does a disservice to both. Realism is conservative in that it tells us what we believe is real is in fact real. But it isn’t. It’s also consensual, questionable, open to interpretation, and often ignorant of other, competing narratives. We are in a moment when the consensus is beginning to shift. Non-realist modes seem to help us get a handle on this faster because they teach us the consensus was never absolute to begin with. People were excluded, people dissented. This breakdown is enjoyable at some level even as it’s also frightening. It means elements of our lives which we lacked the ability or will to question suddenly seem disputable, something we can fight back against. Breakdown gives us an opportunity to see what lies beneath, for better or worse. Increasingly what strikes me as strange about Lovecraft’s fiction is the sense that once the monstrous is encountered, the only options are madness, forgetting or death. And that in its own way is a conservative way of thinking: there are many more options. Resistance, recuperation, remembering, rebirth. This is the energy that comes from the collapse of the consensus—the possibility of change.

How has being an editor on YBWF4 informed your writing and teaching? Is it something you’d like to do again or do you prefer to focus more on writing and teaching in the future?

I loved this experience. I loved how it gave me license to read the field and to explore what lay outside of the field, as we tend to look at it. I would do it again, absolutely.

The post Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 4: An Interview with Helen Marshall appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The third entry in the Year’s Best Weird Fiction series is guest edited by author and editor Simon Strantzas. Strantzas should be no stranger to fans of Weird fiction. He recently edited the Robert Aickman tribute anthology Aickman’s Heirs which won two Shirley Jackson Awards—one for best Edited Anthology and one for Lynda E. Rucker’s story “The Dying Season.” Strantzas was gracious enough to stop by Weird Fiction Review to answer questions about how he defines Weird fiction and how he selected stories for YBWF3. From his responses, I find it interesting that while not every fan may agree with his definition of Weird fiction, Strantzas still provides a very clear and critical framework for how he understands it, along with some insights into what the Weird looks like today and where it may be headed. As a side note, I would also encourage interested readers to check out our interviews with Laird Barron, who edited the first volume, and Kathe Koja, who edited last year’s second volume, in order to gain some perspective into how the Weird is viewed differently by other practitioners.

Weird Fiction Review: Did you read the previous years’ volumes? I’m wondering how you think your selection of stories differ from those of Laird Barron or Kathe Koja.

Simon Strantzas: I dipped into both volumes upon their release, picking my way through the stories that were new to me, revisiting some that weren’t. It seems to me that the first volume was focused on giving a very broad overview of the what constitutes Weird fiction (or at least did so at the time), whereas the second drilled down into a side of the field that hews closer to Fantasy than Horror. This makes it the perfect follow-up in my eyes. Michael Kelly’s mandate for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction series is to show the diversity of the field, and that second volume proved to be a jolt to those who thought they knew what “Weird fiction” was—both those that embraced the term, and those that felt alienated by it. It was a bold and impressive choice, and I think immediately it freed the series from spiraling down a predictable hole.

My own sensibilities about what Weird fiction is and what makes it interesting differ in some ways greatly from those two volumes, yet also stay on perhaps more traditional paths. I suspect I have a greater interest in British and European Horror than the previous editors do, which is likely reflected in my choices. I also lean closer to the Horror side of the Weird fiction spectrum, so many stories I find the most interesting explore the Horror mode in some way. One thing I hope to see more of in future volumes in an influx of writers from outside the Western world, though that carries a number of hurdles, language barriers being only the most obvious.

WFR: In your introduction, you make the case that Weird fiction is just another name for Horror fiction. Would you say that they are completely interchangeable? Or are there perhaps stories that are Weird but not Horror or vice versa?

Strantzas: I wouldn’t call them interchangeable, no. I consider one to be a subset of the other. My argument (laid out, I hope, much more cogently in the introduction to the book) is simply that though there has been fiction called Weird for a long time, the contemporary use of the phrase is relegated to describing the newer forms Horror fiction is taking in this post-millennial age. It’s a term often (not always, but often) used as a short-hand to suggest that because these forms are new and different, they are inherently better than what preceded them, so they need to be divorced completely from what came before so there’s no confusion. “Weird” is too often used as a form of elitism.

One has to remember, though, that all these names are but artificial constructs created to examine and categorize fiction after it’s been written in order to study or sell it. Authors (good ones, at least) don’t tend to worry about such categorizations while writing. What makes weird fiction “Weird” is the author’s desire to tell stories in a different way or with different tools than have been traditionally used. But that’s the same for all leading movements of art, I’d think. I don’t argue that Weird fiction is an interesting and distinct place, I just argue from the perspective that it’s not far enough from its precedents that it can be branched. The Weird is simply new Horror.

WFR: You also acknowledge in your introduction that there’s no consensus around what constitutes Weird fiction. I wonder if you have any theories around why the Weird is such a nebulous genre.

Strantzas: If we accept the tenet that Weird is its own mode, I suspect its nebulousness comes from its relative newness. Established modes like Horror and Science Fiction have existed long enough, and are distinct enough, to have developed tropes and clichés that define them. Should I describe a story where a family moves into a house where a person was murdered, and they suffer through a night of strange noises and unexplained premonitions, you would be hard pressed to find a reader who wouldn’t define that as Horror; just as a story about a rocket ship and an alien planet whose society is both ancient and advanced would be considered Science Fiction. It’s easy for someone to identify these modes. But Weird? Just what exactly is that? Is there a story construct that everyone would agree on as being Weird? The mode is not codified in the same way. In fact, everyone has their own slightly different impression of Weird means. And I don’t consider that a problem. Weird hasn’t existed as a defined (or loosely-defined) thing long enough to develop its own mode-defining hackneyed baggage—it’s still primarily filled with stories on the forefront of literature. It’s and exciting place, but I do wonder if it requires that codification to remain relevant to readers. I remember a similar issue with “Dark Fantasy” a decade or so ago. It was another term bandied around by people who didn’t want to use the word Horror to describe the fiction they liked, but just as Weird fiction it was nebulously defined, and once a generation of readers grew past the term it fell out of favor. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone called a Dark Fantasy author without irony or derision. But perhaps I travel in the wrong circles.

WFR: There are a number of writers in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 3 that are well established (Ramsey Campbell, Tim Lebbon, Reggie Oliver, etc). Were there any writers that were new? Perhaps new to Weird fiction or even new to you?

Strantzas: About a third of the stories selected for the book were from authors I’d never before read. Michael Kelly does a great job at casting a wide net over the field, looking not only for new voices, but new voices in atypical venues for Weird fiction readers. As a result, the stories he sent me to consider were widely varied in style and subject matter. Some were quiet, some explicit; some were realistic while others fantastic. In essence, he was able to provide a healthy spectrum of work to consider, which made my job harder, but much more interesting. I read each story blind so I might assign it an unbiased ranking on several different levels. Then, on re-read, I ranked each again and took an average. This whittled down my list of serious candidates for the book. At that point it was only a matter of re-reading them again to puzzle out the best fit for style and variation. Simple, but not so simple at all. When dealing with the best of the field, selecting which “best” is better than another is a bit of a fool’s errand. In some case, it boiled down to what appealed most to my own sensibilities. The book as a whole is a reflection of the sort of fiction I enjoy, and another volume filled with dissimilar stories could easily have been assembled from the same material and been as good. The stories in all these best-of series are never the qualifiable best of the year, but rather some of the best that are being presented for the readers’ review.

WFR: Do you consciously strive for a balance of well-known and newer writers, or does this balance arrive more or less as a natural part of the editorial process?

Strantzas: Once I was in the final stage of picking the table of contents, I went through the narrowed-down list I’d assembled with my blinders off and linked each titles to its author. This allowed me to make corrections in balance I might not have been able to otherwise. When I ran into a situation where I had two stories I liked equally well, I considered other factors outside the story to lean toward a final list that was balanced by sex and nationality and experience. I could easily have put together a volume of stories written by only straight white men, but I don’t think that properly reflects the field or the talent in it. These best-of books are more than a book of favorites—instead, they function as an overview of what’s happening in the field and what’s exciting. For me, different voices are what’s exciting, especially new voices. I was thrilled to be able to gives some fledgling writers their first taste of being in a curated best-of anthology, and I have no doubt this won’t be the last time for any of them. I must also admit I was excited to be able to include a new story by Robert Aickman in the volume. Aickman’s work has been transformative for me, and it was surely kismet that I should be invited to co-edit YBWF during the year a major new story of his was first published.

WFR: Speaking of Aickman, you talked about the Strange Tale in your introduction. What are the hallmarks of the Strange Tale? Were there any stories in YBWF3 that you would categorize as Strange Tales or Aickmanesque?

Strantzas: I’d probably call the Aickman tale “Aickmanesque”, but it’s not the only one. I see the Strange tale as a more European style of story telling, as opposed to the American style of Weird fiction. The former is weighed down with such a long history that the stories tend to turn inward, whereas the latter are turned outward in exploration of what the world and the cosmos has to offer. American Weird is thus more direct, and more showy that the Strange. (And, again, let me restate that these are arbitrary divisions intended to aid in understanding movements, not define them). Most of the British writers in the book wrote stories I’d call Strange, and the American writers wrote what I’d call Weird, but this was not always the case. I’d suggest the British D.P. Watt’s story falls closer to the Weird scale, and American ex-pat Lynda E. Rucker’s tale falls closer to the Strange. It’s about atmosphere and mood, and plenty of great stories in this book and elsewhere entwine the two irrevocably.

WFR: You’ve worked in the Weird fiction field for quite a while. Did you spot any trends while editing YBWF3?

Strantzas: I came away from the experience with two observations. The first was that the first-person narrative is popular among many writers of Weird fiction. I’m not certain why this is, but I suspect it’s the same at the vanguard of other modes and fields as well. Perhaps the first person narrative is more engaging because it immediately establishes a rapport between reader and narrator, providing a voyeuristic look into another’s life. Or perhaps the subjectivity of first-person works well with Weird fiction because it allows bizarre encounters and effects to be delivered through experience-by-proxy, which heightens the emotional connection. Whatever the reason, I found after reading through a number of first-person stories that encountering one written from the more traditional third-person perspective was an oasis.

The second thread I noticed deals primarily with what newer writers are bringing to this sort of fiction. We used to speak a lot about cross-genre fiction, but whereas once each mode was its own silo with the occasional writer attempting to mix the contents of one with another, newer writers don’t seem to recognize the existence of those silos at all. Instead, they write as though all the speculative fiction fields were one, and glide between aspects without any sense of inhibition. Within the last few years we’ve seen the field shift in this direction out from under those authors who were working at Weird fiction’s vanguard a decade ago, authors who were still working through the influence of the boom period on their fiction and on the field as a whole. These new writers coming of age now not only missed the influence of that boom period, but because the field became so fallow in its aftermath that they instead found their inspirations elsewhere. That they’re bringing those influences back into our recently revitalized field only bodes well for where it’s going.

WFR: How did editing YBWF3 compare to editing other anthologies like Aickman’s Heirs? I know you’ve talked before about editing fiction after Shadows Edge and you said that you enjoyed writing more. After the success of Aickman’s Heirs, which won a Shirley Jackson Award for best anthology, do you see yourself editing more in the future? What about in the near term?

Strantzas: I edited Shadows Edge because I wanted to understand what the editing process was like, and I discovered I didn’t care much for it. Well, that’s not entirely true; I do love reading new stories by my favourite authors, and I do like introducing readers to names they may not have been previously familiar with. And as much work as editing a book is, it’s still less work than writing a book. But that aside I found the task to be a burden that took time away from my own writing, an endeavour I am much more passionate about than editing. So, I decided then that Shadows Edge would to be my first and only foray into editing. And for a time it was.

When the current wave of tribute anthologies we are going through now was initially ramping up, it occurred to me that I might enjoy contributing to one that focused on Robert Aickman. His influence on the field was becoming obvious, and the timing appeared perfect. But no one else seemed to realize that, and after a while I had to accept that if such a book was ever going to exist, it would have to be because I made it happen. So my second (and, I was adamant, final) foray into editing occurred because I saw a hole that needed filling and filled it. As for the award and its nominations, I’m certainly very happy with the acclaim, and I think the notice the book and many of its stories has garnered is proof that my initial instincts about its need to exist were correct.

Both these books involved me assembling a list of my favourite writers and determining who would be able to write great material related to the theme. It’s almost the reverse of a volume like Year’s Best Weird Fiction, where I was reading stories by authors I didn’t know, authors who were exploring their own themes. Editing a book like that requires putting one’s own feelings aside and absorbing each story as a single unit, and only at the end of the process determining how those units interplay with one another, and if there are any general themes or undercurrents that unite them.

As to editing another book in the near (or distant) future, you know what they say: never say never. But there are no plans, firm or inchoate, at present.

WFR: Do you have any projects you’re currently working on that you’d like share with our readers?

Strantzas: I’m somewhere in the weeds of my fifth collection of short fiction. It’s slowly coming together and I’m hopeful it will be completed and polished for a 2018 release. If all goes well, it will be as much of departure from the last book as that book was from the one that preceded it. After that I’ll be turning my attention back to the short novel I’ve been writing for the past few years. I don’t know when that will see print, or even if, but I’ve grown quite fond of the story as time has progressed and I’m eager to finally see how it all ends. Should it work out well, I have another few ideas for novels that will likely take me the rest of my life to complete. Between these projects, short fiction will continue to appear sporadically in magazines, journals, and anthologies. I have three due in various books that have fallen behind on their publishing schedules, so I’m not sure when they’ll appear, but I remain ever hopeful and patient.

The post Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 3: An Interview with Simon Strantzas appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Cover art by Tomasz Alen Kopera. Design by Vince Haig.

If there was any doubt about the resurgence of interest in weird fiction, they should be assuaged by the October publication of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2 from Undertow Books. Looking back to last year’s debut of the series, it might have seemed perilous to risk launching such an endeavor with so many other popular “Best Of…” anthologies in the fields of horror, dark fiction, and related genres that intersect with the weird. However, the release of this second annual volume would seem to indicate that the series is finding its own unique space and an audience that is hungry for more.

For Volume 2, series editor Michael Kelly and guest editor Kathe Koje have pulled together a remarkable table of contents, with authors ranging from the well-known (Julio Cortázar, Karen Joy Fowler, Caitlín R. Kiernan, etc) to the new and promising (Usman T. Malik, Isabel Yap, etc ) and everywhere in between. The stories have been selected from publications as diverse as Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, Crossed Genres, and even WeirdFictionReview.com itself. These are only a few of the primary sources from which these pieces have been curated, and it may serve as an excellent indicator of the health of the field that there are so many venues for high-quality work in the weird.

We caught up with guest editor Kathe Koja to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the second entry in this anthology series.

WFR: Give us an idea of how this volume came together. Also, why did you decide to edit it?

Mike Kelly asked if I was interested, and I was! Simple as that.

WFR: What sort of criteria did you look for in your weird fiction stories when deciding whether to put it in the anthology? What makes a weird fiction story successful?

All pleasure in reading is idiosyncratic. So what makes a story — whether weird fiction or not — successful, is subjective, beyond the writer’s ability to write well, to make “characters” become individuals, to create and present a narrative — that’s a given, that’s the price of admission.The rest, for me, came down to each story’s sensibility, to authorial voice: Was the story one that spoke to me? If it did, it went onto my list.

WFR: I’m interested to know how you think your volume compares or contracts to the first volume (edited by Laird Barron). Do you think there were some stories you chose that Barron wouldn’t have?

I wanted to come to the task without any guideposts or editorial presence, however subtle, from the first YBWF, so I scrupulously did not read it. With YBWF2 finished, I can be a civilian reader again!

WFR: Were there any stories you felt deserved inclusion but for one reason or another you were unable—maybe copyrights prevented you or you felt the story didn’t fit in some way?

I was able to include all my choices, thanks to Mike hunting down permissions and doing all the editorial heavy lifting.

WFR: Do you feel like you’ve gained anything from editing YBWF2, and would you ever consider being an editor again?

It’s a tremendous amount of work. When I received the stories from Mike, I read seriously, and tried to keep my mental palate cleared between stories, which meant not gulping them down, letting the stories sit, then rereading. All this takes time, which was by far the hardest aspect of the job.

WFR: What projects are you currently working on, or what have you worked on since YBWF2?

I finished a new YA novel; and the third book of the UNDER THE POPPY trilogy, THE BASTARDS’ PARADISE, is about to come out (November) from Roadswell Editions, so I’m planning launch events in NY and elsewhere, as well as being a special guest at this year’s World Fantasy Convention. And I’ve adapted, and am directing and producing, DRACULA with my performative fiction ensemble, nerve, for a Janaury 2016 debut. Whew …

WFR: What advice would you give to writers of the Weird who may be seeking to be included in future volumes?

Make sure Mike Kelly gets your stories! Mike was diligent and sent many, many calls for submissions, through many different channels of communication: writers, make sure you keep your ears open. No editor can love and choose what s/he doesn’t get to read.

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