Nightmare Magazine Issue 26

by Nightmare Magazine

  Why has Lovecraft proven so difficult to adapt to film?

  Lovecraft’s stories aren’t the kind of horror tales that filmmakers like. They’re more about psychological terrors than creatures that go bump in the night, and there’s virtually no blood. I think they’re tough to sell to audiences.

  You’re now working on an annotated Frankenstein. I would imagine that a key difficulty in annotating that work might be simply in knowing when to stop, given the gigantic wealth of material surrounding the book and its history.

  You’re right about that—there is a ton of academic material. I expect that I’ll end up taking the same approach as I did with Dracula and Lovecraft, though, and while I’ll try to indicate the existence of the academic scholarship, I don’t plan to examine it in any detail. I’m much more interested in the historical and cultural background than considering whether Frankenstein is a disguised tale of childbirth from the mother’s perspective or an exemplar of Rousseau’s theories of education, for example.

  Are you going to approach Frankenstein as a real story?

  Certainly I will examine the cultural and historical background and criticize the verisimilitude—the improbabilities in the story. I can’t stop myself from doing that. However, I already have a lot of material about the text itself—the changes made to the original text by Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley as it evolved.

  You’ve also worked as an editor, producing both volumes of previously-printed stories (In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes and In the Shadow of Dracula), and new stories (A Study in Sherlock, co-edited with Laurie King). Do you enjoy working as an editor with living authors? Are there other projects you’d like to pursue as an editor?

  I find anthologies a great pleasure, both assembling classic stories and teasing work out of writer-friends. Laurie and I have co-edited In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, another collection of new stories inspired by the Sherlockian Canon, to be published by Pegasus Books in November 2014, and we may well do a third volume—so many friends who want to play in this sandbox! I’ve also just started a very different anthology with my dear friend Laura Caldwell, called Anatomy of Innocence. This will be true stories about exonerees—innocent people wrongly convicted and exonerated—told by major thriller writers working with the exonerees. Laura is the founder/director of the Life After Innocence Project at Loyola University Chicago, and this was her idea. I’m honored to be part of it! It will be published by Norton in 2016.

  Have you ever considered writing something like a narrative history or critical study of an iconic character like Dracula or Sherlock?

  You mean a real book? Actually, I have. Nancy Holder and I are trying to sell a book we call Baker Street Chronicles, a narrative history of the lives of Holmes and Watson, Doyle, and the major figures of the period 1850-1930. It’s kind of a cross between an art book and a history text.

  You’ve worked as a consultant on several movies, and I happen to know that you’ve watched the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer five times. Have you ever been tempted to write a film book?

  I would love to do the Annotated Buffy one day, and Scott Allie (editor-in-chief at Dark Horse) and I actually talked about how to do that with the comics. I also pitched the idea of doing an annotated edition of the Christopher Nolan Batman scripts but didn’t get any traction.

  By day, you’re an attorney, and you’re also very involved with several writers’ organizations (including both Mystery Writers of America and the Horror Writers Association). You must have amazing time management skills.

  And a very supportive wife!

  Are you already considering an annotation project after Frankenstein?

  We’re talking about a big book called Annotated Noir that would consist of four or five classic noir novels (e.g., Maltese Falcon, Big Sleep) and maybe a classic film script. We’re still putting it together, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Also recent are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood and can be found online at lisamorton.com.

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

  Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

  E.C. Myers

  “Who is Your Executioner?” contains many evocative, recurring images, particularly children’s games and Victorian death photos. What inspired the story, and how did you come to develop it around those themes and those specific games?

  This story had a longish gestation for me. Usually I just write and release like I’ve caught a shiny fish, but this one took a while. I was sitting opposite my main collaborator in June 2013 when I happened across a reference to Dead Girl Come Alive. I was looking up the origins of Blind Man’s Buff for some reason, though I can’t now seem to figure out why. As we were both writing and therefore not supposed to be looking at the internet, I texted him a series of illegal OMGs. He’s the reason it got written, because he texted back his own illegal OMG series, and then thought for two seconds and told me the structure of the entire story. That’s how he is. I wish I had that skill because whenever he does it for me, it’s like I’m watching someone walk on water.

  The games in the story are all Blind Man’s Bluff (Buff is the original name for it) variants from various places. Dead Girl (or Dead Man) is American, I think—usually it’s a trampoline game. Kagome, Kagome is Japanese, and Poor Mary (or Jenny, or Sally) is English. They’re all a little like Spin the Bottle, except that a dizzy, spinning person is the bottle, and doomed by fate to choose a mate, or (related?) to create the next dead girl. The game’s been around since Roman times. I like the name of that version: Bronze Fly. The old Greek version is apparently called Copper Mosquito. It’s a pretty tempting game, anything that only takes a blindfold to play.

  The Victorian death photos are straight out of my own childhood. I found a book of them in an Idaho library when I was little. I’m pretty sure I’ve been ruined ever since. They were on a bottom shelf. There were no names in the checkout log. Unlike the narrator here, I didn’t steal the book, but oh, oh, I thought about it. Not porn but photos of dead people dressed to appear living and as though they were part of family portraits? Yes, thank you. I think I was about seven and romancing Dewey 393—death customs—without supervision when I found it. Then I kept going back and hiding it in different sections, worried someone would find it and take it from me. It was my personal high holy horror book.

  I’ve liked the same things since I was tiny. The games in this story are all related to horrifying subtext, as are the death photos. “Who is your Executioner?” I can’t believe that’s a line in a children’s game. But it makes perfect sense that it would be.

  What was your favorite game as a child?

  I hated pre-existing games because I always lost. Written rules and team games seemed invented to spite me. I had no patience. Instead, I was a wild-eyed inventor of terrifying games for large groups of unlucky children seduced by my bossiness. There are reasons Oona is like she is in this story. When I was in grade school, for example, I invented a particular and very unfun game called Witch of Pinch, which was basically me walking around looking scary, knocking my fists together slowly as though I was a miniature mobster ruminating on a war between families. I convinced a lot of children that if I knocked in a certain rhythm, they’d die
on the spot, and that only my mercy would save them. I was aggravatingly tiny, the shortest person in my grade, always. I had to work to get respect. The pinch part of Witch of Pinch involved my fingernails, and the tolerance of the skin of boys. I had a duo of tall girls who functioned as my guards. This meant that we patrolled the playground, me in the center, not walking, but holding their hands and doing a series of front flips instead. I was only active in creating nightmares for other children when I was allowed at recess, of course. For reasons that I now find, um . . . reasonable, as I was clearly a bad element, I was often kept in and forced to play Battleship with my male equivalent, a tiny farmboy genius who could not go outside due to allergies, and whose nose bled from competitive fury whenever we met across the Milton Bradley.

  The names Oona and Zellie are unusual. How do you choose names for your characters? Did they have any special meaning for you or the story?

  Oona is because of Oona O’Neill Chaplin. I’ve always found her interesting—she was Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, and she married Charlie Chaplin when she was eighteen and he was fifty-four. They had eight kids together. Imagine being the daughter of the most famous tragedian and marrying the most famous clown. The tragedian disowned her. Before she married Chaplin, she dated J.D. Salinger. What? Truman Capote said at some point that he based Holly Golightly on her. Double what? I mean. All of this is pretty intriguing, no? None of this bio ended up in the story, as I’m not actually writing about Oona Chaplin, but some of the extremes of her life did end up here. My Oona is both very charismatic and very worrying. She’s interested in terrible things and simultaneously sought after. She’s a dead girl, but a live girl at the same time. Zellie is named Zellie because I always have somewhere in my head a call back to my childhood obsession with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet and the many variations of a powerful, complicated female character named Zillah in that book. This story has some relation, in that it’s full of might-have-beens. There are lots of time periods happening here. I may never get over my first reading of A Swiftly Tilting Planet. It’s so dark, and the unicorn in it is not a pretty pretty unicorn. I got the Wrinkle in Time series for my eighth birthday. That book was especially a big part of the brewing of my brain, perhaps because it says that with extreme focus of your brain, you might be able to change the path of the past. I judge it now, mind you, for the fact that the good people in it are, over centuries, blue-eyed. When I was little, I didn’t notice the gigantor problems there and just got wooed. Now I notice.

  This story jumps around in time as you relate the characters’ past with Oona. Did you always have that structure in mind, and did you write the scenes in a certain order?

  I wrote it in this order, present day going backward every few years. It was the notion of counting to five to bring a dead girl back to life, right there in the lyrics for the rhyme. So counting backward would do the reverse, presumably, and since I knew it was a ghost and resurrection story, I was interested in doing both things with the structure. That said, as I mentioned above, the structure wasn’t all mine. The going backwards in time was my contribution, but the idea of five distinct moments over thirty-something years came from my editor/writer/braintrust guy. That said, though the structure’s always been this, I’ve fought with what ended up in those moments. What do you remember if you see someone only every seven years or so? What are the defining moments of the narrative you share?

  What work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you writing now?

  The End of the Sentence, my novella with Kat Howard, just came out from Subterranean Press. That’s ghosty horror, not quite like this, but it has similarities. And Magonia, my YA sky kingdom novel, comes out in May from HarperCollins. So excited about that! I’m working on a bunch of things. A couple sequels. A couple secrets. You know. I tend to have four novels in various degrees because I’m a distractible and suspicious thing and I fear accidental novel-fails. Lots of short stories will be out in the next few months too. I finished up a backlog of stalled stories and suddenly had a bunch ready to go out into the world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers.

  Author Spotlight: Karin Tidbeck

  Britt Gettys

  “Rebecka” takes place in a world in which God’s existence isn’t questioned and people are aware of His influence on their lives, which could be considered controversial by some. Did you have any reservations regarding the subject matter while writing “Rebecka”?

  Not when it came to religion, no. But then, writing about religion isn’t particularly controversial in Sweden. You’d have to go pretty far to stir things up. I didn’t consider this going very far. What I considered much more uncomfortable was the theme of abuse and the absence of redemption. Rebecka is a woman who experiences horrific abuse and never recovers, and her solution is to inflict the same horrors on someone else. To me that was much more difficult because of the risk of turning Rebecka into a stereotypical victim.

  Did you study or research trauma theory while writing this piece, or did Rebecka’s psyche come to you naturally?

  This was one of those rare stories that pretty much wrote itself. I didn’t do specific research, but I’ve always had an interest in psychological processes, so I did have some stuff in the backpack already.

  Do you think a person’s ability to live and cope with psychological—or even physical—pain makes him or her a stronger individual?

  I think there are a lot of clichés about trauma and how you’re supposed to respond to it. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” carries with it the expectation that if something doesn’t make you stronger, you’ve failed. Another one is that hardship is a gift/challenge/etc., that is, something you should be grateful for and have to learn from. While it’s true that a lot of people come through a trauma or an illness stronger, countless others are worn down or broken. Many live and cope with pain but do so as very fragile people. Are they strong? What is “strong,” for that matter?

  Western culture has a very nasty victim-blaming streak and looks down on those who don’t emerge strong and proud from hardship. We want to live in a just world where pain happens for a reason—either because you deserve it, or because it’s a test. We can’t deal with the fact that horrible stuff can happen to anyone for no particular reason at all, and that any reason or lesson is entirely fabricated by ourselves.

  Much of your work, “Rebecka” included, involves psychological horror and subtly unsettling worlds. What draws you to this particular brand of horror?

  It’s how my brain works. I just take notes.

  Having been published both in Sweden and the US, have you noticed any differences in how horror fiction is received in those countries?

  I don’t know very much about horror’s status abroad, to be honest. My own fiction hasn’t been marketed as horror, except for a couple of appearances in horror-related anthologies. In Sweden, horror has enjoyed a status increase thanks to John Ajvide Lindqvist. His Let the Right One In opened the Swedish readership’s eyes to the fact that horror is actual literature.

  Are you working on any projects currently, and if so would you mind telling us a bit about them?

  I usually don’t talk much about prose under construction, but I can tell you about something else that’s really exciting and is called “In a Coded Reality.” I’ve joined a project by an experimental technology and theatre group, Scenlaboratoriet (The Stage Laboratory), on creating a neural feedback fairy tale. Basically it’s an interactive story where the participants interact
with mind-reading (yes, mind-reading) robots (yes, robots) to affect the story’s content and outcome.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Britt Gettys recently graduated from Pratt Institute where she obtained her BFA in Creative Writing. She currently writes for GeekBinge.com, reviewing television shows and discussing any geeky topic that strikes her fancy. Additionally, she illustrates graphic novels, and her work has been featured in two Pratt sponsored exhibitions. An editorial intern at Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine, Britt hails from Seattle, Washington, where she spends her time writing, cosplaying, and painting.

  Author Spotlight: David Sklar

  Lisa Nohealani Morton

  Tell us a little bit about “Rules for Killing Monsters.” What inspired you to write it?

  A lot of things went into this story, but the main thing was reading a news article about transgender teens using online games to explore gender identity. At the time, I’d recently written a story in which a man takes on a female identity online for practical purposes so he could post things he perceived as “girly” without attracting attention. But it hadn’t occurred to me that an online gender swap could be such a powerful tool of self-discovery. So I wanted to explore that.

  There was also an article I read, around the same time, about a transwoman who was fatally beaten by a stranger who found out she was transgender. And that’s something that happens far too often. I’ve written stories that explore gender identity before, but none that look quite so hard into the brutality and the hostility with which society sometimes treats people when they don’t fit the expected gender roles.