Nightmare Magazine Issue 4

by Matt Williamson

  © 2007 by Lucius Shepard.

  Originally published in Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, raised in Daytona Beach, Florida, Lucius Shepard has won the Hugo, Nebula, Word Fantasy, the Shirley Jackson, the Sturgeon, et al for his fiction. He has lived all over the world but currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Forthcoming are The Dragon Griaule and a novella collection, Five Autobiographies.

  The H Word: Choosing Gruesome Subjects

  John Langan

  That I write horror fiction is not something my wife has ever questioned. Nor has either of my sons asked me to explain the field in which I work. It was my mother who asked me about my fiction, though she did so only recently. We were at a dinner party with another horror writer, and as the plates for the main course were being cleared, my mom turned to him and asked where he derived his inspiration from. As he started to reply, I noticed her eyes dart to me, and widen slightly with alarm as she realized that she had put to him a question she’d never asked me. (She’s a good mom, conscientious about that kind of thing.) So once my friend was done giving his answer, she turned to me and repeated her question. I mumbled a response which I can’t really remember, but which I was aware was neither interesting nor all that accurate. My mom didn’t hold it against me, and soon we were eating the dessert she’d provided.

  It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked, “Why do you write that stuff?” It’s typically been voiced by those who are friendly to me but not particularly close: colleagues at the school where I teach; the parents of my younger son’s classmates; the people who stop to talk to me at bookstores or libraries or conventions, when I’m signing books or after I’ve finished giving a reading or sitting on a panel. After years of hearing this, I still don’t have a good answer.

  Of course, who says you need one? As a friend of mine with whom I’ve discussed the matter says, “What does it matter why you write it? If people like to read it, shouldn’t that be what matters?” Perhaps it should. I can’t help seeing the question, though, as the other half of one that seems to be floated online on a fairly regular basis, namely, a concern for the nature (and purpose) or horror fiction. (Recently, Richard Gavin undertook to address this question on the blog The Teeming Brain [tinyurl.com/gavin-horror].) If we’re interested in what horror fiction does, then it makes a certain amount of sense that we would be interested in where it comes from.

  In thinking about this question, I went to my bookshelf, and found that, as usual, Stephen King had been there first. In the foreword to his 1978 collection, Night Shift, he writes about the question that he, as a writer of horror fiction, is asked most frequently: “Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?” He answers this question with one of his own: “Why do you assume that I have a choice?” As he sees it, writing is a kind of obsessive behavior, and obsessions are, by their very nature, beyond our control. King writes about gruesome subjects because they are what he writes about—or, it might be more accurate to say, what he can write about—or, even, what he must write about if he is going to write.

  There is something to King’s response. The fictions a writer produces are not necessarily those he or she most likes to read. (I think of Philip Pullman, who, despite his considerable success writing fantasy, confessed himself a frustrated realist.) One of the tasks to which aspiring writers set themselves is discovering what kinds of fiction they can write. While there’s no obligation to become a fantasist if you truly don’t want to write fantasy, in writing, as in most things, talent in a particular kind of fiction tends to encourage you to work in it. If the stories you produce in this genre find success, then you’re more likely to continue in it. It’s all very simple.

  Except that it’s not. The appeal to ability neatly sidesteps the further question that King’s answer raises, namely, that if your writing—your obsession—trends in this dark direction, why does it do so? What happened to you—what experiences set you on this path? To be fair, it’s a question we ask of anyone who pursues a career out of the (imagined) ordinary, whether it’s seeking elected office, or practicing medicine, or embracing a religious calling. I think our curiosity is aroused by career paths that are not solely about earning money, but that seem to involve other goals. (After all, when was the last time that I wondered about my friends who’ve chosen careers in the corporate world? Rightly or wrongly, I assume they’ve made their decisions based on what promises to give them the biggest paycheck.) Certainly, we’re fascinated by artists of all stripes. For the artist in question, however, there’s often more than a little anxiety attached to the question of why. This anxiety may attach more strongly to those who work in forms or modes that are outside the main currents of their art (a group in which I would include the writers of horror fiction). As Ramsey Campbell put the matter, it’s a short step from, “Ah, so that’s what you’re writing about,” to, “Ah, so that’s all you’re writing about.”

  Horror writers are not unique in this regard. As his life unwound, F. Scott Fitzgerald refused any therapeutic interventions, fearing that tracing the wellsprings of his creativity would poison them. Rainer Maria Rilke was fascinated by the possibilities suggested by Freud’s view of the psyche, but similarly leery of their effects on his creativity. Of course, Fitzgerald’s later career did not bear out the promise of its earlier stage; while Rilke’s acquaintance with psychoanalysis led to some of the most important moments in his Duino Elegies. Closer to home, as it were, Peter Straub’s engagement with psychological analysis bore fruit in the Blue Rose novels and stories. I find Rilke and Straub’s examples of interest because they demonstrate that, far from hindering a writer’s work, an investigation of the creative impulses fueling it may open the door to new work.

  If there is a danger to such an endeavor, it lies in its potential to oversimplify matters. Freud coined the term overdetermination to describe the excess of motivations that attach to our actions. Any one of these causes might offer sufficient explanation—it’s all we would ask from a work of fiction—yet our psyches are profligate, serving up reason after reason. The temptation to such reductionism is one that bedevils anyone studying the biography of a writer, especially when a compelling incident presents itself. Lovecraft’s father went insane from tertiary syphilis and had to be institutionalized when Lovecraft was three? There you go. Stephen King’s father abandoned his family when King was two? Bingo. Peter Straub was struck and almost killed by a car when he was seven? Case closed. Yet there is more to the lives of each of these men than these details, important though they undoubtedly were to their development. And if we can recognize that there is more to the lives of others, how much more must there be to our own experiences?

  I’m trying to walk a fine line, here, arguing for investigating the sources of our creativity while urging us not to place too much emphasis on any single cause. Those specific incidents do have their uses. They can serve as lenses, bringing aspects of a writer’s work into focus. The figure of the mad, absent father-figure recurs in various guises in Lovecraft’s work, from “The Rats in the Walls” to “The Call of Cthulhu” to “The Shadow Out of Time.” There are abandoned children literal and metaphorical in Stephen King’s work ranging from Carrie through It to Hearts in Atlantis. Trauma and accident stalk Peter Straub’s characters, from Julia to Koko to A Dark Matter. It’s when those lenses lock into place, preventing us from seeing any more in the writer’s work, that they become a hindrance.

  I have to confess, I’ve come to the end of this brief essay without a clear sense of what answer I might give the next time someone asks me what it was about my life that inclined me to write horror. I think about my father’s early and unexpected death when I was twenty-three; I think about the pair of heart attacks that almost killed him when I was thirteen. I think about the surgery I had on my right eye when I was two-and-a-half, the result of a speck of metal that became lodged in my cornea and had to
be drilled out. I remember standing in the ICU room beside my father’s quiet body; I remember sitting up with a family friend, waiting for news from the hospital. I remember (barely) standing in a crib in the dark, crying, my right eye patched, my arms restrained in splints to keep me from tearing the patch off. Any of these memories feels as if it might be the force that drives the black ink across the page. Each of them feels as if it might show me something new about the stories, the novel, I’ve written. Together, they’re a start.

  We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.

  John Langan’s latest collection of stories, Technicolor and Other Revelations, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press. He is the author of a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009), and a collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). His short fiction has appeared in several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including Wastelands, The Living Dead, and By Blood We Live. He’s also published stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in other anthologies including Ellen Datlow’s Poe, Supernatural Noir, and Blood and Other Cravings, and Jack Dann and Nick Gevers’ Ghosts by Gaslight. With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited the anthology, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). He teaches courses in creative writing and gothic fiction at SUNY New Paltz, and lives in upstate New York with his family.

  Artist Gallery: Chelsea Knight

  Artist Showcase: Chelsea Knight

  Julia Sevin

  Chelsea Knight, the Southern California-based artist behind Sparkbearer Photography, has crafted a pure style at a prodigious age. Barely in her senior year at a private university, working on an English degree and minoring in photography, she has plans to pursue a career as a photographer. She uses traditional film and digital cameras to create her images, focusing on creative portraits. Chelsea’s work can be found online at sparkbearer.daportfolio.com.

  Tell us a little about yourself as an artist. How did you get your start in photography?

  As an artist, I’ve grown quite a bit these past few years. I used to draw when I was younger and I wrote poetry as well. I discovered photography when I was around fourteen. I used a throw-away camera first and discovered that my mother had a very simple digital camera. From then on I saved my money to purchase my own Canon. My dad gave me his old Canon F-1 film camera and, ever since, photography has grown into my primary artistic passion. I do still love writing, but photography was hiding there all along, I suppose. It always feels like playtime while still getting work done.

  Which artists inspire you and contributed to the development of your style?

  Oh, so many! I’ll list a few in no particular order: Julia Margaret Cameron, Brooke Shaden, Marie Hochhaus, Tim Walker, Małgorzata Maj, Alphonse Mucha, Jenessa Renae Parrish, Michael Hussar (his studio is in a city close by me and I’m dying to meet him!) . . . to name a few.

  Your portfolio is disorienting. “Cognitive dissonance” is almost not a strong enough phrase. You pull off nature-glam portraits AND haunting/violent photographic vignettes, all while maintaining the same recognizable aesthetic of fascination with the human face, captured at an intimate proximity, expressed via cool, hazy pastels, often punctuated with spots or splashes of glossy, oversaturated color. Why is there so little distinction in style between the two tones?

  You’ll always hear someone say, “I saw an image and just knew it was by you before I saw the name!” After a while you develop a style and pattern to your post-production process (and image taking style as well). Pale and pastel are what I feel looks the best. This is actually an issue for me! I’m so afraid to do head shots because it’s not in my comfort zone. I have to make the skin look alive and vibrant and real, nothing crazy, no outrageous edits. I try to keep all my images within the realm of what I think looks good and pleases me visually. Also, I like to shock people more and more these days. I do get slightly worried when they mention how violent or bloody an image is, but that’s the point! I want to surprise and shock people, make them comfortable with a nice sweet portrait of a pretty girl then shake them up with something ugly and terrifying. I want people to feel like I do when I see something beautiful; where is its counterpart, where is the ugly side to it? And people think I’m a sweet, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. I love it when they’re so shocked to see my work. They look at me confused and just don’t understand. I’ve even made some people wary, unfortunately.

  Was the grotesque an element of your work from the start?

  I want to say yes, but I was too afraid in the beginning to show it. Just in the past few years I’ve been okay with the blood and gore. I’m recovering from a four-year long eczema breakout. It was severe enough to make me quit my job and school. I nearly became a hermit. My skin changed and became ugly and something I wasn’t familiar with. I began to question what was beautiful and why we value beauty so much. I didn’t feel beautiful for a long time so I started to explore darker, uglier things. Besides . . . pretty, perfect portraits get so boring sometimes. And I’m quite attracted to sickly-pale, ill characters in movies. I couldn’t explain why, I guess it’s just what I gravitate towards. Strange things are what I connect to most. Strange feels normal and right for me, and my style.

  Why do you create? And why create this sort of work?

  I create because if I don’t, I can’t function. Every hour of everyday I’m thinking of images and movie scenes and story scenarios, little conversations between characters, specific moments, etc. It’s so persistent that I end up spending hours on it. I’m so busy browsing for inspiration or brain storming. I find photography is easier than writing sometimes, too. Instead of trying to craft together a paragraph to describe a scene, I can take a photograph. I can actually see it right there. I’m fascinated with bringing these things to life with a tangible, visible image. And photography is fairly new in history so I’m more excited to make a mark there, if I can. The history of the written word and all the genius authors we have overwhelms me. So I write poetry when I can and spend most of my time with photography. But I do envy those that can write something so perfect that its meaning is completely understood by millions of readers through time.

  What has been your greatest challenge in achieving these photos? I have to say, I don’t envy you shooting underwater.

  Shooting underwater is actually really fun! And easy, most of the time. My greatest challenge is really my own mind. Some days I have the greatest idea, and then in the execution stage . . . it falls apart. Other days I open a random image, experiment, and suddenly create a fantastic manipulation that I never expected. It all depends on how well I can grab and hold on to what my mind says, and make it come out just as I see it there. I suppose writers face the same issue, right? Writing something that makes sense, but conveys so much emotion at the same time.

  Do you draw ideas from fiction? If so, which authors do you find inspiring?

  Lately I’ve been reading a lot of poetry in my university courses. Robert Frost inspires me not only with photography, but with my own poetry as well. My other favorite photo-inspiration poets have been Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, T.S. Eliot, Edwin Robinson, and many others. I’m also really fond of Diana Wynne Jones, and, of course, Tolkien. I’m really fantasy/fiction geared in my love of literature.

  What’s your dream photography project?

  I know some people cringe when I mention her, but it would be my ultimate dream to have a portrait session with Lady Gaga. Most of the time, she is my creative muse. Every day she lives her artistic vision and I couldn’t ask for more in a person that I would want to photograph. She isn’t afraid of the ugly, dark side of things, and I love that about her. Being famous doesn’t change her creative structure. She knows that if you betray your creativity, it will eventually leave you.

  Besides a
face to photograph, it would be wonderful to have my own darkroom with all the processing equipment and everything I need for toning and cyanotypes. I’d never leave it. I have so many project ideas involving traditional methods, but I have to wait until I graduate to start exploring those paths. So, for now, I remain hopeful that Gaga will eventually notice me, and in the meantime, I’ll make plans for my own future darkroom setup.

  Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign.

  Interview: Ellen Datlow

  E.C. Myers

  Ellen Datlow is an editor of science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories whose work has been recognized with every major award in the field, including the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Locus Award. In the past three decades, she has edited influential genre magazines such as OMNI, Twilight Zone, and Sci Fiction. She co-edited The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies with Terri Windling from 1988 to 2002, and from 2004 to 2008 with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant; she currently edits Best Horror of the Year. Ellen has also edited or co-edited dozens of original and reprint anthologies, most notably Alien Sex (1990), Snow White, Blood Red (1993, with Terri Windling), The Dark: New Ghost Stories (2003), The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (2004, with Terri Windling), Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (2007), Lovecraft Unbound (2009), Poe: New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (2009), and Haunted Legends (2010, with Nick Mamatas). Her latest anthology, co-edited with Terri Windling, is After: Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Tales (2012).