It’s rare—in most publishing you don’t get that kick. In science fiction, fantasy, and horror, editors get more credit than in other fields. In mainstream, how many short story editors are readers aware of? Do they know their names or anything about them? The field of fantastic literature has had many high profile editors. It’s a validation of what you’re doing even if sometimes it seems as if it’s yes, a popularity contest, blah blah blah . . . If I get the award. But if my authors get the award for their stories, that’s really cool. Or even just get nominated or just get attention.
It used to always frustrate me at OMNI and at Sci Fiction when a story that I loved loved loved didn’t get the attention I thought it deserved. Of course there are stories I love that do get attention. But over the years a handful of stories became my favorites, and those are the ones I’ve reprinted over and over in various venues—so an astute reader could figure out my favorites by checking out all the stories I’ve reprinted over the years for different anthologies or magazines I’ve worked at. I feel like I’m a pusher: My job is to get people to like what I like. To persuade them that what I’m showing them is really great and they should read it.
What trends are you seeing in horror short fiction today?
It’s hard to say. The zombies still continue. Each year I hope the zombies go away, but no, they haven’t gone away. They’re mutating and sometimes they’re quite interesting. I can never catch a trend, I can only say this seems to have been a trend last year. I’ve been told for the past three years that mermaids are the next trend. I’m sorry, mermaids have not caught on as a trend. Despite the fact that there’s a “mermaid” magazine, I don’t see them trending.
Do you enjoy horror in other media, like television or film? What are some of your favorites?
I don’t like it on film. Most films I can’t stand. Most of what I see advertised, I have no interest in: the Saw stuff and the Hostel stuff. It just sounds awful. I still haven’t seen Prometheus. I’m going to rent it. I’ve heard how bad it is, but I don’t care, I want to see it.
I like some horror movies but I don’t go out of my way to see them. I’m not sure why. I think I prefer reading horror. I think the last one I remember, that I hated, was Drag Me to Hell. What a piece of garbage! That wasn’t the last one I saw but that’s the last one I remember vividly because I thought it was so bad. Okay, I’ll force myself to name a few I like: (nothing very recent): Pan’s Labyrinth, Paranormal Activity, Don’t Look Now, Alien, The Thing (Carpenter’s), The Blair Witch Project, The Haunting (original), Session 9.
What’s next for you?
Hauntings, a reprint anthology for Tachyon is coming out in March. It’s a mixture of ghost stories, haunted houses, and other types of hauntings. And it’s got a great cover. I was really pleased that I was able to reprint a terrific story by Kelly Link that was only recently published: “Two Houses.” “Delta Sly Honey” by Lucius Shepard. Two stories called “Hunger,” one by Dale Bailey and one by Peter Straub. “Hunger: A Confession” and then “Hunger: An Introduction.” Stories by Connie Willis, Stephen Gallagher, Michael Marshall Smith, Richard Bowes, James Blaylock, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlín Kiernan, David Morrell. I used one by Jeffrey Ford, also Gemma Files. And Jonathan Carroll.
Then there’s Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, all original adult stories that are gaslight fantasy. It’s got a tiny bit of steampunk in it. Terri and I edited it for Tor and that’s also coming out in March.
I’m editing a Clarion West Thirtieth Anniversary anthology that’s coming out from Hydra House, which is Tod McCoy’s publishing house. He was a 2010 graduate. And the Best Horror of course, which is my ball and chain.
I just signed a contract with Tachyon for Lovecraft’s Monsters, which is going to be another Lovecraftian anthology of reprints, with hopefully each story using at least one of Lovecraft’s creatures in it. The “monster” doesn’t have to be the focal point, but it must be at least a part of the story. And again the challenge will be finding stories that haven’t been overused. I think someone will do illustrations of each creature.
Oh, and the Kickstarter anthology I mentioned earlier. Fearful Symmetries, will be about 125,000 words. I have commitments from Laird Barron, Dale Bailey, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, Jeffrey Ford, Michael Marshall Smith, John Langan, Kaaron Warren, Robert Shearman, Helen Marshall, Terry Dowling, Sarah Pinborough, Joe Lansdale, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Bill Willingham, Doug Clegg, Nathan Ballingrud, and Garth Nix. And maybe Kim Newman. Most of those people will be in the book, and we’re leaving three open slots; I am not reading the unsolicited stories but Sandra and Brett of Chizine will be passing on the good stuff to me. If we receive the funding, the book will be out in 2014.
Has anything supernatural or horrific ever happened to you?
Supernatural . . . maybe. I don’t know. But I was staying with a bunch of friends in a house where one friend was house-sitting on a lake on Long Island, and we were hanging out on the first floor, in the living room, just sitting around. Everyone but me went out for a walk and while they were gone I heard footsteps above and assumed it was someone who had stayed behind. But it turned out that no one else had stayed behind.
That was the extent of it. It was kind of creepy going to bed that night. We all slept on the floors upstairs, it was a big house and totally unfurnished, and we heard music. Now of course, this was a lake, God knows where the music came from. It could have been from any of the houses along the lake I guess, but it was very creepy. And that’s the most supernatural thing that ever happened, if it was supernatural.
I love reading about this stuff, but I don’t really believe in it. But that doesn’t matter because a good story forces you to suspend your disbelief. I think supernatural fiction is really hard to sustain for a whole novel. The short story length is usually more effective, because unless one actually does believe in the supernatural, it’s difficult for the writer to not fumble and accidentally push the reader out of the story for a whole novel.
E. C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts. He is a graduate of the 2005 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a member of the writing group Altered Fluid. His short fiction has appeared in various publications, including Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, and Shimmer, and his first novel, Fair Coin, is available now from Pyr. He also blogs regularly about Star Trek: The Next Generation at theviewscreen.com and at his website, ecmyers.net. When he isn’t working, writing, or editing, he plays video games, watches films and TV, sleeps as little as possible, and spends too much time on the internet. Follow him on Twitter @ecmyers.
Author Spotlight: Matt Williamson
Lisa Nohealani Morton
Can you tell us a little bit about the background of this story and how you came to write it?
Sure. I wrote an early draft of this story five or six years ago. But it wasn’t working—or I couldn’t figure out what it was about—so I abandoned it, and then forgot about it. When I rediscovered it, enough time had passed that the story felt new to me. I liked its energy and its dark humor, so I came back to it and finally finished it.
I don’t remember exactly what sparked the story to begin with, but at the time, I was writing a lot of stories with amoral protagonists, or set in amoral universes, and “On Murder Island” was a part of that group. I had a story in Portland Review and one in Cimarron Review that overlap with this one in a number of ways—they all center on characters who might be described as sadistic hedonists, people who lack the capacity for empathy or shame. And I had another story, originally in Barrelhouse and later reprinted in Brave New Worlds, built around a character—a violent person, but not a sadist or hedonist—who’s made a kind of life-project of numbing himself to the suffering of others.
When I returned to “On Murder Island” after that long break, I noticed some things that hadn’t occurred to me consciously the first time I’d worked on the story. One big one is the way tha
t the story seems inspired by video games. “The Mainland” is blurry; you don’t feel too confident that there’s actually a civilization out there, or that anything at all exists apart from the island. And Murder Island itself is implausible, full of features that don’t make sense in combination. Peter and Toby are clearly missing something—they don’t feel fully human—and their victims resemble non-player-characters from a 1990s computer game. (The Weatherman, for instance, doesn’t run away when Toby and Peter try to kill him. The Parachutist drifts into the story—from offscreen, you might say—at just the right moment, as if to prompt the idle player-characters into action.)
Toby has “memories,” but you don’t get the impression that he really has a past, or that anything he does is psychologically motivated. The main thing he wants is to avoid boredom, and the surest way out of boredom is through violence.
The story reads, at times, like something for children, but it’s unwholesome even apart from its violence—and that confusion of tone and subject matter seems video-gamey to me. The strange pairing of Toby and Peter mirrors the unlikely friendships you might find in the world of an online shooter—a sealed-off playground, very conspicuously without girls and women, where people like Toby and Peter could conceivably meet and become partners. And the island—like certain online spaces (game spaces, but also comment boards like the ones on Youtube)—seems like a place where angry thirteen-year-old boys create all of the social and moral norms. So the story as a whole is like a weird dream someone might have after playing Grand Theft Auto while listening to an audiobook of Peter Pan on loop for twenty hours.
When I read “On Murder Island,” I found myself very curious about what’s going on in the world outside Murder Island. Toby doesn’t seem like the most reliable narrator ever (nor possibly the best informed). How much of what he believes about the Mainland (or the island, for that matter) is true?
Ha—right: Toby’s not just uninformed and unreliable; he’s also incurious. He never ponders any of the mysteries the reader instantly notices, and he seems incapable of learning, reflecting, or imagining the future—even the very near future. He kills his best friend, and then he’s disappointed that he doesn’t have someone to play with.
Often when a story has a narrator whose grasp on reality is as shaky as Toby’s, it ends up heavily ironic; the reader perceives a lot of what the narrator misses, and the story ends up being about the narrator’s self-delusion. It congratulates the reader for being smarter and more sensitive than the narrator. In this case, though, Toby’s so oblivious that we can’t see around him well enough to make independent judgments about what’s happening.
On the question of what’s really happening on and beyond the island, though, I’d rather not say much more. I’d be more interested in hearing readers tell me what they think the island and the mainland are.
I like creepy stories as much as the next person, but I really enjoy the way that “On Murder Island” blends a certain amount of humor or absurdity with a horrifying situation—it’s an uncommon approach in the genre. Why do you think that is?
Hmm . . . I don’t know! I think that horror and comedy are two of the toughest things to pull off in fiction. But I should maybe make a distinction between “creepy” and “clever” on the one hand, and “scary” and “funny” on the other. It’s not that hard to be creepy or clever—that just has to do with mood, tone, and style, and other things that a competent writer can control. But actually frightening a reader, or making the reader laugh out loud, is hard. A story has to be a little bit inspired to pull that off, and it has to do something surprising.
There are plenty of “horror stories” and “comedic novels” that I love in spite of the fact that they’re never actually scary or funny. It’s pretty rare for me to encounter something like The Shining, which is actually capable of frightening me, or Lucky Jim, which is so funny it made me cry the first time I read it. (The hangover scene!) So trying to be genuinely scary and funny in the same story almost seems like an unreasonable goal to set for yourself. (Movies seem to have an easier time with this. Drag Me to Hell, for instance, is one of the funniest and scariest movies of the last few years.)
My guess is that “On Murder Island” probably won’t scare people all that much. The situation and the characters are just too strange . . . and the whimsicality of Toby and Peter undercuts their menace; there’s nobody here for a reader to fear, or fear for. I was more interested, with this one, in making the reader laugh uncomfortably.
What are you working on now?
A couple of long stories—and issues two and three of Unstuck, the literary journal that I edit.
Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton.
Author Spotlight: Lisa Tuttle
Erika Holt
Can you tell us how “Need” came to be? Where do you typically draw your inspiration from?
This is a tough one—I wrote “Need” thirty-three years ago, so not only the original inspiration but the details of the story itself are pretty fuzzy by now. I do know that I wrote it in October 1979, when I was living in Austin, Texas, and that I was drawing on memories of a cemetery in Syracuse, New York, for the setting. I went to Syracuse University, and there was a large cemetery located almost immediately behind my dormitory. It was a nice place to go and walk. Besides the location, I suppose I was also thinking back to my college years and finding inspiration from the various complicated emotional involvements of those years. Although, unlike Corey, I was not engaged to be married, I had left a boyfriend behind in Texas, and we wrote many long letters to each other, and planned to be faithful and love each other forever—until one day in late October or early November of my freshman year, I received his letter saying maybe we should date other people . . .
All of that was a good many years in the past when I wrote the story about a lonely college girl. My intention in writing it was to make it into one of the Shadows anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant—I had been trying (and failing) for several years (although Charlie and I both felt I was a natural for this “quiet horror” series, somehow I kept missing) and with “Need” I finally managed to hit the mark. It was published in Shadows 4 in 1981.
I often draw on experiences from my own life for inspiration, but as a writer of fiction I am not bound to stick to things that really happened. Dreams, daydreams, music, art, books, other people’s lives—these things and more give me ideas for what to write.
Corey seems to derive much of her identity from the will of others—whether that of her parents or her fiancé—and struggles to assert herself. Are these themes and issues important to you in your work?
Hmmm, I’m not sure. It is an issue in this story, certainly (as the title suggests, I was thinking about “neediness” in relationships), but in other works? Perhaps that was something I struggled with much more in my late teens and early twenties; not so much as I became older and more independent. Corey’s situation and her view of life seem old-fashioned now, perhaps. (Again, I must point out it was written a long time ago!)
Harold suffers from a similar lack of self esteem. For Corey, he exists only as a “listening presence” to keep her from being alone, and he seems to think of himself in the same way. Is it possible for two such people to truly connect? Would things have turned out differently even if she’d met him as agreed?
Well, no—they don’t have a real relationship—each one is living in a sort of self-absorbed fantasy and doesn’t properly see or understand the other. Harold invests Corey with the power to make him happy—to save his life—while she prefers to ignore his feelings for her so that she can use him to keep her company while she o
bsesses about Philip—or, rather, about the imaginary perfect lover she wants to believe he could be—and meanwhile (I suggest) they are both blind to the fact that all this powerful but misdirected emotion is building up into an incredibly destructive force.
What is it about cemeteries that is so fascinating? It’s interesting that for both characters, it’s a place of peace and refuge.
I don’t know, but they do have a powerful allure. Cities of the dead. Gardens of rest. Many people feel that, although the Victorian tradition of spending a whole day out with the family visiting a cemetery is no longer popular.
What are you working on now?
Trying to finish a novel I seem to have been working on forever. Or way too long, anyway! It’s called Magic Pictures, and has three timelines running through it, set in 1913-1914, the mid-1980s, and the present day. There is a fantasy element, but I am starting to worry—as I near the end—that it is hard to classify, and I will find myself once again “falling between genres” when I try to sell it.
Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens.
Author Spotlight: Tamsyn Muir
Seamus Bayne
“Chew” is a revenant’s tale focused on depredations committed by soldiers in post-war, occupied Germany. What drew you to that time and setting for this story?
Nightmare Magazine Issue 4 Page 9
