by Molly Tanzer
For me they go together very naturally indeed, probably because I’m the kind of person who is given to laughing inappropriately when everyone else is being really serious. That tends to bleed into my work, even—perhaps especially—my Lovecraftiana. It’s weird, I think my favorite non-Lovecraft Lovecraftian story is Charles Stross’ “A Colder War,” which is straight-up cosmic horror and not at all funny, or even amusing. But the one time I tried to write a serious Lovecraftian story it was a total disaster.
Maybe it’s because I came late to Lovecraft, and my introduction began with the Stuart Gordon films Re-Animator and From Beyond. I mean, before I’d even read a single story Lovecraft himself had written I’d seen Barbara Crampton moaning in BDSM gear while Jeffrey Combs turns on that weird Resonator, stimulating her pituitary gland or whatever. And then he eats brains out of a jar. Haha! Which I think is supposed to be funny . . . maybe? Regardless, it was formative for me.
Were I to wax prosy about this subject I would say that since what people find humorous is entirely subjective—even more subjective than what people find horrifying, in a lot of ways—the humor/horror author runs an even greater risk of his or her work falling flat. But it’s a risk I’m willing to take because it’s what I love, and I’m extremely grateful so many people have found that “The Infernal History” hits that sweet spot.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a few projects—a novella about some patients in a mental institution in Portland, OR, a short story about mummies, and some other things of a more novel-ish nature. Always a few irons in the fire!
What’s the scariest nightmare you’ve ever had?
Haha, I’m really not sure! I think I’ll cheat and instead tell the tale of how one of my nightmares scared my husband badly.
I don’t remember the details of the dream, just that it was one of those nightmares that are super-duper-realistic. I was in my own bed, in my bedroom, and there was some scary shadowy man looming in the doorway, staring at me. I guess I started saying out loud, “there’s someone in the room, oh god there’s someone in the room with us, he’s right there” whilst still dreaming/asleep, which of course woke up my husband. He shook me awake and it was fine, but to hear him tell it, there were a few moments where he was lying there with his eyes closed, hoping I was dreaming, but not sure because I was being really quiet and intense about it. I’m not sure who was more relieved that there wasn’t actually someone in the room with us!
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: David Tallerman
Seamus Bayne
What research did you do to write “The Sign in the Moonlight”?
I read a little about Kanchenjunga, its history, and the early attempts to climb it. My main source, though, was Aleister Crowley’s diaries; they were just an amazing resource, and they’re all available on the internet, I couldn’t believe my luck. Really, the whole story went like that. I’ve never written anything where the pieces came together so easily. I began with the idea of a horror story set during a mountaineering expedition and all the detail, Kanchenjunga, its five peaks, Crowley, all of that came out of the research. I just kept discovering these weird facts and coincidences and everything slotted into place. It felt like I’d stumbled onto a story that wanted to be told, which has never happened before or since.
This has the classic feel of pulp horror. Are there authors in that style who have influenced your writing or who you admire?
Absolutely, I’m a big fan of classic pulp horror. Lovecraft was one of my early shaping influences as a writer, and I went on to read most of the authors that he’d drawn from and some of those he’d gone on to inspire. Over the years I’ve written quite a few stories that came from that tradition—which, fingers crossed, will be coming out together in a collection next year.
I think “Sign in the Moonlight” possibly comes more from a pre-Lovecraftian place, though; to me, there’s a lot of Chambers and Machen creeping in there. Maybe even more so, it draws from early pulp fantasy, which I love equally as much, and which often seem to feature mountaineering heavily. There’s a fantastic Fritz Leiber, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, for example, called “Stardock,” that revolves almost entirely around them climbing a more or less un-climbable mountainside.
Why did you choose not to mention the protagonist’s name?
I guess that sometimes you want a protagonist that the reader can get involved with, get to know and think of as a character in their own right, but sometimes you just want someone whose head the reader can get inside easily and experience the story through. When the narrator is something of a blank slate, there’s perhaps more scope to be absorbed in what they’re going through and feeling. For horror especially, I think that that approach can be quite effective.
In this instance, I had a more specific motive too: I didn’t want to out and out contradict any known historical facts more than I had to. If I gave the narrator a name then we’d know for a fact that there was no such mountaineer; that such a person never existed. Even if I’d somehow managed to find a real person who’d disappeared around that time, it would still have meant sacrificing the ambiguity of the ending. This way, it feels to me that the story sits in the cracks of the known history of Kanchenjunga rather than going against it.
This tale is open ended. Have you ever written a continuation? If not, do you plan to?
No, I’m happy with where “Sign” ends. Both as a reader and a writer, I like open endings; I like to have the option of going away and thinking about what might happen next, without necessarily having it written out for me. But while I doubt I’d ever write a direct sequel, I might return to Crowley one of these days. There’s so much fascinating scope there.
Can you tell us about the comic project you’re developing or anything else that you’re working on currently?
Endangered Weapon B is something I’ve been developing for a long, long time . . . an absurdist, sort-of-steampunk, comedy adventure series that draws on everything from King Solomon’s Mines to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Umberto Eco (and that’s just in the first four pages). Issue one will premier this Free Comic Book Day—May fourth—and the first trade follows soon after, in July. Then I’ve got the third of my Easie Damasco novel series, Prince Thief, coming out from Angry Robot in September. I’m putting the finishing touches on both of those right now, while starting to make some concrete plans for my upcoming projects: a novella, and a couple more novels and graphic novels.
Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the ’90s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net.
Author Spotlight: Livia Llewellyn
Erika Holt
How did “Jetsam” come to be?
The first part of the story came to me in early 1999, when I was working at Tor, in the Flatiron Building. From the window of my little work area, I could look across the street and see this massive apartment building, all the windows and lights flicking on and off all day as people went about their lives. There was one window with curtains that moved back and forth behind the glass, which always struck me as odd, since the rest of the windows had flat shades and blinds that never moved. One rainy morning I wrote down a very brief description of that window and those curtains, and then I put it away and forgot about it. Six years later, after 9/11 and when I had started writing fiction in earnest, I found that description of the curtain at the windows in a stack of papers, and it all
came together—the building, the city after 9/11 and how very divided it seemed, how isolated lower Manhattan was from the rest of the city, those strange creeping movements at the window. All of those separate ideas and incidents, plus a healthy dose of a rediscovered love for Lovecraft’s mythos, turned into “Jetsam.”
In a recent interview for the Weird Fiction Review, you mention admiring Laird Barron’s work, saying, “he has the maddening habit of writing around the edges of cosmic horror, leaving out just enough of the story that it makes me want to tear apart the pages thread by thread, hoping I’ll eventually find out what that black void or terrible event was.” If I may say so, you do that very successfully in this story! What interests you in this approach?
That approach to fiction interests me because it’s the exact opposite of who I am and what I want to interact with anything artistic in general. Whether it’s fiction or movies or plays or dance, I’ve always wanted to know more—I want the backstory, all of it, all of the sordid and exciting and boring details of the characters, the world building, the mythology. I want the preface, the maps, the illustrations, the appendices, the books explaining the books. It’s just part of my psyche, from when I was little. I call it Tolkienism, for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who’s familiar with Tolkien’s meticulous and prodigious obsession with his own creation. And that kind of research was always beneficial to me as an actor, because I always had a director to help me pare away the excess and help me be a part of the performance, rather than above it or outside of it. Not putting everything out there allows the audience to fill in the gaps, it gives them permission to weep when you’re wounded, to feel triumph when you’ve conquered, to be a part of the performance in the spaces you’ve left for them to occupy and contribute to. But as a writer, you work alone, and there’s no one to tell you to get out of the way of your awesome, fancy ideas, and you forget that art is a conversation, not a command. So, you have to learn how to vet your output, how to edit the work before you send it off to an editor. You have to learn to be generous to the people who have yet to read your words, to embrace and trust restraint. It’s something I struggle with all the time, every single second that I write. So, not telling the whole story is something I admire in writers like Laird, and something I struggle and strive for every minute that I write.
“Jetsam” seems to be a post-apocalyptic tale told from the point of view of a transformed, marked, or somehow damaged woman rather than from the perspective of an unaffected or healthy survivor. Given her deficiencies of memory and understanding, was this a challenge? This also reverses the usual balance of sympathies, in that we as readers root for her rather than the exterminators (if that’s what they are). Was this intentional?
It was intentional, because “Jetsam” is to an extent very much my story of what happened to me after 9/11. What I discovered in the years immediately after the attack was that people who didn’t live in the NYC area had a completely different emotional and ideological view of what happened, and in their minds, their vision of the events trumped mine, even though I saw every single second of the towers falling, I felt the ashes of buildings and the dead smeared against my skin, I breathed them into my lungs. That afternoon of the eleventh, after the subways opened back up, I stood on an underground platform with a thousand ash-covered people, and no one spoke a single fucking word. A thousand people, and there were no words. We were all affected, we were all damaged. But there were times, during extremely heated conversations with West Coast friends and relatives, that I thought maybe I’d dreamed everything I’d seen and smelled and felt, because they had at some point decided that their 3000-mile-removed version of what happened was the real version, the “American” version, and that I was delusional and a psychopath and traitor and needed to shut up and go away. “Jetsam” is most definitely a response to how I saw people responding to and shaping and silencing my “version” of what happened, of how nothing in history is uncontested and that even at the genesis of events there are always conflicting accounts of what actually occurred—but understand that even “Jetsam” is itself an extremely sanitized and flawed story, a victim of the emotional terraforming that happens within us during truly horrifying, traumatizing times in life. I think there is a much uglier, more emotionally violent and starker version of it somewhere inside me. I just haven’t found the means for digging it out of me yet.
Do you plan on writing any novels in future, or does the shorter form hold the most appeal for you?
Certain lengths don’t have any particular pull over me than others—somewhere in the start of every project, I realize that the idea or plot I’m working with might lend itself better to a story than a novella, or vice-versa. Every year or so I come up with an idea for a novel, but I haven’t had much success in writing one that’s—to be blisteringly honest—any good. And I’ve come to a point in my life where I view writing and selling a novel as some kind of horrific task that I have to slog through in order to get to some imaginary “higher level” of, I don’t know, artistic and financial success, fame, respect—a level that of course isn’t guaranteed no matter what I write. And when something you love turns into a form of self-punishment, then it’s time to stop. So the answer is, I currently have no plans to write a novel. Maybe someday I’ll find myself attempting one again, but they’ll never officially be on my writing to-do list. I really just want to get on with my life, and if it’s novel-less, that’s fine with me.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing up a few short stories for various markets—after that, I’ll start working on the first of five novellas that should all be finished by the end of this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell them to a publisher as my next collection. If not, then, um, I’m going to have five horror novellas for sale in 2014, if anyone’s interested . . .
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: Jeff VanderMeer
E.C. Myers
The cook’s assistant quotes a line from an unnamed poem, “No other breather . . .” According to my rigorous internet research, the word “breather” apparently originated with Shakespeare, and was used in “Sonnet 81” as well as in his play As You Like It (in which Orlando says, “I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults.”). Did the title come to you early with this story, or did you find it only after writing it? Can you tell us a little about what inspired and shaped the story?
To be honest, I don’t remember when I first saw that quote or the one from the sonnet, “When all the breathers of this world are dead; You still shall live,” but there seemed something mysterious about it and it stuck in my head, probably without much of the original context or perhaps with more of it than I realized. The story came to me in the form of the first paragraph, and then the realization that of course it would be one of those rare short stories from multiple points of view. So then it was just a matter of following the threads of that idea, combined with the thought that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. And that sometimes after something has gone terribly wrong, it’s not so easy as picking up the pieces and starting over . . . not if something irrevocable has occurred.
Fiction of “the weird” like this often experiments with style and format, departing from what most consider traditional narrative in order to evoke a certain mood and elicit an emotional response from readers. This piece links story fragments from multiple viewpoints, just as the doctor’s mirror shards reflect fractured images. Did you write with that particular structure and theme in mind from the start, or did it evolve in the telling?
I think what
fiction of the weird does first and foremost is commit to the reality and truth of its premise. Which is to say, a weird tale doesn’t wink at you and it doesn’t try to tell you that what you’re reading isn’t real. The story isn’t all that experimental; it’s just that there’s not much experimentation done in genre fiction in terms of structure. A binturong isn’t necessarily strange in a certain part of the world, but if you encountered it walking down the street in Florida you’d probably do a double take. It’s still a mammal, though. I also don’t ever think, “Let me write a story with a structure like a pretzel.” But a pretzel is tasty.
To me, this story conveys a sense of inevitability as the characters struggle to understand or escape the unfolding horrors. I wonder if the underlying message is that searching for an underlying message and trying to find meaning in it all is simply beside the point. What did you hope readers would take from it?
I think there are stories that are meant to hold your attention and surprise you during a first read, and then to reveal other things on a second or third read.
You’ve mentioned that you don’t like to fetishize the act of writing; that you prefer to vary your routine. That said, how and where did you write this story? Do your surroundings influence the outcome at all?
The surroundings don’t affect the telling of the story, but I wrote it in the Black Dog Café in Tallahassee, Florida, which is a place I frequently write in. I wrote it longhand like I write all of my stories and novels. I would say that writing longhand helps me get into the rhythm of a piece.
