Welcome back! Today’s interview is with the awesome John Linwood Grant! John is the editor at Occult Detective Quarterly, the webmaster for Greydogtales, and the author of numerous works of fiction, including his collection, The Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales.

Recently, John and I discussed his editing work, his inspiration for his site, Greydogtales, and how he put together his collection.

A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?

I normally try not to break ice, because I can’t swim, but if you must… it’s a story of two halves. When I was in my late twenties, I began a long process of constructing really complex novels, based on everything from Mayan mythology to medieval Islamic tolerance. This was not a great idea. I was the only one who understood what I was doing, and what I was doing did not bode well. Only one, out of the four or five novels I drafted, appeared worth pushing. And that one was deemed by a big UK publisher to be excellent but unmarketable. As in, the commissioning editor really liked it; the Marketing Department said No.

I didn’t have a lot of spare time, so I shelved most of that stuff and worked in ‘normal’ jobs for thirty years. Trying another novel seemed like too much hard work. Then someone persuaded me that short stories and novellas might be a more productive route. I sold the first story immediately, at the age of 58. Then a novella, ‘Study in Grey’, was taken up straight away, and almost every other short I wrote sold, in fact. Go figure, I believe people say.

My favourite authors? Too hard. The poetry of Edith Sitwell, the wry works of Jerome K Jerome. Saki. Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany; Daphne Du Maurier and C J Cherryh. I find Chinua Achebe’s books fascinating. David Sedaris, to be more up to date. I ought to spare contemporaries in the weird field, because there’s always an incestuous longing to cite authors who you like both as writers and as people. The trilogy of collections which I read more than once last year was composed of Bartlett, Padgett and Kiste (surely that should be ‘Kistett?), closely followed by a marvellous quartet of tales by J Malcolm Stewart. Purely because they offered things that resonated with me, not because there weren’t other fine works around. This year, who knows?

You are an editor at the ever-awesome Occult Detective Quarterly. How does your editing work differ from (or overlap with) your work as a writer?

I’m not a natural editor. I’m slow and compassionate. Editors should be crisp and savage. As a writer first, I go through agonies seeing what people wanted to express in their story, and how they missed the mark. I get submissions that I would rewrite entirely just to get over a genuinely original idea that someone’s come up with, and not quite got there. I should never be allowed to edit anything. Occasionally I get to commission and edit something wonderful, for ODQ or an anthology project, and that makes up for it. Sort of. Editing pays even worse than writing, generally, and ODQ is one of those projects that earns me precisely nothing.

The other curious aspect of being an editor is that you have to bring out the other writer. It’s tempting to see how you yourself might push a story up a notch, but it’s not your story. So you have to encourage them to up their game, without being an interfering ass-hole. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Did I tell you that I shouldn’t be an editor?

Your website, Grey Dog Tales, is a wonderful combination of book reviews, interviews, and posts about lurchers. What made you decide to start the site, and what has been the most enjoyable (or heck, even the least enjoyable) part of running it?

Greydogtales (yep, all one word, but no one ever bothers about it) is an utter nightmare which absorbs far too much time. It was pointed out to me when I Re-Emerged that I should have An Author Site. The name comes from our late grey lurcher, Jade, a rescue who was quite mad but we loved her deeply.

In practice, I got bored covering my own stuff in the first fortnight. So I decided to lose the plot and fill greydogtales with whatever occurred to me. Within a month I wrote the first ‘Lurchers for Beginners’, about the hounds themselves, which pretty much went viral. After that we spent a month on William Hope Hodgson, a major influence. And then we had some artists on, including the magnificent Sebastian Cabrol from Argentina, who became a friend and has contributed works of genius to Occult Detective Quarterly. So it turned out that it was more fun to feature other authors and artists, and do what we call signposting. If we see something cool, we signpost it. We regularly cover things like unusual late Victorian writers, folk horror and black SFF. Because they’re cool. We also try to notify people about interesting small press publications as they come up, and run the occasional opinion piece by others.

The most enjoyable part is writing long features now and then about mad subjects for no apparent reason. Like my three part piece on the true origins of the ghoul or ghul, going right back to Mesopotamian mythology, which turned out to be hugely popular. Closely followed by the fact that weird fiction/art people will give us awesome interviews, and we would have loads more of them if I had the time to follow up and get the damned things completed. The queue is scary. The least enjoyable part is that queue. We are so waaaay behind.

Your story, “The Horse Road,” which appeared in Lackington’s, was a striking and haunting tale. What was the inspiration for this particular piece?

Thanks. My usual approach is to conceive of characters who have lives and emotions outside of, and regardless of, my writing. Then I look at recording what might happen next, almost cinematographically. ‘The Horse Road’ is one of the results. It’s the pure core of a series I write called ‘Sandra’s First Pony’. Those stories are deliberately ludicrous blends of folk horror, Enid Blyton and H P Lovecraft. This one was different, totally serious, and is simply about a girl and her pony, gifted with mutual inter-dependence and accepting that fact. It’s partly inspired by the Yorkshire I know, the bleak moors and the potential threat of a liminal world.

On the other hand, it’s Mr Bubbles. I receive more comments on that slightly psychotic pony than I do on most of my characters, and maybe that’s because he’s a fixed point, when we have no idea where to place our trust. He is what we want, what Sandra (his constant companion) wants. Living with a powerful, somewhat mad equine who stamps on things can solve a lot of problems. He’s the antithesis of mealy-mouthed, vacillating and untrustworthy politicians.

Last year saw the release of your collection, A Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales. What inspired you to put together this collection, and how did you decide on the final table of contents? Additionally, were there any surprises along the way as you were compiling, editing, and promoting the book?

‘Geraniums’ is, in many ways, a taster. More than half of my work concerns the theme I call ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’. This spans from the 1880s to the present day. So it seemed like a good idea to make a start somewhere. Every story in it is connected, but sometimes the connections are incredibly loose. The difficulty was in deciding about the inclusion of Mr Dry. In the end, half of the collection is about him. I write a re-imagined but faithful and dark late Victorian/Edwardian world, and if anyone spans that period, it’s the Deptford Assassin. I was delighted when one kind reviewer recognised that he was neither hero, anti-hero nor psychopath, but something else – a human being who happens to think and work differently from us.

This meant that ‘Geraniums’ was two collections in one – some of it supernatural, some of it about madness and murder. If I’d had the time, I might have added more stories about Dr Alice Urquhart, my alienist, and her attempts to separate insanity and the paranormal. I did at the last minute decide to include ‘Grey Dog’, a sort of deconstruction of the classic occult detective Carnacki the Ghost Finder. As with ‘Horse Road’ it’s not a pastiche or parody, but a completely serious reverie on life and the presence of death.

Ideally, the collection would also have included Mamma Lucy, but again, time. The ornery 1920s black hoodoo-woman is a natural extension of what comes before, and of terrible events in the early twentieth century. She embodies a different way of facing inhumanity, but she’ll have to wait.

Do you have any writing rituals, such as writing to music or writing at a specific time of day?

Not a one. I write near the back door, so I can let the dogs in and out, and that’s about it.

Out of your published fiction, do you have a personal favorite?

‘Grey Dog’ certainly. ‘Messages’, from the Cthulhusattva anthology, my challenge to classic Lovecraftian tropes, which involves a mother and daughter who have made choices. Strange, yet fully informed, choices. They represent a way of being which is understandably human, and also incomprehensible – or I hope they do. Though I particularly enjoyed one reader’s dismissal of them as ‘the good guys’, after they had driven people to insanity, been satisfied with the extermination of an entire civilisation, and if allowed to continue, would seek the extinction of all life in the Universe. ‘Good’ is a relative term, I suppose.

And I have a fondness for ‘The Jessamine Garden’, which was in the Lambda-award winning anthology ‘His Seed’. It was pointed out to me afterwards that it relates directly to Hawthorne’s ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’ – a connection I’d missed at the time, as I’d actually been contemplating how many of the plants in our own garden were toxic. I wondered if someone might find a purpose in that, beyond simply poisoning everyone who annoyed them.

What projects are you currently working?

I’m almost finished with my new novel ‘The Assassin’s Coin’. It’s an accident, a chance suggestion by writer and artist Alan M Clark. He noticed an aside in ‘Geraniums’, and wondered if I might take it further. So I did, and started risking long fiction again. It concerns a brash young psychic with an unreliable gift, Catherine Weatherhead, and her unwilling entanglement with Edwin Dry, the Deptford Assassin.

Barring the occasional presence of Mr Dry, the book is almost completely about the women of the 1880s. It’s also a dismissal of Jack the Ripper, a negation of the importance of a pathetic, disturbed individual who killed women unable to defend themselves. There have been many men like that before him, and many after, sadly. I’ve no time for the mythologising about him, and ‘The Assassin’s Coin’ will tell you what I think. Alan is writing a complementary novel called ‘The Prostitute’s Price’, and the plan is to issue them separately at first, but later as a single volume of interlaced chapters. I think we should go the whole hog and print alternative words from each book, just to see if any passages still made sense.

Otherwise, I’ve recently completed a novelette which is a sequel to (and complete rewriting of) Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Musgrave Ritual’; ODQ Presents, an anthology of longer supernatural fiction by some cool folk; a weird novelette of sculpture and artists in the 1970s, and the anthology ‘Hell’s Empire’, the Prince of Darkness versus Victorian Britain. An anthology for which I’ve had some truly surprising submissions, subtle, complex and moving. I’m a touch excited about it.

I also have about seven short stories under construction, but that’s how I pay for dog food. The chicken carcasses must flow…

Where can we find you online?

Greydogtales.com, usually updated once a week or more. And I’m on Facebook a lot, and post much nonsense there. It’s a scribble-pad for what’s going on with me (or the pups).

Big thanks to John Linwood Grant for being part of this week’s author interview series!

Happy reading!

Welcome back! This week, I’m pleased to spotlight the fantastic Michael Cisco. Michael is the author of The Divinity Student, The Tyrant, Celebrant, and MEMBER, among numerous other books and short stories.

Recently, Michael and I discussed his latest book, Unlanguage, as well as how he defines weird fiction and what projects he’s working on next.

What first inspired you to become a writer? What is it about speculative fiction or the uncanny that led you to genre writing in particular?

Being a writer never seemed like a decision. I wanted to write from a very early age. When I was a boy, I remember being struck by the idea that, while the people, places, and events in the books I loved weren’t real, the writers were. I couldn’t be those people, do those things, or go to those places, but I could write my own.

I grew up reading fantasy, science fiction, and horror. What I think interested me about all of them was the kind of relationship of wonder they established between the world and the reader. My version of The Hobbit came with maps printed on the end papers. I was eight, and I was astonished at the creativity, almost the arrogance, of inventing maps of imaginary places. To create entire languages for these places struck me as an audacious thing. So then I realized this would be “allowed.”

Horror was always important to me, mainly because I had my fair share of fear and that perverse tendency to use the imagination to trump up greater fears for myself, but also because horror was about re-enchanting the world around me, however darkly. If, for example, I’m told that one of those boring suburban houses over there is haunted, then they suddenly become interesting.

I knew I wanted to write as imaginatively as possible, and I felt a condescending disdain for realism that I hope I’ve outgrown now. I knew I wanted to write that kind of fiction, but at the same time my vanity wouldn’t allow me to do anything in the usual way. So I went about writing genre fiction almost deliberately incorrectly, to see if I could create something new.

Your new novel, Unlanguage, just debuted from Eraserhead Press. What can you share about your process for this book? What was your initial inspiration, and how long did it take to develop into the final version? Also, any surprises in the writing process along the way?

Gahan Wilson created a little comic about someone visiting an unnamed, weird foreign country; he’s studying a handbook of useful phrases to learn, and they include “Please come up to my room, as I have been clubbed and am bleeding profusely” and “I think those people over there are lepers.”

I was studying a language textbook that included a series of linked readings connected to each lesson. In one reading, we’re on board a ship. A man goes wild and starts trying to chop the bottom out of the boat with an axe. Pursued by the sailors, he leaps overboard. The main character of these readings asks the captain if he intends to let this man drown in the ocean. The captain replies, “He was a bad man and he’ll die a bad death.” And I thought — this? This is what the writers of this book thought was a representative and appropriate introduction to their language? I enjoyed the story, don’t get me wrong, but it got me thinking.

Since my Tolkien days I’d been haunted by the idea of inventing a language, but this has been done already, and by far better qualified people. Coming up with vocables and arbitrarily assigning them meanings didn’t sing to me, but I have always been mystified and intrigued by other languages and the possibilities for expression that come out in the unlanguage, the non-place between two languages in translation.

So I came up with the idea of an ominous language textbook with linked readings connecting across different grammatical explanations.

UNLANGUAGE took roughly two years to write, which is about typical for me. I spend a year banking ideas, and a year writing them up.

Your work is often classified under the weird fiction label. But weird fiction itself often defies easy definition, with writers and editors having different ideas about what encapsulates the weird. So in that vein, what is weird fiction to you?

This is something I’m currently struggling to do in a critical monograph. I don’t think that weird is the opposite of normal, but that the two are inseparable. My go to example here is the beginning of David Lynch’s film, Blue Velvet. The discovery of a severed, greenish ear in the grass is set alongside a montage of exaggeratedly ordinary images invoking small town Americana. I don’t think it’s enough to say that you can’t have the strangeness of the one without the normalness of the other, because the normalness becomes strange and the strange becomes normal in that movie.

If a story is nothing but weird events, then it ceases to be weird, weirdly enough, because it has turned into something like fantasy. For me, the weird is about the normal, simply by not taking the normal for granted. It’s like the seduction of the ordinary.

Throughout your career, you’ve written a lot of both short fiction and longer works. Do you find your style or approach differs depending on the length of the project? Do you have a preference for short fiction versus longer forms? Also, has this preference changed at all over the course of your writing career?

I much prefer longer forms, and always have. I gather ideas and heap them up with the intention of shoving them all into one thing, instead of breaking each one out into a separate thing. Writing short stories usually entails an adjustment to this approach.

Writing novels, I still start at the beginning and write through to the end, but over time I’ve gotten better at roving around inside the manuscript. I am still experimenting with different approaches to writing short fiction; I have no one set approach there.

In addition to your own fiction, you’ve also written nonfiction, you’ve done translations, and you teach. Do you find that these various elements of your work often impact your fiction?

They all connect. My nonfiction grows out of the preoccupations I have in my own writing. My translations don’t necessarily have much bearing on what I write, except in the broader sense that I draw ideas from the interaction of languages. I have tried writing passages in other languages and then translated them into English, to see if I could add a certain kind of disoriented feeling to the “normal” English flavor. Teaching means encountering all sorts of different people and learning from them; it has made me a much quicker and more ruthless editor of my own work.

What projects are you currently working on?

I have a new novel that is nearly done, called PEST; the theoretical part of my academic book on weird fiction is done, and I’m now doing some case studies to see how well it holds up in application.

Where can we find you online?

Here’s my blog: https://michaelcisco.blogspot.com/

And I tweet.

Big thanks to Michael Cisco for being part of this week’s author interview series!

Happy reading!

Welcome back to this week’s author interview! Today my featured author is Leza Cantoral. Leza is the author of Cartoons in the Suicide Forest as well as the editor-in-chief at Clash Books, which has just released the absolutely incredible Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana Del Rey and Sylvia Plath.

Recently, Leza and I discussed the Tragedy Queens anthology as well as her inspiration as an author and editor!

What first made you want to become a writer and editor? Who are some of your favorite authors?

I began writing poetry in high school. I don’t think anyone wants to become a writer. It is kind of a shit career. I never wanted to be a writer, it is just the thing I am the least bad at. I am an artist & I need an outlet. I am not that great at painting or drawing or film or willing to do the bullshit to be an actor or filmmaker. Writing is the career the artist takes who has the lowest bullshit threshold.

I started editing Mandy de Sandra as well as nonfiction posts for the yesclash.com site. I learned that editing is so much more than doing line edits. I love working with writers & helping them find their voice & tell their story. As Editor in Chief of CLASH Books I have so much fun doing just that.

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Anderson, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Gillian Flynn, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Joyce Carol Oates, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Baudelaire, Clive Barker, Jonathan Franzen, Bret Easton Ellis, Roberto Bolaños, Scott McClanahan, Sam Pink, Kim Addonizio, Melissa Broder, Lisa Marie Basile, Rios de la Luz, Juliet Escoria.

Big congratulations are in order for the Tragedy Queens anthology! Before we dive deeper into the process of creating this gorgeous book, let me ask you this first: do you remember the first work by Sylvia Plath you ever read? Likewise, do you remember the first Lana Del Rey song you ever heard? What was it about these two artists that inspired you to bring them together for an anthology?

‘Lorelei,’ is the first poem of Sylvia Plath that I read that grabbed me. Then I read the Ariel collection & it changed my entire life. That collection always has a strange effect on me when I read it. I think it has mystical powers.

I don’t remember if I heard Born to Die or Cruel World first, but they both grabbed me right away & I was hooked for both albums.

Lana Del Rey has made herself into a channel of feminine archetypes. Her songs are like stories from the perspectives of different characters/aspects of herself as well as American icons like Jackie Kennedy & Marilyn Monroe. Sylvia Plath did that too. She drew from Greek Tragedy, the Tarot, mystical lore, and fairy tales. I wanted this anthology to bring a full range of female voices to life. Male dominated narratives often put women into boxes. You are either a whore or a good girl, a sex object or a scary crone. It is very limiting. I wanted to challenge these stereotypes about femininity & I thought these two incredible artists would be the perfect muses.

What was the process of putting together Tragedy Queens? Did you know exactly what you were looking for going into the slush pile, or did you let the book evolve naturally as it went?

I came up with the title & the idea & put out the submissions call. The call described the themes of the anthology. My inbox was flooded pretty quickly. I was looking for lyricism & strong character arcs. There are some stories that are more on the dreamy/lyrical side, & others that are more plot driven. I did not care about genre, just compelling stories & characters. I left submissions open for quite a while, because I cared more about getting the right stories than publishing this on some kind of schedule. The goal for Tragedy Queens was for it to feel like an album. The stories are the playlist & it is a killer track list.

Of course, you’re also an accomplished, award-nominated author in your own right. 2016 saw the release of your collection, Cartoons in the Suicide Forest. What can you share about that process? How did you choose the stories for the table of contents, and were there any surprises along the way in writing the book?

Most of the stories I had written at that point made it in to the collection. ‘Star Power’ was the first story I wrote that felt like my voice. It was a piece of flash fiction that I wrote for a writing workshop, based off a Tarot card prompt. That one & ‘Fist Pump’ were written years ago. The rest were written in the couple years leading up to the release of the collection. I left out a couple that relied a little too heavily on dream logic for their narrative structure. The title of the collection appeared in my mind one day & I wrote a story based off the title. It was more literary horror than the other stories. There are also a couple nonfiction pieces in there. This collection was very therapeutic to write. It is the journey of me finding my voice as well as a love letter to fairy tales, surrealist poetry, & horror movies.

In addition to your writing and editorial work, you run the podcast, Get Lit With Leza. What inspired you to start the show? 

Whenever I go to cons or readings I have such fun conversations with other writers, but I live in a very isolated place, so I do not get to hang out that much. Talking on videochat kinda bridges that loneliness gap. I used to drunk-dial my writer friends, now I get them on my podcast. The podcast is a great way to have a conversation with a cool artist & make something entertaining out of it. I was inspired by shows like Between Two Ferns, The Eric Andre Show, The Tom Green Show, & Da Ali G Show with Sacha Baron Cohen. I like talk show hosts like Crag Ferguson, who are not scared to show their flawed & awkward parts or talk about their dark past. It is very human & I connect with it. Get Lit With Leza began to take shape when I started to think about the charm of the bad interview. I am often not sober when I record episodes. I am not trying to kiss ass. I am just trying to have a real conversation.

Out of your own published work, do you have a personal favorite?

‘Saint Jackie.’ It’s a short story in the More Bizarro Than Bizarro antho. It is a conversation with the ghost of Jackie Kennedy about relationships, alcoholism, & growing up.

What upcoming projects are you working on?

A poetry collection called Trash Panda, a personal essay collection called Never Cursed, & a novel about badass witches called Operation Bruja.

Big thanks to Leza Cantoral for being part of this week’s author interview series! Find her online at her website as well as at Clash Books and her podcast page!

Happy reading!

Welcome back for this week’s author interview! Today, I’m pleased to feature Daniel Hale. Daniel’s fiction has appeared in The Myriad Carnival, All Hallows’ Evil, and Strangely Funny III, among other publications.

Earlier this year, he and I discussed how he became a writer, the inspiration behind his recent stories, and what he’s working on next.

What first inspired you to become a writer? Also, do you remember the first speculative fiction story you ever read?

I’ve been playing with the idea of writing since I was in high school, though back then it was mostly just one-off scenes handwritten in notebooks that didn’t really go anywhere. I didn’t seriously try it until college when I figured there was nothing stopping me. I suppose inspiration as we know it didn’t really happen until I read Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, and specifically the introduction in which he explained the work that went into each story in the collection. It made me realize that writing is work, and takes a while and that a story can come from anywhere.

The first book I can remember reading for actual pleasure is One Day at Horrorland by R.L. Stine. One day I hope to write my own original take on a theme park of horror and will dedicate it to him in thanks.

Your story, “Plague Automata,” appeared in The Myriad Carnival, an anthology edited by the talented Matthew Bright. What can you tell us about your inspiration for that particular story?

“Plague Automata” was inspired by the old penny machines that played little tableaus. I liked the idea of these little arcade machines that acted out a story through animate, uncanny sculptures, and wanted to see how they would fit in at a place as strange and unworldly as the Myriad Carnival.

You’ve also had stories appear in two anthologies—Strangely Funny III and All Hallows’ Evil—from Mystery and Horror LLC. I’m a huge a fan of editors Sarah Glenn and Gwen Mayo, so I always love talking about the fiction they publish. So in that vein, what was the process behind those two stories that appeared in their anthologies?

All Hallows’ Evil was the first anthology I ever submitted for, and I’m still deeply pleased by the reception my story, “Pact of the Lantern,” has received. One day that will be a book.

The story came from my own fascination with Halloween and the things I learned about the holiday visiting the town of Salem as a boy. It also stemmed from my sadness that so much of the holiday is fading from common practice. I’m still worried that one day my son might not be able to go trick r’ treating the right way, from house to house lit by lanterns. The day trunk r’ treating becomes the norm is the day that I am officially done with the holiday.

Strangely Funny III featured one of my more enjoyable stories, “A Familiar Problem.” It was surprisingly easy to write, too, being so distrustful myself of smartphones and other modern, labor-saving technology. I figured wizards might have the same problems that they think can be solved with the right gimmicky time-saving enchantments.

You are originally from Massillon, Ohio, which has a special connection for me (since it just so happens to be my birthplace). Have you found that the Rust Belt in general or Massillon in particular has figured into your fiction in any way?

My grandparents live in Massillon, and the house of the wizard in “A Familiar Problem” is partly inspired by theirs. I also wrote a few short pieces for the ongoing “Big Trouble in Little Canton” project by Jason Daniel Myers. Oh, and the Buzzbin in Canton became the Din Den in my story “The Miasmatist,” which will be featured in my upcoming collection.

So as yet it’s mostly just been minor places in the area that I’ve borrowed for my stories. My most recent attempt at a novel took place in the area and featured the melon heads and the lizard lady of Akron, and other local bits of folklore.

Out of your published stories, do you have a personal favorite?

My Halloween stories have tended to be my personal favorites so far. “Pact of the Lantern” and the stories I’ve written connected to it have received the most praise. One of my ongoing projects is a collection of stories that feature Halloween and Christmas stories together.

What upcoming projects are you working on?

The Library Beneath the Streets will be my first published book. Editing with Zumaya Publications is finally wrapping up, and we’re hoping for a release in April at the latest.

I’m also working on two other collections: my holiday collection, tentatively titled Hallowed Days, and Sleepless Nights, a more general collection of mostly unpublished works. It also includes “Faith and Folklore,” my last attempt at a novel, as the penultimate story. I’ve yet to find the right combination of focus and time to write a proper one.

I’ve got a publisher in mind for Sleepless Nights. I’ll keep working on it as I wait for them to open for submissions.

I’m usually working on a short story at any given time. Right now I’m trying for a crossover between two obscure fairy tales, “How Six Made Their Way in the World, and “The Bird, the Mouse and the Sausage.” We’ll see.

Huge thanks to Daniel Hale for being part of this week’s author interview series! You can find him online at his author website and on Twitter.

Happy reading!

Welcome back! Today, I’m thrilled to spotlight the awesome Christa Carmen. Christa is the author of numerous short stories that have been released in venues such as Unnerving, Tales to Terrify, Mad Scientist Journal, and DarkFuse Magazine. Her debut fiction collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, is forthcoming from Unnerving. Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to meet Christa at StokerCon in Providence, and she is truly as delightful and fabulous in person as I’d hoped!

Earlier this year, she and I discussed her inspiration as a writer, the way her stories develop, and what she has planned for the future.

A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?

I’ve been submitting my work for the consideration of publication only within the last two and a half years, but I’ve always considered myself a writer. The idea of writing professionally, writing consistently, writing for something other than my own enjoyment or for catharsis, writing with intent for the work to see the light of day rather than fade and wither in the bowels of a desk drawer somewhere, this was a foreign concept to me for quite a long time.

It’s strange, because I’ve always been enamored of everything to do with books; with the stories themselves, and the authors who wrote them, with movies that were adapted from books and literary series that told sweeping or genre-bending tales, with the illustrations that graced the covers of my favorite novels and the libraries and bookstores that housed them. But the idea of becoming a writer myself was stymied by a longstanding preoccupation with alcohol and drugs. I’m sober now, and have been for a while, but throughout much of the time I could have spent determining if the passion I’d always had for writing could have translated into a viable career option, I was struggling to keep my head above water while the metaphorical eight-hundred pound gorilla clung to my back. I don’t regret that this was the case; while my commitment to writing may have been delayed, the experiences I endured, and how those experiences shaped me as a person, inform my writing today.

As far as some of my favorite authors go, the list is pretty expansive, but I’ll try to keep it brief: Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, Stephen King, Sarah Waters, Jack Ketchum, Ania Ahlborn, Shirley Jackson, Joe Hill, Caroline Kepnes, Ruth Ware, R.L. Stine, Dean Koontz, Jessica McHugh, Michael McDowell, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Roxane Gay, Peter Straub, Agatha Christie, Dan Simmons, Damien Angelica Walters, Mark Z. Danielewski, Harper Lee, H.P. Lovecraft, Annie Hartnett, Cormac McCarthy, Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Pinborough, J.K. Rowling, & B.A. Paris.

As a horror author, are there certain themes that you find yourself returning to again and again, those concepts that really get under your skin? On the other hand, are there topics or themes you’re eager to try as a horror writer, or even ones you’re not quite ready to explore yet?

When it comes to writing horror, the themes that I find myself returning to are more psychological in nature. We know that what one individual finds horrifying may not even register as a blip on the fright radar to another. While a great horror story might err on the more conventional side of what human beings find scary, I think that the truly frightening stories are those that deal with the darker parts of the human psyche, those parts that many of us repress or deny. Home invasion thrillers can inspire security system checks to rival those of an obsessive-compulsive; zombies and vampires make us read of the latest swine flu outbreak or blood-borne virus discovery with an increasingly mistrustful eye. But psychological horror done right exposes our universal vulnerabilities, makes us experience those unpleasant, unsettled, uneasy feelings we work so hard to avoid.

As for topics or themes I’m eager to try as a horror writer, or ones I’m not quite ready to explore yet, I think it’s pretty safe to say that anything that pops into my head as a subject or theme I could potentially write about, I’m willing to pursue. That’s not to say that uncharted thematic territory won’t require more of a time commitment than a subject or theme I’m familiar with. For example, I have an unfinished horror novel called 13 Sessions, about a thirty-something year old woman who pursues acupuncture as a personal infertility treatment with monstrous results, and an unfinished short story, “I Have No Mouth For I Mustn’t Scream,” about a woman whose pregnancy complications have rendered her mute for the entire forty weeks of gestation, so that should tell you a little something about how confident I am with themes related to that subject.

You have a story appearing in Unnerving Magazine #5. Could you tell us about the inspiration behind that piece?

The inspiration behind the story appearing in Unnerving Magazine #5, “Red Room,” is probably a great deal more interesting than that of my other stories. The story is about a woman who, despite her fiancé’s belief to the contrary, is convinced she should be concerned by the gruesome photos appearing on her phone, and whose fear proves justified in a rather ghastly, albeit unexpected way.

On April 13, 2017, Tor.com published an article by Emily Asher-Perrin entitled, “The Peril of Being Disbelieved: Horror and the Intuition of Women.” The piece examines one of the most overdone tropes in horror: that of the woman who feels that something is off, but is disbelieved and brushed off by everyone, right up until the moment the chainsaw begins to rev, or zombies break down the door. The article discusses how every woman knows what this feels like, and how “women know that it’s their responsibility to prevent harm from coming to them.”

Not long after reading this article, something odd happened. I woke up the morning after a wedding to a series of photos on my phone that I did not take. The photos were of two men in a bar, and they had an eerie, old-fashioned feel that lent them a patina of wrongness as palpable as any Instagram filter. The next day, at a post-wedding brunch, the topic of the inexplicable photos came up. The reaction from several men in the group was that, one way or another, I had to have been the cause of these photos appearing on my phone. “You probably just screenshotted them from a website,” or “you must have accidentally downloaded them.” As I mentioned previously, I’m not a drinker, so the activities of the night before were clear in my mind. This complete unwillingness to believe that the photos had appeared through no action of mine collided in my head with the echoes of Asher-Perrin’s article, and “Red Room” was the result.

You currently live in Rhode Island, a state with its own haunted and cosmic horror history. Do you find that your home state often inspires your work, or do you tend to look for creepy inspiration elsewhere?

Rhode Island does often inspire my work! I’d say 95% of what I write takes place somewhere in my home state; the novel that I’m currently working on is set not only in my home state, but in my hometown of Westerly, with much of the action occurring along the coast, in Misquamicut and Watch Hill, and many of my short stories take place in Mysticism, a fictional town that exists somewhere between Westerly and Charlestown, and borrows a portion of its name from Mystic, Connecticut.

I think the consistent use of RI as setting can be attributed to a combination of two factors. First, there is absolutely something haunted and horrific about the smallest state in the US. Especially in the beach communities at the southern part of the state, there’s such a sense of isolation in the winter, of things lurking in the cold and waiting to awaken. Additionally, while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the oft-repeated ‘write what you know’ adage, I find that in terms of place, setting a work of fiction in a locale with which you are intimately familiar makes for fiction that’s more dynamic to read, and more enjoyable to write.

As a short fiction writer, do you have a specific approach when you’re crafting a new story? Do you tend to start with an image or a character or a theme, and write toward exploring that idea? Or does it entirely vary from project to project?

The reason I wrote that the inspiration behind “Red Room” is worthier of reveal than that of my other stories is because my approach to writing short fiction is usually fairly straightforward. I have a designated ‘Ideas’ notebook with a section for singular, striking images, and when I see something I find haunting or unusual, I write it down. Sometimes an image connects rather quickly with an idea, for example, I took a long course on legends through the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, and became captivated with the internet legend of the ‘Stairs in the Woods’ (google ‘Stairs in the Woods Reddit’ if you want to fall down that particularly eerie rabbit hole). I’d already been tossing around the idea of writing a story inspired by some of the women on the methadone clinic at which I was a clinician from 2010 to 2013, and when I thought more about the image of a staircase in the forest, and the type of person who might find the idea of walking up that mysterious staircase to an unknown destination appealing, the story unfurled from there.

It’s probably not much different from what Stephen King says about where his ideas come from in On Writing: “…good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” I’d say that’s a pretty solid explanation for my process.

You were married on Halloween 2016 at the Stanley Hotel (congratulations, by the way!). That hotel, of course, served as the inspiration for The Shining. When did you first visit the hotel, and did anything spooky or strange ever happen to you there? Also, have you visited other horror landmarks in your travels?

Thank you so much! Getting married at the Stanley Hotel was exactly as amazing as my now-husband, John, and I had hoped it would be, and I’m thankful that our families had as enjoyable an experience as we did. We stayed at the Stanley (where The Shining plays on a constant loop on one of the hotel’s television channels) for ten days, and in addition to stalking the Estes Park elk herd (I admit, having become accustomed to regular old white-tailed deer in New England, I was quite taken with the elk, although John might go so far as to say I was obsessed), and venturing into Rocky Mountain National Park on more than one occasion, we participated in as many ‘haunted’ activities as we could fit into our schedule. We played Monster mini-golf and saw Ouija: Origin of Evil at the local cinema. We signed up for a historical tour of the hotel, as well as a ‘spirit’ tour, on which guests are introduced to the “active” phenomena and ghostly folklore surrounding the 100+ year old hotel, and educated on how to interact with the type of activity people have claimed to encounter in the past.

On our second night of vacation, I bought a ticket to attend Illusions of the Past, a theatrical séance put on by the Stanley’s in-house illusionist, Aiden Sinclair, in the Billiards Room of the main building. The show made use of ‘haunted’ artifacts to summon the ghosts of past hotel guests, and the audience got to manipulate actual historic antiquities from events such as the hunt for Jack the Ripper and the sinking of the Titanic.

Feeling bold, I volunteered to participate in a séance, for which I and four other women chose either a black bead or a haunted pearl from an opaque drawstring bag. The illusionist would have no idea who had chosen what, and we were to go around the room declaring “I have the pearl,” despite each participant being uncertain as to whether or not that was true. When the individual who did have the pearl declared as such, the planchette would flip off the Ouija board and into the air, coming to rest on the ground when the spirit had departed.

When it was my turn to state, “I have the pearl,” I did so with lots of hesitation and little amounts of faith. I felt something stir within my hand, a disturbance among the molecules of whatever material my clenched fist concealed. With a screech of metal against wood, the planchette flipped, the room grew cold, and in the mirrored walls behind the illusionist, I watched as something scampered away for the abandoned quarters of the hotel before its presence could be more widely-discerned.

John did not attend Illusions of the Past, however he was in for a supernatural phenomenon of his own. On the night of our wedding, while I stood on the dancefloor with my sister and three sisters-in-law, channeling Winifred Sanderson and belting out “I Put a Spell on You,” John felt a hand on his shoulder, as unambiguous and concrete as the feel of my fingers on the keyboard as I type. He spun around and looked up, expecting his mother or another family member to be standing over him, but there was no one there. An undigested bit of beef, perhaps, or a fragment of underdone potato? Your readers can be the judge as to whether there was more of gravy than of grave about my and John’s experiences, whatever they might have been.

As you mentioned, the Stanley served as the inspiration for The Shining. In 1980, of course, King’s novel became the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name. The exteriors of Kubrick’s Overlook were supplied by the Timberline Lodge, located on the slopes of Mt. Hood in Oregon. John and I would love to celebrate a future anniversary at the Timberline, and at some point we will undoubtedly return to the Stanley. As for additional horror landmarks, I can’t say that I’ve visited too many other notable locations. I’ve been to Lovecraft Square in Providence and on the Universal Studios set of the Bates Motel, but I’ve really got to up my horror landmarks game! Ooh, I have also been to Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA; I read in your Times Reporter interview that you were raised in New Philadelphia, and while I know that’s almost two hours outside the city, I wonder if you’ve had the chance to visit the old, crumbling prison before…perhaps on Halloween, for their “Terror Behind the Walls” attraction? (Gwendolyn’s note: Alas, my New Philadelphia hometown is the Ohio one, not the Pennsylvania one! So I have not yet been to Eastern State Penitentiary. Hopefully some day, though!)

Beyond our shared love of horror, you and I have something else in common: we both have graduate degrees in psychology. As you’re crafting characters, do you find yourself returning to your education as a guide for how to realistically depict behavior? Are there any perhaps unlikely ways that your degree has impacted your writing?

I have a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, and I’ve been a mental health clinician at a detox center, numerous methadone clinics, and I currently work per diem on an inpatient psychiatric unit. I absolutely try to rely on both my education and work experience as a guide for how to realistically depict behavior. I also fall back on my knowledge of psychology in general to inform broader challenges within my writing. I think having a solid foundation in psych helps keep writers from plunging into the pitfalls of stereotypes and overdone tropes. How many times have we seen villains whose sole basis for evil is sociopathy, schizophrenia, bipolar, and/or psychosis? How many times have we seen characters pigeonholed into the ‘bad guy’ role because they’re a ‘junkie’ or a ‘crackhead?’ A lot of my short fiction has dealt with addiction and mental health, and the first novel I ever wrote is sort of a Silence of the Lambs meets Trainspotting, where something sinister goes down at a Maine manor-turned-drug-treatment-center.

What projects are you currently working on?

From January 26th-28th, I attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp to workshop a horror/crime thriller I’ve been plugging away at over the past year, called Coming Down Fast. Last August, I met author and artist Dean Kuhta at NecronomiCon, and I’m putting the finishing touches on a short story called “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” for Issue #2 of Outpost 28, a Lovecraft-inspired dark fiction magazine Dean invited me to be a part of. I have additional work forthcoming from Quantum Corsets’ Her Dark Voice 2, Black Ice Magazine Volume 2, Space Squid, and Dead Oaks’ Horror Anthology Podcast. I have about ten other short stories in various stages of completeness, and my goal is to finish one a month over 2018, keeping in mind that new ideas will inevitably strike during that time, as well as to participate in a second short story collaboration with author David Emery, whom I met while judging a short story contest through The Write Practice and Short Fiction Break literary magazine.

Tremendous thanks to Christa Carmen for being part of this week’s author interview series! Find her online at her author website as well as on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Goodreads!

Happy reading!