Nightmare Magazine Issue 9 Page 8

  The label “Southern Gothic” has occasionally been applied to your work, including Boy’s Life. Do you consider anything you’ve written to be Southern Gothic?

  I think there are elements of what might be considered “Southern Gothic” in Usher’s Passing, Mystery Walk and Gone South as well. I don’t set out to do this, it just happens.

  You returned from retirement with Speaks the Nightbird, the first of your historical Matthew Corbett novels, and you’ve mentioned plans for ten novels in this series—are they already outlined?

  I don’t have all of them planned—and certainly none are outlined, because I don’t work that way—but I know where the series is going. I know how it will end and I know the last line of the final book.

  You’ve talked about how much difficulty you’ve had finding a publisher for your historical novels, because it’s not what they expect from you. Did you ever consider a pen name for those books?

  I had an agent once who told me publishers didn’t want anything but horror from me, and when I suggested using a pen name he said that wouldn’t work because then my fans couldn’t find me. I then retreated again to my cave.

  Technology has changed so much since you began to publish and, later, encounter difficulties with publishers. Does the idea of self-publishing appeal at all to you?

  Self-publishing? Well, I’m not sure about that but certainly the publishing world has changed and is still changing. Where it will go from here is anyone’s guess, and I surely don’t want to make one.

  I’ve heard you speak about The Village, your historical novel about a Russian theater troupe in World War II, and I thought it sounded fantastic, but your website states that it will “never be published”—can you talk about that?

  No, I really can’t. That is a painful episode in my own personal history.

  Given your journalism background and your obvious affection for research, have you ever considered writing a nonfiction book?

  Hm . . . maybe, someday, if I have time.

  Is your new book I Travel by Night (released this month by Subterranean) a conscious return to horror fiction?

  I’ve always said I write what I want to read, so if it’s not there to be read I have to create it. I don’t think of it as “horror fiction” but as something I created because I wanted to read the story.

  The “genre” thing has always been a thorny issue for me. I mean . . . really . . . what is “horror fiction”? What is its point? What does it say? Does it exist to convey a meaning or a “truth” or is it simply to provoke a gross-out? There are so many varieties and styles of “horror fiction,” that it’s hard to put the genre in a box. So . . . again, I always write what I want to read.

  Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as ‘consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.’ Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.

  Author Spotlight: Lynda Rucker

  Lisa Nohealani Morton

  Can you tell us about the background of “The House on Cobb Street”? What sparked you to write this story?

  The story came from a few different places. One was an actual hypnagogic hallucination I had—which I am normally not prone to. I “woke up” but was frozen and I could hear creepy little girls whispering behind me, and could picture them as well. I wrote that section of the story down the following day and the first few pages of the story quickly formed around it, including the initial clippings that helped tell the story.

  At some point, prior to that, I had also come up with the title; I’d wanted to write a story set in Athens, Georgia, for a long time, and I once lived on the real Cobb Street, so all the elements fell together after that.

  Everyone in the story seems to have a different theory about exactly what’s going on with the house. Are any of them right?

  That’s for the reader to decide! I never tell the reader what to think outside of the story itself.

  Vivian’s fatalism about the house gives the story a sense of a slow, inevitable march towards doom (and neatly sidesteps the “Don’t go in the basement!” problem, as Vivian herself muses). Would you say that this sense of inevitability is a common feature in your work in horror? Is it something you’re attracted to yourself as a reader?

  I think that it is a feature of a certain type of horror, and it is often a feature of the horror that I write. In a way, I suppose, it sort of violates a central principle of storytelling in which the protagonist needs to keep making an effort to solve the problem—the active protagonist, if you will. My protagonists often, though not always, tend to be more doomed than active.

  This is actually a really interesting question, and I’m going to have to think about it some more; I have a sense that if the protagonist is really active, the story sometimes becomes something other than horror, but I’m not sure about that!

  You’ve got a short story collection coming out soon. Care to tell us a bit of what readers can expect from it?

  It’s been pushed ahead to June because I am trying to finish a couple of original stories to include in it. It’s called The Moon Will Look Strange and will include my first eight published stories—that means stories from The Third Alternative and Supernatural Tales as well as a little journal Len Maynard and Mick Sims published for a while called Darkness Rising. It’s published by Karōshi Books, which is a new imprint of Noose & Gibbet Publishing run by Johnny Mains in the UK. Johnny runs Karōshi along with Peter Mark May of Hersham Horror and Cathy Hurren. I’m really excited to have a lovely introduction from Steve Rasnic Tem, whose work influenced me as an aspiring writer.

  What are you working on now?

  Mostly, I’m presently working on a supernatural novel about the mystery surrounding a forgotten horror writer from the Golden Age of pulps, a cursed book, and a doomsday cult.

  What’s your favorite haunted house story?

  Definitely The Haunting of Hill House; it’s one of my favorite books of all time, period. At shorter lengths, I love Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One” and Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat.”

  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: Laird Barron

  Seamus Bayne

  What do you think is under the tarp, and does its ability to kill have a ritual significance to the timing of the later events in the story?

  In a horror story, there’s always the choice to reveal the monster, or monstrous, or leave it to the imagination. I chose the latter as one’s imagination will often supply a far more dire vision than a cold description on paper. If nothing else, whatever is under the tarp signifies the narrator’s connection, and obeisance, to a dread and awful power.

  The main character seems somewhat sympathetic to the plight of humanity, its role in their development, and eventual end. Why?

  The narrator feels a connection to humanity because he, or it, has reincarnated into a facsimile of a man. Of course, the being is irredeemably Other, and it experiences melancholia that
spans eons.

  Water seems to factor heavily in the role of the main character. Is this because of the belief that all life springs from the sea?

  Water is a colossal force, the veil of mystery upon our world. It is what we seek when we seek life elsewhere in the universe.

  When the creature next rises, what will the world look like? What other beings might it guide?

  I’m not prepared to speculate on that. The implication is certainly unpleasant for humanity, for all life on the planet.

  What is the significance of it being the mouth of God?

  I originally conceived the idea in my youth when trying to wrap my mind around Jesus as a mortal, yet also the Son of God. It occurred to me that what was being described was a human who’d been designed or repurposed to act as a sensor for an outside agency. I just combined that with a Lovecraftian view of the universe and added water.

  What else do you have in the works that might interest our readers?

  My latest collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, should be available sometime in 2013. I’m working on a crime novel and writing a lot of stories for various anthologies. An Alaska-themed collection is in the works.

  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: Joe Lansdale

  Erika Holt

  Where did the idea for “The God of the Razor” come from?

  I don’t know exactly, but it came to me in the late seventies, and in 1980 I began to write The Nightrunners. I had finished Act of Love that year, as well as Dead in the West, and neither had found a home yet, and I started this one. I began to imagine the character and I don’t know exactly where it came from. A multitude of sources. Perhaps I wrote something about it earlier, but at this point I no longer remember.

  The characters in this story seem to have little or no say over their fates. Could Richards have done anything differently to change the outcome?

  That’s the noir influence, about how a character gets on the railway and can’t stop the train. But, I think Richards might have made different choices, and maybe they would have helped, and maybe not. But it seemed he was pretty much on one of those noir trains, only when it went off the rails it tumbled down into something dark and strange. I always felt the people “The God of The Razor” appealed to were standing by, ready and willing, at least on some level, to board that train.

  What drives the God? Does he have any metaphorical significance?

  I think he has a lot of metaphorical significance, and some of it is about choice. You can choose to ride the train, and once on it seems impossible to get off, or you can turn away from the depot. But the God also represents the darker desires of humanity, a kind of built in self-destruct. From what I can tell, we don’t learn much from history, or at least we seldom learn.

  You write in many different genres, but what is it about horror, in particular, that interests you?

  I love horror for the tone and the mood, but I really don’t like it any better than the other things I write. It appeals to me on a gut level, but I also love crime, which is a close cousin. I’m really fond of historical and Western-influenced fiction, but if I had to write just one thing I’d go crazy. I need the variety.

  Can you tell us about your process? Do you write a certain number of hours or words per day? Work on multiple projects at once?

  I sometimes work on multiple projects, more frequently lately, but mostly one thing until it’s done, or at least nearly done, before I start another. I write in the mornings, usually it takes about three hours, but I go by pages. I try to do three to five pages a day and seldom do less, the exception being on the first few days I start a novel, and I may not do as much then until I get the handle on the characters and the voice. I don’t think much about the plot, as that develops out of the tone and the character, and sometimes a singular situation. As I start to write I may get more pages naturally, and often do. I may, on rare occasions, work in the afternoon or at night. I often find when I work the other shifts, it’s usually on something different than the main project.

  I write like this five to seven days a week. I take a day off now and then, but it’s not unusual for me to work on Christmas or Thanksgiving morning, my birthday, what have you. I get through in a short time, the three hours, acquire the three to five pages, and I’m off to do whatever. Rarely do I take a lot of time off. Lately, I’m in one of those rare circumstances where I have taken quite a bit of time off after three years of writing an unnatural amount of material. But, this week I started a new novel, which at this point I’m still playing with, to see if it’s really there, or it’s a false dream.

  What are you working on now?

  Well, I pretty much answered that question. A novel. But I have a few small projects in the background, including a novella that I plan on writing once I get the novel going well. But I don’t talk about what I’m writing at this stage. It’s still taking shape.

  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: Carrie Vaughn

  E.C. Myers

  I loved how this story snuck up on me with a building sense of horror, as thrilling as it is disturbing. On your website, you describe “Fishwife” as, “a damp foray into Lovecraftian horror,” but it also has roots in fairy tales. Can you talk about what suggested this story to you and how it evolved with those two influences in mind?

  The story owes pretty much its entire existence to the Stuart Gordon film Dagon. While watching it, I felt like I finally got what Lovecraftian fiction was all about, a feeling I hadn’t gotten from any other story, or even any of Gordon’s other Lovecraft-inspired films. It really is horrifying, it never quite crosses that line into gross or silly, and the resulting madness the main characters fall into feels genuine rather than contrived. I just loved it. But of course, given my own quirks, I wasn’t interested in the main characters’ story, I was interested in the villagers, and how they got to where they are from what they had been before. I went back to the original Lovecraft story “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” folded that background into the story, and there we are. If there’s a fairy tale influence, it has to do with Lovecraft’s own roots in fairy tale tropes, the dangers of magic and witchcraft, the psychology of the liminal, and so on.

  You’ve drawn from fairy tales, mythology, and various genres before, most notably in your novel Discord’s Apple. What are the challenges of referencing such familiar source material? What draws you to incorporating and confronting fairy tales and myths in your work?

  Folklore and myths are a universal language in some ways. They’re primal. They’re always being revisited and reworked for the current culture. They have to do with birth, death, growing up, the nature of the world. The challenge is—you have to take a stand. Most fairy tales and myths can be interpreted many different ways, and if you’re going to be writing about them you have to decide what they mean, for yourself and for the story, and I think the stories that come out of them have to have conviction. A confidence that the story really is true and universal. They can’t just be pastiches, they have to be interpretations.

  What’s your favorite fairy tale or myth? How about your favorite Lovecraft story?

  I like the stories involving animals and communication—“The White Snake,” “The Golden Bird,” “The Goose Girl”—where the hero accidentally gains the power of speech of with animals and t
hereby accesses great wisdom, or the hero is helped along in his or her quest by a talking fox, horse, etc. I haven’t written much inspired by these stories, but they were always my favorite to read when I was young.

  I don’t think I have a favorite Lovecraft story. As I mentioned, I just never got into his work, except in the ways it’s inspired other writers and artists. For example, the Lovecraft episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon in which Egon observes that Cthulhu makes Gozer look like Little Mary Sunshine.

  I will put in a plug for an earlier author who inspired Lovecraft—Arthur Machen, whose work is truly weird, liminal, disturbing, and wonderful. I love his stuff.

  Please tell us a little about your writing process, in general and for this story in particular. Did you do any special research for it? Did anything in the story surprise you as you wrote it?

  Once I have the idea—writing a story about the villagers from “The Shadows over Innsmouth,” for example—I let it cook for a little while. Then I’ll brainstorm. For a short story, I’ll often just start writing scenes, setting, and atmosphere, to try to get a handle on where I want it go. Pretty quickly I’ll figure out an ending, where I want to the story to go, and that will give me a map on what the rest of the story needs to look like. I’ll usually do two to three drafts on a short story. My only research for it was reading the original Lovecraft story and a bit of Googling to look at fishing tools. I don’t know that I get surprised, per se, since the whole writing process is about discovery. I’m expecting to find and learn things about the story. I do get a rush when it all comes together better than I expected, like with “Fishwife.” I joked with my friends while watching the movie that I was going to write a story, and those jokes don’t always bear fruit. I’m glad it did this time.