On Robert Aickman

Electric Literature has published an essay I wrote about Robert Aickman, one of the greatest of the 20th century's short story writers:

Thirty-five years after his death, Robert Aickman is beginning to receive the attention he deserves as one of the great 20th century writers of short fiction. For the first time, new editions of his books are plentiful, making this a golden age for readers who appreciate the uniquely unsettling effect of his work.

Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dal穩 was a typical designer of pocket watches.

Continue reading at Electric Literature.

For more of me on Aickman, see this post about my favorite of his stories, "The Stains".

Conversation at Electric Literature

The good folks at Electric Literature invited me to converse with Adrian Van Young, perhaps not knowing that Adrian and I had recently discovered we are in many ways lost brothers, and so we could go on and on and on...

And we did.

We talked about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Sublime, writing advice, writers we like, Michael Haneke, neoliberalism, The Witch, and all sorts of other things. It was a lot of fun and we could have gone on at twice the length, but eventually we had to return to our lives.

Many thanks to Electric Lit for being so welcoming.

On Christopher Lee

Over at Press Play, I have a brief text essay about and a video tribute to Christopher Lee, who died on June 7 at the age of 93. Here's the opening of the essay:

Christopher Lee was the definitive working actor. His career was long, and he appeared in more films than any major performer in the English-speaking world — over 250. What distinguishes him, though, and should make him a role model for anyone seeking a life on stage or screen, is not that he worked so much but that he worked so well. He took that work seriously as both job and art, even in the lightest or most ridiculous roles, and he gave far better, more committed performances than many, if not most, of his films deserved.

Read and view more at Press Play.

Previously Unpublished Stories by Robert Aickman to be Released by Tartarus Press

I just told Ray Russell at Tartarus Press that I think the impending release of The Strangers by Robert Aickman is the publishing event of the year. That's not hyperbole. Aickman's stories are among my favorite works of 20th century art, and I always thought the canon was complete. Indeed, I thought that once Tartarus had brought all of Aickman back into print that I was done with being insanely grateful to Tartarus. But no!

The Strangers and Other Writings includes previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, non-fiction and poetry by Robert Aickman. Dating from the 1930s to 1980, the contents show his development as a writer. Six unpublished short stories, augmented by one written for broadcast, follow his fiction from the whimsical through the experimental to the ghostly, with ‘The Strangers’ a fully-formed, Aickmanesque strange tale. The non-fiction samples Aickman’s wide-ranging interests and erudition: from the supernatural to Oscar Wilde; from 1940s films to Delius; from politics to the theatre; from Animal Farm to the canals.

Included with the book is a DVD of the documentary film Robert Aickman, Author of Strange Tales:

Featuring rare film, photographs and audio recordings, the film sheds new light on Aickman’s role in the development of the ghost story, his interest in restoring the British canal system and his wider involvement with the arts. Jean Richardson and Heather and Graham Smith share their memories of Aickman’s friendship, and writers Jeremy Dyson and Reggie Oliver evaluate Aickman’s literary legacy. 

"Patrimony" in Black Static 42

The latest issue of the venerable British horror/dark fiction magazine Black Static includes my latest story, "Patrimony", and is now available both in print and as an e-book in various formats. I'm thrilled with the accompanying illustration by Richard Wagner, and thankful to Andy Cox for buying the story and rushing it into print, because it's one of the strangest and most disturbing things I've ever written, and not the sort of thing that just any editor would get excited about.

For a preview, here's the first paragraph:

For most of my life, I worked in the gravel pit as an overseer. There had been gravel there for a long time, but there wasn’t much left. Mostly, we spent our days trying to decide where to set off dynamite. We didn’t have a lot of dynamite, so we wanted to be precise. We would go for weeks and even months without lighting a single stick. I spent my days – ten-, eleven-hour days – telling the workers to try over here, to look over there, to dig here, to prod there. We sought the best rock, the least sand.

Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg

For Strange Horizons, I reviewed Glen Hirshberg's Motherless Child.

Motherless Child is a vampire novel that isn't much interested in vampires. Instead, as its title suggests, more than anything else it is a novel about motherhood. Most of the main characters are mothers, the primary themes are ones of parenthood and responsibility, and the basic storyline sends vampirized mothers running away from their children and then fighting against the urge to return, fearing that they will no longer see their kids as offspring but as prey.

First published by Earthling Publications in 2012, Motherless Child has now been reprinted by Tor. Glen Hirshberg has won a number of awards for his horror short stories (collected in The Two Sams [2003], American Morons [2006], and The Janus Tree [2012]), and Tor may see Motherless Child as a breakout book for him, one that will bring a wider audience for his fiction. It clearly displays some of the hallmarks of a tale that could be embraced by a wide audience, certainly more than his often subtle, enigmatic short stories do. Whether this is to its benefit as a novel depends entirely on what you want your novels to do, both in the prose itself and in the story that prose tells.

Continue reading at Strange Horizons.

The Affect Effect: Notes on Sherlock and Hannibal

Last night, viewers in the US got to see what viewers in other parts of the world have already seen: the first episode of the third season of the phenomenally successful BBC show Sherlock. I've already seen it — twice, in fact — because I enjoyed previous seasons of the show enough to work around the BBC website's geographical limitations and watch the episode when it first aired, and then I saw it again at a local cinema's preview showing, where my friend Ann McClellan gave a presentation on Conan Doyle and Sherlock. I've also seen the other two episodes of the season, watching episode 2 twice and episode 3 once.

Recently, I watched the 13-episode first season of NBC's Hannibal, based on Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter character, and I've been thinking about certain overlaps and significant contrasts between the two shows in their approach to their material. The comparison first occurred to me after I re-watched the first episode of Sherlock in preparation for the new season and heard, again, Sherlock refer to himself as a "high-functioning sociopath" — immediately, I thought, "No you're not. But Mads Mikkelsen in Hannibal is..."* That then got me thinking about connections between the two shows.

Rob Zombie and the Cinema of Cruelty

I have a new video essay and accompanying text essay up at Press Play. This one, in honor of Halloween, is about the work of one of my favorite living directors, Rob Zombie. In it, I relate some writings by Antonin Artaud to some of what it seems to me Zombie is up to in his work.

One thing that struck me as I rewatched all of Zombie's movies over the space of just a couple days to create the essays was how very David Lynchian his last two films have become — Halloween II and The Lords of Salem both remind me of nothing so much as Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

"How Far to Englishman's Bay"

My story "How Far to Englishman's Bay" is now available at Nightmare Magazine for reading, or you could listen to it read by Paul Boehmer on the podcast. There's also an interview with me by Erika Holt about the story, though if you don't like to know any plot elements before reading, you should save the interview for after you've finished the story, because I blithely give away a few surprises.

I thought the above image, based partially on one from a 1909 Harper's Weekly story called "The Queer Folk of the Maine Coast" (which would be a perfect subtitle for "How Far to Englishman's Bay") more or less fit the story, so I put it together during a moment when procrastinating from something more important, and so, well, here it is.

Nightmare Magazine issue 11

art by Lena Yuk

The August 2013 issue of Nightmare Magazine contains my story "How Far to Englishman's Bay", which is all about why people from New Hampshire should be careful when they travel to Maine.

The story will be available online for free next week, but why wait when you can have it for $2.99 and also get stories by Jennifer Giesbrecht, Robert McKammon, and Clive Barker, plus part 2 of a great interview with Joe Hill. There's also an "Author Spotlight" interview with each writer, including one conducted with me by Erika Holt, who asked some fun questions.

I'm especially pleased to be in an issue with an interview with Joe Hill, because years and years and years ago, back when I was young and easy under the apple boughs, I interviewed Joe about his short story collection 20th Century Ghosts, at that time only available from PS Publishing in the UK. Back then, he was just a mysterious short story writer who seemed to have popped up out of nowhere, and I interviewed him because I wanted to know how somebody from out of nowhere had written such excellent fiction. It turned out he'd grown up in Maine, but like any sensible person, escaped to New Hampshire.

Thanks to John Joseph Adams for publishing the story, and for helping come up with the title, which I like very much. Although now that I think about it, I should have just called the story by our NH state motto: "Live Free or Die". Too obvious, though. And too much like a Die Hard sequel.

"The Stains" by Robert Aickman

Today is Robert Aickman's 98th birthday, and in honor of that, here are some thoughts on my favorite Aickman story, "The Stains". I've been meaning to write about Aickman's work, and this story in particular, for a long time, but I have found it difficult to muster the courage to write about works that are so mysterious, so ineffable, so richly strange and deeply affecting. I think it is no coincidence that I have had the same struggle with the work of Franz Kafka, who is absolutely central to my reading life, and yet I have never written at much length about him at all. Aickman is not as great a writer as Kafka, but that's no insult; Aickman's talent and vision were narrower, his oeuvre less ragged. Nonetheless, there is an affinity of effect (and affect), partly, I suspect, because both writers were masters of writing from repressed obsessions, and both found unique, personal forms of fiction with which to encase those obsessions.

"The Stains" is a late story by Aickman, first published in Ramsay Campbell's anthology New Terrors. It won the 1981 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, but has rarely been reprinted. (Currently, it's in print in the Faber & Faber UK edition of the Aickman collection The Unsettled Dust, which, along with a couple other Aickman collections, is also available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon, though I haven't found it for other electronic formats.)

It is the story of a civil servant named Stephen, whose wife, Elizabeth, has recently died, and whose very straight-laced, controlled world has begun to come apart. Stephen seems like a perfect representation of the stereotypical stiff-upper-lip, aging British male — but really there's nothing essentially British about this stereotype, for it is more generally a kind of masculine ideal: fastidious, emotionally repressed, with a sense that one's status as a (white, middle-to-upper-class) male should lead then to dominance over a world that always threatens chaos. Such attributes lead to a psychology that fiercely guards against the exotic. Stephen's Britishness (and Aickman's) will be important to the story, though, because of the story's subtle allusions to the Empire.

Marriage is, for Stephen and his ilk, a vital component in the fight against chaos, and Elizabeth was for him the nearly-perfect wife. ("They said he was a man made for marriage and all it meant. ... [H]ow many women would want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would want to marry. Not after Elizabeth.") A man made for marriage and all it meant. Elizabeth's only flaw was her inability to bear Stephen a child, preferably a son to carry on his name, lineage, tradition. But no man can have everything, and each needs some burden to bear.

It is no surprise that once Elizabeth is dead, Stephen's world shifts toward chaos. Their doctor immediately leaves, and he is replaced not by another man of the same mold, but rather someone different. "The new man was half-Sudanese, and Stephen found him difficult to communicate with, at least upon a first encounter, at least on immediate topics."

Stephen leaves to see his brother: the Reverend Harewood Hooper BD, MA. ("Their father and grandfather had been in orders too, and had been incumbents of that same small church in that same small parish for thirty-nine years and forty-two years respectively.") A man of scholarship and God, Harewood is also a "modestly famous" expert on lichens.

Horrors!

Jason Zinoman at The New York Times asked a group of film directors and writers to name "the scariest movie they’d ever seen", and got a lot of overlapping answers from a relatively broad group of people -- The Shining, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Thing.

What most interested me was not the choices, but the reasons. People respond to films (and all forms of art) in diverse and unpredictable ways. Marti Noxon, for instance, lists The Blair Witch Project as one of only two movies (along with The Exorcist) "that have kept me awake as an adult"; on the other hand, I found Blair Witch to be a useful remedy for insomnia.

Many of the responses hark back to childhood reactions, and this is understandable -- children are generally easier to scare than adults, and our early experiences, before we have been numbed and carapaced by life, tend to be the most vivid and visceral. (In 1985, I thought Terror at London Bridge was unbearably frightening. Now? Not so much.)

Horror Countdowns

It's the month of Halloween, and a couple of websites are running countdowns of great horror movies, providing essays in justification of their ideas.  Well worth reading are those at Wonders in the Dark and Gestalt Mash.  We'd all rank our favorite such films differently, of course, and it will be fun in the end to see which films get missed (I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see if one of my own favorites, Blood Feast, gets included on either list!  One must always use exclamation points when talking about Blood Feast!!!  I love it as much for its poster as for the film itself!!!!)  The rankings are interesting, though -- for instance, Wonders in the Dark lists the seminal, original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as #25, and I would be inclined to put it in the top ten; I'm impressed that the writers think there are 24 horror movies superior to and more important than the original TCM.  (And I Walked with a Zombie is all the way back at 85?!?  Insanity!  I'd move it ahead by about eighty spots.)

Oh, where would the world be without lists?!  How did the world ever get by without our being able to fight over such things?!?

Dread

Anthony DiBlasi's movie Dread may be compelling for folks who haven't read the Clive Barker story that inspired it, but anyone who admires the grand guignol audacity of that story will likely be disappointed by the film.

There's plenty to praise in the movie, though, and before I detail why I think Diblasi's screenplay tames the story and saps it of any interesting meaning, I do want to make it clear that my objection is primarily to the screenplay. The cinematography and production design are often excellent, sometimes strikingly so -- every wall in this film seems rich with texture, the colors and lighting are frequently more evocative than anything going on in the plot, and some of the framing of shots is gorgeous (what's in the frame is often grimy or grotesque, fitting the events of the story, but the image composition is nonetheless beautiful). And there's some good gore, too.

The acting isn't as bad as it could be, either, especially given some of the lines the actors have to deal with. Not having seen the Twilight movies, I wasn't familiar with Jackson Rathbone, but he delivers a likeable and sometimes surprising performance, quirky and light, a bit reminiscent of young Johnny Depp. The problem most of the actors face is that the script nearly requires them to seem self-indulgent, like acting students practicing audition monologues.

The problem, yes, is the script.

(Below, I'll be talking about the plot of the movie and story, including the ending. Go away now if you don't like that kind of talk.)

Who Can Kill a Child?

Yes, the title got me.

I knew almost nothing about Narciso Ib獺簽ez Serrador's 1976 movie ¿Qui矇n puede matar a un ni簽o? except that it was a horror movie, and I figured a horror movie with a title like that ought to at least be interesting.  And it is that.

The film has had other titles over the years -- Island of Death, Death is Child's Play, Lucifer's Curse, Los Ni簽os, etc. -- but Who Can Kill a Child? is apparently the original one, and is the one used on the 2007 DVD from Dark Sky Films, the edition I watched.  It's provocative, but it's also perfectly accurate for the movie.

The story is fairly simple: a nice British couple visit Spain and travel to a small, secluded island the husband had visited twelve years before.  When they arrive, the island seems deserted.  The husband says the people often went to festivals on the other side of the island.  Eventually, he and his wife discover the truth: the children of the island have, for mysterious reasons, killed almost all of the adults.  And enjoyed it.

The film would be a somewhat routine (if surprisingly well directed, acted, and filmed) story of demonic children and people trapped somewhere dangerous if Ib獺簽ez Serrador didn't have more on his mind than just shocking an audience.  He did have more on his mind, though, and it is that more that makes the film fascinating -- fascinating both for its content and for what seems to me to be a contradiction between its construction and its theme.

Who Can Kill a Child? doesn't begin right off with its story.  Instead, the first ten minutes presents images of dead or dying children in concentration camps and war zones.  A voiceover tells us that in war and in disasters caused by humans, children are the greatest victims.  Millions and millions of children have died because of adult actions.

From this disturbing black and white imagery, we move to the bright sunlight of Spain and a happy British couple, Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome).  Evelyn is pregnant with their third child.  They enjoy their time in a coastal city, but it's noisy and crowded, so they head off to the island Tom, a biologist, spent time on more than a decade before.  The sunny happiness slowly gives way to sunny anxiety, until Tom and Evelyn discover the secret of the children.  The last third or so of the film is thus all about their attempt to escape, and, naturally, that escape raises the title's question, since it's clear that the only way to escape is to kill some kids.

From the opening sequence and from some statements Ib獺簽ez Serrador has made, it's obvious that part of his intention is to make us realize how hypocritical we adults can be about the killing of children -- most people believe it is absolutely wrong to kill children, but in war children are "collateral damage" and even in peacetime millions of children die from easily-preventable illnesses, so obviously we don't really believe it's unforgiveable to kill them.  In Who Can Kill a Child, the childrens' behavior is never definitively explained, but there's some talk of evolution and adaptation, and in an interview on the DVD, Ib獺簽ez Serrador seems to indicate that, for him, the explanation is that the children have realized (subconsciously, maybe even genetically) that the biggest threats to their existence are adults, and so they are wiping out the threat.  From the opening sequence, Ib獺簽ez Serrador seems to want us to understand that it is in some way or another understandable that children should want to kill adults, since adults kill them so wantonly.

That would certainly be a provocative theme for a movie to develop, but this movie does not really develop it.  Our sympathies as viewers are focused on Tom and Evelyn, while the children are not the least bit sympathetic except for the fact that they are children.  Though she spends at least half of the movie trying to prove she is utterly ignorant of the world and everything around her (presumably because the only way Ib獺簽ez Serrador could think of to make the film long enough was to make at least one of the characters really stupid so lots of time can be spent explaining things to her), Evelyn is by the last part of the movie someone whose welfare we have begun to care about, and Tom seems like a nice enough guy.  The story has mostly been presented through their point of view, making their interpretation of the world is the one the spectators identify with.  What suspense there is in the movie comes from our not wanting them to be harmed.

We don't have any access to the children's inner lives at all and very few of them are named or even differentiated from each other for us.  The boys behave like sullen, petulant brats and the girls giggle and cry, and so all of the children are little more than the most annoying stereotypes of annoying kids.  When Tom and Evelyn are driving all over the island in a Jeep, we're cheering for Tom to just plough through the kids who stand in his way.  Go, Tom, go!  Splat, kid, splat!

Maybe this is the point -- we, the spectators, are put in the position of rooting for children to be killed.  But if Ib獺簽ez Serrador's point is that we should recognize that it would be rational for children to want to kill adults, shouldn't our sympathies instead be with the homicidal kids?  The children in the movie are nothing more than sadistic little demons.  Wouldn't Ib獺簽ez Serrador's point have been made more profoundly and more complexly if we had been brought to see the little demons as sympathic and justified, while the adults deserved their fate?

In the interview on the DVD, Ib獺簽ez Serrador says he thinks the one mistake he made with the film was putting the opening sequence at the beginning rather than the end.  Ending with those scenes of atrocity would have certainly been jarring, and might, indeed, have worked better: we would have been happily cheering on the killing of children, maybe a little uncomfortable at the thought, but nonetheless content that it was all "just a movie" and then we would have had proof that no, in fact, our willingness to kill children is not confined to killing the demonic ones in movies.

Or the effect might have been for us to be annoyed at the false analogy, and to see the film's manipulations as exploitative, sensationalistic, and ridiculous.

Whatever our conclusions about the film's theme, though, it's nice to see a horror film that's thought through the purpose of its violence, even if a bit more thought might have led to a more complex and rewarding experience overall.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome, is a tremendously entertaining and often emotionally affecting story about, among other things, cruelty and pity. King has called Lord of the Flies "the book that changed my life", and its influence feels especially strong here, where a Maine town is turned into an island when a mysterious, invisible dome suddenly covers it, and adults begin to behave like the children in Golding's novel. There are political overtones to the book, with the main villain, "Big Jim" Rennie, sounding an awful lot like Big Dick Cheney; with crisis turned into political opportunity; with fear used as a tool for consolidating power; with brutality replacing sense. These connections to the world outside the book are important, sometimes amusing and sometimes even insightful, but they're also obvious (intentionally so, I'd bet). More complex and interesting is the novel's narrative voice and how it relates to the revelation of what created the Dome.

(It is here, dear reader, that you should depart if you have not read the novel and do not want to learn important details of plot and situation, for I shall soon be writing about some of the primary mysteries of the tale........)

One of the ideas propelling the narrative of Under the Dome is that it is a rare person who will not, under the right circumstances, behave in a cruel and brutal way. There's nothing particularly profound about this -- we all know about the Milgram experiments, after all -- but it's one of those ideas that proves particularly fruitful for storytellers. In Lord of the Flies, Golding found a powerful template for such an idea, and King has extended it to the world of adults, although the adults who are self-reflective and try for decency often think back to the shames and cruelties of childhood. Shame for the decent people usually comes as much from complicity as from the commission of crimes: Dale "Barbie" Barbara, the primary protagonist-hero of Under the Dome carries tremendous guilt for having stood by while soldiers under his command tortured and killed a man in Iraq. Barbie's shame mixes at the end with the very different shame of the other protagonist-hero, Julia, who helps evoke a sort of pity from the alien child controlling the Dome by projecting her memories of abasement at the hands of the children who had attacked her in elementary school along with Barbie's memories of Fallujah, and the effect is to cause the alien child to lift the Dome: "She took pity," Julia says, "but she wasn't sorry." The shame wasn't enough to bridge the gap of species and create empathy, but it is enough to evoke pity and a sort of mercy.

There are more implications in the novel's exploration of such emotions as pity, empathy, and remorse, but the one I found most striking was how the reader becomes implicated by the narrative. The people who get their news of the Dome from CNN are observers, just as the aliens are observers, just as we are observers. We take pity and are not sorry, because this is our entertainment. There's a Hitchcockian element to it all -- reading the book, we share some qualities with the aliens who have set the Dome down on the town of Chester's Mill. The Dome is there in the narrative for our entertainment. The characters suffer and die because we read the words that equal their suffering and death: we create that suffering and death in our minds, and we take some sort of pleasure from the imagining. Julia hears the alien child say, "You aren't real," and "How can you have lives if you aren't real?" Julia tries to convince the alien otherwise, screaming out that she is, indeed, real:

--Prove it [the alien child says.]

--Give me your hand.

--I have no hand. I have no body. Bodies aren't real. Bodies are dreams.

--Then give me your mind!

The child does not. Will not.

So Julia takes it.

The moment can't help but be metafictional. The words we have read are tools that let us imagine a character named Julia, and that imagined character, like all the other characters in the book, has, indeed, taken our mind. If we have read this far, we want her to live. We have developed more feelings for her than the alien child has, though, because we are capable of more than pity -- our minds have turned the words into characters and situations, and those characters and situations have evoked emotions. We have reached the point in the narrative where we want the tension to be released, where we are ready for an end, and so the Dome lifts ... and a few pages later, the book runs out of words.

Thus, King has made us complicit. We are the alien children. Storytelling is an experiment in cruelty. We could have stopped reading at any point. We did not need to imagine the suffering and horrible destruction -- we could have stopped it. But we wanted to see what happened. We wanted to be entertained, amused, to pass some time with this toy of a tale. Fiction is a safe way to enjoy all sorts of things we'd rather not enjoy in life, because it's all make-believe. How can the characters have lives if they aren't real? It's just a story.

The narrative voice supports the metafiction -- it is not invisible. From the earliest pages, the narrator tells us of things that will happen in the future. By page 37 (of the U.S. hardcover) we can't ignore the narrator, who suddenly steps forward:

We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester's Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose.

If the narration has been transparent, it has now revealed itself to be, like the Dome, very hard indeed.

The narrator, being a good storyteller, encourages our fun, popping in now and then to let us know that everything is going to get much worse. If we keep reading and are horrified at the carnage, we cannot say we were not warned.

The citizens of Chester's Mill aren't like ants being tortured and killed by sadistic children, as the survivors think. They're like characters in a novel: their misery is the stuff of someone else's entertainment.

Maybe Aristotle was right, and great tragedy produces some sort of purging of pity and fear. If so, Under the Dome is a great tragedy about great tragedy. Scholars have argued for centuries over who benefits from Aristotle's purgation -- the creator, the characters, the audience? We could argue the same for Under the Dome. For centuries, too, people have debated the uses of art and imagination, the morality of imagining suffering and horror, the complicity of narrative voyeurism.

And yet few of us desire stories where the characters do not face obstacles, do not struggle and suffer, because, alien children that we are, we can't help but want to set down Domes and see what happens.

Ghost Stories

Jeff Ford is looking for recommendations of ghost stories:

My students are presently writing ghost stories. I want to make a list of 10 of the greatest ghost stories for them to check out. What I'm looking for is your absolute favorite one (short story) -- what you believe to be the best ghost story ever written. If you have a suggestion, please post it. No need to mention "The Turn of the Screw" by James -- that's already on the list. For my very favorite, I'm torn between "The Return of Imray" by Kipling and "The Hell Screen" by Akutagawa.

I chimed in with various folks recommending the work of Robert Aickman, a writer I had encountered some years back when I first got a copy of The Dark Descent, but I wasn't a sophisticated enough reader yet to understand his tales, so thought they were pointless and boring. Returning to him this past year, I suddenly discovered he was much more fascinating than I had noticed before, and I dug through various old paperbacks and magazine back issues I had in search of his stories, then found inexpensive used copies of Cold Hand in Mine, Painted Devils, and Night Voices (the latter I got really lucky with after searching the Internet for months for a copy for under $30). Inevitably, some of the stories don't do anything for me, but when I manage to connect with one -- which is more often than not -- the effect is astounding. "The Stains" is my current favorite, one of the most disturbing stories I know, its power in some ways akin to the effect certain of Christopher Priest's novels have on me.

As Jeff says in one of his replies, it would be nice if a publisher in the U.S. would release a book or two of Aickman's work. (In the U.K., there are some Faber & Faber editions still in print.) Surely somebody at a U.S. small press thinks Aickman is worth keeping in print and introducing to a new generation...?

Oh, and if anybody out there is independently wealthy and wants to buy the Collected Strange Stories for me for my birthday, I won't complain...

Blasted Horrors

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted: "Blasted Horrors". Subjects this time around: horror fiction, libraries & children, Stephen King, Sarah Kane's Blasted, Robert Aickman. (For my previous thoughts on Kane, see this post.)

I thought about dedicating this column to Rick Bowes, who went to see Blasted with me in New York this past fall. It's not the sort of play you can invite just anybody to go see with you. Rick was a good sport about it. Then he reported me to the police.

I'll also note that yes, as of right now there is a problem of verb number and agreement in the second sentence. Entirely my fault. I'm terrible with even simple arithmetic. Among the wonders of online publication, though, is that such things can be fixed...

A Conversation with Thomas Ligotti

by Geoffrey H. Goodwin

(Geoffrey Goodwin is going to be popping in here at The Mumpsimus now and then with interviews with a variety of writers. I'm thrilled that the first he has provided for us is an interview with a writer as unique and fascinating as Thomas Ligotti.)

Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Thomas Ligotti are a reasonable list of the three best writers of horror short stories. In the tradition of gnarled minds that scare more with their thinking than with simple shocks, they're almost certainly the ones who matter most.

Ligotti is a genius at exploring emptiness and nothingness. He has committed his life to rejecting life. It's harder than it sounds. His stories take place in a "world forever reverberant with the horror of all who ever have lived and suffered" (a phrase taken from "We Can Hide from Horror Only in the Heart of Horro: Notes and Aphorisms", excerpts from his notebooks from circa 1976-1982). His many books, including recent works like The Shadow at The Bottom of The World, Teatro Grottesco, and Death Poems, are often released as limited editions that become totemic objects for his readers.

Ligotti's is an important and vital voice, though one that speaks most loudly to a certain and rarified sense of darkness. He has been included in numerous anthologies and been a nominee for and winner of multiple awards, but his focus on the horror of pain, suffering, and death have kept him from coming anywhere close to the mainstream. His long essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (still awaiting publication) will shatter those who embrace it fully.

What led to your writing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race?

I could recite a litany of reasons for my writing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but the most immediate cause was my reading an essay written in 1933 called “The Last Messiah” by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. Down the ages, pessimistic writers and thinkers have wailed that our lives are predominantly characterized by meaningless suffering and therefore everyone would be better off not to have been born. This is sometimes referred to as a hedonist view of existence, and for one reason or another practically no one is persuaded that there’s anything to it. Even if someone grants that life is mostly, or even entirely, a trail of tears with nothing but death at the end, they still don’t feel that being alive is not worth it. They’ll carry on till the end and pass on this legacy to another generation, perhaps thinking that somehow things will get better.

My own long-held view was that even if suffering as we ordinarily conceive it could be wholly eliminated, there would still be a differential among the pleasures in our lives. The consequence of this would be that some pleasures would be greater than others, and the lesser pleasures would then come to be felt as suffering. You could also turn this around and say that in a world of all-pervasive but variegated suffering, some ways of suffering would be felt to be worse than others, making the lesser sufferings perceptible as pleasures. One solution to this state of affairs seemed to be the achievement of a steady state of non-suffering. Of course, the problem is that to attain a tolerable middle ground between pleasure and suffering isn’t possible without the experience of pleasure on the one side and suffering on the other. This is assuming that we could live under laboratory conditions in which pleasure and suffering, or degrees of pleasure and suffering, could be controlled by some means presently unknown, unworkable, or underdeveloped. That would be a fantastical scenario, of course.

Other solutions that occurred to me were also more or less fantastic or futuristic. Among them was a psychophysical apparatus that could be implanted in us so that we could live much as we do now, except that whenever a certain level of suffering was reached, a combination of mood elevators and, if necessary, painkilling drugs would be released into our system in proportion to our suffering. These agents could also be regulated to work disproportionately as we approached death, thus assuring us that we would leave this world in a state of ecstasy. No one would ever have to witness the agony of a loved one dying from natural causes or imagine the horror of someone close to them who has died from gruesome accidental causes, since they would comforted by the knowledge of an anti-suffering apparatus functioning in the moribund or traumatized individual as well as having their anxiety assuaged by their own anti-suffering mechanisms. Now, the methods outlined here are just extensions of present-day strategies for bettering our lives, and those of future generations, and operate on the premise that suffering has negligible value or none at all. They’re also based on the same hedonist philosophy that, taken to sufficient lengths, is the basis for pessimism.

But hedonism as a life-philosophy isn’t limited to pessimists. All spiritual beliefs and practices originate in hedonist values and they’re not condemned as pessimistic. What could be more hedonistic than to be addicted to the idea of heaven or Nirvana? Belief in an afterlife is a great Plan B if things don’t work out so well for you in this one. And why even believe in a blissful afterlife, or in the salvation of total oblivion if you happen to be a Buddhist, unless you’re already committed to the view that this life is pretty lousy? Nevertheless, this isn’t how religionists consciously look upon human existence, at least most of the time. As far as atheists are concerned, they just have to hope for the best for themselves and for those who mean anything to them. This is the substance of what I would call "functional optimism" -- the idea that on the whole things aren’t so bad and won’t ever become so bad that everyone would be better off not having been born. And it’s impossible to effectively oppose that way of thinking. It really doesn’t work to tell someone who’s already alive that it’s better not to have been born. They’ve already been born. It’s too late for them. So they make the best of things. They try to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Even pessimists for the most part follow this course. It would be suicide not to, and committing suicide is really hard to pull off in cold blood. Almost no one kills themselves because they think nonexistence is preferable to existence, or because they want to avoid any extraordinary psychological or physical suffering that may be awaiting them. Suicides wait until things are so awful that they can’t stand being alive anymore. Sometimes they’ll kill themselves when it looks like things are going to become really awful in the near future, but there are a lot of pressures against being a proactive suicide. And when it comes around to facing the facts, almost everyone is afraid of death, so they do what they can to hang on as long as they can. They choose the path that they perceive to lead to the lesser of two horrors and keep following it until they keel over dead. And no hedonistic philosophy is going to convince them or anyone else that this isn’t the way to go.

Zapffe was the first pessimistic philosopher to my knowledge who actually came up with a non-hedonist reason for why it would be better not to have been born and not to give birth to others. His observation was that human consciousness, an evolved trait of our species, turned our existence into an untenable paradox. According to Zapffe, it’s one thing to experience suffering and then die. But it’s quite another thing to be acutely conscious that this is our life -- to be aware that we suffer for no good reason and have only a decline into death, or death by trauma, to look forward to. In order to cope with our consciousness of these realities, then, we must smother our consciousness as best we can by using various tactics. The result is a whole species of beings that have to lie unceasingly to themselves, not always successfully, about what they are and what their lives are really like. If we didn’t so this, the rug would be pulled out from under us and we’d have to face up to the fact that we’re a race that can’t come to terms with its existence. Thus we devise ways to mute, distract, and otherwise obfuscate our consciousness so that it doesn’t overwhelm us with what we’re up against in being alive. This line of thought goes beyond hedonism by exposing us as creatures who bullshit themselves a mile a minute in order to keep going. This bullshit takes various forms. Primary among them are simply ignoring that there is anything problematic about our existence, indulging in pleasurable distractions, creating bogus structures of meaning such as a pleasant afterlife in which the books will be balanced for the suffering we endure in this life, and transmuting our suffering into works of art and philosophy wherein we distance ourselves from what real suffering is and in the process reform it into a source of amusement. Even pessimists who believe they have gone the distance of realizing that we lead lives of meaningless suffering are caught up in this game and must brutalize their consciousness into submission or feel the full force of the reality that all our so-called pleasures are based on lies. The only solution to this conundrum, as Zapffe saw it, would be to bring an end to this festival of falsehoods by ceasing to reproduce.

Now, every reading of human life is subject to alternate or contrary readings, and so is Zapffe’s. But his reading captivated me, because I was already predisposed to believe that life was at best worthless and at worst an intolerable nightmare. In essence, Zapffe’s philosophy became another source of bullshit that kept me going so that I could articulate the many aspects of my own grievances against being alive and, I hope, extend or give a greater rhetorical force to what Zapffe had written in "The Last Messiah." I might add that the title character of this essay appears at the end, tells everyone to stop being fruitful and multiplying, and then is murdered for his trouble. Given Zapffe’s reading of the way we are, no other conclusion except utter hopelessness that we will ever change our ways is possible. We’re positively doomed to live and wallow in our own bullshit until we become extinct as a species by one of the many means that have led to the extinction of almost every other species on this planet.

When did you first read Peter Wessel Zappfe's essay, "The Last Messiah?"

I read it not long after it was published in the March/April 2004 issue of the British journal Philosophy Now. Later that year I began work on The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

Does this mean that Zappfe's work was a confirmation of things that you already knew or were aware of?

I hadn’t conceived of the paradox that Zapffe explained had been incited by the development of consciousness in the human species. Nevertheless, I did feel that being conscious was not a good thing. In my story "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech," there’s a dummy who suffers for having been awakened into awareness. I just thought of consciousness as a source of suffering rather than as a faculty that made all human existence into a tissue of lies, which was Zapffe’s idea. While it’s not invulnerable to argument -- as is no concept in philosophy -- this idea provided me with a basis for my generic pessimism, which, as I’ve already said, is not conceptually defensible. I could rant on a daily basis that, as Lovecraft wrote in one of his stories, "life is a hideous thing." But anyone could come along and say, "What are you talking about? Everything is beautiful. I’m having the time of my life being alive." There’s no reply to that. You can just say, "Well, if everything is beautiful, even on every other day, then you’re just not paying attention." But Zapffe’s reply was that not only is everything not beautiful, no one actually believes it’s beautiful even if they say they do. All of our actions bear witness to this observation. In a single essay, which was later expanded as a treatise titled On the Tragic, Zapffe beat the stuffing out of the theory on which Arthur Schopenhauer expatiated for thousands of pages -- that everything in the universe is activated by a "Will-to-live," a transcendental force that works the world like a cosmic puppet show. Schopenhauer’s Will does have its appeal, because if you accept it, then everything that once seemed mysterious makes perfect sense. If you ever wondered why things are the way they are or why people do the things the things they do, it all goes back to the Will, which is pulling all the strings. Intellectually and emotionally, it’s very satisfying. The problem is that Schopenhauer’s system only works on paper and can’t be detected as being part of existence any more than a creator-God.

Zapffe’s thought is very down to earth. You can experience how being conscious ruins human life by taking it out of nature, where the imperative of every living thing is simply to survive and reproduce. Human beings, on the other hand, can ask themselves what they are, why they’re alive, what happens after death, and so on. Since there aren’t any credible answers to these questions, we make up answers for the purpose of shutting down our consciousness as much as possible. At the same time, we busy ourselves with all sorts of projects and playthings just to wile away our time, also for the purpose of repressing our consciousness as creatures who know they’re alive and know they’re going to die. At any rate, the whole endeavor of being human is reduced to trying not to be human, which is very messed up. This allows Zapffe to go all the way and make the pessimist’s signature pronouncement -- that instead of continuing to carry on, we should be getting down to giving up on life. Naturally, this line of thought will not sway anyone who thinks that everything is beautiful, or that anything is beautiful, but it does takes pessimism another step forward, which is admittedly something that concerns only other pessimists.

Before reading Zapffe, I too was aware of my life as a series of distractions and denials that staved off thoughts of the terrible things that could happen to me and of my impending death. I was also sensitive, probably overly so, that these terrible things could happen and in fact were happening everywhere in the world. They had always been happening and, barring some radical change in material existence, would continue to happen until doomsday. I knew that I needed something to take my mind off these things and discover some immediate pretext for being alive. I also knew that I was just biding my time until something terrible came along and I snuffed it, something that would probably happen only after I had to watch those to whom I had become attached in one way or another had snuffed it. One of those terrible things, among others, that actually did come along in my life was major depression. This is sometimes called the common cold of mental diseases, but that’s not how it feels to those who suffer from it. Aside from its other effects, depression has a philosophical effect to it that other kinds of pain do not, and its implications very much changed my sense of what it was like to be alive in the world. In depression, everything is just what it seems to be: a tree is just a tree and not something that arouses symbolic meanings or affective associations. Life itself becomes very transparent in all its aspects to a depressive. There aren’t any mysteries left, since all mysteries come from within us. We’re mystery-making machines, and we project a sense of mystery onto a world that has no such thing behind or within it. Certain questions remain that may one day be answered or may not be answered. Either way it doesn’t matter to a depressive.

Recent movements such as transhumanism and abolitionism project a future in which suffering will be transcended with drugs and technology. There’s a guy named David Pearce who runs a Web site called The Hedonistic Imperative, and he very articulately insists that the only worthy goal in human life is that of feeling good all the time. Of course, this is the goal that everyone is concerned with in their lives, but Pearce argues that this could be more effectively and speedily attained by entirely artificial means. The fact that these people are obsessed with making a serious attempt to abolish human suffering, and to establish this aim as the central project of their lives, is nice to see. Thus far in human history, people have put their effort into curing diseases that make us dysfunctional and unproductive or that are obstacles to increasing our longevity. There hasn’t been much interest in confronting human suffering as such. Paradoxically, should the efforts of those who want to annihilate suffering succeed, it could be the end of us as a species. We would be returned to paradise. And reproduction would be irrelevant in a paradisal landscape where all dreams have been satisfied and all fears quashed.

You're best known for writing horror stories and poems. Did The Conspiracy Against the Human Race feel like a different endeavor, even though it was an obvious continuation of certain themes in your work?

Writing Conspiracy was different from writing horror stories in the following way. For me, a story usually has its inception in something irrational -- a dream, an image, a phrase that doesn’t make any sense. This irrational germ for a story will be something that I feel is dense with meaning and possibilities, even if I know it’s going to end up as a horror story. Then some element of the story pokes its head out -- a character, a setting, a particular scene in the narrative -- and everything comes together very quickly. I’m definitely a didactic writer in that my stories can be reduced to some point that I’m trying to get across, something that emerges in the course of elaborating its narrative elements. I may start a story in the irrational, but unlike a lot of writers I’m not content to let a story be its own meaning. I have to move from the irrational to the rational. With Conspiracy, I started in the rational and stayed there. It was kind of like working in two dimensions instead of three. All the force of Conspiracy had to come from concepts and rhetoric, both of which are prominent in my stories. But the imaginative landscape was missing. There wasn’t a sense of being in a world inside of my head as I wrote. It was more like writing a poem, which for me is an elaboration of an idea. I may start a poem with a single line that fits somewhere into the poem, but that line will make sense conceptually. So writing Conspiracy was like writing a very long poem.

What do you think readers will make of it?

I can only say with any degree of confidence what one faction of readers will make of it. Those are people who have read my horror stories and enjoyed them not in spite of their bleak quality but because of it. An analogy could be drawn with fans of Lovecraft’s stories, who read them for their charming regionalism, their mythology of monsters, or for their unusually literate nature -- something prized by readers who are generally well read yet still have a weakness for the horror genre -- or some combination of these and other characteristics of his work. But they don’t read them as expressions of Lovecraft’s vision of human beings as bits of inconsequential organic material quivering in a black infinity that occasionally throws some phenomenon our way that is completely alien to the settled structures of our existence, as if to say: "You can just forget everything you thought you knew about yourselves and everything else in the universe. You know nothing. You are nothing. And the choices you have for dealing with this reality are to go insane or kill yourselves. How about them apples?" This can be a rather consoling vision to those readers who already think as much and are grateful that someone else out there felt the same and had the nerve to make it the basis of his art. I was one of those readers. It was a great relief to discover the writings of someone who didn’t go for the same consolations as most of the rest of the world, even if the consolations they did go for were no less questionable. I think that some of my readers look at my stories similarly. And those are the ones who will appreciate Conspiracy. As for anyone else, I couldn’t say. The book could very well be judged as badly done on its own terms. It would also be easy for anyone to dismiss it by saying that its author is just a nutjob and has always been a nutjob who should be pitied or justly derogated or simply ignored. I would be in no position to argue with such an assessment, since the general estimation of the reading public about themselves and their existence is so different from mine. I myself don’t believe that my experience itself is so different from that of most people, but the conclusions I’ve drawn from my experience are indeed quite different. Furthermore, the whole point of Conspiracy is that pessimism as a resolute life-stance is not welcome to the minds very many people, even when it’s laid out as entertainingly as possible, which I’ve tried to do. But pessimistic works have never been well received as a rule. And I’m not na簿ve enough to think that it could ever be any other way.

A Conversation with Joe Hill

Joe Hill has been quietly publishing short fiction for the past few years, with each new story causing more and more people to say, "Who is this guy?" The release this fall of his first collection, 20th Century Ghosts, brought a lot more attention, because the book included some excellent original stories and some other stories that had been published in obscure places. With all of these tales gathered together, it became clear to any reader that Joe Hill's work is thoughtful, subtle, vividly imaginative, and yet grounded in an emotional reality that can be remarkably moving, but not sentimental. The best of his tales are models of what can be accomplished with the short story form.

You've been pegged at times as a horror writer, though clearly you've written all different sorts of fiction. Is there a label you like for the kind of writing you do?

I was having dinner with some publishing people and one of them, an editor, asked me how I'd describe what I write. I said I mostly did two kinds of fiction, fantasy and magic realism. So he asked me what the difference was, and I said if I published a story in a genre magazine it was fantasy, but if I published it in a literary journal, it was magic realism. That's the difference.

I read an essay about six years ago, by Bernard Malamud, "Why Fantasy?" Malamud basically made an argument that every fictional world is an artificial construction, a work of fantasy. The world in Norman Mailer's fiction isn't any more real or valid or "true" than the world Lewis Carroll wrote about. Mailer's characters only seem more real because they're more familiar. Whereas no one has ever run into a talking white rabbit. Malamud's position was that writers should be willing to use all the tools offered by the imagination, to explore the fantastic and the surreal. And his reasoning really freed me to be myself, to write about ghosts and inflatable children and murderous man-eating locusts.

Before encountering Malamud's essay, why had you avoided fantasy elements in your writing? What caused that restriction for you?

Fear. I was trying to play it safe. For example, I wrote a story called "The Entire Weight of Tacoma" about a man in late middle-age coming to terms with the idea that he's at least partly to blame for the disaster his grown-up daughter has made of her life. It was well-written, on a sentence-by-sentence level. It was psychologically convincing, I think. It was safe...it was a story I could show to any editor at any literary journal in the country, without fear of embarrassment. It had only one problem. It was boring. I didn't want to risk anything -- of myself. I was afraid to ask interesting questions because I was worried I hadn't lived enough to provide interesting answers.

It's probably no accident that I've written all my best stuff since I became a dad. Having a kid -- that's taking a real risk. It probably helped me see that the kind of gambles I was afraid of taking in my fiction were really no big deal. What, is someone going to tell me I'm uncool because I wrote a ghost story? I am uncool. Fathers are the uncoolest people in the world.

Were the writers you read primarily mainstream?

I used to read everything. D.H. Lawrence. Elizabethan poetry. Modern short fiction collections about suburban malaise. But ever since I had my first son, there's been a definite swing in my reading habits. I have three boys now, and maybe it's all the testosterone in the house, but these days I mostly stick to manfiction. Elmore Leonard. Walter Mosley. James Ellroy.

I don't read too much of what's commonly labeled horror fiction, or fantasy. I don't know why. I usually like it when I do. I just started Anansi Boys, and if I had the time, I'd sit around and read that all day.

In the story note to "Pop Art", you write, "As patiently as I worked at [my mainstream] stories, few of them ever seemed satisfying to me. They refused to come to life, to surprise and excite, in the way of short stories by the likes of Ethan Canin, Richard Bausch or Tobias Wolff." What qualities make a story come to life for you?

There's really two things, and they have to work in concert. They're like positive and negative on a battery, and without one, you've got no charge.

Before I can get started on a story there has to be a hook, a concept that feels fresh and exciting. But it can't just be a clever idea for its own sake. Somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that a story has to be about more than just itself... that it has to ask the kind of questions that maybe can't be answered.

So in "20th Century Ghost," the hook was this: what if someone loved the movies so much, they went on visiting their favorite theater even after they died? But along the way, the story wound up looking at some other, bigger, more meaningful questions. Like what happens to us after we die? And why are movies (and other works of art) so important to us anyway?

So that's one thing I need, a hook I can use to snag some interesting thematic material. The other thing, though, is I need a main character with something interesting going on inside. A lot of the people I write about are not living the lives they want to be living. They've painted themselves into corners. They're their own worst enemies. They drive away the people who want to help them, burn bridges, blow off their futures. And if they do happen to be happy, or content, or lucky, then they're willing to do awful things to stay that way. I don't mean to say that all my characters are anti-heroes, or villains. That's a kind of black-and-white thinking I try to avoid. I mean they're in jeopardy. I like to write about people who are morally or spiritually or psychologically adrift, because right from the start I'm rooting for them to make themselves well, to find their way out of the hole they've dug for themselves. Some of them don't, but I always hope.

How did you go about finding markets for your stories? Did you have any trouble placing them?

For a long time I couldn't sell a story to save my life. I was lucky to manage one story acceptance a year. But there's been a steady shift ever since I wrote "20th Century Ghost" about four years ago. I wrote it very quickly. Everything just dropped into place. And right from the start, it seemed to work in some way a lot of my other stuff didn't.

"Ghost" sold the third place I sent it -- to a lit. magazine, The High Plains Literary Review. I can't remember what I wrote right after it. "You Will Hear The Locust Sing," I think. And that sold quickly as well.

When I was writing more mainstream stuff, I saw a lot of warm, supportive, personal rejections. Editors liked my stories, but something was missing. I wasn't excited about them, that's what was missing. Those mainstream stories were muscle cars with no fuel in the tank. The fantasy element was a hit of high octane. So lately it's become much easier to place my stories. With a little luck, hopefully I can continue to build on the good things that have come my way in the last couple years.

What sort of high octane does fantasy add to your writing?

On a practical level, it tends to create situation. Fantasy involves asking an interesting what-if. What if you went to a movie, and someone sat down next to you and started whispering to you, and then you realized the person talking to you was dead? That you were being whispered to by a ghost? Now you've got somewhere to go. You need to answer that question.

On an emotional level, introducing an element of fantasy helps to remind me what I'm doing. That I'm sitting down to perform an act of make-believe. Right from the start I have to put any idea of playing it safe out of my head. I try always to take some big leap of the imagination on the very first page. I'm either telling you something incredible -- "when I was in junior high, my best friend was an inflatable boy" -- or I'm putting the main character in terrible, unlikely danger. Like at the beginning of "The Black Phone," when the kidnapper sprays John Finney in the face with a can of wasp poison. Either way, we're putting the pedal down and leaving normal behind as quickly as possible.

How did the collection come about?

My agent said it would be a hard sell and he was right. The conventional wisdom is that there isn't any kind of market for a first book of stories. That you can only launch a writer with a novel. Part of me questions that, especially when you're talking about short stories of the supernatural. Kelly Link did pretty well with Stranger Things Happen. And Clive Barker made out okay with Books of Blood.

Anyway, 20th Century Ghosts was turned down by all of the big mainstream publishers. Quickly. But it was a different story on the small press level. Pete Crowther at PS Publishing had a look, and really liked it, came on with a lot of enthusiasm. As a writer of surreal and fantastic tales himself, he just responded to what was going on in the stories. But every small press editor who looked at it -- Richard Chizmar, Bill Schafer, Paul Miller -- responded with interest and excitement. They're a remarkable bunch... I'd throw Kelly Link and Gavin Grant in there too. They play an entirely different game than the editors at the big publishing houses. The guys with the small presses, they get excited about a book and they want to publish it. They don't stop to think how much money they're going to lose.

How did you go about organizing the contents of the collection?

Well, another thing I picked up while poring over Malamud's essays is his idea that a collection should be a single, unified, artistic statement, just like a novel...not an archive of each and every story you've written in however many years. I was choosy about what I put in. And I tried to make sure that each story pointed to the story that followed it, in some way. So "Pop Art" is about an inflatable boy, an eleven-year-old kid made out of plastic and filled with air. He's hated and feared and lonely, the ultimate outsider. The story after it is "You Will Hear The Locust Sing" about another outsider, a greasy, abused loner who turns into a man-eating insect out of a 1950s giant bug movie. There are a lot of upsetting father issues in "Locust" and so the story after it is "Abraham's Boys," which is about the difficult relationship between Van Helsing and his two teenage sons.

Because most of the stories had been previously published, there wasn't a whole lot of editing to do. The stories pretty much were what they were.

I did do some more work on the collection, though, after Pete accepted it for publication. "The Cape" was a last minute add, something I wrote a few months before the book went to press. "Scheherazade's Typewriter," the hidden story, also went in relatively late, although the story itself was over two years old. "Typewriter" was originally twenty-five pages long, and I considered it a failure, a story that didn't do any of the things I wanted it to do. It went in a drawer but I never forget about it. Then, a few months after I sold the book, I tried rewriting "Scheherazade's Typewriter" from scratch. I didn't even reread my first draft, just worked from memory. And I was able to polish the story off in only five pages and this time it felt right.

Are there any plans for a U.S. release?

I don't know. It isn't too hard to get a copy over here if you want one. You can find the book at -- koff koff -- Amazon UK, Shocklines, or order straight from the PS website. If Pete sells out, that'll be the time to think about another, possibly American edition.