“And from the corner of my eye I see him, a vague midge-infested shape rising slowly out of the shallows. Fear grips me; I cannot turn my head to look at him. He sits up in the brackish water, skin and leaves and stones and fallen branches tumbling from his body like clothing discarded hastily during a one-night stand. And without looking, I sense that he is waiting for me to come to him.

Finally, when the ferocious sound of the traffic dies, I strain the muscles in my neck to look his way. But he is gone; and all that remains is the suggestion of his shape in the muggy air, a ghost formed by those droning airborne insects: arms outstretched in a waiting embrace, head thrown back for a kiss”. – from “The Shallows”

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your contribution to the Unspeakable Horror anthology.

Gary McMahon: "The Shallows" was originally planned as a simple coming-of-age story with a twist. The first draft featured a heterosexual protagonist, and the thing simply didn’t work: it was far too obvious. I was pleased with the mood and the flow of the prose, but the actually story refused to gel. Then, when I read the guidelines for the anthology, everything clicked immediately into place. The sexual elements of the tale took on a new shape and the theme of the story became one of sexual confusion rather than your standard rite de passage.

Dark Scribe: Which fellow contributor’s story are you most looking forward to reading yourself?

Gary McMahon: I can’t wait to read Sarah Langan’s story, because everyone keeps saying how good she is and I’ve yet to read anything by her. Oh, and Lee Thomas, for the same reason.

Dark Scribe: What’s your most memorable literary or cinematic closet?

Gary McMahon: Well, that’s got to be Stephen King’s The Bogeyman…or that nerve-shredding scene near the end of John Carpenter’s Halloween! God that scared the hell out of me when I first saw it, on a flickering black and white portable TV in bed late one night.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Gary McMahon: I’m currently working on my second novel, provisionally titled All Dead Things.

Dark Scribe: What’s one thing that readers would be surprised to find in your own closet?

Gary McMahon: A row of skeletons, all hanging in a neat line. (laughs)

Dark Scribe: What makes closets such a popular device in horror?

Gary McMahon: That’s easy. Dark, tight space. The smell of old clothes. The whisper of jangling coat hangers. That odd bundle in the corner, the one that almost seems to twitch when you turn out the light. The broken clasp; the creaky hinge. The way the door seems to gape open a little when you’re lying in bed, in the dark. The shadow that looks like a hand creeping slowly round the doorframe…

More about Gary McMahon

"My dead lover waited behind the apartment door. Up the stairs, key in the lock – before I noticed her faint glow spreading on the floor and darkness illuminated in something not quite light. When I reached for the switch it was her voice that said, "Stop."

She had arrived unannounced, continuing an old habit even after death. Diaphanous and naked, she floated toward me with her arms outstretched. I stood where I was, at once curious and somewhat indignant.

I had no reason to run, I told myself. Not when she had haunted me so much while she was still alive." – from “Memento Mori”

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your contribution to the Unspeakable Horror anthology.

Elissa Malcohn: How far are you willing to go for love, especially when your beloved is more true to herself and more vulnerable dead than alive? "Memento Mori" chronicles a brief encounter between two women on opposite sides of the great divide. They must answer that question for themselves in a world where love, carelessly expressed, can destroy them both.

Dark Scribe: Which fellow contributor’s story are you most looking forward to reading yourself?

Elissa Malcohn: Honestly, I can't pick one. My publications stretch back to the 1970s, but “Memento Mori" is my horror fiction debut. I look forward to sampling the range of talent in all the stories from fellow contributors.

Dark Scribe: What’s your most memorable literary or cinematic closet?

Elissa Malcohn: I recently finished reading Christopher Barzak's One for Sorrow, which blew me away. His closets serve an important function, but the book in its entirety is a stunning ghost story with tremendous sensual and emotional depth.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Elissa Malcohn: I'm currently writing the seventh and final volume of my Deviations series (the second volume, Deviations: Appetite, is forthcoming from Aisling Press), and I continue to work on short fiction and poetry projects.

Dark Scribe: What’s one thing that readers would be surprised to find in your own closet?

Elissa Malcohn: A horde of killer dust bunnies.(On second thought, maybe they wouldn't be surprised.) I long-ago removed the doors from my studio closet, which stores writing and art supplies. My mixed-media art includes dropped bird feathers, shed cat fur, human hair, and objects I find in the shadows of the street.

Dark Scribe: Have you ever been stuck in a closet of your own?

Elissa Malcohn: No, but I accidentally shut a classmate inside a coat closet in the second grade. In those days, I had the job of pulling its heavy wooden doors along metal tracks and I took my responsibility very seriously – so I was horrified to hear his shout after I'd closed him in. Even though he and the other kids laughed the incident off, I'd been traumatized. I've since gotten over it.

More about Elissa Malcohn

"Hobgoblins, knockers, bugbears and hobhoulards. Boguests, bullbeggars and gallytrots. My mother, Kiki Steadman, believed in them all, but the doctor said they were just lesions on her brain – phantoms fueled by morphine.

But I knew better, having spent a lifetime listening to her talk about the Beasts of the Old World. Kiki always claimed she liked to try out her faery anthropology lectures on me because I was such a great listener, but I knew why she came into my room instead of my sister's. Lacy had always belonged to our father, even after the crash took him away, and I had always belonged to Kiki, the only person in the world who knew what I was.” – From “Black Annis”

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your contribution to the Unspeakable Horror anthology.

Joy Marchand: "Black Annis" is about a teenage boy who inherits a Victorian house in Salem with his older sister, Lacy, who isn't supportive of his sexuality. While moving into the house, Winter discovers that the oak tree in the front yard is occupied by a heterophobic hag named Black Annis. When high school thugs nearly bash him to death, Winter and his new boyfriend Russell summon Black Annis to exact their revenge. As you might expect, things don't go as planned. This story is about coming out – the fear, and the risks – but it's also about finding the strength and the courage to maintain your dignity when those around you are bent on taking it away.

Dark Scribe: Which fellow contributor's story are you most looking forward to reading yourself?

Joy Marchand: I'm most looking forward to reading "A Letter from Phoenix," by Kealan Patrick Burke. I first heard his name back in 2005, my first trip to the World Horror Convention. People spoke his name with what passes for reverence in those often drunken, deeply sardonic circles, and I've been looking forward to reading something of his ever since.

Dark Scribe: What's your most memorable literary or cinematic closet?

Joy Marchand: Though I do watch horror films, the closets I find the most frightening are the metaphorical ones. In "Wilde," when Oscar Wilde is tried for gross indecency, he chooses to fight the charge but is convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor. There is a scene where Stephen Fry, as Wilde, is stepping on a mill wheel and it's as if he's suffering a particularly vicious example of contrapasso — doomed by capricious gods to go around and around and around because he refused to live "straight," and refused to admit that his homosexual feelings were "evil." Collective, anonymous ill-will toward adult, consensual sexuality of any flavor is more terrifying to me than any movie monster or spooky closet could ever be (though the clown in Poltergeist did, admittedly, scare the crap out of me as a child).

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Joy Marchand: As per the usual, I'm working on several short stories and several poems, while poking at several novel ideas with a long, sharp stick. I'm finding it a challenge to make the leap from the short form to the long, so I've had quite a few false starts. Actually, I've had about a quarter million words of false novel starts. I hope saying this in public will spur me to finish a novel-length work. But I suspect I'm just a masochistic exhibitionist. Oh! Perhaps I should write a novel about a masochistic exhibitionist!

Dark Scribe: What's one thing that readers would be surprised to find in your own closet?

Joy Marchand: Considering my liberal politics, probably my dress green Army uniform. I've made my peace with my aborted military career as a Russian linguist, and the only alarming thing about the uniform is that I'm can't imagine how I ever squeezed my body into it in the first place. I'm thinking of giving it away to some color-blind, fashion-challenged, emaciated, economically-disadvantaged waif, but then I'd deprive myself of the joy of trying it on once a year and measuring the widening chasm between the brass buttons and the button-holes.

Dark Scribe: Have you ever been stuck in a closet of your own?

Joy Marchand: Why, yes! Thank you for asking. My various closets are nested like matryoshka dolls. The entrance leads to a labyrinth, which is guarded by a polyamorous triad of pansexual minotaurs. Please don't send a copy of this anthology to my mother.

More about Joy Marchand

“He seemed more coherent this night than any of the last, though he began his rambling tale the same as he always had. He spoke of injuries done to him by Fortunato, and a vow of vengeance. The story continued, following the predictable pattern, but somehow, perhaps it was just the look in his eyes, perhaps it was a clarity in language or speech, Vittorio began to get the feeling that he was understanding more this time than he had over the past night's listenings. It was a Byzantine mix of mumblings and explications not all entirely audible, but Vittorio began to catch glimpses of what vengeance Montressor had had in mind.” – From “Cask”

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your contribution to the Unspeakable Horror anthology.

Jude Wright: My story is basically the product of a couple of semesters teaching Edgar Alan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado". That story is widely read as a story about psychological repression, and a queer take on it seemed quite appropriate considering the bewildering relationship between the narrator and Fortunato, his victim. So my story is in many ways a re-telling of "Amontillado" within a queer context. With revenants!

Dark Scribe: Which fellow contributor’s story are you most looking forward to reading yourself?

Jude Wright: I'm excited about many of the stories in the anthology, but I think I'm most interested in Lee Thomas' piece. I particularly liked his story "An Apiary of White Bees" in [Ellen] Datlow's Inferno.

Dark Scribe: What’s your most memorable literary or cinematic closet? [Book or film with a closet scene that frightened/made an impression on you]

Jude Wright: Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves comes to mind. At the heart of its layers of narrative is a closet-like space which spontaneously appears in the house on Ash Tree Lane and, in turn, leads the Navidson family into the ever-shifting labyrinth the story concerns. The discovery of that closet hit me pretty hard (as did the rest of the novel). Of course there are others that come to mind as well. The closet scene in John Carpenter's Halloween is a classic. And whatever the film’s flaws, the closet sequence in Haute Tension was pretty much as tense as one could get.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Jude Wright: I've got a story in the Holy Horrors anthology edited by T.M. Wright and Matt Cardin, due out next year. Presently I'm finishing up a horror novel entitled Hallowed focusing on gang culture and the cult of Santa Muerte.

Dark Scribe: What’s one thing that readers would be surprised to find in your own closet?

Jude Wright: That I'm a sentimentalist at heart: I cried at Finding Neverland.

Dark Scribe: What makes closets such a popular device in horror?

Jude Wright: Closets function in a couple of different ways, which I'm sure will be explored extensively in this anthology. As children, closets – and the underside of the bed – are the dark and concealed spaces in our rooms. They are also the places where we hide things. Often those two ideas are linked. We are afraid of what we are, of our secret selves. The closet is an excellent trope for repression. We can close the door, lock it, or in the case of my story wall it up, but what's in the closet is still there aching for the light of day.

More about Jude Wright

“I may not be very poetically-minded but this sleeping beauty nearly moved me to laud his body in verse and rhyme: his short-cut dark hair, his face, which he concealed in his arms, his muscular neck, his tanned shoulders, back and legs, and, of course, his white buttocks, the only place that the sun had been unable to touch him over the summer months and which seemed to be sculpted from marble. White, virginal marble from the quarries of Carrara that can be descried from the beach; white, veined marble that seemed all the whiter and flawless against the bronzed colour of the rest of his young, unblemished skin and the deep red of his bathing towel.” – From “Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty”

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your contribution to the Unspeakable Horror anthology.

Jan Vander Laenen: I wrote the story [originally titled] “The Sleeping Beauty” back in 1996 in Viareggio, Italy, where I was then living with my Italian lover. It’s all about a closeted, middle-class, married Flemish man who commits a crime of délit de non-assistance, or not helping a person who is in danger of dying. My father recognized himself in the story and got furious — we haven’t seen each other since then.

Dark Scribe: Which fellow contributor's story are you most looking forward to reading yourself?

Jan Vander Laenen: Since I’m from overseas , I look forward to reading the entire anthology.

Dark Scribe: What's your most memorable literary or cinematic closet?

Jan Vander Laenen: Maybe the final, lesbian scene in Polanski’s Lunes de fiel (Bitter Moon), or the Pasolini movie Salò.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Jan Vander Laenen: I finished a fifty-story collection , A Brussels Trilogy , in 2006 . Since then , I have been writing fifteen stories for another collection, Tales of an Aging Gay . I’m also working on a supernatural thriller around the concept of mirror gazing, and a play around the Belgian – and very Romantic and macabre – painter Antoine Wiertz (1805-1865) .

Dark Scribe: What's one thing that readers would be surprised to find in your own closet?

Jan Vander Laenen: Maybe some unconfessed erotic fantasies...

Dark Scribe: What makes closets such a popular device in horror?

Jan Vander Laenen: Closets generate pressure, which has to be relieved in – generally – a horrific way, and they create epiphanies and uncontrolled behavior.

More about Jan Vander Laenen