"The Agathas were born wrong. Their tiny, elf-like bodies, the bald patches along their crowns, and their translucent eyes all bore the mark of the dispossessed. Even the coincidence of their shared name, everyone in the town of Split understood, was bad luck.

They entered the world at the same time, on different sides of town. Each wore a caul, sticky and thin as cobweb. Midwives rubbed their faces with parchment, and pulled back the layers of skin shaped like infants’ faces. These they burned, so that hobgoblins did not climb up from abandoned quarry holes at twilight, and use them as molds for demon children. Despite their rubbing, bits of umbilical skin remained. Neither Agatha cried as they were slapped into the world. Instead, they opened their eyes that reflected light like oil spills, and watched." – from “The Agathas”

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

Sarah Langan: I get sick of hearing people talk about the will of God, as if they’re his (or her) interpreters. It’s been used to justify a lot of stupidity, and my story speaks to that, a little.

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

Sarah Langan: Everybody’s! I’m tired of seeing the gay market marginalized, both in the written word and in film, and looking forward to seeing what all the fine writers in this collection have come up with.

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

Sarah Langan: For movies, I liked Hitchcock’s Rope, but I’m not comfortable with the way he portrayed gay men. I think he was afraid of it, because of his own tendencies. I’m also a huge fan of Children’s Hour. Far From Heaven was pretty awesome, too.

For books, my hands-down favorite is Lee Thomas’ Dust of Wonderland.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Sarah Langan: I’m readying my third novel, Audrey’s Door, for publication this fall and also polishing the MUSE anthology, along with Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Pinborough, and Alexandra Sokoloff.

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

Sarah Langan: A rabbit, chewing on my shoes. In the back, all that stuff I thought I lost, but actually crumpled into a ball, instead of properly folding.

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

Sarah Langan: Yeah, in college and grad school I had to pretend I was writing literary fiction, when I was really writing horror. My brother used to lock me in the oversized compartment of our huge green station wagon when I was a kid, if that counts. More alarmingly, I liked it.

More about Sarah Langan

“Clarke’s murderer walked to the edge of the bed, head canted away from the observing lens. He leaned over Clarke and bit into the man’s thigh. Skin ripped and gouts of blood poured over the leg. It happened quickly. No hesitation or clumsiness. Then it happened again. The killer didn’t chew the flesh, but rather spat it out in the rapidly forming pool of blood. Clarke came to then. Frantic eyes as wide and white as golf balls dominated his features. He opened his mouth to scream but all that emerged from his throat was a shrill hiss.

The killer changed his position, moving closer to the headboard. His palm went to Clarke’s brow. He shoved the abuser’s head back into the pillow, and then he leaned forward and ripped Clarke’s throat out with his teeth.” – from “I’m Your Violence”

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

Lee Thomas: “I’m Your Violence,” follows a police detective, Dean Kaiser, as he investigates the brutal murder of a man who has led a secret and deviant life. The investigation seems easy enough – they have the murderer’s image on video – but tracking down the suspect brings Dean face to face with an entity that was created to kill.

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

Lee Thomas: Wow, tough call. The anthology has such a fantastic line-up. I’m always eager to see what Scott, Livia, Kealan, Michelle and others bring to the table, but if I have to choose, I gotta go with Sarah Langan’s, “The Agathas.” I miss our old writing group and getting to read her work before it reached the rest of the world.

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

Lee Thomas: There’s a scene early in Night of the Living Dead, when Barbara is leaning against the sofa and a zombie emerges through a door (I presume a closet) and stalks into the living room to get her. I saw the movie at an arthouse in Seattle when I was a kid and that scene really messed with my head. The zombies in that film were so quiet. They could be anywhere, hungry and waiting. Fantastically creepy.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Lee Thomas: I’ll have two more Wicked Dead books for Young Adults (written as Thomas Pendleton) plus two stand alone teen titles: Shimmer and The Calling coming from HarperTeen in the next year. I’ve just turned in the first book of a Young Adult, urban fantasy trilogy to HarperTeen as well. It’s called Exiled and should be out early 2010. On the adult side, I’ve just completed a new novel called Ash Street, which my agent is about to start shopping for me, and my next gay-focused book will be Distortion, which is written but needs some polish before I have it shopped. Plus a bunch of short fiction and a couple of novellas that are being released as books through two very fine specialty presses. (I can’t talk about those…shhhhhh.)

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

Lee Thomas: Surprised? Depends on the reader, I suppose. I guess some folks might be surprised if they found my box of “practice” novels, which is to say books I wrote back when writing was just a hobby. There are probably ten of them in there. They’re generally quite bad, and I’d never consider having them published, but I keep them around for posterity.

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

Lee Thomas: Closets are inherently frightening because they share a personal space (assuming the closets in question are bedroom closets) – a space where we are at our most vulnerable when sleeping. And while they are part of this space, they are also separate, because the door acts as a flimsy, yet concealing barrier behind which any manner of creature may reside.

More about Lee Thomas

“The babble of the crowd died. The air grew taut with anticipation. Right at that moment I had complete control of the room, but then, it had been that way from the beginning, whether they realized it or not. And yet all I could think of was yesterday, and how the town had looked in the morning, the lawns glistening with dew, the sun a burning eye in the sky, everything in its rightful place as the world woke up to clean air and cleaner living. And how what I said next was going to ensure that my brother never woke up to that again.” — from “A Letter from Phoenix”

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

Kealan Patrick Burke: “A Letter from Phoenix” is, like the classic Twilight Zone episode from which it draws its inspiration, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” a story about the inevitable erosion of society, civility, and of humanity in times of crisis. In “Phoenix”, a town uncovers the enemy in their midst and must decide how best to deal with it.

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

Kealan Patrick Burke: That’s a tough question to answer without alienating the other authors in what I suspect will be a staggeringly good collection of stories. But if forced to pick only one, I would still have to pick twelve, so let me just say that the first stories I’ll probably flip to will be those by Sarah Langan and Lee Thomas, both of whom have blown me away with their work over the past few years. I will, however, be reading the collection cover to cover, and as there are quite a few authors in here with whom I am not at all familiar, I look forward to adding some new names to my must-read list.

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

Kealan Patrick Burke: Film? Cameron’s Closet. Not sure if it still holds up, but it scared the hell out of me when I watched it!

Book? Night Shift, by Stephen King, specifically the story “The Boogeyman.” The last few lines of that incredibly bleak story still give me the heebies. “Sssoooo niiiice...”

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Kealan Patrick Burke: I'm working on not retiring from writing. Working full-time as a fraud investigator has winnowed my time down to almost nothing, so I'm trying to find a viable way to balance the two. Ultimately, it may come down to sacrificing one over the other until things level out a bit. Hopefully it won't come to that, but we'll see...

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

Kealan Patrick Burke: A tie that shows pigs enacting The Kama Sutra (it was a gift, I swear!)

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

Kealan Patrick Burke: Closets, doors, boxes…you never know what’s waiting inside until you open them, and in horror what awaits is seldom pleasant. As kids, we used to play hide and seek and dread getting stuck in there or forgotten, or finding something in there with us, hiding. Horror movies have only built upon that claustrophobic fear of the dark, and of the unknown. Closets are typically small, narrow, confined, the air thin and warm. If you encounter something slimy and sadistic in there, you have nowhere to go. Think of the scene in the original Halloween, with Jamie Lee Curtis in the closet with Michael Myers on the other side. I remember thinking (as I’m sure most people did): “No! Don’t go in there!” Because a closet is not an escape, it’s a trap, both figuratively and metaphorically.

More about Kealan Patrick Burke

“The train rocked down the tunnel without feeling like it was moving forward. Each stop was a staccato burst of dull, manila light where idle commuters stood on the platforms like disappointed Edward Hopper people.

One of the few passengers at this late hour was quite handsome. If he painted his portrait, Ansel would use golden honey with bits of the waxy comb and dismembered bee wings floating in it to capture the thick, blond texture of his hair.

The boy had been crying. He was barely old enough to drink booze.

Ansel, aroused by tears, wanted to tousle his hair. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ he would say, even though it probably wasn’t going to be.

It was River Phoenix, even though he died years ago, staring back at Ansel. River Phoenix was in Running on Empty with Martha Plimpton. Martha Plimpton was in Pecker with Lili Taylor. Lili Taylor was in Short Cuts with Jack Lemmon. Jack Lemmon was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. There was probably a quicker way to link River with Kevin.” – from “The Next Big Thing”

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

Christopher Fox: “The Next Big Thing” is about bitterness. A second grade student of mine once asked me what the word ‘bitterness’ meant. I told her that bitterness was a grown-up emotion that adults felt when things didn’t turn out the way they wanted, a lot like disappointment and that it was very natural. I then added that when she grew up, there would probably be things she was bitter about too.

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

Christopher Fox: I’m most interested in reading the stories from the newer, younger writers. I want to see the different ways they have of looking at things. Established writers I already know about and am familiar with their work.

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

Christopher Fox: I love the scene in Pink Flamingos when Dawn Davenport has absolutely had it with her daughter Taffy. Dawn, along with her friends Conchetta and Chicklet, forcibly drag the screeching Taffy upstairs to a darkened closet, where they throw her to the bed and tie her up in chains. Dawn is as the end of her rope. She’s tried everything including starving her and beating her with a car aerial. “I’ll never have another one!” she says.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Christopher Fox: I’m working on a lot of stories; one’s about the cut-throat world of competitive tiddlywinks, another’s about Santa Claus, now alcoholic and living on the street, and his relationship with a Goth boy named Hemlock. I’m also stumbling along with a novel concerning the upside of joining a flying saucer cult.

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

Christopher Fox: Boredom. There’s not much in there. I do like to snoop around in people’s medicine cabinets, which can be surprising for me. You wouldn’t believe what some of my friends are on!

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

Christopher Fox: Nearly everyone is stuck in a closet of some kind. It’s part of life. The closet may be one of consumerism / greed, loneliness, anger, addiction, ignorance, arrogance, co-dependence, guilt… it boggles the mind. You spend your whole life either trying to get out of the closet(s) or finding a way to Narnia. When and if you find your way out of all your closets, you’re free. The only thing left to do is die. I don’t think that this is depressing at all. It makes me feel closer to God.

More about Christopher Fox

“The memory box was almost entirely full of picture albums. A smaller shoebox filled the remaining empty space; a peek inside this showed loose photos. Nearly every picture showed a young woman: blonde, slightly on the plump side, pretty – not gorgeous – but with a smile that filled up half her face and transformed all of it into beauty. As Beth turned the pages of the albums, she found herself taking few, then fewer notes. She kept getting distracted by a puzzling trend she noticed while continuing to examine the pictures. The early books, from birth to puberty, had the typical array of family holidays and group birthday parties that you could find in nearly every home in the country. The teen and young adult era showed fewer group shots; just the young woman with her family and two siblings, or more frequently as the albums progressed, her alone. By the time she would have been in college, every picture featured only her smiling self; no parents, siblings, family gatherings, no friends, no candid party shots – just the woman, looking like every day in her solitary world was her happiest. Each of these albums had several blank spots scattered throughout, dark rectangular marks showing where other pictures had once been.” – from “Memory Box”

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

Reesa Brown: I had fun writing "Memory Box" in playing with layers, and embedding little bits that reward repeat reading. So there's a good amount going on in there; I'd say one of the themes of the story is that layered effect, of things within things. The story began after I saw the anthology theme and was contemplating the imagery of closets. I was struck with a vivid image of a woman kneeling in front of an open hallway closet, lifting the lid of a plastic memory box. The story grew from there, from wanting to know the details of what was in that box and why it mattered so much and how we can hide whole stories, whole lives, in such small and dark places.

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

Reesa Brown: I have never been good at picking a single "most" or "best", so I can't really choose any one person I'm looking forward to more than the others. I am quite eager to see how each author interprets the theme of the anthology in their own stories, since the theme is what captured my interest in the project.

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

Reesa Brown: Well, I suppose that my first exposure to the closet theme was the wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia; my mother read those to my brother and I from before we were verbal. For more direct horror correlation, I avidly read both King and Koontz for several years, starting around age ten or so, and I think that Koontz in particular does some interesting work with closets in several of his stories.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Reesa Brown: I have very much enjoyed my experience working with Dark Scribe Press for this anthology and hope I can work with them again in the future. I'm busy with several current projects, including Continuous Coast, a large and ongoing shared-world collaborative storytelling project that I'm quite excited about, as well as the finishing stages of a more SF-themed novel. Plus, I nearly always have a creepy short story or three in varying stages of written, edited, and circulating.

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

Reesa Brown: Other than the matched pair of Hungarian fencing sabers hanging over the cat boxes blocking the otherworldly portal, nothing much interesting. I will say that my closet door is always open!

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

Reesa Brown: I'd theorize that it's related to the nature of the room's purpose. Bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens: these are all rooms with defined purposes, rooms meant to house people engaging in a particular activity. Closets are places for things, not people, and like other mildly eerie home spaces such as attics, garages, and sheds that are designed for things, they bear a touch of "the other" that can spark the dark recesses of our imaginations.

More about Reesa Brown