Jameson Currier found horror by living through it — and surviving it. As one of a group of gay writers chronicling the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s and early 1990’s that included Armistead Maupin, Randy Shilts, Paul Monette, Andrew Holleran, and David Leavitt, Currier came to prominence by focusing on the lives of gay men and their personal experiences with the epidemic. His stories, novels, and non-fiction work of that time period – including his debut short story collection Dancing on the Moon (Viking, 1993), Lambda Literary Award-nominated novel Where the Rainbow Ends (Overlook Press, 1998), and articles for The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among others – committed to page the routine everyday fear, anxiety, and grief gay men of the time experienced in between hospital visits and funeral homes, between post-coital self-reproachment and self-examinations for telltale bruises.

In an interview with the author last year in Windy City Times, writer Wayne Hoffman summarizes Currier’s writing:

“The breadth of his personal experience is evident in his writing, which is moving without resorting to melodrama, familiar without feeling clichéd. In the new book's [Still Dancing (Lethe Press, 2008)] title story, for instance, he describes a man who has lost many friends to AIDS as feeling ‘like a boy lost at an amusement park who can't find his family and doesn't understand why they are not where they should be.’ It's a characteristically vivid yet unsentimental description of what it's like to wake up and find that your entire chosen family, your whole support system, is suddenly gone — and many people who survived the worst years of the epidemic will likely find that Currier has, once again, put into words the things that they've felt for years.”

 And while horror writers of the time were exploring how everyday encounters with classic cars and kindly St. Bernards turned into life-and-death battles with nebulous supernatural evils, Currier was finding the horror in the everyday realities of blood tests and looking at one’s own body in the mirror and how these previous daily banalities could bring unfathomable terror and their own life-and-death battles of an entirely different kind.

Although protease inhibitors and gay issues du jour like marriage equality have now relegated the deadly disease to history in the larger public consciousness, Currier still feels the impact of the virus’ lingering aftereffects.  So it’s no surprise then that AIDS has morphed into a ghost itself in Currier’s latest work, The Haunted Heart and Other Tales (Lethe Press, 2009), a collection of short stories through which readers encounter ghosts of many kinds. Indeed, it’s the specter of AIDS that visits more than one of the characters in Haunted Heart, which was recently named Editors’ Choice for Best Dark Genre Single-Author Collection in DSM’s Black Quill Awards.

Dark Scribe Magazine recently caught up with Jameson Currier to explore how his seemingly unconventional route to the genre fiction scene has been more well-traveled than one might think, how 9/11 factored in, and the process of putting together an award-winning short story collection.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about The Haunted Heart and Other Tales.

Jameson Currier: It’s a collection of gay-themed ghost stories — traditional narrative ghost stories with gay protagonists and gay ghosts in contemporary settings and addressing issues of relevance to the gay community.

Dark Scribe: Explain the process of putting together a collection like this. How did you select the stories for the collection?

Jameson Currier: I wanted all the stories to reflect a haunted aspect of a gay relationship – a deeply felt, passionate relationship between gay men – and that made them much harder to construct and write and select than I had imagined. These are not scary, spooky stories but heartfelt psychological ones. Many of them also required me to do a great deal of historical research. “The Country House” summons up the spirits of two gay lovers from the Civil War – refugee soldiers from an army camp. “The Bloomsbury Nudes” revolves around the artist Duncan Grant and his drawings and lovers and is infused with art history as well details of the “black arts” of Aleister Crowley and his society, so I had to do a lot of reading to make that historically accurate, as well as fly to London to make sure that I was depicting the Bloomsbury neighborhood and buildings correctly. “A Touch of Darkness” uses the sodomy trials in the colonial era as the source of its gay haunting, so it required me to study a number of historical maps of eastern Long Island to pinpoint the exact location of the house and reference historical texts about the Hamptons, where the story is set. But I’ve always been something of a closeted gay historian, so there was a great deal of pleasure and pride in finding these sorts of unclaimed stories to use as the basis of these hauntings. I had originally thought that the collection would be thirteen stories – you know, because it’s such a quirky, odd, queer number – but after eight years of writing these stories they seemed to feel collected at twelve. I had thought about including “Ghosts,” a long AIDS-themed novella that was included in my first collection of stories – Dancing on the Moon – as the thirteenth story, but in the end I decided to only include the newer work.

Dark Scribe: If you had to pick a favorite story from the collection, which would it be and why?

Jameson Currier: Not the favorites game! I’m very proud of all the stories in the collection, because I think that each one stretched and educated me as a writer. “Death in Amsterdam” is the kind of story I would never have written unless I embarked on creating this kind of collection. It’s an old-school suspenseful story in its construction and owes a lot of inspiration to Daphne DuMaurier and Thomas Mann. Some of the stories sat in my head for years – like “The Vision” and “The Man in the Mirror” – which is dangerous because you never know when you start to put them on paper if they will turn out the same way, but I’m very pleased with how readers are responding to them. “Wait!” took five years to write because the ending never seemed right to me until one morning I had one of those “Eureka!” moments – which generally doesn’t happen when I write a story because by the time I start writing I usually have it carefully mapped out. Others are the distillation of hundreds of pages of drafts – “The Incident at the Highlands Inn” is really a novel that I spent over a year writing about an abusive gay relationship that ends in tragedy. It is based on a true story, but when it occurred to me how to write it as a ghost story – as the progression from being human into becoming a ghost – I was able to write it easily and quickly because the plot and the characters were already fully fleshed out in my mind. I’m very happy every time I re-read “The Woman in the Window,” because I see that it was a turning point in my writing style because of its longer narrative plot and over the years I have come to regard those families depicted in it as my families. “The Bloomsbury Nudes” is one of the most complex short stories I have written and I’m proud of all of its details and history. And there are a handful of my own stories that bring me to tears every time I read them and “The Haunted Heart” is one of them. I turn into a sobbing mess probably mid-way through that story. The relationship of the composer and waiter is based on guys I knew, and it is a summation of many years of many fears and desires. I think it also captures the complexity of how survivors of any tragedy move on with their lives.

Dark Scribe: This is your first, full-blown foray into the horror/speculative fiction realm. What prompted the new direction at this point in your writing career?

Jameson Currier: After 9/11 a lot of my book reviewing and feature writing markets dried up and I began to struggle with what sort of fiction I should write next. As a writer I have consciously tried not to repeat myself – rewriting the same story over and over – so I began looking for something different to write and that might expand beyond the boundaries of my own life. I was inching into a science fiction story or a mystery when I re-discovered my boyhood copy of the Modern Library edition of Famous Ghost Stories edited by Bennett Cerf while I was in Atlanta visiting with my parents. I read “The Phantom Rickshaw” by Rudyard Kipling and “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood and was blown away by their literary merit and suspenseful crafting. But I think M.R. James’s “The Mezzotint” had the biggest impact because it made me put the book down and go, “this is what I want to try to do next.”

Dark Scribe: The cover art for the collection is stunning. Tell us who did the artwork and something about the artist.

Jameson Currier: My original intent was to do my own illustrations for each of the stories and I did drawings for all twelve stories – when “The Man in the Mirror” was first published in the gay speculative fiction magazine Icarus, it also included the artwork I had drawn for the story. I used elements from each of the story illustrations to create a composite piece of art for use on the cover of The Haunted Heart and Other Tales. But my drawing talents are very limited and the final product I created for the cover looked too cartoonish and more like the cover of a boy’s adventure book. The two elements I felt that were absolutely necessary for the cover – a feeling of a sweeping, haunted romance and a gay relationship — were missing from it. It was really hard to let go of that concept of my illustrating my own stories, but I knew I had to be edited out of the picture, and I decided not to include any of my illustrations with the stories because I also realized that the art might influence how the stories would be interpreted. Even before I had started working on my own illustrations I had seen Richard Taddei’s paintings on the website of the Leslie-Lohman gallery and followed them to his own [artist] website, and his paintings had produced an immediate, emotional and passionate response in me because they were gorgeous and complex — and I had always thought one of his paintings would be perfect for the cover of this book. When I finally bit the bullet on the limitations of my own drawing talents, I emailed him and asked if he would consider doing a painting for a book cover and I was delighted when he agreed. Since then, I’ve seen many of his paintings in person in his studio or at galleries and they are exquisite. I am actually thrilled to say that I also now own the painting Richard created for the cover — and I know that every time that I admire it that I never, in my wildest dreams, could have ever painted something that brilliant myself.

Dark Scribe: You were one of a handful of important gay writers chronicling the AIDS crisis – which some would argue was true horror – in their work at the height of the disease. How did this earlier focus in your writing inform what you’re doing now?

Jameson Currier: I began writing as therapy as a way to navigate my own fears of becoming ill. I remember around 1982 and 1983 standing in front of a mirror and worrying about freckles and whether or not they were Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions because so little was known. This might seem silly now, but then, it wasn’t. There were no blood tests for HIV then. Friends were running to doctors because they were breaking out in sweats at night or because their tongue was coated white. It was such a suspicious and maddening time. This was true fear – that your health and youth could just be ripped away from you – the same kind of fear you could experience if you were on an airplane and you heard an engine stop working. It was impossible to control. And this fear never relented. It was always there. And there were days when I had to put it all on paper in some kind of way so that it wouldn’t sit and fester in my mind. I was working in the Broadway theater at that time and I had a lot of co-workers who had symptoms and then became ill and died. What I was witnessing was a change in who I was and the communities that I was a part of. I had to write my thoughts down in order to keep myself from going mad. By the late 1980s, after I had been the care partner for a good friend who had died, I experienced a mental breakdown, where I had to take all the pieces of my psyche apart and put them back together. Since then I’ve realized that the epidemic will always be a part of my history and one of the reasons I must write is to keep telling of the unfortunate tragedies – and miracles – of these times. Even if this is not specifically spelled out in every story or book I write, it is there, always a part of my consciousness and who I am today — a survivor.

Dark Scribe: Having survived a global health crisis that claimed many in an entire generation of gay men, is horror now a way of dealing with the specters of the AIDS epidemic and those lost so young to it?

Jameson Currier: I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon that many AIDS writers who are still writing today have inched their way into the horror genres, whether or not they have specifically accepted that labeling – Michael Cunningham wrote a ghost story as part of Specimen Days and I believe he is at work on a slasher screenplay called Beautiful Girl. Dale Peck, who wrote Martin and John, has also written Body Surfing. Andrew Holleran became obsessed with Mary Todd, and his novel Grief was in many ways a ghost story. But I also think that this is reflective of each of us as writers also becoming older men and therefore more involved in spiritual issues and the thought of an afterlife. I know while I was at work on these new stories that I had to confront the idea many times of whether I believed in ghosts.  And I do — but I also see it as an infinite and connected spiritual plane, where ghosts reside along with angels and fairies and demons and ghouls and other unseen energy types.

Dark Scribe: Who are some of the writers who most inform your own writing?

Jameson Currier: I consume a vast amount of books and I read not only for pleasure but to be inspired and to study craft and technique and many times when I am writing a story and stuck I will take a paragraph from another author’s novel or short story and type it into my computer, in order to find the structure, voice, character and details of what was created. I would say I am more an admirer of a specific work than I am an admirer of a specific writer, because many times subsequent works by the same author will disappoint me. That said, I would say in short fiction I will read anything by Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, and Stephen King. Yes, Stephen King. There is a terrific amount of craft behind everything he writes, which I think is also part of the reason behind his spectacular popularity, but I particularly admire his short fiction. Novels – I would probably address the ones that speak to me as a gay man – The Swimming Pool Library by Allan Hollinghurst is one of sexiest books I have ever read, and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood is the gay man’s version of Mrs. Dalloway. For the ghost stories in The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, I read hundreds of ghost stories looking for inspiration and technique. Rising to the top were always stories by M.R. James, Edith Wharton, and a relatively unknown writer to me before named May Sinclair.

Dark Scribe: Fantasy time. You’re stranded on a desert island and can only have one book, one CD, and one movie with you. Which would you choose?

Jameson Currier: Favorites time again! Oh no! Well, The Lover by Marguerite Duras is really a novella, but I have to say it is one of the most evocative reads I have ever experienced. If I were to be stranded on a desert island at the age I am now, which is well beyond fifty, I would want a short book that would produce a emotionally satisfying read for its own narrative – the story of a young French girl involved with an older Asian man as told by the woman many years later – as well as for its ability to summon up moments and memories of my own life – as it was and as I desired it to be – and this book could do all that.

I think if I had one movie it would have to be an action thriller that I could watch over and over, and there is a World War II submarine movie called U-571 that I have watched too many times already. I can watch and watch this movie and never be bored. Go figure.

If I had one CD it would be The Way We Were by Barbra Streisand, the album she made that released around the time of the movie, not the movie soundtrack. I think her voice is at its most expressive and emotional on this album in songs like “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” “My Buddy,” and, of course, the title track. I can’t imagine how my life would have evolved if I had never heard her voice. And, yes, I believe I have redeemed myself as a gay man with this list with this last selection! (laughs)

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Jameson Currier: I’m polishing the last paragraphs of a new novel that will release this spring, The Wolf at the Door, which is set at a haunted gay-owned guesthouse in New Orleans. It’s not a horror story per se, but more of a comic hallucination of an overworked man who drinks too much and thinks he is seeing ghosts and angels and all sorts of other spirits. I hope that it’s regarded as the kind of spiritual adventure of, say, A Christmas Carol or It’s A Wonderful Life. I think Avery, the main character in the novel, comes close to who I am today, a funny, boozy, aging gay man, but this was also another story that required me to do a lot of historical research — this time on New Orleans and its history of slavery and the fact that there were many freed slaves who owned slaves themselves. And I have outlined several new ghost stories which I see as a sort of sequel book to The Haunted Heart, but right now, most of my time is being spent on finishing a draft of a new novel called The Third Buddha, which is set in Manhattan and Afghanistan post 9/11. It’s a large, complex literary endeavor which I hope will provide the same sort of reading experience that Where the Rainbow Ends created. This time, instead of the Book of Job for inspiration, I have used the story of The Good Samaritan, recasting and retelling it during a time of crisis and within a clash of religions and cultures. It’s required me to do a massive amount of research on Afghanistan. I hope it can represent what it means to be an articulate gay activist and citizen of the world.

Dark Scribe: What’s one thing that your readers would be surprised to know about you?

Jameson Currier: That I adored Avatar in the same way that I adored The Lord of the Rings. Here is an amazingly detailed and complex world being presented to the viewer. That movie looks like they spent over $200 million on it and I think it will resonate many years in the future because it’s like taking a trip to another world. I consider it a true event.

Dark Scribe: What scares Jameson Currier?

Jameson Currier: Not having a decent book to read on a plane, not enough time off from the day job to write, and no booze in the house when I really, really need it!

For more information about Jameson Currier, visit his official author website.

Purchase The Haunted Heart and Other Tales by Jameson Currier from the DSM virtual bookstore.

Tom Cardamone’s writing style blends the nightmarish terrain of Clive Barker with the fetishistic sexual violence of Dennis Cooper to create wholly singular worlds in which normalcy and disturbing collide like two rush-hour commuter trains packed with passengers. Safe to say that while Cardamone’s fiction may not agree with those weak of stomach, those with a penchant for imaginative storytelling that pushes the limits of convention and stretches the mind's eye to distortion will find literary nirvana.

Yeah, Tom Cardamone’s fiction is a bit out there. But ask him if he minds that assessment and he’ll probably tell you it’s a compliment.

But, having just crossed the threshold of 40, the NYC-based speculative fiction writer isn’t interested in compliments on the normalcy of his life or career – whether discussing his long-term survival in the city that never sleeps or his humble beginnings writing reviews of books that chronicled the gay Asian experience for earlier incarnations of the Lambda Book Report. No, he wants to hear that his writing hits an uncomfortable nerve somewhere deep in the recesses of those subconscious dark sides.

And while Cardamone aims for nerves of a different kind in his periodic gay erotica outings, like his 2008 novel The Werewolves of Central Park and short story contributions to the anthologies Country Boys: Wild Cat Erotica, Best Gay Erotica 2008, Backdraft: Firemen Erotica, and Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism, it’s in discussing his darker stuff that one can almost imagine his eyebrows raise, then lower, in serious consideration of the ramifications of good versus evil and how the lines between the two get blurred when we surrender to the notion that both exist within each of us.

In his first collection of dark speculative fiction, Pumpkin Teeth (Lethe Press, 2009), Cardamone offers up a mix of thirteen original and previously published tales, ranging from “Suitcase Sam” – a twisted gay variation on (well, OK, complete contortion of) Boxing Helena – to the Greg Araki-esque “Mishima Death Cult.”

“I always knew what I would title my first short story collection,” Cardamone writes on his author website. “Most every story is a story of transformation, but I am fascinated by this particular bent of anthropomorphism, that not only do we project ourselves onto things, but then we become terrified of them, never realizing it’s the human qualities that are so frightening.”

Dark Scribe Magazine decided to launch ‘Queer Horror’ month by sitting down with the frighteningly not frightening Cardamone to discuss the influences that informed his unique writing style, the discovery of the gay experience, and why he’s perfectly fine with having his work called “perfectly strange.”

Dark Scribe: How did you select the stories for Pumpkin Teeth? Were you limited to a certain number — if so, how did you make the final selections?

Tom Cardamone: Years ago, I’d read Nabokov’s A Baker’s Dozen and thought that thirteen was a perfect number of stories for a collection, or at least for me if I was ever lucky enough to cobble one together. When the publisher approached me about putting Pumpkin Teeth together, I gathered all my published work that had a dark speculative theme, then added stories that were unpublished or linked to anthologies that, sadly, went under, so they never had that chance to bloom in the moonlight.

Dark Scribe: If you had to pick a favorite story from the collection, which would it be and why?

Tom Cardamone: Oh, tough! I’m really partial to “Lightning Capital”, the first story. It’s a tale of a boy who can suddenly turn to lightning, and this illuminates his coming out process. I think it’s a favorite because I thought it up in the 11th grade and was sitting in my apartment one afternoon and realized I’d never bothered to write it down. So zap! It just poured out of me, after two decades I finally typed it out.

Dark Scribe: You worked in both the novel and short story formats. Which do you prefer and why?

Tom Cardamone: A short story is a great way to release the pressure of writing a novel. I write my best stuff when I need a reason to avoid finishing a book. I’m much more into novels, rarely read short stories, but when I do, if it’s the right author, I’m just so there, you know? Patricia Highsmith is a forgotten master of the form; I happened to be reading a collection of her work when I finally got serious about the short story.

Dark Scribe: How would you describe your work — queer horror, speculative fiction?

Tom Cardamone: Perfectly strange. I’d say that’s what I’m aiming for. I do want the normalcy that envelopes and ultimately fails my characters to be visible, tangible...I love the elements that Norman Rockwell surrounds his subjects with. I do the same thing, or try too, but my stories also feature tentacles pulling at the edge of the canvas. 

Dark Scribe: What separates queer horror from, say, straight-up horror with gay characters?

Tom Cardamone: Straight people’s lives have trajectory, gay people have discovery.

Dark Scribe: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer? What was your first professional sale?

Tom Cardamone: Always, I always knew and just craved this. I remember putting down an Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars novel when I was like ten and just thinking, “I want to build worlds.” It took me years to gather the courage to write, though, more so to publish. It really was linked to my coming out, I couldn’t really write until I was out. My first published story was “Mishima Death Cult” with Velvet Mafia. The editor there, Sean [Meriwether], was great with advice and subsequently published more of my work. So if you’re reading this Sean, thanks!

Dark Scribe: Who are some of the writers who most inform your own writing?

Tom Cardamone: John Varley opened a lot of doors for me when I was young, so did Octavia E. Butler, and Geoff Ryman. Shout outs to Philip K. Dick are rather passé’ now, but I was trading his books with potheads when all the good shit was way out of print and forgotten. At that time his stuff was considered to be on the same level as acid. Of course Genet and Rechy’s City of Night informed my idea of the queer landscape, that we don’t just have closets, we own cities. And I haven’t seen this noted anywhere, but William S. Burroughs really can sculpt a perfect sentence. Some of his books are all broth and nothing solid and then bam! – he nails it. Look for his nails. They’re sharper than anyone else’s.

Dark Scribe: All-time favorite book?

Tom Cardamone: Oh, Lanark by Alasdair Gray. It’s the only book I’ve ever encountered where the character ages as we do in real life: utterly surprised that it’s happening and happening so damned quickly.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now?

Tom Cardamone: I’m finishing up a queer fantasy novella and I’m in talks with a publisher to edit a speculative anthology – I’ll give you a hint, if anyone liked my short story, “River Rat,” you’ll like this book; this spring, a book I’ve edited, The Lost library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, comes out. Over the years I’d asked gay writers I know to write about that one gay novel or short story collection that mattered to them, affected their lives, but had slipped out of print. Some of the books these writers turned me on to were just astounding. I just created a Facebook page for it if anyone wants to check it out. 

Dark Scribe: Which movie – past or present – best describes your life thus far?

Tom Cardamone: The Hunger.

Dark Scribe: What’s one thing that your readers would be surprised to know about you?

Tom Cardamone: I can ride a unicycle.

Dark Scribe: Your interview kicks off ‘Queer Horror’ month here at Dark Scribe Magazine. How would you define queer horror?

Tom Cardamone: Our experiences can lead us to the shadows and from the shadows. That Nietzsche line, “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.” Well, gay people uniquely dance on the edge of that abyss, some by choice, some by horrible circumstance, but weirdly, we don’t just stare into it, we wink at it. 

For more information about Tom Cardamone, visit his official author website.

Purchase Pumpkin Teeth by Tom Cardamone.

Although you’d think a novelist spends day and night hunched over a laptop, John Everson is something of a creative dabbler. In fact, it’s not uncommon to find him assuming one of many artistic roles at any given time: as a musician laying down tracks in his home studio; as a digital artist creating small press book covers; as an editor putting together cutting-edge anthologies; as a business owner operating the small press he co-founded in 2006; as a weekend horticulturist; or even as an aficionado of 1970’s European grindhouse fare. Fortunately for his growing fanbase of readers, these myriad pastimes don’t distract him from creating the dark fiction for which he’s best known, having penned the Stoker Award-winning novel Covenant (2004), its follow-up Sacrifice (2007), and his latest, the giallo-esque The 13th (2009).

Dark Scribe Magazine caught up with Everson for a baker’s dozen of questions in between stops on his latest promotional tour. In his first DSM sit-down, the dark scribe discusses his gory new novel, numerological superstitions, and why he doesn’t worry about crossing lines.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your latest book, The 13th.

John Everson: The 13th centers around Castle House Lodge, an old hotel that was once a rich man’s resort destination. But after years of deterioration and a dark history of mass homicide, it was abandoned to the mountainous terrain on which it was hidden — until Dr. Barry Rockford buys the property and reopens it as a remote asylum for mentally broken pregnant women.  When David Shale, a failed Olympic cyclist takes a job as a groundskeeper for the asylum, he starts noticing strange things are afoot — macabre patient artwork, a red X on the basement door, and a glimpse at a girl through an upstairs window who looks strangely like his missing girlfriend…

Dark Scribe: The book is being released in two different editions?

John Everson:  I wrote The 13th for Leisure Books – it was my first novel sold directly to them.  But I’ve always had strong ties to the small press (Covenant and Sacrifice, my first two Leisure releases were both first released by Delirium Books). Don D’Auria, my editor at Leisure, was fine with me working with the small press to do a limited hardcover edition of The 13th. So Necro Publications, which issued my short story collection Needles & Sins a couple years ago, put out the limited hardcover.  Travis Anthony Soumis, the artist who did the Needles & Sins cover (the art of which is also a prominent part of my web presence) did the evocative art for Necro’s edition of The 13th as well.

Dark Scribe: The covers for both editions have a very giallo quality to them.  Are there giallo elements in the story itself?

John Everson:  There is some influence there. Though it’s not written as a classic killer giallo story, I immersed myself in a ton of European ‘70s horror films in the months prior to writing The 13th. I didn’t write much during that period, I just camped out on weekends with films from Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Jean Rollin and more. I definitely tried to capture some of the “Technicolor blood” feel of that era of film when I started on The 13th.

Dark Scribe: Were there any books or films that influenced The 13th?

John Everson: The creepy old lodge, the strange ceremonies in the basement, the healthy doses of nudity and blood… I blame it all on a strong diet of ‘70s grindhouse and Euro-horror.

Dark Scribe: Why do you think the number 13 gets such a bad rap?

John Everson:  People love superstition. We always look for “meaning” in things that goes beyond what we see. So once somebody picks something to “curse” with a meaning… it sticks. Why is 7 lucky? Why is 666 the number of the beast? Why is 69 the best number on earth?  Ancient cultures ascribed meaning and found power in numbers; as if the additive aspects of numbers work in some metaphysical sense. There are theories that some of the superstitions revolving around the number 13 come from the lunar calendar — it is the number after the natural division of 12, an even division of the year. There are 12 days of Christmas, and 12 months, and 12 apostles… to go beyond that is somehow… evil! There is even a phobia name for fear of 13 — Triskaidekaphobia. Go figure. I’d live on the 13th floor in a heartbeat. Trouble is, even in a modern 21st century culture… we won’t name the 13th floor that. How sackcloth and ashes is that? 

Dark Scribe: A quote from our own review of the book: “Everson frequently writes stories that involve demons, kinky sex, and ritualistic murders. In his previous novels, he managed to walk the tightrope and keep the story from digressing into misogyny. If Everson didn’t cross that line this time, he certainly stopped just short of it.”  There are persistent misogyny claims leveled at the horror genre in general. Are you aware of this aspect of your work when you write — and how do you keep from crossing that line?

John Everson: I’m aware of the fact that a number of my lead characters are male, as being male is what I know, and that they share some of my own natural strengths and weaknesses. In general, they find themselves trying to save somebody that they love (and thus, by my own sexual predilections, said victim is naturally female). 

I think there are a number of factors that contribute to this “woman as victim” aspect of horror. First, women are the lifegivers, the “mother”. What is more heinous and horrible than to destroy the font of life? Men, biologically, serve only one purpose — to service the mother and procreate the race. Nothing more. So the worst sin is to destroy a woman.

Layered on top of that is the social philosophy that women are the weaker sex (they’re not) and thus make better “victims” of any horrific plot. Certainly they tend to scream better than men.

Layer on top of that that the majority of horror writers are men, who by nature of their sex are more likely to pit their evil construct against their natural opposite – a woman – and thus have a hero (patterned after their male selves) try to save her...and you have layer upon layer of reasons for women to be the “victim” in a horror story. If the majority of horror writers were women, I’d hazard that there might be far more hapless male victims in the genre than females. Though even then, the women writers might be swayed by the core human concern that I voiced first — women are our procreative center, no matter who is writing the story. And putting that center –and by extrapolation, all of our survival – in peril is our race’s deepest taboo and fear.

As far as crossing lines? I don’t worry about lines when I’m writing. I tell the story that begs to be told. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dark Scribe: How is The 13th different from Covenant and Sacrifice?

John Everson: My first two novels were connected, and played off a constructed mythology of the Curburide — a race of succubic demons who thrive on sex and violence. Both novels deal with attempts to protect our world from an incursion of the Curburide. With The 13th, I again deal with an occult backdrop, but this time from a more historical mythology. Ba’al and Astarte both play into this text, because they are connected with fertility, war and debauchery.

Dark Scribe: Of your three full-length novels, which one would you most like to see adapted for the big screen?

John Everson:  I’d love to see The 13th adapted because it’s a really fun, fast story and there are copious amounts of sex and blood...however, for the same reason, I think it may be difficult to shoot. Nobody is likely going to focus on the nudity and blood in a way that truly puts the story on the screen. Sacrifice, which also has a fair amount of sex, blood and action, would make a good film, I think, because it involves ritual erotic murders — but it would be easier to show “less” of those than the book’s text does and still follow the story. There’s a bloody orgy in The 13th that would definitely get an NC-17 rating if it was shot faithfully.

Dark Scribe: Your bibliography also includes three short story collections to your name – Needles & Sins, Vigilantes of Love, and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. If you had to pick one story from each collection as a personal favorite, which ones would you pick and why?

John Everson:  Tough question! There are more than 50 stories between those books, including my first piece every published…and I have to narrow to three?

Cage of Bones was my first collection, released by Delirium in 2000, and I have to mention two stories from that book – “Pumpkin Head” was my favorite reprint in the book, and has remained one of my most popular stories – it’s been printed a handful of times, including a French translation. The story works well because it plays off the rampant, try-anything lusts of a teenaged boy with the spooky trappings of Halloween. The other story in the collection that I really love is “Bloodroses,” the closer. I wrote that one after the book was basically done; when the cover artist turned in this gorgeously dark cover with roses, a woman’s face and barbed wire, I really wanted to do something to capture the dangerous allure of the art. That’s where “Bloodroses” came from and I think it’s one of my best stories overall. Since Cage of Bones has been out of print so long, it was reprinted in Needles and Sins.  I really enjoy performing both of those stories at live readings.

From Vigilantes of Love, my favorite is probably “Calling of the Moon.” It was a quiet dark urban fantasy inspired by a woman from England who I met on a plane on the way to San Francisco a few years ago. She told me all about how the full moon has always kept her awake, since she was a child. It “called to her” every month and she’d be awake all night. I took that “call” a step further and set the story in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, since that’s where I was headed when I met her, and where I wrote a good portion of the text. It ended up getting an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology that year.

Finally, from Needles & Sins, my pick would be “Letting Go.” That story was on the Bram Stoker ballot last year, and is one of my favorites because while it’s set in this strange limbo that merges the trappings of both heaven and hell simultaneously, it’s really a personal story; letting go of people, things, jobs…is something I’m really bad at.

Dark Scribe: You do quite a bit of touring in support of your books. What’s your oddest book signing experience and the strangest item you’ve ever been asked to sign?

John Everson: Ha — you’ve been following my Twitter feed! The strangest things I’ve signed are the hands of two high school girls, and the back of a crumpled receipt that a guy pulled out of his pocket in Indianapolis — while he was hanging around in a Borders, he couldn’t afford to buy a book. But he thought it was really cool to meet an author.

I’ve met a lot of really, um, off-center, people along my bookstore stops. It seems like every store has at least one “character” there every night. And they always have a story to tell. I’ve heard about hauntings, been given an impromptu course in the damage that Oriental martial arts and fighting stars can do, and one guy last fall told me about how his wife had been hit-on by Adolf Hitler.

There are a lot of interesting stories out there. Some of them are probably even true. And some of them are colored by glasses that you and I will never wear. And wouldn’t want to.

Dark Scribe: What’s your favorite part of the writing process? Least favorite?

John Everson: My favorite is when I am working on a scene and it just...flows. The times when I really get lost in the narrative and the world around me disappears in favor of the world I’m writing about. Those are the times that my fingers can’t type fast enough and when they are over, I mourn being forced to return to the here and now.

The least favorite is proofing. I really don’t like reading my work over and over again — when I’ve written it, for me it’s done, and I hate revisiting! I generally don’t watch movies or read books a second time...so it’s a pulling teeth process to lock me to the manuscript editing phase.

Dark Scribe: You were first published in 1994. In the ensuing 15 years, what have you seen change the most in the world of publishing — both for the better and for the worse?

John Everson: Obviously the Internet has changed a lot about publishing, both in terms of ease of access and promotion. Not surprisingly, that’s a double-edged sword; the “filter” of good editing has probably been eroded by the ease of access, and the amount of promotion via email and social networks has gotten so overwhelming that it’s hard to tell what is worth checking out.

For me, I miss the small communities that used to spring up around small press print magazines. They each used to really have singular identities and every time you stumbled on one and got a copy via mail order, it was like discovering a secret society. Each quarter when magazines like Figment, Terminal Fright, Crossroads, Grue, Dead of Night, and others hit my mailbox, I’d drop everything and sit down and leaf through to see what was going on in all of the hidden “pools” of horror. While the Internet has made it easier for the community to interact and correspond...to me it has also encouraged a homogeneity of sorts. Some of the joy in reading and writing for magazines of the ‘90s was being a part of a small “club”. That’s really gone forever now, I think.

Dark Scribe: What can you tell us about your next book, Siren?

John Everson: I just turned in the novel to Leisure last month, actually. It will be out next summer. Siren is the story of Evan, a guy who is deathly afraid of the water. So afraid that his paralysis stopped him from saving his son from drowning a year before. He’s been living a walking death ever since, until one night, as he walks along the beach considering suicide for the umpteenth time, he hears this amazing song coming from the rocks by the bay. When he approaches, he realizes the singer is nude, and when she sees him, she dives away, not to resurface. When she returns the next night, he learns her name is Ligeia...and before long, he is completely entranced by her beauty, music and eroticism. But Evan never wanted to cheat on his wife, and when his conscience prevails and he tries to say goodbye, he finds the leaving won’t be easy. Because there is nothing worse than a woman scorned...nothing worse except a pregnant woman scorned. And Ligeia is going to have Evan’s baby…

Siren really plays off the most horrible fear of fatherhood, as well as the deadly allure of lust coupled with a strong dose of music — which has always been one of the most important things in my life. I’m really proud of this book, and can’t wait until people can read it. Of course first...this month, I’m anxious to see what people think of The 13th!

For more information about John Everson, visit his official author website.

Tobias Hill has a secret. Lots of them, in fact. The award-winning poet-turned-novelist (with the occasional detour as journalist, essayist, and rock critic) has developed something of a niche for himself with the recurrent themes of secrecy, revelation, and obsession in his work. His latest novel, The Hidden (released last month by Harper Perennial), sets these same motifs against the backdrop of southern Greece where a team of close-knit archeologists dig for traces of a formidable ancient power. It’s sex, lies, and soil sifters for the literary-minded.

Dark Scribe Magazine connected with the 39-year-old London-born scribe for a transatlantic chat about his new book, the bearings of age on his work, and the toxicity of secrets.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about your new book, The Hidden.

Tobias Hill: The Hidden is the story of an outsider, an innocent imagining himself loved and in love with people he doesn't fully understand. That’s a story that has always mattered to me. Most writers are outsiders themselves. You can see that reflected in a long line of novels — The Beach, The Lord of the Flies, Le Grand Meaulnes, Great Expectations.

The Hidden is also a book about terror. Extremism is what I set out to write about. I suppose one of the questions I want people to ask, as they read, is ‘What is hidden, here?’ And there are several answers, but one of them is, ‘Terror’. 

Dark Scribe: What was your inspiration for the novel? Were there any cinematic or literary works that influenced you during the writing process?

Tobias Hill: John Fowles’s The Magus and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History were magnets: they attracted and repulsed me. Or I repulsed them: I needed to keep both at arm’s length while I wrote Ben’s story. The concerns of the three novels are very different, but their landscapes and characters echo one another. They cover the same ground but go three different ways.

Dark Scribe: How extensive was your research for the book — ancient Spartan culture, archeological digs, the geography of Greece?

Tobias Hill: Extensive. There are writers who favor invention almost to the exclusion of research, but I’m not one of them. I do envy them. The opening scene of Jim Crace’s Being Dead is an example of how good that kind of writing can be: it precisely details the physical decomposition of the protagonists, and is absolutely convincing, yet Crace didn’t bone up on the scientific facts of decay to write the passage. Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love contains a similar example of the power of invention, a fictional psychological paper on erotomania which purports to be genuine - and might as well be, since reviewers and even psychiatrists believed it to be so. The best writing doesn’t need to be factual to be true.

Dark Scribe: Who was the hardest character to write?

Tobias Hill: The hero, Ben Mercer. He was difficult because he’s neither good nor heroic – he’s amoral, and a coward, for a long time – but I wanted the reader to be willing to travel along with him.

Dark Scribe: The uncovering of secrets and its aftermath seems to be recurrent them in your fiction. The Hidden begins with a quote from Sir John Dalberg-Acton: "Every thing secret degenerates". What is it about the concept of secrecy and revelation that makes for a compelling theme in your thrillers?

Tobias Hill: Is it a thriller, though? I don’t set out to thrill. The last thriller I enjoyed was Michael Jackson’s. Thriller is a shelf mark, like Romance or Self-Improvement; there are some books that sit comfortably with all that, but not all. Shelf marks can be misleading. Does Jane Austen rest easy in Romance? Is Graham Greene loitering down in Crime? (Mind you, I was in Heathrow last weekend and saw The God Delusion in Fantasy and Science Fiction, so perhaps I should count myself lucky).

Secrecy and revelation: I’m interested in the why of the secrecy, and the how of the revelation. Why people keep things from those around them, and what happens when their concealments or deceptions are discovered. At the heart of The Hidden is a group of friends who share a secret. In a way the story is that of the secret; the slow spread of its toxicity. 

Dark Scribe: The Hidden interweaves the lead character’s thesis notes chronicling ancient Spartan history with the main storyline. How difficult was it to interweave these historical elements within the action proper – and did you have any concerns about this type of narrative slowing down the book’s pacing? If so, how did you avoid that?

Tobias Hill: The Hidden starts at a creep, then bit by bit it gains momentum, until by the end the reader is moving very – almost uncontrollably – fast. This is done to bring the reader closer to Ben, who doesn’t realize until too late that he’s in deep in something he has no place in. By the time of Ben’s realization events are moving so quickly that he doesn’t have time to think: it’s too late for him to really contemplate escape. That’s how I want the reader to feel.

Dark Scribe: You have quite an accomplished background in poetry and short fiction, including four poetry collections – Year of the Dog (1995), Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996), Zoo (1998) and Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006) – and an acclaimed short story collection, Skin (1997), which won both the 1997 Macmillan/PEN and Ian St. James Awards. How much does that early work in poetry, in particular, inform your prose?

Tobias Hill: Most of my life I’ve felt more at home with poetry, but that’s changing. It might have something to do with getting older. I feel as if I’m only just beginning to understand what the novel is capable of. I also think, myself, that many poets produce their best work when they’re young (not all, but most), whereas the very best novels are often written when authors are older (not always, but often). The lyric impulse is youthful, but the novel benefits from patience and knowledge. There’s also a gender issue here: many female novelists only have a chance to hit their stride after they have had children. Although that may be changing. Very slightly.

In a day to day way, poetry and the novel are also different for me. When I write poetry I walk — walk all day, given the chance. I listen to people, watch people, talk to people, and it all goes in, as does the rhythm of walking. The novels are...less wholesome. I sit at home, in raggedy house clothes, and write for as long as I can bear to do so. I write novels sluttishly, scuzzily, grumpily, grouchily, and with brain-grinding slowness. A page put to bed is a good day's work for me; half a page is reason to be cheerful. Sometimes it’s not like that — there are days when I surf along for ten hours, and that’s a joy. But it can’t all be surfing, or there’d be nothing but surface. The hard days are the ones that matter.

Dark Scribe: How difficult was it moving from verse to prose? Were you focused on paring down the language and/or did you find a way to integrate both forms of writing?

Tobias Hill: That sounds like I’ve packed my bags and quit Motel Poetry for Novel City. I’d never do that. I think poetry is the cutting edge of writing: it’s where the great advances are made, and it’s where time and place are most precisely reflected.

I don’t pare down my writing when I’m writing fiction. What’s to pare? I don’t write poetry that’s hyper-rich or difficult: I don’t think poetry should be those things. So in those terms the distinction isn’t a big one for me. There’s good writing and bad; writing that’s worth reading and writing that isn’t. The form or genre is beside the point.
 
Dark Scribe: I read somewhere that you once edited Edgar Allen Poe?

Tobias Hill: He’s an interesting writer, wild and innovative. It’s lucky he’s graduated to the Classics shelf mark, otherwise he’d be all over the shop and nobody would ever find him, would they? A writer like Poe needs a shelf mark all to himself. At the moment I’m editing Mishima, who is Poe’s opposite - subtle, smooth, consistent — but equally powerful.

Dark Scribe: You also spent some time working in journalism, with a three year gig as rock critic for London’s Sunday Telegraph. Care to name drop a bit? Share a juicy anecdote about the debauchery of the rock and roll set?

Tobias Hill: It’s all a blur of debauchment. I still have the hangover. There were famous people involved, so maybe it’s worth something.

Dark Scribe: Will you be traveling to the United States to promote The Hidden? If so, which cities are you most looking forward to visiting?

Tobias Hill: Sparta, Tennessee. Time to check out the bluegrass.

Dark Scribe: What can you tell DSM readers about the next Tobias Hill novel? Anything in the works?

Tobias Hill: London. Three families, three decades. There’s a line of Emerson’s at the beginning: “Cities give us collisions.” I’m writing about those collisions.

Dark Scribe: Last question. Are all secrets meant to be uncovered? Or are some things better left buried beneath modern society?

Tobias Hill: The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

Look for Tobias Hill's official author website, coming soon!

Purchase The Hidden by Tobias Hill.

From the barrier islands of the Outer Banks to the dusty mining towns of the southern Rockies, thriller writer Blake Crouch is something of a literary nomad.  On the horror map, the southwestern setting of his latest novel, Abandon (St. Martin’s Press), is geographically closer to the works of Bentley Little than, say, Stephen King’s sinister suburbs of Maine or the black magic-infused French Quarter of Anne Rice’s earlier works. But make no mistake — he’ll go wherever his stories take him on his trip through the literary Travel Channel.

Crouch was born in 1978 near the piedmont town of Statesville, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2000 with degrees in English and Creative Writing. In 2003, Crouch and wife Rebecca – longtime backpackers, mountain climbers, and outdoor aficionados – pulled up stakes and traded in the Blue Ridge Mountains for the San Juans, taking up residence in the small town of Durango, Colorado. The move to the southwest – which was chosen at random, sight-unseen, a move Crouch admitted in a 2005 interview with The New London Day wasn’t “the most logical way to find a home” – would prove to be auspicious.

Having penned two well-received thrillers set in his native North Carolina – 2004’s Desert Places and its sequel, 2005’s Locked Doors, which both featured fictional mystery writer Andrew Z. Thomas and a psychotic serial killer named Luther Kite – Durango proved to fertile ground for his latest novel. Set in the fictional remote mining town of the title, Abandon features an ambitious dual narrative in which past and present converge for a group of explorers hoping to learn the fate of the settlement and its inhabitants more than a century earlier.

Dark Scribe Magazine caught up with Crouch – who has just finished his fourth novel and is considering a third book in the Andrew Thomas series – in between stops on his book tour in support of Abandon.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us about Abandon.

Blake Crouch: Abandon is about a mining town of the same name high in the mountains of Colorado that vanishes on Christmas Day in 1893. The book interweaves two stories set on the same piece of ground. One [story] traces the last 24 hours leading up to the vanishing of Abandon in 1893, and the second occurs in the present when a group hikes into the backcountry to explore the ruins of the ghost town and try to find out what happened.

Dark Scribe: What inspired you to want to make the Old West a backdrop for this novel?

Blake Crouch: I’ve always been a huge fan of westerns and wanted to write one, but of course, my fiction sensibilities run more toward horror and thrillers. So when the idea for Abandon came to me, I realized it was a great opportunity to write a western that felt like a thriller.

Dark Scribe: Your first two novels – 2004’s Desert Places and 2005’s Locked Doors – were both set in North Carolina. Why did you move the setting of Abandon to the Southwest?

Blake Crouch: I moved to Durango, Colorado a few years ago, and I was immediately inspired by the San Juan Mountains which are quite different from the Appalachians where I grew up. They’re so rugged and unforgiving and spectacular, I just had to write about them.

Dark Scribe: The geographical setting of your books seems important to the stories you are trying to tell. Do you envision becoming known for a particular region (i.e. Anne Rice/New Orleans, Stephen King/Maine) – or do you envision a more fictionally nomadic career? If so, which region do you think you’ll end up being connected to as a writer?

Blake Crouch: Wow, interesting question. Geography is very important to me, and I’m not completely sure why, but no, I don’t want to be known for writing about a certain region. I love the way you put it — I’ll very likely be fictionally nomadic for my career, but where I set my stories will always be very important to the stories themselves, because I do think geography plays a huge part in who we are, the choices we make.

Dark Scribe: What was your research methodology like for Abandon?

Blake Crouch: Brutal. I read a ton of books on the history of mining in southwest Colorado and really tried to invent a feasible approach to the way people might have talked in 1893. I also spent a lot of time up in the mountains, getting a feel for the landscape, because it was important to me that people reading Abandon would have a sense of what it was like to be in the mountains near where I live. I also spent a night in a ghost town called Animas Forks which was a little scary. You can really feel the history in these old, abandoned buildings.

Dark Scribe: How difficult was it moving back and forth between past and present while writing Abandon? Did you write the book chronologically or did you write one entire time period first? How did you keep voice, dialogue, and the other myriad narrative elements straight both in your head on and the page while you were writing?

Blake Crouch: I wrote it just like you read it, going back and forth between past and present. It was very difficult, particularly in the beginning because the tone differs between time periods. But I did it this way because I wanted to make sure that when I changed from one century to the next, it was the most opportune time and at a point of the greatest tension. I was afraid I wouldn’t accomplish that if I wrote one storyline beginning to end, and then the other. I needed the two stories to feel linked, even though they occur 113 years apart. Writing this way also helped me to pick up the parallels between the two time periods that really tie the stories together and make this book ultimately cohesive. In terms of keeping the characters and multiple narratives straight, I had a pretty thorough outline starting out – which changed drastically as I wrote – and a detailed set of character studies which kept the characters fresh, separate, and vivid the whole way through.

Dark Scribe: Were there any Abandon characters that can more easily than others? Who was your favorite to write?

Blake Crouch: Joss Maddox, the murderous, black widow barkeep from 1893 was my favorite to write. Loved her voice, her past, her passion. She was a deeply-wounded, angry, dangerous person who wanted to do good, and I really enjoyed exploring those opposing sides of her personality. She probably could have carried an entire book, and I’m sad I won’t get to write about her again. Incidentally, she is based on a real person — Bronco Lou, a bartender in Silverton, Colorado in the 1880s. 

Dark Scribe: Besides setting, how does Abandon most differ from your two previous efforts?

Blake Crouch: I think it’s a much richer read. The plotting is more intricate, the characters more numerous and developed, and believe it or not, the violence isn’t as prominent. My first two books (and don’t get me wrong, I love this about them) are totally in your face in terms of the violence on the page. 

Dark Scribe: Thriller, horror, suspense – how important are labels in genre fiction? Have you found any of them particularly limiting or liberating?

Blake Crouch: I don’t really think about labels when I’m writing, although after the fact, it’s interesting to consider where it falls. Abandon, for instance, might tread some new – or at least scarcely-traveled ground – in terms of being a western gothic/horror novel.

Dark Scribe: Who are your own literary inspirations? And which works shaped your own style and voice?

Blake Crouch: My taste is pretty eclectic... Cormac McCarthy, William Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, Jonathan Lethem, J.D. Salinger, Bill Bryson, Pat Conroy, Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, Tony Earley, Jack Ketchum, David Morrell, Edward Abbey, to name a few. I know I’m late to the game, but I’m just getting into F. Paul Wilson, and I really dig his stuff.  I’m also blessed to count as friends some crime fiction novelists who I really admire…Marcus Sakey has a new one just out called The Amateurs which is phenomenal.  He’s a great talent.  Scott Phillips’ and Gregg Hurwitz’s stuff blows me away. Michael Koryta is scary-good, and J.A. Konrath (aka Jack Kilborn) this year published one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read called Afraid.

Dark Scribe: What are you working on now? What can readers expect next from Blake Crouch?

Blake Crouch: My next one is finished. It’s called Snowbound and should be out next spring or summer. This one is just pedal-to-the-metal fun about human trafficking, set in the desert Southwest and Alaska.

For more information about Blake Crouch, visit his official author website.

Ellen Datlow tells it like it is. There is nothing indirect about her – no ambiguity, no bush beating. Whether she’s rankled over would-be editors who don’t know the difference between line editing and copyediting or lamenting the quality of some of what gets published today, Datlow speaks with the self-assured confidence of someone who knows what their talking about. And it’s a prerogative fittingly reserved for the preeminent American speculative fiction editor and anthologist.

Even when discussing her latest project – an anthology of H.P. Lovecraft-inspired tales – the savvy editor won’t spill on which story or two really stood out and grabbed her as a reader. “It’s impolitic, for one thing,” she says matter-of-factly, adding, “The stories that I’ve chosen for the book each have something unique about them – I hope – or I wouldn’t have bought them.” But even in her reticence to share, Datlow tellingly hints that a future answer to our question may be in the air: “Although it’s likely I’ll pick a couple for my Best Horror of the Year.” Inquiring minds will just have to wait.

To say that Datlow is widely read is an understatement, and that intimate acquaintance with the many genre varieties falling under the speculative fiction umbrella gives her a higher level of expertise on the subject of fantastic literature than perhaps almost anyone. She has amassed a body of work so vast that it’s nearly impossible to list her entire bibliography in one sitting. Even her own website can’t keep up. She has edited fifteen stand-alone anthologies, edited or co-edited seven anthology series, including a series of nine fairy tale anthologies and twenty editions of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror from 1988 to 2008 (with co-editor Terri Windling through 2003, followed by the team of Gavin Grant and Kelly Link until the series ended). Her countless introductions and summations to her works are widely-regarded, often serving as annual reading lists for genre fans and academics

Her editing work has been recognized with two Bram Stoker Awards, nine World Fantasy Awards, four Locus Awards for Best Editor, two International Horror Guild Awards for Best Anthology, and the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology. Datlow also won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor in 2002 and 2005, and, more recently, for Best Short Form Editor in 2009.

Datlow was born on New Year’s Eve, 1949, in New York, a city she returned to in 1973 after four years away at college in Albany and traveling abroad. She shares an apartment in the West Villlage with her cats – Dinah, a sixteen-year-old Calico, and Bella, a four-year-old Tabby – and (quite literally) thousands of books whose numbers now spill over into off-site storage lockers. And did we mention her peculiar penchant for doll heads? Lots of doll heads.

She always knew that she wanted to work with books and says that she knew the best way to do that was to work in a bookstore or to somehow get into publishing. She eventually started looking to get into editing – with no real idea of what editing was, she claims – and landed her first industry job as a sales assistant with Little, Brown and Company’s New York office. In the fall of 1979, she landed a gig as Associate Fiction Editor with Omni magazine. Two years later, she was promoted to Fiction Editor with the magazine, then its Internet-based Omni Online, where she remained through 1998, also editing ten Omni-associated anthologies during her tenure. The rest of her continuing story is better chronicled in bibliographical lists and biographical compendiums.
 
Meeting Datlow, one might be thrown by the prevalent aura of bohemianism, but don’t let her salt of the earth appearance fool you: She knows how to navigate around the modern-day corporate publishing world. That she’s done so successfully for just over a quarter of a century now speaks to her endurance and savvy at keeping ahead of changing trends and market curves.

Dark Scribe Magazine recently caught up with speculative fiction’s busiest editor to discuss Lovecraft Unbound (out next month from Dark Horse Comics):

Dark Scribe Magazine: Tell us a little about Lovecraft Unbound. How did the project come about?

Ellen Datlow: I was in the middle of editing my Poe anthology (in honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s Bicentennial) and I started thinking about Lovecraftian stories written by others and how they’re usually unsatisfying pastiches. All of a sudden, the title came to me: Lovecraft Unbound, and from that came the idea of broadening the sub-genre of Lovecraftian fiction and acquiring a few interesting reprints, and commissioning  new stories inspired by Lovecraft, but not overtly using H.P. Lovecraft’s world or language.

Dark Scribe: How were the contributors selected?

Ellen Datlow: I approached writers I know have an interest in Lovecraft because they’re written provocative, non-pastiche stories or novels previously. Writers like Elizabeth Bear, Marc Laidlaw, Michael Shea, William Browning Spencer, Laird Barron, and Nick Mamatas. And some of those writers recommended others who might be interested.

Dark Scribe: What makes Lovecraft such a compelling subject over forty years after his death? Why do you think the Lovecraftian influence remains such a strong force in genre literature?

Ellen Datlow: The world and mythos was created out of a dread of the unknown and that dread conveyed – and continues to convey – itself to the reader, despite the fact that his language is often over the top.  And there are riches still to be mined from that mythos — for every fifty works derivative of Lovecraft, there are a few that sing and sparkle and are fresh.

Dark Scribe: What were the unique challenges in putting together this particular anthology?

Ellen Datlow: Communicating what I was looking for — the essence rather than the trappings of Lovecraft.

Dark Scribe: For newer genre readers unacquainted with Lovecraft’s work, where would you suggest they start?

Ellen Datlow:  They could invest in the Library of America hardcover collection of Lovecraft edited by Peter Straub. It’s more than 800 pages for about $23-$35 depending where you look. Or pick up any of the many collections on ABE in paperback for a few dollars. The first thing I ever read was the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. But I still own the old Ballantine and Lancer mass market copies of The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Tomb and Other Tales, The Lurker at the Threshold, The Watcher out of Time, and The Colour out of Space.

Dark Scribe: Now that you’ve taken on Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe (in this year’s Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe), are there any other genre luminaries you’d be interested in fashioning a themed anthology around?

Ellen Datlow: Not really. Those are the two iconic names in my mind.

Dark Scribe: You’ve also collaborated with Terri Windling on a series of middle grade anthologies of fairy tale re-tellings, the latest being Troll’s Eye View. How did these books come about and where do you see the series going next?

Ellen Datlow: Earlier in our collaboration, we co-edited six volumes of adult retellings of fairy tales starting in 1993. We thought six books were enough in that series and the subgenre was being supersaturated.

But we’d never edited children’s books (we had already started the young adult, crossover to adult mythic series (The Green Man, The Faery Reel, The Coyote Road, and forthcoming, The Beastly Bride) and, if I remember correctly, we were approached by a children’s book editor at Simon & Schuster. We co-edited A Wolf at the Door and were signed up for Swan Sister when our editor left. It turned out that the editor to whom we were assigned was more interested in realistic fiction than fantasy fiction so we were a bad fit. Terri and I came up with a few other ideas for children’s anthologies but Simon & Schuster wasn’t interested. Instead, the editor of our YA titles at Viking bought our fairy tale villain anthology even though it’s a middle grade book. We’d like to co-edit some more children’s anthologies and have a few ideas knocking around.

Dark Scribe: Are there any differences in how you put together an anthology for adults versus young readers? What are the unique aspects of editing a collection for the YA market?

Ellen Datlow:There are three different age readers we edit for: Adult, young adult (which can mean anything from 16 to early 20's) and children-middle grade which covers 8-12 year olds.

The difference between YA and adult is that the characters must primarily be young, because it’s felt that young readers don’t want to read about middle-aged or old people. I don’t know if this is actually so, but that’s the received wisdom.  Other than that, the stories are generally less dense than an adult story and the sex and/or violence less graphic.

For middle grade, we look for stories that are shorter (3,500 words or under) and more accessible. But we often find that adults who are fans of ours read all our anthologies, no matter what age group they’re aimed at. Which, of course, is gratifying.

Dark Scribe: You moderated a panel on editing anthologies that I had the honor of participating on at the HWA’s Stoker Weekend this past June. One of the more interesting points was made by fellow editor Kathryn Cramer (of the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Year's Best Fantasy series) in response to an audience member’s question about reading slush. While you maintained that you read slush for your “Year’s Best” anthologies, Cramer contended that – by virtue of having been published – the material you are reading is already pre-vetted to a great extent and, thereby, not true slush.  Do you disagree with that and why? Is there no difference between reading submissions generated by an open call and previously published material?

Ellen Datlow: Kathryn is not reading horror so she has no idea what is out there. There are more lower-end horror magazines and ‘zines [in horror] than there are in both science fiction and fantasy combined.  Much of what I read is obviously not vetted. If it had been, it wouldn’t have been published. What does get published in some of these magazines or websites has also not been edited. Some so-called editors out there don’t even know what editing means.

An aside:  I read a piece [by an editor] on a website that ostensibly explained how he “edits” yet what the person was describing was not editing at all. It was copyediting: fixing punctuation and spelling. A whole different animal. My annoyance at this ignorance caused me to rant on my blog about the difference between line editing and copyediting. In turn, I was asked to adapt that rant into an article for the SFWA handbook.

Sorry, back to the subject — in an ideal world the stories I read in magazines have indeed been vetted. But of course I never read unpublished work for my Best of the Year. Neither does Kathryn. My point – if I remember correctly – was that I discover new writers all the time, and have been for going on twenty-three years now, because I try to read widely in and out of the horror field, looking for horror in all kinds of places, including magazines and webzines of every type and genre – including mainstream – that publish fiction. So over the years I’ve developed a gigantic pool of writers whose work I love. From those hundreds of writers, I will contact those I think would be able to write something wonderful for any given project.

Dark Scribe: What can you share with DSM readers about any projects you’re working on now?

Ellen Datlow: I’m currently finishing up the giant reprint anthology of cat stories in all genres, Tails of Wonder and Imagination for Night Shade Books. I’m working on a second volume of Best Horror of the Year, also for Night Shade. Terri and I are currently working on a dark YA anthology. But we’ve already bought some serendipitous submissions and have no more room for anything but by the writers who have already committed to it.

I’m very much hoping to sell a new vampirism anthology and Terri and I are trying to sell an adult fantasy anthology. But until/unless they’re sold, there’s no point talking about them. And no, please don’t anyone send me vampire stories (even if I sold the book, that’s not what it’s about). (laughs)

Dark Scribe: With 21 volumes of “Year’s Best” collections and 39 various anthologies to your name, has there been a favorite? One or two that you take an extra bit of pride or professional satisfaction in?

Ellen Datlow: I have a few favorites: My two vampirism anthologies: Blood is Not Enough and A Whisper of Blood, because they did exactly what I wanted them to do — broaden the idea of what vampirism is. They’re back in print as a gorgeous, huge Barnes & Noble hardcover called A Whisper of Blood, and selling very well. I also love Twists of the Tale, my cat horror anthology (another book orphaned, but this time three times pre-publication).  And The Dark, my ghost story anthology.

Ask me again tomorrow and I’ll respond differently.

For more information on Ellen Datlow, visit her official website.

Brian Keene’s  Castaways – revised and expanded from a 2004 short story of the same name – pays tribute to Richard Laymon and draws upon the themes and styles the late horror master used. Keene’s latest release, Urban Gothic, does much the same, though the man to whom homage is paid this time out is horror author Edward Lee.

Keene is a prolific writer whose stock has experienced a steady ascent over the past few years and continues to rise with each new release. Although his zombie themed novels – most notably The Rising, City of the Dead, and Dead Sea – have earned particular notoriety, Keene has ably proven to be more than a one-trick pony.

Urban Gothic, released last month from Leisure Books, chronicles a group of friends whose car breaks down in a dangerous neighborhood within an inner city. Seeking shelter in a seemingly abandoned row house, the group soon realizes that its residents live in the cellar, remaining hidden during the day for good reason. These residents dislike intruders, and the friends quickly find themselves fighting for their very lives.    

Dark Scribe Magazine recently chatted with Brian Keene to get the scoop on Urban Gothic, his strategy for avoiding thematic repetition, and what’s next on the agenda for one of the busiest guys in horror.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Urban Gothic was released last month. What can you tell us about it?

Brian Keene: The premise is simple: take the standard genre trope of a group of people encountering the murderous, inbred, cannibalistic, mutant hillbillies somewhere deep in the mountains, and transplant all of that to inner city Philadelphia. Basically, I wanted to play with stereotypes and perceptions: the black gang-bangers aren’t gang-bangers. The white football hero isn’t a hero. The airhead teen girls aren’t airheads. And the mutant freaks don’t live in the backwoods of West Virginia or out in the Arizona desert.

Dark Scribe Magazine: You've said that if Castaways was a tribute to Richard Laymon, then Urban Gothic is a tribute to Edward Lee. In what ways do those writers' styles inform each respective book, and how did they influence the finished manuscripts?

Brian Keene: I wanted to pay homage to several writers whose work I’ve enjoyed: authors who’ve inspired me over the years. Castaways was a tribute to Richard Laymon, in that I used some of the themes that have appeared repeatedly in his work, and changed my writing style a bit to make it sound more like his. I’ve done the same thing with Urban Gothic. Since I consider it a tribute to Edward Lee, I’ve used the themes and style that inform much of his work the illumination of human truths and a dump truck load of gore (laughs). With the next novel, I’ll return to my own style. Sometime down the road, I’d like to pay tribute to Jack Ketchum, Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson and Bentley Little, too.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Despite swearing off zombies for awhile, you recently penned three new zombie tales, including "The Wind Cries Mary" (from the forthcoming anthology The New Dead from Subterranean Press). What compels you towards writing zombie fiction in particular, and what made this return to zombie fiction personally worthwhile for you?

Brian Keene: Because the stories required a zombie. That’s really what it comes down to. I stopped writing zombie stories because I had nothing new to say. I mean, let’s be honest. If I wanted to, I could make a pretty decent living just writing zombie novel after zombie novel especially given their current popularity. But doing that doesn’t appeal to me. There are other stories I’d rather tell. Other monsters and situations I’d rather examine.

Then I got three new ideas, all of which involved zombies. If the stories had called for satyrs or man-eating worms or an intelligent, malevolent darkness, I’d have used that instead.

Dark Scribe Magazine: You abandoned a novel entitled The Tunnel, since it tackles the same themes and situations explored in Castaways and Urban Gothic. As your career progresses, how do you make sure to venture in new directions, as opposed to recycling old ideas?

Brian Keene: Well, I guess you do exactly that: stop yourself when you realize it’s occurring. That’s what happened with The Tunnel. I was about 20,000 words into the first draft of the novel when it occurred to me that I really wasn’t saying anything new with it. All I was doing was repeating some of the themes from Castaways and Urban Gothic.

Something else that works is venturing into new storytelling mediums. I’ve found that my recent experiences writing for comic books and video games have really recharged my creativity.

Dark Scribe Magazine: You recently announced you will write a regular column for Shroud Magazine called "Seminal Screams", which will focus on works of classic horror fiction. What can readers expect from this column, and how would you describe the importance of reading classic horror fiction for horror readers and writers?

Brian Keene: It’s basically inspired by two things: Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and Karl Edward Wagner’s wonderful list of 100 horror/fantasy novels that everyone should read. Both sources were indispensable to me when I was younger. However, both are now a bit outdated. It’s been at least 20-25 years since their publication? I thought perhaps it was time for an updated list, and since I consider myself well-read in the genre, and since I don’t see anybody else volunteering to create a new source, I figured I’d better do it.

Plus, Shroud offered me money to do so, and that’s always a wonderful motivator. (laughs)

Dark Scribe Magazine: You also contributed an essay to Writers Workshop of Horror, pairing you with the likes of Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Gary Braunbeck. How did your involvement in that project materialize, and what do you feel is the greatest mistake that budding horror writers commit?

Brian Keene: I became involved because the editor, Michael Knost, asked if he could reprint one of the essays I wrote for my old World Domination 101 blog – a blog that was targeted at new writers.

My thoughts haven’t changed. I still feel the biggest mistake aspiring professional writers make is giving their work away for free, or worse, paying to have their work published. These were mistakes long before I came along. They were mistakes when I was starting out. And they are still mistakes today, even in this era of "new publishing."

Dark Scribe Magazine: You also keep your website regularly updated through blogs, and interact with your readers. What role do you feel blogs – as well as regular interaction with readers – play in marketing fiction in the 21st century?

Brian Keene: The same role that print newsletters and answering fan mail with a letter of your own played in marketing back in the days before the Internet. It’s a way to communicate with your audience. A way to stay connected and gauge how they are reacting to what you’re doing. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dark Scribe Magazine: Director Paul Campion is currently helming film adaptations of both Dark Hollow and Terminal. How do you feel these two novels will translate into film, and where are these films currently in terms of development?

Brian Keene: I hope they’ll both translate very well. Writer Paul Finch adapted Dark Hollow, and his screenplay is wonderful - much better than I could have done, certainly.

Dark Hollow is set to begin shooting later this year, I believe, provided they get the green light. Terminal is, of course, still under option, as is Ghoul. Obviously, as the author, you hope each of them will eventually get made, but there’s never really any way to be sure - at least not until filming has wrapped and a release date is set. For example, The Ties That Bind was put on DVD at the end of July. Knowing that, it’s safe to say that fans will be able to see that movie adaptation of my work. (laughs)
 
Dark Scribe Magazine: What’s next after Urban Gothic?

Brian Keene: J. F. Gonzalez and I are finishing up Clickers 3: Dagon Rising. That will be out next year from Delirium Books. Gak and I are working on a hybrid graphic novel/novel totally unlike anything either of us has ever seen before – a true melding of art and writing and storytelling. It’s tentatively called The Wanderer, and will be published by Necro Publications sometime next year.

My 2010 Leisure Books releases are Darkness on the Edge of Town, which is a post-apocalyptic/supernatural novel, and A Gathering of Crows, which features the return of Levi Stoltzfus, the fan-favorite Amish magus from Ghost Walk and various short stories.

You’ll also see a number of up-coming comic book projects for various comic publishers.

For more about Brian Keene, visit his official author website.

Bruce Boston’s The Nightmare Collection recently won the 2008 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. For Boston, this recent accolade is part of a long resume within the realms of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Boston has won the Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association, where he was also accorded the title “Grand Master.” Boston’s acclaim has stretched beyond the genre world with a Pushcart Prize, and his other books of poetry include Sensuous Debris, Pitchblende, and Shades Fantastic. His fiction includes The Guardener's Tale, Stained Glass Rain, and the collection Masque of Dreams. Shortly before winning the Stoker, Dark Scribe Magazine sat down to talk to Boston about his poetry.

Dark Scribe Magazine: You are probably best known as a speculative poet. Some critics assert there's no such thing as "speculative poetry" — in that one would not find poetry genres mirroring romance or mystery fiction. How would you respond?

Bruce Boston: Although speculative fiction – in particular science fiction – is grouped as a genre with mysteries and romance, it is significantly different. Mysteries and romance are written to be read mainly for entertainment; they generally have no substantive content. However, some science fiction and horror – as well as being entertaining – is more likely to deal with philosophical, social, and scientific ideas. Thus, poetry – akin to SF or horror in that it borrows from their tropes and images – is likely to do the same, in contrast to mainstream poetry, which more often deals with emotions and perceptions.

I would think that the same critics who claim there is no such thing as speculative poetry, might also discount science fiction and horror as serious [forms of] literature. Anyone who has read widely in these genres knows this is not the case. In opposition to the contention that there is no such thing as speculative poetry, I’ve heard the claim that all poetry is speculative — it speculates on the nature of reality and the human condition.

Dark Scribe: How did you first start writing poetry?

Bruce Boston: I became familiar with poetry as a form early on because my mother read Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child’s Garden of Verses to me as bedtime stories. Once I learned to read, this same book was one of my first. I wrote poetry sporadically through grammar school, high school, and college, though by the time I was nine or ten, I was more interested in writing fiction. I did not begin writing poetry seriously until my mid-twenties, when I fell in with a group of writers in Berkeley who were mainly poets. I became the resident fiction writer of the group, editing fiction for several issues of their magazine, Berkeley Poets’ Cooperative, but I also attended their weekly workshops in poetry for nearly a decade. I heard lots of poetry read, discussed, and criticized, including my own, and in the process I honed my poetic skills.

Dark Scribe: Which poet do you admire most?

Bruce Boston: There is no single poet for me that stands head and shoulders above others. The ones I do like, I admire for different reasons. I admire Ezra Pound for his language and the range of his knowledge, Dylan Thomas for his passion and lyricism, Allen Ginsberg for his spiritual-emotional intensity and social awareness, Billy Collins because of his clever imagination and his ability to convey a great deal in very few words. Just as there are all kinds of ways to write poetry, there are all kinds of ways to appreciate it.

If you are after what poets have influenced me most, I'd say certain fiction writers – Robert E. Howard, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, to name a few – and the painter Salvador Dali – have influenced my writer’s voice, and thus my poetic voice, as much as poets have. I’ve always read eclectically, and I write eclectically, exploring many different forms and voices.

Dark Scribe: How do you approach issues of form? In The Nightmare Collection you have prose pieces, free verse, and work that rhymes. How does your working with form help shape the content of your poems?

Bruce Boston: I once had a discussion with a fellow poet about this. Borrowing a quote from renowned architect Louis Sullivan – “Form follows function.” – he argued that the same applies to writing poetry. It certainly is true of architecture. If you are commissioned to build a sports arena, you can't design its form as if it were a hospital or office building. Yet in the arena of poetry, function is more subjective and never quite so specifically defined. When I begin a poem, I don’t think in terms of what this poem should accomplish, its function. Seldom do I have a clear idea of its form. The process is more organic. A poem can begin anywhere: an image, a scrap of conversation, a news article, another poem or work of art. For me, it usually begins with a few lines and grows from there, with form and function interacting in the process. I often discover the function in the process of writing the poem. I’ve had poems that I later adapted as prose poems or flash fictions. The different form, the transition to prose, sometimes changed the thematic content of the piece. In those cases, function followed form.

Dark Scribe: In writing speculative poetry, you engage a fair amount in established myth and legend. How do you engage established myth versus creating your own?

Bruce Boston: In my poem “Curse of the Siren’s Suitors” I chose to write a short poem that was a simple retelling of a classic myth. However, with my poetry in general, this is the exception rather than the rule. Rarely do I set out to write anything based on specific myth or legend. The mythic association, when there is one, comes later. My poem “Curse of Medusa’s Husband” was adapted from a prose poem about a bedroom lined with mirrors that made no mention of Medusa.

Two collaborative poems that Marge Simon and I wrote – “Ajax Redux” and “Lilith Revisited” – existed as poetic narratives before the mythic figures were introduced. It became clear that the narratives of these poems resonated in some ways with stories that had been told before. By introducing mythic figures that readers may identify, a poem can work more effectively because it is grounded in our cultural heritage. Rather than merely reflecting myth, these two poems – as their titles imply – extend the tales and give them a different twist.

Dark Scribe: How does the writing process differ when considering long poems? Do you find that long poems need to be more narrative than lyrical?

Bruce Boston: Long poems are often more narrative as a way of holding the reader’s interest, but by no means do they need to be less lyrical. Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” Poe’s “The Raven.” Or think of such homey classics as “Casey at the Bat” or “The Ballad of Sam McGee.” All of these poems are long, narrative, and lyrical. Although it does not contain traditional rhyme and meter, I think the same could be said of my long poem “Pavane for a Cyber-Princess,” which can be found in my collection Pitchblende (Dark Regions, 2003).

Also, there are other ways besides narrative of holding the reader’s interest in long poems. Take a look at Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. At around 500 lines, this poem is long and lyrical, but not a narrative in the normal sense of the word. Rather, it begins with a passionate diatribe that moves from description to accusation, and ends as a kind of love poem. It attempts to hold the reader by the intensity of its visionary language and the scenes it is portraying. Likewise with my long poem “She Was There for Him the Last Time,” also in Pitchblende. A narrative exists here, but it is so intentionally jumbled in terms of chronology that it becomes secondary to the lyrical language and the visionary scenes being portrayed.

Dark Scribe: You also write fiction. How does the process of writing poetry inform your prose writing?

Bruce Boston: Writing fiction – unless it is flash fiction – is a very different process from writing poetry. The language still needs to flow smoothly, but you also have to include ordinary sentences such as: “He opened the refrigerator door.” or “She sat down and leaned back.” Yet you are still working with language, and there’s plenty of room in descriptive and narrative passages where poetic language can shine and enhance the text. Steve Erickson’s novels (Days between Stations, Rubicon Beach, etc.) are composed largely of narrative, containing many passages which could stand alone as poems. With regard to current horror fiction, you’ll find excellent dark poetry – not only in descriptive and narrative passages but in richly portrayed action scenes – in Michael McBride’s God’s End Trilogy, novels which should have received far more Bram Stoker Award consideration than they have.

Also, in a broader sense, stories and novels can employ metaphor and symbol in the same way that poetry does. The dystopian society that controls the world in my novel The Guardener’s Tale scans its citizens to produce a holographic image of their lives in order to predict anti-social behavior. This image emerges as a configuration shaped like a flower. Images of flowers, plants, and organic growth are pervasive throughout the book, figuring in both negative and positive contexts, reflecting and embodying the themes of the novel, functioning the same way images often do in poetry.

Dark Scribe: During the writing of The Guardener's Tale, how much of the political happenings of the real world around you at the time influenced your prose?

Bruce Boston: A line in a poem by Andrew Joron reads: “All futurity wears the head of an insect.”

I believe that what Joron was saying in a very compact way is that as societies become more modernized and technological, there is less room for individuality and more pressure to conform to established norms of behavior where one fulfills a function of the society rather than fulfilling one’s life as an individual. An extreme example of this can be found in the mechanized nightmare world of Fritz Lange’s Metropolis.

I’ve certainly seen this long-range trend in my lifetime, and that did have an influence on the general theme of The Guardener’s Tale. More recently, eight years of the George W. Bush administration seem to me to have been accompanied by an increasing abridgement of civil liberties and the invasion of individual privacy, while the United States continued to portray itself as a champion of freedom. The society in The Guardener’s Tale is much like this, defining positive and negative freedoms for its citizens, encouraging the former and prohibiting the latter, proclaiming itself as the freest society in human history. Though perhaps more than directly informing the content of the novel, the Bush years helped give me the emotional energy to finish the book, since I felt it had greater contemporary relevance than when I first conceived it.

Dark Scribe: Putting together and sequencing a collection of poems is hardly a random process. How do you balance humor in your work, in terms of using it occasionally while moving from the horrific and the speculative?

Bruce Boston: Assembling a book of poems in some ways resembles writing a story or novel because the book is going to be more available to readers if it has a structure they can perceive. I write fantasy poems set in hypothetical pasts, poems in the contemporary world, and the science fiction poems set in hypothetical futures, so I’ve often employed a chronological approaching when putting a book of poems together: fantasy, contemporary, science fiction.

On occasion I’ve used humorous poems as transitions between one section of a book and another, to break the mood that’s been created and begin in a new direction. Most of the humorous poems I write are dark humor, and some of my serious dark poems contain humorous or satiric touches. So more often I try to group those together. For example, in The Nightmare Collection, “It’s Not Easy Being Dead” is followed by “Monster Lover” and “Curse of the Giantess’ Husband,” all containing humor to varying degrees.

Putting together a book of poems is a balancing act in which you have to keep shifting poems around until you find the order you feel is most effective. To some extent this is a moot exercise since many readers will not read the poems in a collection in the order in which they appear.

Dark Scribe: What future publications do you have in the works?

Bruce Boston: The Spanish edition of The Guardener’s Tale should be out this month from La Factoria de Ideas. I have two books of poetry forthcoming later this year: a science fiction collection, North Left of Earth from Sam’s Dot Publishing, and a mostly dark collaborative collection – with nine other authors, including fellow SFPA Grandmaster Poet Robert Frazier – Double Visions from Dark Regions Press. Watch for more poems in Asimov’s SF and Strange Horizons, fiction in the Dark Wisdom Anthology, and also stories online as podcasts in Pseudopod and Escape Pod.

For more information about Bruce Boston, visit his official author website.

D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning short story writer and novelist. He is also a cultural theorist, an English professor, editor-in-chief of The Dream People, and practitioner of such literary sub-genres as critifiction, scikungfi, and irrealism. He’s a former casino dealer, town crier, sommelier, and garbage man.

In other words, D. Harlan Wilson is a hard man to pin down. But while he and his writing may avoid pigeonholing like the plague, there’s no doubt that he’s got some very interesting things to day – both in his fiction and in the interview that follows.

Dark Scribe Magazine: You’ve earned two Masters degrees (English and Science Fiction Studies) and a Ph.D. in English. How has this education fed into your craft?

D. Harlan Wilson: Immensely. All of my novel-length works are critifictions, i.e., they can function both as fiction and scholarly criticism, depending upon the angles of incidence from which readers approach them. Without my background in the critical study of literature, I would have never become a creative writer. I was a graduate student for about ten years and my focus in school was on reading and interpreting literature. I always wrote fiction on the side, though, and inevitably one informed the other. They continue to do so. Now more than ever, in fact.

By merging theory and fiction, part of my goal is to construct narratives that can be enjoyed for story, characterization, etc., but that also prompt readers to think about society, culture, technology, the meaning of life, and shit like that. Criticism can be so dry. And fiction can be so bland and formulaic and predictable. I try to spruce things up by combining and accessorizing the two forms.

We live in a wildly apathetic world. If somebody’s head blowing up in a creative way piques a reader, good. If somebody double-takes a potential theoretical assertion about, say, the ways technology has reconfigured desire and the body, great. I try to get people’s attention. I try to push the boundaries of narrative, of what is expected from narrative. The problem is getting people to pick up a book. Most people don’t read, or if they do read, it’s a book assigned to them in college, or a book they get because they liked the movie it was based on. That’s cool. I have no lofty aspirations to convert the masses. In the words of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, “I do what I do because I like to do what I do.” But I can’t deny that I wish the Written Word was held in higher regard than it is nowadays.

Dark Scribe: Which is more important in your work? Style or plot and characterization? If you put one over the other, why?

D. Harlan Wilson: I consider myself a stylist more than anything — I try to be a stylist anyway. In other interviews I have said that I don’t care about plot or character, i.e., I don’t focus on it, and that’s true to some degree. But you can’t tell a story without plot or character, of course—these things are essential to fiction—whereas style isn’t. There’s so much crummy prose. And that’s fine. Generally speaking, readers don’t care about prose. They care about whether or not they can empathize with characters and the degree to which a story engages them. So I think I just take plot and character for granted. Stylizing prose, on the other hand, is a chore and I pay a lot more conscious attention to it.

Dark Scribe: What goals do you have for your work? Are you writing to entertain or challenge your readers, or do you write for yourself without trying to generate a particular reaction or feeling in the reader?

D. Harlan Wilson: I try to do all of those things. I try to both educate and entertain readers as much as myself. It’s hard for me to really get into a book or story. Not because I’m a literary snob or anything. My tastes are just very particular. I like dark humor, above all, but executed in certain ways. And I like science fiction and horror and fantasy, but not genre speculative fiction, generally speaking, as there are numerous genre works that I enjoy and revere. Thing is, there’s billions of books out there. So much to choose from. I find myself tapping into the billions, trying out authors and books that I haven’t read, and coming up disappointed, or at least unfulfilled. I want to like more literature. But I don’t! Then again, unlike my wife, who can read purely for pleasure — I find that difficult to do. When I read, I’m always thinking about how I might use or reappropriate or extrapolate aspects of this or that narrative for my own creative or scholarly pursuits. That’s bad, I think. I wish I could just sit down for an hour or two and get lost in a novel. I used to be able to do that. But graduate school ruined me.

As for inciting particular reactions or feelings in readers, I do make an effort, but much of what I write is ultraviolent, for creative and critical purposes, and I’m honestly desensitized to a lot of the grue that I depict. Not always, though. For example, there’s a chapter in my upcoming novella, Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance, where two women torture a man. The first version of the chapter depicted two men torturing a woman, and it really disturbed me — and my wife! — so I switched gender roles. My own disgust wasn’t the final catalyst; there were aesthetic reasons for the alteration relating to the nature of patriarchy and misogyny. Point is, it’s one of just a few instances in which my writing has struck an emotional chord with me. For the most part it doesn’t. I’m mainly preoccupied with how my narratives function in their totality, as word-portraits of extrapolated realities, with or without violence, sex, etc. But sex and violence are at the core of the human condition; they’re difficult to avoid. Some of my readers might be grossed out or taken aback. But I don’t think I portray things that are beyond the scope of what most intelligent adults can relate to on some level.

Dark Scribe: You’ve published both flash fiction and long form — which is more challenging to write? Which — if either — is more rewarding?

D. Harlan Wilson: Flash fiction is easier — much easier. A piece of flash fiction can simply capitalize on one idea or image or string of words. Writing a novel is much more of an intellectual, psychological and emotional investment, if only because of the length (my flash fiction ranges from 10-500 words whereas most of my novels are around 40,000 words). But with length comes more ideas, characters, plotlines, histories, relationships, etc., all of which need to be closely tracked and kept in order during the writing process. It’s a pain in the ass. I enjoy writing flash fiction more; I can compose a story with a beginning, middle and end in one sitting and be done with it. Novels take me anywhere from six months to a year. I have to record notes all the time, and I’m thinking about the goddamn novel all the time, and I’m annoyed by dreams about the novel, and I’m constantly bouncing ideas off of my wife, and so on. But despite this imaginative vigilance and obsession, it’s massively rewarding in the end. There’s nothing like finishing and polishing a book you’ve written that you really like, even if it’s just for the time being (in retrospect, I don’t like most of my writing and want to revise it, as is the case with many authors).

Dark Scribe: Irrealism? Bizarro? Do you like all these labels that get applied to your work, or would you prefer not to be labeled in any way?

D. Harlan Wilson: I like the term irreal — it is the most accurate term for my work. It’s somewhat complicated, but basically irrealism depicts absurdist, dreamlike, but generally recognizable worlds in which the cause and effect schema that you and I are subject to is either slightly or egregiously off-kilter.

I tend to merge irreal aesthetics with the speculative genres. It’s not surrealism—that’s different, although there are similar traits. Surrealism is more akin to Bizarro insofar as both were created as marketing tools and represented a wide range of artistry. Bizarro is an umbrella term for different kinds of fiction. Irrealism is one kind. Others include esoteric subcategories like “Tweeker Lit,” “Avant Punk” and “Subterficial Fiction.” But there are more familiar and straight-shooting forms like satire, minimalism and absurdism. These terms have all been conceived of by individual authors or their publishers to define their Bizarro styles.

Like I said, the idea is to sell books, and in this capacity Bizarro works; over the last 5 years it has really grown in popularity. That said, ultimately I don’t care what people call my writing. I’m not trying to write in a Bizarro vein. It’s nice to be able to say I write this or I write that, I guess. It’s convenient, anyway. The compulsion to categorize things is a basic human trait that I struggle with. I don’t like categories, but I recognize their use-value.

Dark Scribe: What’s the relationship of your work to horror? One and the same? Companions? Kissin’ cousins?

D. Harlan Wilson: Definitely not one and the same — if, that is, we’re talking about genre horror à la Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc. I wouldn’t call them companions either. Kissin’ cousins is accurate enough.

Objectively speaking, if you look at, for instance, my novel Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria and Koontz’s Intensity, there are fundamental similarities. Both novels feature a serial killer. Both contain fair shares of violence against the body. Both elicit fear and contain gross-out moments. And so forth. But our styles differ significantly. I tell stories with schizophrenic rigor; structurally all of my novels are fractal, and I perceive them as mosaics, portraits of the interaction of conscious and unconscious realms. Koontz’s style is more straightforward. I like reading both kinds of narration. I just prefer writing more experimental stuff and trying new things.

It’s tough, though. I don’t want to write experimental prose that looks experimental simply for the sake of it, as you see in a lot of authors fashioned by MFA degrees. I want my narrative structure to reflect the actual content of my work. You might say I want my narrative to be a character as much as the characters the narrative illustrates.

Dark Scribe: Tell us about the online journal you edit, The Dream People.

D. Harlan Wilson: I’ve been the editor-in-chief for this journal since 2006. It used to be run by the publishers of Raw Dog Screaming Press, and before that by Carlton Mellick III, figurehead of the Bizarro movement and founder of Eraserhead Press. The RDSP folks got too swamped with book publishing and they were going to abandon The Dream People, so I offered to take over.

The Dream People primarily publishes irreal fiction — hence the subtitle “a journal of irreal texts.” We consider fiction between 5-1000 words, preferably around 500 words. There are also book reviews, interviews, artwork, microcriticism, novel excerpts, and comics and animation, although the latter two are harder to come by. Currently the journal is a biannual publication. I’d like to make it triannual, maybe even a quarterly, but I just don’t have enough time right now, and I probably won’t have time in the foreseeable future.

The journal caters to our increasing, Internet-spawned, collective short attention span. I don’t like to read long texts on a computer screen — I prefer to hold them in my hands and turn pages, and I know lots of readers who do, too. More importantly, The Dream People is a good advertising forum for both new and old authors and artists. The Internet is the best promotional tool for contemporary creative output; if nothing else, it permits authors and artists to reach large numbers of eyes quickly. I had a lot of help and encouragement when I started out writing from different people. The Dream People is one way I can give back. It becomes more and more important to me.

Dark Scribe: Tell us about your new book from Shroud Publishing, Peckinpah.

D. Harlan Wilson: Peckinpah is a 20,000 word novella in which I attempt to do several things. One is to represent the physical and psychological terrain of Midwestern American life. This is based on personal experience; I teach at a university in a small town called Celina in Ohio, although I relocated the state to Indiana in the book and called the town Dreamfield. So that’s the narrative space I inhabit. Within this space, I explore and critique some of the cinematic themes of filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who has been called a forefather of ultraviolent aesthetics, an issue that concerns me both as a critical and creative writer. On one level, then, I express certain horrors of middle America and the ways in which I think this place sucks. On another level, I examine the great American romance with violence. That includes multiple forms of violence (e.g. cinematic, physical, psychological, cultural, narrational, technological, ecological, etc.).

Dark Scribe: How did Sam Peckinpah become a strong enough influence that you felt compelled to write a novel around him and his work?

D. Harlan Wilson: In addition to Peckinpah’s revolutionary and unprecedented use of violence in his films, I was interested in the man himself. I read a lot of biographical material on him when I was researching my book. He was a fascinating guy. He was this total fuckup. An alcoholic and a drug addict and a womanizer and a brawler. But there was a really soft and caring side to him, too. I like that sort of duality in people, or at least in characters I read or write about. I probably wouldn’t have liked Sam very much in person. I don’t like most artists I meet whose work I admire, whether they are filmmakers, actors, writers, or what have you: I have an idea of what they’ll be like and they consistently let me down. But that’s my problem, mostly.

It occurs to me that the moment I became intrigued by Sam Peckinpah was not after seeing one of his films but when my brother-in-law told me he committed suicide by stabbing himself, like, fifty times. It turned out not to be true — my brother-in-law had Sam confused with somebody else whose name I don’t recall. Some rock star, I think. Still, that’s what set the ball rolling for me.

Dark Scribe: What else do you have in the works?

D. Harlan Wilson: In addition to Peckinpah, I’m currently promoting two other books. One is a novel I mentioned before, Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria, published earlier this year by Raw Dog Screaming Press. The other is a book of literary and cultural criticism, Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction, which debuted at the Science Fiction Research Association’s annual convention in June and was published by RDSP’s new nonfiction syndicate, Guide Dog Books.

Next year I have another novel coming out, Codename Prague, the second installment in my scikungfi trilogy, the first of which was Dr. Identity (or, Farewell to Plaquedemia). That one’s finished, more or less. Now I’m working on the third and final scikungfi novel, The Kyoto Man, which will be published in 2011.

As for criticism, I have been contracted to write a book on John Carpenter’s film They Live for Wallflower Press’s cultographies series. I’m only in the research stage of this project. It’s slated for release in 2012.

For more information on D. Harlan Wilson, visit his official author website.

To most genre readers, Christopher Conlon is a novelist who was recently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Others may know him as editor of two very high profile short story anthologies, He Is Legend and Poe's Lighthouse. Conlon, however, doesn't readily identify himself first as a novelist or an anthologist. He's a poet first and foremost, having written Gilbert and Garbo in Love, The Weeping Time, and Mary Falls: Requiem for Mrs. Surratt. Recently, Creative Guy Publishing released Conlon's latest, Starkweather Dreams. The book probes the lives of Charlie Starkweather, a serial killer back in the 1950's, and Caril Anne Fugate, his girlfriend. DSM recently had the chance to pose a few questions regarding poetry and writing about tragic figures.

Dark Scribe Magazine: A lot of contemporary American poetry seems mired in a navel-gazing "church of self." You seem to sidestep that completely by focusing on figures and stories from history. How did you come to this approach and how do you make it work for you?

Christopher Conlon: Well, there was no plan. It happened very organically. Most of my early poems did indeed occupy that "church of self," and a few of them were pretty good. But at some point I seemed to lose interest in myself as a subject. Around 2000 or 2001 I wrote a poem called "What There Is," which focused on an older brother of mine who died as an infant, and from there I began asking myself what my parents might have been like then, how they might have reacted to what happened. Both had been dead many years and I knew almost nothing about their early lives. I took what little I did know and played with it in my imagination for a while, and out came the pieces that became the "What There Is" chapbook. The poems were an attempt, I think, to somehow reach my mother and father, if only imaginatively. That was the breakthrough for me—I taught myself how to combine fact with imagination with verse techniques and come up with a kind of work that is, I think, uniquely mine. From there it was a matter of simply following my passions—for example, my first full-length book of poems, Gilbert and Garbo in Love, resulted from my lifelong love affair with silent films. In all the books I always stick scrupulously to the "known facts"—I never put characters somewhere they couldn't have been, doing something they couldn't have done. But I also allow myself completely free reign in inventing the characters' psychologies, their motivations, their private obsessions and fears.

Dark Scribe: Do you ever foresee a time when you might write more personal poetry?

Christopher Conlon: No. But then again I've been a writer long enough to know that it's foolhardy to predict. "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," as Chaucer says. I'm still learning.

Dark Scribe: So, how rigorous is your research process, especially when delving into your subject matter?

Christopher Conlon: I don't do anything I would call "research," which sounds very boring and soul-deadening to me. What I do is read about things that interest me. Eventually, if I become interested enough, poems start to come. But to be more specific, I do try to familiarize myself with all the basic sources. For Mary Falls, which focuses on Mary Surratt, one of the forgotten figures in the Lincoln assassination, I also visited her home in Clinton, Maryland, which is now a museum, as well as Ford's Theatre in Washington. I took the John Wilkes Booth Escape Route tour. All of that helped me get a sense of the atmosphere of the thing, for want of a better phrase. I didn't need to travel for Starkweather Dreams—Charlie and Caril's lives and crimes are very well-documented, and anyway, I've been in that part of Nebraska before—but I did have to make a trip to the Library of Congress to find a copy of the basic source, an obscure, long out-of-print book by James Melvin Reinhardt called The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather. Reinhardt actually interviewed Starkweather at length in prison, and the book has a great deal of material that's never been published elsewhere. But only a small run of it was ever done, and on the rare occasions you can locate a copy on eBay or something you find that it goes for three or four hundred dollars. Well, you can't check books out from the Library of Congress, of course, so instead I took their copy over to one of the Xerox machines they have there—I'd come prepared with several rolls of quarters—and simply Xeroxed the entire book! I'm sure that's some awful violation of copyright, but, well, you do what you have to do for your art. It proved to be an invaluable resource.

Dark Scribe: Do you outline the structural approach to your content, or do you write poems as they come to you, filling in any gaps once you have a substantial manuscript to work with?

Christopher Conlon: The latter. I never outline anything. The poet William Stafford used to say he believed that any poem you're writing should be able to go any place at any time; I feel that way not only about individual poems, but about these sequences I write as well. The poems come in any order—from wherever it is they come from—and I write them down. Later I revise them and shuffle them around to find their best narrative sequence, and, yes, at times I do find that I have a gap here or there that needs to be filled. So I go back to reading, thinking, dreaming. Eventually something presents itself that can get me past the trouble spot.

Dark Scribe: Some people choose to show or use fragmentation by tabbing/scattering lineation across the page. In Starkweather Dreams, you did something similar, but broke up the language with multi-space gaps. Why, and what does it add to the book?

Christopher Conlon: What it adds to the book, or doesn't, is up to the reader, I suppose. But I used the gaps, the seemingly random white space, as a way of trying to reflect the increasing fragmentation of Charlie Starkweather's mind. You'll notice that, other than the first poem, "Charlie Dream," which acts as a kind of overture to the entire book, the language for Charlie starts out completely conventionally. Only gradually as you go through the book do the odd white spaces start to appear. Then there are more and more of them.

“Love: Charlie”

Before Caril he dreamed of killing                  for no reason,
but then with her eyes, her voice, her         soft fingers,

he’d found a reason, something                       worth killing for,
and it was a tribute to her,                              an honor bestowed:

he would remake the world                             for her,
burn the fucker down, build it up again      in Their image

Sometimes, too, the language of the Charlie poems is all jammed together, no punctuation at all, or there are strange italicizations (which often indicate direct quotes, as they do in “Love: Charlie”). Anything to keep his thought processes from seeming to flow particularly smoothly or naturally—instead they should feel jumbled, broken-up, rushed, confused. The poems which focus on Caril feature no such fragmentation.

Dark Scribe: So, by that implication, Caril's mind is the more stable of the two? Though she has very specific problems of her own.

Christopher Conlon: Caril was just a lonely, troubled, rather immature fourteen-year-old who would never have hurt anyone on her own. But Charlie would have, and did—his first killing, of gas station attendant Robert Colvert, was perpetrated without her, a month before their collaborative rampage commenced. Caril was psychologically in his thrall—not too hard to understand when you realize that he murdered her mother, stepfather, and toddler sister, leaving her with nothing but him. He was five years older than Caril—a huge difference at that age. We see this kind of thing all the time in society, most recently a year or two ago with the Elizabeth Smart case—the girl who was abducted and held hostage for, I believe, a couple of years, even though she went out in public with her abductors and had any number of chances to escape. But she didn't. She was psychologically dominated by them, just as Caril was by Charlie. That's very clear to me.

Dark Scribe: What drew you to these two?

Christopher Conlon: It was mostly Caril. In my teaching career I've known a lot of fourteen-year-old girls, and what I've mostly learned from knowing them is how very, very young a fourteen-year-old girl really is. For someone like Caril—from a background of poverty, alienated from her family, a very poor student—someone like Starkweather must have seemed exciting, even sort of glamorous, at least until he turned homicidal. There was a poignancy to Caril that touched my imagination.

“Caril with an i”

After her father left she would drape
her mother’s fanciest dress
over her shoulders, spread on
rouge, mascara, lipstick, a flouncy
flower-filled hat, and stand out
in the dirt road facing their house, saying
My name is Caril with an i and my daddy
will be back soon, while winter drained
the Nebraska sky, and darkness rushed in.

Dark Scribe: Caril Ann and Charlie are definitely not Mickey and Malory from Natural Born Killers—that is, romanticized "tragic lovers." Do you think this story, or the legacy of Starkweather has become perverted or changed over the years?

Christopher Conlon: Sure, but that's what happens with outlaw couples—think of Bonnie and Clyde, a pair of violent thugs who have become folk heroes of a sort. There's a tendency to romanticize. I very much did not want to do that in Starkweather Dreams. The story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate is horrifying. It's sad. It's pathetic.

Dark Scribe: How does your writing process differ when writing fiction? How would you compare and contrast say, Starkweather Dreams and Midnight on Mourn Street?

Christopher Conlon: There isn't much difference except that writing a novel is a more linear process. I really don't find writing a poem much different from writing a paragraph, though of course one is using different techniques in each. Still, it's a never-ending struggle with language either way, isn't it? To try to find the exact word, not the approximately acceptable one. To discover the most resonant image. The proper rhythm to the line or the sentence. Those challenges don't change whether it's a poem or a novel or an article or a play or a letter to the editor. It's all language. Every line, every sentence will always be a struggle—which isn't to imply unhappiness, by the way. I love the struggle.

Dark Scribe: You were nominated for a Stoker for your novel Midnight on Mourn Street. Starkweather Dreams was just released. What's next for you?

Christopher Conlon: Well, I have a novella and interview in the newest issue of Dark Discoveries Magazine (#13), which is just out. Next up should be two anthology appearances. I have fiction in a book William F. Nolan is editing for Dark Discoveries Press called The Bleeding Edge, due sometime this summer; and, as you know, I have a poem in the upcoming Death in Common poetry anthology from Daverana. My theatrical adaptation on Midnight on Mourn Street received a professional staged reading in May; I'm on the hunt now for a company to give the script an actual production. But my main energies for the next few months will be on my next novel, tentatively titled Lullaby for the Rain Girl, which has some supernatural elements and will actually include at least a couple of my poems in the text, too. Wish me luck. I may need it.

For more information about Christopher Conlon, visit his official author website.