You recently published a novella, Torchsongs, as part of a “boxed set” of four e-books that also included works by Sarah Pinborough, Rhodi Hawk, and Alexandra Sokoloff. How did that project come about? And how has your foray into e-publishing worked for you?
We all wanted to get together on a project, and brainstormed “Apocalypse.” It was a lot of fun to write, mostly for the camaraderie. Our voices are so different that it was a hard sell—no editor could figure whether it was an anthology or a novel. I’m opposed to e-publishing right now, but the majority were in favor of it, so I went along with the group decision. I can see the other side of the argument, too. The material was tied to specific moments in time—the longer we sat on it, the more dated it got. So why not put it out ourselves?
But as a rule, I’d rather not do that. I think e-publishing works if you’re a fantastic self-promoter, which I’m not. I feel like taking on that role is taking on a part-time job.
Last year your story Afterlife appeared in the first issue of Nightmare Magazine, and painted a melancholy portrait of ghost children who refuse to believe they’re dead and whose souls gradually fade as a result of that refusal. You’ve mentioned that having children changed you; does Afterlife reflect a parent’s fears for their children’s future?
I actually wrote that story before my kids came along, and edited it afterward. I think that story is more about being a child—restrained and powerless—than about adulthood, which to me represents freedom; steering your own ship. Our main character Mary is making that transition, much as I was doing when I first wrote that story. When you’re in your twenties, you live your life like there are all these rules, and constraints. Then one day you realize they don’t actually exist except in your mind.
I think there’s a wonderful strain of black humor in your work; does it ever make you laugh?
Thank you! Yeah, I laugh a lot. Hopefully it’s occasionally funny for the reader.
For several years you’ve been saying Empty Houses would be your next book, but now you’re working on The Clinic. What happened with Empty Houses?
Good question! Empty Houses is very ambitious, like The Keeper was ambitious. I researched the War in Iraq, phantom limb syndrome, tar sands, and American politics for it. The day my second daughter, Frances, was born, I put EH aside. When I picked it up again fourteen months later, I realized that I’d stagnated during the time I’d worked on it. I’d gone over chapters scores of times, rewriting, without ever finishing. I don’t remember laboring over it, but I must have done so. I think I just wasn’t in the novel headspace. I missed my daughter Clementine too much, and was adjusting to motherhood. It’ll take six months of editing to get EH back on track and finished.
It’s a good story, and what I hope is the second novel I publish, if I have my wish, in a three-book deal. But I don’t feel like editing right now. I want to write something fresh and finish it—that’s where my momentum is at.
More to the point, I’ve got an idea and I don’t want to lose it. I’ve been thinking about why the American Family feels endangered. Is it feminism? Narcissism? These baby boomers and their self-actualization? There’s a good parallel between what’s happening now, and the decline of Rome. Decadence was blamed for that decline, and for this one, too. But what kind of decadence?
I was hanging out one day with another mom on a play date, and she told me about Elizabeth’s Warren’s “Dual Income Trap.” Apparently, the single best indicator of bankruptcy is whether a couple has children. Families depend on two incomes, which means the second anybody gets sick, they can’t pay their mortgage. Which is why families have a harder time getting loans, and consequently staying solvent, than other modern income models. That kind of pressure is hard on a marriage. The structure of our economy is the problem. Which makes sense. In the end, it’s not failing morality or selfishness; it’s money, money, money, like it’s always been.
Suddenly the code seemed cracked to me. The Clinic was born.
What can you tell us about The Clinic?
Nothing! Except that it’s set in my hometown, Garden City, and about an ordinary family that gets hosed.
Where would you like to be as a writer in twenty years?
I’ve been studying Shirley Jackson lately—she wrote her best stuff while she had kids. But she also pushed herself too hard and burned out too soon. Then there’s Munro, and Oates, and Atwood. They’re all still doing interesting stuff and they’re senior citizens. Unlike men, their careers weren’t straight trajectories, but mountains with peaks. The struggle kept them fresh. That’s pretty cool.
I’d like to be in a place where I can look back on my life and decisions and feel like I did the best I could. An honest place, whatever that means. From there, good fiction grows.
In an ideal world, I’d like to hit a nerve with people. To reflect back something real, that catalyzes progress.
We’re lucky to be alive, and lucky to have these bodies, and very, very lucky to be Americans. We might as well try to do some good.
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.
Author Spotlight: Angela Slatter
Erika Holt
In what time period does “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” take place? Are the superstitions and attitudes described typical of the time?
The time period is a kind of fugue—when I created this world (for the Sourdough and Other Stories collection) I had a mix of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Victorian era, all jammed together, bringing the ideas and superstitions of their own times into the one place. When I wrote “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter,” I was using the Sourdough world, but this story had a much more Victorian feel to it. As with all my writing, I’m a bower bird, picking over superstitions from a range of places and remaking them into something new.
What interests you about writing from the point of view of a disturbed, murderous protagonist? Is it important that such a protagonist have sympathetic aspects in order to engage the reader?
Hepsibah, the protagonist of this story, owes a lot to Shirley Jackson’s Merricat from We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I’m utterly fascinated by how Jackson got the reader in with sympathy for her narrator, and then deftly turns that on its head as the truth of Merricat’s personality and deeds start to seep through like dark ink through thin paper. I wanted to do something similar with Hepsibah, to have a sympathetic character that you gradually realized was quite dangerous—but for whom you still had a skerrick of sympathy.
Your bibliography is impressive—you’ve garnered awards and critical acclaim while also being quite prolific. What’s your secret?
A lot of hard work and determination, and very thick skin! I sometimes get referred to as a “newcomer,” but I’ve been writing and publishing since 2006! Awards are nice, but they’re just jam—no one should write in order to win awards, and if you expect to win awards and are disappointed when you don’t . . . well, you’re a bit of an idiot. You can’t control the competition, you can’t control the judges, you can’t control individual tastes—so while winning is nice, it should always be a surprise and not an expectation.
I’ve always maintained a submission schedule and I’ve always kept writing and res
earching appropriate markets. I’ve been lucky enough to get some stories published in very visible markets, and I’ve also been lucky enough to make contact and network with some great editors and other writers, which has helped a lot. Basically, I’ve tried to balance being an “artist” with being a “business,” and hopefully managing to be a professional somewhere along the way!
As a genre writer who has both a Masters and PhD in Creative Writing, do you have any thoughts on the literary versus genre divide? Did you write horror and dark fantasy while completing those degrees and, if so, how was this received?
I have a lot of things to say about the Great Genre Divide and the “ghettoization” of speculative fiction! Unfortunately a lot of the words I use for that are fairly profane. You talk to a lot of Literary writers and you can see their eyes glaze over at the mention of genre fiction, then when they focus again there’s the gleam of contempt as if you can’t possibly be a real writer because you might actually sell books! I once had a lecturer say, “So your work contains traces of the supernatural,” in the same tone as someone with a peanut allergy would say, “So, this meal contains traces of nuts?”
For my MA, I wrote ‘reloaded’ fairy tales and examined the idea of a reversal of agency in the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue—which was acceptable as the examination of fairy tales and feminism is an accepted field of study in academia. With the PhD, I wrote the Sourdough collection (which was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award), and the exegesis looked at ideas of fairy tales, involuntary memory, and mosaic novels. So again, enough academic stuff to get it through with minimal eyebrow lifting.
The main thing for me is: is the story good? Is it well-told and well-written? Is the reveal well-balanced, are the characters and the world believable? Is the storytelling seamless and does the writer keep the reader’s interest? Those are the only things that count, whether the genre in question is a navel-gazing examination of someone’s marriage breakdown/sexuality/life-changing experience OR a quest to find a magical artifact that will save the world from evil/darkness/destruction. Whether it is Literary or Genre should not matter.
Do you gain more satisfaction from writing or teaching?
I think there’re different kinds of satisfaction to be gained from each activity. I mostly teach short workshops or critiquing clinics, and there’s a great joy when you can see people just getting what you’re talking about—they’ve been stuck on things for a while and finally made the decision to take a class and you can see that moment when they’ve learned something and made a break-through.
But I love writing the most—it’s what I do. Being able to create worlds and characters, and have other people enjoy them and find them memorable, that is the best feeling.
Tell us about your current projects.
At the moment I’m three-quarters through editing an urban fantasy novel, Hallowmass, (the first of a trilogy, followed by Vigil and Corpselight), and I’m also halfway through writing a new collection, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, which is a prequel to the Sourdough collection. Along with some festival appearances, that is pretty much my year for 2013!
Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens.
Author Spotlight: Marc Laidlaw
E.C. Myers
What sparked the idea for “Bonfires”?
I was listening to the local live hip hop show one Sunday night on the car radio, and a guy came on talking about how he had been inspired to write a tune about going to the beach and hanging out by a bonfire and kicking around a ball . . . I thought, “That’s not very punk!” They were talking about this song as if it was edgy and “street” or whatever, and I became increasingly annoyed, because I couldn’t think of anything less relevant as a topic for music I associate with social commentary and attitude. This led to me becoming outright angry, and then thinking, “Well, is there something dark I could do with this?” I immediately saw the kind of figures that I would be far more interested to see around a bonfire, and the sort of story that might unfold there. All of this happened while I was driving. As soon as I parked, I went right in and grabbed my pen and notebook and wrote this. It had its origins in nothing more than getting pissed off about a lame hip hop song.
What draws you to writing horror and dark fiction?
Often it’s simply the desire to contribute something worthwhile to my favorite field of fiction. Dark fantasy and horror have given me so much over the years. It’s such a rich field, with so many wonderful writers working in it, such an extensive tradition, and even when the stories age there’s still something in them that I love, something ageless. It’s a challenge I try to rise to again and again, while feeling that the chance of my contributing anything nontrivial is incredibly remote. Still, you’ve got to have something unattainable to shoot for . . . Anything less is hardly worth the effort.
In addition to your many novels and short stories, you write and design video games for Valve, including the popular Half-Life series. Can you tell us a little about what that work is like, and what kind of impact it has had on your prose writing (if any)?
I don’t think it’s affected my prose, but it has made me more aware of wanting to engage an audience, of wanting to entertain. I still approach prose from a very different place than when I’m working on a game. It’s a solitary endeavor and I know whatever story I write will be read by a tiny fraction of the number of people who enjoy the games I work on . . . My books sold a couple thousand copies apiece, if that. Our games sell in the millions. So the cheesy pun-laden one-liners I wrote for Dota will be heard all over the world for years to come, while my best writing is out of print and impossible to find. But in a way that’s freeing. And I enjoy taking what I know from writing stories and trying to inject it into games in unexpected ways.
Your books The Orchid Eater and The 37th Mandala are “Easter eggs” in Half-Life, and a fictional novel called The Extreme Aggrotato is attributed to you in Half-Life 2. Now that your real books have appeared in a video game, do you have any plans to write the fake one?
The Rotato is a design I intended to patent: It is a potato that rotates freely along every axis. Amazing, no? If I could make millions off that idea, then I’m pretty sure I could get a series of franchise novels out of it. I would probably hire someone else to write them, though.
Do you have any video games you would recommend for people who like reading horror?
Clive Barker’s Undying is an old one, probably hard to find and play these days, but it was an inventive and genuinely frightening game. Amnesia is a more recent one that is great . . . I know quite a few people who found it simply too terrifying to play. Just about the scariest game I’ve ever played is the original Fatal Frame, a PS2 ghost-photography game that had a few sequels, although I didn’t get sucked into those. Even games that are not marketed as horror may have some sequences that are powerfully atmospheric—such as many sections of the Thief series, notably the Haunted Cathedral and Shalebridge Cradle sequences. There is something about a game that lets you take a relatively hackneyed horror premise and make it something fresh and frightening.
What are you working on now? What can we expect to see from you soon?
For the past few years I’ve been working on the multiplayer online game Dota 2 along with fellow Nightmare contributor Ted Kosmatka and another writer, Kris Katz. This involves writing scripts, casting actors and recording their voice sessions, and writing lore for this chaotic fantasy world that exists mainly to justify 5v5 online battles. It’s a mess but it’s fun, and it will soon be available for the whole world to play for free . . . That’s on top of the milli
ons who are playing it already. Millions! Maybe a few of them will read this issue of Nightmare!
E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers.
Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Hand
Lisa Nohealani Morton
To start us off, can you tell us a little bit about writing “The Bacchae?” Did anything in particular spark you to start writing this story?
I wrote “The Bacchae” heavily under the influence of J.G. Ballard, I think in particular his novel High Rise, which I’d just read. I’ve always been aware of how close our world is to the precipice, but I’d always projected the tipping point to be at some indeterminate moment in the future. With High Rise, I saw how the tipping point was right now. So I played with that notion, of the world devolving into a rather effete savagery. It’s funny to look back on “The Bacchae” and see how it anticipated shifts in the fashion world—some of those characters could have walked right off the runway of an Alexander McQueen show.
When I read “The Bacchae,” I was struck by how much the situation of the men in the story (absent some of the speculative elements) felt, to me, like the realities of everyday life for myself and most other women I know—reading reports of attacks and acquittals over attacks, nervous to be out in public at night, looked on with disapproval for making too much noise, and so on. Were the parallels intentional, or did they just grow organically with the story?
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