Nightmare Magazine Issue 8

by Caspian Gray

  You once said, “Romero in general was a real inspiration for me. Not only did he make the best horror movies, he also did them his way. He’s the original DIY guy.” Yet you haven’t really tackled zombies yet. Is that still coming?

  I wrote Remains, which was made into a TV movie for Chiller. That was my one big zombie thing. It was more about the relationship between characters, but there were lots and lots of zombies. DIY is incredibly important to me. I came up in the Washington D.C. music scene and we did everything ourselves, put out records, books, shows and tours. We never even thought about going to some corporate bullshit label. Something happened and I found myself sitting around waiting for DC to give me work, and I guess you could say I woke up again. I think DIY will save books, comics, and film. It’s the only way we’ll ever hear a creator’s voice as we head into a world owned by Disney. It’s vital that creators in all arts learn how to deal direct and make their art themselves. Do not sit and wait for anybody.

  This April will see the publication of Transfusion, which collects the three issues of your horror/science fiction hybrid comic. Transfusion seems different from most of your earlier work, using not only science fiction tropes but a more terse style, with sparse text and dialogue. Was it a deliberate attempt to explore something new?

  The artist, Menton3, inspired the style of writing, to be honest. I always try to match the art and for me Transfusion is an incredibly grim story so the sparse dialogue and captions seemed to fit. And yes, it was extremely deliberate. I love to experiment. I fall flat on my face a lot but when it works, man, that’s the best.

  Transfusion is a post-apocalyptic story that features both blood-drinking robots and vampires. These vampires seem quite different from the ones in 30 Days of Night—how intentional was that?

  Very intentional. I wanted to steer clear of the 30 Days types of vampires, not only to avoid ripping myself off, but also to try something new. The vampires in Transfusion are much more traditional, and since I don’t have much experience with those types it felt very new to me.

  You’ve written graphic novels, screenplays, and short fiction—will we see a full length novel from you at some point?

  Yes. I am done with the rough draft of my novel A World of Hurt. I’m doing rewrites right now and working on something very different for that as well. Can’t wait to show that one off.

  Lastly: Have you really received hate mail from Twilight fans?

  Just when we did the Sparkles for Blood Drive where people could turn in their Twilight novels and exchange them for 30 Days of Night. I got some of the most awful, venomous emails . . . followed very quickly by the sweetest apologies in the world.

  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: Caspian Gray

  Seamus Bayne

  What is the origin of “Centipede Heartbeat”?

  I was briefly involved with a man who worked at an entomology lab, and one day when I went to meet him for lunch he was feeding pinkies to their Amazonian giant centipedes. Even though centipedes don’t have the brain capacity for cruelty, the way they fed looked cruel. The centipedes would attack, inject their prey with venom, and then withdraw while the pinkies convulsed. This would be repeated two or three times before the centipedes finally started eating. This is a perfectly viable feeding strategy if what you’re trying to kill can fight back, but with helpless infants it looked like these centipedes were deliberately drawing out the process, and then stepping back to admire their prey’s agony. I suppose centipedes have stuck with me as rather menacing little creatures ever since.

  Lisa appears to be agoraphobic, but we never learn why. Why doesn’t she want to leave the house?

  My imaginary background for this story is that Lisa has suffered from mental health problems throughout she and Joette’s relationship, and that Joette was finally on the brink of leaving her—some of her things are still packed up in the garage—when Lisa had a breakdown that convinced her to stay. So not only is Lisa motivated by psychosis (or, if you’re so inclined, an actual invisible centipede invasion), but she’s also found a way to keep Joette forever if the poison kills her.

  This story taps into a primal fear of insects. Is that a personal fear of yours?

  Not really. One of my very first acid trips went bad, and I became convinced that my body was a spaceship being piloted at very high speeds by centipedes that wanted me and all of humankind to suffer terribly and die. In retrospect that’s hilarious, but at the time it was quite distressing. Snakes and insects are such common unpleasant hallucinations that I do believe we’re hardwired to respond negatively to them, and for that reason they play a large role in our collective unconscious. Personally I don’t mind insects, though I prefer that they not be crawling all over me.

  Lisa’s actions and the question of whether she’s imagining her partner’s condition or if it is really happening, drive the horror of this narrative. As the writer, did you ever decide if what Lisa was experiencing was real or just a paranoid delusion?

  For me, this is a story about a crazy person, but I had readers who preferred it if the centipedes were really there. One of the joys of reading can be interpreting a work without regard for the author’s intent, so I don’t think my preference really matters here.

  What else do you have coming up?

  I’ll have a piece called “Flock,” about a woman kidnapped by giants, coming out in Kaleidotrope this summer. I also write non-fantastical fiction under a different pseudonym, and as that guy I have a short story forthcoming from the New England Review.

  Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the ‘90s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net.

  Author Spotlight: Caitlín R. Kiernan

  E.C. Myers

  I loved “Houses Under the Sea.” You’ve mentioned that it was inspired by R.E.M.’s song “Belong,” which you briefly quote in the story. Could you tell us a little more about the genesis of the idea and how it evolved from that initial inspiration?

  Sometimes . . . often, really . . . I’ll hear a lyric, a line or two from a song, and it’ll lodge itself in my consciousness, where it sits and ferments. Which is what happened with “Belong.” I’m a great fan of R.E.M. I have been since the eighties. When the album Out of Time was released in 1991 and I first heard “Belong,” that one line—“Those creatures jumped the barricades and have headed for the sea”—I heard it and immediately saw the image of people walking into the sea. I have no idea what the band meant, but that’s what I saw. Those lines, they struck me as simultaneously beautiful, sorrowful, filled with awe, somehow terrifying, but also joyful. And the image stayed with me for years. That was actually back years before my career as an author began, but it stuck. It didn’t coalesce into a story until 2004, but it was always, always there, germinating for those thirteen years. So, yeah. I doubt the story would ever have happened had I not been inspired by the band. Actually, R.E.M. have often inspired me. Their lyrics taught me a lot about writing.

  I was
surprised and pleased to see this story was partially set on Cannery Row. What kind of an influence has John Steinbeck had on your work?

  Steinbeck was actually a tremendous formative influence. I began reading him in high school, and he was one of those eye-opening authors for me. He’s one of the writers who taught me invaluable lessons about characterization; that stories, novels, are not about events. They’re about people. When they stop being about people, you’re writing shit. Steinbeck also introduced me to the importance of profoundly flawed characters and their importance to literature. Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men, for example, or the cast of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. These aren’t characters many people would see as heroic or virtuous or strong, because too often readers are, I think, too afraid of their own weaknesses to sympathize or empathize with characters they deem “unsympathetic.”

  In the two Cannery Row books, Steinbeck gives us bums, whores, and a marine biologist who exists outside academia. Beautiful, beautiful people. And, I don’t know, years and years ago, I was looking through a book of photographs of Cannery Row before it was essentially turned into the Disneyland attraction it is today. That exquisite, weathered, decaying desolation, what it became after the sardines were overfished and poverty set in and all the people moved on, leaving behind that shell. As with the line from the R.E.M. song, I filed those images away, knowing I’d need them someday. And when I finally found the story of Jacova Angevine, I knew the Row was the perfect setting. It exists—or at least once existed—as man’s fragile interface with the ocean. It exists in “Houses Under the Sea” as a parable of man’s simultaneous ruthless exploitation and awe of the sea, and, too, of humanity’s constant, idiotic romanticization of the past. The characters are not truly walking along Cannery Row. They’re walking along a theme-park zombie that once was the Row.

  What research did you do for this story? Did you reread any Lovecraft stories before or while you wrote it?

  When I’m writing, research is always a combination of what I already have in my head—which is sort of a disorganized encyclopedia—and on-the-fly research. In this case, I think that hard part was getting the science and technology concerning deep-sea submersibles as right as I possibly could without going to Monterey and climbing aboard the ships. Now, that’s how the story should have been researched, yes, but there aren’t many authors who have the luxury of that sort of thing, and I’m sorry to say that, Mr. Hemingway. So, I don’t know how many hours I must have spent studying ROV schematics and specs and whatnot, but a lot of hours. That, I would say, was the bulk of the research done immediately before and as I wrote the story.

  As to Lovecraft, no, I didn’t read any of his stories while I was writing “Houses Under the Sea,” but I’d already read every bit of fiction he ever wrote, over and over again. I live in fear of pastiche, so if an author or authors—in this case Lovecraft, also Steinbeck—serves as an inspiration, I avoid reading them while I write the story they’ve inspired. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth, his Deep Ones and Dagon, and especially Mother Hydra, they were all jumping off points—as were Steinbeck and R.E.M.—but I also wanted the story to be its own thing, not just some “mythos” tale.

  By the way, Lovecraft wrote virtually nothing about Mother Hydra, which is one reason I’ve used that deity repeatedly. She’s really nothing more than a shadow in his work, a force he hints at. Makes her a lot more interesting to me than, say, Cthulhu. Also, it’s an opportunity to feminize the Weird. “Houses Under the Sea” is a tale of goddess cult gone . . . maybe gone wrong. Maybe gone exactly right. Probably, the story could have ended no way except the mass drowning. Willing sacrifice to that which is vastly greater than humanity. Or, conversely, it’s about mass hysteria and the danger of charismatic personalities. Regardless, “Mother Hydra” becomes a metaphor for, a personification of, the sea.

  When you write stories like this that include pieces of news reports and found documents, do you start with them first, add them as you go, or construct them at the end after discovering where the plot takes you? How do you strike the right tone with each fragment?

  I don’t know I’m going to need them until I get to that part of the story. Well, usually not. Here, our narrator is a journalist, so I had a pretty good idea those snippets were coming. But I didn’t write them or sketch them out before hand. I don’t use outlines, anything like that, when I write. But when I reached, say the CNN clip, I had to stop and spend a day or so reading CNN reports to get the feel of the voice down, because if I’m going to employ that sort of device, it absolutely has to be authentic. Same with those excerpts from Theo Angevine’s novels, and that was actually much more difficult than the news reports. I had to pause to create the voice of an author who isn’t me, whose work isn’t mine. Otherwise, I’ve failed. And I have to be able to sustain that voice across more than one excerpt, so they appear to have been written by the same author. This was something I had to do extensively in The Red Tree. Truthfully, this is one of the things I love to do, creating “found” artifacts within stories and novels—found film, books, paintings, whatever. It’s a fascinating device, and one I expect I’ll employ for many years to come.

  We see the Open Door of Night cult again in your Tiptree-Award-winning novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and meet someone else whose life it has changed. Did this story inspire the novel, or did the link between them grow in the writing?

  No. The story didn’t inspire the novel. I didn’t even see the connection until I was very deep into writing The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Then, well, it was just obvious to me. I don’t want to say too much about that, though, because I don’t want to spoil the novel for anyone who hasn’t read it, and, too, the Open Door of Night is, I think, a fairly minor element in the novel. By the way, the cult also makes an appearance in a story I wrote with Sonya Taaffe, “In the Praying Window.” It might crop up in still other stories, as well. I can’t recall offhand.

  What can readers expect to see from you next?

  At the moment, I’m finishing up the second Siobhan Quinn novel, Red Delicious, the sequel to Blood Oranges. These three novels came about after writing The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, because I was emotionally exhausted, and I needed to do something fun. So, I decided to poke fun at the mess “paranormal romance” and “shifter” porn has made of urban fantasy, to rip apart those conventions, deconstruct and disembowel them. So, yeah . . . I’ll finish Red Delicious this spring, and then write the last book in that trilogy, Cherry Bomb, this summer. Also, I’m scripting Alabaster, a series for Dark Horse Comics, a reboot of my Dancy Flammarion character who first appeared—in a rather different incarnation—in my second novel, Threshold. Subterranean Press will be releasing my ninth short fiction collection, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, this summer, or maybe this autumn, so I’ve been editing that. And I think that’s quite enough for one year.

  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: Tanith Lee

  Erika Holt

  Did you draw upon any particular myth or lore about mermaids for “Doll Re Me”?

  Not at all. For me it was just the complementary shapes—violin, woman with fish-tail.

  Your parents were dancers—did you hear a lot of classical music growing up? Are you a classical music fan? Do you play any instruments?

  My gorgeous parents weren’t classical dancers—but very able and graceful exponents of Ballroom and Latin American. However, they both loved classical music. So yes, I heard lots, and fell in love with it too. I did try to learn the piano as a child—I could compose on it, but
stayed useless as a pianist. (Same with the guitar, later). Both my parents could play well.

  What is the significance of the dream sequence? Who is the figure with the webby veil?

  A reader will undoubtedly decide for themselves in both cases. There may be many answers, and most of them correct.

  Do you see “Doll Re Me” as a story about punishment for hubris?

  No, I see it as the punishment for wasteful cruelty, which the main character so lavishly displays towards both people and things.

  What scares you? Who are your favorite horror authors?

  In books what scares me is usually rather less the subject matter than how it is handled. Among my favourite writers here are R.L. Stevenson and M.R. James. Individual books: I’d cite John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot—the only example of a work that truly, if temporarily, made me afraid of vampires. While William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is, I think, one of the most frightening novels of any sort ever written.

  What are you working on now?

  I’m working on a weird contemporary novel (my contemporary stuff is generally even more odd than my fantasy) called Turquoiselle. I shall never think of a garden shed the same way again!!

  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.