by Ted Kosmatka
I’ll go with him that far, but I will not take the next logical step: That we have become jaded by exposure to the genre, or that we have outgrown our imaginations. If that were the case, we’d abandon the genre—admittedly, some people do—just as we abandon the other accoutrements of childhood: action figures and Barbies, bicycles with playing cards in the spokes, the baby dolls which many of us trade in for the real thing. When I became a man I put away childish things, and all that. But I am unwilling to argue that horror is essentially a juvenile genre. If it were, Stephen King would not routinely sit at the top of the bestseller lists. But of course he does, which raises the crucial question: Why do we keep returning to a genre that no longer achieves its purported end—that no longer “works” (if it ever did)? I’d like to answer the question definitively (ask any mathematician; there is nothing more satisfactory than discovering an airtight theorem) but here I am reduced to speculate upon two not necessarily contradictory theories.
By way of getting at the first of those theories, I’d compare horror to another genre of the fantastic: science fiction. Science fiction, despite the “sense of wonder” that has often been held as the central feature of the genre, for the most part hinges not upon a sense of mystery, but upon a firmly held belief in an orderly universe that can be apprehended through reason. Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic assumes that what appears to be magic is indeed technology operating according to as yet undiscovered scientific law—the key words here being as yet. What is mysterious in the world will ultimately yield to the rational mind.
The horror writer (and reader), on the other hand, is committed to the idea that the universe is essentially unknowable. The monsters of Lovecraft’s Mythos are not in themselves particularly scary. Indeed, Cthulhu himself, with his wings and tentacles, is faintly ridiculous. As a symbol of the universe that will not yield to the human mind, however, he (it?) works just fine. As Lovecraft himself puts it in the justly famous opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the action of the rational mind—“the piecing together of dissociated knowledge”—will not unveil an orderly universe, a world that makes sense, but a world of profound mystery: “terrifying vistas of reality” that will plunge us into madness. Horror fiction confirms an existential position that is the inverse of Clarke’s law: magic might well be magic. We live in a universe that we can never hope to understand, where mystery will never succumb to the power of reason. This is disturbing to be sure, but not on the visceral leave-the-lights-on level we experience as children unable fully to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
Second, I think that dissonance between reality and fantasy—and our increasing understanding of it as we age—further undermines horror fiction’s ability to scare us as adults. Frankly, a world where school shootings with massive body counts have become routine is infinitely more terrifying than any merely fictional threat, from haunts to Hannibal Lecter. It’s not the failure of adult imagination that leads to horror fiction’s inability to inspire real and lasting terror; it’s the superabundance of imagination. As a teacher and the spouse of a teacher, and especially as a parent, I am routinely aware of the threat of a campus shooter. Compared to that reality, The Shining seems like a walk in the park. And I don’t think, as some would argue, that such works provide catharsis by way of temporarily exorcising (or even exercising) those fears. I think they do something all the more disturbing: they confirm the essential darkness of the reality we live in, a reality where good is perishingly hard to find, and perishingly fragile when we find it. Horror readers (unlike, say, science fiction fans) are more than pessimists. They are realists, and—here is the secret—horror fiction provides the confirmation they crave. The boogeyman in the closet is little more than a symbolic reflection of the world we live in. And when nothing is scarier than the reality we live in, I would argue that nothing much is scary at all.
We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.
Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, has won the International Horror Guild Award and has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award.
Artist Gallery: Sergio Diaz
Artist Spotlight: Sergio Diaz
Julia Sevin
Sergio Diaz (sergiodiaz.com.ar) is a mostly-autodidact digital painter based in Buenos Aires. Already a jack of all digital arts at the tender age of thirty-two, his career has spanned architectonic visualization, 3D modeling and texturing, character design and concept art, matte painting, and television commercial work. He currently works as an illustrator, concept artist, and character designer for commercials, movies, and video games for clients such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Nestlé, Nissan, and Honda. His passion remains the science fiction and fantasy imagery of his childhood.
First, can you tell us about the Argentinian attitude toward horror? It seems to me that many other countries have a better cultural integration of horror than the U.S. Are you considered bizarre by family or friends for your focus on it?
I don’t think there is a prevailing “Argentinian attitude” toward horror in art. I know some who are drawn to it (like me), some who are indifferent to it, some who are repulsed by it. At least that’s all I can tell you based on my personal experience. In Argentina there are exceptional artists whose work is based in horror and they’ve earned public acceptance.
Many Argentinians like my work, but I also get lots of attention from other countries. I don’t think there is a greater interest in horror in Argentina than in other places. Perhaps in the U.S. it’s, as you say, not as appreciated as it should be, but many of my favorite artists come from there.
My family and friends know me so they’re used to my tastes. But sometimes they ask me why I choose certain themes for my illustrations, what it is that I find interesting or beautiful in these images. I believe beauty exists equally in the image of a nude woman or enchanted fairy-tale forest and of a child with hydrocephaly or radiation-borne deformity. Of course I’m not referring to the suffering tied to these things, but strictly the visual aspect. I guess I could be considered bizarre for this, I don’t know.
You have said that, as a child, science fiction and fantasy inspired you to create. What were some of your biggest influences?
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror have always been my fountain of inspiration, since I was a child and still today. But really it’s a mix of many things. My biggest influences are other artists, films, and video games. Above all, the internet has allowed me to discover and learn so much about the craft from people I never would have otherwise met.
Do you still draw ideas from fiction?
Without a doubt. However, the majority of the time, this is not a conscious process. That is to say, there is a great deposit of ideas that has formed throughout the years—film imagery, video games, things I’ve read—all of that was steadily forming a bounty of ideas that appear mixed and transformed when I draw them. Additionally, there are a great many artists I admire and who have directly influenced me: Ashley Wood, Jeremy Enecio, Jon Foster, Michael Hussar, Simon Bisley, Jim Murray, Brom, Oscar Chichoni, and João Ruas, to name just a few.
Do you have a particular attraction to body horror in cinema (Cronenberg, Bottin)?
Yes, it’s my favorite horror genre. It probably has most to do with a moment when I was a boy, maybe six or seven years old, watching TV with my parents. A horror movie came on about people in a spaceship who, without realizing it, were traveling with an extraterrestrial. I didn’t know it yet, but I was watching Alien. I vividly remember the dinner scene—just as we were eating dinner—
in which the chestburster comes out of Kane’s chest, destroying it. I felt a terror like I had never known. I remember raising my feet onto my chair for fear that the monster would attack me from below. I don’t think I ever again felt such a sensation of horror and desperation as in that moment. When I got older, I sought out more horror films. I found them terrifying but also fascinating. As an adolescent, I loved the Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Hellraiser movies.
While our interest here is in your horror-themed art, you are actually extremely versatile in both style and medium, with works ranging from matte painting to 3D modeling, pop surrealism to erotic. Do you have a preference for what type of work to do?
I go through phases. There are periods in which I’m more focused on illustration of a particular theme. In others I’m more interested in 3D modeling. That it works this way helps me to not spend too much time doing the same thing—I get bored by that. Of everything I do, I most enjoy drawing—horror and erotic illustrations most of all.
The works we see in your selected gallery here are so fine and yet so grotesque, it’s hard to imagine what sort of commercial venture would have commissioned them. Are they all personal works?
Thank you. Yes, except for two or three, the illustrations are all personal work. The 3D modeling, on the other hand, is almost exclusively professional.
Are they strictly digital paintings, or do you also work physically?
Everything on my website and blog was done digitally in Photoshop or Painter, except for some pencil sketches. I try for a certain traditional air with my digital paintings, emulating the look of oils or acrylics. I keep a sketchbook and use it occasionally, but I don’t show that work. I worked more traditionally as an adolescent. When I finally obtained a Wacom Tablet, I was able to unite my love of computers and drawing into a single endeavor, and since then the vast majority of my drawings have come to life digitally, from the initial sketch to the finished illustration.
What are you working on right now?
Right now I find myself doing lead character modeling & shading for the 3D animated feature Foosball, directed by Juan José Campanella. I believe this will be the best Argentinian cartoon made to date. It’s international grade. In my spare time I like to draw, study, watch tutorials, that sort of thing.
What’s your dream illustration job?
Maybe cover art for a comic book that has girls, zombies, monsters, and so on.
Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign.
Interview: Caitlín R. Kiernan
Jude Griffin & Paul DesCombaz
From her first fiction publication in 1995 (her SF short story “Persephone” in Aberrations (#27)) to her latest book, Blood Oranges (coming out February 5, 2013 under her Kathleen Tierney pseudonym), Caitlín R. Kiernan (b.1964) has written the dark and the weird in multiple genres and formats: fantasy, science fiction, erotica, graphic novels, and a screenplay novelization. Her creativity and vision has been recognized with numerous awards (four International Horror Guild Awards, James Tiptree, Jr. Award Honoree, and Barnes and Noble Maiden Voyage Award), praised, inter alia, by Gaiman (“a gift for language that borders on the scary”), and The New York Times (“one of our essential writers of dark fiction”), and translated into ten languages. She has worked as a vertebrate paleontologist and has published in numerous scientific journals. She fronted the band “Death’s Little Sister” and currently makes her home in Providence, RI.
Your new book is called Blood Oranges. You’ve said that the “point of the book is, largely, to lampoon and undermine the tropes and clichés of ‘paranormal romance’ and what readers and publishers have allowed urban fantasy to become.” Why was this important for you to do?
I’ve been watching, over the last decade or so, as dark fantasy became supplanted by these idiotic books with their ubiquitous “tramp-stamp” covers: usually, a woman in some supposedly sexy pose, usually holding a weapon, often standing near a motorcycle or the like, often sporting tattoos. And the books are almost always as formulaic as the covers. In that sense, those horrid covers do the books justice. Only, my books began getting slapped with the same sort of covers, and some were truly awful and bore little relation to the text. This got much better with The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, a cover I actually like. And part of this is that people would go into a bookstore and pick up the novels without first even bothering to see what the books were like, buying them because they like the sorts of “ParaRom” and “shifter” stuff that those covers signify. And then they grouse on Amazon or Goodreads or in blogs, whatever, because the covers were misleading, or because I failed them by not including romance. Worse still, this whole mess has appropriated the phrase “urban fantasy.” Which is beyond dreadful. Those of us who recall what genuine urban fantasy was, this has been a hard pill to swallow. With Blood Oranges, I wanted a book that took the formula and tropes of “ParaRom” and inverted them. For that matter, going all the way back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s gritty, nasty. Wicked. There’s no romance, and nothing like what most “ParaRom” readers would consider a sympathetic character. It doesn’t fetishize or romanticize. I thought someone needed to do that, and I’ve been so pissed about being shoved into that category, I thought it might as well be me. But, you know what? I think people are making too much out of Blood Oranges as a response to “ParaRom.” As if that’s all it is. As though I was driven by an overwhelming agenda to do the book, which I wasn’t. In some respects, it was just a lighthearted bit of popcorn to let my brain rest after doing The Drowning Girl: A Memoir.
One of the things that jumped out at me in Blood Oranges is that Quinn is rarely depicted as clean, both figuratively and literally. Can you talk about that?
Siobhan Quinn is a junky. First heroin, now blood. She lived on the street for years. She exists as a predator, beneath the underbelly of human society, within a world of monstrosity. She eats people. She’s a serial killer, as are all vampires. Again, turning the clichés of “ParaRom” upside down. And she’s a character. She’s possessed of a personality which is her own, which I discovered as I wrote the book. I certainly had no concern for her hygienic habits. But dirtying up the squeaky cleanness of “ParaRom,” that’s only a good thing, and in keeping with my intent. And it’s hard for me to imagine a person who has become both a vampire and a werewolf, and who was a former street kid, that they’d be clean. Do people actually imagine violently killing someone—and Quinn is violent—would be clean? Have they ever seen photos of murder scenes? I don’t think so. And one thing I was going for, that was important, was that the story would be a neo-noir, supernatural noir. I went in thinking, “how would Quentin Tarantino do this?” Well, for one thing, he certainly wouldn’t give you clean vampires and werewolves.
The scene where the Bride of Quiet starts singing is really chilling—what makes this scene so effective?
No idea. That is, I don’t set out to write frightening or creepy fiction. If it strikes a reader that way, fine. Though I do see that everyone who has read the manuscript has that reaction to the Bride. I love the character myself. The perfected wrongness of her. An unspeakably monstrous monster. I borrowed that name, by the way, “The Bride of Quiet,” from a Decemberists song I love,
“Why We Fight.” I hope Colin Meloy doesn’t slaughter me for that. One day, I was writing the book, listening to the song—I always write to music—and I thought, “Damn, that’s what she’s called.”
Quinn notes for the reader along the way which of the various myths about werewolves, vampires, and other nasties are true and which are not true. How did you decide which myths to keep and which to discredit?
Mostly, I kept the ones I liked and tossed out the ones I didn’t. There was no plan I worked out beforehand, no real logic to it. It was rather arbitrary. Though, in a few places, I’m clearly harking back to older myths, instead of the post-Stoker, post-Anne Rice inventions.
Continuing on the thread of narrative voice, Quinn frequently comments on tropes and what writers do—a storytelling approach you’ve employed before in both novels and short stories—what are the challenges of balancing narrative pace with metafictional observations?