Interview: Simon Strantzas talks Aickman's Heirs

Robert Aickman's fiction is often referred to as "strange fiction" instead of "weird fiction."

Whether or not you're a fan of labels, they do exist even if they best serve consumers. What are the defining characteristics of strange fiction as opposed to weird fiction? Do the two ever overlap?

I wrote a whole essay on this topic for Nightmare magazine last December, so I urge anyone with an interest in this topic to visit that site and read the thing. The truth of the matter is these terms are in many ways unimportant. Horror, Weird, Strange, Dark Fantasy—whatever dark fiction is written, someone will come along and classify it. The thing is, these terms are to a large extent meaningless—the genre is so fluid that there really are no firm dividing lines between them. Some stories wholly occupy one space, some multiple. That's how it should be. But, that said, I did write an essay explaining differentiating the two. Why? Because I feel that it still serves an important purpose. Not to chop up, categorize, and sub-genrify Horror, but instead to identify some of its most pervasive and interesting threads. By understanding how the genre works, I feel we can better understand the genre itself. As writer, that understanding is a powerful tool.

But, your question. I suppose it's unfair to direct readers elsewhere, so the crux of the difference (to my mind; yours may differ) is this: the Weird seems to be primarily an American-led movement, and the Strange European-led. The Weird is concerned with the effect on us of the extra-planetary, and the Strange the effect of our internal world. This is due to a large degree on the mindsets of the two peoples as a whole, the Americas staring at the stars and exploring, the Europeans gazing at their shoes and reflecting. 

I think it's safe to say that many horror and weird fiction fans have at the very least heard of Robert Aickman, and with new, affordable editions of his work published in the last few years many have had the opportunity to read his fiction. What sets Aickman's works apart from his contemporaries and those who came before him? 

Aickman followed in a less-travelled line of ghost story writers whose concerns were of the ambiguously internal. His precursors were writers like Onions and, most specifically, de la Mare, but unlike them he had the influence of modern psychiatric thought and philosophy to bolster his beliefs. Using them, he was able to fashion his thoughts on sexuality, poetry, and dream-logic into something wholly unique at the time it was written. And, still to a large part, it's remained so. Aickman is difficult to imitate, precisely because what he wrote was so uniquely born of his own personality. Not many writers can claim such singularity.

What does Aickman and his work mean to you? How has Aickman influenced not only your work, but the weird/strange/horror fields? What current authors are currently carrying on his legacy?

Aickman has been immensely influential on my own work by showing me how much of a story can be intuited by a reader by only the scarcest of clues. Forming narratives that exist on a different plane than the page is fascinating, though the danger one faces is some readers are unwilling to follow along the entire way. This evokes confusion and frustration, but if I've played my cards right, never a sense of aimlessness.

Aickman's work was heralded by only a select few for a number of years, but I feel that tide is turning. "Aickman's Heirs" being, I hope, of the first of many to champion him. What effect this renewed interest will have on the genre remains to be fully seen, but already we're seeing writers picking up the baton. No one is writing quite like him, of course, but we're seeing strong threads in the work of Steve Rasnic Tem, Ramsey Campbell, Lynda Rucker, Daniel Mills, and Terry Lamsley. To name but a few.

Aickman's Heirs is your second time editing an anthology, with Shadows Edge being your first, with a third coming in the form of The Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume Three. What have you learned from editing? Is this something you enjoy and will revisit?

I've learned that editing is a challenge that demands one's full attention, and that there is little more exciting than the discovery of new talent. But all that time takes its toll, and the more I edit the less time I have for my own work. Some writers may consider it a fair trade, but I'm disinclined to agree. I think my own fiction has been under attended to for some time now, and I hope to remedy that over the coming year.

For the readers who have yet to read anything by Robert Aickman, what are five essential stories that they should start with and why? What makes these stories special?

My favorite perhaps is "The Inner Room", a tale unlike any others in its mystery and symbolism. But it's very oblique, and not where I'd send a new reader. Instead, perhaps I'd point them to my first Aickman tale: "Ringing the Changes". It's perhaps the most straight-forward of his work, yet still maintains that sense that there is more beneath the surface than immediately clear. Or, perhaps I'd direct them to "The Swords", a dazzle of sublimated sexuality, one that's in turn funny and disturbing. It doesn't go in the direction one might expect, though like great fiction, it's conclusions are inevitable. Since I'm naming the popular tales, I might as well suggest "The Hospice", which revels in its bizarre nightmarishness and dislocation. And, finally, a personal favorite: "Marriage", a story about the pull of love and lust.  

There are so many more that this, though, that I could recommend. Aickman was absolutely fantastic, and I'm quite pleased to have this opportunity to help highlight his work by showing how its influenced this new generation of writers. 

Thanks for your time!

The thanks are all mine.

Interview: Molly Tanzer Talks Vermilion

To start, this is your first novel? How did it feel to finish such a big project?

It’s certainly my first published novel. I typed THE END on my first novel back in… gosh, maybe 2008? 2009? It was fun, but it was definitely training wheels time. I think that beast was like 175k, and it was bonkers. The second novel I wrote I feel no affection for whatsoever; in fact, I deleted it from my hard drive when I finished it, it was so awful. 

As to your second question… I’ve experienced various sensations at various times, with Vermilion. Finishing the first draft felt great. Finishing the draft that went out on submission felt… exhilarating. Finishing the version that’s now printed and thus no longer editable felt pretty terrifying, actually!

Much of your fiction takes place in historic time periods, but to my knowledge this is your first time writing a Western. What attracted you to this setting? What did you set out to do with the tropes and the genre?

My initial desire to have a conversation with the Western came about when I moved to Colorado. The scale of the landscape was amazing—I had visited before, but waking up every day to see mountains, being able to explore them at my leisure… living right where the prairie meets the front range… wow. It triggered my memories of being wild for the Little House books as a kid, and bam, I wanted to write something about this place. Uh, and I was also watching a lot of Deadwood.

The thing is… as you noted, Westerns have certain tropes. Most modern Westerns, in terms of novels and film/television, seek to either draw attention to those tropes, or to invert them, because even though the Western has fallen out of favor, we’re still all too aware of those conceits. In terms of characters, you have the Gritty Loner, the Native Threat, the Trifling Whore vs. the Good Woman, and so on. In terms of plots, you have A Stranger Comes to Town, the Man with a Past, The Person from Back East Who Must Leave Civilization Behind, and so forth and so on. Because they’re all very familiar, a Western that unconsciously draws on tropes can come off as feeling a bit outdated… take Appaloosa, the film, for example. While it was an enjoyable movie with a lot to like, I was annoyed by the movie’s embrace of the Trifling Whore trope in Renee Zellweger’s character. Maybe it’s a holdover from the novel, I’m not sure, but regardless, it was boring because it was just so dang familiar.

With Vermilion, I wanted to invert the Western while still paying homage to and drawing on the tropes of a genre that I love. So, while I might start with a Gritty Loner as a hero(ine), she goes East, not West; she moves from a state of detrimental independence to flourishing under positive interdependence (in the traditional Western, the hero usually has to “go at it” alone, leaving behind any wimminfolk or friends). Additionally, throughout the novel, traditional outsiders, even within the “Weird” Western, such as women, progressive thinkers/social radicals, and racial minorities prove more “civilized” and establish order much more effectively than those in a position of privilege. Oh, and of course, Lou is a person of color, and she gets a white sidekick. That was also fun to write!

One of the major themes throughout the book is gender fluidity and sexual orientation. Could you discuss why you chose to explore these themes at length and what you hope readers took away from this theme?

First and foremost, I write what I like to read! But it was also part of my mission above. Classic Westerns are often relentlessly heterosexual—or at least, they try to convince us they are, by having rough-and-tumble ‘good buddies’ visit a whorehouse or get married to make it clear they’re not really hot for one another. Hell, even Red River, which is famous (infamous?) for its awesomely homoerotic subtext, pairs Montgomery Clift’s Garth with a lady at the end, much to Cherry’s dismay. I’m having a hard time even coming up with a classic Western that features lesbians, or the implication of lesbianism. Maybe a little in East of Eden, but like, that’s kind of a stretch. (If anyone knows of any, let me know in the comments!)

Westerns are often very traditional in their approach to gender roles, as well… when men were men and all that. Women, with notable exceptions, are almost exclusively relegated to domestic duties, and even the ones that saddle up to ride with the boys are usually doing it to stay close to the man they love. Mattie from True Grit is the obvious counterpoint, but that’s one of the reasons True Grit is so good. And when you do get a gender-ambiguous character, like Calamity Jane in Deadwood, they tend to be tragic in some way. I wanted to spin this, and have a genderfluid heroine at the center of the narrative, one whose ambiguousness helps her, rather than makes her some sort of object of pity or spite, and who doesn’t have some sort of magical transformation moment where she puts on a dress to amaze the hero, showing she was “beautiful all along.” Meh.

As to what I wanted readers take away… I’m not sure how to answer that. Sure, I had a lot on my mind when I was writing it, but first and foremost I wanted Vermilion to be a fun adventure story—and I saw the characters and their private lives as natural fits for the tale, rather than object lessons. If anything, I wanted to normalize the presence of such characters and themes within the genre of the Western, not draw attention to them!

On that note, I’ll point to a novel that was almost constantly on my mind while drafting Vermilion: Connie Willis’s Uncharted Territory, a novel that at first I wasn’t sure I liked when I read it in college, but really stuck with me in that way of better books. For those who haven’t read it, I shan’t spoil it, but I actually structured the first chapter to be an homage to her novel in my first draft, and though I eventually chose to introduce Lou in a different, more effective (for my project) way, I kind of still regret the loss. Those who have read Willis’s novel probably know what I’m edging around—and anyone who hasn’t, who liked Vermilion, might want to pick up a copy. It’s a Space Western, and it’s super good.

Vermilion has quite a lot going on, being a weird Western with elements of Ghostbusters and a liberal dose of Chinese mythology/folklore. The psychopomp business is especially fascinating. What sort of research did you do for this novel?

What sort of research didn’t I do would probably be an easier question to answer. Of course I put a lot of hours into researching the Chinese cultural element, because I wanted to be as respectful as possible in my treatment of Chinese-American culture and the Taoist traditions Lou’s work draws on. I also read and did just a ton of random stuff… I visited a train museum, drove up to Cheyenne to see the lay of the land to give those scenes a touch of verisimilitude, researched the properties of cinnabar/vermilion… hiked all around the Rocky Mountains (oh, the sacrifices I make for art!). Hell, I even contacted a period firearm museum for information on Lou’s LeMat, toured the death facilities at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and got a prescription filled at a Chinese apothecary in San Francisco after reading all about traditional Chinese medicine in a copy of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. Fun times!

Now for the big question. Are there any plans for a sequel? Will we see further adventures of Lou Merriwether or more fiction set in the same world? 

More fiction, certainly. This August, Nightmare Magazine will be reprinting a short story of mine called “Qi Sport,” which is about Lou’s first adventure. It’s referenced in Vermilion, but this is the full account. And next year, Lazy Fascist will be releasing a standalone edition of “Rumbullion: An Apostrophe,” a novella/short novel of mine (which you actually reviewed). “Rumbullion” is very tangentially related to Vermilion. No one who read “Rumbullion” on its own would have any idea it was related to anything else, but I think anyone who reads Vermilion first will notice some overlap.

As for an actual sequel… I feel confident saying Vermilion won’t be Lou’s last adventure. We’ll have to see! 

What else can readers expect from you in the coming months?

I have several short stories coming out—one in Joe Pulver’s anthology Cassilda’s Song, and all-lady King in Yellow anthology, that’s sort of about Ayn Rand and Carcosa… it’s called “Grave-Worms.” I have another story called “The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad” in Innsmouth Free Press’s She Walks in Shadows, ed. Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Oh, of course, and “But Only Because I Love You,” in Dreams From The Witch House.

In terms of big stuff, I have another novel coming out this November from Lazy Fascist, called The Pleasure Merchant. It’s an 18^th century picaresque about Tom Dawne, a wigmaker’s apprentice who becomes a manservant when he is dismissed after one of his wigs is sabotaged, and then rises through late 18^th century society… but as Tom’s station changes, so do his pleasures… Anyways, it’s probably my most personal novel to date, and my least speculative work (even if it’s the most horrifying, in a lot of ways). It’s very loosely based on the real-life 18^th century philosopher and poet Thomas Day, who was bewitchingly terrible. If people have heard of Thomas Day, it’s usually because he wrote a poem called “The Dying Negro” that was intended to drum up support for the abolition of slavery (good!), but Day’s sympathies did not extend to women. Because he was unlucky in love—this guy was basically an 18^th century “nice guy”/MRA and all women he came near basically fled his presence—he adopted two orphan tween girls, took them to France to isolate them, and tried to train them in the hopes one of them would blossom into his ideal bride. The account of his experiment is best chronicled in Wendy Moore’s How To Create The Perfect Wife which I highly recommend if you want an excellent pop history read about how horrible the 18^th century really was.

Thanks for your time!

Thank you!

Interview: Jesse Bullington, editor of Letters to Lovecraft

So far you've penned three published novels and numerous short fiction. As far as I know this is your first time editing an anthology. How did you adjust to the change? Is editing something you see yourself doing again in the future?

You're correct that this is my editorial debut, but I made my first fiction sale something like fifteen years ago, so I've logged a lot of hours working closely with professional editors. The funny thing is you learn as much from the bad editors as from the good ones. I've also beta-read a lot of my colleagues' work, so critically eyeballing other people's work isn't anything new. So adapting to being on the other end of the process was fairly painless, and a nice change of pace. That said, the work itself is just as time-consuming and headache-inducing as writing, so while I'm sure I'll do more of it in the future I doubt I'll make a regular habit out of it.




Letters to Lovecraft is an anthology with a concept that really stands out to me. Mythos anthologies abound, and there's also a good deal of non-Mythos themed Lovecraft anthologies, so seeing an anthology tackling his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature was refreshing. What inspired you with such an original anthology idea? Why have authors respond with fiction instead of short essays of their own?

The premise was something Stone Skin Press already had in mind when they invited me to edit the project. As soon as I found out what exactly they had in mind for the anthology my enthusiasm doubled, because as a longtime Lovecraft fan I'm of course very familiar with the essay, and it seemed a remarkably novel way of engaging with the Gentleman of Providence. Asking for original fiction in response instead of essays seemed far more intriguing, because by doing so they'd be demonstrating their ethos instead of simply explaining it. Since including your own work in projects like this can often seem gauche, the only downside was knowing that as anthologist I wouldn't be able to write something myself for such a neat premise.




With the anthology, what was it you most hoped to accomplish and what did you want to avoid? 

My primary goal was providing readers with an interesting anthology, one that represented a wide array of tones and styles instead of just ringing the same bell over and over.




The fictional responses from authors varied greatly. Some chose similar passages, some did not. Some wrote stories supporting statements from the essay and some wrote stories opposing the same statements. Are there any portions of the essay in which you think Lovecraft was 'spot on' and were there any portions where you felt he was totally or partially wrong?

Well, I don't wish to simply repeat the particulars I singled out in my introduction to the anthology, so let me see...I'm in harmony with a lot of Lovecraft's assertions, and even those I don't necessarily agree with are of course well-reasoned and articulate. If we can consider anyone a preeminent authority on the titular topic, it would be Howie, but as a result the essay is full of broad-sweeping generalizations--that there's one test of what constitutes "the really weird," etc.--which I find more interesting than convincing. But then I'm not much for absolutes in general--that this philosophy worked for Lovecraft is evident enough, and it's fun to contemplate. Oh, and in terms of his assessment of his predecessors, I'm more or less in agreement with him in some instances (William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen,and his particularly rich survey of Poe), but think he gives others short shrift--Matthew Lewis' The Monk, for example.




Do you feel that Lovecraft's essay is still relevant today, nearly a century after it was written?

Absolutely, or else I never would have edited the project! For all his shortcomings, Lovecraft remains one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century, and I think future generations will always be able to learn a thing or five from both his fiction and his literary philosophy.




Finally, are there any future projects that you're willing to talk about?

A lot of my works in progress remain Top Secret Clown Business, but one that I can talk about is Swords v. Cthulhu, an anthology that I'm co-editing with Molly Tanzer. As you might guess from the title, it's a collection of action-heavy fantasy with a dark or historical bent. After the somewhat esoteric nature of my first anthology it's been refreshing to take a turn at something much more straightforward--we're still finalizing the table of contents, so while I don't want to drop any names just yet, I will say we've scored a number of luminaries of modern Lovecraftiana, as well as veterans of neighboring genres...




Thanks for your time, it was pleasure.

Thank you for the opportunity, and of course for taking the time to read the book.

Interview: Rich Hawkins

With your latest novella you take readers to a small, seemingly isolated, small British town. I find that a setting can have a huge effect on a piece of horror fiction, as atmosphere can make or break a story. What drew you to this type of setting?


I was born and raised in a village very similar to the one in ‘Black Star, Black Sun’, and I’ve always loved horror/weird stories set in small communities. The sense of dread and isolation seems to work well in those stories, especially when combined with Lovecraftian themes. I spent twenty-seven years of my life living in my home village, so the idea that I could take that small village mundaneness and add some cosmic horror themes to it was very appealing to me.



Black Star, Black Sun is a novella, and is your second book to be published. Your first, The Last Plague, is a much longer work. Do you find the novel length or novella length to be more challenging?


The novel, definitely. It’s a long road and I seem to put more pressure on myself with a novel.This leads to bouts of anxiety and stress punctuated by moments of relief after a good day’s writing. I’m a bit fucked up, I suppose.  The novella holds a different challenge in that its brevity compared to a novel demands a leaner, more streamlined plot, but at the same time needs some meat on the bones. At the moment, I feel more drawn towards novellas, but that may change in the future - I’m still a rookie and I’ve got a lot to learn.



Besides Lovecraft, what other authors and pieces of fiction lent inspiration for Black Star, Black Sun?


I’m a big fan of Adam Nevill, and while I think his writing is not particularly Lovecraftian, it was a great inspiration to me when I was working on the novella. Also, Laird Barron’s work has influenced me greatly and continues to do so. I first read ‘The Imago Sequence’ about two years ago, and it floored me. It’s fantastic.

Growing up, were you always a reader of dark fiction? What draws you to these types of stories? Do you have any personal favorites (stories, novels, authors)?


Not always. I began reading horror/sci-fi/dark fiction in my early teens, but as I grew older, into my late teens and early twenties, I stopped reading any sort of fiction due to a greater interest in alcohol, women and sports. That was until my mid-twenties and I picked up a copy of Stephen King’s ‘Pet Cemetery’, and I rediscovered my love of horror fiction. King, in turn, led me to Lovecraft and contemporary writers, and ten years later my house is full of books.
I’m not sure what draws me to horror. I’m quite pessimistic, if that matters. I was a strange child. Horrific things have always intrigued me. If I’m honest, I think I find comfort in horror.
As I said above, the works of Adam Nevill and Laird Barron are great favourites of mine. Other writers whose work I admire greatly are Gary McMahon, MR James, Tim Curran, David Moody, Wayne Simmons, Conrad Williams and Nathan Ballingrud.I would advise anyone who hasn’t read their work to check it out.
And Lovecraft, of course…



As an author of dark fiction, what is it you hope most to accomplish with your work? What do you want readers to take away from your stories?


At the moment I’m just trying to build a portfolio of work and see where it takes me. I’m not writing for the money (or lack of it); I write because I have to, I think. It’s a strange feeling. I couldn’t even tell you why I started writing stories in the first place.
I’m just grateful that some people are reading my stories. If I can scare, unsettle or even affect them in some way, I’ll be overjoyed.



As of the time of this writing I haven't had a chance to read The Last Plague yet. Does it draw any parallel with Black Star, Black Sun?


Not really. There are undertones of cosmic horror in The Last Plague, but I never intended it to be overtly Lovecraftian, and it’s a different story in many ways. They are both very bleak stories, however, so they’ve got that in common, and they both deal with humanity’s helplessness against alien horrors.



Any future writing projects that you would care to tell readers about?


I’m currently working on the sequel to The Last Plague, set some months after the events of the first book. Once that’s done I have an idea for a horror novel about religious fundamentalismand missing children.



Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.


Thanks for inviting me over, Justin. It’s been a pleasure.

Interview: Timothy J. Jarvis

Timothy J. Jarvis is the author of The Wanderer, which was my choice for weird fiction novel of the year. Below is an interview I conducted with the young author in which he brings his knowledge of the weird to the table to share. Enjoy!



I'd first like to thank you for taking the time to talk to me. What can you tell readers about yourself and your work?

Thanks for interviewing me; it’s a pleasure. Though that’s quite a tough question to open with. Well, in brief biographies I’ve called myself, ‘a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange.’ Which is close enough, and though that ‘scholar’ is deliberately archaic, it is true that I’m an academic as well as a writer. I’ve lived in London for a good while, and the city is one of my main inspirations.

In my writing, I attempt to fuse a fustian old Gothic sensibility with a more contemporary pulpish narrative, to bring together various tendrils of weird fiction, and to be jarringly odd: at times horrible, at others cloyingly sentimental, at times tense, at others comically absurd. The Romantic Gothic writer, Charles Robert Maturin, whose Melmoth the Wanderer is a key influence on my book, once wrote, venting his frustration at the critics and theatre managers who wished for him to exercise restraint, to curb his grotesque excesses:

‘I have no power of affecting, no hopes of instructing, no play or other production of mine will ever draw a tear from the eye, or teach a lesson to the Heart, so I wish they would let me do what I am good for, sit down by my magic Cauldron, mix my dark ingredients, see the bubbles work, and the spirits rise, and by the pale and mystic light, I might show them “the best of my delights”.’

While I see much to admire in subtlety, consistency of atmosphere, controlled prose, in the end, like Maturin, I just want to throw everything at the page, see what sticks, then drench it in gore.



The Wanderer is quite a complex narrative for a debut novel, and works out quite well. What made you to decide to write it in the framed narrative format?

Thanks! I partly wanted to go back to the roots of the Gothic, with its found manuscripts and strange tale fragments, and in particular to those later, more complex and antic versions of the tropes, found in books like Melmoth and Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. And some of the most powerful weird tales, from William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, to more recent examples, like Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Gemma Files’s and Stephen J. Barringer’s ‘each thing i show you is a piece of my death’ (which I reckon one of the most terrifying short stories ever written) have been convoluted found text stories. It’s my sense that complex, many-stranded plot structures are like mazes, in which the reader becomes lost. They also, especially those involving storytelling, threaten contamination; the borders of the text are corroded, the tale seeps out, and the setting in which the reader reads seems just another frame. When the found text’s strange appearance of truth, its suggestion of being more account than story, is added to this, then the effect can be positively nightmarish.



What were the biggest influences on The Wanderer? While reading it there seemed to be many that stood out to me, and a few names readers of weird fiction should pick up on scattered throughout the book. What were you hoping to accomplish with this novel?

As I’ve mentioned, the key influence was Maturin’s strange book of 1820, Melmoth, a novel often considered the very last of the original Gothic mode. Melmoth is very odd text, which brings, to the violence and ‘bad taste’ of the Gothic, a high-Romantic sensibility, and also, more incongruously, the comical, sceptical, and metatextual mood of Renaissance and Enlightenment satire: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Sterne, and Diderot. I hope to set up a similar jarring clash of tones in The Wanderer.

Another important precursor, was Poe’s only longer work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe seems to have hated writing it and to have done so for quite cynical commercial reasons. He was, of course, a master of lyric verse and the powerfully atmospheric short tale, and based his poetics on a unity of effect, but I think those stories of his that leaven the ‘Arabesque’ seriousness, with the impish and ‘grotesque’, his most enthralling. And in Arthur Gordon Pym, a book often criticised as awkward, episodic, unable to sustain a mood, there is much that is grotesque, and downright odd.

Poe’s general disinclination for the novel also led him to attempt to make of it a hoax, and present it as a true travelogue; it seems he thought he could, in this way, ease his financial hardships with the sale of the book, while distancing himself from the potboiler nature of the project. But sometimes it’s parodic, makes its fictionality apparent, and at others, when Poe appears to have had a moment of enthusiasm for the book, a more sublime, philosophical tone predominates. It is a novel of confused motives and disparate moods, and also one in which the world of appearances is a bizarre puzzle, and the numinous lying beneath no less absurd. And I love it for all of these things.

Writing The Wanderer, I was inspired not just by Arthur Gordon Pym itself, but also by what I see as two failed attempts to solve Poe’s enigma: Jules Verne’s The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Both attempt to make of Poe’s chaos some stable order, Verne through tedious scientistic explanation, Lovecraft by aligning the text with the events of his nihilistic cosmos. But Poe’s ridiculous text just sticks its tongue out, scampers about, clubs them to the ground.

This idea of the victory of the absurd led me to put Punch at the heart of the book. Punch is as brutal an example of the Carnivalesque prevailing over reason as can be imagined. I was thinking also of Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu, who, like Punch, is a scion of the commedia dell'arte figure of Pulcinella, and is also perhaps a descendant, via Lautréamont’s vile Maldoror, of Melmoth’s.

Arthur Machen’s London tales were also an important influence. In his work, characters may find themselves rounding an ordinary street corner in the middle of the afternoon, only to find themselves confronted with something utterly bizarre. I tried to infuse my book with this sense that you might just happen on something strange and terrible when wandering the city.

I also wished to weave together yarns pulpish, but believable, with threads of theory, to produce a rough and unevenly textured cloth. In this I was inspired by Angela Carter’s extraordinary The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, a book in which philosophical musings clash with Sadean picaresque. Among the ideas that shaped my book are Vico’s argument that the nature of history is cyclical, Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of writing as a plunge into the abyss, and Eugene Thacker’s horror of philosophy.

There were a number of other key literary inspirations. A notion as to the structure of The Wanderer came from Machen’s The Three Imposters, M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud was a particular influence on my thinking about the desolated world I wished to depict, and from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, ‘The Immortal’, I took a sense of disaffection and amorality in the undying. I also wanted to find an odd and apt voice for my eternal narrator, and cast about looking for models. I ended up taking quite a bit from Thomas Browne’s prose style, and allusions to Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus crop up in the book. I also took cues from the digressive nature of Laurence Sterne’s eponymous narrator in Tristram Shandy.

And there was one further influence on the book – eerily, a retrospective one. While editing the book, after completing my first draft, I came across a reference to a novel by Walter Owen, More Things in Heaven…, a book made up of linked narratives about cursed manuscripts, manuscripts that cause readers to spontaneously combust, a book itself supposedly cursed. Intrigued by the seeming resemblance to The Wanderer and undeterred by claims of malign influence, I ordered up More Things in Heaven… at the British Library. On opening it, I felt an eerie shock. The first line of Owen’s work runs: ‘On the 14th July 1935 Mr Cornelius Letherbotham, an English gentleman resident in Buenos Aires, died under extraordinary and distressing circumstances.’ The first line of The Wanderer was (and is): ‘On the 18th December 2010, Simon Peterkin, a British Library archivist and writer of weird tales with a small, if cultic, following, disappeared from his Highgate flat.’ I read on, gripped by a horrid fascination, and discovered more and more correspondences. Then I began dabbling, working more, this time intentional, allusions to More Things in Heaven… into my book.

Then, in the block I lived in at the time, there was a bad fire. No one was hurt, but the building was gutted. I stopped tinkering after that.

I guess my main aims for The Wanderer were to evoke a creeping weird horror, but also to create a riotous clash of tones and modes that would in itself be weird, to move from gruesome violence, to mawkish sentimentality, to the absurd and comic, without any respect for a unity of impression.

Or rather, I should say these would have been my influences, methods, and aims, had I written The Wanderer. But the fact is I found it in the flat of an obscure author of strange stories, Simon Peterkin, after he’d vanished in uncanny circumstances. Initially I thought it a novel by Peterkin, now I’m not sure who wrote it. I merely brought it to publication. And I’m no longer sure that was at all a good idea…

As a reader of the Weird, how would you describe weird fiction to a reader unfamiliar with the genre? What would you describe as essential reading for fans of the weird, both works of antiquity as well as their modern counterparts?

It is my sense the Weird is defined by a slow realisation, which dawns, dread and ineluctable, that things were never what we thought them to be, that they were always already weird. This is the etymology of the word after all; what the Weird shows us is what is, and has always been, fated for us. This is the main way the Weird differs from horror, I think. In horror, things as they are, are attacked by something which slops forth from some rent in reality. This thing may be defeated, or prevail, and the world will return to normal, or all will be changed utterly, but there is always the sense that the horror is something from outside, from beyond, that disrupts the world. In the Weird the world is shown to have been weird all along – we simply had our eyes closed to its weirdness before. Weird therefore lacks narrative climax, but has more subtlety: the true face of the world can inspire dread, but also ecstasy, or evoke both at the same time.

I think there are actually two kinds of weird. The first is the Weird as a true genre, a genre of stories in which, in a broadly realistic setting, a speculative element strips the mantle from the world, shows us its numinous flesh. But I think there is a broader category too, in which the general meaning of the word is present alongside its etymology; weird fiction here is simply what’s weird, what doesn’t sit neatly anywhere, is unsettling. This kind of story also shows us that what we thought we could trust – the stability of a narrative, the consistency of tone, sense and reason – can also be enweirded, betray us.

Because the Weird contains these two possibly categories, it can accommodate the visceral and scalpel-keen horrors of Laird Barron’s The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, alongside the chilling ecstasies of D.P. Watt’s The Phantasmagorical Imperative, and Anna Tambour’s delightfully delirious Crandolin – to pick at haphazard three brilliant books I’ve recently read, three very different books, but all weird.

My notion of what is essential weird reading is constantly changing, but off the top of my head, aside from those books I’ve already mentioned, here are a few I think really potent examples of the mode. William Beckford’s dark Arabian Nights fantasia, Vathek, is one of the oddest novels of the original Gothic I’ve read, and is certainly deeply weird. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly’s linked tales are harrowing and deeply strange. Stefan Grabiński’s tales, in which the occult and the technological are melded, are uniquely haunting. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington is one of the most consistently bizarre novels of all literature, constantly wrong-footing its reader. Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight is a bizarre odyssey across a surreal USA, reminiscent of some of William Burroughs’s novels, a novel of furious compassion and belligerent pacifism. The mundane strangeness of Shirley Jackson’s short fiction is, for me, utterly compelling. Robert Aickman’s work contains more overt supernatural and surreal elements than Jackson’s, but also conveys the horrible sense of a real that is unreliable, or has been compromised somehow. Eric Basso’s The Beak Doctor is an extraordinarily evocative work of fantastical urban decay. Kōbō Abe’s The Face of Another is a delirious and nightmarish work of philosophical horror. The Course of the Heart, by M. John Harrison is one of the most affecting and devastating novels of all weird fiction. And I find the bleak vision of Thomas Ligotti’s tales always gives a shudder.

As a number of commentators have noted, we seem to be in the midst of a weird renaissance at the moment, and there are a number of recent books that I think have expanded the possibilities of the mode: K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City took the New Weird urban fantasy template and gave it a fin de siècle, decadent mood; Kelly Link’s scintillating stories are bogglingly complex, structurally and generically, but with a real human core to them; Hal Duncan’s work has powerfully queered the mode, and woven in myth and folklore; Reggie Oliver has taken the classic English ghost story and made of it a brutal bludgeon; Mark Valentine’s and John Howard’s Connoisseur stories take the psychic detective tale and infuse it with a revelatory mysticism; John Langan has shown that the weird tale can be made metafictional and playful without sacrificing even a jot of its horror, and Nathan Ballingrud has shown that a spare literary prose style and brilliantly realised characters can be added to the form. And Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy has demonstrated that the weird can cannibalize other genres, be genuinely horrifying and transmutative at the same time, and can deal both with vast concerns and the minutiae of human life.



Does film interest you as well? What films do you think best express the sense of The Weird?

I think the Weird has translated really well into cinema – inventive filmmakers have found powerful visual analogues for the linguistic estrangement of weird fiction. Growing up I watched lots of horror films, particularly relishing ’80s slashers, but it wasn’t till I got to university and watched surrealist classics, such as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Maya Deren’s At Land, that I realized a film could be strange and unsettling, without being overtly frightening.

David Lynch is a master of using striking visual effects and powerful sound design to enhance the weirdness of his strange, transgressive narratives. They are also utterly tonally inconsistent, rapidly cycling from horror to comedy to melodrama to crime and so on. I think my favourite of his films is probably Inland Empire, though I also love the often underrated Lost Highway, which contains, for me, perhaps the most terrifying moment in all cinema – the protagonist, Fred Madison, meets at a party a mysterious man, who tells him to call home, and when he does so, the mystery man, who still stands before him, picks up…

Other films with a powerful weird sensibility include: Bella Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, a film based on László Krasznahorkai’s novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, which enhances the strangeness of the central premise – a travelling show displaying a stuffed whale and a Machiavellian dwarf comes to town and rioting ensues – by using just 39 shots in its two and a half hour running time; Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, which takes an already very odd sf novel, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, and makes it truly weird by refusing to explain anything and suffusing it with a wan melancholy; The House with the Laughing Windows, directed by Pupi Avati, is a ’70s Italian horror, but is utterly unlike a conventional giallo –muted in its colours and effects, odd and etiolated in its plotting, it’s a captivatingly weird film; Andrzej Żuławski’s Posession is a truly bizarre piece, a harrowing relationship breakdown mixed with highly sexualized Lovecraftian elements, and espionage; Marebito by Takashi Shimizu is a far cry from the director’s Ju-on (The Grudge) films – there is no attempt to explain the speculative elements in supernatural terms, and few jump scares, instead there’s just creeping dread and a plot that mashes together weird influences into an impossible to parse story of manifestations of fear, an underworld beneath Tokyo, and vampire robots; Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom is quite possibly the weirdest TV show ever made, mixing up a number of utterly incongruous elements – a hospital built on cursed ground, a sentimental ghost story, child abuse, silly, and often ribald, comedy, medical drama, the rebirth of a monstrous evil – into something that makes absolutely no sense, but lingers in the mind; and Jessica Hausner’s film, Hotel, which is a masterpiece of restrained terror, taking a series of horror film tropes – a bullied new girl working in a strange hotel in the woods, a cave rumoured to be inhabited by a child-eating witch, another missing girl, whose glasses the protagonist is forced to wear – and inverts, twists them, building up such a cloying tension that a late revelation that a long corridor simply goes nowhere is enough to utterly harrow you.



Can you tell readers about any upcoming project or plans for the future?

I’ve been told that there exists a set of critical notes and an essay about The Wanderer, or a version of it, written by a student of the weird, who has apparently disappeared; I’m trying to track these down, and get to the bottom of the story. I have also been passed a collection of manuscripts that tell a very strange tale of a London under threat from some demonic source, of the tutelary spirits of the city, of the death of the scholar who discovered the texts, and of parallels with the demise of a decadent Belgian poet during the siege of Paris in 1870. I’m trying to see if I can make head nor tail of this before compiling these; I’m kind of hoping I won’t.

Interview: Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall is one of the finest practitioners of strange fiction working today. I recently read and reviewed her latest collection, Gifts For The One Who Comes After and found it to be one of the best fiction collections of 2015.



Gifts For The One Who Comes After is one of the finest fiction collections of the year. The themes of legacy and of family are a common thread throughout. What is important to you about these themes and what made you want to explore them?

Let me first say, thanks very much for saying that! It’s tremendously kind! I suppose, in some ways, the themes in Gifts followed on naturally from my first collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side. In that collection, I was exploring issues of history in a broad sense, which no doubt came from the fact that I was in the final stages of a PhD in book history and medieval studies. I was interested in the physical traces of history, and in books particularly. But when I started writing Gifts, my brother had just had his second child; the question of family, what binds them together, what is passed on from generation to generation, seemed very important to me. And when you think about it, it’s just another way of thinking about history—not textbook history, but personal histories, the stories you hear from your grandparents, the fables you make up for your children. And in some ways it seemed like a warmer sort of history, closer to the oral tradition.



Have you always had a love for the fantastic? What brought this about?

I started reading fantasy at a very early age: E Nesbit and Susan Cooper, Patricia C Wrede, Scott O’Dell, Lloyd Alexander. When I got older then I moved onto Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel Kay. My mom would read to my sister and me every night until we were old enough to read ourselves. With me it never really stopped. I was a reader—that peculiar type of child who never stops reading, no matter what. If my family was going to drive from my hometown in Sarnia to Toronto, about three hours away, then I’d get to choose a new book from the bookstore and that would be the best part of the trip. I remember very vividly that my grade one teacher brought over a girl for me to play with at recess because I was always stuck in a book. The whole situation confused me. I didn’t know what to do with her. And I hadn’t been lonely at all.          

What were some of the authors and books that you've read throughout your life that have stuck with you the most?

I mentioned some of them above but, oddly, although those writers made up much of my childhood, they don’t have such a strong connection with what I write now. There’s a part of me that wishes I felt more comfortable with high fantasy. I have a PhD in medieval studies and that seems the perfect background to go write a big, fat, epic trilogy. But I can’t—or I can’t yet. I don’t understand, narratively, how those books work. Or I don’t feel it intuitively the way I can with other kinds of stories. But picking at random amongst the works that have stuck with me, Guy Kay’s Fionavar Tapestries would rank highly. It seemed to me that there was tremendous humanity written into his mythic reworkings, particular the Arthur and Guinevere strand. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is another. I came to it much later in life, as a graduate student on one of my first research trips to London, and it still strikes me as one of the finest pieces of literature ever produced. Just watching it makes me tear up—not even at the sad bits, just because it’s so damn good. The whopper of a novel It was my first introduction to Stephen King and it has a profound effect on my writing. King is a master of the yarn. I read recently that there are stories you fall into effortlessly and stories that give pleasure in the work you do: King is one of the most engrossing storytellers I’ve ever encountered and the way he writes about children and growing up always moves me and charms me at the same time. And then Robert Shearman’s collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical made me fall in love with the form of the short story. Like King, Shearman has an easy, offhand style but there’s such deadly precision in what he does. And I had never encountered absurdist fiction before that—there was something about it that instantly chimed with my own sense of humour, which is both very whimsical and quite dark.



Of your own fiction, what are your favorites and why? 

It’s strange because when I think back on my stories, what I remember most about them is the process rather than the final product. And so I do have favourites—of course I do!—but they’re my favourites because of the way I wrote them. In that respect, “Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects” is probably at the top for me. I wrote that story for Kelly Link and Gavin Grant at Clarion West, an intensive six-week workshop I did in 2012. And I was coming up on my deadline to submit but the story I had been trying to get to work—a complex beast of a thing I never managed to crack—completely dissolved. I was trying to force it but I never had the right sense of what I was doing. So in a panic I went to the only part of the story I had written that seemed like it had any life, and that turned out to be the beginning of “Household Objects”, a story about a little girl who adopts two cans of tomato soup. What followed was a mad rush of gleeful typing where I said to myself, “no rules except at the beginning of every section something must happen.”
But some of my other favourites in Gifts for the One Who Comes After are “Supply Limited, Act Now”, about a group of kids who get a working shrink ray, because it’s much lighter. Also—miniature dogs! And from Hair Side, Flesh Side my favourite story is “Sanditon”, about a woman who finds a lost manuscript of Jane Austen written on the inside of her skin. That was the first story I wrote where I really felt as if I tapped into something that was my own, something that felt new and distinctly me rather than an experiment in someone else’s style.

If an unfamiliar reader asks you about your fiction, how would you best describe it to them?

Clumsily, for the most part. I still don’t have a good answer to this question and in part that’s because my fiction is quite changeable. Sometimes it’s surrealistic, sometimes more openly fantastic or horrific, sometimes poetic. I don’t know. Many people call me a horror writer but I have a sort of push-pull relationship with horror. I quite enjoy certain kinds of horror fiction: ghost stories, the strange and the weird. But there are aspects of the horror genre that I find myself resisting: namely, brutality and open violence, excessive gore, the sometimes shoddy characterizations of women. But I suppose that’s the best reason to be part of a genre—because you feel invested but you still have something to push against.



In another recent interview you said you were a lover of single malt scotch. I'm also quite a fan, and have been considering writing up whiskey (or booze in general) pairings to go with books. What are your favorite whiskeys? If you  had to choose a whiskey to pair with each of your ChiZine collections, which would you choose?

I’d choose Glen Morangie to go with Gifts for the One Who Comes After: it’s sweet on top but it’s still got a bit of smoke and fire to it underneath. Hair Side, Flesh Side would probably be a dirty martini. There’s a touch more bitterness there, but also it’s a bit naughty. (When I was writing Hair Side, I eventually ran out of gin and vermouth and came up with a pretty poor substitute—olive juice and tequila. I’m not sure I recommend it.)



What are you currently reading? Do you have any recommendations for fans of the weird and fantastic?

I’ve been working my way through all of David Mitchell’s books. What a find! He’s brilliant! I started off with The Bone Clocks but in all honesty my favourite of his is probably Black Swan Green, a completely realistic novel about a kid growing up in Worcestershire in the eighties. The writing is extraordinary. As for recommendations for fans of the weird and fantastic, well, I discovered Robert Aickman’s short stories this year and he’s wonderful: dry, witty and very, very odd. Julio Cortázar was an Argentinian short story writer who I like very, very much. He wrote a short story called “Letter to a Lady in Paris” in the collection Blow-up about a tenant who starts vomiting up rabbits. His work is so wonderfully surreal and often hilarious. More people should be reading him, I think. I also came across a fantastic collection of graphic short stories called Through the Woods by the Canadian web cartoonist Emily Carroll. She’s a wonderful inventor of grisly little ghost stories and her use of space is amazing. You can also find her work online at http://www.emcarroll.com/



What's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you, and/or the weirdest place you've ever been?

I visited the island of Delos last year. It is hard to explain how amazingly cool it is: it’s one of the most geologically stable places in the Mediterranean and so, as a result, it became a holy sanctuary and was the reputed birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. The site, which is huge, is filled with numerous temples belonging to the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, my favourite of which was the temple of Dionysus, which featured relief carvings of chickens with entirely phallic heads. I ended up wandering around with my notepad for most of the day, writing roughly a series of passages which eventually became “All My Love, a Fishhook”. But near the museum there was a large forested area that used to be the sacred lake of Zeus, which apparently held the spermatozoa until it was drained on account of the mosquitoes which were breeding there. There were benches set up so I sat down to write. About twenty minutes in, I heard chanting. There were men and women in bright orange robes all around who were getting on with a ritual of some sort—apparently, so the guard at the museum told me, they were cultists and they regularly performed their rites there.



What can readers expect from you in the future?

I have a couple of stories coming out in collections in 2015 including “The Vault of Heaven” in Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas; “Stud” in Twenty-First Century Bestiary edited by Heather Wood; and a story in Cassilda’s Song, edited by Joe Pulver. I’m also hard at work on a novel called Icarus Kids about children who come back from the dead with wings. I hope to have that finished off in a month or so!

Interview: Mike Allen

Author/Poet/Editor Mike Allen recently blew me away with his debut short fiction collection, Unseaming, and was kind enough to grant me an interview.

First off I'd like to thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

You’re welcome, Justin! Thank you for inviting me to gab.

I have to admit, I was a bit blindsided by your collection Unseaming. Until now I've known you as a poet, and an editor (Mythic Delirium, Clockwork Phoenix). Unseaming collects short stories from a span of sixteen years, and quite frankly is one of the best short story collections of the year. Do you see yourself writing more short fiction in the future?

Thank you so much for the kind words! It sounds like, in your case, Unseaming had exactly the effect I’ve hoped it would. May the effect continue to spread!

Laird Barron’s introduction puts things quite succinctly: I’ve been writing fiction all along, with a story published here, a story published there, rarely appearing in venues that reach a large audience. In hindsight, it’s not hard to see why; I’m definitely not one for comforting or crowd-pleasing. If I were, I would never have written so much poetry, heh.

On the other hand, it’s true that even though I’m a Nebula Award finalist – a published novelist even! – I’ve had numerous encounters with folks who know me as an editor or a poet but express surprise on learning I write stories; and I can find that frustrating. But on the third hand of this mutant, with this collection, I’m making a statement about who I am as a storyteller that I haven’t made before. And I’m stunned, in a good way, at the attention it’s been getting.

As for whether I’ll write more: of course. I have a new story in progress in my far future “Hierophant’s world” series (the latest of those, “Still Life With Skull,” appeared last year in Ian Whates’ Solaris Rising 2), and other tales flying to various places, hoping to land. The next short story bound to appear in print is my horror tale “Tardigrade” in Jason V. Brock’s mammoth (I mean MAMMOTH) 700+ page anthology A Darke Phantastique.

Your fiction revels in the dark and the weird. What attracts you to dark/weird fiction? Is your poetry also slanted this way?

Morbid curiosity certainly plays a role. My first exposure to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in third grade left me wracked with night terrors for months, and yet I was drawn back to that book again and again. (I now own a copy of that exact edition of Poe's stories, complete with the illustrations that disturbed me so.) Lovecraft had a similar effect, King, Straub and others. I eventually conquered these night terrors when I was a teen by saturating myself so thoroughly with horror stories and horror films that I achieved a sort of vicarious ownership of the things I found scary. Clive Barker's Books of Blood were the turning point, when I started to feel as if I was sharing in the author's wicked acts of creation rather than a victim of them. Perhaps my writing, when I bend it toward horror, becomes the ultimate expression of that ownership? I definitely enjoy crafting stories that others find unnerving.

The thing of it is, though: in hindsight I see evidence that I was always bound to become the person I am now, Poe or no Poe. The narrator of my story "Humpty" describes being attacked by a stuffed doll in his crib -- I had that exact nightmare as a tot. Or at least I assume it was a dream, I remember it as if it actually happened.

As for whether my poetry shares in this, I give you the words of my good friend Amal El-Mohtar, who wrote the introduction to my newest poetry collection, Hungry Constellations: "This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated … this is a book of monsters."

When did you know you wanted to become a writer? What were early dark/weird fiction/poetry works that influenced you?

Honestly, I'm a late bloomer. I didn't get serious about submitting stories until my senior year at Virginia Tech. I made my first small press sale, to a pay-in-copy zine, right after I graduated, which let me trick myself into thinking my first professional sale had to be just around the corner, heh, heh. Nowadays I'd consider that first story (and others from those early days) unpublishable, but it's perhaps a good thing I didn't know that at the time.

On a side note, since you're asking about influences, it might be worth mentioning that the first story I sold was inspired by the music of Slayer, as was the much better story "Let There Be Darkness" that's included in Unseaming.

In terms of poetry, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" stands tall in my youth, with its tarot cards and cities of the dead. As for stories, I've mentioned Poe, Lovecraft and King. I read Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" when I was pretty young, and it rather traumatized me in a way that kept drawing me back to it, much like good old Poe. I had a comparible reaction to Thomas M. Disch's nihilistic "Descending."

It's funny, I was a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings, and in the tiny Appalachian town where I lived, there was no "fandom," absolutely no one who I could talk with about this genre stuff in a knowledgable way, so I explored in a vacuum. A well-meaning family friend provided a book called A Treasury of Modern Fantasy that I started wolfing down thinking it was more Tolkien/Lewis type stuff, but nooooooo, it was basically an epic collection of dark fantasy and horror, ranging from Clark Ashton Smith to Philip Jose Farmer, and lo! my fate was sealed.

The favorites I've discovered as an adult -- Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron -- have entailed dark joy rather than night terror trauma, heh.

Unseaming has an original novella called The Quiltmaker, which is a sequel to the opening story of the collection, The Button Bin. Why did you decide to revisit this story?

After "The Button Bin" lost the Nebula Award, I had the opportunity to share it with a film producer, who was intrigued (or so it seemed to me) but didn't think there was enough material there for a full-length movie. I had not at all planned to continue this story, did not believe it could be continued, but faced with this possibility (which, by the way, went nowhere) the creative part of my brain started worrying away at the problem.

Sometimes my stories start with an image. The inspiration for "The Button Bin" came as I was idly running my arm through a huge tub full of buttons at a local store and imagined the buttons adhering to my skin as I pulled my arm out. A new image came to me, of a woman trapped in a room with our, um, hero from the first story, trying to escape as he starts to violently unravel. More scenes followed, demanded to be written.

"The Quiltmaker" contains seeds for a third story, though I don't yet have a pivotal scene in my mind to serve as a springboard. We shall see how things go.

What stories/authors/books/poetry collections are on "Mike Allen's List of Essential Reading?"

My list of favorites has evolved over the decades. I just finished and was immensely impressed by Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance.) Those books reminded me of so many cool and disparate things: Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Ligotti's best "horror in the workplace" stories, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. But what he's done is something fresh, haunting, bizarre, gorgeous and full of compelling mysteries.

Laird Barron's existing collections of stories, The Imago Sequence, Occultation, The BeautifulThing That Awaits Us All, form a trilogy of their own, and I recommend them without reservation. (And I will never stop bragging about having published the title story of Occultation in the first volume of Clockwork Phoenix.)

Earlier this year I finally read Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire and was just blown away. I can't shut up about it. By all means, if you're a fan of horror, seek out that book.

Boy, I could go on. But since we're talking about horror, let me just say that David Hartwell's massive anthologies The Dark Descent and Foundations of Fear opened door after door after door for me. I made so many amazing discoveries wandering through those books.

What can readers expect from you in the future? Also, for unfamiliar readers could you discuss your other projects (Mythic Delirium, Clockwork Phoenix)?

My first novel, a dark, dark fantasy called The Black Fire Concerto, was published in 2013 by Haunted Stars, an imprint of Black Gate. I've written an even grislier sequel, The Ghoulmaker's Aria, that still needs a lot of work before it can go to press, but I hope to have it out next year. Sitting on the back burner, homeless but hopeful, is a 110,000-word novel that expands on one of the short stories in Unseaming, "The Hiker's Tale." And I've begun yet another novel, working title These Bloody Filaments, that shares a lot of traits and themes with the stories in Unseaming -- imagine black magic infesting the milieu of  Breaking Bad. Some characters from the Unseaming tales will turn up.

Man, Mythic Delirium and Clockwork Phoenix could warrant a whole 'nother interview. Mythic Delirium was once a poetry journal I printed and published twice a year; now it's a webzine devoted about evenly to both poetry and offbeat fiction. My wife Anita and I are about to re-release the first four issues of the webzine, repackaged as a print anthology, called, of course, Mythic Delirium -- and this anthology incarnation just received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which has us tickled to no end. (By the way, we're currently open to submissions. Guidelines are here: http://mythicdelirium.com/?page_id=290)

Clockwork Phoenix is a series of anthologies that I initially subtitled "Tales of Beauty and Strangeness." For a summary I'm going to steal from one of Rich Horton's reviews in Locus, who wrote that each of the four books holds "a set of well-written stories occupying multiple subgenres, usually in the same story, often ambiguously." And those stories have racked up an astonishingly high number of award nominations and "best of the year" reprints for a series published by a micropress, so I like to think that though it's hard to explain exactly what Clockwork Phoenix is, it's something we do well. The cat's out of the bag, so I might as well repeat it here: Anita and I are planning to hold a Kickstarter for a fifth volume in 2015.

Thanks for your time.

You're welcome. Thank you for the questions!