The other month, I was interviewed by the fine fellows of the Cromcast, a podcast which, as its name suggests, is devoted to all things sword-and-sorcery. (If you’re unfamiliar with this type of fantasy, think Robert E. Howard’s Conan character.) A fine time was had by all.
Conan! By the late, great Frank Frazetta.
Following the podcast, I contributed an introductory essay to the third issue of their self-described “amateur magazine of cosmic horror,” Witch House. They asked me to say a few words about cosmic horror, a type of horror with which I’ve been associated since at least The Fisherman. As is usually the case with me, the introduction grew in the writing to a little more than twice as long as what had been requested, beginning with a consideration of a short-short poem by the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and using that as a leaping off point for a discussion of the role of the sublime in cosmic horror. To their credit, the Cromcasters did not blink an eye at what I gave them. The essay and the entire issue is now available for free download. My thanks to the Cromcasters for giving me the space to follow through on an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while.
Photo courtesy of David Surface. I don’t know what the name means, either; although if any bird could write a book, it would have to be an owl, right?
This past Saturday, I drove just about two hours north-northeast to join David Surface and Julia Rust at Owl Pen Books for a Halloween reading. The reading had been set up by the notorious Glen Hirshberg, whose former student is one of the (newish) co-owners of Owl Pen. I was looking forward to seeing Glen in person again for the first time in years; while David and Julia were looking forward to seeing him for the first time in person. Alas, at the last minute, a combination of airline incompetence compounded by illness prevented Glen from crossing the continental divide, leaving the rest of us to do the best we could without him. To a charming crowd, Julia and David gave terrific readings I did my best to live up to. Afterwards, I pressed a tiny guitar into David’s hands and we led the group in a rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” that Julia recorded and you can watch here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=314964317931218
Photo courtesy of Julia Rust. We’re available for parties, witches’ Sabbats, and Walpurgisnacht.
Owl Pen has a terrific (and terrifically affordable) selection of used books. The physical store is open seasonally, which means it’s closed now in preparation for winter. Some of their stock is listed online, but really, if there’s something you’re looking for, shoot them a message, because they just might have it. They have great and exciting plans for the spring, and I’m hoping Glen can convince them to hold a spring ghost story event.
Photo courtesy of David Surface. The bookstore is located inside a former chicken coop. It is much bigger than it appears on the outside. It may be haunted by the ghost of an angry rooster named Big Fitzy.
Also: I know I don’t need to tell you about Glen Hirshberg (though if you haven’t, you should absolutely check out his novel-in-stories, Infinity Dreams, and his most recent collection of ghost stories, Tell Me When I Disappear), but if you haven’t picked up David Surface’s collection, Terrible Things, I heartily suggest you do so. He is a terrific, graceful writer who writes stories that move from eerie to horrifying in a heartbeat. Julia Rust doesn’t have a collection (yet), but once she does, you’re going to want to get your hands on it. In the meantime, take a look at Angel Falls, the novel she and David co-wrote.
I guess the title of this entry says it all. Alma had her cancer surgery a bit more than a week ago at Hudson Highlands Veterinary. The vet removed three masses, and because of the size of the two incisions needed, had to use surgical staples to close the wounds. This meant several days of wearing a protective cone, of which Alma most assuredly was not a fan.
Oh, the indignity.
Our little dog has recovered well, though, and today was her trip back to the vet to have her staples removed, which was done quickly and well. We’re extremely grateful to the doctors and staff of Hudson Highlands for taking such good care of Alma, and to all who have sent their good wishes along the way. We’re also extremely grateful for the support of Amsterdog, who really are a model rescue organization. When Giving Tuesday comes around, please remember them (if not sooner). And if you’re thinking about fostering or rescuing a dog, they really do stand behind them.
The mail the other day brought a copy of Sadie Hartmann’s new book, 101 Horror Books To Read Before You’re MURDERED. Its Sadie’s loose, informal survey of the horror novels and collections from the last twenty years or so she’s liked the best. It’s a beautifully produced book in which I am flattered The Fisherman receives a mention. It’s also a great reading list for anyone interested in taking a look at what’s been going on in the horror field since the turn of the century.
In a way, Sadie’s book serves as a kind of sequel to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, his survey of horror media from approximately 1950 to 1980 (with a few looks back much farther). I’ll admit, there have been times I’ve contemplated writing my own sequel, trying to cover the period after King’s, from 1980 to 2010, say. The problem is, horror media in that time explodes to such a degree it’s difficult for me to imagine being able to do it even the slightest justice in a single volume. I mean, you could write a book on King’s work, alone. (And people have.) Or the X-Files. Or horror video games. When Paul Tremblay and I co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters in 2011, the book was meant to fulfill something of that sequel function, at least in terms of showcasing some of the good work done by writers during the 1980 to 2010 period. (We had planned a non-supernatural follow up, but the publisher’s stinginess killed it.)
In 101 Horror Books, Sadie isn’t interested in discussing every last horror novel or story written since the year 2000. Instead, she maps out her parameters quite clearly in the introduction and then takes us through 101 brief overviews of her choices. Probably the highest compliment I can pay this book is that it suggested some new titles for me to check out. Of course there are writers and books not included in these pages; that’s the nature of the beast. And if I wanted to come up with my own list, or if you wanted to, or if anyone wanted to, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
That said, I am not without more serious concerns when it comes to this book. Watch the video below, and you’ll understand.
I’m very pleased to have a story in the new anthology of academic horror stories, Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia, edited by Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle. It features stories by such luminaries as Brian Evenson, Gabino Igelsias, Jo Kaplan, Premee Mohamed, and Steven Rasnic Tem, as well as a work by a host of up and coming writers. If you’re interested, you can buy a copy here.
The publisher sent me a copy of the book in a cool little package, so I thought I would share the unboxing of it here.
Thanks to my younger son and his girlfriend for helping to record this.
I believe I first read one of Priya Sharma’s stories in Ellen Datlow’s anthology of bird horror, Black Feathers. I was dazzled by her contribution, in no small part because of the sharpness and beauty of her prose. Her first collection, All the Fabulous Beasts, was a knockout assortment of stories loosely gathered around the theme of the title. It won the Shirley Jackson award for collection, and rightly so. Then came Ormeshadow, a novella which reminded me variously of D.H. Lawrence, John Fowles, and Lucius Shepard’s “Dragon Griaule” stories. To write a great story, while not an easy task, is something to which any writer might aspire. But to write great stories so consistently is something else altogether.
Priya Sharma’s new novella, Pomegranates, is another terrific story, one in which figures and situations from Greek mythology collide with a world whose apocalypse has come in the form of a new ice age. The narrative shuttles back and forth between the mythological and the near-future. In the process, Sharma updates the histories of several of the better-known Greek deities, reframing their stories in contemporary terms and settings. At the same time, her presentation of the icy apocalypse moves increasingly from day-after-tomorrow science fiction in the direction of mythic quest. These strands bleed into and blend with one another as Sharma steadily raises the stakes for her characters and the worlds they inhabit. The novella ends in a moment of eucatastrophe that is shocking and wonderful.
There are certain writers whose new work cannot come fast enough for me. Priya Sharma is one of those. If you’re looking for a place to start with her fiction, you might take a look at Pomegranates.
Today is a sad day: the first anniversary of the great Peter Straub’s death. At the time it happened, I didn’t have the words for it, though subsequently, Mike Davis graciously had Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay, and myself on the Lovecraft eZine podcast to talk about Peter. Then Cynthia Pelayo reached out to me to ask if I would write an in memoriam for Peter for the 2023 Stokercon program. I thought I would share this to mark Peter’s passing, and to recommend to those of you who haven’t read his work to do so. Ghost Story is a great place to start; really, though, you can’t go wrong with any of them.
Peter’s Ghost
I miss Peter Straub. I think the last communication I had with him came about a year before he died. Via Twitter, he told me that he was feeling better than he had in a while and was looking forward to getting back to writing. A few months after this, I watched what would be his final podcast appearance, on Patrick McDonough and Brennan LaFaro’s Dead Headspace. It was a long, generous interview, and while Peter looked as gaunt as I had ever seen him, he was in good spirits, gregarious and insightful. After that, he was supposed to appear on Neil McRobert’s Talking Scared but had to cancel. Henry Wagner posted a picture of the two of them to social media and Peter was shrunken, though his face remained bright and lively. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I learned he had been put on a portable device designed to keep his heart pumping. I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Paul Tremblay texted that Peter was gone, but it stunned me all the same. The room receded and it was as if I was looking at my phone in a dark space. Later, I told my wife the news, and she made the noise you make when a dear friend dies.
The thing is, I didn’t know Peter especially well. I taught his novels, Ghost Story and Shadowland. I wrote a long review of his novel, In the Night Room, for the Internet Review of Science Fiction. I spoke with him at a number of conventions. We were on at least one panel together. I attended a couple of his readings in New York. He said very nice things about my first novel. I wrote an appreciation of his work for the Readercon souvenir book the year he was guest of honor. I visited him at his brownstone on the upper west side of Manhattan twice, the first time with Laird Barron, the second alone. I conducted a long phone interview with him for the inaugural issues of Nightmare magazine. He wrote very nice things about my second novel. I exchanged messages with him on a variety of social media platforms, mostly livejournal and Twitter.
I didn’t spend nearly as much time with him as I would have liked. After conventions we had both attended, I would see photos he posted of late-night vigils spent in the hotel lobby, to which he had been driven by the neuropathy that burned away his sleep. If only I had known, I thought, I would have sat up with him, kept him company. When he and Susan, his fabulous wife, relocated to Brooklyn, I thought I should visit him at the new place, but I felt awkward inviting myself over, so I didn’t.
While there are still video interviews of Peter available, for which I am grateful, my principal relationship with him now is through his writing, which is how I first came to know him. Stephen King had written astutely and appreciatively of Ghost Story in his non-fiction study, Danse Macabre, which led me to seek out the novel at my local library. Ghost Story did not have the same immediate effect on me as King’s Christine, which in one fell swoop had made me a writer, and a horror writer, to boot, directing all my creative energy to a single end. In contrast, Ghost Story left me sure a great deal of what I had read had flown right over my head. But there was no resentment attached to this impression, no anger at a writer pointing out my limitations to me. Instead, I felt a kind of gratitude knowing this was a book I could and would return to in short order. I think I appreciated Shadowland, which I read soon after, more, in no small part because its protagonist was a teenage boy not much older than was I. But I still closed the book with the same sensation I had with Ghost Story, that there was a great deal going on here I had not understood. Again, though, my response to this realization was to be thankful. I’m reasonably sure these were the first times I had such reactions to literary works I knew I didn’t fully understand.
And indeed, if I had to offer a sweeping generalization for what Peter achieved in his fiction, it was to write novels and stories that never finished speaking to the reader. Of course I returned to both novels. Each time I did, I understood more of what I was reading, even as I found more to understand. I had the same experience with Peter’s subsequent works, with Koko, The Throat, The Hellfire Club, lost boy lost girl. He was, if you will, building enormous houses, great structures with many rooms of different sizes and configurations, full of winding hallways and secret corridors, staircases to windows with hidden views, labyrinthine basements and cavernous attics. These were spaces you could walk around in for as long as you wanted. In a few cases, Peter had used a similar frame to structure his books, but their interiors were markedly different. There were connections among many of the narratives. Some were direct passages from one book to another; others were stone pathways snaking between fictional locales. The result was less a distinct geographical region, a Yoknapatawpha or Castle Rock, than a kind of neighborhood of the soul.
It feels a little too glib, a little too pat, to say I can return to this neighborhood whenever I want: all I have to do is take one of Peter’s books down from the shelf. But it’s a kind of obstinacy to insist there is no consolation to be found in the work to which he devoted his life. Maybe you know Borges’s line about writers becoming their books after they die; which, he says, is not a bad afterlife. There’s enough truth to the statement for me to mention it here. I still miss him, but it’s past time I paid a visit to one of the grand, sprawling houses that populate Peter Straub’s afterlife.
Well, the good news is, I took Alma the foster dog to have her lymph nodes scanned to see whether her cancer has spread, and it has not. This makes her long-term outlook that much better, and clears us for surgery. Unfortunately, the first available surgical appointment was in mid-December… I took it, to put us in the system, and needless to say, we’re on the cancelation list, but I can’t lie: the good news would have been made that much better were the surgery that much sooner. All good wishes appreciated.
I had the pleasure of meeting Candace Nola virtually on the Dead Headspace podcast, after which, she invited me to be interviewed for her Uncomfortably Dark website. The interview went live yesterday, if you’d like to check it out, where it nestles amidst interviews with all sorts of interesting and talented people. Thanks very much to Candace for some great questions and for having me on her website.
Mr Gaunt: 