Archive by Author

An Interview with Mercedes M. Yardley

To kick off Women in Horror Month (which we’re totally using as an excuse to talk about a number of the awesome authors we work with… not that we need an excuse), Sean talks with Mercedes M. Yardley, an author who appeared in the Word Horde anthology Tales of Jack the Ripper. In addition to being the author of Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Novel of Murder and Whimsy and Nameless, her novella Little Dead Red currently appears on the 2015 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot (you’re definitely going to want to read this one). Take it away, Sean and Mercedes…

What do you feel the purpose of genre is in fiction?

MMY: Genre is about marketing, straight-up. It tells the bookstore which shelf to place the book on. It gives the reader a good idea where to start looking for something that will interest them. I think it has very little to do with a good story. Most stories are more than one genre. I have a book that is a serial killer thriller romance with heavy horror and surrealism. I usually just say it’s a fairytale with a high body count, because it’s simpler. Genre is a categorizing tool to help organization.

You have a story in Tales of Jack the Ripper, “A Pretty for Polly.” What inspired you to write the story, and what was it like working with Ross as an editor?

MMY: I was over the moon when I was invited to that anthology. Jack the Ripper is my jam. I challenged myself to see if I could make Saucy Jack, who is arguably the most heinous and notorious killer of all time, come off as sympathetic. How do you do that without neutering the legend? I did my best and I’m pleased with the result. It’s a dark little thing.

Ross is a very cool editor. Professional, yet laid-back. He has a strong reputation for quality work and deservedly so. I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.

You seem to enjoy whimsy? Is that a fair assessment?

MMY: Absolutely. I call my work “whimsical horror.” I think it’s apt. Pretty, quirky, whimsical things are what make the world go round.

Does your environment alter the settings in your stories?

MMY: It really does alter my settings. I grew up in the desert, so I write quite a bit about that. But my heart is in the Pacific Northwest, so that’s the setting of at least two of my books. I find that if it’s raining outside, I’ll write about rain. If it’s windy, I’ll write about that. It helps to have whatever is influencing my day show up in my work because it gives the stories diversity. It isn’t always daytime, it isn’t always sunny, etc.

Do you write in the morning, at night, or neither?

MMY: Ideally I’m a night writer. That’s when I’m naturally most creative. But unfortunately, that’s also when I’m the most exhausted and I want to kick back and veg. It’s a struggle for me to be disciplined enough to turn off Grimm and work on a book. But ultimately, that’s when my best writing is done.

What inspires you?

MMY: I’m inspired by beauty. I’m also inspired by ugliness and rot. It’s amazing how closely beauty and horror are intertwined. Strength and suffering. I’m inspired by finding the gems in ordinary, everyday things. It adds sparkle to the mundane.

Thanks.

MMY: Thanks for having me! It was a pleasure.

Livia Llewellyn’s Furnace cover reveal, preorders now open on two 2016 Word Horde books

We are pleased to reveal the cover to Livia Llewellyn’s collection Furnace, which we will be publishing in February. We are now accepting preorders for Furnace.

Horror fiction has long celebrated and explored the twin engines driving human existence. Call them what you like: Sex and Death, Love and Destruction, Temptation and Terror. While many may strive to reach the extremes, few authors manage to find the beauty that rests in the liminal space between these polar forces, the shuddering ecstasy encased within the shock. And then there’s Livia Llewellyn, an author praised for her dark, stirring, evocative prose and disturbing, personal narratives.

Lush, layered, multifaceted, and elegant, the thirteen tales comprising Furnace showcase why Livia Llewellyn has been lauded by scholars and fans of weird fiction alike, and why she has been nominated multiple times for the Shirley Jackson Award and included in year’s best anthologies. These are exquisite stories, of beauty and cruelty, of pleasure and pain, of hunger, and of sharp teeth sinking into tender flesh.

Also now available for preorder (though the cover isn’t quite ready to show off yet) is Michael Griffin’s The Lure of Devouring Light, which we will be publishing in April. If you love short fiction like we love short fiction, 2016 is going to be your year!

Over the last few years, Michael Griffin has been heralded by critics as an author of breathtaking skill, melding the aesthetics of quiet horror, dreamlike wonder, and the strangeness inherent in the classical weird. Readers have sought his stories, scattered throughout prestigious anthologies, magazines, and limited-edition chapbooks, hoping to assemble their own collections of Griffin’s ferocious, poetic fiction.

Now, Word Horde presents Michael Griffin’s debut collection, The Lure of Devouring Light. Here you will find strange and luminous tales, character-driven, emotionally resonant, and grappling with horrors both everyday and supernatural.

Experience for yourself The Lure of Devouring Light.

An Interview With Michael Kazepis

Sean M. Thompson recently sat down with King Shot Press head honcho (and helluva writer) Michael Kazepis to ask him a few questions. Here are the results…

What do you think the role of genre is in fiction?

I’m not sure this is a question I can unpack in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a shithead. My view is, I guess, it’s a marketing tool that can become a cage. I’ll leave it at that.

Your story from Giallo Fantastique, “Minerva” is a traditional take on the Giallo genre. What inspired you to write the story?

Is it really a traditional take? I’m seeing this response enough to think I fucked up there—I kept trying to think of ideas reminiscent of giallo that weren’t going to feel like a retread. When Ross invited me to send him something, I was trying hard to figure out a recipe to fake my way in because I’ve always wanted to work with him, and you never know if that invitation comes around again. I mean, yes, I watched Deep Red to figure out some colors to write toward. But that was the extent of my research in the genre. Julio Cortazar’s “Blow-Up” gets riffed heavily. The character of Detective Halkias is a more serious take on Casey from Lloyd Kaufman’s Terror Firmer. I think the cinema sequence was informed by Godard’s Masculin, féminin—that Bergman “film within a film.” Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was also on my mind—I really like its Rubik’s Cube narrative. The Courier’s Tragedy, too. There are lots of scenes like this in literature and film, where the main character sees a performance and it echoes the main story in subtle ways. Here, I thought it’d be kinda funny to have the protagonist, Celia Marrast, watch a stylized snuff film about her brother. Something else is, I originally intended “Minerva” to be set in Rome, but I don’t really know much about Italian culture so I brought the story home to Athens. So that’s why the location is what it is. And you know, the more I think on this question, I guess there really is an overlap between what I did and what’s come before. The failure feels vaguely Borgesian to me. Like, I ended up rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and to me it reads like some other story. I think it took about seven months to walk away from it. I can be a very slow writer. Ross was extraordinary in his patience.

What themes do you find yourself coming back to in your work, if any?

Of what I’ve picked up? There are steady patterns of the unreliable witness, ruined cities, coping with parental death, amateur detectives, ghosts, godlessness, some leftist ideas. The struggle to sustain love, which is significantly more difficult than the pursuit of it. Life as a slasher film garnished with surrealism. I’ve been accused of writing all my lead characters as loners and I’ll cop to that.

Do you have any writing rituals?

It used to be that I’d take smoke breaks and long showers as ways of measuring space between writing scenes. I try not to smoke anymore. I don’t have the free time that I used to. Mostly it’s just sit and do this when I can. Coffee during the day. I’ll drink VISO at night because it’s less abrasive than coffee or an energy drink. Sometimes I’ll wake up at 3am and work when it’s quietest in the house. Today, I overslept and felt mostly unproductive. I’ve noticed that if I don’t regularly change up my diet, or where I’m working, I won’t get anything done. I get stir-crazy if everything’s continually the same. Almost four months ago, part of the middle finger of my right hand was crushed hydraulically and hasn’t healed yet—this week I was told the distal phalanx (or, fingertip, in doctor speak) doesn’t seem to be healing with the rest of the injury, so I’m presently hoping I won’t lose that part. I spent the first couple of months after the accident in a painkiller haze, and that’s set me back, in terms of schedule. Life is moving slower than I’d like it. So I haven’t had a consistent ritual in a while.

What’s your favorite Giallo film?

I haven’t watched enough of them to form an educated favorite. Recently, I liked Deep Red. As a teenager, I remember enjoying Suspiria, Tenebrae, other Argento stuff. I remember seeing a few films with David Hess in them, because I knew him from The Last House on the Left. Bava’s Bay of Blood, that.

Do you like the cold? Do you find your environment influences your writing, including the weather and the season?

I live in an old apartment that used to have baseboard heaters, but I tore them out because they smelled bad and never replaced them. I’ve got a portable radiator that I’ll occasionally plug in and that helps some. Usually I just layer up. I think some level of discomfort is essential for work to get done. Especially since it’s easier to be lazy this time of year. I find myself wanting to work from bed a lot, even knowing I’ll fall asleep. That’s a struggle because I’m already tired from working at my job and fixing things around the house. But as far as the weather goes, it’s not the being cold that bugs me, it’s the wind, when it can cut. That shit’ll split my knuckles in a day and draw blood. I end up hating the notion of going outside.

Do you have anything you’d like to tell our readers about? Special things?

There’s a novel I’ve been working on for a few years now called Nothing Crown, and it’s written like a post-apocalyptic road novel. It’s about a street kid that walks from Jerusalem to Paris to pursue rapping. Think something akin to Children of Men meets, like, Illmatic (Nas) . . . in the Levant.

I also run King Shot Press, which is a post-bizarro publisher of radical fiction. Last year, we released some really great books by Cody Goodfellow, Eric Nelson and Chris Lambert. This year, KSP is releasing Lambert’s sophomore novel, Killer Unconquered, the second part of a bigger novel-in-series. Violet LeVoit, who won the Wonderland Book Award back in November, has her debut novel coming up, I Miss The World, a Nicholson Baker-esque novel that follows two siblings through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. November was very surprising in that Scott Nicolay, whose forthcoming book Noctuidae is part of the next batch of KSP titles, took home the World Fantasy Award the same weekend that Violet nabbed the Wonderland. His book’s about a hike through an Arizona canyon that leaves two people stranded with something very big. Lastly, there’s Troy James Weaver’s Marigold, in which a 30-something floral salesman searches for reasons to keep living.

Thanks, man.

Thank you.

This Is Horror Award nominations… and your chance to vote!

With the dawn of the new year, awards season has begun. And Word Horde has been recognized with nominations in two categories of the prestigious This Is Horror Awards. It is indeed an impressive ballot, filled with many friends of the Horde and a number of our favorite books of 2015. Now, it’s up to you to vote. Drop by the This Is Horror website, check out the full ballot, and cast your vote today! And while you’re there, check out the This Is Horror podcast and shop. You won’t be disappointed.

Nominated for Anthology of the Year: Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Nominated for Publisher of the Year: Word Horde

An Interview with T.E. Grau

We’re back! And here’s a brand spanking new interview Sean M. Thompson conducted with author T.E. Grau. Take it away, Sean…

What do you think the role of genre is in fiction?

The role of genre is that everything is genre, and nothing is genre. That might sound faux philosophical and ridiculous, and probably is, but it’s what I’ve come to believe, in analyzing how I classify books and stories in my own head based on outside pressures, coming the realization that a) it doesn’t matter, and b) too much is made about genre vs. non-genre, the latter of which is usually referred to as “literary fiction,” as if stories and books tainted with the genre smear are any less literary. I’ve read some poor, incredibly dull writers who are incredibly popular in the “literary fiction” grouping, and read some brilliant, heartbreaking prose that’s been cast down into the basement of genre. I resent the labels, not because they mean anything to me, but because they mean so much to the outside world, and – as a proud writer of so-called genre fiction – I think there is a huge dupe going on, and a tragic disservice.

In a recent “year in review” blog posting, horror author Adam Nevill wrote about recently buying a house through the proceeds of his writing, noting: “Over two decades of commitment to the most unfashionable, and second most derided, genre of fiction eventually paid dividends that I never expected.” Why must one feel this way? Why are very successful horror writers moved to mention such things, even when celebrating success? Because of the very real lack of respect for horror fiction by the outside world, while those on the inside can’t figure out what everyone is not seeing. This was reinforced by a conversation I had just this morning with horror writer Ray Cluley, during which we discussed our frustrations at the reputation worn by “genre fiction,” the near-apologies – or long explanations at the very least – horror writers must make when discussing what they write in mixed company, especially if that company includes writers of what is considered more “literary” fiction. Ray writes some of the most “literary” tales, most of which also happen to be classified as “horror,” that I’ve ever read. But he, too, feels the stigma, the guilt by association. It’s nonsense. But it’s real.

Another example, and more specific to the point: I just finished John Connolly’s masterful Night Music: Nocturnes Volume 2, and the last piece in the book is an essay titled “I Live Here,” in which he discusses how horror fiction, from as far back as its first inception as gothic and supernatural fiction, was seen as somehow lurid and obscene, nearly akin to pornography, or worse – something cheap and certainly not to be taken seriously. This reminded me of how mainstream critics perceived hip hop when it first emerged into the wider public sphere, that it was just some sort of cheap trick, a fad, and not something that merited serious interest or examination. Horror, just like hip hop, is STILL dealing with this sort of second class citizenship, and it angers me greatly, as both are just as worthy – if not often more worthy – of esteem and veneration as weighty and influential members of their particular art form. In looking for an exact quote from this Connolly piece, I came across this bit from the author issued in 2011, published by June Caldwell on her blog Shakespeare Couldn’t Email: “Novelist John Connolly gave a talk at the Irish Writers’ Centre recently on the history of crime writing in Ireland, our problematic relationship with criminality and publishing trends. ‘We have a very peculiar relationship with genre in this country,’ he explained. ‘So few reviewers want to engage with it, they’d rather categorise books they don’t quite get as literary fiction instead.’ Avoiding the subject leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fiction, a distrust of popularism. ‘Genre is embedded in fiction, if you don’t understand it, then you don’t understand fiction. Novels were always the great populist form, designed to be read by a lot of people; it wasn’t drama or poetry. The idea of high-brow literary fiction as a separate identity is a recent enough (20th Century) notion.’

And these examples of the fallacy of genre occurred just in the last two days, so they are fresh in my mind. There are thousands of examples of this genre-shaming going on, and the reaction to same by those within the genre.

When you truly think about it and parse it down to the atoms, what is genre? Romance? Action? Mystery? Science Fiction? Noir? Western? Horror? What if a story has all of these, in equal measure? Where do you place it on the shelf? What if it has none of these, but nods toward one or more of them? Is that then Literary Fiction? Who decides, and how are these determinations made? Who benefits from these determinations in the end? I think it’s a bunch of malarkey.

All fiction is inherently “fake,” and all well-crafted writing is considered “literature,” so a well written book about a bored suburban househusband who takes up quilting to bring meaning to his life is no better example of “literary fiction” than brilliantly rendered story about alien gods bent on destruction of humanity. A gibbering, six armed monster dismembering a jogger is no more or less “horror” than a businessman doing the same over his lunch break. Which is genre? Which is what subgenre within Genre? It’s all unreal, it’s all fantasy. That one can “actually happen” while the other cannot (are we sure about that?) makes no difference to me.

So, neither does “genre.” What matters, truly matters, is this: Is it good? Does it move you? Are you transported? Does it resonate? Are you entertained? Being boringly realistic, or excessively fantastical or gory or bizarre, can’t hide substandard writing, or save a story that probably shouldn’t have been written, as it’s a complete waste of time for everyone involved. That “genre fiction” is held in the same contempt as B-Movies or straight to video indies in Hollywood irritates me, to say the least. The squares and snoots don’t know what they’re missing.

Wow, didn’t think I’d spend two complete pages on that answer. I guess a bit of venting was in order. So, while my long-winded answer to a very straight forward question might have been a tad temperamental, I think it shows my irritation at the treatment of horror authors in the overall publishing industry.

Your story from The Children of Old Leech “Love Songs From the Hydrogen Jukebox,” seems to have, for lack of a better term, rapscallions who take mouth candy and suck at the happy sauce. Is it fun to write beatniks? Also, what inspired you to write this story?

It’s fun to write about Beatniks and their scene to a point, as the enterprise can easily fall into clichéd, 1960’s Beatniksploitation, but I do admire that whole movement, and hold it close to my heart, as reading the Beats inspired me to change my major from pre-law in college to English Lit, which led to me eventually turning my interest to writing books. So, the Beats blessed and doomed me at the same time, which is sort of a Beatnik thing to do.

The inspiration for the story was a tribute to the Beats and City Lights literary scene, coiled inside a tribute to Laird Barron, who has influenced me most recently in my writing. It all seemed to fit together well.

What does the “E” stand for? Are you allowed to say?

Edamame. My full Christian name is Theodore Edamame Grau III.

Do you have anything one might call a ritual you go through when getting into the headspace to play the keys? For instance, do you listen to music, work out, or sit in silence when reaching deep into the ether to pull out configurations of words stitched together for our amusement?

If I’m going to be writing after I get home from work, I listen to music on the way. Something heavy, martial, as I like to gear up mentally. That’s for the actual writing part. Most of my ideas and pre-production have come just after the gym, in that time of walking, showering, and driving between getting ready for work and arriving at the office. Almost everything good I’ve come up with has been created during that morning time period before my brain is pulled into the details of the day job. My story “Clean” came to me almost fully formed in the 90 second walk from my car to the gym. Mornings are important to my initial creative process, that first blush of story. Nights are for finishing.

Do you feel like your surroundings motivate you to write about a certain place?

I don’t know about motivate, per se, as motivation usually comes from within. But, I do feel like my surroundings and the places where I’ve lived and visited have hugely impacted my stories. I live in Los Angeles, and have for many years now, longer than any other location in my life. Because of this, the city features heavily in several of my stories, such as “The Screamer” (Century City, Echo Park) “MonoChrome” (Pico Union, downtown LA), “Twinkle, Twinkle” (Pasadena), “Low Hanging Clouds” (Hollywood Hills, Century City). I’m hammering out a crime (genre!) novel in my head that is set in Highland Park (a section of northeastern Los Angeles), that is mostly about murder, but also explores gentrification and hipsterization of historically blue collar or non-white (I despise the term “ethnic” used as an adjective) neighborhoods. I have two more Noir/crime novels that will be set in Los Angeles, as well, in vastly different parts of the city. LA is such a fertile ground for the dark, the weird, the brutal, and the beautiful. It’s got it all.

I have also lived in Nebraska, and in Pennsylvania (at both ends of the state), and those places show up in my work, too. My novella “The Mission” takes place in the Nebraska Sandhills west of Fort Robinson, and introduces the fictional town of Salt Creek, Nebraska, which is a location that I will be returning to several more times in the future. “Beer & Worms” is set in Nebraska on a farm pond, around the Douglas/Washington County line. The featured couple in “Return of the Prodigy” (from Cthulhu Fhtagn!) is from Omaha.

I think place can have a huge impact on a story, and help color it. As for motivation, and living in Los Angeles, daily witness to one or more of the forty-seven billion screenwriters hammering out screenplays at every coffeehouse and cafe within the city limits can either motivate you to sit your ass down and write along with them, or it can make you never want to commit another sentence to paper, just to avoid the whole cheeseball affectation of it all. It’s a double edged sword, living in a creative town. The energy is palpable, but the execution can be off-putting. Or maybe I’m just jaded.

Do you feel there are any themes you keep going back to in your work?

I do, yes, and it’s not usually conscious, but definitely there. Innocence adrift in a cruel, dangerous world. Individuals alone in a crowd. Failed parenting. Travel as a form of life renewal. The terrible nature of human males. They hypocrisy and tragedy of religion. Misanthropy. Cosmic nihilism. Not all of these are always on the surface, but most of these themes show up in the bios of the characters in my pieces, and therefore inform their actions and reactions.

Thanks for your time, and do you have any plugs for our mugs?

Thank you for the interest! I’m such a huge fan of Word Horde, so I’m stoked to be included on the site.

As for plugs, my first fiction collection, The Nameless Dark, is currently available in paperback and e-book through Lethe Press. Stories that weren’t included in the book can be found in the anthologies In The Court of the Yellow King (“MonoChrome”), and Dark Rites of Cthulhu (“The Half Made Thing”), as well as a few other sources that are now out of print and floating around eBay.

I’m finishing the first draft of a novella titled They Don’t Come Home Anymore, a tale of obsession, mortality, and the myth of vampirism, that will be published in 2016 by This Is Horror. A second novella for This Is Horror is also in the works, taking place in a doomsday seed vault near the North Pole, which will also be released in 2016.

Everything else is still too undercooked to discuss, but I’m sure I’ll be yapping about it sometime in the coming year, which promises to be a busy one.

Xmas Hiatus / An Interview with John Langan

We’ll be taking a short break this week in order to spend the Xmas holiday with family, but we’ll be back to shipping orders on December 29. In the meantime, we’d encourage you to order Word Horde from the better bookstore near you. And to fill your stocking with Holiday Horrors, here’s Sean’s interview with John Langan.

What do you think the role of genre is in fiction?

I think of genre as a fundamental component of narrative (and here I’m using genre as Michael Chabon does in his introduction to Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, to indicate regions in a country, as compared to countries on a globe). It’s inescapable: every story has a context, has a set of texts to which it is related. To me, this is something to be celebrated and explored.

Your story from The Children of Old Leech, “Ymir,” deals with the Norse myth of, well Ymir. Do you often like to draw from myths in your work?

I love myth; I love comparative mythology. No doubt, I was led to it via comic books, The Mighty Thor in particular. When I was a kid, most of the books I could find dealt with Greek and Roman myth; although there were a couple about the Norse pantheon. I picked up a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology when I was eleven or twelve, and it laid the Greek and Roman myths out in order; there was also a brief section at the end about the Norse deities. Hamilton remains my go-to; though I loved Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (so much I named a character in a story after him [actually, he’s shown up in a few stories]). I suppose the differences between the Greek and Roman treatments of a figure such as Ares/Mars were what led me to an interest in comparative mythology, which was fed by reading both in other mythologies and in literary critics such as Northrop Frye, who pointed out the underlying similarities among mythic narratives. Especially given the current predominance of the Cthulhu mythos in fantastic fiction, the older myths can provide a welcome alternative narrative context.

I know you can’t say a lot about your upcoming novel, The Fisherman, but what can you say about the novel?

The Fisherman tells the story of a fishing trip two widowers take to a haunted river that promises to allow them one last meeting with their loved ones. In the middle of that, they learn some of the occult history of the construction of the Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York. Terrible things ensue. I hope to have more news to share about the book in the near future.

Have you ever wondered why memory works the way it does? Why some things burn themselves into your brain, but others won’t stay unless you go over them over and over?

Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about memory and the way it functions. It’s at the heart of some of my favorite writers’ works: Ford’s The Good Solider, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, Straub’s Ghost Story and Koko and Mrs. God. Proust and Eliot both obsess over the relationship between memory and time. The nature of memory is at the heart of the way influence functions, I think, which is one of my academic preoccupations. I did some reading of trauma theory years ago—especially Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History—as a way to approach questions of memory and influence (in light of what you might call traumatic memory, I suppose). Caruth explores the idea that it’s the very wound in your psyche that allows you to speak, which is kind of an updating of the argument that Edmund Wilson made decades earlier in The Wound and the Bow and which I’m not sure I (completely) agree with. At the same time, I think of Kirk’s declaration, in the otherwise-atrocious Star Trek V, that he won’t relinquish the pain in his life, because that’s what makes him who he is. To take things down a notch, it may very well be that the things that lodge in your memory, from annoying tunes to bits of dialogue to images you can’t place, are part of the material from which you construct yourself.

Do you consider yourself a weird fiction author, a horror author, or do you simply think of yourself as an author?

I think of myself as a writer working within the horror tradition. If someone wants to call me a horror writer, I’m fine with that. I’m also fine with being called a weird writer; though, to be frank, much of what has been included under the weird umbrella strikes me as a semantic fig leaf, horror writing looking to rebrand itself with a more appealing name.

I remember hearing in passing that you, sir, are a fan of comic books. What are some of your favorites, and do you think that comics have influenced your work in any way?

Comics played a foundational role in my development, first as a reader, then as a writer. I became interested in comics during the seventies, when Marv Wolfman and Roy Thomas were working on The Amazing Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian, respectively. I followed Wolfman’s work on Spidey, The Fantastic Four, and then The Teen Titans and Night Force; recently, I picked up the black and white reprints of his and Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula. During the later seventies, there were paperback reprints of the first issues of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, and this introduced me to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. When I was a little older, I discovered Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing, which led me to The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and pretty much anything by Moore I could get my hands on. In more recent years, I’ve been a fan of Gaiman’s Sandman, Mike Carey’s Lucifer and Unwritten, and Bill Willingham’s Fables. The entire run of DC’s Hellblazer was probably my single favorite comic, ever: pretty much every writer who worked on it rose to the occasion and produced some of their best work, ever. Lately, I’ve been reading Eric Powell’s The Goon, which I love for its astonishing, Bernie-Wrightson-esque art, and for the way it swerves wildly between raucous comedy and utter pathos, and the books in the Hellboy universe, especially The B.P.R.D., which seems to me unparalleled in its portrayal of a world dealing with the consequences of an ongoing apocalypse. I could talk about comics all day.
As to how they influenced me: when I was younger, I aspired to work in comics, first as an artist, then as an artist-writer. I think the Marvel comics I was reading when I was very young showed what you could do if you brought a relative degree of realism to your fantastic situations, if your superheroes struggled to balance their private and public lives, if they operated in a world something like ours. At their best, those Marvel books are master-classes in melodrama. Alan Moore’s work built on all of that, deepening the characters’ psychologies and thinking through the implications of their powers and places in the world more thoroughly. Gaiman, Carey, Willingham, and the Mignola crew constructed elaborate mythologies that they followed through long, intricate narratives.

How much of a role do you think where you live has to do with the type of fictional landscape you choose to create?

It would seem it has to have some connection, wouldn’t it? In my own case, I wonder how much my use of the mid-Hudson Valley in my work has to do with the fact that this is where I was living when I started to read those writers who made use of their particular places, Stephen King and William Faulkner (though I’m pretty sure I was planning a comic book set in this region before that, so maybe I’m wrong [or maybe I was responding to Stan Lee et. al.’s use of Manhattan and its environs…])? And yet, there have been places I’ve been to, Glencoe in Scotland, the varied landscape of Kentucky, that struck me the moment I saw them, and that have stuck with me since then. It’s funny, Simon Schama wrote an interesting book, Landscape and Memory, that touches on a couple of these interview questions.

Thanks for stopping by. Long live the Word Horde.

Thank you!

For more on all things John Langan, visit his website, or, better yet, read one (or more) of his books.

An Interview with Nikki Guerlain

Today, Word Horde’s social media maniac Sean M. Thompson talks with one of the preeminent tastemakers of the Bizarro and Weird Fiction scenes, part-time Valkyrie, and darn fine writer, Nikki Guerlain. Here’s what she had to say…

You come upon a pen, and it can only write truth. What do you do with the pen?

It would be super tempting to go all Star Chamber with the pen. That said, I would probably give it to Michael for Valentine’s Day. That would make a great gift, yeah? He’s loads more responsible than I am. I’m sure he would figure out a brilliant way of using it that wouldn’t involve me possibly going to jail.

What role do you feel genre plays in fiction?

Genres are playgrounds. The more playgrounds the better. Categorizing fiction by genre is just a method of bringing the most promising readers to a particular book. It would be interesting to drop genre altogether and categorize fiction by its intended emotional impact. You know, you walk into a bookstore and you tell the clerk, “You know, I want something that will bum me the fuck out.” And the clerk points you to the Bum Me the Fuck Out section and everything from dark fiction to drug addiction memoirs to books on global warming are all there getting cozy with each other just waiting for you to pick one of them up for your much yearned for bad trip.

Of course, this would get extremely complicated and you’d always have readers who fell outside the intended emotional response categories–but these people know who they are and would have no problem finding what section they needed. And hey, while they’re hanging out ironically in the Bum Me the Fuck Out section of the bookstore why don’t you sell them a shirt that says “Nihilism Makes Me Wet” and donate a portion of each shirt sale to the Make a Wish Foundation?

Honestly, if we want to get more readers to books they’ll enjoy without the genre hang ups we’d start using movies and television and other visual media as short hand. You know, like If You Enjoyed X Movie You’ll Likely Enjoy Y Books. We need better, quicker, more evolved ways to communicate the potential experience to the would-be reader than simply genre.

Now I’m thinking I didn’t really answer the question I was asked which is entirely possible. I will say that the idea that literary fiction is somehow better than genre fiction is total shit. Either something is written well or it isn’t. It’s totally gross to be around writers who look down upon other writers for the genre they write in. Eww.

Favorite Tattoo?

I have FUCK tattooed across the knuckles of my right hand. It’s my favorite because it’s been the best ice breaker/litmus test ever. This tattoo has brought many awesome people and conversations into my life. Nothing makes me smile wider than when someone asks me if my right hand really says FUCK.

Your story from Giallo Fantastique, “Terror in the House of Broken Belles” has a fair amount of eroticism to it, albeit a twisted and deranged sexuality. Do you think that writing about sex is something the bizarro genre embraces over other genres, and if so, why do you think other genres such as, say, weird fiction shy away from sexual themes?

I can only speak for myself and I wouldn’t categorize myself as strictly a bizarro writer. I write fiction that falls in many categories. To me, bizarro is more an attitude–a spirit–than a genre with strict conventions. It has a willingness to play where others might not due to any number of things: taste, propriety, lack of market. Bizarro covers a broad range of work. It can be quiet or quite loud and juvenile. Bizarro does what it wants to and fuck you if you don’t like it–it doesn’t need your approval or respect. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve it. It just means that the writer isn’t fettered by social norms. The work succeeds or fails on its own grounds. Sex is more fully embraced in bizarro than in other genres because the writers aren’t afraid to go there–they’re expected to. It’s a little harder to justify a brekkie bukkake scene with a toaster in “literary” fiction. I mean, you could do it but you’d have to build it up so much and justify it endlessly and it’d take over the entire novel. In bizarro, you can have a brekkie bang and move on with the rest of your day in the space of a couple sentences just like you’d do consuming any normal breakfast. More. Weird. Shit. Faster. Move. Move. Move. Just because the content can be batshit crazy doesn’t mean it’s not written well. Bizarro writers know and trust this. This makes them very free to do whatever it is they want to do which often involves sex.

As far as weird fiction is concerned, I think BIG IF weird fiction writers do shy away from sexual themes it might be because they fear not being taken seriously or it could be that it’s difficult to deal with sex subtly. I don’t think this is the case. I write weird fiction, but in it I have elder gods wearing meatsuits and you better believe there’s going to be a squirrel and a moneyshot and bewbs somewhere in there. Why? Because I I like to play. I want to break any genre I play in. Genres are toys. I want to break them and rebuild them in a way that is mine. I want evolution. I want to piss off the stodgy old guard and usher in the new. I want to show people that there’s room for nearly anything in any genre if written well. Weird fiction is evolving and it comprises more than just a handful of writers that get repeated over and over. Weird fiction and bizarro have a lot in common and I expect that they’ll come to influence each other more and more.

How many gifs do you look at per day?

Oh my gah. I look at maybe a hundred gifs a day. I post a fraction of those. I love gifs because they are moment based. They usually encapsulate a moment or a beat. Other times, they are relaxing meditations. I think the simplicity and brevity of the gif form can have a tremendous impact on someone’s headspace. Gif=play. They have become more important to me and my friends than any of us could have ever imagined.

Do you have any writing rituals? Personally I like to smear my shoulders in guacamole, throw on some Stevie Nicks, and take a massive amount of bath salts. The bow tie is of course, optional…

I do have writing rituals. I drink a fuckton of tea, take loads of baths, and usually have a movie or music on in the background. I also do a lot of sprint writing. Fifteen minutes here and there during the day. I write for prolonged periods late at night. I eat a lot of grapefruit when I write. I feel I’m at my best when my mind is loose from sleep deprivation or stimulus overload. 99% of the time I’m stone cold sober during the actual sitting ass in chair part of writing, but I take notes constantly. I write the vast majority of my stuff longhand first so by the time I type, I’m really at a third draft or so. I inhale candy, burn candles, and often write naked. When I get stuck, I do ridiculous things like ask my friends to send me pictures of their dicks in shoes because it’s funny and irreal and brings me back to that “I’m not in reality” headspace I need to write. Writing is serious business but sometimes I have to step back to enjoy it and nothing tells me not to take myself too seriously like an unkempt semi flopped into a Victorian slipper addressed to me me me from a loving and indulgent friend. Oh my gosh. I’ll just stop there.

What is it about working with Ross Lockhart that you find so enjoyable? Is it the advice decreed by his mighty hair?

Working with Ross is amazing because he’s genuine and sincere and he’s got some serious balls to accompany his professionalism. Ross is one of my favorite people on this planet. I will do anything for him. Plus, yes, he has awesome hair.

You got anything to plugeth?

As far as things to plug–I have a few things coming out later this year but I don’t have definite dates so while I have the reader’s attention I would like to point them to the current projects I’m excited about–

1) Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (Lazy Fascist Press) Yes, he is my honeybunny but only because he is absolutely extraordinary. Also, have you seen the cover?

2) Chesya Burke’s The Strange Crimes of Little Africa (Rothco Press) After listening to Rob Cohen and Christine Roth gush about it, and knowing Chesya is awesome, I’m *totes* excited about digging into this one.

3) Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction edited by Jeff VanderMeer (Cheeky Frawg Press) This one is enormous and I can’t wait to educate myself with it!

Want to help Word Horde prove that weird fiction can be a force for good in the world? Make a donation to a food bank or food-related charity near you, then share the experience on social media using the hashtag #FeedCthulhu. You can score a free e-book of Cthulhu Fhtagn!, plus be entered in a chance to win a signed copy of the book. Plus, through the end of November, you can take 20% of any direct order with Word Horde using the coupon code THANKS. Details here!

An Interview with Michael Cisco

For our latest Word Horde interview, Sean M. Thompson tracked the legendary Weird Fiction author and whiskey aficionado Michael Cisco to his lair, and asked him the following questions…

What do you think the role of genre is in regards to fiction?

Genre is a memory image that gathers together a local micro-canon around a given piece of writing. Reading just about anything, you will see how it repeats settings, phrasings, movement through plot points, and so on, from other writings. This isn’t necessarily copying, though. Where there’s just copying, there really isn’t any new writing there, just another older story poorly recollected. The writing is new not just in what influences it combines, but in that it connects with ideas and impulses from earlier works and extends them. So genre is the landscape a piece of writing uses, but it’s also an orientation.

Your story from The Children of Old Leech contains a pretty brutal scene with someone breaking their neck after slipping on frozen urine. How did you come up with such a terrible way to die?

It just occurred to me, the right amount of disdain, with a dim echo of Roald Dahl when it came to the melting evidence. It had to be something that could not be attributed to the main character, so that I wouldn’t have to take us on a sidelight through a prison term. Then again, that might have turned out better than what I did.

Do you find yourself gravitating to any theme over and over again in your fictional output?

Decay, delirium, some kind of altered monasticism, self-conscious writing and a sort of paranoid universe. Generally I’m looking for ways to invert what seem to me to be common sense notions about things, so I would be looking for a way to make decay or delirium affirmative. That’s difficult to the extent that so much horror fiction valorizes what’s normal.

Do you get up to a lot of stuff of Halloween?

Not really, not any more. I would like to, but all I really manage to do is carve a pumpkin and watch a few movies, read a few stories.

What’s the scariest thing you can remember happening to you this year?

Air turbulence. I don’t fear crashing, but I do fear sudden plunges.

Do you have any writing rituals?

All of writing is a ritual for me. Generally, I listen to music before writing, taking notes if anything occurs to me. I don’t write on days when I have to go to work, because I don’t want to write with any distractions or fatigue. I wear earplugs when I write, but then I live in New York City. And I don’t sit there waiting to find something to say. I write what I have to write, then quit.

Do you believe in the supernatural?

I don’t believe that there is anything beyond or external to nature. I do believe that nature itself is in a continual state of change, and not a body of fixed rules. I don’t like to see anything impinge on the imagination or the reason, so rather than take a censorious view of the supernatural, I would rather think about it. This has been the thrust of what academic work I’ve been able to do.

If you could impart any advice on aspiring writers, what would it be?

Your problems are worth more than your answers. When a compositional or conceptual problem arises as you write, you’ve just found what you were really writing about. Include the problem in the writing. The problem is the motor.

Michael Cisco’s latest is Animal Money, out now from Lazy Fascist Press.

Want to help Word Horde prove that weird fiction can be a force for good in the world? Make a donation to a food bank or food-related charity near you, then share the experience on social media using the hashtag #FeedCthulhu. You can score a free e-book of Cthulhu Fhtagn!, plus be entered in a chance to win a signed copy of the book. Plus, through the end of November, you can take 20% of any direct order with Word Horde using the coupon code THANKS. Details here!

The Return of #FeedCthulhu / Saying Thanks

One week from today is Thanksgiving in the United States, a holiday which we celebrate by gathering together, sharing food, and saying thanks. This year, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, because you’ve helped Word Horde succeed in its most ambitious year yet. We published five books this year: Molly Tanzer’s weird western, Vermilion; Nicole Cushing’s ultra-dark delve, Mr. Suicide; Orrin Grey’s captivating collection, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, and the anthologies Giallo Fantastique and Cthulhu Fhtagn! So, to celebrate this success, and to give back, I’ve decided it’s time for The Return of #FeedCthulhu.

In 2011, when my first anthology, The Book of Cthulhu, was published, I challenged readers to make a donation to a local food charity, and to share news of that donation on Twitter, using the hashtag #FeedCthulhu. That year, we raised several hundred dollars in pledges across the country to local food banks and homeless shelters. In 2012, to accompany the publication of The Book of Cthulhu 2, we repeated the challenge, raising over a thousand dollars worth of pledges.

Thanksgiving may be the time to celebrate our prosperity and providence, but people still go hungry. And hunger sucks. So once again I’d like to challenge you to make a difference, by making a donation–no matter how small–to a food charity. This can be a local food bank, church, temple, mosque, coven, bin outside your grocery store, or national (or international) hunger relief organization. The organization doesn’t matter, so long as they’re feeding people. Once you do that, post the following on social media:

I fed Cthulhu [your donation] to [organization] #FeedCthulhu @lossrockhart

Don’t forget to include the hashtag (#FeedCthulhu) and my Twitter handle (@lossrockhart) so that I can see–and share–your post. Also, if you send a link to your post via email to publicity[at]wordhorde[dot]com, in return for your generosity, I’ll send you the ebook of my latest anthology, Cthulhu Fhtagn!. Just let me know if you’d prefer ePub, mobi, or PDF format. I’ll be checking social media for the hashtag, and on December 1, I’ll be selecting three random posters, who will receive a personalized autographed copy of Cthulhu Fhtagn!

“Pie is my favourite dessert, and blueberry (for summer) and mince (for winter) are my preferred kinds—with apple as a good all-year-round third. Like to take vanilla ice cream with apple and blueberry pie.” –H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard (7 November 1932)

And for dessert, I’d also like to say thanks to you by making you a special offer. Place an order with Word Horde between now and the end of November, use the coupon code THANKS, and take 20% off your purchase. It’s our way of saying “Thank you!” for a great year, and encouraging you to give Word Horde books to your cool friends this holiday season.

An Interview with Anya Martin

Word Horde’s resident social media maniac, Sean M. Thompson, recently chatted with one of our favorite authors, Anya Martin, whose work has appeared in Giallo Fantastique and Cthulhu Fhtagn! Here’s what Anya had to say…

What do you think the role of genre is in fiction?

That’s a tough one in that like most writers I both hate being placed in a genre box, and yet I am a fierce defender of the claim that spec-lit in all its forms (SF/F/H, etc.) has every bit of legitimacy as literary fiction. I tend to prefer “mode” to “genre” and see the different forms of spec-lit as freeing me to approach realistic topics more, rather than less directly through a fantastic lens. For example in “The Prince of Lyghes,” my story in Cthulhu Fhtagn!, I consciously tackled the destructive impact of alcoholism on a relationship through the mode of Weird horror. The story begins monotonously because the daily life in such a relationship tends towards a constant, creeping dread, but the mode of the Weird allows me to push further into the emotional horror of that daily Hell by giving it a physical manifestation.

I’ll add that I never set out to be a Weird fiction writer per se, but since the recent ascent of the Weird, I have had an easier time selling my work. Before that, I was often told that it didn’t fit. It’d be nice to dream of a day when all books are shelved together and genres don’t matter, but genre classification is also a marketing reality that writers have to live with if they want to be published. Right now, I am fortunate in that editors and publishers seem to be more open to the type of whatever genre I write, whether Weird, horror, dark fantasy, or magic realism. I haven’t written a story I consider explicitly science fiction since “Courage of the Lion Tamer” (Daybreak, 2009), but I grew up loving science fiction and “Sensoria” in Giallo Fantastique actually started as a science fiction story. But that’s another story.

Your story from Giallo Fantastique, “Sensoria,” contained a drug primarily taken at a rock and roll show. What kind of influence does music have on your writing, and have you been to a lot of concerts in your life?

I listen to music constantly, though I stick to instrumental when I am actually writing. A lot of experimental jazz, funk, Krautrock recently filling in gaps because I was such a punk rock girl. My punk/post-punk roots are still on my daily playlist–Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, John Cale, Bowie, Eno, Iggy, Ramones, Robyn Hitchcock, Pere Ubu, Wire, The Cramps, to name just a few. And yes, I have been to a fair amount of concerts from local bands to international acts, though not so many stadium-sized shows as I tend to prefer more obscure music. I was also a college radio DJ and music director. I named my show Dangerous Visions.

Music is more of a subliminal than a direct influence in most of my work, though my characters are often listening to music. However, as chance would have it through anthology invitations, I had two stories come out this year in which rock music was integral–”Sensoria” and “Resonator Superstar!” in Scott R. Jones’ Resonator anthology which explores a possible occult side to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable light/film shows accompanying early Velvet Underground gigs. The latter took a considerable amount of research and came out of attending a re-creation of that experience by a local avant garde film group in Atlanta. I actually wrote the first draft of what would become “Sensoria” around 1990, but its final form was heavily influenced by Goblin and Fabio Frizzi concerts–the latter in a London church on Halloween in 2014. So, OK, yes, my concert experiences, I guess, do bleed directly into my writing. I’m not working on any explicitly music scene stories right now, or wait, I just remembered the novel I am probably writing as my first might have something to do with a dead rock star.

Do you have any writing rituals?

Well, as aforementioned, I do listen to music either before and/or while writing. Otherwise they fluctuate. In the winter, I’ll often drink green or camomile tea depending on whether I need a caffeine lift. I do coffee in the morning but that’s my nonfiction journalism day job time. For “Sensoria,” “Resonator Superstar!” and other stories that I need to tap into a more intense trance state especially as I get near the climax, I have drunk Kava. Some stories come together better in bed with my laptop with scented candles lit, and others sitting at my computer desk–I’m not sure why other than needing a change of scenery. I do usually prefer writing alone rather than in a public place like a coffee shop.

Would you ever eat a bug?

I have eaten bugs! Dried seasoned grasshoppers and still not sure whether those were caterpillars in the soup in China. Also more recently at a natural history museum insect-tasting event, but I can’t remember what kind of insects they were now.

Have you ever written a novel?

I have started novels but have not finished one yet. One in particular keeps knocking around in my brain. It seems manageable in length, I haven’t read anything else like it and fortunately the concept seems saleable. I hope to pick it up again sometime soon, but not until after a novella and I finish up at least three more short stories for anthology invitations.

How do you deal with fear of failure?

I just try not to think about it and keep working. Get the story done and move on to the next one. My brain may be a little too good at compartmentalizing, which is something I may tackle in a future story. On the other hand, right now I also try to keep my fiction goals modest. Get a few more stories completed and sold, see how my work is received, and then hopefully someone will want to collect them. And in due time, hopefully this winter, novel.

Would you consider yourself a fast writer, or a slow writer, in terms of your output.

Haha! Both. I tend to write very rapidly once a story gets going and have been known to complete a story in a day to a week. But I’ll start other stories and there could be long gaps of time as the parts come together in my head. “Resonator Superstar!” and “Old Tsah-Hov” in Cassilda’s Song (edited by Joe Pulver, Chaosium) were both written in two weeks or less, but “The Prince of Lyghes” evolved over three years and even when I thought it was done, I made more changes after a beta reader hit upon something simple and missing that should have been obvious to me.

Thanks for taking part. Anything to plug?

You’re welcome. I do have two more works slated to come out this year–making it a total of six in 2015. My short story, “A Girl in Her Dog,” will be in Issue #2 of Xynobis from Dunhams Manor Press. And Dunhams Manor is also publishing a one-act Weird play called “Passage to the Dreamtime” in its chapbook series. It’ll be the first time a work of fiction by me will be published in a freestanding format, i.e. not in an anthology or magazine, so I’m pretty excited.

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