How do you think growing up in the South has influenced your work?

Everything runs a bit slower, a bit hotter and more confused in this Southern humidity. That oppressiveness leaked into my fiction. It was around me in the stories my aunt told me about alligators that rose up from the South Georgia swamps to chomp off the meaty legs of small children. Jesus is pervasive in the South, and my childhood was “Christ-haunted.” The devil and evil were real, tangible things during those tender, formative years. It seems like a natural progression to have had both a fascination and aversion to the darker things that lurk in the world and then have that become such an integral part of my writing.

What are the themes you think you come back to the most in your work? Why do you think certain themes resonate with you?

I consistently come back to the relationships between mother and daughters. The idea that it can be predatory. I constantly come back to the idea that loss is something that cannot be explained or healed fully. Here lately, I’ve been writing more and more about things that scare me in real life and that is completely wrapped up in the nonsensical nature of loss.

Do you have any writing rituals you stick to?

Minimum of 500 words per day. Every day. No matter what. Lull or Cities Last Broadcast on repeat.

How do you manage your time between being a mother, working, and writing?

People ask me this a lot, and the honest answer has nothing to do with time management or finding any kind of time I can, but everything to do with how I let things slip through the cracks. My kid probably watches too much television while I’m writing. My house is nowhere near as clean as it could be. I should probably grade essays faster. I forget things a lot. But it’s a weird balance that works for me. I also took a lot of pressure off of myself this year by lowering my daily word count from 1,000 words to only 500.

Is there anything you’d love to write you haven’t done yet?

I’d love to do something more literary, but I cannot bring myself to carve the spooky out of my writing.

How do you feel about snakes?

Terrified of them. TERRIFIED.

Would you say writing a novel takes a lot of faith?

100%. There’s so much time in sitting with that stack of words alone. So much time to self-doubt and wonder if the whole thing isn’t working. It’s one thing to scrap a 5,000 short story. It’s another to have the sudden realization that 50,000 aren’t working. It takes a lot of faith in your belief that you can come to the page, every day, and do the work. It takes a lot of faith to know that’s enough.

Do you like to outline, make it up as you go, or a bit of both?

I don’t usually outline, and the time I tried, the novel died after 7,000 words. I like it best when I can discover as I go, but that also leads to a lot of staring at walls and wishing I was a trust fund baby.

What writers lately have really inspired you? What writers over your life have had the most impact on your work?

Writers lately include Helen Marshall, Kelly Link, Livia Llewellyn, Amelia Gray, Damien Angelica Walters, Lysley Tenorio, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Wehunt, Ramsey Campbell. This list is longer, but I’ll stop there because there are only so many pages in the world.

Over my life is a much more eclectic list. C.S. Lewis, Beverly Cleary, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.M. Montgomery, R.L. Stine, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Christopher Pike, Anne Rice, John Irving, Pat Conroy, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ray Bradbury.

What’s your favorite swear?

It’s a tie between the old standard “fuck” and “goddammit.”

What’s the hardest part about being a commercial artist?

As in creating content for sale? The constant worry and anxiety that people are going to hate everything I do. The fear of being called a fraud or a hack. You know. The typical.

Do you think being completely complacent is the death knell of progression in art?

I think being uncomfortable or at least uneasy with your work is what keeps you moving forward. It’s like a musician who puts out album after album of songs that sound exactly the same. Eventually, people stop paying attention. It’s the same for fiction.

KRISTI DeMEESTER writes pretty, spooky things in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared in publications such as Black Static, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and several others. Her work has been reprinted in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volumes 1 and 3. Her debut short fiction collection, Everything That’s Underneath, is forthcoming this year from Apex Publications. In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first. Beneath is her first novel.

Preorder Beneath today!

So here’s a treat (and a trick) for all you monsters and monster-lovers out there, from a guy who knows a thing or two about monsters. This is “Strange Beast,” by Orrin Grey. This story first appeared in Orrin’s Word Horde collection Painted Monsters and Other Strange Beasts. So unwrap a fun-sized candy bar, sit back, and enjoy…

STRANGE BEAST

by Orrin Grey

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following manuscript has been assembled from notes left behind by Kennedy Sanchez, who was contracted with Deanna Bloom of Fetlock & Burridge to produce a book-length work entitled Last Days on Monster Island. The manuscript was never delivered, and Ms. Sanchez returned her advance seven days before she drowned in the swimming pool of her Tallahassee apartment complex. A subsequent police investigation ruled the drowning an accidental death. In reproducing the notes, sections printed entirely in italics indicate hand-written passages in the margins of the rest of the notes, which were printed out from her word processor and sometimes copied-and-pasted from websites. No actual manuscript for the proposed book was ever found, and the notes are presented here exactly as written.]

Deadline creeping up on me. I keep getting sidetracked, going off on tangents. I’m going to try one more time to get these into some kind of order before Deanna has my ass.

April 30, 1972 (Walpurgisnacht? Significant?) – Haruo Kitsube, Shinichi Kimura, Yoshio Amamoto, Ross Brenner, and Dereck Scott are kidnapped from a boat off the Florida coast by armed men in military fatigues and ski masks. (Ski masks even though it was a 93 degree day. It’s a good detail, keep that in.) They are loaded onto another boat and taken to an unnamed island north of Puerto Rico (get lat/long?) where they are held at gunpoint and forced to make a movie about a giant monster.

June 21, 1972 (Summer Solstice) – After 52 days of captivity, Haruo Kitsube leaves the island in a small boat. He is picked up 5 days later (June 26) by a Coast Guard ship. He is the only person to leave the island alive. He gives one public interview about the events on the island, and otherwise remains silent on the subject until his death in 1983. There is a hearing, which is made a matter of public record in 2002.

November 3, 2011 – James Takarada, grand-nephew (great-nephew? both are correct, pick one and stick with it) of Shinichi Kimura launches a Kickstarter to fund the production of a documentary film called Strange Beast, intended to chronicle the bizarre ordeal that cost the life of his great-uncle.

November 27, 2011 – The Kickstarter is fully funded, securing enough to finance a trip for Takarada and his crew to the island. Just over a week later (December 6) the Kickstarter reaches a stretch goal allowing them to commission effects company Thingmaker Studios to produce an exact replica of the Zeuglodon suit from the movie.

June 5, 2012 – Takarada and his crew leave Florida on board the Orca bound for what the crew has dubbed “Monster Island.” They plan to be there for the 40 year anniversary of the tragedy. This time, none of them will return.

IMDb Plot Summary for Zeuglodon Attacks! (1964): Awakened by deep-sea oil drilling, the prehistoric Zeuglodon wreaks havoc along the coast of Japan before heading toward the United States. The monster is ultimately stopped by a brave fighter pilot, a scientist, and a lovely inhabitant of the lost continent of Mu, whose people venerate the Zeuglodon and who knows the secret method of lulling it back into its thousand-year sleep. – Written by Barugon66

I need focus. There’s so many ways I could tell this story, and I need to have a consistent approach from the word go. I want to set up the background fairly succinctly without sounding too much like I’m just exposition-dumping. The meat of the story is what happens on the island each time, but we need the background in order to understand that.

The five men who were taken from the deck of Ross Brenner’s ship that sunny Sunday in April had never worked on a movie together before and, in fact, weren’t working together at the time. They were actually in Florida filming two different movies that happened to be using some of the same locations. One was an Arnold Zenda film called Isle of Blood that would later be finished using different actors, while the other was a never-completed bit of Aztecsploitation (can I say that?) called Revenge of the Jaguar God. (See if I can get the rights to use that publicity still with the terrible Jaguar God suit that looks like it has three arms.) The men had apparently hit it off and were out on Ross Brenner’s boat for a Sunday afternoon of drinking and fishing.

As near as history can tell, the kidnappers were only targeting director Haruo Kitsube, cinematographer Shinichi Kimura, and suit actor Yoshio Amamoto. The three men had previously collaborated on the 1964 film Zeuglodon Attacks! The kidnapping appears to have been spearheaded by Norman Cohen, a militant and what we would today call an eco-terrorist who was also a monster movie aficionado. He had seen and loved Zeuglodon Attacks! and wanted the three men to make a sequel from his own script called Zeuglodon Returns. He had even gotten hold of the original costume from the film somehow. He intended his production to be a propaganda film, expanding on the first feature’s criticism of US oil interests and foreign policy.

Yeah, Kennedy, that’s not exposition-y at all. See if I can track down how Cohen got his hands on the original Zeuglodon suit, since it becomes pretty central to the narrative here.

From The Dark of the Matinee Blog entry on Zeuglodon Attacks!: Here’s the thing about the Zeuglodon that sets it apart from pretty much every other kaiju: it was a real thing. Actually called a Basilosaurus, the name Zeuglodon was proposed by paleontologist Sir Richard Owen after it was discovered that the Basilosaurus was really a kind of marine mammal—sort of like a prehistoric whale—and not the reptile that the –saurus suffix would imply. Over the years the name Zeuglodon found its way into the public imagination, thanks in part of a bunch of people discovering “sea serpents” that they stuck with the moniker.

The titular beast in Zeuglodon Attacks! looks a bit like a blue whale, but with arms and legs. There’s also a row of fins or flippers down the side, which don’t really match too well with the physiology of a whale, but which, being big and rubber and floppy, help disguise somewhat the suit’s human occupant. Suit actor Yoshio Amamoto walked with a particular hunched-forward gait when playing the Zeuglodon, allowing these fins and the tail to drag the ground, giving the Zeuglodon’s movements a particular creeping effect which still holds up remarkably well among rubber suits of the time.

Reconstructing the events on the island that preceded the first tragedy is crucial, but also difficult, as we have no records to go on except Haruo Kitsube’s one brief interview, and the transcripts from the hearing. In the interview and the transcripts he called the conditions in which the filmmakers were kept “brutal,” “abhorrent,” and “terrifying.”

The men were kept in a cave near the shore, where they also did much of the filming. “There were guns trained on us at all times,” Kitsube said in the transcripts, “and we were never alone.”

Though Cohen and his men had brought them cameras and supplies, they had very little in the way of lighting or sound equipment, and almost nothing with which to produce special effects. With the help of the men who were guarding them, Kitsube and the others built a miniature city in the cave, constructed primarily out of cardboard, plywood, and stacked up rocks.

“There’s no way anyone could have made an actual movie in those conditions,” critic Aiden Bullock said in probably the only scholarly piece written about the events on “Monster Island” prior to the launch of Takarada’s Kickstarter, “and they had to have known it. That situation was always going to end in tragedy.”

I need to figure out how much of the interview and transcripts I can quote in the book. Maybe Deanna can help me with that, though I’m afraid to ask.

From the only recorded interview with Haruo Kitsube after the island: “I saw them shoot [Yoshio], but there was no blood, because he was still wearing the suit. The bullets just went in and left clean black holes, like Swiss cheese. So it didn’t seem real, just a bad special effect. Then he fell, down from the ledge and onto the rocks and the surf. We couldn’t get to his body, they couldn’t get to it, so we just left him. As I was sailing away, I could still see him there, bobbing as the waves slapped him against the rocks. But it wasn’t him, it wasn’t my friend, it was just the suit, the Zeuglodon, going down to sleep again in the ocean. That’s how I saw him last, how I left him there.”

Takarada and his crew arrived on “Monster Island” in good spirits. They had just wrapped up a very successful Kickstarter, and they were filming the movie they’d been talking about since film school. In the first video from the island—sent out as part of an update to Kickstarter backers—you can see them making land, the camera lens splattered with droplets of water. It’s a rainy day, but everyone is laughing and joking as Takarada attempts to narrate, calling the island a “forbidding place.” From somewhere off camera a female voice, probably belonging to boom mic operator Mackenzie “Mack” Sheraton, intones, “It’s an ugly planet. A bug planet.” Takarada gives her a dirty look before the camera switches off.

They set up camp near the cave where the previous filmmakers were held captive. The cave is a long one that opens at one end near the beach, and then runs along the shore to some cliffs where it empties over a rocky inlet, the one where Yoshio Amamoto’s body was left in the surf. Inside the cave, Takarada’s crew film a startling discovery. It appears in the video footage as a sort of mirage; impossible to make out at first, slowly coalescing as the hand-held camera adjusts to light and focus, until you can see that it’s the remains of the model city built by the previous filmmakers, now rendered down to rubble by time, rather than the stomping feet of the enraged Zeuglodon.

That first video, which shows the crew arriving on the island, setting up camp, and exploring the cave, is the only one that ever goes out successfully as an update to Kickstarter backers. Records indicate that the crew were left on the island with some kind of satellite array for posting Internet updates, but it appears never to have worked reliably, and that first video was uploaded by Takarada’s partner once the ship returned to the mainland.

It ends with a shot that feels prophetic in hindsight, unaccompanied by explanation or voiceover. The camera looks down from the cliff at the rocky inlet where Yoshio Amamoto’s body was left bobbing in the surf as Haruo Kitsube sailed away. Now there is nothing to see, just smooth rocks being beaten again and again by the water.

Jesus, Kennedy, find a tone. Are you gonna do this super-serious, or scholarly, or what? Are you reporting? Are you eulogizing? Make up your mind!

Establish a rough timeline of events on the island. What do I have to work with? Early video, probably shot as updates to be sent to Kickstarter backers, mostly showing the crew getting ready to shoot, exploring the island. The island is small, if there weren’t any plants or rocks you could probably see from one side to the other. The videos prominently feature Eugene Cullenrock, the suit actor hired to wear the repro Zeuglodon suit for the documentary. He shows up several times wearing the suit, usually without the top part on, so it’s just legs and tail. Even when he wears the top part, he doesn’t slouch like Amamoto did, so the flippers just kind of jump around whenever he moves. Several times in the videos he talks about how heavy the suit is, or how hot, even though it’s raining in pretty much every shot.

(Is there a rainy season north of Puerto Rico in June? How do I figure that out?)

Comb through my notes, find out where it starts to really go wrong. It’s somewhere in those videos. Re-watch them, look close. When is it? Where is the first indicator? Mack tells Eugene not to wear the suit when they’re not filming. It’s probably not supposed to go out in the backer video, would have gotten edited before the video was actually sent, but they’re talking in the background of a shot Takarada is trying to get. “We don’t have another one of those,” she’s saying, and he says something like, “I’m the one in charge of the suit,” and she says, “Just don’t wear it when we’re not using it,” and he asks what she means and she says, “I saw you when I got up to pee.” He seems angry, indignant. The camera moves away after that.

The Orca was supposed to pick up Takarada and his crew on June 26, but when they arrived they found the camp deserted. Tents had been shredded, but most of the equipment was still intact, though some of it had been damaged by rain. Most of the rest of the information we have about what happened during those last days comes from video and audio files salvaged from that equipment.

We’re getting into Weekly World News territory here, so pick a tone and stick with it. How credulous do I want to sound?

I’m transcribing the notes from my first viewing of footage recovered from one of the hand-held cameras:

Okay, we’re in night vision mode now, and the camera is on the ground. Mackenzie(?) is sleeping in the foreground, or pretending to sleep, maybe, I don’t know which. They’re outside, but I think I can see a tent in the background. Just a big pale shape. It isn’t raining for once.

(Later note added: I’m pretty sure this was Mack, trying to catch Eugene on tape walking around the camp in the Zeuglodon suit. Time stamp puts it after the argument caught on the other tape.)

How long are they going to shoot nothing?

Oh shit! Okay, that was a foot. A foot just came down in the background, but it didn’t look human. It was, okay, I’m rewinding here, it was the Zeuglodon foot, absolutely. So I guess someone is walking around in the suit? There’s the edges of the flippers, maybe. I wish night vision didn’t make this so hard to make out. Yeah, there’s the flippers, but they don’t look like they did before. Why not? Is he walking different?

There’s a notebook, waterproof, where Takarada kept notes on the production, mostly secret from the rest of the crew. The majority of it isn’t helpful—movie stuff, written primarily in some kind of quasi-indecipherable personal shorthand, but there’s something about the escalating tensions toward the end of the notebook. (What do I have to do to get permission to quote from this?)

“Eugene says he isn’t using the suit at night, Mack says he is, that she’s seen him. She showed him footage on her camera, and he knocked it right out of her hands. I asked him when he’d cooled down, and he said that it ‘wasn’t me, godammit!’ I saw the footage, though, it was someone. And Eugene can’t get into the suit by himself.”

In a later entry: “Now Eugene is seeing things, too. Sounds at night, weird lights. It isn’t just him and Mack, everyone has complained about something. And then, last night, when I got up to take a leak, I went outside my tent, away from camp. There were lights on in the cave, so I went to go look. I thought maybe someone had gotten up, was shooting something, or maybe I could get to the bottom of what’s been making everybody crazy lately. I was sleepy, so I didn’t realize until I was standing at the mouth of the cave that the lights weren’t the color of any of our lights. They were blue, or maybe green, or maybe purple.”

The page has been erased here, hard enough to tear through the paper and render a section illegible. The part that can be read starts back up: “there was something standing at the far end of the passage. I can’t describe it, I’m not going to try. It was all mouth, I’ll say that much, really messed up. And then it was gone.”

After that, a sentence is scribbled out thoroughly enough that it can’t be salvaged, and below it is written: “The boat won’t be back for several more days.”

From that point, Takarada’s notebook becomes increasingly unreliable. Pages are torn from it, whole passages erased and re-written. The last legible words in the notebook are: “This is the end. I feel it. Everything has gone wrong.”

People isolated on an island growing fractious, going crazy, disappearing, that’s all fine and good. That’s some Unsolved Mysteries shit, but it’s salable, as Deanna would say. I can tie in some Roanoke stuff, there’s lots of opportunities to sound totally rational while also being open-ended and a little exploitative. It’s these last two videos that are the problem.

Second-to-last video:

The handheld cameras that the crew was using are time-stamped, so we can tell when things are happening. This one is June 21, starting at 11:57pm.

It’s night vision again. I don’t know who’s holding the camera. They’re leaving the camp, whoever they are, and going into the cave. They’re maybe looking through the camera, because they stumble a lot, point the camera down at their feet, then back up. Down, then back up. One time when it goes down, it comes back up on what would be a jump scare in one of those found footage horror movies that are so big right now. It’s Eugene, standing in the middle of what’s left the miniature city on the floor of the cave. He’s staring straight at whoever’s holding the camera, but his eyes are glazed over. It’s like he doesn’t see them at all. Maybe he has been sleepwalking all this time.

Then there’s a sound. Up til now, the video has been silent except for the hiss of the mic, the breathing of whoever’s carrying the camera, the distant sound of the ocean, like from a shell held up to your ear. Now, though, there’s this sound from somewhere deeper in the cave. What would I call it, in the book? A roar? A bellow? What do they call the sound that a whale makes? Songs, they call them songs, but this isn’t a song, or is it? The planets in their orbits are supposed to make songs, right, and this is kind of like that? If I didn’t know better, I’d think the cave itself was making the sound. And maybe it is. Rock groaning together, wind blowing through, I dunno. It sounds old, though, somehow, and it sounds hurt. So badly hurt.

The video moves past Eugene. Whoever’s holding the camera doesn’t talk to him. They get most of the way to the far end of the cave. There’s something there. Something that’s casting its own light. It’s impossible to tell the color, because the night vision of the camera washes everything green, but the light doesn’t seem like a lamp or a spotlight, it seems like a glow, something organic, though again, I don’t know how I can tell. The camera starts to turn the corner, but then the screen pixelates out, so you can’t really see what’s there, just that it’s big, and glowing, and making that sound that, up close now, I want to move toward, and run away from, and I’m just sitting in my apartment with my headphones plugged into my laptop.

Last video:

This one is time-stamped June 22, 2:14am.

The camera is on the floor of what I can only assume is Mackenzie’s tent. She’s sitting cross-legged, holding it with her feet, probably, pointing it up at her face. She’s got the viewfinder turned around to face her, because she keeps looking down at it, checking to make sure that it’s still watching. Night vision is off, and there’s a lantern sitting somewhere off-camera, providing the only light. In its unflattering glare, we can see that she’s been crying, but she’s struggling not to cry now.

“Gram,” she says, reading off a piece of paper that she’s holding in her right hand, her eyes going to the paper, to the lens of the camera, to the viewfinder, to the wall of the tent, back to the paper. “I wrote this down, because I didn’t want to get it wrong, to forget. I hope I can say it all. I hope this gets to you someday, that you get to see me, hear me.”

She sniffs, her eyes continuing their circuit from paper to camera to tent and back again. “I just wanted to work on a real movie, Gram. You were so damn proud of me when I did the sound for that commercial. So proud. You taped it off the TV—who does that anymore?—and you made all your friends come over and watch it, even though I wasn’t even in it, and it didn’t have credits for you to see my name. You said, ‘My Mackenzie recorded this,’ which made it sound like I was the director or something.

“I just wanted you to have something with my name in the credits, something better than that tape you kept sitting on top of the TV for months, even after I offered to put it on a DVD for you, with a label where you’d written ‘Mackenzie’s commercial!’”

Mack stops, looks to the right, as though she just heard a noise, though we don’t hear anything, even with the sound turned all the way up. She wipes her nose, looks at the paper, starts again. “Now I’m afraid that I won’t ever see you again, and you’ll never have anything with my name on it. All you’ll have is this, if the guys from the boat find it, if it can get back to you somehow. Gram, I’m sorry. I just wanted to do something you could be proud of, really proud of.”

She takes a deep breath, maybe to steady her nerves. She closes her eyes for a minute, and the silence becomes deafening before she speaks again. “But people died here,” she says. “That isn’t something that goes away. I guess you know that. When Mom died, you shut up her room, even though we really didn’t have the space. Even after you moved it all out, you kept everything, boxed it up. I remember you going through it. You knew, even then, that when people die, they don’t go. They stick around, they leave themselves in all the things they leave behind.

“The men who died here, at least one of them, he left something behind too, I think. He was pretending to be a monster when he died, and now he’s forgotten that he was ever anything else. He’s turned into what he was pretending to be, and now he doesn’t even know what that is anymore.”

Somewhere in here, we realize that it’s getting lighter outside the tent. Maybe it’s dawn, but it’s too early in the morning for dawn, and the color isn’t quite right. Blue or green or purple, or some combination of the three. “We had a costume, you know,” Mack is saying. “Like the monster the guy was pretending to be. Eugene wore it around, and he pretended to be the guy who pretended to be a monster. All that make-believe, it gets confusing, even for us. How much worse when you’re dead, when nothing makes sense anymore. I don’t blame him, I don’t want you to blame him. I don’t think it’s his fault. I guess it’s not our fault, either, not really. It wasn’t Mom’s fault that cancer got her. Death is never anyone’s fault, maybe. It just comes through, and then someone is gone, and something else is there instead. A void in the shape of a person, or the shape of a suit.”

The video begins to break up here, and there’s a roaring, and then the tent is just gone, maybe, torn away, but it’s not dark, because there’s a glow coming from something. It looks like the stars, on a totally cloudless night, or like the Northern Lights, but it isn’t far away, like either of those, it’s right there, just beside her. And if you freeze the frame at the exact right spot, between the pixelization as the video breaks up, you can see something there.
It’s translucent, but not like a ghost in an old movie. More like a jellyfish or some other deep-sea creature, and it’s filled with light. It takes a lot of looking to make out the Zeuglodon suit. There’s not much of it left. The mouth has grown, and split apart, and the flippers have become more like the arms of a starfish, so that now the whole thing opens up like a flower as it reaches out for Mackenzie before the video goes black.

I talked with Mackenzie’s grandmother when I was first researching. She told me not to use the contents of Mackenzie’s final video in the book. “Some things have trouble staying at rest,” is what she said, “and it’s better for all of us if we leave them that way.”

She didn’t want me to write the book at all, wouldn’t even have let me see the video, but it was entered into evidence in the inquest, and so I was able to get a copy. You can get a lot of things when you tell people that you’re writing a book. I don’t know that we could ever get away with quoting it, though, and maybe that really is for the best. When I first talked to Mackenzie’s grandmother, I thought she was being sentimental, or otherwise unreasonable. Now I’m starting to agree with her. And even if I do write the book, do I really want to turn it into a ghost story? Probably not. And if I did, Deanna probably wouldn’t let me.

Don’t kid yourself. You’re writing a book about people who’re dead, and every book about dead people is a ghost story, some of them just don’t know it.

Read “Strange Beast” and more in Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters and Other Strange Beasts, available NOW from Word Horde. Ask for it by name where better books are sold.

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

Genre is especially useful for booksellers, marketers and publishers. I think genre divisions are useful for people trying to find their way toward work they would enjoy, as a way of herding together works that share certain traits. From the opposite perspective, that of a writer, I would stop short of saying genre is a negative thing, as I’ve seen some other writers say. Some writers gladly align themselves to a genre, wear it like a badge on their sleeve, and go around proudly waving the flag. Many writers, though, don’t want to think about it too much, and look at genre as a necessary thing unavoidably imposed upon them. The writers I most respect pretty much seem to do what they want to do without consciously aiming at a certain genre target. The create the work, and their agent or their publisher or the critics decide what it is. I think this last approach makes the most sense to me, but I don’t want to disparage those who are flag-wavers for their chosen territory, and who exclusively write (and read) within it.

How do you think the weird has evolved in modern fiction, if you think it has at all?

I used to believe the weird had evolved a lot, but the more widely I read beyond the obvious starting point (Lovecraft) the more I discovered examples of weird writers throughout history creating all kinds of challenging and diversely varied stuff. I do feel that in the last ten or fifteen years, the number of people writing truly strong, individual work is higher than it has ever been before. But I no longer believe that the kind of thing being written now is entirely different in kind from what came before my lifetime. Maybe a slow evolution.

You’ve told me before you’re a proponent of a lot of edits. What’s the most you’ve ever edited your work?

There are different kinds of edits. I used to line edit endlessly, second-guessing word choices, adding commas, changing pronouns and shifting around phrases. That’s still important, and I spend a lot of time trying to get every word and every sentence just right. Certainly more important, though, is editing with a wider angle of view. By this I mean looking at the overall shape or trajectory of the story, maybe trimming or adding entire pages or even scenes. Once I start writing, I continue to pause, step back and look at my stories with a wider view. Sometimes I do what I call a “reverse outline,” where I look at the structure of the story as it’s written, and I create an outline from it. This helps me find things like jumps in logic, or especially repetition. Sometimes in a reverse outline I discover something like, “Hey, I don’t really need to have him visit the lawyer’s office and talk about the case in scene 9 because he basically did the same thing in scene 6.” I make sure each piece of the story contributes something, or else it gets changed or removed. I have to say, I read a lot of stories that could benefit from this kind of structural analysis. Very often stories include dead scenes or repetitive sections. But to answer the original question, I have stories I’ve reworked at least 20-30 times, and quite a few that have gone through more than 10 versions. As I get better at this, so I make fewer mistakes and follow fewer dead-ends to begin with, it seems like I’m able to get by with fewer drafts, maybe four to six.

What is the significance of the title of your collection?

First of all, it’s the title of the lead story, so that’s why it’s the title of the collection, not just because it’s the first story but because it’s also representative of what I do, and a good opener, neither too long nor too short, and not too confusing. But to explain the significance of the story’s title, I’d say something that’s important to me is to avoid the too-easy trap of Horror and Weird writers making everything “black” and “dark.” There’s certainly plenty of darkness and nighttime and black imagery in my work, but I’m interested in different kinds of fear and unease. Also, the story makes the point that sometimes people or things that are dangerous or malicious don’t in fact appear horrifying or gruesome. They may be appealing, attractive or seductive. They have something to offer, something to draw us nearer, otherwise we would just run the other direction.

How do you think your style has changed from when you first started writing?

My style hasn’t changed too much, in terms of how I tend to build sentences. What has changed is that my way of conveying to the reader what’s happening has shifted to give a perspective from inside the mind and senses of the point of view character. As much as possible, everything should be filtered through the mechanism by which this person makes sense of their surroundings and what they see and hear unfolding around them. I guess a simpler way to say this would be that I try hard to make the point of view more subjective.

Ultimately what do you hope readers take away from The Lure of Devouring Light?

Aside from the obvious, like wanting to provide entertainment or enjoyment, the outcome I most hope for is that readers will find the characters believable, convincing human beings. I also hope some of the images or situations will linger in the mind after the reading is done.

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

I honestly don’t know. It’s really just a device the writer uses to help tell the story. I know, I know, it’s a marketing device used by the publishing and bookselling industries to target customers and create more sales, but it’s also a reflection of the writer. Beyond that, I couldn’t say – it’s not something I think about, because I honestly don’t care.

When you’re putting together a collection, do you view it as like an album, or do you have another analog?

I do see it very much as like putting together an album. Each piece of fiction or song is a story unto itself, but the entire collection or album is also a story, an emotional narrative that you want the listener or reader to experience. You want them to come away thinking that they went through something, that it was a journey with a beginning and an ending, not just a random jumble of art. So your first piece has to be saying something very specific, it has to invite them in, give them a taste of what’s to come but not send them off in the wrong direction altogether; and then as you go through the collection, you put stories together that maybe have similar themes or settings, you have an interlude or two where your reader can catch their breath with a piece that isn’t quite the same as the rest, and then you have a final stretch of your most intense work, ending with the story that you hope (I hope, anyway) encapsulates all of the themes of the entire work and leaves the reader in an emotional place that hopefully isn’t the same as where they were at the beginning. The best albums have that ability to guide listeners through that kind of an artistic and emotional journey, and so do the best collections and anthologies. I can only hope that Furnace can do the same. Time will tell.

Do you have cats that tend to hover around you while you try to write? (asking, uh, for a friend, (get out of here kitty-))

I can’t afford a cat on my salary, but if I ever do get to the point where I can have an animal in my life, it’ll be a dog.

You seem to be pretty up front about the fact you don’t consider yourself a weird fiction writer. Do you think the label of being “weird” is kind of like tacking on that a horror film is a “thriller” when it starts to do well, or do you genuinely think the weird is its own thing?

I think weird fiction is genuinely its own thing – I just don’t think that I write enough of it to be called a weird fiction writer, anymore than I should be called a Lovecraftian writer. My writing branches off into so many areas that I think “dark fiction writer” is a better umbrella for me to stand under.

Your last collection was Engines of Desire, and your new one is Furnace. What is about imagery with machinery that you find yourself drawn to, or does it just make for a cool-sounding story collection?

It didn’t occur to me until this question that I have two collections with machinery in their titles. That’s interesting – I have no idea what it means. Since I was very young, I’ve found engines and machinery fascinating and alien and exciting, but I think I’d need a psychiatrist to tell me why. I don’t really need to know why. Maybe in twenty years I’ll look back at my body of work and the light bulb will go on, but until then, I’m happy to work it out in my writing.

Do you have a set amount of time you usually can write for before you have to take a break?

I can write for maybe ninety minutes before my mind starts to wander. But in my defense, I’m usually writing in the evening, after an 8-10 hour work day, so I’m already tired and a bit frazzled to start with – ninety minutes on weekdays is my limit because I need at least part of the evening to wind down by reading or working out or just listening to music and staring into space. On weekends, I write maybe three hours at a stretch, and then I have to walk away from the computer screen to recharge my batteries.

Coffee, tea, or the lightning juice?

When I’m writing, I prefer either coffee or tea, depending on the time of day. I really don’t like to drink when I’m writing – alcohol makes me lose my concentration, so I save that for after I’ve finished for the day.

Would you ever write a science fiction novel, fantasy novel, anything like that? Or do you just start a story, and whatever it is, it is?

Do you mean story? I’ve never even managed to finish writing a horror novel, let alone a novel in any other genre – but as for stories, I do tend to just start writing and not worry about what genre it is. I have no interest in writing SF or Game of Thrones-style fantasy, though. It’s just not my thing. I suppose if I ever did, the science fiction would look a lot like Alien or Event Horizon, and the fantasy would look like… Alien vs. Conan, which is not a real movie but absolutely should be.

My cousins live in Long Island. (Oh shit, wait, that wasn’t a question.)

You’re still in NYC, how’s that going? Has anyone at Starbucks really f-ed up your name again?

I’m not a big fan of the big city – I’d really prefer to be in a smaller city somewhere near mountains – the cultural experiences here are amazing, but the housing situation is something of a nightmare (for anyone who’s not quite wealthy, that is), which makes it a constantly depressing and demoralizing situation for me. But the job is here, and my friends are all here, so until I can retire, I cope as best I can. And, I’ve largely stopped going to Starbucks for coffee. I did enjoy the very creative misspellings of my name (Libba, Navan, Lil’diq), but the coffee is way overpriced, and more and more the baristas were getting my orders wrong and then treating me like shit when I complained. We get free lattes and cappuccinos at work, so I just make my own coffee and misspell my own name nowadays. Hello, Liveria!

Your prose hits like a lead pipe to the teeth. Do you ever write anything, and go “oh, whoa, I should probably tone this down a bit.”?

Yes, I’ve thought that a couple of times. Whenever I have that reaction, it’s not because I think I’ve gone over the line, but because I think I’ve gone over the line for the intended market. I do have to take into consideration the anthology or magazine, and what kind of audience the editor is targeting with my and the other contributors’ stories. A number of stories in Furnace are quite sexually explicit or graphic in their depictions of the female body, and I thought perhaps they might be rejected. Amazingly, they weren’t. The editors probably knew readers would just skip over my story, so it didn’t matter that they weren’t appropriate – most people pick up anthologies for the much bigger names! But if asked, I would certainly work with the editor to change the story, if I felt some of the content wasn’t the right fit for the market and if I felt I could make the changes without turning the story into something I wasn’t happy with. I’ve had to completely tear apart stories before, and it’s always a bit painful, but the end results have so far resulted in much better stories.

Thanks for taking part in the interview. Please, tell our fine readers what they have to look forward to from you, in this, the dawning of the age of Word Hordius.

I have a number of short stories that will be coming out later this year and in 2017. I’m also in the middle of putting together a collection of extremely fantastical and dark erotic stories over on Patreon, called Tales of the Dark Century – that should be finished this year, but I honestly don’t know if I’ll find a publisher for it, as it’s definitely not the kind of erotica that currently popular. Maybe Chuck Tingle can give me some self-publishing tips…

In your own words, why do you think it’s important for there to be weird fiction (or really any type of genre) collections featuring work exclusively by women?

In the horror genre, and that includes Weird fiction, women don’t seem to get much attention. Whenever there are lists of Top Ten Horror Writers people remember to include folks like King, Lovecraft, yet even figures as crucial as Jackson can slip through the cracks and be ignored. Some anthologies routinely used to include only all men in their TOCs, I’m thinking of several Lovecraftian books which did this not even five years ago. So, there’s a complex problem. Yes, there are less women horror writers than men. But the ones we have can have a hard time drawing attention. And how do we get more women interested in the genre? In creating and consuming and being part of it, that’s not an easy thing to do but part of it must be visibility. Anthologies can help highlight the work of women which we don’t see, but I should say it’s not the only way this should be done, nor is it an instant solution to get more women interested in the field.

What prompted you to start the process of creating She Walks in Shadows? Was the turn around faster or slower than other editing work you’ve had?

There was a Facebook discussion where someone asked “Do girls just not like to play with squids?” By squids the person meant Lovecraftian stories, there was the assumption there are no women writing it because it doesn’t interest them. There was a long discussion about this on several spaces. At some point someone said women were incapable of writing Lovecraftiana and at another point someone said if you want something different, why don’t you do it yourself. So we did. Of course then some people got mad that we actually were action-oriented and not just talk, but that’s another story.

You have a story in Word Horde’s Tales of Jack the Ripper. Does the Ripper case interest you? Are there any other murder cases that you find yourself terrified by/ intrigued by?

The Ripper is one of the cases I find more dull, in comparison to others because it’s not as bizarre as some other stuff I’ve read. I’m interested in crime, not just murder, and I’ve read a lot of nota roja, yellow journalism, and crime books. I’m curious about people and I like knowing about the investigators, the criminal, the victim. There was a case in Mexico City in the 50s which I find quite interesting and apparently I’m not the only one since they made it into a play and a movie. Basically this guy had a whole family, six kids and a wife, and he kept them locked inside his home all the time. They never went out. They made a living by making rat poison and the father went selling it door to door. And you think for sure they’re going to murder him with rat poison! But they don’t. A daughter throws a scrap of paper onto the street and eventually the cops come and take the guy to prison. But the things that gets me, the thing I go over and over again in my head, is the mother. After the guy goes to jail she says she still loves him and wants him back.

It’s just strange, the bizarre shit that can be going on behind a perfectly normal looking house.

What kind of music did you listen to today?

Today? 80s music. I had “Mad World” playing.

How goes your dissertation?

Half there. I need to re-write a portion of it but getting there.

Do you think there are certain place which contain some type of power we can’t explain? You hear people talk about, say, The Bermuda Triangle, and no one can quite pin down why so many ships disappear in that area?

I don’t believe in ghosts or monsters or demons. But my great-grandmother was superstitious and I grew up with that, so it’s hard to scrub it off even when you are an adult. I also lived for a bit in Massachusetts and you’re from there so you know what it’s like. A lot of old houses and this kind of sad, depressing feeling in certain spots. There’s a lot of history in certain places, in New England, in Mexico, in Europe of course. And it feels different than the ‘new’ cities like Vancouver where everything is glass, it’s clean, and there’s an optimism which seems to flow from this youth. That said there was a place in Vancouver my husband and I found creepy. We would walk by a building which had been a hospital and was abandoned and we both swore the building was staring at us. It would follow you. And it looked angry. They turned it into condos and it looks very fine now, nothing like it did before, but I don’t think I’d live there. It’s not scientific at all but that building was a nasty building.

Growing up, were there any creepy areas around Mexico City you thought might contain some type of unexplainable forces?

There are a lot of creepy places but I was never afraid of ghosts or the supernatural in Mexico City. My fears were very concrete and very real. Would I get mugged, for example. As a child there used to be some weird knocking in my home. Knocking on the walls. It was made of brick, so it wasn’t like in the US or Canada where you can safely assume the wood is contracting, the floorboards are making noises, it was this knocking that happened when I saw in one room. I’m sure there is a natural explanation but when it bothered me a lot I would yell. I would say “Shut up! Stop!” I figured if it was a ghost it was motherfucking rude ghost and it deserved to be told off. And the noise did subside after I yelled. But I was never afraid. The ‘real’ world was a lot more scary.

Do you have any writing rituals? Molly Tanzer has some very specific ones…

No. I write late at night because it’s the only spare time I have.

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

Does it have to have one? You use whatever tools do the job. Sometimes its genre, sometimes its lit.

Order She Walks in Shadows from Innsmouth Free Press. Order Tales of Jack the Ripper from Word Horde. Silvia’s debut novel, Signal to Noise, is available from Solaris. To learn more about Silvia Moreno Garcia and her awesome projects, visit her website.

In his house at R’lyeh, Cthulhu waits dreaming…

What are the dreams that monsters dream? When will the stars grow right? Where are the sunken temples in which the dreamers dwell? How will it all change when they come home?

Within these pages lie the answers, and more, in all-new stories by many of the brightest lights in dark fiction. Gathered together by Ross E. Lockhart, the editor who brought you The Book of Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech, and Giallo Fantastique, Cthulhu Fhtagn! features nineteen weird tales inspired by H. P. Lovecraft.

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart
Cover Art by Adolfo Navarro
Cover Design by MMP

Table of Contents

Introduction: In His House at R’lyeh… – Ross E. Lockhart
The Lightning Splitter – Walter Greatshell
Dead Canyons – Ann K. Schwader
Delirium Sings at the Maelstrom Window – Michael Griffin
Into Ye Smoke-Wreath’d World of Dream – W. H. Pugmire
The Lurker In the Shadows – Nathan Carson
The Insectivore – Orrin Grey
The Body Shop – Richard Lee Byers
On a Kansas Plain – Michael J. Martinez
The Prince of Lyghes – Anya Martin
The Curious Death of Sir Arthur Turnbridge – G. D. Falksen
Aerkheim’s Horror – Christine Morgan
Return of the Prodigy – T.E. Grau
The Curse of the Old Ones – Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington
Love Will Save You – Cameron Pierce
Assemblage Point – Scott R. Jones
The Return of Sarnath – Gord Sellar
The Long Dark – Wendy N. Wagner
Green Revolution – Cody Goodfellow
Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form – Laird Barron

Pie by Petaluma Pie Company.

Ask for Cthulhu Fhtagn! wherever books are sold.