Last week I spoke with R. B. Wood about his latest novel, Bayou Whispers and what he learned about himself and the society he lives in while researching the book.
This week, Girl Meets Monster welcomes writer and reviewer Eva Roslin.
Eva Roslin writes dark fantasy and horror fiction. She is a recipient of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship, awarded by the Horror Writers’ Association. She is a Supporting HWA member. Her work has appeared in such publications as Dark Heroes (Pill Hill Press), Murky Depths, Ghostlight Magazine and others. Her reviews and articles have appeared in Cemetery Dance and Hellnotes to name a few.
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Eva. This will be the final Fiction Fragments post before I take a brief hiatus. So, let’s jump right in and start with some serious questions about your writing. And, your experience as a reader, reviewer, and consumer of speculative fiction in general. I know that you read a lot, not just professionally but also for pleasure. What issues have you encountered with how disabled characters are represented in fiction, or disability in general? What do people get right or wrong? How can people who aren’t disabled write disabled characters authentically? Have you written about disability?
ER: Thank you for having me! The biggest issue I’ve encountered with how writers, particularly nondisabled writers, represent disabled characters is lack of research. If a writer has not done their homework, if they’re just guessing or making assumptions of what it “must” be like to live with a particular disability, and they don’t bother to speak to anyone in the disabled community they’re portraying, it leads to things like the ‘disability is a superpower’ trope. I’m a huge fan of Professor Xavier in the X-Men, for instance, but it bothers me that in some people’s minds, he matters and is “allowed” to be a central character only because he is a mutant who has superpowers that “compensate” for his disability.
I have both physical and intellectual disabilities, and I use a mobility device to help me get around. One of the tropes I despise features a nondisabled character posing as disabled to trick the other characters and then suddenly using a walking aid as a substitute for a sword. There’s also the trope where a character gets up out of a wheelchair and proclaims “Fooled you!” I love many, many things about Buffy the Vampire Slayer,but invoking this trope with Spike in Season 2 is not one of them.
There’s a tendency to make disabled characters one-dimensional or to equate disabilities with being evil and villainous, which I also think is very offensive.
Nondisabled writers who want to write disabled characters should start by looking into workshops like the fantastic Writing the Other series that Nisi Shawl and K Tempest Bradford operate. I think it’s also important to do as much research as possible. Many writers might assume that a few quick Google searches are adequate (spoiler alert: they’re not). As well, writers should pay attention to conversations within the disabled community online.
When it comes to my own fiction, I’m still hesitant to write about characters with disabilities because there’s the fear that I will get it wrong, or that my experiences will not resonate with other disabled folks, or that some nondisabled people will comment that the character doesn’t seem disabled enough, or just plain trolling. I’m working on ways to try to overcome that hesitancy.
GMM: Tell me about your writing. When did you begin writing dark fantasy and horror? Who or what were your first influences, and how has writing within these genres pulled on your personal experiences or helped you grow as a person?
ER: I started writing when I was 14. I loved Halloween growing up, and enjoyed shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark, superhero cartoons, as well as reading many of the Goosebumps books and other young adult horror. As well, I started reading Anne Rice at what was probably too early an age and that solidified my interest in genre fiction and began a life-long obsession with vampires. I also loved mob movies and video games thanks to my older brothers, so when I started writing, it was dreadfully bad screenplays based on Goodfellas. Soon after, I bought a video game featuring vampires that I had no idea would become the flame that fueled my desire to write. I still remember watching the opening cinematic and thinking, “This is amazing. I want to write something that makes people feel the same sense of awe as I do now.” The game was Soul Reaver, which is one of the most epic, finely-plotted stories in video game history.
Shortly after that, the first Underworldfilm came out, and that also fueled me to keep writing horror. I joined some online critique groups as well as a local in-person one that my mom had to accompany me to because I was still a minor. Although that group was mostly a bunch of old white dudes and a few women, it taught me important lessons on how to take feedback gracefully, how to provide it, and the fundamentals of good storytelling. I kept writing and most of my subject matter extended to fallen angels, demons, and went into a gritty urban fantasy direction. Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slimand William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angelwere both huge influences. Then, somewhere along the way, my work and interests morphed into something more subtle. I began to write Southern Gothic stories, which I realize is ironic because I’m neither American nor am I from the South. Around the same time, I started researching Haitian vodou, learning about the West African roots of the religion, and discovered the history of these regions. It was important for me to see how all of that transformed into Louisiana voodoo and the pop culture derivations that followed. This inspired my obsession with New Orleans, a setting that features prominently in my work.
When I was a teenager, I had that horrible phantom pressure inflicted on me to “hurry up because if you don’t publish a novel by the time you’re 25, you will lose your chance forever!” And then 25 became 30 until I worked harder on understanding that these are arbitrary benchmarks that other insecure people set up, and it’s part of the theatre of literary snobbery. My experiences working in the publishing industry doing marketing and PR showed me firsthand which books sell and why, which books don’t, all the work that goes into promotion and working with authors, and how dispiriting it was to get unsold copies back to the warehouse. When reviewers did not have favourable feedback on one of the titles we were pushing that season, that was always tough. It made me more cynical for a long time, but it also helped me see things from the business side, which was educational in many ways.
I don’t experience the same sense of catharsis that some horror writers describe, but I definitely bleed on the page. When I was writing urban fantasy, it was much more a wish fulfillment fantasy of including these kickass female protagonists who didn’t take any guff, but were incredibly self-centred and one-dimensional in many ways. For a long time, I avoided writing from the wounds and scars that have shaped me because I was worried about being dismissed with labels like “semi-autobiographical,” or “B-movie genre pulp.” I fixated on people’s reactions. Gradually, I am learning to break away from that and I’m writing from darker places. This has been more traumatizing in some cases, but I feel that I’m taking bolder strides and I’m less afraid as a writer in some ways.
GMM: You are currently writing a novel. Is this your first novel? What is it about? What has the process been like for you as you draft the manuscript? What have you learned about yourself as a writer, and what have you learned about writing in general?
ER: This is the eighth novel I’ve written. It’s a young adult dark fantasy novel about a group of young women in New Orleans in the 1850s. They learn witchcraft at an Academy that disguises itself as an Ursuline convent and school. A very dangerous witch that they thought they’d sealed away for good has found a way to return, and the main characters need to figure out a way to stop her before she unleashes even more havoc. There are vampires and werewolves who also get tangled into the fray.
I’ve learned that it’s important to be true to what I want to write and to stop fixating so much on the negative energy some folks insist on spreading. As well, I’m also learning that no matter how much work I have done whether it’s research or incorporating feedback, that we don’t have any control over how readers will respond to our work. Still, it’s important to have a vision of what it is we’re trying to accomplish, and to continue persevering no matter how many times we get kicked down (which I know is easier said than done).
Thanks so much for having me, Michelle!
(From an unpublished short story, “His Heart Beats in the Fire”)
“Miss Malveaux?”
Charlotte jolted as she realized her mind had drifted whilst talking to this handsome suitor.
Before she could respond, Father’s other daughter, Olivia, bumped into Charlotte.
“Pardon me, Lottie!” Olivia squealed with laughter. She looked like a pink cloud in her dress, her cheeks and lips stained with cerise rouge.
“There you are!” Father pulled Olivia into a hug, and kissed her forehead. He had never once come close to regarding Charlotte with anything resembling affection. In his mind, Olivia would forever be his one true daughter. “You are a stray dog. I adopted you because my first wife wished it,” he had said to Charlotte on more than one occasion.
Elijah stared at Olivia, transfixed. A crack formed in Charlotte’s heart at that moment, as if a knife had slashed her. She knew then that whatever chance she may have had with Private Kemper evaporated like dust.
“Olivia was just saying…” Father walked away with Olivia and Elijah, Charlotte forgotten. His words echoed in her mind. Simian blood. She approached the live oak in front of her and brushed her hands over the bark. Memories filled her mind of this spot where her grandmother, Betsy, had been hanged. She had been six at the time. She clutched her locket and breathed, trying to wrench her thoughts from that day.
Images flashed in Charlotte’s mind. The noose that broke Betsy’s neck. The flames that sprang from Charlotte’s hands.
The family told tales that Betsy shed her skin at night, a witch who practiced dark magic. Father blamed the ailing slave woman for failing to cure his first wife of consumption. It would not be until many years later that Charlotte would learn of his deception, that he had Betsy hanged to teach the other slaves a lesson.
Something tapped her on the shoulder a moment later. When she whirled, a man with dark eyes and hair examined her, his cheeks angled and sharp. Beside him stood Ava.
“This is Corporal William Rawden, Lottie,” Ava said.
She held out her hand. While he brought it to his lips, bowing slightly, he regarded her as though he were reading a journal of the news of the day. He frowned.
“How do you do,” she said.
“I was just mentioning to the Corporal that we have an elder daughter, and he expressed to me that he wished to be introduced to you.”
Charlotte wanted to scoff, to tell him she was sorry to have disappointed him by not being Olivia. “Charmed.”
He smirked. “I hear you are quite a respectable young lady, apart from a certain, shall we say, indiscretion.”
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
He brought his face a bit closer to her. “Your true race.” His mouth reeked of tobacco and whisky. “Your father told me. Still, since your other sister seems to be preoccupied with other, blonder interests, I thought I would see if you might do just as fine, provided a little extra compensation.” He tapped his right pocket. Instead of telling him to get away from her and burn, she held her tongue and stretched her mouth into another saccharine smile, trying to imagine when the day might end.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. Fiction Fragments will be on a short hiatus. Stay tuned, and see you soon!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Last week, Jill Girardi joined me to talk about her book to film project, Hantu Macabre, and why Kandisha Press anthologies are a labor of love.
This week, Girl Meets Monster welcomes Carol Gyzander. I met Carol at NECON in 2019 when I released Invisible Chains, and I am looking forward to spending more face to face time with her when we are able.
Carol Gyzander read classic science fiction and Agatha Christie mysteries non-stop in her early days. Now that her kids have flown the coop, she writes and edits horror, suspense, dark fiction, and sci-fi stories from her couch—with her black cat firmly Velcroed to her side.
Her stories are in over a dozen anthologies including Stories We Tell After Midnight fromCrone Girls Press; Across the Universe: Tales of Alternate Beatles from Fantastic Books (amidst stories by Cat Rambo, Spider Robinson and David Gerrold); Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse from Camden Park Press; and The Devil’s Due: Nothing is Ever as it Seems. She also has stories in Hell’s Highways: Terrifying Tales of Tormented Travels and Hell’s Mall: Sinister Shops, Cursed Items and Maddening Crowds from Lafcadia Press.
As editor-in-chief and one of the founders of Writerpunk Press, she’s edited four anthologies of punk stories inspired by classic tales, including Merely This and Nothing More: Edgar Allan Poe Goes Punk and Hideous Progeny: Classic Horror Goes Punk. The latest, Taught by Time: Myth Goes Punk, comes out summer 2021. Carol works with James Chambers as Co-Coordinators of the Horror Writers Association New York Chapter and as co-hosts of the HWA-NY Galactic Terrors online reading series on the second Thursday of every month. She is also one of the overall Chapter Program Managers for HWA.
Carol’s a member of Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Broad Universe, and Historical Novel Society. Find her at www.CarolGyzander.com or on Twitter @CarolGyzander
Three Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Carol. It has been one year since many of us went into quarantine and had to rethink how we work as writers in terms of promoting our work, connecting with our communities, and just finding the motivation to keep writing. How has the pandemic changed the way you think about writing? What have you done to adapt to the needs of being in quarantine while continuing to promote your work and engaging with the writing communities you belong to? What do you miss about the before times? What do you like about the new ways of doing things within the writing community?
CG: Thank you, Michelle! I love what you’ve been doing with this project.
Can you believe this has been a year? I had a hard time buckling down to do any writing during those first few months but was lucky enough to have several editing projects that kept me busy—it was so much easier to just edit and look at one word after another than it was to create anything. With a freelance schedule and working from home, every day is Blursday.
I usually do a lot of in-person writing with various groups, and of course that went out the window. Pretty soon I was able to pivot to doing group writing events in person! We all sign onto the Zoom session and chat for the first bit, then mute ourselves and work away while the camera is on. Knowing the other people are there working and expecting me to do the same keeps me on track (it’s sometimes called body doubling). People can do this themselves with an inexpensive service at http://www.Focusmate.com .
The most exciting thing I’ve done to stay engaged came through our HWA NY Chapter. We used to do live readings every few months. When it became clear that wasn’t coming back anytime soon, Jim Chambers and I figured out how to host a monthly reading called Galactic Terrors on the StreamYard platform (every second Thursday at 8pm—see HWANY.org for details; replays available at our YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/y4gj654q ).
We’ve done seven shows so far with writers from our local chapter, and fabulous guests from all over including Lisa Morton, Linda Addison, Craig DiLouie, Jeff Strand, Lee Murray, Kaaron Warren, Nicole Givens Kurtz and Angela Yuriko Smith. I really miss hanging out and chatting with writers, so we tried to build that into the GT show by having people ask questions in the chat, then doing a Q&A with the writer after their reading. We bring everyone together at the end. One of the things that I do like about this strange new world is that I’ve been able to attend and participate in various online cons that I would not have been able to get to in person. My local sci-fi cons HELIOsphere and Philcon were cool. Getting to WorldCon, the SFWA Nebulas, and a lot more was awesome! I’ve also been able to do more readings with Broad Universe at cons; we’re actually starting an online series that will continue into the future.
GMM: Tell me about Writerpunk Press. How did you get involved, and where did the idea for the anthologies come from? What types of “punk” fiction are covered in your anthologies?
CG: We started from the Writerpunk facebook group of writers who like punk genres. One fellow suggested it would be fun to write punk stories inspired by Shakespeare and we were off! We did two anthologies of stories inspired by the bard, which was my first time being published. It’s a cooperative effort with volunteer writers, editors, artists, layout folks, and marketing people; profits are donated to PAWS Lynnwood, an animal shelter and wildlife rescue located in the Pacific Northwest.
I started out helping with editing and moved into the role of Editor-in-Chief/Managing Editor with our third volume of stories inspired by Poe because I wield a clipboard and spreadsheet well. I work with a crack team of editors and we help writers with content editing, as well as doing copy edits and proofreading the entire novel, of course. I have to say that reviewing the stories as well as the edit suggestions from the editorial team has been really educational and has helped improve my own writing! We followed the Poe volume with one inspired by classic tales you likely read in high school English class, and then classic horror.Taught by Time: Myth Goes Punk, our sixth charity anthology, will be released this summer! We’ve taken the myths, legends and lore that readers love and turned them upside down and inside out. With a wide range of punk genres represented—steampunk, cyberpunk, dreadpunk, nanopunk, biopunk and atompunk—there’s sure to be something for everyone in this volume. Details will be on my website.
GMM: You write in several genres, but I know you through the horror community. When did you begin writing horror? What subgenres of horror do you write? Do you cross genres, or stay true to the conventions and tropes of the genres by keeping them separate? Which genre(s) are your favorite to write in? What are you currently working on?
CG: It was actually Writerpunk that drew me into horror! I was writing cyberpunk tales for the anthologies, which is a pretty dark genre to begin with—one of the themes is that the common person tries to better their circumstances against the corporation but winds off worse than before they started. Then, rereading almost all of Poe and the classic horror stories really hooked me (I read the originals to ensure that some key component is represented in the new story).
I was also going through a pretty dark period five years ago, having taken both of my parents through Alzheimer’s. Writing horror really helps me explore some of the dark stuff and bring it into the light where it can be released. I think it’s one of the genres that truly allows us to do that well.
I do indeed like to blend genres. Most of my horror writing is quiet or soft horror; I aspire to do what the Twilight Zone tales did, where everything starts out normal and then starts going subtly … wrong. I blended this approach with the satanic bargain sub-genre in the “Face It” excerpt (which gives you a hit of where the story goes next!). I also love cosmic horror; one of my stories, “Stars the Color of Hope” is a cyberpunk tale inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space.” Currently, I’m writing short stories for various places (I love kraken stories) and working on a novel that links together two of the Shakespeare novellas I wrote—can’t beat cyberpunk Macbeth!
Call back to Women in Horror Month
CG: I did an online reading with Syosset Public Library and HWA NY Chapter for Women in Horror Month. Readers were Linda D Addison (an HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient), plus three writers from HWA-NY: Meghan Arcuri, April Grey and me. We each came up with five women horror writers we recommend people follow (hint: Michelle is on my list!) and I made a short video to showcase our selections.http://carolgyzanderauthor.com/2021/02/25/women-in-horror-month-our-recommendations/
Connor drove down the two-lane highway, heading to their country house after their latest visit to the hospital. Amy, his wife, sat dozing in the seat next to him. It was late at night and she was exhausted from the rounds of medical testing she had undergone. Again. None of it had shown any difference.
No good news.
He sighed and rubbed his face to try and wake up, his blue eyes bleary with fatigue. Wouldn’t do to run off the road. I’m just so tired—tired of it all.
His glance flickered over to his wife. The side of her face that was toward him was smooth and unlined, but he knew what the other side looked like. Had been staring at it over breakfast every day for the past two years. Creased and full of pus-filled blisters—and part of the cheekbone eaten away. Her eye was sunken down into her face.
It was just a matter of time until it spread to the side nearest him. Or her brain. For now, in this moment, he could almost pretend she was not affected by the terrible disease.
But deep down in his heart, he knew she was dying. Knew what the doctors told them every time—there was no cure, no way of arresting the progress of the flesh-eating disease. They even had a name for it—ETR—that made his fists clench and his stomach roil. He knew the letters stood for some technical terms but could never make himself remember the acronym. He couldn’t get past the idea that the damn disease was eating his wife alive and just called it EATER.
Her head lolled a little as she slept, turning toward him, and when he glanced over the next time he saw the ravage of the other side of her face, which extended down her neck and shoulder into her arm. Her hand was clenched and twisted in her lap.
EATER?Fuck me.
He replayed in his mind the reaction of the people at the hospital as he’d brought her in. The way even the medical professionals had pulled back from her. Not to mention the way ordinary people reacted to the two of them. It’d gotten difficult for them to go out in public anymore—people feared she was contagious, which she wasn’t, and countless times they had been refused service at a restaurant or asked to leave a cocktail lounge.
People wouldn’t even shake his hand.
Connor and Amy had been the “it” couple for years, with money, prestige, society connections. Then their busy social life, once so bright and vibrant, had slipped away as her EATER disease progressed. They spent most of the time home alone. Friends no longer stopped by to visit. What kind of life is this—for either of us?
She had pleaded with him to help her finish the struggle. “I just can’t do it myself,” she’d said. “But I can’t stand what this is doing to you. To us. But mostly to you. I know I’m going to die. Where’s the quality of life anymore?” Her one good eye had searched his bright blue ones, looking for some kind of a response.
He had refused, of course. How could he kill his wife? Even if she begged him, which she had. In a stunning display of the power that desperation and anxiety could have over a strong person, she had let her normally capable veneer slip to show her inner fear.
And he had turned her down. What does that make me?
Don’t I love her anymore? Or maybe I’m just afraid of going to jail.
Of course, he already felt like he was in jail. No friends, no life, just stay home and watch Netflix while he took care of his sick wife. She didn’t deserve it, but then again, he didn’t, either.
Only one part of his mind was on the driving, as they were the only car on the road at that late hour. He took a corner on the rural road a bit too fast and the car swerved along the shoulder. He gave himself a scare as he yanked the wheel to pull the car back into the lane.
Wow. Almost drove right off the road there. Would’ve hit the trees … and at this speed. Damn. Well, if it killed us at least she would’ve gotten her wish.
He mulled this thought as he drove along at a more sedate speed. She had not even woken when the car swerved. Had no idea of the danger they had just averted. The steady consumption of painkillers her condition required left her mostly absent from his world.
But if I do that, it kills us both. Is that what she wants? I don’t think so. She just wants to end her suffering and therefore end mine. She doesn’t want for me to die too.
Right?
He looked over at her again and then reached out to hold her hand where it lay on her lap. I love you, darling. But maybe you are right. This is no life for you.
Or for me.
He released her hand and slid his fingers down to the buckle of her seatbelt. Pushed in the button. Released the belt, controlling it to let it retract quietly into the door.
Okay. I’m not really going to do it. But if I do fall asleep on the road, she wouldn’t want to walk away from the accident.
Right? She wouldn’t.
Of course, I would be okay. Oodles of airbags in this car. I mean, with my seatbelt on and the airbags, I’m sure I’d be fine. What about her? He looked over at the dashboard on her side of the car. Saw the button for the passenger airbag. Idly reached up a hand and stroked the button. Pushed it in. It lit up.
Passenger airbag OFF.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Gemma Files. She had a lot to say about her writing process, what inspires her, and why she writes horror. My favorite quote from last week’s interview is…
“…horror is the place where all the non-default people can meet, a place where becoming or realizing you’ve always been what most people see as “a monster” might not be such a bad thing.”
This week, Girl Meets Monster welcomes one of the kindest an most supportive women in indie publishing who is doing her damnedest to promote the work of female horror writers around the world, Jill Girardi.
Jill Girardi is the author of Hantu Macabre, the internationally best-selling novel featuring punk rock paranormal detective Suzanna Sim and Tokek the toyol. Suzanna and Tokek will also be taken to the big screen, as a full-length film based on the characters, set to start shooting in 2021, with former MMA Fighter Ann Osman starring as Suzanna. A special revised edition and movie-tie-in of the book will be published by Crimson Creek Press in the near future. Jill currently lives in New York where she is the editor of the Kandisha Press Women of Horror Anthology books. Please find her on Instagram/Twitter @jill_girardi or @kandishapress
Three Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Jill. Tell me about Hantu Macabre. Was it your first novel? Where did the idea for a punk rock paranormal detective come from? What was the process of turning your novel into a film? What have you enjoyed so far about the process? What has been most difficult? What advice would you give writers who are interested in seeing their work on screen?
JG: Thank you so much. It’s an honor to be featured here! Yes, Hantu Macabre was my first novel, and actually was only my second published work. My first published work was a short story called “Don’t Eat the Rice” which featured the characters that would later be in the book. After having lived in Malaysia for many years, I became obsessed with Hantu – the Malay term for ghosts and creepy folklore. I particularly enjoyed the legend of the toyol. A toyol is a deceased child, resurrected by black magic, for the purposes of stealing money and other valuables for its master. He’s quite a comical figure in Malay folklore, as he’s not a very adept thief, is childlike and easily distracted from his mission by toys. I played with the idea of having an occult detective solving crimes with the help of a toyol for several years before actually sitting down to write the first story. It wasn’t until I was back in New York, miserable and missing Malaysia, that I really got going on it. The punk rock part came about as I was a music producer for many years. So I wanted to evoke that fun atmosphere in the book.
I really can’t even give any advice on the process of going into film as the whole movie deal kind of fell into my lap. The director and film company owner (Aaron Cowan and Jo Luping) picked up the book in a bookstore, and later got in touch with me about doing the film, which will be titled “Best Served Cold,” and is based on my original short story as well as the novel.
GMM: How did Kandisha Press get started? Why were you interested in creating a press? And what inspired you to devote three anthologies to the work of female horror writers? Do you have plans for more anthologies in this series? Do you know what themes you’ll use next?
JG: I honestly just wanted to do an anthology for fun, and never really thought things would take off the way they have. I’ve always been obsessed with books. They give me a high that nothing else in life has ever done (I’m sure anyone reading this understands this feeling very well!) The thought of being able to do my own book was so exciting, I just couldn’t resist giving it a shot. I had noticed that many of the anthologies I was reading or even being featured in had a very skewed ratio of men to women, so I felt it was only right to do an all-women book. I do have plans to continue the series, though it is a bit chaotic right now as things have been moving faster than I was prepared for. So I need to slow down a bit and get things organized. My lovely BFF (Best Frightening Fiend) Janine Pipe is really stepping in at this time, filling in the gaps and holding things down while we get things figured out. She is also working on her own soon to be announced project for Kandisha. I’ve long had an idea to do a Heavy Metal themed anthology, so that may be the next route we travel.
GMM: What are you working on right now? What does your dream project look like, and what steps would you need to take to make it happen?
JG: Right now I’m revising Hantu Macabre, rewriting it and fixing all my rookie mistakes. It will be reissued in a special edition by Crimson Creek Press. And then hopefully I can work on the second book in the series, and continue doing the Kandisha books. My dream project would be writing just about anything in peace and quiet. I dream of going to a hotel for a week, turning off my phone, and just finishing the damn book ala Paul Sheldon.
EXCERPT FROM “THE NIGHT WOULD BE OUR EYELIDS” BY JILL GIRARDI (First published in December 2020 in Know Your Enemy, an anthology by J. Ellington Ashton Press)
It’s 2019, and I’m back in New York for the first time in years. I’m thirty-three and divorced, trying to assimilate into a world I’ve never belonged in. A few nights ago, I downloaded Tinder on a whim, and now I’m out with a younger man who grew up in the same area as I did. On the way to dinner, he talks a lot about his vegan diet and religious doctrine. I imagine how his face would look if I told him I’ve dined on bloody-rare steak with unfathomable devils. I don’t think he’d ask me for a second date.
The route we take to the restaurant goes past the walled-in forest area on the outskirts of my hometown. Nestled inside are the ruins of the abandoned psychiatric hospital where I once fought for survival. We pass a pedestrian bridge built high over the railroad tracks. I’ve been running from that bridge half my life. Now my date is pointing it out to me.
“A girl died there when I was in junior high. Her best friend pushed her off the cage at the top.”
“She didn’t push her,” I mumble as I stare at the massive steel structure. It’s imposing, rigid, unchangeable even by the rust and dust of time. I clear my throat, forcing myself to speak up. “Can we change the subject?”
He won’t let it go. “I’m sure the other girl shoved her. Oh yeah—they also killed someone else—one of their stepfathers or something. It was in all the newspapers. They repeated the story on News 12 every hour.”
I fight to maintain my composure. “Look, this was a bad idea. You should take me home now.” He turns his head and looks at me as he drives down the dark road. In a split second, he figures it out. He gets a bit too excited over my teenage tragedy.
“Holy shit—it was you! I knew your name sounded familiar.” He pauses, stroking his hipster beard with one hand as he steers with the other. The fool is about to ask the dreaded question. I can feel it.
“So, what happened? Did you push her?”
“Keep your eyes on the goddamn road!” I snap at him as he drifts into the path of an oncoming car. He swerves while the other driver honks his horn and screams out his open window. Our car slams to a stop on the gravel in front of the bridge’s cement steps. The other driver shouts again as he zips by. The obscenities he heaps on my date are nothing compared to the names I call him. His eyes widen as I let loose on him, revealing the dark side I keep hidden on my dating profile. I can tell he’s afraid of me. He has that look on his face—the same look everyone had after my discharge from Four Pines Mental Health Center.
My date stammers, trying to contain the situation before things get dangerous. He apologizes, but I’m already lost. I should have known I wouldn’t fit into his orderly, well-governed existence, where people rarely stray from their rote behavior. My world is a darker place, where monsters do exist, and they’re not under your bed, nor do they have horns and tails. They’re your everyday friends and neighbors, the ones who appear normal on the surface, yet their skins house indescribable evils. This evil has infected me too. I’ll never be free of it, no matter how hard I rail against it.
I slip into silence as I stare out the window. My mind is hurtling back to the days when I was seventeen, and I had the world at my fingertips, but I blew it.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Last week I wrapped up my month-long celebration of black women horror writers for Women in Horror Month/Black History Month with an interview with Zin E. Rocklyn, a.k.a. Teri Clarke. If you haven’t had a chance to read all of the interviews I did last month, take some time and and get caught up now. These women have a lot to say about writing horror while black and female and how their personal experiences and intersectionalities have an impact on what they write about.
This week, Girl Meets Monster is back to business as usual, with a fragment and an interview with Gemma Files.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published four collections of short work, three collections of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Adult Novel). She has a new story collection just out from Grimscribe Press (In This Endlessness, Our End), and another upcoming.
Three Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Gemma. Thank you for taking time to chat with me a bit. Tell me about your newest collection of stories, In This Endlessness, Our End. Is there an overarching theme, or threads that connect the stories? Are all of the stories new, or are there some reprints? How do you decide which stories to include? Did you have a plan in mind when you started the collection?
GF: So, the funny thing is that as it turned out, all the stories in this collection were essentially written—finished, at any rate—within the time-period from about a year before Trump’s election to almost the end of his (hopefully only) term in office. The fact that they were originally intended to be published by my former home imprint, ChiZine Publications, which suddenly and acrimoniously collapsed in November of 2019, is also interesting, in hindsight; so is the fact that Jon Padgett at Grimscribe chose to pick the book up during a global pandemic. Which means that the overarching theme of all these stories is the sort of fear you feel when the world you think you know tilts on you in a way which only seems “sudden” at the moment it happens, as well as the guilt and grief which come when you realize you saw [this, whatever “this” is] coming from miles away, and simply chose to ignore those warning signs as they mounted because…well, because you wanted to. Because you liked your life, and the illusions it was rooted in. Because you hoped things had gotten better, and you forgot that every ten years, a generation comes of age who haven’t lived through the same things you have, so they have to have experiences which will prove the same basic facts about human nature over and over and over again. Etc.
It’s easy to say, of course, that the theme of every horror collection is fear. But I do find it oddly significant that the first story in the TOC—“This Is How It Goes”—happens to be set during the aftermath of a body horror plague that rips around the world like a creepypasta come true, moving from urban myth/internet rumour to immediate reality within forty-eight hours at the most. When I read it on The Outer Dark Podcast recently, I called it a “pre-pandemic post-pandemic tale.” So, these particular stories ring with a very current sort of fear, for me. Whether other people will see it that way as well is up to them, I guess.
The stories are all reprints, basically, though because I often get published in fairly obscure places, I expect that a lot of them will be new to most readers aside from those solicited by people like Ellen Datlow (“Cut Frame,” from her Hollywood Horror anthology Final Cuts; “The Puppet Motel,” from Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories). And no, I didn’t have this in mind when I put the book together, it just shook out that way. The one thing I have in common with the Joker is I’m not much of a planner.
GMM: So, you mention that you’ve written a story-cycle and a Weird Western series. What is the difference between a story-cycle and a series, and how does your process change from project to project–short stories versus stand-alone novels versus a series, etc.? Do you decide on what shape your stories will take before you write them, or do the stories evolve into the appropriate length to fit the story as you write them?
GF: The Weird Western series—my Hexslinger books—basically filled in a three-act, chapter-driven narrative over three separate novels. I’d made an outline at the very beginning for what I thought would be one book (A Book of Tongues), only to find that by the time I’d written 100,000 words I’d only gotten to what was fairly obviously the first break-point; I kept to that outline throughout, moving through it linearly, as if I was writing a trilogy of screenplays. The story-cycle, on the other hand—We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven—was built around a base of stories reprinted and slightly polished from earlier in my career, ones which inhabited an urban paranormal universe I only slowly realized was anchored by the same cast of characters, all of whom were literally related to each other. I sprinkled them through in non-linear order, introducing those characters and the five families they belonged to as I went, while also writing/finishing four new novellas that made these connections clear and brought the overall story to a climax. I like to call it my Alice Munro book, except with evil angels, witches, monster-killing nuns and the Fae.
As for whether I made either of those decisions strategically…yeah, not really. Sometimes I think the only method I have for knowing if a story is finished is: “Does it feel ‘right?’ Okay, then.” I do know that with the Five-Family Coven stuff, I essentially wanted to prove to myself that polite, clean Toronto, Canada could be just as dark, weird and potentially awful as any other city written about from that angle by one of its citizens. It started out as what I called my Toronto Dark phase, then got more and more complicated, like a bunch of in-jokes which grew legs and started to walk on their own. And even now, I still continue to use that universe as the back-story of a lot of my more recent tales; a minor character from We Will All Go Down Together plays a main role in “Cut Frame,” for example, plus a minor role in “The Puppet Motel.” It’s there if you look for it.
Otherwise, the shape of a story is usually dictated by the voice of the person who’s telling it, or the perspective of the person who’s living it. My plots are often a little more complicated than they need to be, but I don’t believe that plot and character can be completely separated. It’s not just “this happened,” it’s “this happened, because someone did something.” As Bill Duke says in Menace 2 Society, speaking for/to almost all my protagonists, “You know you fucked up, right?”
GMM: Why horror? What draws you to the genre? Have you written in other genres? What do you like most about horror as a writer? As a reader? After winning the Shirley Jackson Award, did you automatically feel like a bonafide horror writer, or do you still struggle with impostor syndrome? Has winning awards changed you as a writer?
GF: A deep and sparkling darkness has always been what draws me towards the things I love, at least in terms of art. I mean, I started out ostensibly liking science fiction, but soon figured out A) what I liked was actually space opera, because B) I’m really not that great with science, outside the purely biological. Also, my formative life was full of fear, so horror seemed like “home” to me…normal, natural, understandable.
Part of my journey after my son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder was coming to realize that if a diagnosis of Asperger’s had been something people were looking for (in girls, or at all) back when I was at my worst as a kid, I might well have gotten one. I’m 52 now, so I’ve worked very hard to pass as neurotypical, but most of my life has been spent second-guessing my own instincts and berating myself for being born somehow “wrong.” The fact that that alone doesn’t make me super-different from a lot of other similarly diverse people isn’t lost on me, either; I’ve gotten away with a lot over the years, on account of reading as a typical cishet white lady. But again, I think it still has a lot to do with me feeling as if horror is the place where all the non-default people can meet, a place where becoming or realizing you’ve always been what most people see as “a monster” might not be such a bad thing.
“…horror is the place where all the non-default people can meet, a place where becoming or realizing you’ve always been what most people see as “a monster” might not be such a bad thing.”
I spent my high school years reading Tanith Lee, Peter Straub and Clive Barker, my university years reading Caitlin R. Kiernan, Billy Martin (then Poppy Z. Brite) and Kathe Koja. My favourite movies were things like Nightbreed and Near Dark, stuff about found families bound together by hunger rather than affinity. And all of this stuff came together in my writing, which from the very beginning was dictated by the old adage that if you can’t find what you want in the world, you may well be forced to make some. One of the things I’ve become very proud of, over the years, is the idea that I’ve somehow indulged or inspired other people doing the same thing, giving way to their own ids/needs and letting the devil drive. Someone told me once that my story “Kissing Carrion” told her it was okay for women to do that, and I was like: “Oh, the story about a woman who makes a puppets out of a human corpse so she can fuck her necrophile boyfriend with it, while the ghost that used to be the corpse hovers nearby invisibly going WHAAAATTTT?!? Cool!” I’m down for monster pride in any and every form.
Winning the Shirley Jackson Award for Experimental Film was a huge surprise, but that was also absolutely the award I knew I’d be happiest winning, because I’ve never pretended to be anything but a horror writer. Even my fantasy is always “dark”; even my nonfiction is always Weird. As Yukio Mishima put it, my heart’s yearning has always been to night, and death, and blood. But yeah, imposter syndrome truly doesn’t go away. I fight it by writing to a deadline, writing like it’s a job, and never fooling myself into thinking that the stuff which comes out of me is somehow so pure and beautiful it doesn’t need to be cut, tweaked or otherwise rewritten. Things can always get better, and an outside eye is a gift.
500+ WORDS OF SOMETHING NEW
Gemma Files
One thing a job like mine teaches is that people will say all sorts of things when they’re dying. It’s like the process breaks something open inside them, some long-buried infectious reservoir, a quick-draining sick-pocket. They don’t even have to know what’s happening, let alone accept it; they might still be entirely convinced they’ll survive, but it doesn’t matter. A sort of punch-drunkenness takes over, an irrepressible urge to confess.
“I put my hand under the pillow, and that’s where I found it,” Mrs Camp told me, one morning, as I stripped her mattress so I could check it for night-sweat and all sorts of other fluids. “Then it bit down, so I couldn’t get it out again.”
“Found what, ma’am?” I asked, only half-listening. Wet bedsheets I could deal with; did, almost every day, and hardly just with her. It was sponging down the rubber mattress covers that always took up the most time, because we had to move the clients while they dried; bleach on urine never is the best smell, and it does tend to stick around. Some of (the bulk of) the lazy fools I worked with would just stick whoever they’d cleaned up for back in bed immediately, ignoring the fact that bedsores don’t react any better when crossed with cleaning product than feeble lungs do when exposed to corrosive funk. But screw it—no matter how much I longed to get shed of this job, I was determined to at least be a little better at it than those assholes.
“A mouth, wide open, like I said already. With teeth.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” I told her, to which she smiled, revealing her own teeth.They looked like a busted-up china doll’s.
“No, it does not. Are you married, Kevin?”
“KeVon, ma’am. And no.”
“Oh, that’s a shame, then—big, good-looking fellow like you. I bet you’ve made a fair deal of women cry, in your time.”
Probably, I thought, the faces of all those poor girls I’d “dated” in high school suddenly coming back to me in a weird sort of flip-book flash, fluttering across my inner eye before breaking apart against the hard bone bell of my skull, disappearing into darkness. But not ’cause I wanted to, no, ma’am. Only ’cause I wasn’t strong enough yet to know who I really was, let alone to say it.
“I do try not to, ma’am,” I told her, angling her wheelchair next to the flower-pots where I knew she liked it best. Those gardenias, heads bent over and dripping, plumped up fulsome on the very edge of decay. You could just see her faded eyes light up at the sight of them.
“Beautiful,” she told me. “Oh, Kevin. There’s still a whole lot to love in this world, isn’t there? Even now. Even here.”
“Yes, ma’am, there sure is.”
She nodded, sunk in thought. Then whispered, almost to herself, as I was turning back to see what might or might not yet be on offer from the kitchen: “But then the sun goes down and the lights go out. Then I go out, and they come in.”
At that last part, my heart gave a strange little leap, tapping itself against my breastbone like it was knocking on some door hid inside my chest. “Who’s that, ma’am?” I asked her, standing there with my hip thrown out so awkward it hurt, but not quite able to go on to my next step ’til she replied.
(God only knew, the membrane between sleep and death certainly did seem to stretch thin enough to see things through, sometimes, in life’s very last stages. Things you shouldn’t be able to see, under more normal circumstances.)
Mrs Camp just kept on staring at those damn flowers, though, like she was waiting for them to speak instead. “Oh, nothing at all, I’m sure, Kevin,” was all she said, at last. “Must be I’m being silly—mixing stuff up. Old people do that, you know.”
“Yes ma’am,” I agreed. “And young people too, on occasion.”
She nodded and lowered what she had left for lashes, then threw me a glance I’d’ve surely called flirty if she weren’t terminal, and knew herself to be so.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “That’s surely true.”
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Wednesday, I spoke with Valjeanne Jeffers and she shared a fragment from the next book in her Mona Liveling series, Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective III: The Case of the Vanishing Child.
Today, Girl Meets Monster welcomes Zin E. Rocklyn.
Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, KaijuRising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck TalesNo. 7 zine. Their story “Summer Skin” in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax’s Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster ofMe” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story “The Night Sun” and flash fiction “teatime” were published on Tor.com. Their debut novella will be published by Tor.com in Fall 2021. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2022 Clarion West candidate. You can find them on Twitter @intelligentwat.
Ten Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster and thank you for being part of my first Women in Horror Month series, Zin. What projects are you currently working on? Is horror your primary genre, or do you write in other genres? If you write in other genres, which do you feel most comfortable writing, and why?
ZER: Thank you for having me! I write primarily horror but use it across genre. Combining horror with other aspects of Speculative Fiction is what makes it fun. The genre I like to write in most is the weird because of how much freedom there is in writing it.
GMM: When did you first know that you were a horror writer? How did you develop an interest in the genre? What initially attracted you to horror stories? Which writers influenced you then? Which writers influence you now?
ZER: I’ve been a horror writer from the very beginning. My brother, who is 8.5 years older than me, made it a point to scare me in any way he could so he started with A Nightmare on Elm Street. But it backfired! I fell in love with horror instead of being frightened. I saw a way to express what I felt like was a growing darkness within me and I almost immediately took to the page. I found the Fear Street series by RL Stine not long after at around the age of 7 and used that as a framework to learn how to write as well as how to scare folks. Clive Barker was my next great discovery. His prose and imagination appealed to everything I aimed for in my fiction. Books of Blood Vol I-III is still considered a Bible to me. Barker is still a huge influence, as well as NK Jemisin, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison.
GMM: The documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019), explores Black horror and the portrayal (and absence) of Black people in horror movies. As a definition of what Black horror means begins to take shape, Tananarive Due says “Black history is Black horror.” What do you think she meant by that? Can you give an example of how this idea shows up in your own work?
ZER: This is essay material, but I’ll keep it short: despite the efforts of revisionist history, Black people have never been treated like humans in, at the very least, this country. Our survival against these odds is our history, our present, and unfortunately, our immediate future. Writing is my way of fighting for the truth. My stories always feature a Black woman lead, no matter how hard history tries to erase us and our contributions. I speak to my experiences in my stories as a way to flush them out as well as show the world that we are here, we matter, we are worthy.
GMM: As a WOC writing horror/dark speculative fiction, do you feel obligated to have a deeper message in your stories? Can writers of color write stories without broader messages about identity, class, and racism? Is it possible to divorce yourself from that ongoing narrative within our culture when you set out to write a story?
ZER: I do feel that pressure to have a deeper message in my work, but I’m learning to let that go and simply tell the stories within me. By default, my presence within horror and writing horror is a message unto itself. Me showing up is message enough, so there’s no definitive way for me to divorce myself from that ongoing narrative. Our presence is our protest, so I encourage folks of colour to just simply write anything they want!
GMM: What are your top five favorite horror movies, and why? Top five horror novels? Which book or movie scared you the most?
ZER: Aw, man, my favourite horror movies: 28 Days Later, Silence of the Lambs, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Shelley, and Attack the Block. I like meditative horror as well as action and humour.
Favourite horror novels: Dark Property by Brian Evenson, Blood Child by Octavia Butler, NeverLand by Douglas Clegg, Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud, and kindred by Octavia Butler. These novels shaped the writer I am today and continue to influence me. The book that scared me the most was actually a collection of short stories mentioned before: Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Vol. I-III. These stories still haunt me, and I sleep with the lights on anytime I reread them.
GMM: How do you feel about white-identifying writers who write stories about non-white characters? What problems have you encountered? What potential issues do you see with white-identifying writers telling BIPOC stories? What advice would you give those writers?
ZER: While I definitely feel people should be able to write what they want; I also caution intent versus impact. Our experiences are unique to what is in popular media about us and to live the experience is completely different to being on the sidelines observing. My advice would be to hire authenticity readers and more than just one. Our experiences are not monolithic so make sure you gain more than one perspective and not just one that agrees with you.
GMM: All writers have experienced some form of impostor syndrome. What has your experience with impostor syndrome been like? Did you ever have a particularly bad case of it? If so, what caused it and how did you manage it?
ZER: I’m going through it now! LOL! I think most writers go through this phase multiple times in their careers; it’s part of the deal when you have a talent that’s so subjective to its audience.
GMM: About a year ago, I bought a T-shirt you designed that says: “Support Black Women Who Write Weird Shit.” First, and foremost, what do you consider “weird shit”? And, second, where can people order their own T-shirt?
ZER: Weird shit, to me, is the uncanny, the thing in the periphery that makes your heart skip for a second. It’s the unsettling feeling you have when something is just a tad off. Once I launch my website, I’ll have t-shirts for sale!
GMM: Zin E. Rocklyn is a pseudonym. I won’t reveal your real name unless you are comfortable doing so. Why use a pseudonym? What are the benefits? Drawbacks? What dark secrets are you hiding?
ZER: LMAO!! I have no issue with my real name being out there. I chose a moniker to pay my respects to the source of my imagination: family.
GMM: If you could give advice to your younger self about writing, what would it be? How would your journey be different, or would you keep things the same?
ZER: You are good. Keep writing. And, yes, you can write that.
“In Full Bloom” by Zin E. Rocklyn
12:15
He’s slight in every sense of the word. Fine-boned, like a delicate bird. Pale and sickly. Shoulders rounded, back slumped. A heavy breath from paper-thin lungs could break him.
I want to cradle him.
I want to wrap my large, dark hands around his tiny torso and squeeze. I want to read the notches of his spine with my heavy fingertips, pluck and play his pronounced ribs with my thumbs. My fat tongue fights to taste his powdery flesh. My ears yearn for the crinkle of his reedy skin.
I need him.
Just as he needs me. He’s my baby, my child, a man born of my desire and aching. He is my manifestation.
He looks to me. For care. For comfort. For protection.
And all I want to do is hurt him.
He knows that look. Understands it. Me. More than I know myself.
My steps are careful, but I am clumsy. Big feet, stubby toes, long limbs. I am everything he is not.
I am his God.
He is my Goddess.
And we hate each other for it.
Long fingers curl into a ball tight enough to crack air. The strike is solid, satisfying.
The sight of red pleases me. He whimpers. I giggle.
The tear is angry, but not alone. More crowd his blind eyes until they fall together, storming down the misshapen hills and valleys of his face. They gather at the peak of his chin, clinging to one another, impregnating each other until there is nowhere to go but down.
Rain meets concrete and I am empty once again.
I turn away, but his claw-like fingers find a wisp of my shift. Clinging. Pulling.
I step forward, dragging him. One inch. One foot.
I stop to peer over my shoulder, to see if he’s still there. If he’s still devoted to me.
His flesh has betrayed him, streaking gore across the gritty floor, leaving him in strips and chunks.
It is my turn to whimper. To moan. To mourn the loss of such beautiful, delicious meat.
I kneel to him. Take his face in my grotesque hands. Press my plump mouth to his sealed lips. Drag my hot tongue along the bitter muscle that is his.
And I squeeze.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
This past Friday, I chatted with Nicole Givens Kurtz, one of the first recipients of the Horror Writers Association’s Diversity Grants. Today, Girl Meets Monster welcomes another Diversity Grant recipient, Sumiko Saulson. Sumiko provided me with multiple versions of hir bio and there is so much interesting information in each one that I felt like using only one would somehow rob you of knowing all the cool shit ze has done and is doing. As a woman of color who writes speculative fiction that often crosses the lines of genre and gives my readers a glimpse into my various parts that make up the whole, I can completely respect and wish to honor all aspects and intersectionalities of a fellow woman of color who writes horror.
So…here are all the bios Sumiko sent me. Bask in the glory of hir muliplicities.
50 Words Sumiko Saulson is a cartoonist; horror, sci-fi and dark fantasy writer/blogger; editor of Black Magic Women and 100 Black Women in Horror. Author of Solitude, Warmth, Moon Cried Blood, and Happiness and Other Diseases. Author/Illustrator of Mauskaveli, Dooky, Dreamworlds and Agrippa, writes for Search Magazine and the San Francisco Bayview Newspaper.
100 Words Sumiko Saulson is a cartoonist, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer, editor of Black Magic Women, Scry of Lust and 100 Black Women in Horror Fiction, author of Solitude, Warmth, The Moon Cried Blood, Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, Insatiable, Ashes and Coffee, and Things That Go Bump In My Head. She wrote and illustrated comics Mauskaveli, Dooky andgraphic novels Dreamworlds and Agrippa. She writes for the SEARCH Magazine and the San Francisco Bayview column Writing While Black. The child of African American and Russian-Jewish parents, a native Californian and an Oakland resident who’s spent most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is pansexual, polyamorous and genderqueer (nonbinary).
100 Words (but different) Sumiko Saulson is an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror. Ze is the editor of the anthologies and collections Black Magic Women, Scry of Lust, Black Celebration, and Wickedly Abled. Ze is the winner of the 2016 HWA StokerCon “Scholarship from Hell”, 2017 BCC Voice “Reframing the Other” contest, and 2018 AWW “Afrosurrealist Writer Award.”
Ze has an AA in English from Berkeley City College, and writes a column called “Writing While Black” for a national Black Newspaper, the San Francisco BayView. Ze is the host of the SOMA Leather and LGBT Cultural District’s “Erotic Storytelling Hour.”
150 Words Sumiko Saulson is a science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer and graphic novelist. She was the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writer Association’s Scholarship from Hell, and 2018 winner of the Afrosurrealist Writers Workshop Short Story Award. Sumiko Saulson is a cartoonist, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer, editor of Black Magic Women, Scry of Lust and 100 Black Women in Horror Fiction, author of Solitude, Warmth, The Moon Cried Blood, Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, Insatiable, Ashes and Coffee, and Things That Go Bump In My Head. She wrote and illustrated comics Mauskaveli, Dooky andgraphic novels Dreamworlds and Agrippa. She writes for the SEARCH Magazine and the San Francisco Bayview column Writing While Black. The child of African American and Russian-Jewish parents, a native Californian and an Oakland resident who’s spent most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is pansexual, polyamorous and genderqueer (nonbinary).
Ten Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster and thank you for being part of my first Women in Horror Month series, Sumiko. What projects are you currently working on? Is horror your primary genre, or do you write in other genres? If you write in other genres, which do you feel most comfortable writing, and why?
SS: I have three works in progress. The one I am currently focused on is Akmani, which is the fourth book in my paranormal romance / horror erotica series Somnalia, which begins with Happiness and Other Diseases. I promised Mocha Memoirs Press, publisher of my anthology Black Magic Women (and another anthology I am in, SLAY: Tales of the Vampire Noire) the first option on it when it is completed. It’s about 85% there at this point. I also have a manuscript for Disillusionment, the sequel to my first novel, a sci-fi horror story called Solitude, about 75% complete, but that one is tabled for now. And finally, I have a file I put all of my poetry in (I write quite a lot of it, on my blog and social media) which is called “Emotional Side Chicks.”
Horror is definitively my primary genre, but I do a lot of crossover into other genres that are combined with horror. Sci-fi horror, monster porn, paranormal romance and horror erotica are some of those, and my Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism tends to be dark and essentially horror. I have a significant amount of erotica in my short story portfolio now, and some of it isn’t horror, but is fantasy, or sci-fi erotica. Poetry is the only genre I work in which isn’t usually horror flavored, as I am a beat or spoken word poet. However, I do have a poem in the current Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase.
GMM: When did you first know that you were a horror writer? How did you develop an interest in the genre? What initially attracted you to horror stories? Which writers influenced you then? Which writers influence you now?
SS: I started out as a poet and a journalist, and hadn’t completed any short stories or novels. I was a published poet as a teenager, and showcased as an upcoming beat poet in the San Francisco Chronicle at the age of twenty. So, the first short story I submitted anywhere was to Phantasmagoria when I was eighteen. They sent it back and said we would love to see more work from you, but this is suspense, not horror. I had sent it to four magazines but only they wrote back. I was easily discouraged and didn’t try again for a long time. I had a half written sci-fi horror novel that I never finished when I was twenty-five called The Chain. I think I tried writing things that weren’t horror, and it just didn’t work.
On my first novel I just gave up on the idea of writing anything other than horror, or trying to not sound derivative because I had consumed so much Stephen King that his voice was ingrained in my mind. So I finished Solitude and was bummed out when Under the Dome (the book, not the television show) came out and I saw that the time bubbles in my book were similar sounding to his dome. They were written at the same time, so it was almost like I had gotten so influenced by him that I was mind reading. Well… after the first book I got really good at having a distinct voice, and you gotta start somewhere.
The more I felt that my voice as an African American was important, the more that I felt my voice as a disabled author was important, the more I had a distinctive voice.
GMM: The documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019), explores Black horror and the portrayal (and absence) of Black people in horror movies. As a definition of what Black horror means begins to take shape, Tananarive Due says “Black history is Black horror.” What do you think she meant by that? Can you give an example of how this idea shows up in your own work?
SS: I think that Victorian era horror, Gothic horror, which is at the root of modern horror, is filled with white voices othering people of color, and then expressing fear that the people they oppressed would come back to destroy them. Consequently, American Gothic horror was filled with slaves cursing white people, Native Americans cursing white people, etc. British Gothic horror was filled with curses by Egyptians, East Indians, and people from Romania who had been oppressed by the Empire or the Church. Black horror switches the focus to us, so instead of it being about how we want revenge for all of the horrible things done to us… it is about how horrible things done to us were. Even in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” where the house is haunted by the child Sethe killed, the visceral horror of the institution of slavery is cloying, overwhelming, and more horrific than the ghost. Sethe’s terrible deed was done to save her child from slavery.
The institution of slavery itself was the stuff of nightmares, I believe, is what Tananarive Due is saying. The horror of our ancestors being stolen from Africa, the heinous deaths aboard the overcrowded slave ships where we were treated like chattel, and the abuse at the hands of the slave owners and slave hunters. Then, the abuse continued during the Reconstruction, during segregation, through Jim Crow laws, and voter suppression, the birth to prison pipelines, racial profiling, and police brutality.
GMM: As a WOC writing horror/dark speculative fiction, do you feel obligated to have a deeper message in your stories? Can writers of color write stories without broader messages about identity, class, and racism? Is it possible to divorce yourself from that ongoing narrative within our culture when you set out to write a story?
SS: My horror stories almost universally have broader messages about identity, class, racism, disability, and/or queerness. I don’t think that I personally can easily divorce myself from that narrative when I set out to write a story, but I do think that, in general, writers of color have the ability to write outside of those parameters. I was in a horror writing contest that HorrorAddicts put on, called “The Next Great Horror Writer” contest back in 2017. The runner up, Naching T. Kassa, was able to turn in several excellent horror stories that HorrorAddicts loved. They do not like political horror. That’s a fact. I got sixth place, but the more political my horror has become, the more rejection letters they send me. They probably have more people applying, but the rejection letters express their distaste for political horror. However, some of the most powerful work by authors of color addresses these issues. Toni Morrison refused to stop writing for Black audiences, and frankly, so do I. I have had to find markets that want political horror. Let someone else write for the ones who don’t.
GMM: What are your top five favorite horror movies, and why? Top five horror novels? Which book or movie scared you the most?
SS: Candyman is my favorite horror movie. I am so jazzed for the new Jordan Peele one. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Bones (yes, that Snoop Dog movie), Dawn of the Dead, and Queen of the Damned (even though I know Anne Rice hates it, so hopefully she won’t read this interview). Novels – gosh, so basic. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Steven King’s The Stand, again Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale. Please don’t tell me you don’t think all of those are horror novels, because I am not trying to hear that. The movie that scared me the most was a sci-fi movie, The Planet of the Apes, the original one. I had terrible nightmares about it as a child. Apocalyptic themes frighten me the most, so naturally, The Stand was the scariest of those books, although, The Bluest Eye was also terrifying.
GMM: How do you feel about white-identifying writers who write stories about non-white characters? What problems have you encountered? What potential issues do you see with white-identifying writers telling BIPOC stories? What advice would you give those writers?
SS: I think that own-voices are really important, but I know that I am not the only Black horror fan who swooned the minute Akasha showed up in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. My love affair with Akasha still has not ended. Even though I love Akasha, it was many years later before Black vampires who weren’t villains showed up in the Vampire Chronicles. Also, it took years for her to write dark skinned characters who weren’t supernaturally faded by vampirism.
Stephen King’s treatment of African American characters in The Stand was horrific. He martyred two different major Black characters in a book about the near-end of humanity, and didn’t even bother to show any Black children being born. It creates a creepy inference that all of the Black folks have died off. After many letters from concerned fans, Stephen King started writing stories where the martyring of Black folks came to an end, but there were other issues. Don’t even get me started with Bag of Bones… the black characters in that book are totally objectified, go through horrendous things, and yet are vilified, othered, and made into a backdrop for a story about a four year old white Last Girl.
My advice to white writers telling BIPOC stories is to try to avoid tokenizing. If there is only one Black person, and only one Latina, then if one or both end up dead, or as a villain, then you have no heroic person or even neutral person in that role. A diversity of different kinds of characters of any given race makes it more likely that you will have at least one sympathetic character in that demographic.
GMM: All writers have experienced some form of impostor syndrome. What has your experience with impostor syndrome been like? Did you ever have a particularly bad case of it? If so, what caused it and how did you manage it?
SS: Oh gosh, I am having it right now. I have been putting out tons of short stories, but haven’t managed to finish a new novel since 2015. The more political my short story writing has become, the more I worry about potentially problematic things in my novels, which are mostly multicultural and take place in urban settings. I just wrote when I first started, and didn’t second guess myself as much. Now I am like, “Oh wait, I am writing about people who are different than me – did I do it right?”
My experience with impostor syndrome is that the fastest way to get past it is to set aside perfectionism. Sometimes I pick up a book I was told is terrible that got published, and read it and tell myself that I suck less than that. Then I tell myself that all of an author’s books aren’t masterpieces, and it is okay to write a book that isn’t Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In fact, if none of my books are ever as good as Toni Morrison, that will be okay. I am a horror writer. Then I pick up a really crappy Stephen King book like The Tommyknockers and remind myself of how many mediocre books he has put out. And yet, I am a fan.
GMM: Do you write about characters who share as many intersectionalities as you do? Did it take you a while to develop the confidence needed to tell their stories, or did you simply write the stories you needed to tell without worrying about what other people might think? Have you experienced any backlash for the stories you write?
SS: I am half Black and half Ashkenazi Jewish, am a non-binary femme who is woman-identified, am mentally ill and pansexual. Some of my characters have as many intersectionalities, but not all of them. The protagonist in “The Moon Cried Blood” is a thirteen year old biracial Black/Mexican girl, and the protagonist in “Happiness and Other Diseases” and “Somnalia” is a biracial Chinese/Hawaiian man. There are tons of queer characters in the Somnalia universe, which is based on Greco-Roman mythology. The Roman pantheon was queer as all get out.
I have a few trans and gender noncomforming characters, and X’ashia, the alien in Solitude and Disillusionment is a major one. He is composed of multiple subatomic creatures, and although he is biologically agender (because he procreates through cellular division), he shapeshifts a bunch and eventually acquires a gender identity, as male. There is a transman in“Insatiable but he is not a major character. Flynn Keahi, the main character in “Somnalia,” shapeshifts into a leopard who is female. Angelo and Shiela are two people who share a body in a three-story arc in the “Scierogenous” anthology – both of them African American. They are a technologically created system. A chip was implanted in Shiela’s brain, which created a new person, Angelo, for a companion. Although they are sexually involved with each other, both are primarily attracted to men.
People in the African American community of writers and in the Horror community have both been very supportive, so not a lot of backlash there. Early in my career, I had a handful of cisgender white men I knew from my twenties get drunk and come at me for trying to write. Trust me they all think they are liberal. One of them drunkenly rage-posted about how women can’t write horror until I blocked him on Facebook. Another bought one of my early self-pubs and then drunkenly rage-posted about there being typos. I have also had to deal with micro aggressive behavior at conventions.
GMM: Tell me about the “Erotic Storytelling Hour.” What’s the backstory of how it began and how have you had a hand in making it a reality?
SS: The Erotic Storytelling Hour is run by the San Francisco Leather and LGBT Cultural District. Our Cultural District is in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California. We are the world’s first LEATHER & LGBTQ Cultural District. The Cultural District was created by a resolution unanimously passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on May 1, 2018 and signed by the Mayor on May 9, 2018. We will have a Cultural Center there in the future, so this is literally bigger than me.
I have been very active in the local leather community since 2015, but did not become involved with the SF Leather District organization until after the pandemic last year. The original host, Bicoastal Beth, moved to the East Coast. I was a regular participant there, both as an attendee and as a reader. I had no idea they were considering me until they offered me the position. My boss, Cal Callaghan, actually took over Bicoastal Beth’s position as the District Manager. He said he wasn’t an entertainment type, and asked them to hire a separate person to host it.
Now, Cal and a very active board member, David Hyman, co-host the Erotic Storytelling Hour (ESTH) with me. Cal and David are behind the scenes running technical aspects of the Zoom call, and David makes announcements for the SF Leather Cultural District. The purpose of the ESTH is to support the members of the Cultural District, so every week we have four community readers and one feature. The feature is usually a name in the Leather community, such as a Leather titleholder, someone who runs community spaces or meetups, or someone who runs safe spaces for marginalized groups within our community. Sometimes the feature is an erotica author. People who attend virtually are a part of our community, as well as people who live here, and people who visit the Cultural District when they are in town. The event also serves to broaden awareness of our historical Cultural District as a tourist destination for people in the Leather community worldwide.
Part of my role and responsibilities is to help ensure that we have a diversity of readers. Because San Francisco’s Leather Heritage District was initially established by predominately white cisgender gay men, this includes making sure that ethnically diverse kinksters, and other members of the LGBTQ Leather District community such as trans, nonbinary, lesbian, bisexual… pretty much any queer person who isn’t a white cisgender gay man… get to read. Straight kinky people are also a part of the leather community.
GMM: What advice would you give to new writers who occupy more than one identity and embody the intersectionalities of race, class, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexuality, etc.? If you could go back in time, would it be the same advice you would give yourself as a novice writer?
SS: If I could go back in time, I think that, as a novice writer, I would have done some things differently. I didn’t find out about Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s “Writing the Other” until after I was well into my novel writing career. I have since become more aware of the fact that a person, while being a minority at many intersectionalities, can still be writing the other. I had some inkling, because I talked to my cousin, Heather, who is a quarter Hawaiian (a really big deal, since Europeans brought diseases to Hawaii that wiped out a lot of the native population) about a lot of things that went into the Somnalia series. Especially Book Three, Insatiable, which takes place in Hawaii, where I lived for seven years. Flynn Keahi, the protagonist of the series, is Hawaiian and Chinese and was raised by a Hawaiian single mother. Asking people to give you perspective on the characters that are unlike you is a good idea, even if you have no one available to do a sensitivity read.
Things I did actually do as a new writer that I would suggest, include getting involved in writers’ groups. I was in school at Berkeley City College, where I got a lot of advice from teachers and critiques from student peers that were useful. I started a Black Women’s Writing Group with a fellow student, and joined another Women Writer’s Group that was not exclusively, but predominantly, Black. As a disabled author, I got a lot of support from the disabled student’s services, and I also joined WryCrips, a disabled women’s writing and theater group. I was not out as a nonbinary person at that time. I started a Writing Group for kinksters after I came out as nonbinary. There were a lot of transpeople and queer folks of every ilk in it. It is good to have both mainstream (such as educational) and community writing spaces, in my opinion.
I am a firm believer in completing your first draft before getting perfectionist and hyper self-critical. It is a difficult lesson for a lot of first-time writers. You need to complete a first draft in a timely manner to avoid having a metric shit-ton of consistency and chronology errors. While you are sitting there, re-writing the same sentence fifty times, you are losing momentum on your plot points. Rewrites can occur during editing, and the flow is sometimes more critical than the perfect turn of phrase.
Get other eyes on it after you finish your rough draft. Other eyes during the writing of the first draft, that I choose, are much less critical than the ones I choose to allow to help me after the first draft is done. Hypercritical people during the writing of the first draft give me pretender’s syndrome and writer’s block.
“The Calico Cat” by Sumiko Saulson
“Don’t bring that thing in the house!” his mother shouted, as Joe slipped in the door after three p.m., a raggedy patchwork shadow at his feet. The cat, which couldn’t have weighed more than five pounds, had been following him since he walked off his school playground four blocks back.
“Aw, mommy, why?” he cried. “I was hoping to keep her. Can I keep her?” The cat was too thin. Her patchy fur was infested with angry fleas that bit his ankles when she rubbed up against them, begging for a pet. She wasn’t very pretty, but she was so sweet. She… he knew it was a she because calicoes are almost always female… already acted like he was her human.
“Out, you damned flea-bitten mangy mongrel!” Mom screamed. Could the cat understand English? She hissed at his mother, orange eyes blazed like campfire blazing.
“Come on, Mom!” Joe begged, but to no avail. Mom came running for the door, straw broomstick in hand. He jumped out of the way so she wouldn’t hit him with it on her way to the cat. She swatted madly at the calico, who responded by hissing, back arched like a Halloween decoration. Her claws dug into the pine stick, but to no avail. His mother struck the cat firmly in the hindquarters, and it skittered out into the yard.
“Mom’s right…” his older brother Stan whispered with a haunted look in his eyes. “We don’t want a cat in here, not that cat, anyhow.”
Joe wondered what was bothering Stan, but his older brother wouldn’t tell.
The next night, the calico showed up in his back window at dinnertime, meowing and begging to be let in or fed.
“Don’t feed it!” his father warned. The boy ignored him, and snuck table scraps to the calico at the back door. The calico licked her slender, black lips in anticipation as he offered her a strip of bacon. She must have been starving. She leapt up and nipped his wrist with her tiny fangs so hard that it bled.
“Told you so!” his dad said, shaking his head. “Those things are dangerous.” The boy yelled at the cat, and she skittered over the back fence, disappearing.
“Why are you afraid of cats?” Joe asked his father.
“Doesn’t she look familiar?” Dad asked him.
“She does,” Joe admitted. “But all cats kind of look alike, don’t they?”
“That’s one of your grandmother’s cats,” Dad told him. “She had about four of them, all but this one black. Last year, she died of a heart attack. We were shocked when we got home and found all four cats eating her corpse.”
“My goodness!” Joe shrieked. “Eating her?”
“Eating her face right off,” Dad nodded. “That one right there is named Amanda. She was eating your grandmother’s eyeball like she thought it was a mouse. And the smell… just awful.”
“Smell? How long was grandmother dead?” Joe asked. “Maybe they were just hungry.”
“Like hell!” Mom yelled. “Those cats are evil. Vile, plotting little things, they are, wicked! And she had the audacity to leave this house to them in her will.”
“She left everything to them,” Dad laughed. “Her lawyers probably think those cats still are living here and we’re giving them all the money. Fat chance of that!”
His brother Stan looked spooked. “Why don’t you tell Joe the truth?” Stan demanded. “Grandma was a witch. She left the house to those cats because they’re her familiars. That’s why they hate mom and dad. And they’ve been trying to get into the house ever since!”
“That’s crazy,” Joe said. But he wasn’t so sure. He’d been away at summer camp when Grandma died. When he came back, they’d moved into this nice house. They used to live in a trailer before that. No one explained where the house came from until now.
“The calico was their leader,” Stan insisted. “You’ll find out.”
Joe had terrible nightmares that night. Amanda had gotten into the house, along with three other cats, all of them black. She chased him to the bedroom, but he pushed her out and locked the door. He climbed into the bed, and hid under the sheets, but he couldn’t sleep. There were terrible screams coming out of the other rooms in the house.
The next morning, he got up and went down to breakfast, but no one was there.
“Mom?” he called out. Joe walked through the house looking for her, but didn’t find her. When he went to his parent’s bedroom, and opened the door, they weren’t inside. Instead, there were two black cats, sleeping in their bed.
He walked down to his brother’s room, and opened the door. There was a black kitten sitting on his bed.
Thinking he missed them, he walked back down to the kitchen. There, he saw a strange woman. Her black, orange, and white hair was up in a bouffant hairdo. It reminded him of the cat’s fur.
“Hello, Joe…” she purred. “My name is Amanda. I’ve come to take back what is mine.”
“But you’re a cat,” Joe said, his jaw dropping as he took a seat so he wouldn’t fall down.
“I am a witch,” she informed him. “I am your grandmother’s sister. You know, all of our family members can turn into cats. Too bad your no-good parents didn’t know that before they tried to steal my inheritance.”
Joe looked down and saw a bowl of cereal sitting on the table in front of him. In a state of shock, he began to eat it without thinking. He tried not to imagine his grandmother’s sister eating her eyeball while he was doing it.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you Friday!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Last week, I had an interesting discussion with veteran horror writer Amy Grech on writing horror while female. If you missed it, go check out her post.
This week, Girl Meets Monster welcomes two-time Bram Stoker Award winning writer Rena Mason to talk about her writing journey and her service to the horror writing community.
Rena Mason is the Bram Stoker Award® winning author of The Evolutionist and The Devil’s Throat, as well as a 2014 Stage 32 /The Blood List Search for New Blood Quarter-Finalist. She’s had nearly two dozen short stories, novelettes, and novellas published in various award-winning anthologies and magazines and writes a monthly column.
For more information visit her website: www.RenaMason.Ink or follow her at: Facebook: rena.mason Twitter: @RenaMason88 Stage 32: Rena Mason Instagram: rena.mason
Three Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Rena. I’ve been waiting to have you as a guest for a while and I’m glad we were able to get together. Before we jump into talking about your fragment and your writing in general, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your involvement in the Horror Writers Association. In 2019 you received the Richard Laymon President’s Award. Can you tell us about the different roles and responsibilities you’ve had or are currently performing in the HWA, and why this award is such an honor? Have you won any other awards for your service within the organization? When did you first become a member of the HWA and when did you decide to become a more active member of the community? What advice would you give others on how to become more active within the community?
RM: I’m honored to be among the authors you’ve had on Girl Meets Monster. Thank you for having me, Michelle. I’d finished my first novel, which wasn’t The Evolutionist, in 2009 and didn’t know where to go from there or what I needed to do in order to get it published, or even if it was publishable, so I started Googling and then attended writer events, the first being the Pacific Northwest Writers Association event. It was a strange experience, and even though I enjoyed it and learned a bit, I didn’t feel it was exactly right for me. Huge crowd, and not a very diverse one. There was well over a thousand people there. One lady sat next to me, looked at my badge that had Sci-Fi and Horror printed on it and then she got up and left. I glanced at her badge before she bolted—Romance. I know not all romance writers behave that way, but for a very new writer at her very first writing convention of any kind, I’ll admit that stung a bit and has stuck with me since. Long story short, I finally got to a horror writer event. KillerCon was my first in the genre and after that first one, I volunteered to work registration at the next few because I thought that would be the best way to meet people and remember their names. It worked for the most part, although I’m still terrible at remembering names. After deciding these were fellow genre lovers and friendlier folks, I started attending other horror events and was encouraged to join the HWA by people I’d met. I volunteered to work registration and more at their events as well, but after the events were over it was hard to stay in touch with my new writer friends and meet more new ones (I was very new to social media then and am still not very good at it), so I thought volunteering within the organization would help get me more comfortable in this whole new writing world I knew nothing about. I’ve made so many wonderful, lifelong friends in the horror community that they’ve become more like my family. It has meant a lot to me both personally and to my growth as a writer and I wanted to return that in some way, and that’s why I volunteered and have worked so hard over the years alongside so many others, and I’m proud of what we accomplished together. I think I became an HWA Supporting member around 2010 and volunteered to do data entry as the Compiler, and then became head of that department after a couple years, and then I was asked to become one of the awards chairs, finishing my 9+ years serving on the awards committee in 2019. The Richard Laymon Award is a volunteer service award given by the current President of the HWA for “exemplary service and dedication to the organization.” I also received the Silver Hammer Award in 2014, which is another service award given to volunteers who do a “massive amount of work, often behind the scenes.” The organization is always reaching out for volunteers. Whether you’re serving as a mentor or a juror, they’re great ways to meet other people in the community. Attending the events, and volunteering to work them, and volunteering to work in organizations, was and is a great way to network and best of all, make friends.
GMM: When you began your writing career, did you always envision yourself as a horror writer or did you have other goals in mind? What was the first horror story you wrote, and what inspired it? As a woman of color writing horror, have you encountered any obstacles along your journey of becoming an established writer? If so, how did you overcome them?
RM: Being such a big fan of horror and dark sci-fi and fantasy, I knew that whatever I wrote, it would be dark and have horror woven throughout. I started out writing what I enjoy, and that hasn’t changed. The first horror story I ever wrote was a dark fantasy. I was inspired to write it by something my mom had said after my younger sister died in a car accident. And no, I won’t say what it was, but it wasn’t anything bad. I’ll get back to finishing that story one of these days. It’s a very personal story and I wasn’t ready to write it before, but I’m getting there. If there were any obstacles in my becoming an established horror writer, I can’t list any specifically that are related to my being a woman of color that I’m aware of. Any obstacles I felt I overcame were because of my writing and where I was at in my writing career.
GMM: Your excerpt reminded me of some of the experiences the protagonist in Octavia Butler’s Kindred has when she finds herself in the past and has no idea how she’s gotten there. The idea of waking up to discover physical evidence on your body from something you thought was part of a nightmare really is terrifying. Without too many spoilers, can you tell us what’s happening to your protagonist? Did actual events inspire this story? Were you influenced by the work of any other writers?
RM: Kindred is such an amazing story. The way Butler moved Dana and Kevin through time and the way time itself was a changeable character in the story with so many deep and rich layers. I’m smiling ear to ear that you mention my excerpt reminded you of some of the experiences. In my story “Of Earth and Bone” the main character, Qieng, was sent to assay an abandoned and crumbling part of the Great Wall in the desert for a future tourist site possibility. In his gut Qieng knows it’s a punishment for having an affair with his commanding officer’s wife. In his gut Qieng knows he’ll likely die there. In the heat, with his water supply dwindling, he finds himself back in time to when they were building the Great Wall. He’s one of the workers, being treated the way those who built the wall were abused. When he returns to the present time, he records what he’s seen in his journal. What happens to him in the end is karmic in that he was not an innocent character. His journal, which has in essence become his spirit, is able to exact its revenge. A lot of Chinese stories and folktales end this way, everyone dies/no one wins, to keep balance, and I know that has a huge influence on my writing. I think everyone I’ve ever read from nonfiction to fiction has had an influence on me that I interpret in my own way on the page. This has been fun. Thanks again for having me.
Excerpt from “Of Earth and Bone” in the anthology The Forsaken: Stories of Abandoned Places published by Cemetery Dance in 2017.
“Get up, dog! No sleeping. Only work. Bring those rocks over there!”
Clouded in a sleep haze, I looked up at a man standing over me, yelling and pointing. The bright sun behind him shadowed his face.
“What?” I said.
The man raised his arm then brought it down. A hard, sharp sting struck my shoulder. I scrambled onto my feet.
“You heard me,” the man said. “Now get moving or I’ll have the other dogs put you between mud and stone!”
A crack, then another surge of pain through my arm as the man whipped me again. Worn and beaten men trudged past in lines behind the one with the whip. Hunched over they carried large stones and bramble. I hurried in the direction from where they came.
My tent had vanished. The wall section appeared crude and low. Men moved their loads to the north end.
“Hey you,” I said to one of the workers walking past. The man kept his head down and rushed on. Everyone else ignored me or turned away if I approached.
Sun seared the bleeding lashes on my arm and shoulder, slowly cauterizing them, cooking the split wounds open. My white uniform shirt had already browned from the previous day’s digging. The green trousers I wore had powdery tan dirt coating them. Everything worn and raggedy. But my boots and socks…where were they? Had I taken them off when I laid down to rest? I couldn’t remember.
Hot ground burned my bare feet from below and the sun’s rays heated everything above. Any sweat from exertion evaporated too quickly to cool my body. How could these men work in the high heat of day?
By the time I got to the front of the line, I’d had two dizzy spells. A haggard man handed me a large rock and a dried branch of saxaul. Blood in various stages of drying stained what remained of his shredded clothing.
“What’s your name?” the man said.
“I’m Major Qieng—”
“Shush. Speak no more.” The man looked around, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Don’t tell anyone else you’re a soldier. They’ll treat you worse. Believe me, I know. My village rose up against Emperor Wu, and now I’m the only one left. I’m Niu.”
“Emperor Wu? From the Han Dynasty?”
“He’s Han, yes. I’ve never heard of dynasty, though. Is that a new place?”
“What? No.” I thought for a moment on my history lessons.
“It was Wu’s armies that destroyed my village and brought anyone still alive here. Every day since I’ve watched my neighbors and family members die, their bodies used to build up the old wall.”
“Old wall?”
“You two!” The work master stood above them and shouted down.
Niu flinched and shoved the rock and tree branch into me. “Take these and follow the others. Look busy when Feng comes around. He’s heavy-handed with the crop.”
Thinking it lighter, I armed the wood using my injured side. It weighed me down nearly as much as the stone. The course bark of the sauxal and abrasive rock tore through my shirt and scraped my skin.
As I walked in line and kept pace with the others over hot ground, I raised my eyes. Barren desert wasteland dotted with greenery went on for miles in every direction; more than I remembered from when I’d set up camp to survey it. The surrounding hills lower, as well as the wavy sand dune layers that crept toward the wall.
Niu spoke in a crude dialect of old Mandarin, but I’d assumed him an uneducated laborer from a desert village. The more I thought on it, I wondered if I’d become dehydrated and delirious. Besides ruined clothing and slash marks across exposed areas of their skin, the people’s attire looked old, ancient even. I’d thought Niu might be deranged when he’d told me about Emperor Wu, but perhaps he was right and I wrong. Had I somehow traveled to the past? Maybe I’d gone mad.
The most profound evidence stood before me. A long ridge of packed earth that rose only three feet high, lower in some areas, stretching across the desert plain. Very different from the section where I’d staked my tent. These men were tasked to raise the dirt mound with rocks and whatever else nearby that might lend strength to it. Then I passed three wooden carts on my way to the end of the wall, unusual for their primitive wooden wheels. Niu would have more answers, so I rushed back.
“You there! Stop!” the work master said.
Everyone halted. A quick glance up revealed no one on the wall. I turned my head and heard a whoosh before a sharp pain raced across my shoulders. Then another came, slightly lower.
“First you don’t move and now you want to hurry?” said Feng. The task master continued thrashing until my entire back throbbed and I fell over.
—I’ve no idea of the actual date or time.
I woke from a nap with wounds I received during a nightmare. Pain keeps me from getting up and working much, but I did manage to dig down another foot when I came across small bundles of old rope. I’ve placed them into the pack along with the broken bones.
My dreams have become increasingly realistic. I fear I may be suffering fromdehydration. As fast as I’m going through the water supply, I’m beginning to doubt I will lastuntil the end of the week. It seems I may have stumbled upon some type of wormhole and am able to travel back into the past. This desert section of the Great Wall is a gateway. On the other side is Hell.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Happy New Year! Before Fiction Fragments took a short break to celebrate the holidays and regroup after a monumentally challenging year, I featured an excerpt from Deesha Philyaw‘s short story, “Peach Cobbler.”
Now, we’re back. It’s 2021 and Girl Meets Monster has some great writers lined up for the month of January, including this week’s guest, Donna J. W. Munro.
Donna J. W. Munro’s pieces are published in Dark Moon Digest # 34, Flash Fiction Magazine, Astounding Outpost, Nothing’s Sacred Magazine IV and V, Corvid Queen, Hazard Yet Forward (2012), Enter the Apocalypse (2017), Beautiful Lies, Painful Truths II (2018), Terror Politico (2019), It Calls from the Forest (2020), Borderlands 7 (2020), Gray Sisters Vol 1 (2020) and others. Her upcoming novel, Revelations: Poppet Cycle 1, will be published by Omnium Gatherum in 2021.
Order Donna’s novel, Revelations: Poppet Cycle 1, here: Amazon
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Donna and Happy New Year! Here we are at the beginning of 2021 and I’m sure we’re all hoping for a frest start and a less traumatic year than 2020. What exciting things do you have planned for the new year? What projects are you working on, and what writing goals are you setting for yourself?
DJWM: Happy New Year to you, too. I have a whole lot of hope that things will be better. I mean, the real world shouldn’t be weirder than things we are writing, right? It has been. I felt like we were living in American Horror Story for the last four years.
I’m excited that you’re interviewing me today, because my first novel is out tomorrow! Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book 1 is the first in a trilogy I’m working on, so most of 2021 will be rewrites of book 2 and 3. Besides that, I write a flash fiction story every weekend as part of the Obsidian Flash Writers Group. As far as goals, I think I’m shooting for at least 12 short stories published in 2021. Beyond that, I hope to stay well, get vaccinated, and start hanging out with my Convention friends again. Man, I miss my nerd fam so much!
GMM: Tell me a bit about your fragment. IS it more difficult writing from the POV of a guinea pig than it is for a human, or did you simply imagine Muffin as a human while writing this piece? What was your process like, and what inspired the story? Why a guinea pig?
DJWM: “He Ate It” is a story I wrote as part of a challenge at Obsidian Flash. We post images there to spark our weekly stories and then share them with each other for critique. One week the prompt was a guinea pig. That, combined with the my anxiety over our current US politics, created Muffin the meglomaniacal guinea pig. His voice wasn’t hard to come up with, since it’s the internal voice I imagined that our President might have. I had a whole lot of fun trying to think about what obstacles would stand in the way of a guinea pig trying to become ruler of the world. The absurdity of its lack of experience and not knowing how big the world is, but still wanting to rule it as it’s first act of sentience tickled my writing fancy. The hubris he had was super fun to write, especially since I got to slap him in it. It’s not a perfect story and the Neitzche joke at the end might be a bit flat, but it makes me cackle every time.
GMM: Tell me about your most challenging writing project to date. Was it a short story or a longer piece of fiction? What roadblocks did you encounter while writing it? How did you modify your process to complete the piece? Did you publish it?
DJWM: Novels challenge me. I force myself to write one every year because I’m told that’s where the big money is (all the writers I know are laughing along with me right now). Short stories naturally come to me. Good or bad, if I sit down to write a short story, one comes out. But novels! Holy cookies, there’s so many moving parts. Continuity and plot vs character arc and description and action and subtext–Oh my! That’s why I surround myself with brilliant people that catch me when I’m lazy. My beta readers are great, but Anna LaVoie of Literally Yours Editing is my savior. Honestly, if you are a writer and you want to make your plot sing, developmental editors like Anna are so, so worth it. My process now includes two to three rounds of Anna combing through my writing and asking hard questions that kill the stupid plot devices and melodrama. She’s incredible. The result of this new process is the beginning of my trilogy that’s dropping tomorrow, Poppet Cycle. Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book 1 has been in my hard drive for probably twelve years. I dusted it off after meeting with Johnny Worthen of Omnium Gatherum a couple of years ago at HWA’s Stoker Con and now it’s about to be born.
Novels are hard. You know what I’m talking about with your fantastic debut Invisible Chains.Writing is just one part of the job. Then, there’s marketing. And keeping track of businessy stuff, which isn’t my thing. I will learn though! Might take the rest of my life, but I’m on it.
Roadblocks? Everything is a potential roadblock. Time crunches, bills, kids, cats, day job as a teacher, depression, shiny things that keep me from putting my butt into the chair and getting work done. How about the fact that all writers are really two people inside. There’s the hopeful creative who keeps throwing out new ideas, even when you need to just focus on the one you are working one. Then there’s the vicious editor. No real life editor I’ve ever met acts like the editor I have inside my own head. It’s the voice that tells me I’m too old to make it as a writer or that my words are childish and no one will ever want to read them. That voice is useful when you can tame it into a true editor voice, but mostly it’s the worst roadblock of all. It takes away joy from the process. It belittles your efforts. No matter how many successes you have it makes you wonder if you’ll ever have another. That little monster is tough to tame.
HE ATE IT by Donna J. W. Munro
Muffin became self-aware on Saturday at 8pm. Until then, he’d been a carefree guinea pig occasionally living with a stinking cage or water, tinged green. Overall, he’d been well cared for. His human, a female juvenile, picked him up and cuddle warm sweet skin to his fur. This time he realized that he’d never have a better chance. He bit her soft throat where heat thrummed closest to the surface. Fluids gushed from her wound, red gouts wetting him. Her little hands dropped him as they struggled to cover the terrible wound. Exactly as planned.
Her screams drew the larger humans into girl’s room– exactly as planned– and Muffin rushed out the door into the larger world. He hid himself beneath a thing with metal springs and wooden slats and padded with lovely fluff, though it all smelled like human ass. He watched the humans rush by with the little one clutched between them. As they ran, they voices squeeled as he’d done when he’d been a dumb beast. He couldn’t blame them their weakness. After all, he’d attacked their young. But Muffin’s own history taught him that some young must be eaten for the benefit of the stronger. He’d eaten his nest brothers and sisters to keep the milk only for him.
They left and, exactly as planned, Muffin had conquered the world. He waddled into the food room, drawn by the bitter odor real food. Not the tough pellets the young female put in his cage. A tall machine hummed and rattled, doing business Muffin didn’t care to understand. Only the room’s obstacles concerned him. He sniffed the edges of the room, taking in the potential bolt holes as he sought food and water. High above him, the scent of fresh water falling in ringing drips wafted down, but the wall before him rose as a sheer monolith. Somewhere up there sat a bowl of fruit– he remembered seeing it when the female adolescent carried him. Now the cloying sweet of the fruit filled his nose full. He needed to climb the cliff, but how?
He noticed on the floor a bowl of slimy water and a bowl of kibble that reminded him he wasn’t alone. He slunk over to the flapping entrance in the middle of a closed door. It smelled like the other animal. Could he convince the dumb beast to help him reach the food and water, through tricks or taming. Or would the beast be so mindless he’d need to eliminate him? Muffin wanted to assess the situation. He tumbled through the flap into a cold, hard-floored room that smelled of bitter things and danger. Muffin sneezed the scent out of his nose. In the corner, a massive beast lay curled on a stinking pillow. Muffin’s heart hammered as he considered the it.
He sheltered behind a leaning chalky cliff, watching the beast take deep breaths. It had a pointed nose and long legs. So many times bigger than he. Muffin swallowed down the urge to run. Hadn’t he defeated the humans? Hadn’t he conquered the whole world? This creature would work for him or Muffin would kill him. With that thought, he scuttled forward, following the outline of the wall toward the corner the beast lay in. The closer he got, the stronger the creature’s musky scent. Muffin knew this beast from when the human played with this it in front of his glass-fronted prison. Named Nee-chee or some such, it leapt and capered and carried toys in its mouth like a giant imbecile. It could be trained, therefore Muffin just needed to figure out how.
“See here, beastie,” Muffin said, tapping on the wet, triangular nose before him. “Wake up.”
Its eyes snapped open and its lip curled over sharp teeth. But Muffin had come too far to let fear stop him.
“I defeated the humans. Sent them scurrying. Now, I’m the master of this house. You’ll serve me as you served them. Do you understand?” The creature nodded, teeth parting and tongue sliding out with panting breaths.
“I need food and water. Both are high up. You’ll let me ride your back to get up.”
The beast tilted its head, in deference. Muffin’s spirits soared and he hurried toward it, to climb its back. Then the best fixed his gaze on the exposed Muffin near it’s flanks and snorted.
“Why would I help the one who injured my little human? I’ve been training her for years. Foolish rat thing, do you think you are the only self-aware being in this place? ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.’” The tall beast lifted itself with a languid stretch.
“Or perhaps you’ll have to deal with a monster,” he said, smiling.
Muffin squealed and started to dart away when one massive paw pinned him to the cold floor. “What will you do to me?”
“Why worry about such things, little mote? I’m the abyss and I’m finished looking into you.”
His massive jaws encircled Muffin’s head, crunching down. Thus, Muffin was self-aware no more.
“I’m going to kill that rodent,” the woman said as she carried her bandaged little girl into the house.
“We’ll have to find it. Could be anywhere by now,” the man whispered, opening the door to the child’s bedroom so his wife could lay the child in bed. Stitches and shots and blood transfusions left their mark. She’d be scarred and fearful, but she’d survived. They checked under the bed, hugged their girl, and shut the door.
The man began searching for the Guinea pig under the couches, but the tick-tack of the dog’s claws across the wooden floor caught the wife’s attention. “Oh, my poor puppy. Are you hungry, Nietzsche Dog? Want dinner?”
The dog woofed and lay the head of the guinea pig at her feet. He grinned up at her, his grey schnauzer mustache stained red with the blood of the dead conqueror.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Last week I chatted with Tony Tremblay about tacos, reviewing books, and his forthcoming novel from Haverhill House, Do Not Weep For Me.
This week, Girl Meets Monster welcomes poet, lyracist and writer Donna Lynch.
Donna Lynch is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated dark fiction poet and author, spoken word artist, and the co-founder—along with her husband, artist and musician Steven Archer—of the dark electronic rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records).
An active member of the Horror Writers Association and three-time contributor to the HWA Poetry Showcase, her published works include the novels Isabel Burning, and Red Horses; the novella Driving Through the Desert; and the poetry collections In My Mouth, Twenty-Six, Ladies & Other Vicious Creatures, The Book of Keys,Daughters of Lilith, Witches, and the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award-winning Choking Back the Devil (Raw Dog Screaming Press).
She is the founder of the Garbage Witch clothing brand, part-time tour manager, avid cross-country driver, and geography fanatic. She and Steven live in Maryland.
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Donna. Thank you for joining me in these weird times. Has the pandemic and current events had an impact on your creativity? What spooky things have you been cooking up while in quarantine?
DL: It absolutely is having an impact. My focus and concentration are worse than usual, and I’m having to work extra hard at not putting myself down because of it.
That said, I have been able to dive into a new poetry collection: a mix of contemporary folk legends and the lives of my friends and myself growing up in suburban and rural areas. There is a quiet horror that happens in those communities that have traditionally fancied themselves safer and of higher moral ground than urban areas, and as young women growing up in those places, we knew it all too well.
GMM: Tell me about your writing process. Does your process differ between writing lyrics, poetry and fiction? Or, does the same Muse speak to you for all of your creative endeavors?
DL: Lyrics require hooks and there are more “restrictions”. The words not only have to be memorable and impactful, but they have to fit. Everything else feels easy compared to that.
But the words all come from the same well. The bigger challenge is keeping the well from going dry.
GMM: Without giving away too many spoilers, can you tell me about your fragment? Is this part of a larger piece? What’s happening in the story?
DL: My fragment is an excerpt from a work-in-progress collection of short stories that feature the same protagonist: a centuries-old entity who has taken numerous forms throughout time, but during the twentieth century, assumes the identity of a southern gentleman, based on an archetype of the devil they once saw in a film. I won’t share their/ his purpose here, only preface this excerpt by saying they act as a companion to those who need it the most, but in this particular story, struggles with their agenda.
I started this collection many years ago, and I made two mistakes: I made it too big, and I made it too precious. But now, in 2020, enough has changed that I feel ready to carve it into manageable pieces, and I can make the adjustments necessary to feel good about its place in the world, to whatever degree that may be. Offering up this (unedited) fragment here is the first step in me letting it breathe and letting it go.
Miss Abyss
I said it before and it’s always true: some of them are just harder than others.
This one, I can’t say she’s a failure. I wouldn’t ever call her that, no way. But she ain’t made of the same stuff the others are. She’s of something stronger and stranger, and at the same time she’s nothing.
A very long time ago she bound me not to say her name, and I can’t even remember it now, which goes to show how powerful she really is. And pardon my metaphor, but if I’m the stitches, she’s the wound that’s just too wide and deep.
I can’t really save any of my girls, that’s not my job and I couldn’t if I tried, but I especially can’t save her. For her to be who she is, she can’t ever be spared from it. She’s a chasm, a void. But, by god, there’s something deep down in there that is so fragile, and compassionate, and alone, I don’t know how it survives. It’s so far down, I don’t know how it’s fed, but it is. Not much, but enough, I guess.
Now—for a void— if there’s one thing she’s excellent at filling, it’s your time. Otherwise, she’s a taker. She takes your energy, your sanity, your common sense. But even then, that ain’t her fault. It’s her nature, and she only takes what you offer. It’s a pretty deep hole she’s aiming to fill, so it takes a lot, and there ain’t much point in fighting because once you open your mouth and start telling her your story and she starts listening in a way nobody ever listened before, you’ve already approached the event horizon.
The problem with little Miss Abyss is that there ain’t no lesson for her. There’s no moral of her story. She’s not a saint, or a martyr, not a demi-god, or a spirit. She’s eternal, but that don’t mean much when you only exist for other people, because they will you to exist. She’s a distraction for anyone looking for an escape, though she doesn’t know it’s temporary. If everyone let her alone tomorrow, she’d just…not be.
She doesn’t know she isn’t real. But that ain’t ever gonna happen, because people ain’t ever gonna stop wanting someone to listen the way she listens. They ain’t ever gonna stop wanting something to fill their time and emptiness.
It took me a hell of a long time to figure out why we came across each other, but then it hit me: someday, I’m might have to tell her. At least, I think I will. My job is to be merciful, to make the transitions easier, to not let them linger, hurting and desperate. I get mad at myself for letting her go on this long, getting used and thrown away time and time again. I lose track of time, but I’ll tell you, it’s been long enough to make me feel ashamed. Hard truth is, I’m fond of her, and I don’t want to set something into motion I can’t control. Like I said, that ain’t my job. But it also ain’t really fair to her.
It seems harmless enough, just thinking it through. If she’s nothing, then why shouldn’t people bring her into existence if they need her? She’s summoned by the lonely, the trapped, the insecure. She’s called by people who need a distraction from their boring lives and ugly selves, and they’d rather face the better person they see reflected in her hopeful eyes. “Where’s the harm?” they think. They never remember asking for anything out loud. So when they’ve used her up, or offered more than they could afford to lose to, they always say “Hey, sweetheart, I never said you had to keep coming around,” or “We never said this was forever”, and they send her away, emptier than when she got there, if that’s even possible. It’s like looking at a hole torn in space. You can hardly even understand what you’re looking at. You just know it’s dark and cold.
But here we are, over and over, and though I see she’s hurting, I can see she’s hoping—hoping to be real, hoping that this time, she’ll be enough—and I let it ride because it feels so good to have her with me. I don’t have to teach her a damn thing. I don’t have to carry her through a trauma or a gate, into her next form. I don’t have to hold her hand while she nestles into place in a folktale or ghost story. We just exist together and I tell her about all of it and she just listens and smiles and makes me forget all of the terrible things I see, and every time, just as I’m feeling so good, it hits me like a shotgun blast to the head—
I don’t set her free because she’s my distraction, too.
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Last week, I spoke with Mexican American expat V. Castro about her erotic vampire fiction and I’m still thinking about that scene in the Irish pub, wondering what filthy delights await her vampire protagonist.
This week, I’m excited to welcome Jessica Guess to Girl Meets Monster. I recently picked up a copy of Jessica’s horror novella, Cirque Berserk (2020) and couldn’t put it down.
Jessica Guess is a writer and English teacher who hails from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She earned her Creative Writing MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato in 2018 and is the founder of the website Black Girl’s Guide to Horror where she examines horror movies in terms of quality and intersectionality.
Her creative work has been featured in Luna Station Quarterly and Mused BellaOnline Literary Review. Her debut novella, Cirque Berserk, is available for purchase on Amazon. You can get weekly content from Jessica by joining her Patreon at www.patreon.com/JessicaGuess
Three Questions
GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, Jessica. I loved Cirque Berserk, because it captured so many of the things I loved about watching slasher movies while I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. The major difference being that one of your main characters is a young Black girl, and her love interest is Latino…or possibly Native American. Most of the slasher movies I watched didn’t have Black people in them. The ones that did have Black characters usually killed them off right away, to the point that this is now considered a trope in horror films. How did this absence of Black characters affect you as a viewer and reader?
JG: I think that being a huge fan of horror while being constantly reminded of how much the genre disregards Black people created a resentment in me. Don’t get me wrong, I really do love horror. I love the mythologies, and the blood, and the monsters, but for a very long time it has felt like we’re a punchline in the genre. I think it’s like that for anyone who isn’t a white, cis-gendered, heterosexual person in horror. That makes me want to kind of right that wrong in my own writing. I want to see all the things I didn’t see growing up.
NOTE: Jessica told me Rocehelle’s love interest is Native American, but asked me not to reveal his name to avoid spoilers. So, go pick up a copy of Cirque Berserk and find out for yourself.
GMM: I recently watched American Horror Story: 1984, and during each episode I was calling out the names of the movies or characters they were referencing based on the way someone was murdered. What are some of the horror movies or scenes from movies that inspired your work? Are there murders in your book that mimic the tropes of slasher movies?
JG: Definitely Urban Legend. I think that movie has some of my favorite slasher kills ever. I wanted the kills in Cirque Berserk to be as memorable as those and have a type of irony that they did in Urban Legend. An example of that is the opening of when the girl in Urban Legend is driving with an ax murderer in her back seat and “Turn Around Bright Eyes” starts playing. That’s definitely an inspiration for a scene in Cirque Berserk. That scene in particular also takes some inspiration from The Strangers: Prey at Night. I just like the idea of upbeat music playing when something horrific is happening.
GMM: AHS: 1984 uses music not only to trigger nostalgia, but to put us in the setting and create a sense of atmosphere to remind us which time period we’re witnessing on screen. How did you use music in your novella to create nostalgia for the characters and your readers? What other details did you use to give us a sense of the time and setting? Did you rely on any specific horror tropes, or did you try to create something new?
JG: So, the song titles set up the sections of the novella, but they also give a hint to what the theme of that section is. For instance, in the “Rhythm of the Night” section, we finally figure out exactly what is happening, which is to say we’re figuring out the rhythm of this night. It helped me to frame the story while also relying on the nostalgia and atmosphere those songs create. As for tropes, I hoped to take some old tropes and re-invent them. I think that’s what we’re supposed to do as writers, take tropes that could be stale or overused, and find a way to make them new and fresh. I like to think I did that with Rochelle and Brian. I wanted the reader to start out thinking they knew exactly where the story was going and then realize they didn’t know at all.
Karlie, Karlie, Where Did You Go? (Excerpt)
Lisa
I watched Erica’s blue impala through my rearview mirror. I was parked with the back of my car to the back of her car. Why had she pulled in to an orange orchard? Did she spot me? Why wasn’t she getting out of her car? A cold sweat formed on my forehead. What if she told Aaron?
Just then, Erica got out of her car and walked up to the storefront that was shaped like a cottage. Maybe she wanted to pick oranges. Or maybe she was calling Aaron to warn him. My palms were suddenly slipping off the steering wheel from sweat. Should I follow her or just go home? I gripped the keys ready to start the ignition but stopped. I had to find out what happened to my cousin.
“Hello darlin’,” an old gray-haired white woman said from the cash register. “Care to try some orange and peach jam? I make it here myself.”
“No, thank you. I’m uh, just looking around,” I said.
“If you want to pick from our grove, you just come on up here and grab a basket and go on out back. You can take a guide with you. Sometimes people get lost back there you know.”
I smiled at her. “Did a girl just come in here? One with deep brown skin and frizzy brown hair and a red hoody? We’re supposed to meet up.”
The woman nodded. “Said she was pickin’ some orange for her mom.”
“I guess I’ll take a basket.”
“That’ll be a dollar fifty for the basket.”
I gave the woman the money and she offered me a wide wicker basket and pointed me towards the back of the cottage where the wide grove started.
Was Erica really doing something kind for her parent? Did I follow her for nothing? Maybe this was a distraction so that Aaron could hide evidence while I was off chasing Erica. Damn it! Did I fall for some trick?
I walked down a row of oranges and looked for a glimpse of Erica’s hoody. The sun was beating down hard but there was a breeze so the sweat forming on my forehead wasn’t as much as it had been for the past few days. The citrusy smell of oranges invaded my nostrils as I turned and looked for any glimpse of Erica.
I moved further and further into the grove trying to keep the entrance in sight.
Sometimes people get lost back there, you know.
I moved passed orange tree after orange tree but still, there was so sign of Erica.
“Erica?” I called finally. It was a long shot but maybe she’d answer. “Erica, I just wanted to talk to you for a second. My name is Lisa Yen, I’m Karlie Yen’s cousin. The girl who died? I saw you with Aaron earlier. I just need to ask you some questions.”
Just then I saw a flash of the red to the right of me. I turned. Nothing there. Instead just more orange trees. I moved to where I saw the flash.
“Erica?” I called, running further into the grove.
A feeling of dreadful realization rose inside of me. No one knew where I was. I didn’t tell Travis where I was going. That woman in the cottage thought I was here with a friend. This grove went on for acres. I looked back to try to see the entrance but all I saw was more orange trees.
“Shit,” I whispered. I tried retracing my steps to find a way out. My heart was beating loud and fast in my chest and sweat poured down my neck.
My bra was noticeably wet now and uncomfortable. I had only been in the grove for a few minutes, but I was lost and drenched and starting to get scared. I tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t.
“Fuck,” I whispered as I frantically checked my pockets for my inhaler.
I must have left it in the car. I forgot how bad my asthma got in Everpeirce. Orlando was a little better even though the air was dryer there. The problem with Everpierce was that there were more swamplands, dust mites, and pollen from all the different citrus orchards in the air here. And here I was in the middle of a field of oranges, with no inhaler. Smart girl.
“Shit,” I whispered trying not to panic. I stopped walking and managed to slow my breathing a bit though knew I still needed my medicine. I walked in the direction that I thought I came from, but nothing. No entrance, just oranges.
Just then there was another flash of red just to the left of me.
“Erica? I just want to talk!”
“Is that why you were following me?”
I turned around and there she was. Her hoody was pulled over her head and her sleeves pulled all the way down to her wrists despite the overwhelming heat.
“Erica?” I said stupidly. I was out of breath again now. The heat, orange blossom pollen, and fear not doing my asthma any favors. Erica on the other hand looked fine, cool, and not scared in the least.
“Why are you following me?” She stared at me, her hands in her hoody pocket.
“I-I just wanted to ask you some questions,” I said, hands on my knees. “Hey—do you—know the way—out?” I said between gasps. “I’m—lost”.
Erica stared at me silently, not moving. Her face was expressionless and unreadable, but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Her dark brown eyes moved around, seeming to look if anyone else was in the orchard with us.
“It’s r-really hot out here,” I said gasping a little. She turned back to face me but remained silent. “Aren’t you hot?”
Her eyes narrowed in on me, her face still unreadable.
“E-Erica,” I said, starting to get dizzy. “Can’t breathe—please—help.”
Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!
Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.
Girl Meets Monster 
You must be logged in to post a comment.