TC Review & Interview: The Professor Is In - John Langan teaches and terrifies with second fiction collection THE WIDE CARNIVOROUS SKY & OTHER MONSTROUS GEOGRAPHIES

Cover artwork by Santiago Caruso

Every insular creative scene has its personalities, its movers, its stars. It's like the cover of Tiger Beat magazine.  Or a boy band... covered by Tiger Beat magazine. These personalities have labels: The Shy One. The Flirt. The Bad Boy. The Heartthrob.

As mainstream publishing occasionally—and grudgingly—accepts while also further insulates indie press Weird fiction (not an easy bit of cultural gymnastics), a brighter light is being shed on the personalities in this scene, as well. The boy (and girl) band members. While others can hash out who is who and whom is whom, I have my own labels. And in this issue of Tiger Beat, John Langan is The Professor. Or, The General. But mostly The Professor.

You see, Langan actually is a professor in his workaday life, and seems to be naturally suited to the proud vocation, as he can't help but teach us—his students—with each and every one of his layered, finely crafted, incredibly interesting stories of horror and the strange, which are on full display in his latest collection of short fiction The Wide, Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus Press, 2013), a title I muchly dig, splayed over a cover featuring art by the renowned Santiago Caruso.

When I write "teach" I don't mean "preach," as his work is not preachy in the slightest. Didactic, yes, but I enjoy didacticism, as I'm a huge fan of stylistic writing, unique voice, and guiding subtext. In the case of The Professor, the teaching comes from his deconstruction of the supernatural tale, tearing it down, showing us the parts, and then building it back up in front of our wide, wondrous eyes. There is a deftness in the way he plays with tropes, a celebration, and even at times a wink and a nudge to the reader while he turns them inside out, shining light on a new angle of something you thought you already knew. This is an expert at work within genres, archetypes, and iconic monsters that he clearly loves, and his enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious, which translates to the reader as a good professor does with an interesting, or even a complex, lecture. One gets the sense of learning while being entertained, or moved, or horrified. That is not an easy thing to do. Hence, my clumsy metaphor above. Hence, Langan as The Professor.

The analogy is set from the first pages of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies, as "Kids" takes place in a classroom, a setting to which we are returned two stories later, in "Technicolor." The former is a piece of flash fiction written from a viewpoint you'd imagine is quite common amongst teachers forced to deal with the smallish nightmares birthed into the world and hustled off into the local schools, while the former is a mesmerizing rumination on Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," in which the reader gets a glimpse of what The Professor might sound like when standing in front of his assembled students. An arcane history of Poe's famed short story and the details surrounding its creation are reeled off by an instructor in loving homage and as a bit of slight of hand, while something else is happening just outside the schoolhouse. This is a dazzling info-load couched inside historical and dark literary fiction, wrapped up by a Weird mystery tale. EAP would be incredibly proud.

In between these two pieces is the meaty, strong-limbed "How The Day Runs Down," which is a zombie tale unlike any I've previously read. Not that I've read a lot of zombie fiction, mind, but I love the theatrical, shattered fourth wall way that Langan structures this tale, and inside of this armature of a narrated stage play, his overall rendering of a zombie apocalypse touches on the often random nature of total societal collapse and those who will survive. Terrifying, heartbreaking, and boldly experimental, this is—as are other stories in this collection—a piece of meta horror fiction that evidences a writer who can look at stories in three, and sometimes four, dimensions when deciding how to tell them.

The titular tale arrives next, shifting gears into an action-packed Gulf War story detailing the decimation of an American platoon by something that swoops down from the sky, told in both the present and through flashback, as the survivors prepare to deal out some payback against a cosmic bloodsucker that apparently hasn't read any of the old, tired vampire yarns about what it can and cannot do, and when. This is grim, grisly, totally fun stuff, reminiscent of the Pulps, and reflects Langan's love of comic books and Robert E. Howard.

"City of the Dog"—in addition to being a story about canine monsters prowling the more ancient parts of 1990's Albany—struck me as a powerful tale about cowardice, and other emotional failings of selfish people trying to hold onto relationships, and ultimately save themselves, at a very selfish age. "The Revel" deals with similar beasts, but in a much different way, walking the reader through the commonplace steps of your classic werewolf film while not telling that same reader that the camera was never rolling.

At this point in the collection, we've seen the author give the Langan Treatment to zombies, werewolves, and vampires, while also discussing, in detail, the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Not many writers can jump strata with such a deft, confident touch, or with such a sense of enjoyment.

Veering left is "The Shallows," which shows us backyard Lovecraftian horror drenched in the bizarre. Dread and loneliness and grief and madness now live in a world that has changed forever, while something incredibly large is moving out in the water... The story had what can only be described as a psychedelic effect on me while reading it, as I imagined the scene dotted with colorful strobes and that weird soundtrack music of early 70's experimental film while the narrator puttered around his property and garden, accompanied by his trusty crab.

"June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris." is a quick, jarring tale of a serial killer answering to a higher calling, intent on making a spitfire named "Laird" his next victim, written for an online ribbing/tribute page to fellow horror author Laird Barron. The creep-out factor of the antagonist balances well with the reader cheering on the protagonist, who obviously knows what to do when he has a knife in his hands. Blades ain't just for slicing sled rope, bub.

"Mother of Stone" is saved for last, which is fitting, as this big, intense work of investigative supernaturalism grabs up the reader and shoves them inside a very real world where things aren't as they appear, and dark forces from outside are at play in the most common of places. This story of a headless statue of mysterious origin and the skeptical writer who tracks down the truth could have easily served as the anchor text for a full novel, so well drawn are the characters, so vibrant is the setting. The crescendo created by "Mother of Stone" struck the perfect note to finish off the symphony.

Following the fiction, I loved the story notes section, as my inner fanboy geeks out on background and inspiration info related to stories I enjoy. The early edition ARC I received unfortunately didn't include the afterword by Laird Barron, as I'm always interested in Barron's take on writing in general, and specific writers in particular. His close friendship with Langan would have made for epic reading.

Last year I read Langan's previous collection, the outstanding Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, and upon finishing The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies, I can see the growth of a writer in terms of narrative scope and guiding structure, in the confidence and audacity. One can sense newfound freedom in these nine tales. This is a powerhouse collection, large and deep, both familiar and innovative, at times heartrendingly tragic and other times giddy fun. John Langan is a writer working at the leading edge of horror fiction, tipping his hat in respect to the landmarks behind him while helping map the new terrain ahead. The genre is in good hands while The Professor is drawing up tomorrow's lesson plan.
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What brought you into writing, and if you can recall, was there a moment of clarity in your life where you thought that you could move beyond just reading books and possibly become an author yourself?

Storytelling has always been present in my life, in one form or another.  I can remember writing my version of King Kong vs. Godzilla when I was in first grade; admittedly, so I could draw the accompanying picture of the two monsters squaring off.  When I got in trouble for something in the third grade (I can’t remember what), and my father told me he wanted me to write him a story as part of my punishment, I wrote my own version of the latest issue of Marvel’s Supervillain Team-Up, in which Dr. Doom fought the Red Skull on the moon.  (As you might imagine, this was not what my father intended, but to his credit, he accepted it.)  And when I was in the sixth grade, I wrote and read to my English class a Halloween story about a kid’s encounter with what was essentially one of Tolkien’s Nazgûl.  I think that may have been my first inkling that I had some ability as a writer.  I can remember the feel of the other students’ attention, the quiet that descended on the classroom as they listened to the story.  My freshman year of high school, I would write a horror story that won first place in the school’s Christmas writing contest, and was published in the school newspaper, and I suppose I could point to that as the moment of clarity as regards to my writing future.  But reading a story about a confrontation with a monster—a fundamentally literary monster—to my classmates may have been my first hint of the direction I’d eventually go.


Now that we've squared that away, what drew you to the darker side of the literary ledger?

That’s the question, isn't it?  My childhood was punctuated by moments of trauma, from getting a sliver of metal in my right eye when I was two and a half (which required surgery) to my father suffering a pair of heart attacks pretty much consecutively when I was thirteen.  That awareness of the contingency of experience, of the way in which the bottom can drop out from under you without warning, combined with a deeply Catholic upbringing, in which the supernatural, both good and bad, was an active part of existence.  If you look closely enough at any writer’s life, I suppose their choice of material will seem overdetermined.  Certainly, I’m aware of that in my case.


In a similar vein, who (or what) do you consider an influential force on your writing? What writers do you most (professionally) admire, and read the most?

I can’t overestimate the importance comic books had for me as a developing reader and writer, especially the Marvel titles of the sixties, seventies, and eighties.  Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Doug Moench, Chris Claremont, all played an important role in the formation of my writing, as did Robert E. Howard, to whose fiction I was led by Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian adaptation, and Lloyd Alexander and J.R.R. Tolkien.  The writer who first galvanized me, however, who made me feel as if I’d been touched by the Hand of God and set on a mission to do this same thing, was Stephen King, whose Christine I read in paperback the fall of my freshman year of high school, and from which I never looked back.  In the three-plus decades since then, I've encountered a few writers who have had a similar impact:  Peter Straub, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Henry James, more recently Dickens and Robert Browning.  These are the names that come to mind when I think about the writers I’d like to re-read once again.  Heaven knows, a number of my contemporaries have evoked a similar response, too, from Laird Barron to Paul Tremblay to Glen Hirshberg to Michael Cisco.


What is your normal writing schedule? 

I try to write every day, and to produce at least a page during those one or two hours.  I used to get up early in the morning to do this; now, I stay up late into the night.


With echoes of the classroom throughout The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, how has your work as a teacher effected your writing and the stories you choose to write?

“Teaching,” was the answer I gave to my parents when they asked me how I intended to support myself as an adult (since “writing” was never taken seriously as an option).  Initially, I planned to teach high school English, but the English professors I had when I started my undergraduate education at SUNY New Paltz convinced me that I should pursue a degree in English, as opposed to education.  To be fair, I didn't take much convincing.  From the start, I was infatuated with college, and the prospect of remaining in that environment, to pursue literary study and to teach at that level, appealed to me more than I could say.  When I began studying for my Master’s degree, also in English, also at New Paltz, I was accepted into the English Department’s teaching assistant program.  I was assigned a section of Freshman Composition 1, which I took through fifteen weeks of writing the college-level essay.  At the same time, I took a class in and attended weekly meetings dedicated to teaching at the college level.  Still, talk about on the job training…  Since then, I've taught pretty much every year, with the exception being two semesters I took off when I started taking classes at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I did work towards a Ph.D.  I've moved from teaching freshman writing to teaching introductory literature classes, then to teaching more advanced literature classes, and then to teaching creative writing classes.

All of which is to say that teaching has been a crucial, even fundamental, part of my adult life.  It’s allowed me to return to certain texts and writers over and over again, and to discuss how a novel such as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier works with a room full of bright, motivated people.  It’s helped me to remain aware of the possibilities of style and form available within fiction.  The classroom and larger college campus have also served as settings for a number of my stories and my novel, House of Windows.  There’s a great diversity of students and faculty at a public university like SUNY New Paltz, a great number of stories swirling around.  There are the same conflicts of the human heart that you encounter in any community, any workplace.  From the standpoint of setting and character, it’s fertile ground, one that permits me to write about pretty much any type of character or situation I choose.


What is your favorite story in this collection? What is the most personal to you?

It’s funny:  I've never thought of the stories in this book in this way.  There are things in each of them that I’m pleased with.  I do have a soft spot for “The Revel,” because its earliest version marked my return to writing horror fiction after a long time away.  I decided to pull out all the stops in writing it, to go for broke, to bring together everything I knew about writing fiction with everything I knew about horror narratives.  I read it to my wife, then my girlfriend, when I visited her at Penn State, where she was completing her dissertation.  It was the middle of a hot summer, and her apartment had no air conditioning and no TV.  She would take breaks in her work, and I would read the next installment to her.  I suppose it was part of our courtship.  In any event, reflecting on that story returns me to the humid air, the voices of the golfers playing the golf course across the street, the clack and snap of the keyboard.


At 68 pages, the harrowing investigative piece, “Mother of Stone,” could have easily hopped and skipped its way to becoming a novel, and - with the general industry perception that "the novel is king" - I can see a temptation to pad it up a bit to release it as such. What led you to include it in a collection of short form fiction?

The simple answer is, I needed a new story for my collection, and I thought I’d finish this one, which had begun as my intended contribution to Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas’s Haunted Legends anthology.  I knew it was going to be long, but it never occurred to me that it might be a novel—possibly because I was already thinking of it as a story.  I have written things that have turned out longer than I expected—to be honest, this is true of pretty much every story I've finished.  Even the short short pieces turn out longer than I’d planned.  And this is how I came to write my first novel, House of Windows, and my (as yet unpublished) second, The Fisherman.  Both started as stories that continued to grow.  So upon reflection, I suppose “Mother of Stone” could have grown to novel length, but it would have had to do so organically, which, as things turned out, it didn't.


You wink at the true location of several of your tales set in the fictional town of Huguenot.  Does the historic - and in many ways, unprecedented - nature of the Huguenot settlement in New Paltz inform any of your work?

Initially, I wrote about New Paltz and its surroundings because I was following the lead of writers like Stephen King and especially Faulkner.  I figured if William Faulkner could find sufficient material for a library shelf’s worth of novels and stories in what he called his postage stamp of soil, then so could I.  When I began to read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a more serious way, I recognized that he was employing setting in a similar fashion to Faulkner.  For both writers, the evocation of their specific places helps to ground their narratives in a realistic context.  This helps (I think) the events of each writer’s stories to seem more realistic, themselves, as if they've borrowed some of the belief their settings have evoked in the reader.  At the very least, the settings give Faulkner and Lovecraft’s narratives additional resonance.  For both writers, setting has a temporal dimension, too, and that sense of history really resonated with me.  (My single favorite example of this kind of writing may be William Kennedy’s great novel, Ironweed.)  It may be due to growing up in what, for the United States, is one of the older parts of the country.  It may also be due to having parents who were from Scotland, and who took the family to visit our relatives there, several times, when I was a kid, and exposed me to a much older culture.  And it may have something to do with having been raised Catholic, in a religious tradition with a long and storied history.  Probably, it’s for all of these reasons, and more, besides.  But even when I think back to my youthful readings of the Conan stories, I remember being fascinated by the conceit that these stories were set in an incredibly ancient version of our world (ditto Tolkien).  So while I haven’t (yet) done much with the Huguenots per sé, the history of the region continues to be very important to me.
   

Keeping with geography, New England and areas north and east of New York City seem to have spawned a library full of supernatural fiction over the years, and most of your stories vibrate with the local topography. What is it about this aesthetically beautiful area that inspires such dark and haunted interpretations? The people? The land? The time period of European colonization?

You might answer, “All of the above.”  At the risk of sliding too much into my professor voice:  The northeast coast of the United States is among the first parts of the country to be densely settled by European colonists, which means it’s also among the first literary centers of the emerging country.  It’s settled in part by people who have an especially grim and frightening view of the world, and who leave that viewpoint as a legacy to subsequent generations.  It’s home to many of the writers who comprise the first great movement in American letters, the American Renaissance (which is the American version of the Romantic movement whose English exemplars included Coleridge and Keats).  One of the greatest writers of that movement, Nathaniel Hawthorne, writes dozens of brilliant stories and a couple of novels that make use of the New England setting and bring it together with elements of the supernatural.  Through an accident of geography, H.P. Lovecraft is born in roughly the same area about two generations after Hawthorne’s death.  Of course, Lovecraft was born into a culture whose literature now included Hawthorne.  In turn, when Stephen King was born in approximately the same region, he was born into a culture that now included Hawthorne and Lovecraft.  And so on.  I was born into a culture that included Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and King.  There’s a kind of process of literary accretion at work, I suppose.  Nor is this unique to the northeastern U.S., anymore:  both the American south and California strike me as places that have developed their own considerable traditions of weird fiction.
 

Five years passed between the publication of your first collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, and The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies. In an impatient age where some writers put out several books a year and readers often demand new material tomorrow, this can be considered a protracted period of time.  Was this break between collections deliberate, and/or do you consider yourself a deliberate writer?

It’s a little of column A, a little of column B.  I do like to take my time with my writing.  When I decided to write seriously, in my mid-twenties, I set myself the goal of completing one page a day.  Once I started publishing, I set myself the goal of completing one story per year, which I would have accepted for publication by the time last year’s story appeared.  Both of these goals were intended to keep me writing by making the process of writing manageable.  They also allowed me time to linger and labor over my fiction, which I did.  After I completed my third published story, “Tutorial,” I began work on a story that would become my first novel, and the writing and re-writing of that narrative occupied me for the next several years, which removed from what little audience I’d attracted.  I assumed House of Windows would be my first book because, as you pointed out above, there’s a great deal of emphasis placed on the novel as the pre-eminent length for fiction.  It took longer to find a publisher for the book than I’d anticipated, however, and in the meantime, Prime Books had a slot open in their publication schedule for a new collection of fiction, and both Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay gave them my name as a possibility.  The result of all this was that, just as I was starting to publish short fiction, again, I had two books appear within less than a year of one another, my collection and then my novel.  After this, my story writing really started to pick up, as more and more invitations from more and more editors to be part of more and more anthologies found their way to my e-mail’s inbox.  Somewhat quickly, I had enough stories for a second collection, which my agent sold in 2011 but which various delays on my part kept from appearing until 2013.  As this was going on, I finally finished my second novel, which I’d put off completing in order to write stories.  The novel proved to be as hard to sell to the big houses as its predecessor—once again, my agent received replies complimenting the literariness of the book, and explaining that this was why it wasn't going to be published.  Which is not to say we've given up on it, only that it will be a bit longer still before it appears.  And while I've been focused on selling my next novel, I've continued to write shorter fiction, with the result that I now have enough stories published and forthcoming for another two and a half collections.  I’m hopeful the next collection will appear sometime in 2016, and then we’ll see about the others after that.

I guess the point of all this is, I've taken a somewhat scattershot approach to book publication.  I’m hoping to be a bit more consistent in that regard, especially when it comes to novels.  On the other hand, years after each of my books appeared, they continue to receive notice.  There’s a tendency among a lot of writers, especially newer writers, to fret over the fate of their book if it doesn't make a big splash when it’s published, or if it doesn't make year’s best lists, or if it isn't nominated for the relevant awards.  I know because I've worried over all these things.  Yet my limited experience thus far assures me that, if you do good work, people will find their way to it.  Maybe not as quickly as you’d like, but it will happen.  So I try to remember that, and keep on writing.
 

Was the artwork from the always excellent Santiago Caruso commissioned for Carnivorous by Hippocampus, or was it selected by you?

Santiago’s cover was commissioned by me for the book with Hippocampus’s blessing.  I owe my discovery of Santiago’s work to the folks at Night Shade Books, who tapped him to do the cover for House of Windows.  This led me to his website, which featured a generous sampling of his stunning work.  I loved the way his art reached back to someone like Goya, while also invoking the surrealists.  I wanted very much to work with him again, so when Derrick Hussey asked me if I had any thoughts on cover artists for The Wide, Carnivorous Sky, I immediately thought of Santiago.  To be honest, I think he knocked it out of the park with that cover.


How did you rope Laird Barron into writing the afterword for your collection?

I've been friends with Laird longer than pretty much any other writer I know.  I’m pretty sure it was Gordon Van Gelder, who had published my first story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who told me to check out Laird’s first story in the magazine, which appeared the month after mine.  Laird and I started corresponding, based on our mutual appreciation of and esteem for one another’s work, and have grown to be good friends since.  Laird is the real deal.  He’s immensely talented, and restless to take that talent in ever-new directions.  He’s one of the hardest working artists I know, and that’s saying something.  Predicting the literary future is a mug’s game, but I’ll play it anyway and say that I’m pretty sure Laird’s fiction is going to stand the test of time as well as that of anyone else writing now.  So, naturally, I decided to piggyback on his success by asking him to write the afterword to my second collection.  Some folks have no use for such things, but I've always loved them, for the glimpse they offer into the writers’ lives, for the insights they can bring to a reader’s understanding.  I’ll admit, Laird took the piece in a direction I was not anticipating, much to my delight.  But his friendship means the world to me, and I’m happy he was able to be part of the book.

What is your involvement with the Shirley Jackson Awards, and explain to those who might not know how the awards were launched, and why?

With Brett Cox, JoAnn Cox, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay, I’m one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards.  To describe the awards, I could do worse than quote the official webpage:

“In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

“The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories:  Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.”

Basically, the awards were founded because there’s a tremendous amount of great dark fiction being published at all lengths, and it seemed appropriate to us to have another means of recognizing it.  The nominations lists are up at the award website, and you could do worse than read through their contents.

As part of our fundraising efforts for the award, we've also partnered with the LitReactor website the last few years to put together a four-week, online class in writing horror fiction.  It’s taught by four instructors—one per week—each of whom tackles a different aspect of writing horror.


What is you take on the modern state of horror and Weird fiction? Do you think that a proliferation of avenues to print publication - in additional to the rise of self and electronic publishing - has helped or harmed contemporary speculative fiction?

It seems to me that, in many ways, horror fiction is doing as well as it ever has, maybe even better.  You have writers such as King, Straub, and Campbell, continuing to produce vibrant and exciting work.  You have writers such as Laird Barron, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay, who are starting to come into their own as powers in the field.  And you have newer writers, such as Mike Griffin, Usman Tanveer Malik, and Molly Tanzer, who are making a real splash.  It also seems a bit easier for work in the horror field to be taken seriously by a wider audience.  A lot of the fiction that has been important to the field is being brought back into print by presses like Valancourt and Tough Times.  Due to the internet, it’s easier for writers working in the field to communicate with one another.  If there’s one downside to the present moment, it’s that the major publishers remain cautious about publishing horror fiction in the way that they used to.  From that perspective, the smaller houses have played an important role in allowing writers such as Chesya Burke, Michael Cisco, and Livia Llewelyn to find a home for their work.
 

I count you as one of the most inspirational figures working in Weird fiction today, as I always feel positive and fired up to create after hearing or reading one of your interviews. Not to put you on the spot, but any words of advice for writers, both new and veteran? Any advice for readers?

For writers, I’d offer two pieces of advice:  write, and practice patience.  Specifically, work on your fiction.  If you’re doing anything else—posting on Twitter, posting on Facebook, blogging, engaging in lengthy online debates—you aren't writing fiction.  Fiction takes time, and is challenging.  Social media is quick, and is easy.  The temptation to indulge one at the expense of the other is obvious.  Resist it.  You don’t want to fall into the trap of confusing having an active presence on social media with having a writing career.  What’s more, it takes a while, sometimes a long while, for a story or book to find its audience.  (I talked about this above.)  Don’t lose heart.  Keep writing.  Eventually, good work finds its way to its audience.

For readers, I’d ask you to continue to try to read writers who are new to you.  I know that money can be tight, and there’s already so much to read by writers you know and like, but once in a while, take a chance on something unfamiliar.  And whatever you read, when you like something, please let other people know.  For me as a writer, there’s still no bigger thrill than seeing folks recommending my work to other readers.


What's next for John Langan? What new projects do you have cooking, or possibly on the horizon?

My third collection will be forthcoming from Hippocampus Press in (I think) early 2016; the working title for it is Sefira and Other Betrayals.  My agent continues to work on finding a home for my second novel.  I’m wrapping up a number of story commitments, and hope to begin work on my next novel over the summer.


If this matters to you, and not to be morbid, but what do you want to leave behind as your legacy as a writer (or as an individual)?

I would like my wife and sons to know that I loved them, and that I tried to be the best husband and father I could be.  I would like my friends to remember me as loyal and kind.  I would like my readers to continue reading and talking about my fiction, and I would like it to continue to engage and entertain them, to reward their time.


Thank you so much for your time, John.

Thank you, Ted, for such fine questions, and to you and your readers for reading them.

Publishing News: THE NAMELESS DARK, the debut collection of short fiction from T.E. Grau, slated for release July 25, 2015 by Lethe Press

Cover art by Arnaud de Vallois

Now that the cover is squared away and the manuscript is into the last throes of the copy edit phase, I am happy to announce that my debut collection of short fiction, titled The Nameless Dark, will be published this July 25, 2015 by Lethe Press.

This collection represents (nearly) every single step of my journey into prose writing after spending over a decade as a screenwriter, and a music journalist and humor columnist several years prior to that, starting in my freshman year of college. It was at age nineteen - and hot on the heels of what Rimbaud described as a "long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses" - that I changed my major from History/Pre Law to English and never (okay, rarely) looked back. In all those years of writing, and through every minor accomplishment, nothing has even remotely been as satisfying as completing a book of prose and finding a publisher that is not just willing, but actually relatively excited, to print it upon rectangled paper and sell it to the reading public.

The journey from manuscript to publishing deal was a bit of a surprise. While wrapping up the last story for the collection ("Tubby's Big Swim"), Steve Berman of Lethe Press contacted me after both Nathan Ballingrud and Laird Barron posted reviews on Facebook of my prairie horror novella The Mission. Steve first sought to re-publish the limited edition novella (which was at that point out-of-print), but after a bit of discussion, he then made an offer to publish my entire collection based in large part of the good word of these two colleagues, whose writing I admire so much. Naturally, I am very much indebted to both Laird and Nathan for reading and then publicly commenting on my work. That sort of exposure is priceless, and incredibly important. Forever pushing the boundaries of manners and entitlement, I then asked Nathan to pen a foreword to The Nameless Dark. As gracious as ever, he agreed, for which I am and shall ever be eternally grateful.

As noted above, these stories stretch back to 2010, starting with "Transmission," which was the first short story I ever wrote, then becoming the first piece of fiction I ever sold. The bones of "Twinkle, Twinkle" were actually written before "Transmission," but I never sought to find a home for it, knowing that I'd want to sit on it a bit and rework it, which I did for The Nameless Dark. It, along with "Tubby's Big Swim" (my most recently completed story), and "Expat" (finished just before "Tubby"), are the three unpublished (and unclaimed) pieces in the collection. "Mr. Lupus," my longest work to date in terms of word count, sold to an anthology a few years back edited by Scott David Aniolowski, but has never been released to the public. "Return of the Prodigy" will be included in this summer's highly anticipated Lovecraftian fiction anthology Cthulhu Fhtagn!, edited by Ross E. Lockhart and published by his excellent press Word Horde. The rest of the stories have appeared in various anthos, fiction journals, and other books over the last five years, and I am excited to have them all collected under one roof, elbowing for space at the family dinner table.

As requested elsewhere in the ether, the table of contents reads as such:

Tubby’s Big Swim
The Screamer
Clean
Return of the Prodigy
Expat
The Truffle Pig
Beer & Worms
White Feather
Transmission
Mr. Lupus
Free Fireworks
Love Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox
Twinkle, Twinkle
The Mission

Pre-orders will begin in April via Amazon, so keep watching this liminal space for information on that, and in the meantime, thank you ever so much, dear readers and watchers and tenders of the signal fires, for your interest in my work.  I hope The Nameless Dark satisfies, and opens the door for me to show you previously unknown places and the shadows that live there, both now with this book and in the years to come with whatever will come after. This is just the beginning, the hill country at the foot of the mist-shrouded mountain. I can see the overgrown trail up into the high country, and am adjusting my pack upon my shoulders. The way won't be easy, and is sure to be treacherous, but the view from the top promises to be so incredibly worth it.

Edited (3/30/15) to add: Pre-Orders now available right here.

Publishing News: Word Horde set to release in December the trade paperback edition of THE CHILDREN OF OLD LEECH, featuring a new cover by Dalton Rose and Scott R. Jones

I am a short story writer.  And while I have ideas for novels, and will most likely begin work on them soon, I see myself at this stage in my writing life primarily as one who most enjoys scribbling things out in the short form.  Novellas, novelettes, short long fiction, long short fiction, flash fiction and micro fiction - I like it all.  There is a certain compressed power to a complete tale told in a small, confined space. Like a focused punch delivered by a master martial artist, or gunpowder dumped into a metal casing, turning sparkling fire into a deadly concussive force.

All that stated, I realize that to most of the reading and publishing public, the novel is king/queen, and this prevailing fact is no different in the realm of horror fiction.  But, for my money, shorter works are and have been the lifeblood of the dark, the supernatural, and the weird, from the very beginning.  Think of your favorite works of speculative fiction, and I would hazard that many (most?) of them would be classified as something less than a novel, in terms of word count.  I know it is that way with me, as the individual that I consider to be the most talented English language writer of all time (Flannery O'Connor) wrote in the short form. My favorite story of all time is "The Lottery," which is a short story.  My favorite weird fiction writers - Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein, Machen, Bradbury, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Poe, Blackwood, Bierce, Bloch, William Hope Hodgson, Fritz Leiber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Karl Edward Wagner, Michael Shea, Joe Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell and a host of newer writers currently working in the field - all write either primarily in the short form, or have devoted a large portion of their output to the same.  The premiere dark fiction novelists, including King, Barker, Gaiman, Lawrence Block, and George R.R. Martin, wrote hundreds and hundreds of short stories between them.

In short (my apologies), I am a short story writer, and a short story fan. It just works for me.

Over the past several years, I've been fortunate enough to have my short fiction appear in numerous anthologies, and while all of them have been wonderful opportunities for which I am extremely grateful, several of them have come with a little added zing, based on publisher, editor, theme, or ToC.  A project that combines all of the above is The Children of Old Leech - edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele for Lockhart's Word Horde press - which is a "tribute to the carnivorous cosmos of Laird Barron."

Barron's work was some of the first horror fiction I read that wasn't penned in 1930's during my deep immersion into the genre, and has always remained some of my favorite, especially in terms of atmospherics and overall bleak-as-shit cosmic horror. As such, I was quite honored when Ross and Justin invited me to submit a story to a tribute anthology to Barron and his own unique mythos, which combined savage cosmicism with dark wilderness tales, occulted aristocracy, black magic, and bare knuckle Noir.  It's a cosmology that has always resonated with me, and so I was thrilled to see what I could come up with that would fit into the Barronverse.  What emerged was my story - a novelette, actually - "Love Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox," which serves as an homage to my beloved Beats amid an homage to Laird Barron. Two birds with one tribute stone, and all of that.

The story has receive positive reviews, and - more importantly - the anthology itself has been met with critical accolades and impressive sales.  As such, Word Horde is releasing The Children of Old Leech as a trade paperback in December, sporting a snazzy new cover featuring artwork by Dalton Rose (for a Slate article on Barron) and cover design by Scott R. Jones.

Even if you already have the original hardcover release, featuring that iconic cover by Matthew Revert, it would behoove (and behoof) you to pick up The Children of Old Leech in paperback, as I have a feeling that both will be considered bookends of each other in days to come, as Barron's dark star continues to ascend, and these unassuming works of indie fiction being created today become codified, carved into the damp cave stone of weird literature's canon eternal.

Original artwork by Dalton Rose

Publishing Update: Reviews of THE MISSION

Cover design by Ives Hovanessian

Upon abandoning a long, mediocre stretch as a screenwriter and officially entering the ring of dark fiction in 2010, I've had many stories published in various anthologies, publications and other mediums.  But it wasn't until 2014 that the very first stand-alone book of my work came out with The Mission, which was released as a limited edition chapbook by Dunhams Manor Press/Dynatox Ministries, founded and run by the gifted writer and publisher Jordan Krall, one of the hardest working fellows in indie press.

The book shipped throughout August and September, and the feedback so far has been wonderfully positive.  The Arkham Digest published a review in early October, while Daring Defenders put up a piece on The Mission several weeks back.  Recently, several authors I admire, respect, and count as inspirations in the Speculative Fiction omniverse have chimed in with their thoughts on The Mission, including Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud, and Jeffrey Thomas - three greats spinning their craft at the very top of the field.  I'm so very appreciative for all of these reviews and blurbs, and although they cannot lift sales with the book being out-of-print, it is still a lovely thing to know that your work connected with a reader.

As The Mission is not listed on Amazon or Goodreads or any of the usual review sites, I've decided to wrangle reviews into one electronic corral, for personal posterity if nothing else.  This will be - and has been - updated as necessary:
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Award-winning author of the Weird, the Noir, and the cosmically horrific Laird Barron wrote:

"The Mission--an unholy union of Cormac McCarthy's annihilating moral vistas and filmmaker JT Petty's dark vision of the West."

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Shirley Jackson Award-winning dark fiction author Nathan Ballingrud wrote:

"'Goddamn a thief that salutes you first.' 

THE MISSION, by Ted E. Grau, reads like a classic weird tale. It has echoes of Howard, Lovecraft, and even a hint of Clark Ashton Smith's 'Tsathoggua,' but written with greater worldliness and sharper, cleaner prose. A band of unlikely soldiers set off to track down two Lakota warriors in Nebraska, and stumble across something fantastically strange and terrifying. Creepy, bizarre, and fast-paced, this novella satisfied on all fronts.

'Ebke snorted. He had no dog in this fight. Didn't care for a damn thing in the whole wide world, including his own hide. The kind of man who was just born hollow, who just went where he was supposed to. Didn't matter, though. When the chips were down and the dander up, it was always light against dark. To hell with this New World.'

'Farm boys ain't exactly expert trackers. Good to have at your side in a saloon dust up, as those coffee can fists always found purchase, but rosy-cheeked plowboys weren't born bloodhounds like those with a more suspicious nature.' 

Coffee-can fists. I love that. This is the first in what will be a series of stories about Salt Creek, according to the back-cover copy of this sadly out-of-print novella. I'm on board for the full ride."

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Acclaimed Horror, Lovecraftian, and Weird Fiction author Jeffrey Thomas wrote:

"Last night I finished THE MISSION. I can’t express how much I enjoyed it – it’s a knockout. Just one of the most engrossing, riveting, creepiest stories I've read in a long time. Truly, this is the most muscular, gritty, thrilling approach to horror I've experienced since I read Laird’s latest collection (and I include the entire contents of CHILDREN OF OLD LEECH in that assessment...). I was out there WITH those guys, in that hard landscape… experiencing one mind-boggling mystery after another. 

Grau packed an incredible amount of strange revelations and dangerous encounters into one novella, without it ever feeling crowded or overdone. He just pulled that Wild Bunch of cowboys in deeper and deeper, took them further and further, and me as a reader along with them. I hope to see a return to this location and these thoroughly intriguing mysteries in future work, as the back cover hints. 

So very impressed. He just consistently impresses…but this one is especially noteworthy. I don’t know if it quite tops THE SCREAMER, which I have a special fondness for and consider a modern masterpiece, but I’d say it’s pretty damn close. 

Again, I’m proud to possess #1 of this chapbook, which somewhere in the near future could become quite the collector’s item!"

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Rodney Turner of Daring Defenders said:

"I recently acquired The Mission, a weird western by T. E. Grau published by Dunhams Manor Press. I’m sad that it was a limited run because this is a fucking excellent little book. If you didn't get your hands on it, light a candle and mourn your loss.

OK, that is quite enough mourning. Let’s get to it! 

The Mission is the tale of a rag-tag group of soldiers on the trail of a pair of Native-American fugitives. A chance encounter in a town that shouldn't exist sets in motion a chain of events that shatters the sanity of our protagonists. 

This not the West of 1950’s cinema with its bright blue skies and crimson mesas. From the first paragraph, Grau drags the reader into an ugly world. A world in which humanity’s self-inflicted horrors walk hand in hand with the ancient secrets lurking in the frontier. 

Grau’s pacing is frenetic, evoking the sense of urgency felt by the narrator and his companions. Like any good story, The Mission made me feel less like a reader and more like a powerless observer carried along inside the narrator’s head. It is not until the characters arrive at the titular mission that we really catch our breath. Grau gives us a brief moment of wonder and discovery, but it is a moment colored by the fact that the light at the end of the tunnel is just the reflection of the Reaper’s scythe. 

I’m going to give this one a 5 of 5."

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Reviewer and editor and all-around voracious Horrorhound Justin Steele of The Arkham Digest wrote:

"I've always been partial to the Weird Western... T.E. Grau’s The Mission serves as prime example of what can be done when these two genres collide. The novella starts off with a typical Western plot; a group of Army men are on the hunt for a couple of Native Americans. Grau shows what can be accomplished when combining the West with the horrors of Lovecraft, as the men make some strange discoveries. 

The tension of the group is already thick when the novel begins, with some members clashing over racial differences and just skimming the boiling point. Once the stage is set, the already palpable tension ratchets into overdrive for the remainder of the novella. As the group is beset by strange occurrences, such as finding an out of place town where a town shouldn't be, the Captain does his best to stay cool and keep his group from tearing each other apart. 

Some of The Mission brought to mind The Men From Porlock or Blackwood’s Baby by Laird Barron. All three stories are period pieces featuring groups of tough guys coming face to face with horrors beyond their comprehension. Grau nails the rough tone required to portray these types of characters, making for a story that has already moved high up on my list of favorite Weird Westerns."

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Bizarro author David Anderson wrote:

"A few months back, in the thick of summer, I was given a copy of T.E. Grau’s THE MISSION and happily accepted it. Limited to 50 hard copies (I got a digital review copy) I was excited to be able to dig into this tasty gem from Dynatox Ministries’ Dunhams Manor Press...

Grau, who’s work I've read before, not only continues to amaze me with this story but sets a new precedent. The ending is terrifying, and stuck with me for long after the story. I can look back on that feeling of hopelessness and cosmic doom and smile because it was invoked so well. Anchored by a really well done Western Story motif, THE MISSION has a cast of characters that immediately launched off the page and held my interest throughout. The pace is amazing, and given the smaller format here we are just HANDED the goods right away and they keep coming. Fans of Lovecraftian fiction will love, love, LOVE this, as it invokes the dread of the Mythos in a very classic way. There have been a lot of experimental Lovecraftian releases like Jordan Krall’s NIGHTMARES OF A LOVECRAFTIAN MIND that explore different ways to tackle the Mythos, but here Grau delivers what fans of classic Lovecraftian Fiction crave most – cosmic monsters! And scary stuff! There’s still enough to tickle your cranium, mysteries to explore, but we still get some hair raising chills. 

THE MISSION is a valuable edition to your collection."

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Editor David Binks wrote:

"I highly recommend it.  Well written, good pace and it seemed to have a hint of Clive Barker which is always a good thing.  Everville comes to mind.  The characters were believable and flawed like most of us.  Grau takes the reader into the flat lands of Western Nebraska, a part of the world he knows and describes very well,  building up the suspense as he adds more ingredients to the mix. And if that weren't enough, we realize that we are reading a Lovecraftian work. My only hope is that this becomes a full length novel one day."

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While The Mission is no longer available as a chapbook, it will be included in my debut collection of short fiction, which should be completed quite soon.  More updates as they are made available.

The Delectable Darkness: Dark Delicacies Keeps Los Angeles Quaking, and Bibliophiles Booked

Along a quiet, tree-lined street doth lurk...

As much as it brings convenience to our silly, self important lives, technology kills a great many beautiful things.  The hiss of steam engines.  The clack of a typewriter.  Actually looking at your surroundings while outside, instead of staring down at that glowing rectangle clutched in your hand.

But one of the greatest harms wrought by the explosion of Electronic Everything is the slow bloodletting of the local bookshop trade.  What Amazon couldn't kill by making an impulse book purchase just a mere  click away, eBooks have nearly snuffed by beaming printed page into another one of those damnable glowing rectangles.  Your average Joe Ma & Pa book retailer - hell, even the gargantuan book chains - just can't keep the lights on in an environment such as this.  Humans are fickle, easily distracted water sacks, jonesing for the next toy rather than realizing the toys we already have are more than could possibly ever need.

So how wonderful is it that not only is an independent bookseller thriving in media-addled Los Angeles (okay, Burbank, to be exact), but an indie book shop devoted entirely to horror fiction and related ghoulish media.  That's what Dark Delicacies does, and has done, since 1994, when Del and Sue Howison creaked open the crypt doors and shared with the lighted world one of the most comprehensive shops devoted to the gruesome and macabre the west coast had - and has - ever seen.  Dark Delicacies is the home for horrorheads in Los Angeles.

I'm not proud to say that up until about a month ago, when chum and colleague John Palisano had his book signing there, I had not yet darkened the door of Dark Delicacies.  Ives and I had been meaning to get out there several times, but the vagaries of schedule, and weekends devoted almost entirely to either family or writing/editing the last few years, have kept casual browsing time among haunted stacks to a nearly non-existent minimum.  So, I was super excited and happy for the excuse that John's release and signing of his debut novel Nerves afforded me.  To the darkest heart of Burbank I sojourned....

This is Dark Delicacies - HorrorHead ground zero in L.A.

I was not disappointed.  After queuing up and waiting while John chatted with fans new and old, I ducked down aisles and poked around in corners, finding pretty much anything a devoted fan of horror would ever want.  Books, toys, movies, t-shirts, fragrances, collectibles, graphic novels, antiques, oddities, bizarrities, rarities, and novelties.  And lots and lots of signed merchandise, as all dark roads through Southern California eventually travel through Dark Delicacies, bringing in hundreds of individuals devoted to horror and dark fantasy in fiction, film, television, and the visual arts to launch and/or sign their creations.

This place had - and has - everything I've always wanted in one store but dared not dream to discover.  I felt like a gearhead at Pep Boys.  A stoner in a donut shop.  A redneck at a gun show...  I felt giddy, and in between reaching for my wallet as yet another coveted item caught my eye, I felt like I had come home.

To give you a better feel of this unique hollow of beautiful shade, please enjoy a mini-gallery of photos, without the cloying nature of my reportage:

Readers really fucking rule.

This is the closest Cthulhu has stood next to Sweeney Todd without violating a restraining order

The inestimable Jeffrey Thomas gets some well deserved top-o'-the-stacks rack space.

If they can sell 'em, why the hell not make 'em?

We do love our toys, don't we?

'Dark Delicacies III' gets my hornish seal of approval.  

Every horror film worth watching, both great and small

Doing my best to insert myself in the cabinet of interesting horrors

The Dark Del Himself - as in Howison

Every bookstore I enter must endure the Laird Check.  Dark Delicacies passes with flying colors.

Meanwhile, at the signing...

Stoker Award nominated author John Palisano, signing my copy of his debut novel 'Nerves.'

I paid Palisano 60 bucks and Coffee Bean Groupon to stick his hand up my bum and make me his Puppet Boy

Go here for more information on Dark Delicacies, and here for more on John Palisano's Nerves, published by the esteemed Bad Moon Books.  Go here for pictures of a dude pulling his eyes off of his face, and here for a delicious green been casserole recipe (you're welcome).

TC Book Review & Interview: Laird Barron Weaponizes the Weird in Debut Novel ‘The Croning' from Night Shade Books

Laird Barron made me gain five pounds.

No, he didn’t hold me down and shovel deep fried butter wedges into my gaping yapper (although, dare to dream). What he did was write a colossal piece of fiction that was nearly impossible to put down, even at the gym, where I do much of my reading every morning. As I hazily recall, just before cracking open Barron’s debut novel The Croning some weeks back, I marched my happy ass off to the local garishly lit LA Fitness, eager to absorb a few pages in between moving weighted objects from one place to another. Forty-five minutes later I found myself on the floor, sprawled in some lazy stretching pose, peering at the pages in front of me with wide, slightly twitching eyes while sadly oblivious meatheads preened in front of mirrors around me. I was hooked, boated, and clubbed, and stayed that way until I closed the last page some blurry span of time later. As I became doughier, I also became more willing, suppliant. I was fattened and ready for the provender plate of dear Old Leech. Just like They wanted it.

Barron’s storytelling has that rare power of grip, weaving a particular strain of beautiful, sinewy prose that somehow possesses enough tiny microfibers to pick up the grit and sharp things swept into the corners of forgotten history. Both beautiful and monstrous, his evocative imagery lures you into the forest with the cadence of lost eons, leaves you in expectant silence, and then rips back the shading canopy, exposing you to the terrible realities that lie waiting under the thin veneers of bullshit “civilization”.

Not surprisingly, the writing is a reflection of the writer and his unique experience set. Barron grew up in the wilds of Alaska and spent several years fishing the murderous Bering Sea and racing the Iditarod on arctic tundra like some goddamn throwback to a time of brawnier, more road-tested scribes, who could lay down some poetic verse before laying you out in a pool of your own teeth for spilling his drink. Papa Hemingway. Jack London. Dashiell Hammett in a parka. All sitting in the corner booth of the Bar on the Borderland, waiting for their Weirdling pals from the Pulps to show up and swap stories of the violent and strange.

Indeed, his meaty, imaginative style is an amalgam of all of these rough and smooth elements, taking shape as a barrel-chested ballerina, a professional wrestler moonlighting as an ice skater. A pagan ninja hopped up on blood saki, beautifully weaponizing the sublime and stuffing horror into documented and geological mysteries long buried for a reason. Barron respectfully nods his heads to his forebearers, but is truly his own man, blazing his trail through the wild, untamed places to find the haunted ruins. The cryptic mounds.  The dolmens... This is Weird fiction boiled hard.

Unfairly or not, Barron is often compared to (elder)godfather of cosmic horror  H.P. Lovecraft, but in many ways, Barron’s work is far more bleak than the Gentleman from Providence. In Lovecraft’s Mythos, profoundly alien Great Old Ones and Outer Gods were mostly oblivious or apathetic to our meaningless existence. The horror often came from the realization of unimaginable truth.  Much like Barron, HPL’s protagonists reflected the man, and as such, were bookish and aloof, ghosts in the coal powered machine, sneering strangers in the hated crowd. In Laird’s “Barronic Mythos” (an increasingly legitimate construct that I may or may not have just given a name), the unearthly entities not only know where we are and what we’re doing, they pop in from time for a bite, and/or to continually fuck with us just because they can. His characters ARE the crowd, reflecting all strata of life, from the aristocratic elite to the shithouse dogs. Barron understand them all, and spares none. All are claymation figurines caught up in a Game Unutterable organized before the beginning of time. All of them are doomed, and Barron allows us a front row seat to the slow, excruciating execution.

The Croning, Barron’s first full-length novel after making his bones and racking up accolades as a conjurer of short fiction, is a perfect reflection of what he does as a writer, while serving as a stage one culmination of much of his storytelling from the past decade. Characters, artifacts, and even families that were introduced in such short stories as “Mysterium Tremendum” and “The Men From Porlock” reappear in The Croning ready to cast off their potential and reveal their dreadful destiny. After a prologue of sorts, which serves as more than just a pitch-black origin story of Rumpelstiltskin, we are lead through three life stages of the affable geologist Don Miller, and together, we follow Don as he follows his brilliant and headstrong wife Michelle, forever living in her secretive shadow as she chases arcane anthropological discoveries around the world, when not locked away in her study researching her family tree, obsessing over the hard-to-find root system buried impossibly deep in the antediluvian loam. As Michelle pursues her own path that occasionally intersects with her husband, Don is left to reflect on his own life barely lived, and in doing so, starts to unspool – with the help of off-the-grid intelligence agencies, old money eccentrics, and even his own son – the mind shattering reality of what has been slithering around his ankles and through his home for decades, and his role in ongoing Outer Machinations older than the cosmos and twice as dangerous. Cults and conspiracies. Secret societies and powerful bloodlines with grand designs forged through unwholesome alliances dating back to the Stone Age. Mind snuffing dread born beyond the reach of time and space. This is the world of The Croning, and this is the writing of Laird Barron, who effectively synthesizes science fiction with science fact, creating a New Kind of Truth that can be as mortifying as it is wondrous. And it all works. Perfectly, it works.

Much like Bloch, Carter, Lumley, Campbell, Klein, and even Ligotti before him, and with the curiously scarred crone looming protectively behind him, Laird Barron has emerged as the new poster boy of cosmic horror, thankfully without a shred of pastiche anywhere in the shot. The Croning shows an already masterful writer fully in the throws of his own, unique style somehow getting better, and that bodes well for us, his readership, which grows by the hour.  We are the Children of Old Leech, and we love you.

In the end, and after all of this convoluted blather, I supposed the highest compliment I can pay The Croning is that it’s the sort of novel I wish I had written had I not first read it. It’s a gift of cosmic naturalist horror that will force you to re-examine everything and everyone around you, if only slightly. The X-Files in print, only infinitely scarier and hitting far closer to home.  It will make you fear the trees.  It will make you check for zippers.

I reckon that’s not too shabby for a first novel.

(The Croning can be purchased directly from Night Shade Books [recommended by The Cosmicomicon, because it's the right goddamn thing to do], and from Amazon for you corporate-felching cheapskates who hate Santa Claus a little and Ross E. Lockhart even more)

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As you process the jibber jabber above, please enjoy the second installment of the The Cosmicomicon Book Review & Interview (the first of which was christened upon the diamond cut abs of Simon Strantzas).  I'd like to thank Laird for making time to sit down with me across the table o' ether, as I know his hours were limited in the days leading up to the hugely anticipated release of The Croning.  As such, I kept my questions as brief as possible, attempting not to repeat inquiries covered in other interviews.  The resulting answers show a very candid, free-form/riffy side of Laird that I don't think I've read before.  Fantastic stuff, that I'm honored to share with you all below.

TC:   Your writing is often compared to that of classic cosmic Weirdists H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, etc. (including by yours truly above), but there seems to be far more at play under the surface of your prose.  More contemporary, brawnier, bare-knuckled stuff.  Just as much Lawrence Block as T.E.D. Klein.  Who are your influences, both conscious and subconscious?

LB:  My earliest influences were pulps and adventure novels. H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, that was my crowd as a kid. Big men with axes, naked alien princesses, exotic landscapes, fantastical beasts. Rivers of blood. Hell of an escape from my family’s sub-Arctic shack.

My interests have shifted over the years. I enjoy Martin Cruz Smith and Kelly Link in equal measure. I riff on Lovecraft and McCarthy if the firing solution calls for it. But my love of the pulps is always there and ever inflecting what I write.

TC:  Charlie Parker had a great quote that always stuck with me:  “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”  Based on your diverse, wide-ranging jobs, pursuits, and travels – many of them often taking place in some pretty gritty, unforgiving locales - you’re a writer who has certainly “lived it” out under the sun and rain, in contrast to a more reclusive individual like Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti.  How important do you think it is for a writer to get out into the world in order to write about it and the homo sapiens taking up so much space, or can the same time be spent researching to achieve a similar result?

LB:  A good artist had better be able to fake it until he makes it. There’s a reason I do what I do, however. I look at the more desolate portions of my youth as a sacrifice to the muses.

My professional writing career has spanned a decade. What was I doing before that? Digging my way out of the hole provenance dropped me headfirst into as a baby. I know what it feels like. To be punched, kicked in the balls, frozen, dragged, bitten, betrayed and heartbroken. I’ve fired guns and swung clubs when my life depended upon them. I’ve set aside years to train in combatives, and I’ve used them too. I’ve gone completely off the deep end from too many months alone in the wild and come all the way back again like a drunk who drinks himself sober. If a man’s going to write about damaged human machinery it doesn’t hurt to have spent time on fishing boats among ex cons and addicts. Doesn’t hurt to have bunked with bikers and trappers and professional ne’er do wells. I don’t have to invent much when I write. I just reach into my pocket and pull out some bloody receipts.

TC:  I’m sensing that you wouldn’t trade one second of it - the many hardships, tough upbringing, and dangerous scrapes you’ve been through.

LB:  There are moments here and there I’d do anything to change. Just like everybody alive. In the end, it’s all grist for the mill.

TC:  The natural world features heavily into your brand of cosmic horror (I call it “cosmic naturalism”).  Do the wild places on earth – places where you’ve spent quite a bit of time – truly terrify you, or are you instead mining what you know and enjoy, and then twisting it to the dark side?

LB:  I lived in Alaska for about twenty-five years. My family was nomadic. We chased the snow in order to train huskies for the racing circuit, and most especially the Iditarod. Of course the more fabulous elements of my stories are fabricated. But there’s no dismissing the sinister grandeur of primeval wilderness. There’s got to be some natural force in Alaska that fucks with human circuitry. I think Lovecraft’s head would’ve popped like a balloon if he’d found himself trapped in some of the places I’ve been.

TC:  Your memoirs could be a piece of Weird Noir.  Have you ever thought about publishing something entirely autobiographical?  Or hell, maybe you already have.

LB:  Oh, perhaps someday. In the meantime I’m working on a sequence of stories that deal in more explicit terms with Alaska and what I saw there during my youth.

TC:  When writing previous tales like “The Men From Porlock” and “Mysterium Tremendum”, did you know that the characters, locations, situations, and/or Mythology would someday evolve into a novel?  Into this novel?

LB:  With a tiny handful of exceptions, my entire body of work exists within a continuous universe. A few stories, such as those you highlighted, indeed feed directly into one another. I seldom write something that doesn’t inflect or reference every other piece I’ve done prior. I don’t write for an anthology or magazine, regardless of theme, without plotting how it’ll fit in to the mosaic.

TC:  Building on the previous question, are you intentionally constructing a Mythos, or perhaps adding onto that which was initially crystallized by Lovecraft?

LB:  I owe debts to every piece of fiction I’ve read, every man I’ve fought, every woman I’ve loved, every musician or artist who’s taken my heart out then handed it back, changed. The classical masters of dark fantasy and cosmic horror perfected a tradition of the weird story that generally features aloofness and restraint. For better or worse, I am not that guy.

The old tradition’s hallmarks include those of repressed sexuality, violence hinted at or understated, vagueness, iciness. Lovecraft is a giant in the field and I don’t believe the canon needs a contemporary update from me. I don’t repress jack shit. There’s going to be fucking, fighting, blood and thunder in a Barron tale. When I write in this tradition, I’m interested in weaponizing it.

TC:  You’ve emerged as a standard bearer, of sorts, for whatever we’re calling the brutal amalgam of Weird fiction/dark fantasy/cosmic horror these days.  I’ve personally described “Barronic verse,” and I’ve seen “Barronian” used as an adjective.  Did you ever foresee this sort of impact on speculative fiction from the back of a dogsled heading up into the frozen white all those years ago?

LB:   No. My dreams were humble. I was usually too worried about starving or whether freezing my dick to the side of my leg would have long term consequences.

TC:  In a perfect world, what would you be writing in twenty years?

LB:  In a perfect world I’ll be alive twenty years.

TC:  What’s next on the docket for you?  Longer term, what’s a personal or professional goal still unachieved?

LB:  There should be a new horror collection out next year. Deal just needs to be inked. I’ve several stories set to appear soon. Longer term, I’m working on a crime novel. Right now, my main goal is just to keep moving forward as a writer. Keep pushing myself to the breaking point.

TC:  Who would look better poured into a tight pair of spanking new Jordache jeans?  Robert E. Howard or Ramsey Campbell?

LB:  Considering how much weight Mr. Howard has lost these past decades, I’d say Mr. Campbell wins it in a landslide.

"Laird Barron" by JD Busch