Interviews & Reviews

KYLE SEIBEL’S ‘HEY, YOU ASSHOLES’ IS NOT NEAT, BUT IT’S PERFECT: A CONVERSATION by Naya Clark

March 26, 2025
Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his story titles. Seibel is based in Santa Monica and lives with his wife and dog named Snacks—who also has an established internet presence now. In this interview, Seibel and I chat over the phone, discussing what it means to be a “break out writer,” the literary industry, crafting a story cocktail of real-life anecdotes and surrealism, and his short story collection Hey, You Assholes (Clash Books, 2025). Naya Clark: The nuance in the situations and the characters you write sometimes make your short stories feel surreal. Do you consider any of your work magical realism, or is that just happenstance?Kyle Seibel: No, I don't know if it's intentional, and I don't know if I could say it's magical realism. I think that comes with its own audience, parameters, and guidelines. I read that kind of stuff, so I imagine that it's had some impact on my work. I think there’s that feeling of uncanniness to something that's normal. I really love art that does that. It's the normal stuff, and that’s subverted by something absurd. Those contrasts and that tension make really interesting stuff happen in art. And that's the kind of stuff that I'm drawn to. David Lynch is the really big kind of tentpole in this kind of stuff. But then also, I think of Denis Johnson. There's a book called Jesus’ Son. One of my favorite stories in this book [called “Work”]—these guys are ripping copper wire out of a house that's been destroyed by a flood, and sell it for money to do drugs. And while they're getting all the wire out of the house, they see a naked woman in the air, and she's parasailing, being pulled by a boat down the river, and it's this guy's ex-wife. It's never explained, but I love that. There's this crack in reality, where something extraordinary comes through, and it throws all of what preceded it into a new context. I think that's a trick that I try to bring to my writing.NC: I feel it’s the same with life. Sometimes there is no understanding of reality, or justification for why something happened, or why you, in particular, saw a part of someone or a situation. I'm particularly thinking of “Be Gentle”.KS: That one, especially, is such a special story. It's one of these stories where I was kind of writing it and putting it together and had an idea of how I wanted to have the basic idea that a veteran gets a job at a computer lab and befriends a weirdo student. I started to really think about the idea of the weird kid in class. So, I would ask all my friends about their stories about their weird kid from class. And everybody has this story of that kid from class. I started to put them all together. This character of E.J. started to take shape, and he just became a very real person to me. So I developed the story over a couple weeks, and edited over a month or two, and I got very attached to it. At the end of the story, I think E.J.’s fate is pretty tragic, and I wrestled with it, because I think what I really wanted to do was to give a really happy ending to this kid, and I knew that wouldn't be honest to the story—wouldn't be honest to what this character has seen in my mind. You get the fast forward of what happens to E.J., but what I wanted to leave the reader with is the feeling of what anyone is capable of doing—to be gentle enough to hold a bee.NC: It’s one of those things that has no explanation. I feel it’s more realistic that this character didn't have a happy ending. You said E.J. was a culmination of people's stories of this kind of kid in school. Is that the same for most of your characters?KS: Several real anecdotes braided together to form some of the characters in the stories. There's a story [called “I Suppose You’ll Want To Know About My Life Now”] that is about a guy who, on the day his grandma dies, goes for a run along the beach and almost gets hit by a car, gets a boner, and then gets stopped by the police...so that story is several stories kind of all rolled into one. I think what it ultimately becomes is a love letter to this guy's wife, and I think I use part of it in my vows. So part of my vows are enshrined in that story. There's some language that's pulled from that. And then my last grandma died. I was on a bike ride in Santa Barbara. I don't run, so the running part was fiction, but I almost got hit on my bike by this woman in a car. This was years before I even wrote the story. It was kind of funny that it was not written in the moment it happened—it was only in reflection, years after. The first line of the story came to me and the rest wrote itself. I mean, the first line of the story is the title of it. Then I would realize that I was writing about my grandma. Then I realized I was writing to this woman that I dated in the Navy who had died. And then I realized that was all to my wife, Ali. So it was just a bunch of different things. That was how I drafted it. Then as I edited it down and made it more digestible, it became what it is now, which is a little bit tighter of a narrative. But yeah, that's how it starts: taking from anecdotes or these shreds of memory or something that sticks in my mind, or I've written down for whatever reason, and then just kind of slamming them together on the page and seeing if anything jumps out. I think that's...a chaotic approach. Maybe other people will have something more intentional, but that's how I've been doing it.NC: Something I appreciate about your writing is that it’s complex, but not flowery. I feel everyone can read your stories. How have you developed your distinct voice, and how do you edit to ensure it comes across how you intend it to?KS: I think a lot of the stories in this collection are representative of this style. Stories that feel like they're being told to someone. I feel that makes it feel so intimate. So an occasional second person is addressing the reader. I think that it can be effective. And feeling like a story is being told to you personally is a big part of the guiding style of the voice. There’s a lot of first-person stories in this collection. They are not all me, thinly veiled, at all. I try to let the characters speak in their voice in the stories. In doing so, you're understanding a character, but also why they're telling their story. It gives a sense of urgency, and I think that makes them feel readable. I think sometimes you can be reading a story for five or six pages and think this is beautiful, technically proficient, but why is this story being told to me? What's so important about this story? That's something I really try to center on. Is there a reason this person is telling you this story? It’s because they can't help themselves but tell it. This is this person's one story to tell, they're telling it to you right now. Hopefully, that's the kind of energy some of these stories bring.NC: I do think that is the energy they bring. I don't know what's been up with people hating first-person stories lately.KS: I thought people were mad at third-person stories.NC: Whichever number story perspective they hate this week, I don't know. But I feel how you do it is very effective. I think it makes it more intimate. Like a story that you hear when you're grabbing a drink and you meet a friend of a friend, and they start telling you a story. I will admit that your book was my plane read. I've been traveling a lot lately. So it's what I read when I'm on a plane to stay up. Your stories feel like meeting someone while traveling and they start telling you a story. Another thing that makes it feel that way is the rhythm of how you write your stories. The character always has a goal, they're on their way to do something, then there's these characters that are just so fucking stupid. I could imagine these being my friends because of their decisions and personalities.KS: “Newlyweds” is definitely a story. Those guys are boneheads. They just can't help themselves.NC: That’s one of those rules in writing: make your characters do something that when you're reading it, you go “God, no, why are you doing this?” Again, a lot of the rhythm is because there is a goal. How do you maintain rhythm when you're writing a short story?KS: I hate to shout out my experience as a copywriter at an ad agency, but I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to give it up to the absolute boot camp of writing that being a junior copywriter is. You have so little time. Not just in an ad, but of your creative director's time and of the client's time and attention. There's something about being a copywriter that you innately understand how media — regardless of whether it's art or just dog shit — is a competition. It is a competition for your attention. Knowing that as a copywriter, and being able to bring that sense of attention and competition is just something that is very useful. You understand about attention span. You're just not gonna keep people around forever if you don't hook them immediately. So that's always on my mind when I'm revising things and tightening things and going back and rewriting. I ask how big is the hook of this story? What is the sentence that someone will read and have to read the second one? Those are the stakes really, especially when a lot of this book was previously published online. The rule of digital media is they must be hooked immediately. Obviously, it's different for literature, and I think that the immediacy applies. I think that ended up giving my voice a real distinctive quality, especially in these couple stories.NC: Yeah, I will agree. That feeling of I need to get to the point quickly, or something else needs to loop around to almost give the reader whiplash from what's going on in the story...I do feel it is great training. I'm not saying that most writers should be copywriters at all, but it is an exercise in brevity. My background in journalism is another thing. So much of my writing is about getting to the point. How do you get this information across quickly? But bringing in that creative, surreal element that you bring feels like breaking the rules.KS: I will read some stories—of the kind you would read in The New Yorker or a big publication like The Paris Review—where the stories are almost mysteries to be solved. In some ways they're to be figured out, and their value is to be assessed by the complexity of the process in which you have to figure them out. I think there are exceptions to this rule. I'm generalizing, but when we were submitting Skylarking [novel] there was just no interest. We kind of had to let Skylarking go. I don't know what's happening with it now. So that was my big bummer this summer. I was waking up in the morning thinking “Do I want to do this anymore?” I feel all the stuff with the collection has been going really well, and all the stuff with the novel is just tedious, and I feel frustrated. I think there's just really strong headwinds in publishing right now in general. Publishers are tightening budgets and doing layoffs and stuff like that. So the tendency is towards safe bets. It’s not really a climate where people are taking huge swings on new voices.NC: Do you consider yourself a new voice? When do you think being a new voice and being an up-and-coming writer, or being someone deep in the literary world, starts?KS: Well, I think that you can have an infinite amount of debuts. I think everyone's a new voice until they've really broken out. That term, “breaking out”—I've heard a couple of writers recently use it without any hint of irony, and it’s just strange to me. I don't know if it exists anymore. I mean, I think it's rare that people talk about breaking out. It feels to me like a term of antiquity. It was just funny how we people can have three or four debuts—if the last one didn't reach that threshold of audience, or whatever. “Oh, it was just a chapbook. It was just a mixtape” kind of attitude. Does that make any sense?NC: It’s when you can start breaking rules in what you do. Although you consider yourself a writer, that's just breaking in. I do feel you break a lot of rules in your writing style and your grammar. I feel you've maybe gotten to a point where you can say “Fuck grammar.” For instance, your lack of quotations when characters are talking—what is the choice behind that?KS: I'm trying stuff in the collection. A lot of them are new, and then a lot of them are from when I first started writing fiction. I’ve had a change of heart about quotation marks. There is something about when I remove quotation marks from a particular story, I always tend to think that means the entire story is in quotation marks. They could almost be monologues. Maybe that’s how I've intended them to sound; as if they're all contained within one quotation mark. I think I was trying different things—to use voice, and use a point of view and perspective in a narrative way to frame it, as a deeper dimension of the story. Here it exists outside the text, or in the blank that you fill in. I don't know how effective it is or how much it’s working, but that's how I came at some of those stories.NC: I think it works really well. I feel this is a major goal for a lot of writers. If somebody were to show me your writing without your name or the title, after reading a body of your work, I can tell that it's you, because it creates a distinct writing voice. It kind of zooms out and becomes its own monologue. When you write a short story in particular, what is your goal?KS: I think that changes when I'm in different seasons of writing. Sometimes I will sit down to write a story that evokes a special or particular feeling, or a unique flavor of a broad feeling, whether that's loss or anxiety, or joy or horror. There are special kinds of nuanced feelings being explored. Something that feels rather broad, but bringing it down to its sinew, examining it and exploring it at that magnification. It makes it seem much more specific—much more personal and intimate. That's sometimes how I approach stories, and I think that's maybe a first draft kind of thing. Then the narrative takes over, and there's other craft things to consider the different components. That’s usually when I sit down to write a short piece, especially a flash piece. A piece under 1,000 words, I'll be out to explore the nuance of a particular feeling as a jumping-off point, using a personal anecdote as a way to explore it. And I think that's really as simple as those two things coming together, and then it becomes something else that evolves into other things. That's my goal...to bring those two things together.NC: How do you find a humorous voice and inject that in your writing?KS: It's tough and humor is hard. I'm not saying that I figured it out. It's so individual. What you might find funny, someone else might not find funny. It's so weird, having done a couple of readings this year and seeing what I think are funny jokes that just go nowhere. Then what I think are pretty, plaintive lines of narrative get big laughs. It is so strange getting that kind of immediate feedback on different parts of the language of a piece. The collection as a theme, it's kind of—that these are all assholes, right? On any day, everyone, anyone could be an asshole. And they could have a story too. There's something about the charming asshole that is a very, very funny and bewitching character. And I think it holds multitudes. There's an element of selfishness and cruelty and casual violence that some of these guys [in the collection] seem pretty accessible to. But then there's also a little humility and tenderness as well. And in the distance between those two there's humor. There's comedy. So I'm glad that people think it's funny and I'm okay if people don't think it's funny at all. I'm okay with both reactions.NC: Some of it is the situation that your characters find themselves in are realistic, yet they're absurd. Veterans or Navy guys. How much do you pull from your own experiences?KS: It's because those are the characters and settings that I'm familiar with. I think it just feels authentic. Some of these stories are stories that have been told to me third-hand, or things that have survived as memories that are probably not true, in the way that I remember them. Sometimes that can have its own kind of internal magic. The veteran stuff is interesting, because I definitely write about military veterans, but I don't think of myself as a veteran writer. I just don't think that I fall into that category neatly. I don't know if I have anything interesting or particularly meaningful to say on the subject of service. I think it’s almost besides the point that some of those guys are in the military. It just happens to be where their story is taking place.NC: That's your experience, so that's where you're coming from. Do you think it's important for writers to write at least some of what they know? Does that help your writing?KS: I think so...It lends to the authenticity of the story's construction. It gives credence to the more incredulous elements of the plot. So I think that in that way, it can be effective. I think it's important to pull from your own experience, but more than that, it's important to follow the story and have the story be at the center. To lose track of the story, or distract from the story, or to make a choice that deviates from where the story should go because it happened in real life, or because it was part of your real experience, doesn't impress me. That doesn't convince me of it. I think that there should be a point where the story takes over, and all the details and craft, and all the tools and elements and language, roll up to in service of the story that you're telling, and that should be preeminent. And if it happens, the story becomes centered around the factual narrative that you're pulling from. It's a simple question that I'm answering currently in my life.NC: So are there elements that you feel aren't your experience that you add that aren't from your life. How do you write something that you haven't experienced? For example, the “Fish Man” story.KS: This was a story that was told to me in the Navy over a cigarette. One guy grew up on a farm, and was telling us about how there was some sinkhole in this lake, and they couldn't figure out why they had to take all the fish out. What happened in the story is kind of what happens in real life. They did their best to save all the fish, and in the end, they went back the next day, and all the fish had jumped out and died, and they didn't know why. It was this big, crazy mystery. But then I was starting to think about it. I don't know how I came on this idea of a guy getting drunk and finding these fish in a municipal area. It was such a delicious premise for me. It unfolded as fable to me, with the boys finding him and helping, and it being this crusade. Then the idea that it was supposed to be this moment where everything changed and got better. Instead, it was the last breath of hope on a downward spiral. Very little in that story happened to me, except for the feelings of imminent failure. I think everyone feels, or has had the feeling of, nothing going right. Being one of those boys feels so real to me. Having written that story, I don't think it happened to me, but where I feel I show up in that story is not in the main character. It’s in one of the boys that comes across him. So I think that there are different perspectives in the story that I associate myself with, but it's not always the first-person perspective in the story.NC: I feel a lot of the stories, they're all trying—on a mission, a side quest—to do something that's right. As a writer, it's exciting because you don't have to be the main character or the narrator in the situation. You can even appear or identify with a side character in a story. It makes it feel like a lot less pressure to tell a story from another perspective.KS: A lot of times the narrator is the least interesting person in some of these stories. I'm thinking specifically of “cullen”. The main character in that story is having a nervous breakdown and a complete manic event. If you really wanted to make the wildest story Cullen would be the first person, and you would see it from his perspective. You would get a front-row view of his paranoia. But you don't get that. You get this. You get states removed. You get countries removed. This friend that he calls and who's going through his own kind of crisis and you see the real main human crisis is being viewed through a telescope in the story,NC: Right. These things are happening at the same time, but also in retrospect. Then there’s this idea of making it out alive. Something I really respect about your writing is that the endings aren’t always in a neat bow. How do you approach writing the ending of a short story?KS: The endings are truly mysteries. One of my friends, Mike Nagel, has always said“A good short story ends on a sharp intake of breath.” You're just coming to. You're being removed from the moment where the next thing happens. Which I think is interesting. I don't think this is the case for everything, but it can lead to some interesting results. The endings, I mess with so, so much. I'm rarely happy with it. I think sometimes the stories just exhaust themselves. Maybe that’s not being fair to the stories that are a little bit more tightly scripted.NC: Endings are hard, but you do them really well. You trust that the reader is intelligent enough to take from it what they want. They’re not neat, but they’re perfect.KS: I think the endings kind of revealed themselves. It was one of those things where I gave them to a couple early readers, and they had a bunch of notes about how to fix the rest of the story. But there was this unanimous consensus that the endings should be as is. And I think that was the same thing with “A New Kind of Dan” as well. I worked on that story for a long time, and got a lot of feedback on that story specifically. But then again, the unanimous consensus was that the ending, and the content that that bookends, is something solid and to be retained.NC: Thank you so much for this conversation.KS: I sounded insane 85% of the time. You got a good 15%.NC: It’s totally workable. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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STUFF YOUR FACE WITH SCOTT LAUDATI by Scott Laudati

March 11, 2025
A special offshoot of our Recommends series, where Scott Laudati enjoys the planet’s best foodstuffs and eateries.New York City, 2010. It’s a 24-hour city. Budweisers are $3. We complain about the rent but a one bedroom is $950. Something big is happening every night in Brooklyn. The So So Glos are playing in a loft and our friend Dasha knows the door code. The garment building hasn’t been annexed by Netflix yet, its basement is rented by an old Marxist who calls it “The CCCP Gallery” and Drew is having his art show there tomorrow. And most importantly, pizza, which we eat on the way into the party and then again on the way home, is $1.50 a slice, and every block has a lit storefront where men are stretching dough and spreading sauce until last call.This city does not exist anymore. I don’t know when exactly it happened. One day the bodega became a grocery store. Then it was demolished entirely and a one story building became a ten floor high rise. The Budweisers don’t come with a shot special anymore, they are just $7 now. And your friends, who you sat in parks with, helped move couches down impossible flights of stairs, they just disappear. Where did they go? Why didn’t anyone invite you? Suddenly you’re all alone with no friends, nowhere you can afford to drink, no galleries to just pop into on your way home, and you ask yourself, “Did I make it all up?”This is a New York City tale as old as time, though. It’s never been a place anyone stayed ’til the end. And if you’re the last one left it means you didn’t get the girl or the memo, and now you’re forty with roommates. But something is happening here that has never happened before. New York City is losing its pizza. It’s losing it to indifference, to age, to a change in taste, but mainly—it’s money. The landlords have chased out everything else that once made New York great, and now they’re coming for the pizza.Most people won’t care, because most people have terrible taste. You see, not all pizza is being targeted. Every day, in every former working class (ghetto) neighborhood, a small storefront transforms into a hipster-hell zone with pizza at its core, but you would never know that at first glance. Because you’d have to wade through the Japanese models who are never eating or doing anything really but getting their picture taken. Or the other influencers posing with whatever sets this pizza joint apart from the other one-hundred vaguely punk rock, sweaty, mandatory four-hundred pencil tattoos on the cook’s arms. And the gimmick always comes across like it was conceived in a boardroom. Like a cute cup of ice cream, or the merch that repurposes Basquiat’s crown in “fun” new ways. “Edginess.” “No conformity.” Somehow your slice is always charred. It takes twenty-five mins to come out because they have to grate fresh parmesan over one slice at a time. But you can get laid at this place. And a band in Ridgewood will eventually write a song about it. So if that’s your idea of a good time, rock ‘n’ roll. But it’s not my thing. I like real pizza. I like it served by two brothers who took over the business from dad and now their rent’s about to become unaffordable after sixty years. Or a brother yelling at his sister to hurry up with the cup of Coke she’s filling from an ancient soda fountain. He takes the soda, slides two slices over the counter to you, and says, “$6.” Nothing in this city has cost $6 in almost a decade. You can smell old New York emanating off the wood-paneled walls of these joints. The ingredients are always fresh. The pies haven’t been sitting around and getting reheated all day. A man who loved pizza founded this place with his family’s name, and he put his blood into it because as far back as his line went it was all leading to this, and now his children remember that legacy, the struggle, the commitment, what it took to put food onto their tables after grueling hours, and so they put their souls into it, and whether you show up on Monday at 11 a.m. or Saturday at 10 p.m. every slice has been made with the same care and pride.Here are my Top 3, gold-medal, all killer, Peoples’ Champ winners of Williamsburg: Tony’s Pizza (Graham Ave.)I wanted to start with my favorite. This is the place I walk my dog to. Somehow they’ve kept this small room looking exactly like the Italian restaurants you remember from your childhood. The ones you went to after basketball games when your coach was buying for the whole team. They’ve got the small tables with the red-checkered table cloth. The old-timers from the block drink espresso and dunk a biscotti in like it’s Pisan fondu. They look a little side-eyed when you walk in with a dog, because this is an old-school neighborhood, but they break when she jumps on them and looks for a pet. Two brothers run around doing the prep work, if you want to talk they stop and talk, they’re funny, they’re tough, and two very pretty girls take your order, pet your dog, and if you’ve said the right thing you might even get a wink and a smile as they hand you your plate. And this triangle that’s on the plate, it’s a Mona Lisa, it’s a hug from your mom, it’s perfect. It unravels in your mouth with each bite. It’s not just mozzarella, there’re hints of other cheeses, like parmesan, maybe pecorino, a sharp cheese but a subtle note, and little flakes of oregano to round it out. There’s good distance between the crust, the sauce, and the cheese. Light on the oil, no char. It’s a clean slice you can eat in front of someone and not need a napkin. A famous pizza critic gave this place a 7.9. Only someone from Boston would miss the subtleties that make this pizza exquisite. Tony’s gets a 9.5 every time. No debate.     Sal’s Pizza (Lorimer St.)Sal’s is pretty much the same vibe as Tony’s, and at $3.50 a slice, they’ve got a lock on the cheapest pizza in Williamsburg. There’s not as much in way of ambiance as Tony’s, but that’s not Sal’s fault. The stretch of Lorimer Street it’s been on for decades has flipped to the yuppies with expensive baby strollers, so there’re no Italians out front talking about the old days like Tony’s. But that’s okay because the pizza comes out quick, and when you take that first bite the cheese stretches out but snaps before it slops on your chin or shirt. And it’s a great slice. It’s so simple I feel stupid even writing about it. Sal found three things that can’t be improved when you put them together. The hipster spots will hire a guy on a unicycle to spread honey from an upstate bee farm on a slice and charge you $8 for it, and if you’re from the midwest you’ll be dazzled by the spectacle, and if you’re an idiot your brain will tell you it tastes better because you’ve got every color of the rainbow staring at you. But we need you to be better. We need you to realize a great song isn’t just an endless chorus. What makes it a piece of art is your need to return to it. Not just a box to check on your bucket list, but something to live with. To spend your days itching to go back again.  How can Sal’s charge so little for a slice and cover the rent? Well, luckily this ain’t Papa Johns, and the guy who owns Sal’s is usually behind the counter, so you can ask him these kinds of questions. “I bought the business from Sal a long time ago,” he says, “And Sal owned the building when he opened up.” Here we have the American Dream. A man who owes nothing to no one. A man who bet on himself and won. So now the prices don’t have to rise with inflation. The ingredients don’t have to take a hit to cover the bottom line. This is what we call a victory in the game of Capitalism. Sal’s gets a 9. I’ve never had a mediocre slice. Vinnie’s Pizza (Bedford Ave.)Vinnie’s is the correct way to bridge the old and whatever this nightmare is that’s happening now. It’s been on Bedford Ave. since 1960, but if I didn’t just tell you that you’d never guess it’s eligible for Social Security. Aside from the classic New York style pizza, the interior of Vinnie’s is a time capsule of the Williamsburg that existed when I moved here, when it was more like the Lower East Side and less like a tech-boy playground. Street art and pizza paintings decorate the walls, a thousand band stickers are on the door, and a Ninja Turtles bench out front brings a smile to the face of everyone born in the mid-’80s. There’s a body type I associate with Vinnie’s that I never even see here anymore—a fat dude in skinny jeans, in a tight band shirt with a balding head and big full red beard. Does that make sense? It’s punk rock but I can’t really tell you why. Maybe it’s because I ran into Andrew W.K. there once at 2 a.m. Vinnie’s has none of the Italian thing that I usually require with my food. This should be a deal-breaker, especially where I’m from. We require authenticity here in New York above everything else, but there’s this ability skateboarders and artists and punks and trans kids have when they find a neighborhood that’s been abused and neglected by time. They take all the influences, the blank spaces, the garbage, the possibility of redemption, and through raw power they build their own thing, and this hustle brings a level of cool that supersedes any idea of what a neighborhood or restaurant is “supposed to be.” This is Vinnie’s. It’s the original punk rock pizza of Williamsburg, on a block that less than two decades ago was the raddest place in New York. And though it’s become one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on earth, Vinnie’s is actually still pretty close to the roots. A slice is less than $4. It tastes exactly like a slice of pizza should. It’s like a Budweiser. It’s consistent every time. There are no frills. It’s just awesome tangy cheese over a sweet sauce. And it’s open late. Fun fact, last time I was there Kieren Culkin was dragging a kid and a kid’s basketball hoop angrily past the Ninja Turtles bench looking like every choice he’d ever made was the wrong one. I’ve also seen Rosamund Pike on that corner as well as Michael Cera, Nas, Sean Penn, and Willa Ferryra. If you’re visiting, grab a slice at Vinnie’s and sit on that Ninja Turtles bench. You’ll see someone.
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An Interview with Jeffery Renard Allen by Kenny Meyer

January 23, 2025
I was introduced to Jeffery Renard Allen’s brilliant short story collection, Fat Time (Greywolf Press, 2023), by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (prize winning author of Dancing Elephants). At the time I was a participant in her short story class. She made a habit of urging me to get out of my reading rut and explore the work of writers from divergent cultural backgrounds. Chaya had plenty of good things to say about Allen’s Fat Time, so I bought a copy.I should explain that I come from the opposite end of the cultural universe from Mr. Allen and the characters he portrays. I’m a seventy-plus-year-old retired programmer who grew up in Houston, middle class and Jewish. My reading has been a steady diet of southern gothic writers and the British and American classics. By contrast, Mr. Allen grew up in South Chicago and worked his way to a successful academic and literary career. His characters in Fat Time are people of color. Some from desperate circumstances. Some with world-class talent. Some brutalized. Some celebrated. Their stories are different as different can be from my own lived experience. And yet, I was enthralled. His stories were lyrical, literary and challenging in the best way. They took me to places I will never know.Mr. Allen responded quickly to my request for an interview, proving to be very approachable and an altogether authentic and decent fellow. He kindly agreed to answer a slate of questions. Some are about the Fat Time collection. Some are about craft. Some are about a writer’s life. Sometimes we’re lucky to connect in real time with a writer who affected us.  KM: Mr. Allen, thank you for agreeing to an interview.JRA: Call me Jeff.KM: Cool. Let’s dig in. I found the writing in Fat Time beautifully lyrical. It’s also a complex and demanding read. When you compose, how much weight do you give to the reader experience?JRA: My first concern is to myself. In a nutshell, I write primarily because it’s what I do, writing is who I am. I work hard to create the best manuscript I can, something that I feel is an honest reflection of how I see the world. For whatever reason, I have a hard time telling a story straight. Also, language excites me. Language is my entry point to creation, meaning that part of my individuality as a writer gets expressed in my singular approach to words and syntax and rhythm.Some of my favorite writers—Proust, Faulkner, Nabokov, Henry James, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison in Beloved—are demanding. They don’t/didn’t cut corners. (Well, James did try his hand at playwriting because he was desperate for money.) They were smarter than I am.Even if you consciously try to shape a manuscript to be more “commercial,” there is no guarantee that it will find a popular audience. As writers, we have little control over the market. Obviously, publishers spend a lot of time and money promoting a small number of books. But for me, writing is one thing, the publishing industry is another. Writing is an act of faith. All I can do is try to write the best manuscript I can.KM: How would you describe your ideal reader?JRA: They would be a person who enjoys and appreciates the pleasures and rewards of literary fiction, literary narrative. I am a political person, a progressive, a social democrat and internationalist committed to justice, for all people. Social and political concerns certainly inform my work, but they are secondary. I don’t believe that literature is an effective way to change political discourse or change the world. Not to badmouth anyone, but it seems to me that almost everyone in America now has political pretensions. It has become expected of us. I’m not interested in trends.I do my work. That said, I still hope to gain a larger readership over time. I am a huge fan of Michael Ondaatje. Somehow, he has been able to strike a balance between serious literary fiction and a popular readership. May I do the same.KM: The stories in Fat Time are vivid; the descriptions specific, often metaphorical and highly decorated. For example, the scene in “Heads” at the shawarma shop. “...the rim of the sky catching fire”, “trees bent like fingers,” “building ballooning,” and “tangled stalks of words.” All in the length of a random page. It’s lavish. When you compose, do these images tend to flow out in your initial visualization? Or are they primarily the result of considered and scrupulous revision?JRA: I’m gifted with a knack for metaphor. Simile, metaphor, and image—those come naturally to me. I think visually. (On one level I’m a failed visual artist. When I was a kid, I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for several years.)I’m also a poet. Although I rarely write poetry these days, I still read a lot of poetry for inspiration. Perhaps I remain a poet at heart. As memory serves me, Jean Cocteau—poet, filmmaker, novelist, visual artist—said that he was a poet at heart and a poet in everything he created. The same could be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini, another multi- faceted artist.When it comes to metaphor, I would not separate that device from everything else that happens on the page. Namely, sound, music is important. I find tremendous inspiration in music, especially jazz, artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker, among others. (On another level I’m a failed musician.) I strive for a type of syncopation in my prose. And I also strive for a type of layering, multiple directions and voicings.KM: Are you ever concerned that a metaphor might be strained or that it bogs down the flow of the narrative?JRA: In the revision process, I edit to make sure that I’m not overwriting, to avoid things like hyperbole, mixed metaphor, and sentimentality. But, as you know, writing is always paradoxical. So much goes into the initial drafts. I keep informal notebooks for every manuscript where I write down metaphors, images, sentences, and ideas. Revising is largely about concreteness and precision. As a writer I strive to be a stylist. Lyricism is not the same as purple prose.That said, I admire and appreciate all kinds of writing, including minimalists and writers who strive for a transparency of style. The important thing is to write well. And writing well is always hard. I maintain tremendous respect for anyone who gives their life to this largely thankless profession.KM: How do you begin writing a story? Do you typically start with a scene? A character? An oddity? As you’re building up a story, how do you tend to grow the narrative? Chronologically? Thematically? A Character reaction to circumstance? Some other method?JRA: I’m not sure if I have one formula for starting a story. First, let me speak to the pre- writing process. I’m in the early stages of planning a new collection of twelve stories, and perhaps the only commonality is that I want to write about some real people who interest me: Kunle Adeyanju, Virgil Abloh, Paul Robeson, Ota Benga, the Fiske Jubilee Singers, my former brother-in-law who has spent most of his life incarcerated, etc. I’m usually inspired by characters and situations. (What was life like for Paul Robeson when he lived in the Soviet Union? He never spoke about his time there. That gap in knowledge affords a space for my imagination.)When I begin writing, my general strategy is to start at a place in the story that I think I know best. That might be an image or a scene. It might be the beginning or the ending. Then I try to sketch out the overall shape of the story in a very rough and fragmented draft. At some point I begin to fill out the story scene by scene, section by section, although that filling in may not happen in strict chronological order.KM: The Fat Time stories are divided into Parts 1 and 2. What considerations went into that split and the ordering of the stories of the book?JRA: I don’t think of Fat Time as a collection of interrelated stories. I’m sure there are correspondences, but I did not plan those relationships. I had thirty ideas for stories and didn’t know if they would be one book or two or three. But I whittled those ideas down to the twelve stories in the published book.In some ways the stories are a mixed bag. Some stories are about Africa. Other stories are about the U.S.A. Some stories are set in the past. Others are set in the present or the future. Some stories are riffs on real people or inspired by real people. Others are about completely imagined people. In organizing the stories, I placed them in an order that made sense to me. I do think there is a sense of narrative momentum as you move from one piece to another. And the collection seemed to naturally fall into two parts.KM: Did the editors participate in the ordering?JRA: My editor at Graywolf Press, Ethan Nosowsky, did not make any suggestions about the ordering of the stories, although he gave many other important suggestions. However, he did with my first collection, Holding Pattern. He even suggested that I retitle the collection. (It was initially called Bread and the Land after one of the stories in the collection.)In the new collection of twelve stories I’m working on, six stories are set in the past while the other six are set in the present. Pretty simple.KM: The stories in Fat Time include historical characters. They might be considered historical fictions. I once heard Hillary Mantel give a talk. She said that in her books about Thomas Cromwell, she was deeply concerned that the narrative be historically accurate. The fiction was used to animate her characters. During the talk, she proposed a moral high ground for historical novelists. She argued that “...We shouldn’t recirculate the errors of the past generation or their prejudices. We should join in an honest project to help the public understand that history is not just a body of knowledge but an interpretive skill.” Do you feel constrained to avoid ‘alternative facts’? Is it important that a reader of Fat Time finish the story with an accurate understanding of Jack Johnston, or of the atrocities in South Africa, or the degenerate life of Francis Bacon?JRA: I don’t think of myself as a writer of historical fiction. I have no interest in writing fictional narratives that dramatize events and people of the past. Instead, I write riffs on real people, places, and situations, what some people might call alternative histories. I view this as a form of speculative fiction, more so given the supernatural elements in my fiction. I would characterize myself as a modernist in terms of technique and my concerns. But I’m also a fabulist.When I do research, I’m not driven solely by a concern for historical accuracy. I’m also looking for gaps in the historical record that will allow me to invent narrative. And I’m also looking for interesting facts that I can riff on. For example, I read that Francis Bacon lived in South Africa for a time during his early adulthood. Given my interest in Africa, that was a fact I knew I needed to use. Then I thought about something my doctor had told me years earlier. She had a photograph of herself petting a lion taken on a safari in Kenya. She explained to me that in that moment she was so terrified of the lion that she urinated on herself. In “Heads,” Bacon urinates on himself when he pets a lion in South Africa. This is often how things come together for me when I compose a story.As for Jack Johnson, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about how he spent his time in Australia when he went there in 1908 to fight Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship. That was the starting point for the story “Fat Time.”For the Miles Davis story, “Pinocchio,” my original plan was to write a fragmented narrative that dramatized various anecdotes I heard about Miles from various people who knew him, incidents that I had never seen in any of the biographies about him. But then other things began to make it into the story. For example, the nephew in the story is based on my friend Anthony Chisom who died tragically the way the nephew dies in the story. In addition, my Miles Davis is still alive and well. His evil deeds extend his longevity, lengthen his life, my take on the Pinocchio story. And, of course, Miles recorded a song called “Pinocchio,” which was, among other things, inspired by the Disney cartoon.KM: I found your use of time very inventive. For example, the story “Fall” begins in the middle and folds back in time as if told in a recollection. That’s preceded by “Testimonial” which reads like a prologue to “Fall.” It’s a puzzle at first. There aren’t many clues. These relative placements were disorienting, but make perfect sense on second reading. How do you arrive at the sequence of the story telling? Do you have a design in mind? Perhaps there’s an effort to replicate a dinner-table conversation where the teller leaves out important details that must be filled in with digressions. Or is the order governed by the sequence of composition? Or some other method that you could describe?JRA: Every story comes about differently. (Miles Davis advised, “Play what the day recommends.”) “Testimonial” is the earliest story in the collection since I wrote it in October 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. It was my response to 9/11 and came to me in the form of a dream.“Fall” was more planned. I saw the Nat Turner film, The Birth of a Nation, back in 2016 when it first came out, and I was so disappointed with the film that I began making plans to write my own story based on Nat Turner. Then I began to think about Nat Turner in terms of certain conflicts in the political world today. I spent a lot of time in Tanzania and learned about the horrible phenomenon where people with albinism there are hunted for their body parts. So I decided to do a kind of retelling of Nat Turner’s revolt focused on people with albinism in a fictional African country with Turner’s “confession” still serving as a model (structural) for the piece.Overall, I see every element of a story in terms of the progressive development of conflict. So, for example, I don’t think of flashbacks or past action as “exposition.” Timewise a story can move in any direction and push the conflict. Also, asides and dreams can amplify the conflict. I’m drawn to the sea of African time where past, present, and future exist all at once. And I think of reality as a layered continuum encompassing the unconscious, dreams, fantasies, altered states, and the everyday. So rarely do I think of a narrative in terms of beginning, middle, and ending. Much else can happen. For me, narrative is always mythical, archetypal. I’m not a realist. And linear narratives feel artificial to me. I’m more drawn to broken and circular narratives, what I call “shadow narration.”KM: Could I get you to think back to your days as an emerging writer? No doubt you received comments from other writers, instructors, and editors. Some helpful; some not. There seems to be two verdicts... our own and our readers. When revising, do you make pragmatic compromises on the advice of a trusted reader? How did you, or do you, go about reconciling the two?JRA: I don’t have any first readers, although I do from time to time share a recently finished manuscript with a friend. Usually, I have a strong sense that a manuscript is or isn’t working because I’m a slow writer and spend a lot of time trying to get everything right. But I’m also aware that a good editor can see things that a writer can’t. I speak from experience since I’ve had the good fortune of working with people like Ethan Nosowsky, my editor at Graywolf Press.In composing a manuscript, I think it’s important for a writer to have a strong sense of what s/he hopes to achieve and say in a manuscript before seeking out the feedback of others. I don’t think it’s the job of a first reader (or workshop cohort) to “correct” your manuscript. Part of the process of developing as a writer is coming into your own with regard to voice, vision, and value. How do you see the world? How can you articulate what you see in language that is uniquely your own? Finding answers to these questions will involve discovering what you value in literature (and in other art forms). Which writers speak to you? Why? As a developing writer, ninety percent of what you learn comes from reading and from learning how to read properly. I like craft books that focus on reading. I’ll mention two here. I really like Francine Prose’s How to Read Like a Writer. The title says it all. I’m also a big fan of Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design, which focuses on structure as opposed to the workshop format.Some writers don’t believe in the workshop process because workshops can take a boilerplate approach that allows no room for individual expression or innovation. As well, some developing writers will take every opinion in a workshop as the truth and try to respond accordingly. I would advise the writer to listen to the people in the workshop who seem to understand what he is attempting to do in a manuscript.However, every writer is different. Some people rely on readers. Others don’t. As I said earlier, I don’t. To each his own.It’s worth bearing in mind that the workshop is an American invention, and that most writers in other parts of the world develop outside of the workshop system. However, an MFA writing program can have its benefits like affording one time to focus on writing and reading in a supportive community of like-minded writers.KM: You write frankly and vividly about sex between the characters in “Big Ugly Baby.” Do you have any advice for writing sex scenes? Any words of caution? Any red lines that shouldn’t be crossed?JRA: It goes without saying that it’s hard to write about sex in literary fiction or any literary narrative, for that matter. Usually, sex in literary fiction is psychological. But that can easily become a cliché. So how can you write about sex and make it fresh and interesting, without it becoming either trite or pornographic? A year or two ago I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the first time and was surprised that so many people at one time found the novel scandalous. I found the novel moving and powerful. Lawrence often gets a bad rap, but I think his best work—the short stories and novels like Women in Love—are as good as anything. Lawrence was doing his best to figure out love, both heterosexual and homosexual, and he tried to write about it honestly, even if he got some things wrong. His work never feels pornographic to me.But pornography can be a good thing if you’re writing satire. Satire is best when it offends. (Think of the brilliant South Park. Or think about Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is in large part about a dude who gets an erection whenever the Nazi’s fire a V rocket at London.) So if you’re writing satire, you may want to cross all the red lines when it comes to sex.KM: Do you consider yourself to be a polemical writer? I was wondering because “Orbits” struck me as a polemical piece. It’s a fantasy about the life of the black princess Laila. The daughter of the world’s leader, a descendant of Malcom X, who, with the aid of Moon People, have ascended to the leadership of the world government. It’s a troubled time. A porcine curse has turned black people into pigs. White devils have tails amputated and they turn green if they die. Survival of the race depends on good relations with the Moon. Is it reading too much into the story to find racial overtones in this cast of characters?J.R.A.: I’m not a polemical writer. As I said earlier, I’m a fabulist. Before anything else, “Orbits” is a work of speculative fiction. This story has a specific origin. Some years ago, I met Elijah Muhammad’s youngest daughter. She explained that when she was a girl growing up in Chicago, she and her father lived across the street from Muhammad Ali. Ali gave her her sixteenth birthday party at his home. That was the origin of the story. Something else happened. Once, I was on a bus in Brooklyn and overheard an older member of the Nation of Islam telling a teenage boy that there are people living on the moon. These people live inside the moon and have a lifespan of a hundred years. The third source of the story was an incident that I witnessed when I was in high school in the late seventies. I developed this coming-of-age story from three different sources. Other things in the story riff on the actual beliefs of the Nation of Islam.KM: Cultural norms change. For example, Flannery O'Connor wrote her satires when racism was normalized in the culture. Her stories use lashing humor and demeaning stereotypes to make moral statements. They often rile people up. It seems to me that a story like “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is still relevant to our time. Do you think someone like Flannery O'Connor is worth reading in the current cultural context? Should she still be read? Or is the preservation of her work like a statute of Bedford Forest, something to be shunned?JRA: I don’t believe in censorship. That includes “canceling” artists for their aberrant beliefs or abhorrent behavior. Just as some readers might be offended by some of the racist statements Flannery O’Connor made in interviews, other readers might object to the heavily Catholic nature of her fiction. Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite writers. I find her stories brilliant on many levels—funny, wicked, violent, and highly symbolic and resonant.If I read a story or look at a painting or see or movie or listen to a piece of music, I take the art for what it is. I don’t know anything about the person who created it. If I’m impressed or blown away by the art, I will probably do some research and find out more about the artist. But I’m not doing so as a way of discovering some troubling facts about the artist for the purpose of dismissing the artist and his/her work. I think we need to rebel against that Stalinist approach to art and artists.KM: I’m retired now, but when I was working, I did a poor job of keeping the working hours in check. I was captive to my obligations. As you were coming up as a writer, did you ever struggle choosing between life and the project of writing? Is there any warning you might offer to young writers making their way? Any hints about the best way to balance the creative and commercial portions of the job?JRA: In an interview once, Miles Davis said something like “Music is ninety percent of my life. My wife and friends are the other ten percent.” I think here he speaks to the obsessive nature of art. My experience has been that making art is an obsession. You do it because you have to. You don’t have a choice. It’s a calling. It’s who you are.On a typical day, I wake up early, before 5:00. I walk for 90 minutes. Then I start writing. I work for four hours. I try to find time later in the day to read for at least two hours. And I also jot down notes and ideas. That’s a full day. But time has to be made for your partner, your family, and whatever else. And even when you’re not writing, you’re thinking about it, mulling over some idea or problem. In an interview, Miles Davis says, “I think about music all the time. I’m even thinking about it now.” That’s how it is, making, creating.I don’t believe there is an easy solution to the work-life balance. The reality is, if you are genuinely an artist, writing needs to be something more than a hobby. You have no choice but to maintain a schedule. The disciple of a schedule is crucial to creating work. The best you can do is work out some compromise with your partner and family. And you have to also earn a living.When I taught full-time, I asked for classes in the afternoon and evening so that I could write in the mornings. But I know some writers who can’t write for an entire semester when they teach. They completely focus on teaching.When I go away to an artist residency, I put in more than four hours a day, usually at least eight hours. I have even worked around the clock.Writing is a torturous process. The process is hard, both mentally and physically demanding. However, if I take a day off from working/writing I feel guilty. Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse.KM: Writing is often described as a lonely pursuit. However, it’s my understanding that to have a literary career today, it’s necessary to take a leading role in the marketing and promotion of your own work. Is that your experience? Do you see yourself reading on stage as you write? Does a successful writing career demand a person develop performance skills? Would you advise an emerging writer to cultivate some showmanship? Is getting a book published a little like the dog who catches a bus?J.R.A.: In today’s market, reclusive writers like J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Octavia Butler would not get published. One reality of the publishing industry today is that publishers expect you to promote your work through public appearances and on the Internet. So it is.That said, writers are not actors. And not every writer is a performer or showman. (Harlan Ellison would go to a bookstore and sit in the window writing a new story. That evening he would read the story to the public.) I would encourage a writer to simply feel comfortable and confident in public. And read your work in your natural voice, with your inflections and rhythms.It's also important to find a suitable passage to read before an audience. Not every passage is suitable to a reading. Select a passage that reads well. And remember to look at the audience from time to time. Make eye contact.KM: Before closing, I’ve got to ask, what book did Lamont pull off the shelf in “Big Ugly Baby” or Laila in “Orbits.” I’m sometimes asked by friends for short story suggestions. With emerging authors in mind, are there three short stories by contemporary authors you would consider essential reading? Are there three short story collections by contemporary authors you consider essential? What’s important about those works?J.R.A.: I recently read a terrific collection by a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World. The stories were surprising and never predictable. Most serious readers by now should know Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections, Lost in the City and Aunt Hagar’s Children. Jones is like nobody else. The stories are smooth and simple on the surface, with the energy and momentum of spoken tales. He brings his characters alive on the page. I’m also a huge fan of John Keene’s Counternarratives. Keene explores a wide range of locales, forms, modes, and voices in this masterful collection.But let me not stop there. John Edgar Wideman is a master of the short story. Wideman totally reimagines the form through a narrative voice that both is and isn’t him, that both is and isn’t autobiographical. Start with his first collection, Damballah, and read all of them. The Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett is also a terrific short story writer. His stories are traditional in form, but they sparkle and are alive. The late Mavis Gallant is not a contemporary, but she is one of my favorite writers. I would recommend her collection Paris Stories, which was curated by Michael Ondaatje. She has a Chekhovian range where each story has the depth of a novel. She was a remarkable stylist and always found innovative ways to approach the short story form.KM: Thanks Jeff. You’ve been very generous. This has been a wonderful experience.J.R.A.: No sweat. Happy to do it.
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CHARLENE ELSBY RECOMMENDS: Books from the Void

January 21, 2025
Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order on this “Recommends” list, I’m choosing to focus on Void-related works. Otherwise, there’s just too much out there to love.   Joe Koch, The Shipwreck of Cerberus (self-published limited edition, 2023)Joe Koch is known around the void as the “King of Horror,” and The Shipwreck of Cerberus is the perfect example of why. It’s adorably small, like a Filthy Loot book, and a Joe Koch limited edition. He was kind enough to set aside my numbered copy so I could pick it up at VoidCon 2023. The action revolves around Rex, who has some interesting sexual encounters with a green woman and an actor-father figure whose decapitated head Rex has an established relationship with. The magic of the book is how you can open it to any page and read a beautiful sentence that evokes an immanent and other-worldly image. Joe Koch gives zero fucks about making it easy for the reader, because he is more concerned with being superb.  Brian Allen Carr, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press, 2013)I got this from Brian at VoidCon 2024 because it’s the one nobody else has and holy fuck, Brian Allen Carr is good. This is a short novel about a guy with very long arms just killing the fuck out of everybody, but the emotional sincerity of this character, his trials and tribulations, and his love for Edie ring so true. There’s a category of art that’s just the plain and simple statement of something soul crushing, and Brian Allen Carr is in there, along with Fred Eaglesmith, Neil Young, and Cormac McCarthy. I also feel a bit like Carr has tricked me into empathizing so hard with this long-armed murderer. But I am with him, for him, and I don’t care what he has done. I believe it was inevitable, understandable, and he should be lauded as a genuine hero in an unkind world—a tragic hero.   OF Cieri, Lockdown Laureate (Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I picked up this collection from Castaigne Publishing after reading OF’s Backmask, which I gather got a whole lot more attention than these stories. There’s one blurb on the back from Evan Dean Shelton, who is the publisher. But damn, people, read this book. It’s beautifully illustrated by Rachel Lilim. The paper is good quality, and the cover can take a harder beating than anything I’ve had printed on demand. And then there are the stories. It’s the kind of grimy literature that makes you feel the best and worst parts of being alive simultaneously. It’s isolation and social performance and an interiority you’d be privileged to access and oh wait you can if you just read the book. I read the whole thing on one plane trip. OF has style plus content plus a gracefulness of expression that propels you forward in the text. I loved every minute of it.  Michael Tichy, Wound of the West (Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I traded Tichy for this collection of “Four Harrowing Tales from the Draw” at VoidCon 2023, and goddamn, Tichy can write. The West is the old timey American west, and the wound is a scalping that the character in the first story survives. Tichy writes like someone who’s been scalped and left for dead and then come to accept it. There’s a gravity to it and a peace. Just read this: “Will is eating the same hare, drinking the same muddy water, sweeping the creeping sand out of a doorway that you stare at each day and hope, pray that some shadow comes to break the light apart. That someone will darken that doorway and kill you or save you, because you can’t do either yourself, and at this point both come to the same.” It’s devastating how at home with despair he is. Highly fucking recommended.  Justin Lutz, Give Unto Us (Ghoulish Books, 2024)I picked up Justin Lutz’s novella at VoidCon 2024, after I previously wrote a blurb for his short story collection Gone to Seed, at the request of Ira from Filthy Loot. Give Unto Us is a hole story—a family (mom, dad, and toddler) move into a lakeside house that turns out to have a sandpit in the backyard, and the sandpit exchanges items they drop in for items it acquired from the previous owner before his unexpected death. Of all the void books, Justin Lutz seems pretty normal, in the sense I could see this selling copies. I would definitely watch this movie, and I would gleefully watch the part where Trevor just fucking boots his toddler (away from the sandpit), because Lutz understands that it’s funny when children get hurt.   Rios de la Luz, An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints (Broken River Books, 2023)I will always associate the Broken River Collective with the void, because they were well-represented in its inaugural year, even though I didn’t meet Rios until a few months later at AWP. Her book of short stories feels like the rose+eyeball+anatomical heart being pierced by the fiery dagger that graces the back cover. Her prose is piercing, impossible, and bloody. The back of the book says that the stories within were inspired by motherhood, and she does not hold back. It’s the lyrics of music inspired by the heavens and the answer to the question of what if emotions had viscera.   David Simmons, Eradicator (Apocalypse Party, 2025)Simmons is a grotesque master of ceremonies with a heart of gold. He had the crowd mesmerized when he read a story called “Whole Time” at VoidCon 2023. (You can listen to it on the Agitator Patreon site for free.) After that, I read the Ghosts of East Baltimore and Ghosts of West Baltimore set, which tell the tale of Worm, a recent felon whose release catalyzes a series of absurd and gory events. So obviously when I had the opportunity to read the manuscript for Eradicator, I jumped at it. Simmons is hitting at the extremes with this one. It’s hilarious, disgusting, relatable… if you laughed at the end of The Substance, check out Eradicator, forthcoming 2025.   Alexandrine Ogundimu, The Longest Summer (CLASH Books, 2023)I feel like Alexandrine Ogundimu should be on every list. For me, she’s the third in a triangle of horror writing grounded in filth and despair, alongside Elle Nash and BR Yeager. This novel is hard to summarize, because its effect has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with the fact that Ogundimu’s sentences feel like they were only made possible after a hard run through a deep pool of pain and self-reflection. It’s biting and revelatory in a way that, “This is a book about someone accused of stealing from a store that seems very similar to but legally distinct from Hot Topic” doesn’t capture. Alexandrine participated in the void prompts leading up to VoidCon 2023 (This was a series of writing prompts using a word-of-the-day distributed by group chat on Twitter.) Maybe next year she’ll show up for real.  Stanley Stepanic, A Vamp There Was (Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2024)This book has three parts – the first part epistolary fiction about a man named Middy who falls in with a vamp who happens to be a vampire, and this fiction is supplemented by historically accurate facts about Fredericksburg, Virginia in the 1920’s. This is followed up by a scholarly essay on how the “vamp” character of the time is conceptually distinct from a vampire but certainly meant to recall the bloodsucker’s image. Rising feminism finally made women threatening enough to take on the role. The title is a nod to the 1915 film A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara as the seductress who ruins the life of an unsuspecting family man. The rest of the book gives short biographies of notable vamps of the time, which reminded me of Debra Nails’ The People of Plato. This book shines in how it provides the explicit historical context for its own story, and I’ll always remember this aha moment from when Stepanic is putting the pieces together for me about how, according to the historical record, woman becomes monstrous simultaneously as she becomes capable of exerting her own agency—that for a whole movement in popular culture, becoming master of one’s own fate and becoming a monster are the same thing. Honourable mentions to Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, whose books I blurbed. (You can go read about them on the publishers’ websites.)
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AUG STONE RECOMMENDS: Steve Aylett, Kevin Maloney, Madeline Cash, John Patrick Higgins

January 16, 2025
Steve Aylett, The Book Lovers (Snowbooks, 2024)  .Steve Aylett is back with a new novel that could very well be his best work yet. In The Book Lovers, Aylett’s fireworks are at maximum intensity – dazzling, dizzying, and coming straight at you. Launched from one of the all-time great opening lines – ‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best’ – the text is hilarious, profound, and just a delight to engage with. Almost every sentence is rich, full of meaning, and contains enough avenues of thought to construct a city around. The majority of these sentences lay out truths so deep one wants to sit and spend an afternoon contemplating them. The writing, however, sweeps you along, crackling with electricity, megavolts on their way to illuminate heart, brain, and soul. I’m not the only one singing such high praises, the cover – and the artwork is lovely – features similar commendations from Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, and Robin Ince. No one writes prose like Steve Aylett, or has quite such a singular worldview, ultra-cynical but way too funny to be completely despairing. His is a precision that appears out of thin air a millimeter away from its target. “‘It’ll get worse before it gets better’ – the fact that this statement is perennial should tell you something,” explains Sophie Shafto. Hugo Carpstein tells Inspector Nightjar “It’s your job to depict justice, isn’t it?” It’s that ‘depict’ that is perfect, saying so much about the surface level workings of government and its employees. As referenced above, there’s some of Aylett’s best character names too, and this is reflected in the version of 1885 London the book is set in, with locations such as Shroomsbury, Kimlico and Biccadilly. Another excellent joke I want to point out is ‘Albion holds its citizens in two cupped hands, and is sometimes so pleased it applauds.’The setting is quite literally a steampunk world. Steam being one of the three main forces that powers industry here. The other two being voltaics and the wonderful ‘denial engine’, which the human race has most likely been running on since the dawn of time. There’s more plot here than in a typical Aylett book, though one can be forgiven, what with everything else going on, for not catching every detail. Sophie, daughter of magnate Lord Shafto, has been kidnapped and Inspector Nightjar is on the case, interrogating a cast of personalities who, whether given the chance to speak or not, spout sidesplitting bizarre complaints often only tangentially related to the topic at hand. With the book being so much about, well, books, it is tempting to look for Aylett himself behind the masks of say Hugo Carpstein or Sir Percy Valentine, and a description of the writer Emmanuel Feste describes our author to a tee – “an obscurity with a sixth sense of humour who was said to have blown ‘a swarm out of a whistle’, shouting from one horizon to the next about how morality is not altered by altitude and annoying all by demanding that his pursuers keep up.” Sophie Shafto is a precocious youth who has sensed the importance of books from an early age. “In a box of sunlight by the window she tasted a vibratory honeychain of ideas confirming that human beings think and feel, a fact unacknowledged by the real people in her young life.” Books abound through the text, as they should in something called The Book Lovers, and there is a lovely bit of prescience in the fact that despite this being the late 19th century the population has become engrossed in ‘mirrored books’, complete with leather spines, held in one’s hand and gazed at all day long, an excellent dig at cell phone culture. And while these are an example of the superficiality of the masses, The Book Lovers is a testament to the power of books – in what it says about them and what it is itself.  Kevin Maloney, Horse Girl Fever: Stories (Clash Books, 2025)In Kevin Maloney’s fiction there is always something wondrous happening, often pop-culturally infused, and the narrator is keenly aware of both. They happen to and around him, and his retelling of such experiences is almost always hilarious. This is greatly aided by the hyperawareness of their own shortcomings and willingness to dive headfirst into them. Maloney’s narrators keep falling deeply in love with every woman they see, whisk the willing of these off to exotic locales, and will most likely at some point vomit over themselves from drink, drugs, or a cocktail of the two. That’s not to say these stories are purely comedy or that the frequently dark subject matter – suicidal strippers, surprise deaths, teenage drug addicts and dealers – aren’t handled with concerned care. And the tone itself is never too dark, even when worlds are completely falling apart. I won’t conjecture that this is Maloney’s reason for writing these stories, but there is a (often desperate) need on the part of the narrators to connect with another human being, body and soul, no matter what the cost. Fortunately, some of these objects of affection are aware this isn’t in his best interest. For instance in the final story, ‘Epicenter’, where – after he’s been tossed into the alleyway by a gigantic bouncer and there attacked and bitten by a rat – a stripper tells him he doesn’t want to date her. Maloney’s presented circumstances seem as much jokes as they are all-too-real possibilities. There’s a lot of ridiculousness but it’s the kind of ridiculousness that is life. And I can’t overemphasize how funny Maloney is. A lot of that is down to his killer succinctness. His ability to give a tight, honest assessment of a situation with optimal word choice is powerful indeed. The first three stories – ‘Ghost’, ‘Hannahs’, and the titular ‘Horse Girl Fever’ – all blend comedy and tragedy in the above manner and offer the widest range of emotions in this collection. Next up, ‘King Of The Pit’ is less nuanced, an account of seeing Alice In Chains during the third Lollapalooza, but it keeps getting funnier and funnier as undefined drugs crank up the mayhem of that strange bonding ritual known as the mosh pit. ‘Wrath Of The Red-Eyed Wizard’ is an ode to navigating work, alcohol, and sex after turning 40, while ‘Malaria Diaries’ sees the narrator and his whirlwind romantic partner cheating death down in Columbia. ‘The Informant’, one of the best stories of the bunch, takes things back to pure comedy, though the setting is still pretty dark – a dry run for drug smuggling gone very wrong. Within the humor, Maloney manages to throw in some wonderful descriptions of the U.S. Southwest – “spent the night whizzing across the mystical dreamscape that some people insist on calling Arizona”. The drugs keep on coming, and ‘No No’ is a first person recreation of Dock Ellis’ 1970 no-hitter, pitched under the influence of LSD. Given the subject matter, it fits right in. ‘Bloop’ is also a highlight, a few days spent experimenting with a drug called Lotricaine, an anti-fungal cream for birds. This new high goes beyond ketamine, which itself is excellently described as “makes you feel like you ripped the wings off a Pegasus and used them to fly over the city of your birth, laughing at your enemies”. The past few years have proved that autofiction can be very funny indeed, with Maloney’s 2023 novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim being one of the best of the genre. Horse Girl Fever proves a fine addition to his work.  Madeline Cash, Earth Angel (Clash Books, 2023)Speaking of hilarious autofiction, Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel is a delight. Cash’s prose is sharp, crisp, ironic yet real in a very pleasing way. Her dialogue is even punchier. Nothing wasted here. Her descriptions are always charmingly odd yet perfect to the situation. The humor comes from numerous angles – irony, a childlike wonder at the shit adults get up to, bemusement at all human interactions, wry acceptance of particularly puzzling aspects of modern life even while our humanness rails against them. In the first story, plagues have descended upon us, but at least this proves that God exists. This is followed by ‘The Jester’s Privilege’, an over-the-top account of a ludicrous though entirely-plausible-in-this-day-and-age PR job, changing the public face of a terrorist organization. While that’s happening the narrator also deals with a heavy friendship rivalry based on status, this derived from work and lovelife, and her own tepid uncertain romantic relationship. And kudos for a couple hilariously dark lines in a wedding speech. The two best stories are the title tale and ‘Slumber Party’. The latter being one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Nearly every sentence is a gem. The narrator wants to have a sleepover for her 30th birthday but after it becomes apparent how out-of-touch she is with her closest friends, she hires a company to create the experience for her. The corporateness of the affair is outrageously funny while the cost of the whole thing is simply outrageous. Cash has a unique sense of callback, always unexpected and, again, very droll. While Cash’s work is mostly comical, it’s not all so. There are keen observations about the awful way men too often treat women. One aspect of the title story is Anika’s truly horrific boyfriend, the famous actor Jake Willner, an ultra-violent control freak. While Cash details Anika’s attachment to him, Anika also of course has her own agency, the main part of the story being her interactions with the CEO of ‘Nosi’, a highly toxic and controversial fragrance machine manufacturer, who she’s tied to a membership program impossible to get out of. The different layers ‘Nosi’ operates on is bound to bring a smile.  Another arrow in Cash’s comedic bow is when she has characters drop matter-of-fact truths. There are many excellent uses throughout the book, delivered in sniper-esque single shots, and said CEO neatly summing up Jake Willner on page 76 is exceptionally devastating. Cash also has a great sense of how amusingly complicated anything can get, shown at the end of ‘Earth Angel’ when she explains why Anika’s little brother doesn’t want to press charges against the car that broke his tibia. All the best qualities of Cash’s work culminate in this story. And these seeds blossom across this entire collection. John Patrick Higgins, Fine (Sagging Meniscus, 2024)With his debut novel, Higgins capitalizes on the dark humor offered up in his short dental surgery memoir, Teeth. Fine is not strictly a comedy novel, however. While there’s jokes aplenty – and almost every chapter title is a pun – the prose tends more towards Martin Amis than Wodehouse. That said, Wodehouse is mentioned by name in the getting-to-know-me third chapter, as Leave It To Psmith is protagonist Paul Reverb’s favourite book, The Smiths his favourite band. So complete a picture do we get of Reverb’s likes and dislikes, it would be understandable to take this as more autobiography. Higgins, outside of the book, has stated this is definitely not the case. But top marks for making it so believable. Reverb is at work on a Young Adult novel about a hypnotist vampire by the name of Count Backwards. Interestingly, this pursuit is not the main focus of the story. Rather we see Paul as he comes to grips with uncomfortable parts of his personality and as he tries to be a better person. It’s just that in doing so, things tend to turn out pretty badly for him. Of course there’s other times where he’s not trying at all. One of the funniest bits in the novel is the ‘Through a glass, Barclay’s’ chapter, about a ‘dedicated wank day’ gone horribly and hilariously wrong. Much more wrong than you could imagine. And that’s not the only time in the novel there’s an issue with the same activity, the next being an incident which has the funniest description of a penis I’ve ever read – “furious and red, like a man arguing with a deckchair attendant”. It’s not all that obscene, though. There’s pop culture references galore throughout, for Paul has, as you might guess, a sizeable record collection and is very fond of film. As often goes hand in hand with these, he’s not so adept in the romance and socializing departments. These matters aren’t always played for laughs, though Higgins’ strong comic touch is never far away. There’s a quite touching funeral scene that nevertheless spawns a few good jokes. And without wishing to give anything away, the twist at the end is handled very well, especially considering how poorly it could have come off. But rather it is proof of Higgins’ talent that the denouement is so pleasing.
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THE HAUNTED MEMORY OF A DEAD PLACE: An Interview with Derek Fisher by Rebecca Gransden

January 14, 2025
Is there something up with modern dread? Derek Fisher’s enigmatic collection Container (With an X Books, 2024) strokes the lid of contemporary malaise, and teases the release on stories that simmer like a broiling pressure cooker. This is writing cast adrift on strange currents, Fisher’s domain that of diseased architecture, where dark impulses meet bad vibes. I talked to Derek about this unsettling and dynamic collection. Rebecca Gransden: When did you write your first short story? Has your approach to the short story form evolved over time?Derek Fisher: Yooo. Hi Rebecca, my fellow Lizard Brain!My first short story, like ever? Uhhhh, I think I was in high school. I remember submitting little weird things to my high school’s annual short story publication. A couple of them got in. Then I was supposed to join everyone that got tapped and do a reading at a nearby bookstore and I most definitely did not show up. No way I was reading in front of people back then.For a while I wrote stories based on what I thought readers might want, based on what kind of style and voice trends you’d see in literature. Don’t do this. It’s the ultimate bad move. Over time I think I stopped caring about what the work would look like to others, and just wrote the stories I wanted to write. I found myself writing in a handful of approaches to voice and style that started to feel like my own. There are a few stories in here where the paragraphs are all blocks of text, no indentation. I write with this format more and more, as I find it tends to drive this ominous tone that I’m usually gunning for. Something about the fragmentation helps conjure the spooky vibe. I also think nowadays my stories are getting shorter. Soon they’ll just be two sentences long. “Jim went to the store to buy a bag of Milk. The severed fist was still in his ass. The end.”   RG: The collection shares its title with one of the stories included in the book. What led you to select Container as the title for the collection as a whole?DF: For the longest time I wanted to name the collection I’ll Only be Happy Once Everything is Gone, and had submitted previous versions of it with that title to other presses. But I hadn’t written the story “Container” at that point. Then one day that story spewed out and it was obvious that it would be the title track. I love that goddamn story. The way it grips tight like having your whole body wrapped violently in duct tape. That’s the feeling I get when I think of that story, so it seemed like alright why not just call the book that and hope the whole collection feels that way? Try to convince the reader that the whole thing carries that same tightness through the title, haha. Gotcha.   That story deals with desire on the verge of rupture. It takes place in constricted spaces. Cars, elevators, storage rooms. And maybe more than anywhere else, inside the obsessed brains of these two characters. Their thing threatens to rip open at the seams. I think the story itself feels that way, like it’s just barely contained. I really like this story. I think it constricts us into these spaces. Confronts us with the lust or obsession or self-erasure or whatever flood these characters find themselves in. RG: How old is the oldest story you’ve included in Container, and how new is the newest?DF: The oldest is “Scorch Earth.” I probably wrote that in late 2019, early 2020. The newest is “Rhino.” I wrote that like two seconds before I sent the collection to Jon at With an X. It came out in La Piccioletta Barca after the collection had been accepted. RG: The stories featured in the collection have appeared at a wide variety of literary venues. How did you go about selecting which pieces to include?DF: I went back and forth forever on what to include and where to stick ’em. The stories “David Lunch” and “Rhino” were last minute additions. The title story came fairly late in the game too. “Scorch Earth” and “Bird Eating Glass” and “I’ll Only be Happy…” had been around in the hard drive’s basement for a little while but I always knew those stories would be part of the deal. Whether or not they had been previously published didn’t factor in too much. It took me a while to figure out the order. That’s a fun exercise. Rearranging the pieces until they feel right, or as right as they’re gonna feel. I wasn’t sure about including the flash pieces at first. But then I figured who doesn’t love a one-pager? Easy work. Throw them in! I’m always interested in how writers arrange a story collection. Feels similar to how the tracks come together on an album. Or a set list at a show. Sometimes you read a collection and you just know why the final track was picked to close the show. Two of my favorite collections in recent years are Maggie Siebert’s Bonding and Sara Lippmann’s Jerks. Two entirely different gems. In both cases, you get excellent collections all the way through. But then they both end on such strong notes that it changes the complexion of the whole thing. In both cases, these final stories (Siebert’s “Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” and Lippmann’s “The Polish Girl”) imprinted the joyous experience of reading the collection with a perfect, final sledgehammer to my ribs. You don’t forget a thing like that. Good curation can sew the feeling of a story collection to your skin. That’s what I want to feel when I’m done reading a book. That, or a feeling of “What the fuck did I just read?”RG: In “Bird Eating Glass” you present a character named Mantle, who is a musician swept up in the modern fame game. For them, sound brings renown, brings the noise, brings powerful recollections and associations. Are there particular sounds that flood you with memory?DF: I constantly hear the sounds of trains in my head; that braking screech, of the train pulling into a station, or possibly derailing. I don’t know what that’s about. Like I have a subway stop full of dead people living in my skull or maybe in my house behind the wall like in that Robert Munsch book Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then he Heard a Sound.At all times I feel like I am hearing dead static, or electric feedback. Should probably get that checked out, right? Like someone is holding a microphone to an amp. I don’t know if I literally hear this, but it’s there in my head. Probably just been to too many shows. I enjoy it. It tunes out the world for me, which I don’t mind at all. I have what I think is a problematic compulsion to repeat songs in my head all day long. But not necessarily because they are catchy. Lesser Care’s “Finally Bare” has been on constant repeat in my brain for three or four weeks. I’m totally haunted by this song and I am losing my mind. It’s a good song! I enjoy it very much. But sounds and music often turn compulsive as they repeat for me. Every song I’ve ever heard just gets added to the jumble of infinite repetition. When I stop to think about all this constant music in my head I think I must have a tumor or a serious neurological problem. It hasn’t killed me yet so I guess it’s probably fine but who knows.  I always write with music on. Silence drives me crazy. Unless I’m beside someone I love. Then I can be ok with quiet. Their breathing is enough. Otherwise, I need sound. Mantle, in “Bird Eating Glass,” is the manifestation of this part of me. I’ve never played music, but I can’t live without it. Sound informs my ability to make stories. Mantle is what a character would look like if they were stripped of everything but sound-driven compulsions. An expression of pure noise, otherwise locked into the body and mind of a human. I think people can relate to the idea that our internalized noise not only has value to us, but is a reflection of all the sensory mania we absorb, and can be filtered into something quite lovely. The world is a fucked up place, right? Mantle’s noise is the meeting point between the world, and total sonic isolation forced outward. The conceit of the story is that harsh noise can become the world’s most popular art form. I am 100% confident that this is true. It’ll just take the right artist to deliver us.  RG: The story “Scorch Earth” makes repeated reference to a purpose-driven life. What does a purpose-driven life look like to you, and how does that manifest in your writing life?DF: If you asked me this question four years ago I would have had a whole spiel about how writing is my purpose and how my life is driven by it and as long as I have writing goals I’ll be fulfilled or some blah blah blah like that. But I’ve calmed down a lot with that shit. I don’t know if life (mine or anyone else’s) is purpose driven. I just do things I guess. Write, eat, work. I really like eating. Sometimes I watch these competitive eater YouTubers and think I should do that. That can be my purpose. To eat. Consuuuuume. Lily in “Scorch Earth” is a smart cookie but at the start of that story she’s still too young to understand what life means as something separate from her parents. She believes in a “purpose-driven life” but doesn’t fully appreciate the fact that this idea has been dictated to her from birth. I think there’s an undercurrent of spirituality in that story, where her parents probably believe that by killing, by devoting their lives to the pursuit of taking life, they are somehow closer to god, or the devil, or whatever nasty thing they worship. We don’t see this translate into Lily. She does not show signs of spiritual belief in pursuing her victim. She lives this purpose-driven life because that’s what she’s been taught to do. Sometimes this is how I feel about the rhetoric around this idea of purpose, that we are being fed a pseudo-spiritual concept and that if we live with purpose, we will be complete. But the more I think about this as something dictated to me, in YouTube videos or podcasts or whatever, the more it feels like snake oil, and just fodder for boot-strap narratives that exist only to feed the machine of capital. My true belief is that people just do things. We just do things. We will always do those things. Whether we like it or not. They are coded into us, and/or the influences around us lead us to do things. Eat, drink, lie, steal, kill, love, donate, write, play, serve, worship, make annoying sounds for no reason, travel, do drugs, smash our teeth out with a hammer, whatever. RG: I found many of your stories to be governed by strong undercurrents, as if the crux is brimming beneath the surface. This gives the pieces an enigmatic quality. Is this element one of conscious intent?DF: Oh, thank you! I like hearing this. It is conscious yes, but I never know if I’m doing it well. I am a giant fan of subtext in fiction, and so I prefer to try to work with undercurrents as opposed to surfaces, but I also like to write stories that are more vibe-driven than plot-driven, so I think these undercurrents you identify are part of my attempt to encourage certain vibes more than anything else. I’m a big fan of dread. Apocalyptic nothingness and the haunted memory of a dead place. Memory is the motif I’m obsessed with most. Almost all my stories are about memory. Humans are made of memory. I think these undercurrents are all attempts to explore the memory of a place, relationship, moment, etc. Often memories are haunted and uncanny. I like to try to get at these feelings in the subtext.I think about how this applies in the story “Progress.” The meat of the story is the dialogue between TurtlePhone and Positively Pete! It seems like such goofy shit. A smart-ass talking toy turtle with the mind of an up-his-own-ass PhD student and who also believes he’s a special ops super-killer. It’s probably obvious that I had a lot of fun writing this. But the part of the story I’m most drawn to is the abandoned, scorched shell of the town of Baker, California at the end. What happened here? Why this apocalyptic graffiti? What haunted hell is this? In some ways I see all the dialogue and silliness of the story as a colorful vehicle to get us to this apocalyptic end, this haunted memory of a place that existed until recently. As a reader I just love seeing and thinking about undercurrents. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of my absolute favorite books, because of how it tells a rich story entirely in the subtext. Laura Van Den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves us (I just typed that whole thing without Googling it) is a goddamn masterclass on subtext. Both of these books deal with subject matter that isn’t of high interest to me; both are books I stumbled on, but quickly came to love because of how strikingly they channel what’s below the surface. I don’t care so much about craft. Sure I like to see talented writers throwing down some nice moves, like watching elite athletes do their thing, but that’s relatively low on the list of things I look for in writing. But with subtext, different story. When I see a writer do subtext well, I get the full body shiver. I think Hemingway said a good writer doesn’t say what’s happening on the surface, but they have to know those details, and like, by knowing, the reader will get some kind of a sense of truth, a conveyance, even if they aren’t made explicitly aware of the details. I say, fuck off Hemingway. Don’t tell me what I have to know. I don’t know what TurtlePhone is up to when he’s sitting on the can. That’s his business.     RG: “Does Anyone Care How the Vegetable Oil Feels?” describes a technique you call method writing. Any examples of this in your own writing life?DF: Haha, no way. I used to think this idea was attractive as hell. To live the shit hard, as the narrator in the story says. But that sounds like a goddamn nightmare to me to be honest. I guess some nightmares produce some good writing. But it’s never been that way for me. I just have ideas and write them down and hope they work well enough. I think the idea of the artist living their art as authentically as possible is sexy to us, but it has problems. If we exoticize and romanticize all the violence, addiction, desperation, and evil that we see in our literary heroes, that forces us into a confrontation with our own values that I don’t think we particularly want to have. As someone who loves wretched characters, it’s a place I hesitate to go. I think of Al Swearingen in Deadwood, a magnificent TV character. To come up with a character like that I might have to become a murdering, deceiving, totally self-interested pimp? Well, shit. That sounds like a lot of work. I remember reading Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, about a literal starving artist, a favorite book of mine, thinking God damn! this poor bastard. Someone shoot his ass and put him out of his misery. Hamsun really lived off fumes, nearly starving to death in his early days. I guess Norway wasn’t so rich back then. Then he got big and famous and won a Nobel Prize and eventually became a Nazi sympathizing maniac. A bunch of them went this way. Celine. Eliot. I just want to write stories.I will say, I do gush at some examples I hear about of writers doing insane shit in order to conjure their art. Like Gary Shipley watching Begotten on repeat in a dark room for two straight weeks to write You With Your Memory Are Dead. That is the most batshit thing I’ve ever heard. Or, sticking with Inside the Castle books, their Castle Freak projects, where the writer has five days to write 100,000 words. These feel like experiments in what we might call method writing, putting our minds and bodies through extreme ordeals in order to test our creative limits and access the most unhinged, terrifying depths we got. I wish I had the discipline to attempt maniac stuff like this. I’d probably produce 75 words about stoned beavers wandering around the forest looking for wood.    RG: The office building is the tallest, thinnest in the city’s history. A man plummets to his death on the first day it is occupied, the day after completion. The sounds of children screaming are heard in the elevators, in the stairwells. On several of the floors. Throughout meetings. It’s much worse when the wind hits the building. A feeling of nonstop vertigo defines daily office life. The above quote from “Rhino” is a prime example of the ominous quality you can inject into environments. How do you use location when it comes to building atmosphere?DF: I think I’m obsessed with the haunted potential of a space, interior or exterior. I want to feel the imprint of a place, I want others to feel it. We might not know what happened in an empty room. Maybe nothing. Maybe somebody was tortured. Maybe a plot to commit a mass atrocity was concocted in that space, in a basement, over tuna sandwiches and old moldy coffee. Maybe all kinds of unthinkable things happened in this little desert town that used to function well enough, but is now burnt to the ground. I like trying to think about what a place feels like to someone stepping into it, and they know bad things have happened there, but they don’t necessarily know what or how or why.  I think “Rhino” is about the design of haunted places, as if their hauntedness was intentional, built into the space, rather than the space becoming haunted after the fact. The story seems to connect this spooky business to Lorna, the architect who designs them, as if she is the haunted one, and everything she touches turns to death. But we don’t know why. Is she plagued by this herself, or is she some kind of a demonic figure sewing chaos, getting off on diabolic design? I enjoy trading in uncertainty with these kinds of questions, and letting the reader decide. My first job outta undergrad I worked in a big ad agency. Way up on the 32nd floor. Could see the whole city. I had a meeting with one of my bosses and I can’t remember why but I started spouting off the heights of all the tallest buildings in Toronto. She said, “Uh, Are you… into buildings?” I said no, all embarrassed. But the truth was hell yes, I am. I am into buildings. All their vertical pathways and tunnels, elevator shafts, unseen dark corners, crawl spaces. I’m afraid of heights. But I lived on the 25th floor for years. All tall buildings are haunted spaces to me. The wind sounds like a screaming animal up there. All day, life accented by constant screaming.     RG: Your exploration of unconventional romance, featured in “Container” and “For Whom I Bare My Teeth”, presents an intense and, I found, cinematic take on sensuality. What is your approach to erotism in your work?DF: Hmmm, I don’t think I have an approach exactly. These stories are about desire. I think desire is dark, by its nature. I wanted to find ways to show that, but without being too on the nose. “For Whom I Bare My Teeth” is a bit more straightforward about it, but I do find that story to be funny, and maybe less serious about the darkness of desire. At least that’s how I felt writing it. I suppose cannibalism stories will always be funny to me. I really enjoyed writing both these stories, but they came from very different places. “Container” feels more serious, like it’s reflecting on something where for the characters the stakes are sky high. I don’t know if in other stories dealing with erotism I would use similar approaches. I just recently finished writing something about a couple so obsessed with each other that they begin to literally eat each other. There I go with the cannibals again. But the approach there is different from these other ones. I guess I just try to channel a question about what these characters’ desires look like, and what would happen if they took those desires to extreme, unreasonable places. I’m interested in making the unreasonable feel real, necessary. Unreasonable but necessary. Unavoidable. Impossible for them to avoid going there. Maybe that’s the approach.   RG: I remember when the terminally ill artist Anastasia Pelon brought her whole family to Neon for one last dinner together. We had been expecting a room full of eccentricity, full of chaos, full of the infusions that such a prominent artist would have inevitably left on her closest family members, especially in the shadow of her imminent death. But what we got was something much different; a room full of working-class, down-to-earth, polite people, who all happened to be this woman’s family. There was never an unsmiling face around the room. These parents, siblings, and cousins were so happy to be together. Anastasia’s sister helped her whenever she needed to use the bathroom or stretch her legs. Her sister would carry her oxygen tank as they walked together, holding each other’s arm. I remember the expectation that the whimsical and ferocious aesthetic that imbued her art would reveal itself in the room, but no. The bloody, bodily, confrontational, qualities of her work had no role here.The above quote is lifted from your story “Neon”. What has surprised you about the collection, either in the writing of it or in the process of releasing it to the world?DF: The fact that I have ever published one word of writing surprises me every day, let alone a whole collection.  RG: The elevator appears as a recurring motif in the collection, frequently as an uncanny space. Do you have any insights into why the elevator is attractive to you?DF: You caught that eh? I hadn’t anticipated a question about elevators, but I am happy to see this. I do think about them a lot. These steel boxes in which we spend a significant amount of cumulative time, those of us that live or work in tall buildings. The elevator is removed from the rest of the world. Such uncomfortable little moments can happen there. Yet such significant moments too. They test our humanity. Small talk. Claustrophobia. Fantasizing about the terror of being stuck in one. I’ve met people in elevators that became significant in my life. I’ve watched dogs piss and shit in them. In the height of the pandemic, the elevator became this place of mania, paranoia, and uncertainty. And total crushing awkwardness. Infection. All of these things factor into how I think about the floating steel box that hides us from the world for a couple minutes.I think elevators are crazy places. Intense, crazy places. Have you ever ridden in an elevator and had someone you don’t know stare at you the whole time? I picture the cables being cut, and the box plummeting. Everyone crushed inside. Impaled with shards of splintered steel the size of swords. I don’t think about this kind of thing when I’m in cars or trains. Something about this closed box brings these thoughts. No windows. Closed off from the world. I picture people in the elevator unable to control themselves. Strangers so attracted to each other at first sight that they tear each other apart. They know they are on camera but they don’t care. They know they only have a minute. That others might enter. But they don’t care. Elevators are crazy places. We can think these thoughts, for a minute or two, and then we get off on our floor and it’s over. The thoughts are gone.  RG: An undertow of dread and unease permeates your fiction. What attracts you to exploring this area with your writing? What do you dread?DF: I always think back on that Clive Barker story “Dread”, from Books of Blood. The character Quaid is obsessed with dread and experiments on people, forcing them to confront their worst fears. Great story. He leaves that poor vegetarian girl starving in a room with only rotten beef until she’s forced to eat it.There are some great vibes to be mined from dread. The well of dread is endless. The world is a dreadful place. We all are forced to confront dread in our own ways. I don’t always plan to write with dread in mind, but some stories just take on this tone. The undercurrents we spoke of earlier, the feeling of spaces being haunted with memory, this can be a dreadful feeling. Sometimes I do dread by accident because I write a character that is too flat or one-dimensional and in their flat silences there can appear to be things dreadful about them. Whoops, haha. I think the dread in my work tends to come from feelings of insularity, containment. Some of these characters are so locked in their own heads. We only see what they think. The rest is a mystery. I think this can be dread-inducing. They are containers; all we know of them is how they perceive a dying world, experience a violent sexual relationship, look down at the gun in their hand. Sometimes I think of dread as a feeling elicited by the knowledge that the world is filled with monsters that we don’t see. We know they’re there, but they live in the shadows. It’s the knowledge that they exist that breeds dread in us. We know terrible things happen. Murder, torture, human trafficking, genocide. And sure, we see these things on the news. But most of us don’t confront them for real. Most of us. This is of course a good thing, not to have to know these horrible realities first hand. The dread lives in the space between us and the shadow. I sometimes try to write as if considering the monstrous, even if I’m not describing it or writing about it directly. The writing is the empty space between us and the horrible thing. What’s uncanny about it is that we all recognize the smell, the sound of the empty space. We see a recognizable horror in it despite it being empty. That’s why that “Backrooms” picture is so scary. I think this is the driving force behind stories like “Bird Eating Glass.” A character who is plagued by the unfathomable knowledge of the world. This character is a mystery to us. We don’t know what they’ve seen. We just see some whisp of it reflected in their intolerable music, in the scars on their face, in their severed voice. The fact that their music happens to be popular in spite of itself is the signal that we all recognize the terror in this empty space. You ever read Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps? I think that is the best book ever written about dread. RG: “Reasons to Stay” addresses the vagaries and vacillating tensions of a relationship forced to factor terminal illness. How did you decide upon the approach to structure for this story?DF: This story is pretty much entirely based on a true story. I don’t love to admit this, because doing so interferes with the pretense of fiction from which I feel we must always approach books billed as such, but in this case I make an exception. I’d been trying for a couple years to find a way to write about the person that “Reasons” is about and I kept coming up flat. I tried much longer works that were more formally conventional, but hated all of them. Then one day I sat down and wrote this and it just felt true. I like to think of this story as being pretty good at expressing what memory feels like – all broken up and fragmentary and mixed up between the good and the painful. I didn’t exactly set out to write the story in this fractured way, it just came out like this, and I knew that it was the real story as it was coming out. It ended up being much shorter than any of the previous versions, which also felt correct. My memory of this relationship feels compressed and frenetic, hard to pin down yet clear as day in some parts. My memory is engraved with ambivalence and longing, but as time goes by, those elements are further compressed and reordered, slotted into this larger chaos that is the sum of all memories. I wasn’t thinking any of this as I wrote it, I just wrote. And then after the fact, it just made sense that my mind was processing these feelings and memories through this fragmented ambivalence. I don’t know if any of that shit makes any sense but I think it makes sense to me.  RG: Container is released by With an X Books. Why have you chosen to work with them for this collection? In a wider sense, how do you view the small press scene?DF: It has been a total pleasure to work with Jon and Traci at With an X. They are so diligent, generous, and professional, I could not have asked for a better experience. I had an intuitive sense that With an X might be a good fit for a couple reasons. I felt that the vibe of some of their books of photography connected with the tone of the title story “Container,” in an abstract but not insignificant way. As it happened Jon had read that story previously when it was first published in Maudlin House, and said he was taken by it, so I think there was already a seed planted there, unbeknownst to me at first. I also felt that a previous collection they’d published, Drew Buxton’s So Much Heart, had some similar sensibilities to my work, the mixing of the real and the hyperreal, some darker stuff but not lacking in heart, that the vibe felt right. Far as I’m concerned, small presses drive literature. A few weeks ago I drove to Portland from Vancouver just to go to Powell’s. I spent like three hours in the small press section, examining every single book. Anyone watching me woulda thought I was a lunatic. Dennis Cooper always says that all the best writing in the world comes from small presses and he’s ten thousand percent right. I love the small press scene. I couldn’t live without it. I do have favorite books that were published by big publishers, we all do. But the vast majority of the work that interests me as I grow as a reader is from small presses. I get an explosion of joy every time I think about some small presses, just knowing they exist. It’s like, I know that the true, raw, unfiltered voices will find their place in the world. The most uncompromising writing is available to us because some of these small presses exist. I am eternally grateful.RG: “Do I fear for the future? Hell fucking no I don’t. Hell no. You know why? Because fear is dumb wasted pussy shit that serves no purpose. That’s why. We’ll figure this out like we figure everything.”Do you think about the future? If so, what does the future look like to you, with regard to your writing, or anything else?DF: Oh ya, I think about the future. I think about it all the time. I think about burnt buildings penetrated by hollow winds. I think about cities washed away by floods. I think about vast landscapes marked by emptiness, with little fossilized remnants buried beneath the surface, hidden signs that we were once here. I love thinking about the time beyond the end of us. It gives me a blissful chill. I don’t care if that’s a cliché. I don’t like being told not to be cynical. I embrace feelings of cynicism and nihilism. I don’t care if they absolve me of having to work for a better future or not. I don’t care if it is a privileged position to think like this. It’s just the way it is for me. I get creative fuel from thinking about what the world looks like when we’re gone. I also think about all kinds of nice things, future-wise. But I keep that shit to myself.   
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David Simmons Recommends: Brian Evenson, Charlene Elsby, Kelby Losack & J David Osborne

January 9, 2025
Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight (Coffee House Press, 2024)Brian Evenson is my favorite author of all time so I make it a policy to read whatever he writes.Some of you may already know Evenson as the innovator and pioneer of the this-house-we-just-moved-into-has-more-windows-on-the-outside-than-on-the-inside-so-now-I’m-going-to-burn-it-down-with-my-family-still-inside horror genre. Whether it’s the crime noir-religious cult-horror-mystery Last Days or the schizophrenic-Mormon-fever dream of The Open Curtain, all he drops are bangers. His short story collections are my favorite though. Fugue State and Windeye are two of the best collections I have ever read. So you already know I was too hype to get Brian’s latest collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight.One time, I heard Brian described as “too literary for horror” and “too horror for literary” and at the time, I remember thinking to myself, damn, that’s lame as fuck, so I stopped listening to whatever podcast it was and just drove in silence for a minute. What does that even mean? He can write really well so he’s too good for horror? TF? That’s disrespectful.And yet, I understood what they meant in a way. Brian’s command of language is uncanny, and I imagine it has to do with his time growing up in the Mormon church and then his position in the church itself before he left/got kicked out. (You can read about the Brian Evenson origin story in like every article about Brian ever, and other people have done a way better job of breaking it down than me, but TL/DR, back in the day he got kicked out (?) of BYU and like, excommunicated (?) from Mormonism (?) because his first collection Altmann’s Tongue was way too gangster (not sure if this part is 100% correct but it’s how I imagine it happened) and some lame-ass student filed a complaint. I think. What I’m saying is that he uses language and pacing in a way that makes it read like a reverend from a strange religion in a different time and different universe wrote it. He will use unfamiliar words, or familiar words in strange ways. It’s something to do with the rhythm. And you’re never quite sure where you are exactly, as far as setting. You could be anywhere or nowhere.Take this for example. There is a story in the collection called “Vigil in the Inner Room” and it opens with: By midday father had sickened again, and by nightfall he was dead.This is already a crazy opening line, typical of Evenson. We know that the father has been getting sick and this time his ass died. But it’s the use of the words midday and sickened and nightfall that makes this line hit so hard. He could have used afternoon and got sick and night and the line just wouldn’t have hit as hard. But he didn’t, and because of this, his writing takes you to a different world, a different time. His specific combination of words is like a password that unlocks something inside of you that makes you feel like an early-9th century Chaldean peasant when you read it, eating a hard loaf of bread and sipping wine you made yourself. Maybe I’m not explaining it right. Hold up, let me try again. Brian Evenson’s writing is like the first time you try PCP. That empty feeling where you don’t know who you are, that liminal space where suddenly your clothes begin to seem too small for you, so you wonder if your clothing has actually gotten smaller or if you have gotten bigger, and then you have crazy cotton mouth so you attempt to spit but you can’t spit that far so your spit lands on your North Face sleeve, and then you try to wipe the spit away with your bare hand, and you realize that you have lost the ability to sense things using touch, because you can no longer tell the difference between a spit-covered sleeve or the bare, dry material of the spit-less sleeve, and this makes you wonder if you will still be able to do your job when you clock in at work on Monday, and the whole time you have been thinking this you have been curled up in fetal position in front of a Panera Bread, so now you have to burn your house down with your family still inside it. This is how all of his short stories make you feel. Like you are trapped in a dissociative nightmare that never ends.OK, but whole time, everybody writes book reviews about Brian’s shit. I want to do something a little different. I want to talk about just the opening lines to his stories and how he is the straight up GOAT of openers. In rap music, this is called an opening bar. The opening bar makes the whole song to me. If you don’t come with something so hard that it immediately makes me run around the room in concentric circles screaming “OH SHITTTTTTT” then your music ain’t for me. I feel this way about books too.An example of a great opening bar can be found in the classic motivational record “Cheese and Dope” by Project Pat. In “Cheese and Dope”, Project Pat begins the song with:Out here slangin on this blade prayin that I don't get cutBy these police makin raids, jumpin out and checkin nutsImmediately we are transported to North Memphis, in the summer of 2001, where we have sequestered dope under our ballsack, praying that the police do not throw us up against a wall and frisk us, and we must know what is going to happen next to our hero, Project Pat. Will the nefarious MPD catch up to our hero? Will he make it off the blade in one piece? We have to know.I feel the same way when I read Brian’s work. Take any story from Good Night, Sleep Tight. In “A True Friend”, the first line is: There are times when it hurts to be alive.GYAT! That is a crazy opening bar. The reader has to know more. ISTG if somebody interrupts me before I find out what happens to the narrator I am going to CRASH OUT. Hold up, I’mma quickly flip to another story in the collection. OK, this one is called “The Other Floor”. Sometimes at night–not every night, only rarely–the transition between being awake and dreaming would stretch long enough to become its own sort of time, a time in which it was impossible to know whether he was awake or asleep, a time in which, in the end, it didn’t really matter.WHAT THE FUCK! That is nasty work. First of all, in anybody else’s hands that shit would have been a run-on sentence, but not Brian. That shit is CRAZY. We have to find out what’s gonna happen! We have no choice. This time-shifting weird almost-sleep-purgatory thing he is talking about sounds very interesting, but also, in the end it didn’t really matter. Why didn’t it really matter? Does somebody get killed or some shit? So it doesn’t really matter that this person experiences a dream-like state since they are gonna get bodied anyway? We have to know.In conclusion, Brian Evenson’s Good Night, Sleep Tight is a healthy, homeopathic, all-natural alternative to smoking PCP and I implore you to get trapped in that dissociative nightmare as soon as you finish reading this. Charlene Elsby, The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty (Apocalypse Party, 2023)We define people according to what’s been done to them, not what they have done.I have read this book a couple of times and this quote always stands out to me. Because I agree with it. At first, it sounds brutal, unforgiving. Unfortunate, even. That this is the way we are. And perhaps it is. But that doesn’t make it untrue.In The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty, Elsby asks the question: which is worse: working in the food industry or getting fucked to death/giving birth to millipedes? Just kidding. But not really. The part I found the most horrifying is the abuse the unnamed narrator—living below the poverty line with a dead-ass mom—takes regularly from the people she encounters at school, in the trailer park she lives in, and in the terrible diner she works at. She links up with a few other troubled youths and they explore the psychosexual. And then some REAL serious shit goes down and she embraces her true nature and becomes what she was always meant to be. And all along she is keeping track of the people who wrong her, this poor girl on the margins of society. But where Elsby truly shines, is how we find ourselves really rooting for our narrator, cheering her on, even (ESPECIALLY) when she is burning down her trailer park with everyone in it.   Kelby Losack & J David Osborne, Dead Boy (Broken River Books)Brian Schuck’s girlfriend has just committed suicide and Brian is a mess. He has no job and owes money to a perverted gangster with an affinity for dog fighting and sexual violence. And then Brian’s dog—who is devastated from the girlfriend’s suicide—decides to stop eating. When Brian’s dog dies from self-inflicted sadness starvation, his buddy Handle has a brilliant idea, a way to bring the dog back to life. All they need is a bathtub of Monster energy drinks (for the electrolytes, flavor doesn’t matter) and some electricity and our boy can have his best friend back. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the girlfriend.I’m a fan of Osborne and Losack’s solo writing, but when they get together it’s like Bun B and Pimp C. Eightball and MJG. Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine. It’s a classic out the gate.  In Dead Boy, you learn a lot about dog fighting while getting hit with the darkest punchlines. I love how all the characters just acknowledge the craziness, the zombie dog, and agree to never speak of it. And all of it gets recorded for Brian’s TikTok. Because that’s the only thing that really fills the empty hole inside Brian. The attention. The engagements. The likes. It’s also very touchy subject matter, suicide, dog fighting, dogs dying and all that. Reading it makes you feel like Osborne and Losack were trying to outdo each other with every line. I asked them about that and Kelby texted me back: when you’re tryna make your homie go “broooooo that’s fucked up” you write crazy shit lol Also, the dog’s name is Mike Jones.
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THE TERROR IS THERE: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY COSTA by Kevin M. Kearney

January 7, 2025
Emily Costa’s debut story collection GIRL ON GIRL (Rejection Letters, 2024) isn’t a book of horror, at least not in the traditional sense. These stories can be horrifying, sure, and there’s a palpable uneasiness in nearly every chapter, but Costa’s premises are notably banal: girls at an ice cream shop deal with their shitty boss, two moms take their children on a playdate, high schoolers drink warm High Life in a half-empty basement. That’s not to say they’re boring. Costa’s fiction interrogates how those seemingly innocuous interactions are so often charged with aggression and violence—how quickly a welcoming smile can turn into a menacing smirk.Like Bennett Sims’ Other Minds and Juliet Escoria’s You Are the Snake, two other collections from this year, Costa’s GIRL ON GIRL is subtly terrifying, exposing the unsettling realities lurking beneath our common experiences. I’m not surprised at how great the book is—I’d been a fan of her fiction for years, and loved UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT (Autofocus, 2022), her memoir of undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder—but I was still amazed at how seamlessly she pulled it off.I called Costa on GIRL ON GIRL’s official release date to ask her about developing as a writer, assembling a story collection, and figuring yourself out through fiction. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.  Kevin M. Kearney: We’re talking on the official release day for GIRL ON GIRL. I know you’re sick, but are you doing anything to celebrate?Emily Costa: I’m…not. I am not teaching today—I had my last class yesterday. I’m all caught up on grading and that is a reward in itself. I’m going to watch a movie tonight and my husband did get a cake, which was really sweet. That’s the extent of it, though.KK: That’s awesome. Does the cake say anything about the book release or is it just a cake?EC: It’s just a cake. It’s from a really nice Italian bakery, so I’m excited about that. It says, like, “Congrats!” or whatever on it.KK: I would imagine if he asked for the book title at a bakery that might lead to problems.EC: [Laughs.] Yeah, not a good idea.KK: Were your students aware of your book?EC: I don’t think so. I finally just switched to the English Department after 10 years and I’m teaching Comp. We’re talking about arguments and all that. But a student just told me that she dropped out of Engineering major to become a Creative Writing major because she really enjoyed the class. So, that was really great to hear. But I don’t think they know about the book, although I am planning a reading. I teach at the school where I got my MFA, so my mentor, my MFA advisor, is planning a reading for the spring. So, they can figure it out. I guess I’ve got to be careful about what I read.KK: A lot of these stories don’t take place in college, but they do take place in high school, or they’re centered on people thinking back on high school. Were you writing much fiction when you were a high schooler?EC: I started writing then. It was really bad. I was attempting to write books about dogs when I was, I don’t know, 8 to 12. I don’t know why. Finally, in high school I thought, “Wait, that’s not just some stupid thing I was doing? I could actually get good at this? Or try? Or take a class?” I was writing. It was really embarrassing. I still have some of that stuff, and…I won’t be revisiting it anytime soon.KK: Was it a very early version of what you’ve now developed? Or was it just Dog Fiction?EC: [Laughs.] I quit the Dog Fiction! That stuff was more…I remember when everything clicked for me Junior year. I had a really good English teacher. I think this happens to everybody. We got to this one portfolio where we got to do all these different writing assignments, showing different parts of ourselves. I guess it was essentially CNF. It was just fun to write in that way. Freshman year, me and my friends were trying to put together a little magazine and it didn’t go anywhere. None of it was really serious, but it was cool to see there were opportunities to do this. And people were encouraging, so that was really nice.KK: When did you start taking writing more seriously?EC: I was an English major, but I didn’t take any Creative Writing classes until I went to grad school. I was just writing here and there. It was fun, but I didn’t ever really know what to do with it. In college, there was a class where we read short stories and wrote essays about them. But one of the assignments was we could write a short story based on one we’d read. I wrote one based on “A&P” by John Updike. It was a lightly fictionalized version of an awful job I had. This is a recurring theme for me. I worked at an amusement park as a 16 year old. It was just bad. But my teacher was really nice to me about it. So that was always in the back of my head: “It’d be really fun to do something with this. I enjoyed this a lot. I don’t love writing essays about Henry James.” So then I eventually decided to pursue the MFA.KK: I’ve never assembled a story collection, so I’m always interested in the process behind putting one together. It seems like everyone has their own philosophy. What was yours? EC: I really just went by vibes, but I wanted to vary the length and the points of view. But there’s so many of the same themes that I didn’t know where to put the one where the cat goes into space. [Laughs.] In conclusion, I didn’t put in a ton of thought and I really just went by feel of whether it felt right together. KK: Reading it felt more like a novel. I struggle with reading through a story collection because I feel like I need to stop at the end of each chapter knowing the next will be wildly different. There are a lot of distinctions between your stories, but it felt like you were always driving at something larger. One of those things is the past—the woman in “Ethan Marino” can’t move beyond the social hierarchies of high school, the mom in “Dead Mall” is fascinated with old toys, the girl in “Balefire” is still processing a traumatic episode from years earlier. What draws you to characters like these, who are so focused on the past?EC: I think that’s me trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. [Laughs.] I don’t know. It’s really just me trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to the past and can’t move forward in a lot of ways in my life. I don’t think I ever figure it out and I think most of these characters end up in trouble because of their focus on the past. There’s a lot of feeling stuck and not knowing how to move forward, and getting it wrong, over and over. What’s been interesting in talking about these stories is I have to be aware of what I did, and a lot of it I didn’t do on purpose. I didn’t know I was writing all of these stories about these people who are really stuck in the past until D.T. [Robbins, publisher of Rejection Letters] was, like, “Write a synopsis.” [Laughs.] Then I realized it and thought, “Shit—what do I do now?” Maybe, by getting it all out on the page, I can move forward. Like I’m lifting some curse. I really don’t know.KK: Like you said, I’m rarely aiming for something in my fiction. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a moral or a theme I’m trying to develop over the course of a story. It’s just a story and I try to make it as interesting as possible or as fun as possible. And then I go back to read it and I can see all these kernels that it feels like my subconscious has planted along the way.EC: Yes. Yes.KK: It’s my brain screaming at me, “You need to deal with this thing.”EC: That’s exactly it.KK: I revisited your memoir about outpatient therapy for OCD, UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT, in advance of reading the collection. At one point, you write, “I know this whole thing, this whole disorder, is about trying to control the uncontrollable, scrambling around in the unknown for footing.” I underlined that immediately and wrote in the margin: WRITING. [Laughs.] EC: I think now it’s starting to feel clearer that it was my subconscious doing it. I don’t know what was going on before. But now I’m looking at the stories I put in and what’s going on in them. I was talking with my friend about CNF versus fiction; about what freedoms you have in fiction versus where you’re stuck in CNF, trying to use what you have in real life and put clues together to figure yourself out. I think I’ve been trying…it’s so navel-gazy and self-absorbed, but I’ve been trying to figure myself out in the fiction, too. I didn’t think I was. But I was drawn to certain things and I was drawn to them because I couldn’t figure them out in my life. What’s been fun in writing fiction is you can do whatever you want. You can choose something you wouldn’t have done in your real life and see what the consequences of that are. You can take it as far as it can go. It sounds so obvious, so many people have come to this conclusion before, but I was really keeping those worlds separate. I have a friend who didn’t know I wrote fiction because they only knew the other stuff, the CNF, but to me I guess they all now just seem intertwined. The stuff I’m working on now is this autofiction stuff—or whatever the hell you want to call it—and I’m calling it that because I was writing it as memoir and felt so stuck, so bogged down and bummed about the past. It felt so sad to me, like trauma porn, and not anything I wanted. I talked to another person about it and they were like, “Just make it fiction.” Oh, duh, okay, obvious. Ever since then, it’s been fun. That was the key that unlocked everything. I’m seeing that they’re not as separate as I was keeping them in my brain.KK: Is this the novel about your dad’s video rental store? EC: Yeah, it is. KK: Is it stylistically similar to your short fiction? Is it at all like your memoir? Is it completely different from both of those?EC: I think it’s similar to the short fiction, but…and this might change, because I don’t know how much mileage I can get out of it…but I’m doing it from a child’s perspective. First person. Starts with me—or the character of Emily, or whatever—at six years old all the way through high school. We’ll see how long I can sustain that. Or if anybody would ever want to read that. [Laughs.] It’s been fun because you’re limited by the age. “Would this character use these words?” That kind of stuff. That part of it is fun. I have a child who’s seven-and-a-half, so I’ve been studying him. If he would say it, then it’s fine. I’ve also been using my own home movies and my grief journals from when I was five to see what I said or what I was interested in. [Laughs.] This is where I’m showing you how clearly stuck in the past I am. Really, really deep into what was going on in 1993.KK: There’s a slight terror simmering in the background of a lot of the stories in GIRL ON GIRL. If the settings were different, someone would maybe call it “gothic.” I know “horror” has been used to describe it. Or maybe genre’s made up and it doesn’t really matter. Is that terror something you were actively aiming for or is that something that naturally seeps into your fiction?EC: I guess it’s just something that naturally occurs. The terror is there. I can see it now. Not to sound like a complete idiot, but I wasn’t aware I was doing that. Maybe it’s because that’s what’s there in real life. But what can we do about it? How can we interact with it? How can we pull it to the forefront?
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KEVIN CHESSER HAS A HEADACHE: AN INTERVIEW WITH A POET WHILE WATCHING AN ORIOLES GAME by Dalton Monk

December 3, 2024
Kevin Chesser lives above a candy shop in Thomas, West Virginia, which is a historical coal mining and railroad town with a population of less than six-hundred people. I met Kevin almost a year ago when he came to Huntington to read from his poetry collection, Relief of My Symptoms, at a reading series I host called Ham’s House. Kevin read his poems, played the banjo, and made people laugh. I’ve thought of him often since the reading, and so have others who were in the crowd—they’ve asked me about him. He has that effect on people. He makes them feel special.We met at his apartment as the cool, end-of-summer evening swept over Tucker County. He had just gotten off a shift at the Invisible Art Gallery and looked just as sprightly as he had when I’d first met him. His apartment was dimly lit and decorated with nostalgic relics: framed drawings of Garfield and Charlie Brown, childhood photos stuck to the fridge. On his bookshelf were multiple VHS copies of Twister. His partner, Carina, shook my hand and exuded a similar nirvana as Kevin. He offered me a cup of tea, which I took, and then we sat down in his living room while, on the TV, the Orioles played the Tigers. Dalton Monk: Did you grow up playing baseball?Kevin Chesser: I played baseball until I was about thirteen. I was not… I’m not very athletic. When the kids started hitting their growth spurts, I didn’t hit a growth spurt. That’s when I went to my dad and was like, “I’m not doing this anymore. These kids are seven feet tall and two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds.”DM: Did you grow up in Thomas? KC: No, I grew up in southern Maryland. I lived in Elkins [WV] for like fifteen years before I moved up here. I went to school there and stayed.DM: How old were you when you moved to Elkins?KC: Eighteen. I moved up here [Thomas] in 2020. Kind of at the height of COVID.DM: The last time I saw you, you said you see the same people every day. Who are those people?KC: Well, I see my coworkers. I see my downstairs neighbor, which she’s only here half the time. I see my next-door neighbor out walking her dog. She’s usually out walking her dog at the same time I’m usually out walking. I like to walk after dinner every night because I have trouble sleeping…I see a little bit of everybody. Honestly, I run into a lot of people in the alley back there [points in the area behind main street]. Back there is where a lot of people live in these buildings, and the alley is where they actually hang. It’s actually really nice on a walk. I can come across four or five different pockets of people out chilling. Because there’s that big retaining wall over there it kind of makes it feel like you’re in a place that’s separate from town, like it’s kind of secreted away. So, that’s nice. That’s nice right there.DM: In what ways does this town influence your work?KC: I first started coming up here to do readings and shows probably around 2016 and started spending more time here in 2018 or 2019. There’s a really dense concentration of different kinds of artists who live here because this place has become a magnet for all kinds, like transplants and tourists. People up here have always just been really encouraging of stuff that I do. I think that if you’re a local and you live here and you know everybody—if you approach somebody who has one of these spaces here and say, “I have an idea for this,” they will likely give some time and energy to help you with it. If they recognize your face, if they know you, they’re like, yeah. It’s easy to make shit happen. That environment is really good for me. Once you get your boots on the ground here, you get to know people pretty quick. It’s not super competitive. There’s a lot of people doing creative stuff, and there’s a lot of support. If you’re a transplant here, you’re probably looking to be somewhere that doesn’t have too many people but feels funky and creative… I find it inspiring for my work. It’s beautiful. I like that there’s a lot of open space where I can walk and not see anybody. There are trails out in Davis that I love to go on—camp 70 trails. There’s a whole lot of boggy sods type terrain. Different times of year there’s amazing colors and it’s all muddy and weird and there’s trails all through it. I love being out in that stuff. It’s good for my brain.DM: As I was reading Relief of My Symptoms I felt that there had to be an influence from David Berman or James Tate. Then I came across “Self-Portrait at 35”, which is dedicated to David Berman. How did you first come upon Berman? Was it through his music or poetry?KC: His music first. Poetry shortly after. I was a big Pavement fan in high school so I sort of knew about Silver Jews. I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Chapel Hill and I went to some awesome record store in Chapel Hill and I got The Natural Bridge by Silver Jews. I put it on and was like, “I don’t even know why I exactly like this so much but I do.” I got really into them and got his [Berman’s] book a couple years after that. I still love his book. I read Actual Air once a year. Very few people—musicians or artists of any kind that I listened to when I was seventeen—have stood the test of time. He’s something to aspire to. The references, the way that he phrases things. That kind of flat humor that runs through everything. I just love it, and I think it’s only gotten better with age. That poster [pointing to a Silver Jews poster on the wall behind him] is from the liner notes of The Natural Bridge. My girlfriend my freshman year of college gave this to me and I’ve had it in every place that I’ve lived since I was eighteen.DM: What’s your favorite song on the album?KC: The first one [“How to Rent a Room”]. I love that the band is really not trying too hard. The production is pretty middling. He’s not an amazing singer. He writes great hooks and melodies. He writes amazing lyrics. It just all kind of like—it just has some magic.DM: Do you read or have you read James Tate?KC: Yeah, I like him a lot. I feel like his older stuff, like the Worshipful Company of Fletchers, that stuff is a little more interesting to me. As he got older, the stuff was always good, but he had really locked into one thing that he was doing. He and Russell Edson were the two guys who kind of taught me how to write a prose poem.DM: Relief of My Symptoms has several poems in which the narrator details a rich interior life—maybe even isolated at times—but there are also poems in which it’s clear the narrator is around others, maybe too often. Tony Paranoia, or Tony P., shows up a few times. Is Tony P. an amalgamation of several people? Is he made up? Is there an actual Tony P.? Tell us about Tony P.KC: Tony P. has like a seed of maybe a couple people who I grew up with. He’s not really based on anything super specific. I came up with his name in the moment. In that poem that’s called “No Mercy” his name kind of popped up out of just working on that. That poem was written well before I had any idea to make that book. So he was already in that poem and as I was putting together the book I realized I should just bring that guy’s name back in so it would be a character. He’s really just there as one of the people that the speaker is speaking to. Most of what I write is first-person, so I will admit to having a lot of one-dimensional creatures orbiting around me. DM: As a reader, I got excited every time Tony P. showed up. He felt like a friend.KC: Yeah. He really doesn’t do very much. He’s in the hospital and he’s in the baseball game and he’s talking about wanting to play the pipes. I realized that that’s what I wanted to do when I was reading Bud Smith. I was reading Double Bird, that collection of stories. They’re not supposed to be super strongly linked, in terms of characters or narrative. But, for example, in multiple stories there’s references to a store called Food Universe. It’s such a great touch, just a really simple way to add some continuity. In order for me to do that with my book, it was just a cosmetic change. I already had that stuff written. That was something that clicked for me as I was going along. I was like, “Well, I’ve got a couple characters that are mentioned by name and since the family stuff comes up over and over again, I’ll give them all the same name and it gives it a little bit of continuity.” But it’s a cosmetic change. I just repeat people’s names a couple times and I love the effect. It’s like a trick.DM: When did you know you had a cohesive collection? Was that the original goal?KC: I just put my balls in my hands and prayed. I didn’t have an editor on it. I had Carina and my friend Séamus Spencer give me some basic notes. I think when I figured out when I was going to have recurring characters and names, I was like, “This can work.” Before, I was putting the manuscript together because I knew I was definitely going to put it out with my friend’s press. My friend Jen Iskow is the one who runs Ghost Palace Press. She’s a designer and visual artist mostly… Oh, oh my god [talking about the homerun just hit on TV]. And he caught it in his hat! This bullpen guy, when guys hit homeruns into the bullpen, he’s caught about four of them in his hat. This is a momentum shift that we’re seeing happening on TV right now. They have not been scoring like this in two months... Sorry. I don’t even remember what I was talking about… I knew I was going to do the book. I went through about maybe three years worth of whatever I had and I found the stuff that seemed like it was somewhere in the same ballpark, as far as tone and the shape. It ended up being more prose than anything. I knew I had a cohesive thing because I said, “This is about as cohesive as it’s going to get.” Because we had already planned the party to release it and it’s got to go to press at some point. I need some kind of external pressure to finish something like that. I’m kind of bad about letting go of it. DM: In addition to writing poetry, you make music under the name Wizard Clipp. What got you into playing music?KC: I started playing guitar when I was ten. We had my mom’s old Epiphone laying around. I really loved music at a young age, so I naturally wanted to play around with the guitar. I kind of half-played it all through high school. The guitar is something I’ve never really been good at. Playing five-string banjo is my main thing. I started playing the banjo when I was twenty, living in Elkins. There are a lot of old-time musicians there. I found a really good banjo player to take lessons with. The banjo just made a little more sense for me. Something about the tuning and picking was something my brain could grab a hold of.DM: Everyone loved hearing you play at Ham’s House. We need more Kevin Chessers.KC: A lot of the people I know who are musicians first—almost all of them do a little bit of writing. Maybe not so much the other way around.DM: I’ve seen on Instagram that you’re doing Tarot decks. KC: Not yet. I’ve got a Tarot installation up.DM: And you’re possibly coming out with a Halloween chapbook?KC: We’ll see. I’ve been sort of restless on social media lately just trying to get somebody to gas me up. I’m going to try to put together a reading up here in early November, and my friend Cole Fiscus—who I’m going to do the reading with—he’s going to try to get a chapbook out. And I thought, “Man, I wonder if I should try to slap together a little chapbook.” I was fucking around with those little haunted house haikus and I thought, “I bet I could write a bunch of these.” I did a haiku chapbook one time.DM: Is it important that you always have a project to work on?KC: It’s helpful if I have an idea of a finished product that I’m working towards, but I don’t always get it done. That’s not always a bad thing. That’s the thing that’s cool about living in this town. It has made me a little more focused and constructive because of getting encouragement from people here. Knowing people who have got spaces where you can hang some art on the wall or put on a show... And they’re approachable people who will be like, “Yeah, sure.” It has made it so that I’ve gotten more constructive with finishing stuff. But generally speaking, I feel I’ve always been a little aimless with it. I like doing it and just kind of scratching away at it all the time because it comprises ninety percent of my interests. If I don’t have a project I’m working toward, it doesn’t necessarily keep me from working on stuff. Sometimes I like it better if I don’t have a project.DM: What are you reading right now?KC: I brought these in from my bedroom. [Gestures to a stack of books on the coffee table: a Richard Brautigan anthology which includes Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, and So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away; Small Moods by Shane Kowalski; and Nature, Man and Woman by Alan W. Watts.] I really love all of this [talking about the Richard Brautigan anthology]. I’m almost done with it. I liked it better than the three-pack that has Trout Fishing in America… My friend turned me onto Shane Kowalski. It’s really good. [Picks up Alan Watts book.] I love Taoism and Chinese philosophy so I’m reading this Alan Watts book. DM: What’s next for you?KC: I think we’re going to try to get tarot decks printed. I drew all the cards on 5x7 pieces of mat board. There’s seventy-eight of them. It’s this big wall installation. Earlier this year, I was playing a lot of music and I was feeling like I was getting enough material together to do another record. But I don’t have the money for it. So, right now, I’ve been writing a lot, just trying to build up the biggest heap of poems that I can get. Just trying to generate so I can do another book and maybe send it out to presses with a little wider distribution. I don’t know if that’s worth it or not, but if I came up with a manuscript that I was excited about—especially because I’ve got a better idea of what I want to do in the future—it would be cool to get it further out into the world. But historically I’m kind of bad at that. I love finishing projects and putting a bow on them and polishing them and getting them how I want them. Once they’re out in the world, though, my interest in them really drops off precipitously. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Or maybe not. Poets can relate to that. Maybe musicians can’t. Musicians have to maintain some enthusiasm for their material because performing is so essential to being a musician, whereas being a writer, performing is more of a minor part. You could much more easily write a book and disavow it, but if you’re a musician, you can’t get up on stage and be like, “This stuff sucks.” I’m hoping to have another draft of a manuscript next year. And then I want to see if I can screw up my courage enough to send it out to a bunch of places. They’re all just shots in the dark… which is frustrating. But that’s also what I like about it. I think I like the fact that it’s such a fucking headache. It’s a headache when I’m sitting down to try and focus and then it’s a headache to send out the submissions. And then it’s a headache to try and go back and revise what I’ve written.DM: That should be the title of this interview: Kevin Chesser has a Headache.KC: I actually suffer from chronic headaches… [Now, looking at the game on TV] Corbin Burnes is about to strike you out. Yeah, and that guy’s shaking his head. He just roasted you, you fucking idiot, and you just stood there looking at it. Order Relief of My Symptoms:Ghost Palace PressAmazon(Or send Kevin a DM).
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EVIL, EVIL, EVIL: CHRIS KELSO’S ‘THE DREGS TRILOGY’ by Matthew Kinlin

November 26, 2024
“They say you can hide from Blackcap if you burn all your dreams.”- Alfie McPherson, Ritual America Chris Kelso’s The Dregs Trilogy (Black Shuck Books, 2020) is a triptych of novellas: Shrapnel Apartments, Unger House Radicals, Ritual America; where each part deepens and troubles its sibling. The book moves backwards and forwards through time and space, from the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a backwoods area near Winnipeg, to Louisiana and a number of other locations; some terrestrial, others interdimensional. Kelso’s trilogy revolves around a series of ritualistic killings. These murders appear to contain their own psychogeography and initially gravitate towards a televised realm called Shrapnel Apartments, inspired by a snuff-movie-cum-art-movement known as Ultra-Realism, before rippling outwards through its grainy unknowable corridors. The victims of these murders are given a voice and often describe their own execution in direct, deadpan fashion. The central victim that is returned to is a young girl called Florence Coffey. Her suffering is recurring and endless. The bodies of these ritualistic killings are delivered to an entity that links the many strands and subplots of the book. The name of this entity is Blackcap. Assisted by another being known as King Misery, their multitudinous appetites flow and feed upon human consciousness. Kelso’s trilogy evokes a watercolour painting called Hands of Fire from American artist, hospital janitor and recluse, Henry Darger, which shows a group of young girls waking from their beds at night. Frightened, they look up as two enormous orange hands descend from the ceiling. Darger’s mythical world-view presents his children of Abbieannia, or the Vivian Girls, fighting against evil Glandelinian overlords, but the hopeful youths are often slain in battle or brutally tortured. Darger is mentioned once in Kelso’s trilogy, in the central novella Unger House Radicals. This story revolves around a young filmmaker Vincent Bittacker who, after falling in love with a serial killer called Brandon Swarthy, moves into the Louisiana house of child murderer Otto Spengler. Unger House becomes a neo-Nazi fort for their burgeoning homosexual relationship and exploration of the artistic practice known as Ultra-Realism: the act of committing murder on film, cinéma vérité taken to its furthest limits. Their initiation into Ultra-Realism involves the killing of a girl known as Janice. Kelso later writes, “The Glandelinian race sought inspiration from Darger’s text and set out to be the scourge of Abbieannia.” Here we have an inversion of Darger’s myth where the radicals of Unger House identify with the monstrous Glandelinian race. Bittacker and Swarthy devour a thousand sources and realign them to intensify their brutality and fascism, extermination dressed up as avant garde. After the murder of Janice, “The sky has a milky hue. Vince realises that he can no longer appreciate the beauty in anything except violence…” He then compares the image of Janice’s half-dissected body with Andy Warhol’s five-hour film Sleep. Warhol is filming his lover John Giorno, “We can see up his nostrils, see the triangular mound of philtrum and septum.” Like a fly crawling across a corpse, the image on the screen offers both a source of voyeuristic pleasure and physical revulsion. Bittacker responds with, “I hate this movie. I hate all Warhol’s movies. Why do I do this to myself?” Why do these men commit unspeakable acts? There’s an ambiguity to their Glandelinian philosophy. As Sartre writes of Genet, his thugs invent an artistry to their savagery: “The criminal dances his crime as the ballerina dances the dagger step.” At first, Bittacker and Swarthy seem to delight in the irony of their position: their so-called Ultra-Realism is deeply performative. They even go on to pronounce, “We wanted to make Unger House the new Grand Guignol.” Evil has become simply vaudeville, a ghostly cabaret of sexual pathology. As Sartre writes, “It is Evil which is a ballet. We now see the matter more clearly: if the world of Evil is only a play of appearances and conventions, it depends on the consciousness of the spectator who contemplates it.” Bittacker and Swarthy have invented an audience for their Nazi snuff pantomime but it soon implodes into jealousy, paranoia and mental collapse.Throughout The Dregs Trilogy, its many killers feed on the mythology of Otto Spengler and a white power, misogynistic band known as King Misery, named after a murderous and malevolent being. However, their voraciousness finds its apex in the cosmic entity of hyperstition called Blackcap. Who is Blackcap? Blackcap is no one and everywhere. Dr Wilson describes him as: “A nocturnal, bat-winged monster exiled to the stars. Appearing as a gelatinous mass extruding razored tentacles to some, and as an itinerant showman to others.” Dr Baker offers, “He looks sort of like a jellyfish. Three-lobed burning eye all flared.” Blackcap weaves his way through all three sections of the book. There is no escape. One of his victims, Lydia Pittmann, explains, “I soon came to realise that if you reject the philosophy of Blackcap and his gang then you wind up here. In the demi-plane.” Orange hands descending from the ceiling. Blackcap is interdimensional and swims through the nightmares of all his accomplices and victims. In Male Fantasies 2: Psychoanalysing the White Terror, Klaus Theweleit writes that the fascist male sees the general population as hybrid, unclean and often animal: “It has a thousand legs, a thousand heads, it can generate a thousand degrees of heat. It can metamorphose into a single creature, many-limbed: rat, snake, dragon.” Blackcap is like an octopus inside the brain. Its fluid nature is feminine and multiple, or as Theweleit conceives, “the belly of the erotic woman menstruating or ‘ruptured’ in childbirth: the Hydra, the head of the Medusa, the Gorgon.” Theweleit argues the fascist male’s central fear is one of disintegration so, “his role is the builder of dams, as killer, exterminator.” Is Blackcap an alien entity from outer space or an unconscious projection? Murderer Beau Carson tells us, “Blackcap doesn’t come from the sky, or the woods for that matter. He comes from somewhere else, down there. In the aquatic arena of the gods.”Lydia Pittmann is one of Blackcap’s many victims from Amber Acre and taken to a place known as Shrapnel Apartments, overseen by homicidal landlords. Prior to the suicide of William L. Bentley, we learn, “When I left for Shrapnel Apartments, I took Florence with me,” where, “I have a decent-sized fridge, two bathrooms, a shower and a WC. My apartment had direct access to the balcony and a view of the abyss and surrounding blackness.” Throughout the whole of The Dregs Trilogy, Florence Coffey is the victim obsessively returned to again and again. Similar to Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, Florence’s body becomes a recurring site of interdimensional torture and abuse. Like one of Darger’s girls, she is running amongst the Glandelinians and Blengigomeneans: gigantic winged beings that can take part-human form. A disturbing feature of Kelso’s work is the inclusion of autopsy reports, similar in style to Warhol’s clinical filming of his dreaming subjects. A report states, “Ms. Florence Coffey was a 13-year-old white female who was reportedly found by law enforcement in a bathtub and unresponsive.” We then learn, “Her arms, a portion of sternum, heart, and left lobe of liver were found wrapped in a plastic bag in a laundry basket.” What makes these episodes even more disorientating is that we also hear from the victims during their own autopsies. Florence explains, “Everything you’ve heard about autopsy dreams are true. And the roughness of the doctor working on you.” The thousand-year-old Tibetan text Bardo Thödol, translated as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, states that after death the human soul occupies an intermediate space between death and rebirth. Following her brutal killing and dismemberment, Florence floats in limbo in the post-mortem state of Bardo. Her suffering is multiplied and glorified in the hearts of Blackcap’s followers, ad infinitum.Dr Baker explains further the endless appetites of Blackcap, devouring, “children, unmarried women and people who have died of leprosy or snake bites... These people are set afloat down the Ganges, where the tribesman from the Aghori Babas retrieve their corpses and ritually consume them. This is Ritual America and our sacraments can be equally barbaric.” We have the meeting of barbarism with the holy. Atrocity serves a higher god that resides inversely in the bowels. In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes, “The holy mystery of sacrificial death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god.” They are cleansed and connected to Blackcap in their consumption. Florence Coffey is the totemic animal of Blackcap that must be ritualistically slaughtered and eaten again and again to reinforce their fascist hygiene and their holy bond. They are so clean in her blood and sorrow. They feel much stronger. As William Blake, a visionary that complements Darger’s dichotomous worldview, writes, “Evil is the active springing from Energy.” The madmen of The Dregs feed and renew themselves on Vivian Girls but this energy soon fades away, the spilling blood of Florence is short-lived. Bataille writes that the goal of Sade was, “enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of destroying human beings, of destroying them and enjoying the thought of their death and suffering.” The energy of Evil soon gives way to boredom. Bittacker glamorises his sadism with Aryan mysticism but it quickly falls into childish games of delusion and misery. A Darger painting of a horned red dragon looming over a pile of dead children. As one character drily remarks, “People always feel the need to conjure up these ugly spirits as a way of rationalising the bad things that happen in the world and the awful things human beings do to each other.”
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