This isn't a blog post

...because I should be finishing revisions on a book chapter right now. So. In one hundred words or less:

It's November!

Jose Cruz has written a wonderful spotlight on "Final Exam" over at The Haunted Omnibus. Also check out the interview, in which I discuss genre, Lovecraft, humor, and futility.

And I have a new short story, "What Hands Like Ours Can Do," in the November issue of The Dark:

She’s washing the dishes after a simple breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes, looking out the window towards the river winding low and shaded beneath the willow trees, when she sees a man coming up the road from the south. He’s dressed nicely, gray suit and waistcoat, well fitted; his shirt looks new, with one of those low Mandarin collars that take a pin instead of a tie. No hat, and his dark, longish hair blows across his eyes like a veil. She thinks to herself that there’s rain coming, with that kind of wind.

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Thursday, November 05, 2015

academia, horror, interview, short fiction

Destroying Horror, Week 2

This week's story is Alyssa Wong's nightmarish "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers," and the nonfiction is Nightmare's H-Word column with a twist: Stoker Award winner Lucy A. Snyder's "A Good Story," which asks what "caring about the quality of the story" means in the context of a genre where a publisher requesting that a writer 'straighten' a queer protagonist is not out of the question.

Horror is the literature of fear. And if you’re queer, and if you write fiction about your darkest fears while also doing your very best to tell a good story, a funny thing happens. Many of those readers who claimed to just care about story are now all squirmy. Sure, the plot’s exciting . . . but you made it all weird! Why couldn’t you just write a good old-fashioned entertaining story where the monsters are uncomplicatedly monstrous and the heroic guy gets the trophy girl at the end? Why couldn’t your story be straight, darn it?

Read, enjoy, and keep spreading the word!

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Friday, October 16, 2015

editing, horror, nonfiction, queer fiction

I Destroyed Horror - AMA

The first story and nonfiction piece from Queers Destroy Horror! went live at Nightmare Magazine this Wednesday. The story is Matthew Bright's phenomenal "Golden Hair, Red Lips," which drops the protagonist of my favorite novel into an AIDS-crisis era San Francisco, and ends on an absolutely chilling note. The nonfiction is the editorial introduction, including a few words from guest editor-in-chief Wendy Wagner, poetry editor Robyn  Lupo, and yours truly:

As queer writers and readers, we find ourselves feeling both at home and deeply unwelcome in the horror genre. Sexual and gender nonconformity are in the genre’s DNA; queer people began writing horror long before it was a recognizable fiction category, and our ranks include some of the biggest names in the contemporary horror scene...It makes sense that many of us are drawn to fiction that tackles [sex and desire] in unexpected and often unsettling ways. But, as the essays and interviews in this special issue demonstrate, if we often see ourselves reflected in horror stories, it can also feel like the genre wants us gone—or dead.

If you don't want to wait, or if you want to read the full slate of fiction and nonfiction in this oversized issue, it can be purchased in paperback or e-book.

Also, the QDH team is doing an Ask Me Anything on r/Fantasy on Tuesday, October 13. Unless dire circumstances arise to prevent me, I'll be dropping by in the afternoon. Come and ask us questions, or lurk your way through the answers.

Final, unrelated note: Mirror Dance will be closed to submissions until January 15, 2016 so that I can clear out the backlog. Exam reading has not been kind to my slush schedule,and too many authors have been waiting way too long for a response. If this is you: my apologies, and thanks for your patience.

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Saturday, October 10, 2015

editing, horror, nonfiction, queer fiction

Five Things of various shapes and sizes

Looking at the archive of this blog, there seems to be a pattern: in January, I resolve to work harder on my internet presence, and there are a fair number of blog entries; then the winter quarter catches up with me, and between teaching, research, and writing, I fall off the internet-planet until something happens that demands to be blogged about. The question of whether this particular post fits the pattern or not if left open as an exercise to the reader.

1. Reprints! "Final Exam" is being reprinted in John Joseph Adams' Wastelands 2. Read an interview with me (and other interviews with the other fabulous contributors) here. "The Minotaur's Wife" appeared in Pantheon's Persephone issue at the end of January, and "All the King's Monsters" will appear in Airships & Automatons at the beginning of next month.

2. The Spring 2015 issue of Mirror Dance is all ready to go! I'm also getting a lot of awesome submissions for the summer "Animals and Humans" - more so than usual. Just an especially popular theme? Or is everyone getting a lot of writing done now that they're cooped up for the winter?

3. I finished a story! Yes, that is important enough to get its own bullet point. Horror stories are easy to start and hard to finish, in my experience, so I'm giving myself credit on this.

4. I am not at all caught up on reading. However, as a reward for myself for achieving something like a word-work balance (like a work-life balance, but for people who do two different kinds of work), I bought a copy of Caitlin Kiernan's The Red Tree and re-devoured it in one sitting.

5. And finally, speaking of horror: I am going to the nonfiction editor for Nightmare's Queers Destroy Horror! special issue! Ridiculously excited about this. More news as it comes.

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Saturday, February 14, 2015

horror, Mirror Dance, queer fiction, the writer in its natural habitat

Horror Recommendation

From earlier this year - "No Breather in the World But Thee" by Jeff VanderMeer. Not sure why it came back to me this morning, but it did, and I had to revisit it. Apologies if you planned to sleep soundly tonight.

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Friday, June 21, 2013

horror, recommendations, voice, weird fiction

The Light

First published in Ghostlight, the magazine of the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers, February 2010.
* * *
Moira told me once, when I lay out across the rug-softened cabin floor with my head in her lap, about a fish living deep in the darkest part of the ocean that carries a spot of light on its forehead to lure in prey. Moira was full of stories like that—too full, I teased her sometimes, and smoothed her frown-creased forehead with kisses. She knew every danger in the seas, and feared them almost as much as I worshiped them.

It has been a long time since I saw the sea.

Forgive me if I seem sentimental. I am sure I can count my remaining hours on the fingers of one hand, and even I am sobered by such a thought.

But it is not merely this that brings Moira to my mind. I see a light now and then in the distance, across the frozen lake—the lake, I keep reminding myself, though Michigan is as wide and dangerous as the oceans from Moira’s nightmares—and I find myself drawn to it, this brief cold light, like a sea creature must feel drawn to Moira’s angler-fish.

Again, I have started wrong. Forgive me. As they said in that play Moira was so fond of, it is bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.

Sometimes I think I must be a ghost. This schooner, the Cornelius, is solid enough; but it is very late in the year, far later than I have ever sailed before, and the rest of the crew is gone. Utterly gone; not a bone nor a trunk nor a scrap of clothing left to mark their existence, and I do not remember them, neither their names nor them living nor throwing their corpses into the waves. I should think they never were, but for the fact they must have been, I could not have brought the Cornelius out here alone.

And where is here? Only the shore could tell me, and there is nothing there, nothing but limestone cliffs and snow-heavy trees and the light that comes and goes without warning. Perhaps the edge of the world is not in the ocean, as they once said, but here in the lake. Perhaps I sailed over it and reached a shadow world where it is always winter...

God, I sound like a madman. Is it the prospect of death that does this to me, or the cold, or something worse yet?

Sometimes, when the light is here, I see thin shapes moving on the ice, like men but not fully. The first time I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. Now I’m not so certain.

Log of the Cornelius. Date Unknown (November?).—suck in ice too thin to walk on but too thick to sail through. Lighthouse (?) on the cliff sends out bean at no predictable intervals. Do they see us trapped in the ice? Then why not light the lens fully? Are they also in danger?

I think I am a ghost. I said this before, but I am growing more certain. I gestured and shouted when the last light came, but the shapes on the ice did not seem to hear me. I’m not certain I could hear myself.

The Cornelius sailed out of Milwaukee on August 16, headed for the Peninsula with a cargo of cream brick. I remember this. Why can I not remember our crew?

I do not think it is a lighthouse I see. I list in my head the lights along our route—North Point, Kevish, Port Washington, Sheboygan Breakwater—and this coast fits none of them. Nor can I imagine a lighthouse keeper sending out this weak, jolting beam on a winter night, when by all rights there should be none who even see it.

Those thin men on the ice remind me of a story, a story Moira did not tell me; it is from some of the nations here on the lakes. There is a creature, they say, in shape like a tall thin man or a corpse, that haunts the shores in search of human flesh to eat. It is called the Wendigo. I’ve never doubted these stories, and I doubt them less now. Moira, of course, would call me a fool.

Get out of here, she said, her final words to me. Get out! And I got out, got out and came to Milwaukee. Perhaps she was glad to know I was away from the sea; more likely nothing I do or did will ever make her happy again. She was made for a cleverer man than me, or else for no man at all.

As long as I am thinking of her, I will say this: I am glad she is not here, glad she is still in her cabin on the shore of the sea, where these things cannot haunt her. How gentle the sea is by comparison! We were happy there, Moira and I, despite her fears, despite the dangers. I was a happy man.

Listen to me; I am overcome with melancholy. That was one of Moira’s words. Melancholy? she’d ask, fisting her hands in my hair and pulling me in for a kiss. That will pass. But it won’t pass, Moira, never again. Never again...

The light is steady now, has been for several minutes. The thin brown figures are merely yards away from the hull. I think I was wrong, the light is not meant to lure me in, merely to guide them to me. I think they are made to walk on thin ice.

I cannot walk on thin ice. I am clumsy; I break things. Forgive me, Moira, forgive me for our dead child, forgive me for my ignorance, forgive me for leaving you.

This is foolish. I know she will never read this letter. But I am sentimental, and I must write to her nevertheless.

It has been growing gradually colder since the light became steady. This makes me hopeful that I will die of cold before the thin creatures reach me. It is not so terrible a way to die—the cold. Moria told me that, and I believe her.

There is a line, from that play she loved. It ends and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. It is a beautiful line, and I say it now—not for me but for her. I can’t help thinking she is awake tonight and in need of rest.

The light has gone out. I hear noises on the deck—fumbling noises, dull noises, noises made by dumb things. Come and find me, thin men, Wendigo, whatever you are. Moira, forgive me. Reader, remember me.

The rest, they say, is silence.

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Friday, March 01, 2013

horror, short story

Between a Sleep and a Sleep

Youth Finalist in OddContest 2009. Previously unpublished.

* * *

You open your eyes.

The room is dark, dark like rat eyes, dark like a spider’s body. The dark is warm and heavy. The heat is like a second skin wrapped around you; the weight is the crushing vacuum left by eight hours of dreamless sleep.

In a moment, you will wake up.

Until then, you see.

You see a room; maybe it is yours. Maybe it is your room as it looked a year ago, or as it will look in another decade. Maybe it is your room as it was before it had walls or floor or ceiling. Maybe it is all of these at once, pieced and layered like a patchwork quilt.

You see the room, and it is alive.

There are spiders in the walls, spinning little crystal webs from the bones of your house. There are rats and moles and snakes beneath the floor. There are birds in the ceiling, from the days before your room had walls; there are fish in the air, from the days when your room sat at the bottom of the ocean.

And there are things.

Your waking mind would have no words for them; your sleeping mind has too many. They are tiny glow-worm things, coiling together in mats of writhing indigo and gray. They are solid dog-things with sharp teeth and long tails and hard boney limbs. They are massive, lumbering whale-things, as big as a world, so big you can’t see their edges; they engulf you. Your room shakes with their heartbeats.

In a moment, you will wake up.

Your heart will shake in your throat. Your eyelids will flutter franticly, washing the last traces of vision from your eyes. Your room will be dead again, empty and bright and cold.

From this moment, you will be afraid.

The fear will hide itself well. You will only find it in the little things; the way you shy from spider-webs: the way you hate the sound of your heartbeat. For the first time in years, you will dream.

You won’t mind the nightmares.

It’s waking up that will terrify you.

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Friday, June 15, 2012

horror, short story

The Kindness of Ravens

First published in Everyday Weirdness, 31 March 2010.

* * * 

So he did what the LORD had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there.  The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. – 1 Kings 17:5-6

On your first day in the desert, they will bring you food. Fruit, soft and pitted and spongy-dry, they will pierce with their thin red feet and carry to you. And because they are kind, they will bring you better things: scarlet scraps from the mouths of fledglings, tender with fat and blood, or the thin-boned bodies of songbirds so fresh that their feathers shine.

Brothers, you will say—for like all your kind, you are proud—I thank you for these gifts, but I have no need of your food.

As you wish, they will say, but they will leave the food before you. In the night you may grow hungry, and have need of it.

On your second day in the desert, you will look down at your hands and see that they are dry and cracking, and the cracks are filling with sand. Your palms are angry red and raw.

The ravens will hear your cries, and because they are kind they will come to you, singing and straining their wings through the dusty sky. Their onyx beaks will point you west, toward the cliffs in the heart of the desert and the soft nests built in their shade.

Brothers, you will say, I thank you, but the cliffs are far away, and no place for me to sleep.

As you wish, they will say, but a few will linger overhead. The sun is hot, the moon is pale and cold, and in the night you may awake and need a guide to shelter.

On your third day in the desert, you will sprawl headlong in the burning sand, too weak to stand or walk. You will raise your fingers to your eyes, your lips, and they will come away bloody. Open your mouth to breathe, and dust will coat your tongue.

When you see the ravens, dark and glistening in the cloudless sky, you will raise yourself to your knees and crawl in their wake. You will crawl over miles of fire and glittering rocks, crawl past the cliffs at the heart of the desert, and because they are kind, the ravens will fly lower in the sky.

A little farther, they will say, a little farther and you will find a vast oasis, where the water pools as clear as crystal and sweet as milk and honey, and the shade of the trees is green and cool. The earth there is as soft and moist as nestlings’ feathers, and the air is fresh as killing.

But you cannot move another inch.

You are weak with hunger, the ravens say. You are weak from the heat and the cold.

The ravens fly lower.

Be kind, Brothers, you beg. Please be kind.

They take your eyes first, and the hot moisture lingering in your mouth. Beneath the cracked and sandy skin, your flesh is tender, sweet as milk and honey. You are taken in the mouths of fledglings, carried on thin red feet to the nests in the heart of the desert.

Your heart, they bring to the oasis.

Such is the kindness of ravens. 

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Friday, June 15, 2012

horror, short story

Of Flying Time

This is something in the character of a memo-to-self, so please excuse my self-indulgence.

I thought no longer of kind mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on evening air; and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be saying ‘How clear Betton bell sounds tonight after the rain!’; but instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly contents below, and of flying Time and all it had taken out of my life.

From M. R. James, "A Neighbor's Landmark." So far as I can recall, this is the only time one of James's characters experiences anything like a tragic past. And, okay, a brief sentence in one short story hardly counts as a past, but no where else does a Jamesian protagonist's encounter with the supernatural make him think about anything in his life. Graves and spiders and rot and dust, yes, but not all that Time takes--friendship, companions, lovers. This passage starts out being too cliche to be effectively terrifying, but then that last phrase--"of flying Time and all that it had taken out of my life"--that's Terror with a capital T.

Well done, Mr. James. Well done indeed.

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Sunday, November 13, 2011

ghost story, horror, M. R. James, the writer in its natural habitat

A Work out of Progress

I vaguely remember writing these three hundred words or so sometime last spring, but for the life of me I can't remember what the story was about (aside from, clearly, la bête du Gévaudan). Perhaps posting the not-story here will jog my memory; if not, I hope you enjoy not coming along for the ride as much as I do.

* * *

We did not learn of it in the usual way.

On September 20, 1765, a black carriage shuddered to a halt outside my family’s house in Langogne. The final rain of summer fell in warm gossamer sheets, washing black Languedoc mud from the coach’s wheels and the shoes of its occupants. My sister Antoinette emerged, dressed outlandishly as usual with travel-stained lace and ropes of damp fox-fur at her cuffs; if it weren’t for the black ribbons and grave expressions her companions wore, I would never have known something was amiss.

“Mélisande!” Antoinette opened her arms to me as I flew down the brick steps, her white clock flowing off her shoulders like cream. The rain sheeted over her sharp cheekbones and caught, pearl-like, on her eyelashes and crisp red curls.

“Bienvenue, sister,” I said hesitantly, holding her out at arms’ length. All around us, footmen vied with the family servants to get her luggage in out of the damp. None of Antoinette’s men would meet my gaze. “Where’s Michel?”

At the sound of her husband’s name, my sister pursed her lips in a sharp, familiar gesture of despair.

That was how we learned that our protection from la bête du Gévaudan had run out.

* * *

“And what, pray tell, is so damn hard about writing a letter?”

“Père.” Antoinette frowned, her long fingers loosening the clasp of her cloak. A slow puddle spread across the parlor floor at our feet. “Do you mean to say you aren’t pleased to see me?”

“Don’t needle him,” I whispered. Antoinette’s only answer was to shove her cloak into my arms and hiss at me to hang it up.

Papa leaned back in his chair. His dark eyebrows—the only spots of color in his face—met in a straight line over his crooked nose. “You should be in Paris, Antoinette.”

“There’s nothing for me there.”

“Célestin Charbonneau is there.”

“As I said.” She folded her hands at her waist, resting her elbows on her hips. “Nothing for me.”

* * *

Apparently, that's as far as I got. Your guess is precisely as good as mine.

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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Cthulhu fhtagn, historical fiction, horror, weird fiction, writing

Arthur Machen Pumpkin

My nerdhood continues to emerge.

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Friday, October 30, 2009

art, ghost story, horror, insanity, weird fiction

The Nerdiest Pumpkin Ever?

Well, yes. This was last year's Holloween pumpkin, a tribute to M. R. James:







This year's pumpkin (which may actually be a gourd) is much more elaborate and even nerdier--a tribute to Arthur Machen's "The White People." More pictures will follow.

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Sunday, October 04, 2009

art, ghost story, horror, weird fiction

No "Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008"

I am saddened, to say the least.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

anthologies, fantasy, fiction, horror, reading