C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 33

Podcast S02E15 ~ Thirteenth Part 15

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

Ricky struggles to cope with his cousins and his deeply-rooted insecurities, while Katy, struggling to deal with her grief and newfound knowledge, figures out why Wes is on the List. Wes is just… struggling.

CWs: alcohol use in context of a depression spiral, lack of self-awareness, on-page panic attack, references to drug use, deteriorating mental health.

listen nowChapter 9

Merlin Silvestris never needed to change his shape to see the future. He’d never be that good. Getting Katy to kill him was a gamble, and his head was scrambled still from the thrust of the poker and the fact he didn’t know what was going to happen. It was time to enact another ritual, he’d need another body bag of entrails to rip open and then the mistress would get upset. Katherine, too, most likely. He’d have to be careful about it and get some twat out walking alone, not college-age, but even then…

Even then, what was the fucking point?

That thought, the tail-end of a bitter tirade, brought him up short. He stopped walking.

Ricky found himself facing the long barrow in Barrow Field, hands in his pockets. He’d walked the long way around, taking his time, avoiding The Chase where his
father lurked somewhere in the trees.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, p. 289

In The Crows towards the end, Ricky makes a few oblique references to Merlin and how he distrusts the Welsh, never mentioning him by name. The reason for this is because he met Merlin Silvestris twice as a kid, once when he was 10 years old (this story is in the back of the anniversary hardback edition of The Crows, now available from Amazon, and also in full on my Ko-Fi for monthly subscribers of all tiers), and once when he was 16 (the flashback opening chapter of The Day We Ate Grandad, the direct sequel to Thirteenth).

I do want to explore Merlin more as a character and myth, and the interplay with Eglantine Pritchard who cursed Fairwood House to begin with and whose magic stopped the Pendles from setting foot in the house or near the Pendle Stone again. I have a historical fiction novella planned with Eglantine and her life partner/companion Gwen, who is also a human vessel and host for the darker mythological figure Gwenhwyach, the dark aspect of her sister Gwenhwyfar/Guinevere. You’ll get more backstory for the Pendle sisters Beverley, Olive and Eileen too, and key points in their backstory including the 1920s and 1940s.

In this chapter, Ricky is having a crisis. In The Crows he was cocky and confident to start off with so you got to see him in his element, rocked/undermined only by interactions with his immediate family (parents and grandmother). When you put Ricky in close contact with his peers, he’s very different when he can’t hide behind his farsight and the interaction isn’t based on him doing something for them. He derives power in those interactions from his abilities, which they need. In this instance, it’s the cousin he had some level of attraction to and feels more ambivalent towards (as evidenced in his POV in The Crows, where he even generously suggested a doomed Carrie hook up with Wes if she wanted sex, because Wes was the only sexually-active person Ricky really knows well and he knew her days were running out, so it wouldn’t matter anyway).

Now that he’s having to deal with Wes in person and not in a situation he can control, Ricky is having to confront a lot of things he doesn’t want to think about, and having a 17 year old in the house is dredging up old memories of his teenage years that he would rather move on from.

This is Ricky in the process of falling apart, particularly after his whole world has become so destabilised after The Crows, where Carrie’s fate made him want to change the course of destiny for the first time, and his core belief system took a knock. He’s also adjusting to having someone in his adult life he is desperate not to lose, and he doesn’t know how to deal with that. He’s a really interesting character to write, and his arc continues into the next book (but so does the exploration of his deconstruction of self, reconstruction, and depression/anxiety).

read along

Author Interview ~ Mason Hawthorne

Author BioMason Hawthorne

Mason Hawthorne writes horror, dark and urban fantasy, and studied writing and English literatures at the University of Wollongong. Most of his work is in speculative fiction, usually dark or horror themed.

His stories often feature body horror, transformation, hunger, and anxiety. Queer thematic elements are always right below the surface, or in line with the surface. Sometimes bobbing along the very top.

Portfolio of Published Work: https://mason-hawthorne.jimdosite.com/portfolio/

Romancing the Gothic Talk: Gender and Adaptation in the Hannibal Lecter Franchise

Twitter: MasonHawth0rne

listen nowIntroduction

CMR: Well hello! Welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and today we have Mason Hawthorne over from Australia with us. Mason, would you like to introduce yourself.

MH: Sure, so my name is Mason Hawthorne, I studied creative writing at the University of Wollongong and I’ve been published in Unspeakable, a queer Gothic anthology, and Monsters we Forgot anthology and a few podcasts. I mostly write horror queer fiction and Gothic fiction and I’m sharing some of that today.

CMR: And you’re reading an extract from Leadbitter House today, right.

MH: Yes, so it’s Leadbitter House, which was in the collection Unspeakable a queer Gothic anthology, yeah.

CMR: I’m excited! I love this story. When you’re ready and if you’d like to read it, go for it.

MH: All right, here we go.

Extract from ‘Leadbitter House’, Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology (Nyx Publishing: 2020) ed. Celine FrohnA Gothic anthology, filled to the brim with exciting new queer voices!

UNSPEAKABLE: A QUEER GOTHIC ANTHOLOGY

Let Down by Claire Hamilton RussellMoonlight by Ally KölzowAn Account of Service at Meryll Point, as recollected and set down by C.L.The White Door by Lindsay King-MillerDoctor Barlowe’s Mirror by Avery Kit MaloneLaguna and the Engkanto by Katalina WattThe Moon in the Glass by Jude ReidBrideprice by S.T. GibsonLure of the Abyss by Jenna MacDonaldHearteater by Eliza TempleQuicksilver Prometheus by Katie YoungHomesick by Sam HirstRodeo by Ryann FletcherLady of Letters; or, the Twenty-First Century Homunculus by Heather ValentineTaylor Hall by Jen GlifortThe Ruin by E. SaxeyThe Dream Eater by Anna MoonLeadbitter House by Mason Hawthorne

Cover and interior artwork: Jenni Coutts
Cover designer: Charlie Bramald

The dark under the mangroves is not absolute. Reflections, refractions of light from the water dazzle and gleam between the tangled roots and the drooping canopy, the whole dim thicket pulses and hums with insects, with the water lapping, Elijah sways on his feet, staring into the shadows, listening, his whole body bending toward it, while a hand curls over his stomach, his nails digging into his skin hard enough to leave marks, even through his t-shirt.

The sarong tied around his waist is damp at the knee, dark splotches on the hand-dyed fabric, and as he steps forward it slaps against his leg, clammy, and he twitches and glances down at himself, at the tangle of white roots and torn foliage at his feet, at his fingers, black with soil and clawing at his belly. Elijah shakes himself. The sun is hot on his shoulders, and the top of his head, and when he glances across the property and over the jetty, between the dark clouds of the casuarinas the river is bright as magnesium, and after a moment, Elijah blinks and the river’s negative is imprinted over the garden as he turns away.

Everything smells herbaceous, green and wet, though it hasn’t rained for, oh, months probably, and the paddock over the fence all brown grass and thorny weeds, the horses there forlorn and seemingly abandoned.

Elijah has lost track of the time he has been in the garden, pulling the weeds, upending clods of soil into his own lap, barefoot in the slippery grass, nor can he remember what it was that caught his attention in the mangroves, what it was he heard, or saw, or…his efforts with the weeds are ineffectual, he could keep going until sunset and hardly make a dent, the whole garden is overrun, overgrown.

A shadow falls across Elijah, and he turns. Behind him is a weathered man, shy of six feet with curling white hair that falls to his shoulders, and a great white beard, stained nicotine yellow around his mouth. His skin is raw and broken, sunspots and cracks and spidery veins cross his cheeks, and his nose glows red. There is a boil under his left eye, inflamed and fit to burst.

“Are you—Mr Davies, right?—are you the, uh, gardener?”

The man has a coiled green hose in his arms and he scowls, “Groundskeeper.”

“Oh.” Elijah’s hands curl and uncurl, twisting the hem of his shirt until the fabric strains and his knuckles creak. “But you do look after the gardens, yeah?”

Davies expression doesn’t change, he scowls, nods once and lifts a gnarled hand to scratch at his cheek. A drop of blood wells from the boil, but if it hurts he doesn’t react to it.

“This garden, I mean, those tomatoes are going crazy, but everything else…there are so many weeds, and the zucchinis are all rotten, they’re mush!” Elijah is out of breath, his heart thuds so hard his pulse flutters in his throat. His knuckles are white.

“I take care of it.” Davies scratches again, and this time his ragged nail catches skin and the boil splits. Something green sprouts out of the hole in his face, and blood drips all the way down to his beard. The green thing unfurls, standing up out of the hole in his cheek.

“What? What does that mean?” Elijah’s voice pitches high and strained, and he gestures to the overgrown garden beds, the weeds, and the thorns, “this doesn’t look taken care of, I don’t…I mean I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but this isn’t taken care of.”

“I work for the house,” Davies spits. He picks at the thing growing out of his face and pulls it free, and it comes out long, and greenish-white, and the crater in his cheek is a pit of blood.

Elijah gapes at Davies wordlessly, then skirts around him and backs toward the kitchen porch.

Davies watches him the whole way until the door is shut between them.

“Fuck,” Elijah says to the stillness of the kitchen, “what the fuck?”

He drifts through the house, feeling the hardwood floor and then the hall carpet under his bare feet. Vaguely the thought occurs that he ought to change, or bathe, or something, but then he is in the sitting room, where he has begun to work at clearing the mantle. He’s been doing a half-arsed Marie Kondo, the stuff sorted into three piles, to chuck and to donate, and so far the keep pile has a single small figurine of a bird.

In the morning he’d gotten into a kind of rhythm, clearing out junk, making some small progress in claiming the house for himself. Now he struggles to begin again, picking things up and shuffling them around, and then the rev of a car engine outside makes him jump and he looks out just in time to catch the taillights of his cousin’s flashy car.

Biting his lip, Elijah turns back to the mantle. He holds a garbage bag open and sweeps the rest of the clutter into it. China tinkles against metal, and there is the loud crack of something breaking. Every last thing gone. Taken care of. He ties the bag off, and it splits down the side. He wraps it in another bag and hauls it out to the bins. The pile of donations goes in a cotton bag and onto the front porch, and he sets the little bird figurine back on the end of the mantleThe rest of the sitting room, the rest of the house swims with stuff, a grotesque assortment of items tossed together by his aunt’s dedicated hoarding. 

Interview with Mason Hawthorne

CMR: I love the little moments of body horror it in that with like Davies and the boil and the little tiny sprouting thing, which is a little garden friend. Do you find yourself drawn to certain repeated themes or motifs in your writing and is Leadbitter House a good example of some of these? And why did these come up for you a lot? Sorry, there’s a lot of questions in there.

MH: Yeah, so in terms of themes or sort of motifs, yeah so body horror comes up a lot I’m not sure if that’s a theme, or like a genre I suppose. I tend to end up writing a lot of stuff that I think is like, Oh, this is a nice story, this is interesting, and then people read it and they’re like yeah you’re writing body horror again, like thanks… thanks for showing me that before I’ve had my breakfast, like love that.

So yeah the body horror stuff does come up a lot. I think the other big thing for me is like, descriptions of natural world. So a lot of plants and animals and sort of natural features being very present in the story is a big part of what I write, yeah, and that – yeah, so both of those sort of turn up a lot in Leadbitter House, yeah.

CMR: Why do you think… what’s the appeal of those for you, why do you think you find yourself writing those sorts of things?

MH: Well, the body horror I think is kind of like. I never really think of it as body horror until I’ve written it and then I’m like, oh yeah, like you know, doing a little bit of surgery on yourself is probably… probably body horror, I’ll put that on the list… so it’s just kind of like, I don’t, I don’t set out thinking I’m going to write some body horror I sort of start off and I’m like, here’s an interesting idea. What if you were doing, you know, this thing, and then you sort of end up down the garden path a bit, and then it ends up with like, you’re going to have a boil that has a plant growing out of it, that’s the perfect image for this moment.

So yeah it’s just kind of like, I don’t know sort of the permeability of the body into what else is happening in the story is kind of the way I get there, yeah.

CMR: Mm, I love the Gothic-ness of a lot of your stories as well and that you play with those sorts of themes and the aesthetic. Because you’ve got some interconnected short stories right, so this is one and then it’s all kind of set in the same universe of the same world with some crossover characters and that sort of thing? What was the other story that you had that was connected to this?

MH: So I think the other published ones I’ve got out is Banksia Men, which is set on a nude beach and involves some vagina dentata and cannibalism, and the other one is Darlin’ You’re My World which is like a little road trip with your vampire friend.

[Read Mason’s interview about Banksia Men here: Monsters out of the Closet]
[Read-along and Interview with Mason Hawthorne on Darlin’ You’re My World here: Romancing the Gothic Interview]

CMR: Yeah.

MH: Yeah, so I’ve [got] a few stories written in this setting. I think only those three are published so far, yeah.

CMR: Yeah. And they all touch on themes of – I guess you could call it Australian Gothic.

MH: Yeah I think it is pretty important for me to sort of ground my stories in Australian… Australian-ness, because, like obviously I don’t really have any other experiences. And I feel there’s a, you know, when I was studying and stuff there was a lot of sort of push of like well, if you want to write you’ll have to appeal to a mainstream audience, and that means people overseas and people overseas don’t want to read about Australia unless it’s set in the desert or it’s set in like, Sydney. You know you’ve got your opera house or you’ve got your red dirt, that’s it, there’s no other options, if you want to do something, if you want to do anything else, move to Germany or America, basically.

It was very it was very restrictive in that sense, and I sort of thought, like, I mean I read about small town America, like why shouldn’t they have to read about small town Australia? So that’s where I am, yeah.

CMR: I think that’s fair, yeah. There’s something about the small town experience itself though actually quite universal though as well, I think, if you do come from a small town, you see that mentality, even though it’s embedded in a different kind of culture, you still see how that works and how people work within it, I think there’s something universal about that that appeals to different – you know, you can appeal to a wider audience in that way, but also, it’s like, Oh, this is interesting, there are cultural differences that I’m able to pick up on in the context of the story and it’s like this is actually really interesting, so I think it’s more of a hook.

You know, like, if you want to learn about different things, but there’s also other influences on your work as well, so what what particular things influenced you with this story, but then in your work in general?

MH: This story – it’s been a while since I wrote it. This story, I think I had just read The Picnic at Hanging Rock which is sort of a classic Australian Gothic short novel, and I think I had not long since had my top surgery, and so I was kind of like, writing this character who’s kind of like not… not like sort of immediately post-hospital but sort of still in recovery and then having had like a big life change kind of thing.

And so that’s kind of where I came from with Elijah as a character, and sort of, at the time I was, I think I was Oh, I think it was like when The Haunting of Hill House [Netflix Series] had just come out and I think I’d watched that and I’d also read the novel, the novella, I can’t remember, it’s like a short novel as well, so I… read The Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Haunting of Hill House and I kind of was like, yeah. What if you did have like a weird house that, you know, [some] sort of a relative had left you?

And so yeah so he had this aunt, you know, it’s not explicitly said in the story, but I think his aunt was probably the only person in his life, who was … his family life, who was accepting of what he was doing and where he was going, and so, then she’s passed away and the rest of the family is kind of like wait, why does he get the house, that’s not fair so there’s like this sort of antagonism from her actual children who she had not gotten along with, so it was kind of the two outcasts of the family had bonded and been quite friendly together, and then she’d remarried and inherited the house from her late husband and then passed it on to him and the rest of the family went, well, we were going to get what’s ours… Which didn’t work out for them, yeah.

CMR: It’s a really good story! I was wondering what in general is the appeal for you in terms of the Gothic mode and how you choose to use that in your work?

MH: So. I think it’s second nature when I’m writing. I always – like ever since I was a little kid – I was always reading horror, like, I think I read my mum’s whole Stephen King collection when I was 12 and I was on school holidays one year and I was like Oh, I found all these new books in the cupboard here. Let me just take those down. And I just read them one after the other sort of lying on the spare bed [in the] spare bedroom.

So, when I was a kid I used to be able to create… my bedroom looked directly through into the living room so when we were put to bed, and my parents were watching movies, I could peek out, and I think the first time I saw like Alien was peeking out through my bedroom door when I was supposed to be in bed, probably far too young, but I liked it. So I’ve always been into sort of like horror and creepy things and dark fiction and stuff and when I’m writing it’s just kind of like. It just goes that way without really sort of trying so yeah I didn’t really consciously set out to be writing Gothic fiction, but it just kind of really fits the way that I think when I’m writing.

CMR: Yeah that makes sense to me I think it’s just you sort of find that’s part of your voice don’t you? I think it’s just something that makes a lot of sense to write.

MH: yeah like my current project, I’m working on a novella at the moment. I’ve got a writing group that I share work with them, we critique each other’s work and I sent them the first part of this current novella I’m working on. And I hadn’t said anything about it, I was in a rush I just sent the email here’s my piece this week and it’s just sort of a section of like a guy sitting in a garden peeling and orange and they were like this is going to be really scary isn’t it, I was like oh boy yeah but how did you tell and they were like well you didn’t – you didn’t use any scary words and you didn’t say anything explicitly was happening, but there was a sense of dread in the garden, and I was like good. That’s working well.

CMR: I love that! I like the little atmospheric moments so you’re like…  Oh crap.

MH: I think that’s my favourite part honestly, it’s just like I want to be able to describe a garden and say nothing overtly, but just by reading about the flowers, or whatever, you go oh shit something bad’s gonna happen, yeah.

CMR: Yeah you like gardens a lot though, you write about –

MH: Yeah.

CMR: – the natural world is a big thing for you isn’t it?

MH: I think cuz like you know, because the town that these stories are sort of based around is based on the town I live in, and so a big part of growing up for me was, you know, walking over to the beach and walking along the cliffs and looking at the… so we have stone quarries here so like just big chunks taken out of the landscape and also there’s the largest subtropical rain forest in the southern hemisphere is 10 minutes that way, so you know there’s a huge variety of natural landscapes and sort of different things that you can see, but also sort of, you know, backyard gardens and vegetable gardens and flower gardens and things, and mangroves showing up a lot because there we’ve got a river here that has beautiful mangrove swamps, so yeah it’s all the stuff that I’ve liked being around and looking at and exploring my whole life and it kind of works really well for the stories that I want to write.

CMR: I think there’s a lovely synergy, though, as well, between like writing about plants and trees and that kind of thing and then thinking about the permeability of the human body as well because, like. I’m just thinking of that episode of Hannibal where everyone’s like covered in mushrooms.

MH: Yeah. That’s sort of the connectivity that, yeah. I’ve been reading a lot of books, I read like the secret life of trees, or the secret world of trees, or something like that, [The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Peter Wohlleben, Mike Grady et al.] about how trees and their roots use mycelium to connect and share nutrients and communicate in tree language and whatever and I also read the Merlin Sheldrake book, the one about mushrooms, obviously I can’t remember what it’s called [Entangled Life] but it’s by Merlin Sheldrake I think he just won an award for it, which was like it’s an amazingly written book like really beautiful and I really enjoy reading nonfiction stuff about you know plants and the natural world and stuff so.

Yeah it all kind of comes together, and I feel like it gives me a better sense of like what I can express what I know like what the real thing is.

CMR: Yeah and you always tend to do it in and i’m always in awe of people who write really good contained short fiction, which I think you do—

MH: Aw, thank you.

CMR: Have you ever written anything in a longer form or is short fiction just where you live?

MH: I’ve written longer things, I’ve just never really finished longer things. So I have like a third of a big fantasy novel written.

I wrote a novella, sort of 20/22,000 words or so, which is part of this collection of stories. I’ve got a 40,000 word novelette skulking in the shadows somewhere, the one I’m currently working on I’m aiming for about 25,000 words.

Yeah so sort of I’ve been working on a lot of shorter fiction in the last couple of years, but I do have that novel, but I do intend to finish. Because. Yeah I’ve been slack on that one but short fiction’s fun, because you can just sort of jot it off and then a lot of people go oh no, why did you show me that?!! So.

[laughs]

CMR: Yeah I was thinking like I I’ve always struggled with the short form for a long time until like the last couple years and I don’t know if that’s just because you know some premises don’t work as short stories and some premises don’t work as novels and you know, you know what I mean?

MH: Yeah yeah for sure, like, I think it’s also like a completely different process like writing a short story versus writing a novella or writing a novel it’s like, you know, in a short story conceivably you could sit down and finish it in a couple of hours, with a novel it’s like no you’ve got to hold the idea in your head and keep it working for the whole time it takes you to type it out, and you know, maybe you’re like a sort of amazing fast writer and you do it in six weeks and that’s great, but I can’t do that or I haven’t so far, you know.

So I think for me that’s kind of the biggest hurdle, being able to hold that clarity of purpose together for long enough to actually get the piece finished.

CMR: What is it about the short form for you that makes a good vehicle for the premises of your work? Like, why do you think it works better that way?

MH: I think a lot of the things I think of, it’s like well a lot of the short stories I write it’s ideas where I’m like, yeah I like a lot of them as a concept, but I don’t think it really has legs.

I’d rather give it like a short flash in the pan, like yeah that’s great and rather than sort of … With some of them that’s definitely the danger that I would sort of run them into the ground. Like, yeah this idea is great for 4000 words but at 60,000 it’s getting pretty thin, you know? Um yeah so I feel like it’s…

You know, I leave my options open. I think I could you know, there are some things where I think how that’ll work in a longer form, but when I get to it.

But yeah I think yeah but also you know, having said that no shame in redoing the same idea: if it’s a good idea, it’s worth doing twice. Yeah I could write longer things,

CMR: Expand, yes, but then that’s it isn’t it because, like with the short form as well, you can just layer those things on. So it’s more like you’re building it upwards, with like here’s the premise, you’ve got the beginning middle and end that’s 4000 words done and then you can kind of layering things into that instead of stretching it.

MH: Yeah. I think that’s kind of like with the novel that I’ve sort of stalled at on 30,000 words, which I will finish one day, it’s sort of similar ideas, the concept is… I was like Oh, I want to write like a fantasy story, but I want it to be based on Ancient Rome rather than Medieval. I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about Ancient Rome and that sort of thing, and I was like Oh, but you could do some really cool weird stuff with that the way that they did things and the way that they thought about things, and so that was kind of the concept of that, but yeah I was finding first planning that novel, it’s trying to stack things in rather than trying to stretch things, because I really hate reading a book and going like okay yeah I get it, we got this at the first third of the novel, please just give me something new.

I kind of want to keep building things in but have them feel like Oh, of course, that’s how the world works, that makes sense given what we’ve seen, so it’s a little bit complicated.

I’ve actually got like three books about Carthage and Hannibal sitting over there because I kind of got into a Punic War phase.

I find it really interesting the way that like Roman religion becomes sort of mechanism of state control. Like yeah that whole thing of like no, you have to do it our way because that’s how we keep the state actualised, it’s really creepy but also like very interesting.

CMR: Yes, fantastic! Yes, sorry, back to Gothic-ness… [laughs] so yeah so in your short stories actually as we said you’ve got some linking ones and I’m wondering what the difference is between, for example, instead of doing a series of novels in which you follow these arcs through and in a novel you can have like be plots and all sorts of things, and so you know this linear story with short stories, how do you handle arcs into linking ones?

MH: Yeah so with my short stories I generally try to have – every one should be able to be read on its own, I think I have one or two, I think really one actually in the lot that I’ve written so far, which depends on having read the previous three or four stories that it’s related to. So, like overall, I would like to have the sort of arc that’s going through the multiple short stories be completely optional. It’s just that one story really where it really needs the other ones to prop it up, so it makes sense.

And I think it works in the context of producing a coherent collection, based on a single setting and using the same characters. I think it works for that. It’s not something that I think is sort of approach that I want to be taking all the time, like, I feel like that’s kind of a one off where I kind of thought oh yeah the reason that happened was because I’d written the story called “Junkyard Dog”, which is about some boys who come across a vampire and that all goes pretty horribly. And I’d written a story about a baby minotaur, he’s been raised on a farm in isolation. And at the end of the minotaur one I was thinking like oh it’d be cool for the vampire boys to show up and befriend him and then that didn’t fit.

A lot of these things where it’s part of the interconnecting stuff, it’s like, I had the thought early on, of oh it’d be cool if these people showed up here like in the background. And then, it just ends up for not for whatever reason, not working, but because I liked the idea of it so much I’m like, I could write that story on its own, you know.

And it’s kind of kicking the can down the road and bringing more stories into it, because it just didn’t fit into what I wrote to start with, but yeah so Leadbitter House kind of has one of those as well, so originally that there’s a character for the other novella that I wrote, so the other novella in the collection is “Outside Angels” and is about a reverse werewolf.

CMR: Yeah!

MH: The reverse werewolf was supposed to be a character in Leadbitter House, but I sort of got to the end of Leadbitter House was like oh there’s really no room for this here it’s just not going to work. I’ll just cut that and do something else with it later. And that turned into Outside Angels, yeah.

CMR: That’s cool. Yeah. Do you plan on expanding the world that you introduced in Leadbitter House a little bit further? I mean how many… so you’ve got three stories now…?

MH: Yeah three published so far. I’ve got two novellas, a handful of short stories and the novella that I’m working on currently are all kind of set in the same world. I’m hopeful of publishing the collection altogether, but if it comes back from the submissions I’ve sent it on and isn’t there’s no takers, I’m probably going to start trying to publish more of the short stories individually and then try again later for the collection.

CMR: Yeah.

MH: Yeah, it’s eventually, you know, it’s all – I don’t have a time limit.

CMR: Is there anything you’d like to plug or like to mention while you’re here?

MH: Um… at the moment, not really. I think 2021 has been a bit of a slower year for me in terms of publishing, mainly because I haven’t been sending stuff out, like that’s the big problem.

CMR: That’ll be why!

MH: That’s, that’s why it’s so slow, I would say check out if you haven’t, if you haven’t read it, check out Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology because that has some great stories in it even aside from mine. Yeah, there’s a lot of like really cool stories in that so if you haven’t read it, check it out.

CMR: And also you’ve got a talk with Romancing the Gothic.

MH: Oh, yeah, so I did a talk with Romancing the Gothic. So I did my honours’ thesis on the Hannibal Lecter novels, doing structure and characterization in the Hannibal Lecter novels which was fun, and then I wrote a paper about gender specifically, which was also fun yeah. And then I did it for Romancing the Gothic, which was great.

CMR: I think that was a Sunday talk, wasn’t it, not a Saturday one?

MH: It was a short one, yes.

CMR: It was a short one, yes – found you! It was: “Is this our Great Becoming? Gender and Adaptation in the Hannibal Lecter Franchise”. And that’s on YouTube. That was a really good one. I did a live tweet of that. It was one of the first ones I did a live tweet for, I think. [live thread below: see also slideshare.net for the slides to download].

SUNDAY GOTHIC TALK with @MasonHawth0rne – i RT'd the thread of his stories yesterday but will relink that here. Today: is this our great becoming? Gender and adaptation in the Hannibal franchise #promotehorror #romancingthegothic #HorrorMovies #HorrorFamily

— C. M. Rosens (@CMRosens) May 24, 2020

MH: Oh nice.

CMR: yeah. Yeah it was great.

MH: I think I also have a published version of that paper in a Horror magazine. Digital Horror Magazine? Or something like that. Yeah, my memory is not great for things.

CMR: Same. It’s fine. Words. What. Why. [laughs] Thank you so much for that Mason, it’s been really lovely to chat to you.

MH: Yeah no worries.

Next Episode of Eldritch Girl: Thirteenth Part 15!

Podcast S02E14 ~ Thirteenth Part 14

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

This post is a few days late, apologies! I’ve been having a much-needed rest and enjoying my birthday month, and preparing for THE CROWS to come out in hardback (Season 01 of the podcast, if you missed it!).

In this episode, Wes sets his cap at Fairwood (and Carrie), takes drugs to see glimpses of a strange future, and recalls his own Changes.

CWs: drug-taking and on-page trip in POV, come-down and out-of-touch/derealisation POV due to drug-taking, very strong language (the C-word again), depersonalisation (when Wes can’t remember his own face for the first time), explicit attraction to first-cousins in inbred family context, coerced alcohol intake/relapse, toxic family dynamics.

listen now

Chapter 9

Wes went for a short walk around the gardens once his sister had gone back to her room. He had to clear his head of the energy pulsing in the kitchen, free his mind of Ricky’s ripped abs, and definitely not think about that time they’d been stupid teenagers with nothing better to do than each other. Ricky hadn’t been into it then, either.

Striding around the back lawns and skirting the broken wall to return to the gravel drive at the front, a twinge of jealousy stirred in his chest as the gables loomed over him.

It wasn’t often – never, in fact – that he was jealous of Ricky. He’d always known the old ruin as The Crows, a wild-sounding name that suited its decay. Its restoration was a revelation, an epiphany, a promise that even the most broken of things could be restored to some kind of life, and that life could be glorious.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 267-8

This section encapsulates Wes’s character arc and motivations, and I am looking forward to expanding on this in the next book THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD (being written at the time of this episode going live).

Class is pretty much the key thing to understanding Wes, mainly that he’s upper working class by birth and schooling, as the family didn’t make their money until Ricky grew up and was able to predict the lottery etc for them. He moved out at 16 to stay with Uncle Wayne and Aunty Jenny, went to college to get his A Levels, only just passed most of them since he was deep into drugs and having a good time.

He’d also figured out Ricky was useful to hang around with for this reason since at 16-18 Ricky was fully committed to being out of his skull as much as he could be. This was when Ricky was more open to experimentation, and how he realised he wasn’t really into sex/romance even though he was theoretically up for trying with anyone because it was all the same to him (but had no vocabulary to explain his orientation).

Wes now has millions (at least) and never earned a penny of them, and while he was in London on his first lottery win he spent his time trying to get into the right circles and failing. He attended as many parties as he could get into, mainly dealing for Uncle Barry as an ‘in’, until he gained a reputation as someone you had to invite for recreational reasons. He didn’t go to the right schools, he didn’t have the right vocabulary, and his ideas of how you spend money and what you spend money on is what lower class people think the rich/upper classes spend money on.

He had to learn how to blend in, to go for the brand names he’d never even heard of before and not the ‘popular’ ones, what topics of conversation were off the table in what kind of company, how to talk to people to get them to invite him back. He still never fitted in properly, but as long as he got to live his party lifestyle that was okay for a while. He got into the queer community and sex party scene, got through a lot of casual relationships and hook ups, and his Changes meant that he was a curiosity, someone that people found irresistibly interesting for reasons they couldn’t quite pin down.

How Wes met Charlie (and her best friend Hugo, whom he didn’t get into a relationship with until 4 years after they met) is told in OVEREXPOSURE, a short story available to buy from all eBook retailers and my Ko-Fi shop for £1.99. If you want to listen to it before you buy it, it’s a bonus episode on the podcast (linked in the title).

Reviews of it on GoodReads/StoryGraph/Amzn/elsewhere would be very much appreciated!

read along with thirteenth

Podcast S02E13 ~ Thirteenth Part 13

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

Katy faces the consequences of her actions and some unwelcome revelations about the List and her destiny.

CWs: gore, maggot-adjacent infestation, body horror [assimilation/distortion and parasite-adjacent], emesis, panic attack, eldritch horror

listen nowChapter 8

Ricky was still very, very dead. He’d been too cocky. What if she had killed him for good? What if it was different because it was her, regardless of if she’d Changed?

It was unreal, like a dream. She wasn’t angry anymore, but she didn’t know what she did feel. Numbness seeped through her chest, leaving her light-headed. It was a dream. She was a good person, she had friends, she wasn’t a monster, she had never hurt anyone before. It was the Beast, the Beast inside her, the Beast that made her do it. Except she wasn’t the Beast yet, and Ricky wasn’t moving.

“I didn’t do it,” she lied, reassuring herself. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.”

She couldn’t have done that. She couldn’t even kill squirrels properly.

He was going to get up, though, wasn’t he?

That was a bloody big hole in his head.

Wes stumbled up behind her, his hand pressing her back. She leaned into it. “He’s going to get up, isn’t he? That’s… supposed to happen, right?”

“I bloody hope so.” Wes patted her back and rubbed her shoulder. “Fuck me, what a mess. Nice one.”

“What did I do?” Katy turned frightened eyes to her big brother, almost forgetting his own betrayal. “I thought he’d get out of the way, I thought it was…” She looked at her hands. “I really killed him, didn’t I?”

Wes put an arm around her shoulders, but she barely registered it. “He told me to, I didn’t…” She didn’t know what she was saying, nothing made any sense. “He’s going to get up, isn’t he?”

How could he get up?

How could it be a trick? She’d never seen him do it before, his Mike Myers routine or whatever this was, and Wes seemed less sure of himself.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 236-7

Well, shit… xD

This midpoint is one of my favourite scenes because it pulls a few things together and makes Katy face up to her destiny properly.

It’s also the part that takes us through the portal for the first time, and we see what the Pendle Stone actually does and what the Outside looks like (at least, a part of it). That’s pretty enjoyable.

read along

Podcast S02E12 ~ Thirteenth Part 12

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

Fairwood extracts Katy’s memory of her 11th birthday, in which Katy’s destiny becomes clearer to her; in the present, Katy learns who killed her beloved grandmother and Wes and Ricky face a reckoning.

CWs: child neglect and manipulation, disruptive/drunk/violent family member in family gathering situation, gift-giving (can be read as manipulative but without CSA connotations); gore, violence with blunt instrument, head injury/impalement, maggots, parasitic-infestation-adjacent body horror, strong language, dealing with grief and trauma in destructive ways.

listen nowChapter 8

“I hate you,” Katy spat, and it felt good to get that out, like spraying out poison. “I hate you. You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you, but you ruin everything. Everything!” She couldn’t stop now, even if she wanted to. It all flooded out, word vomit on a tide of fury. “…All my birthdays when I was a kid, pretty much every Yule you ever bothered to show up to, you’re a fucking embarrassment, and you took Gran away from me! You… you took her away!” She couldn’t see. Angry tears blurred the garden and smudged him out of existence, the way she wanted to erase him from her life. “I hate you.”

Wes sniggered, but Katy was over him, too.

“Shut up, Wes.”

“See, this is why I had to abduct you.” Ricky was infuriatingly calm. “Knew you’d never come if I just asked.” She charged him, poker raised, point first. She expected him to dodge. He didn’t. The point went straight into his head, her whole weight behind it, and right through into his skull.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 234-5

I didn’t want this to be the note we ended on before Christmas so I skipped a week, but this is the anger and rage chapter where Katy gets to see if she can really kill someone as herself, and not as the Beast.

A lot is going on for a 17-year-old to cope with and Katy isn’t making rational choices, but then she’s only got Wes and Ricky to support her, and both of them have betrayed her in some way, and neither are particularly reliable or can provide the support she actually needs.

Ricky is pretty sure of himself and confident that he’ll come back if she kills him, like he usually does (see: The Crows). Katy is, on the other hand, born to be a family killing machine. So let’s see if he’s right about this next week…

Read along50% off eBook until 01 Jan 2022

December Letter! ~ Podcast S02 Bonus

Bonus Eldritch Girl Content

My monthly Ko-Fi supporters are receiving letters written by Carrie updating them on life in 2021/22 (The Crows is set in 2018, and Thirteenth is set in 2019; The Day We Ate Grandad, being written at the time of posting, will also be set in 2019).

This is a non-canonical exploration of the characters as if their timelines aligned with ours, getting to know what happened over the lockdown periods in 2020 and what they might potentially be up to in 2021. I may find threads of story arcs in these letters as we go along that would work as a piece of prose fiction (short/long, unsure!). 

These are exclusive to monthly subscribers, audio available on request (please say when you sign up if you need it to be in audio format), with the posts accessible here:

Links to Ko-Fi, Instagram and RSS.comNovember Letter (Text)December Letter (text)Christmas/Yule Card on InstaPodcast Update Episode: News from Pagham-on-SeaPodcast December Letter Episode

ELDRITCH SEEKERS:
– Unlimited slots at £3 per month
– Access to Discord Server and private Discord channels
– Exclusive content including advance access short stories, Carrie’s letters, and more
– Exclusive discount codes

ELDRITCH FAMILY:
– Limited slots at £5 per month to cover postage: frozen until 2022
– All of the above
– Handwritten letters and cards posted internationally each month
– Merch e.g. postcards, stickers and bookmarks a few times per year

Podcast S02E11 Thirteenth ~ Part 11

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

In this chapter, Wes’s meeting with Katy goes very badly, resulting in Katy needing a rescue. For those who need specific CWs about on-page family bullying and physical intimidation (siblings, parents, uncles), this is the one to skip or to be aware of.

CWs: driving-under-the-influence POV, implied careless driving, homicidal ideation (he fantasises about strangling Katy with his scarf) and strong language, attempted abduction by father and siblings, some graphic sibling bullying and intimidation.

Theme Tune: Gemma Cartmell

(c) All Rights Reserved 2021

listen nowChapter 7

The Porter boys were all largely identical, but she could tell Liam from Kieran by his greater muscle-mass, and Ashley was much taller. She wondered if Ashley was actually the same height as Wes but couldn’t remember.

 “Leave her alone!” Wes’s voice sent a chill through her. He appeared, panting, but their siblings ignored him. “What are you doing?”

“Uncle Marcus said you’d do a shit job,” Nicole said. “We’re the back up.”

Katy backed up against the wall and tried not to throw up. She stared at Wes in horror and hatred, and he couldn’t look at her.

“This is wrong,” Wes muttered, and to his credit he sounded sincere.

Liam laughed. “Which way did you vote, again?”

Katy couldn’t hear this. It was one thing to suspect, another to know. She stared at her older brother, the only one who’d made her life bearable, and felt the world dropping away.

“Wes?”

Wes was an impressionistic blur of colour, approaching slowly, filling her vision as he stepped between her and their family. “I fucked that up.”

“But you voted.” Liam sounded hurt. “You voted for us. You chose us. What are you doing?”

“I’m – I don’t know.” Wes didn’t move. “I don’t know, I think this is wrong.”

“Get out the way,” Nicole snapped. “Uncle Marcus wants her to stay with Uncle Barry for a while. That’s all. He thinks he can help you.”

For a second, Katy faltered. “Can he?”

“You don’t need that kind of help,” Wes told her, voice low. “Trust me.”

She just wanted it to stop, for them to all go away.

“I… I don’t want to go with you, leave me alone.”

“‘Leave me alone’,” Nicole mimicked, giggling. Her whole back parted into two wings of flesh rimmed with wriggling teeth, then snapped back together. Nicole had always been Daddy’s little angel.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, p. 182

This is the section where you see the sibling dynamics for the first time, and what the Porter siblings are like as individuals. I want to get into more of this in The Day We Ate Grandad and explore those dynamics through the warped retrospect of memory and how grief impacts those relationships…

Nicole is one I want to develop more as she only appears in this scene. Liam and Kieran may also be 2 brothers I focus on more, and the triplets (Kirsty, Lucy and David [Dave], who aren’t present in this scene).

Dave is canonically trans, which has already been alluded to earlier in this book, but he’s off-page in this one, as is Kim (with her spawn) and Adam. I have also written a scene I probably won’t use in the next novel but will put on Ko-Fi for supporters which is a scene where Wes visits them and they video-chat with Kim (who is not present at this intimidation scene either). They will probably appear in the next one, which is very family-focused.

Liam is a serial killer who has a storage unit like his dad, and Kieran’s just as bad. I want to investigate the others a bit more, although Nicole’s the most interesting and the most like Wes in terms of lifestyle, just without the cash. She is deep into the darker side of the family rituals, and works alongside Uncle Barry in experimenting with drugs and their effect on human and non-human organs, I think. In my head she’s the Frankenstein of the family, and there’s a lot I could do with her in short fic form.

ELDRITCH GIRL will be taking a week off for Christmas, and return 30th Dec 2021.

Next time (after Christmas) : the immediate aftermath of meeting this lot, and the consequences for Wes and Ricky when Katy processes it all – including when she checks her phone and reads Wes’s text.

Podcast S02E10 Thirteenth ~ Part 10

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

In Chapter 6: Strange Meeting, Wes finally finds out what’s really bothering Hugo and has a confession of his own; Katy goes back to college and gains a magical artefact. (In both the eBook and paperback version, this chapter follows a gorgeous black and white illustration, The Vote, by Thomas Brown).

CWs: In Wes’s section: under-the-influence POV, suicide ideation in context of reference to a deliberate car-crash, father/son estrangement, and references to cocaine and fictional designer drugs.
In Katy’s section: refs to historic animal cruelty, a toxic and manipulative friendship, and a bit of sexually-active teenage drama.

LISTEN NOWChapter 6

Hugo looked stricken now, twisting in his seat, bumping his ribs against the edge of the table. “That’s – that’s the other thing. What’s going on?”
“I can’t…”
“What are you scared of?”
“I…” He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He shook his head, lost, but Hugo wasn’t going anywhere and he wasn’t going to let him get away with silence. He winced, pulling himself up a little straighter, and studied his hands.
“Katy. I’m scared of Katy.” Wes remembered Uncle Marcus’s threats. “All of them, to be honest.”
Hugo knew a little about the various branches of his family, but he probed. “What happened this summer?”
The chemicals had kicked in enough to drown out his pride. Enough was enough. Fuck it.
“They… We voted to… to… to kill her.” He couldn’t look him in the face. “And I – I don’t know how to take it back, I don’t know how to help her, and I don’t want to die…”
“Good god.” Hugo breathed out, barely audible over the music. “She’s a kid, Wes.”
Wes crumpled.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, p. 157

This was a fairly important scene (I think?) because it shows the dynamic between Wes and his other partner Hugo, establishes that different people experience Wes in different ways, and contrasts what the family think of as normal and acceptable vs what other people think. Hugo and Charlie are the main reason Wes has broken as far away from the family setting as he has. He left home at 16 because he fell out with his father, and moved in with Uncle Wayne (this backstory is not specifically mentioned in this book). After his Changes, he got Ricky to tell him the lottery numbers and share prices, and bought himself a fancy life in London where he mainly dealt designer drugs as a means of making friends and influencing people. Now he’s struggling with the life he thought he wanted, because he doesn’t fit into the circles of friends he’s established, and his family keep pulling him back.

As a character, Wes was hard to write in this book because his POV is drug-addled and incoherent a lot of the time, with the amount of cocaine and hallucinogenics he does. I had to make it less incoherent and fragmented than it was, and cut a whole trip he had after this scene. There’s also a reason why the only sex act you see him involved in, despite him fancying himself as Casanova, is cut short, and it isn’t just because Katy got in his head. It’s also because his lifestyle has given him bouts of erectile dysfunction, and that is made more explicit in The Day We Ate Grandad (2022). It’s not made explicit in this book, although it’s hinted at. It’s also not the foremost thing on Wes’s mind at the moment…

Meanwhile, Katy is trying to be grownup and self-rescuing, and Wes can’t get it through his head she’s not 12 years old anymore. Such is the lot of the youngest sibling.

Read along

Author Interview ~ Magen Cubed

Author Bio

Magen Cubed is an Eisner-nominated writer, essayist, and occasional critic, best known for her queer monster-hunting urban fantasy/paranormal romance series SOUTHERN GOTHIC. She has appeared in the critically acclaimed TWISTED ROMANCE comics anthology from Image Comics and has bylines on the award-winning Women Write About Comics. Magen lives in Florida with her girlfriend Melissa and a little dog named Cecil.

Find out more at: http://www.magencubed.net/

listen nowIntroduction

CMR: Welcome to the next episode of Eldritch Girl, and I’ve got Magen Cubed with me make it would you like to introduce yourself?

MC: I would, thank you and thank you so much for having me.

MC: I am a what I call a monster romance writer, I began writing fiction and weird tales about 10 years ago and meandered my way into media criticism and reviews and such as mostly like comics and visual media. Outside of that I am a published novelist, I write short stories, I write essays and I write prime- or I should say I’m primarily known for the Southern Gothic series which is my little ode to monster hunting fiction and queer romance and all that good stuff so.

CMR: That’s how I know you also, from that series.

MC: [laughs] That’s how most people know me…

CMR: And you get to read an extract from the first book.

MC: yeah so another lady actually the book is the novelization of a short story of the same name, which was originally published in 2013 by, of all places, image comics. It was a[n] anthology of romance prose and comics, And it was a huge international group of people who got together and told it is very you know off beat romance fiction and different sort of like sub genres from like historical to horror to you know contemporary and like more YA type stuff so.

My story is was asking me what’s originally in the first issue, which was you know horror themes that was pretty good.

the novelization came out February of this year right in time for Valentine’s Day it follows the main character Dorian who is an unlucky vampire from the slums of Devil’s Row. He makes ends meet working in sleazy bars and nightclubs doing survival sex work, you know, under the, I guess, watchful eye of the local vampire mafia.

He meets a human, a monster hunter named Cash Leroy. During a vampire bar fight at Dorian’s job, where he saves Cash’s life from a particularly nasty brutish vampire who’d been hunting humans and basically saves his life.

In doing so, Cash, who is indebted to Dorian, for you know saving his life and everything, and you know, putting everything on the line, agrees to take Dorian under his wing to train as a monster hunter and help him, you know, now that he’s kind of on the outside in the vampire world, like at least he can start over in the human world as a monster hunter. They become partners and best friends. But unfortunately, this is a romance so everyone catches feelings quite quickly and that you know, kind of complicates things, as monster hunting is kind of a nasty brutish and short career.

And you know, all of the the… the emotional and romantic plot kind of has to take a backseat when a particularly like nasty case lands in their laps: a pair of man-eating were-deer on the loose in town stealing hearts. And so, with pressure on to end it, they have to set aside their feelings and track down a pair of very nasty were-deer.

But yeah so that’s pretty much the setup of the book and I’m going to be reading the first chapter. I think it’s like a very good intro to the world.

CMR: Perfect, yeah.

MC: I’m not an avid I’m not an excellent you know, public speaker, so we’ll give it a shot.

CMR: That’s fine, everyone’s very forgiving.

MC: Well, I appreciate that.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Magen Cubed (@magencubed)

Extract from Leather & Lace

Karl Dreschner wanted to scream as he ran for his life from the charging beast, but he knew there was no use in it.

No one was around to hear him as he raced down the winding footpaths of Robert P. Chastain Park. This late at night, the Devereux Police Department squad car that lingered in the parking lot to chase off loitering teenagers was already gone. The lamps that dotted the footpaths didn’t stay on past closing once the groundskeepers left, casting the entire park in deep pools of shadow. Around him, some shrubs and trees made it hard to see where he was going, tripping as he went or snagged by branches.

Above Karl, there was moonlight.

Behind him, the sound of hooves beating the dirt.

The trees shook as the creature ran between them, following Karl’s frantic breathing. He didn’t get a good look at it when it appeared outside the Werner Family Packing Plant. It was standing in the farthest corner of the parking lot that faced NE Pascal Boulevard. Karl had just left his shift for the night when he saw it stand up from a crouch onto two legs.

All Karl knew was that moonlight bathed its shaggy fur and head of antlers in what looked like silver ribbons.

Then the creature charged at him.

Karl ran and never looked back.

A sound of a thick branch snapping caught Karl by his frayed nerves. He turned to look behind him as a massive silhouette barreled down the footpath. Karl didn’t turn in time to see the creature in front of him emerge from the brush. Their bodies connected in the sudden violent impact of a soft human hitting a slab of dense muscle and fur. Karl stumbled back and hit the sidewalk, his head spinning and lungs burning for oxygen. He blinked, and when his vision cleared, he saw it.

The stag appeared with the body of a musclebound human and a deer’s narrow, black-eyed face. It towered overhead in seven feet of brown fur, black hooves, and a gnarled spread of bony antlers. Before Karl could scream, the creature picked him up by the throat. He wheezed, vision growing hazy and dark as it squeezed the breath from his aching lungs.

Death didn’t wait long for Karl as the other stag charged at him from behind. The creature that had pursued him was much larger than the one before him, a lumbering giant with a head of massive antlers protruding in sharpened points. The antlers pierced through Karl, breaking his rib cage and tearing through his lungs. He died a violent death, listening to his own bones shatter.

Once Karl Dreschner’s heart stopped beating, the beast who crushed his throat used the other’s antlers to steady his body. The stag tore into his chest, peeling back the skin and bone to take his heart. Holding the organ up in a meaty paw, the creature licked its mouth with a long black tongue.

Karl’s body left to the dirt, the stags—one large, one short—underwent their transformation back into their human forms. Their antlers receded into round human skulls; their dense, speckled fur shed to reveal their vulnerable skin underneath. The men the stags hid inside of stood naked and bloody under the moonlight. They were middle-aged men with gray hairs at their temples and in their mustaches, crow’s feet gathered in the corners of their eyes.

One was tall, Black, and sturdily built. The other was short, white, and round.

“Just his heart?” asked the taller of the two men. His name was Paul W. Garrett. Flecks of muscle and bone clung to his coarse grayed hair where his antlers had receded into his skull. He swallowed, feeling queasy.

“No.” The shorter and rounder of the two, named Mathew Lane, smirked under his mustache. “I want all of it.”

Tonight, the weredeer feasted.

~ Magen Cubed, Leather and Lace, Ch. 1, pp. 3-5

Buy nowMagen Cubed Interview

CMR: Yes, so yeah that’s such a good intro to the world it’s such a good opening and in terms of your world building because there’s such a lot going on in that opening section so what are the dynamics of monsters living alongside humans and and what are the main conflicts that you wanted to play with about that?

MC: Well, in this world monsters basically have been living incognito I guess you could say among humans for a few you know hundred to 1000 years depending on where they are in the world, you know monsters are basically evolutionary offshoots of humans, so they ran parallel to humans and are naturally occurring in the world, so in this world, you know, monsters lived in London in the natural world and in trees, in caves and forests and the plains and all these places, you know, and mountains, until humanity started to encroach upon them so more, you know, indigenous cultures had more of an understanding of a relationship with monsters, while those who tended to empire build would rather to sort of pave over the top of them or kill them outright so.

Over the course of history monsters have either like been killed because of you know, violent skirmishes with humans, you know, killing livestock or eating children… those are like nasty things that happened when they sort of bump up against each other and don’t know what to do… Or have been slowly sort of folded into human society.

There’s basically three kinds of monsters in this world, only two of which that we we do see in this book, you have shape shifters like you know, Paul and Matthew, who are able to shift between fully human form, a sort of hybrid form, like the man-stag, and then like a full animal they’re able to completely blend in and live normal human lives and pay taxes and all that stuff and more or less navigate without any problems, and then you have vampires and other what they call ‘deadlocked’ monsters, which are totally locked into their forms. They can’t shift so while they’re more humanoid you know. Then, say, like a bigfoot or like a mermaid which are like more like corrupted you know and can’t speak can’t communicate with us and can’t blend in. They are human enough to sort of pass, but have to like hide their appearance and kind of hiding in plain sight.

These two classes kind of clash amongst themselves, you know, because you have one that you know the shifters who are very good at like simulation and hiding and copying humans and living among them, then you have those like vampires who are kind of struggling for their freedom kind of like living under humans, and you know, obviously it was either fold into human society or die, you know so they those who survived, yeah, made the choice.

Yeah so it’s forced assimilation, it’s not like these were happy times.

You have monsters like I said kind of living incognito and the rule is basically keep your head down, pay into human economies, you know. Property, food, whatever way that you can. Taxes if you’re a shapeshifter, all that good stuff if you can have a job… But you know, keep your head down. Don’t do anything to bring attention to yourself and do not kill, do not attack humans, like that’s the rule.

Those who step outside of that rule, those who attack humans those to draw any attention to themselves – that becomes the business of monster hunters who are like a class of labourers basically who are you know brought in by human governments, local law enforcement, whatever, to you know just handle the nasty stuff of dealing with monsters, because human governments don’t want to deal with it, they don’t want to they don’t want them in prisons, they don’t want them to have rights to do anything it’s, just as the as long as they keep their heads down it’s fine.

If they act up whatever a hunter is called in to take care of it. It’s swift ugly you know brutal justice. And monsters are essentially just like – they know they have no rights they know they know there’s no there’s no due process, you know if you step on the line you’re dead.

But most of the conflict is between the relationships in this series, and in the book specifically is between monsters and hunters. Because hunters are like a discrete class that are like on the fringes of society, you know they’re basically stateless you know they Simply exist to kill monsters and police and basically but, on the other hand, when monsters can’t police their own or someone is drawing attention to them, or like finding a social contract in some sort of way, monsters will also call in hunters to deal with those that they don’t want to deal with themselves, you know, sometimes it’s just easier to sort of like pass the buck on to someone, and you know wash your hands of a Community Member who’s causing a problem or you know doing nasty things that will you know brings attention back to the Community so.

The conflict is mostly between you know hunters who know that they’re hitmen, basically. That they’re operating outside of the law and have to do very nasty ugly things under the guise of keeping humans safe when it’s mostly just to avoid paperwork and bureaucracy for human governments and police and all that.

CMR: Yep.

MC: And then monsters who understand that, like the cost of not dying is you know behaving, essentially, living up to this human contract that is forced on them and navigating that relationship where they don’t necessarily fear hunters, they don’t like them, they’re just sort of a part of the everyday life.

You know, and in that negotiation of like hunters who are like marginalized maligned in human society and monsters, who are completely at the bottom of any social hierarchy because they have nothing you know.

And so, so that that that the conflict is is sort of like negotiating like what is justice what is fair, how do you sleep at night, you know. How do you navigate any of this. That’s the core conflict between humans and monsters in this world.

CMR: What drew you to Southern Gothic as a vehicle for storytelling as opposed to another kind of spec fic genre? I think it lends itself quite well to the darker themes of those sorts of struggles and things like that, so what what is it about southern Gothic for you, that makes you think like, oh yeah this is kind of the aesthetic I want, this is that the genre that I want to use, was that a deliberate thing or did it just kind of organically happen for you?

MC: It kind of … I’ve always been intrigued by monster hunting fiction. And like you know in America, where I live, it’s always paid lip service to like the ideas of southern Gothic I think in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of the aesthetics of life on the fringes and, like, the dilapidated American town, and dealing with the scars of industrialization and economic exploitation and racism and the fallout of the American Civil War and a lot of these other things you know.

It’s a very common thing to sort of paint hunters as like, bad men who do bad things, and wear the aesthetics of the low-brow salt-of-the-earth labourer like a costume, you know, they drive fast cars, they live in these dark dreary towns, you know they’re sort of gesturing at the lack of agency, like the the death of infrastructure in the American South and poverty and class disparity, and they sort of like gesture towards these things, and you know and it’s all fine but doesn’t really meaningfully engage in that sort of like, the trap of like generational poverty. You set stories in mining towns but don’t actually explain what a mining town is, and how people got there, and why things are the way they are, and you know, how you can have people living amongst monsters – well you know if the guy running your town is essentially a monster, like what’s the big… what’s the big difference??

But um, I’ve always been very interested in telling stories about the lived reality of the American South like I’m from Texas originally, which is more like Southwest, it’s a little further removed from a lot of these sort of places, but like a lot of my family come from the places that these kind of stories are set and the kind of cultures that are being like gestured at.

And you know I’ve always been very interested in like getting that perspective from some like from someone who like is familiar with that kind of life and understands, instead of like poverty tourism, actually giving dignity to people who live in these conditions.

CMR: I think it’s really interesting how you engage with the American class system, if you like, the US class system, which is very different to like a British or European conception of class, and I like how your work, seems to be quite socially conscious as well anddigs into those sorts of things and then like puts monsters and monster hunters within that context and deals with it within that. Again, is that something that you did deliberately is that something that you found yourself drawn to because of the particular themes and the it just sort of lends itself to that?

MC: Yeah it did. I kind of ran into it. Because I’m like, I come from a working class background, you know, it didn’t make sense to me to have hunters be just a cool guy who does cool things and has no engagement with his material conditions or anything like that, so you know. In the case of like Cash and everything, yeah he’s a human character, his family is split. His mother’s family comes from Mexico, they’re a monster hunting dynasty essentially, they’ve been doing this for generations. His father’s family comes from like the Bayou of Louisiana. Both sides of his family are you know very like low working class, you know, and he kind of just met in Texas, he grew up there.

But you know he’s in the Mexican-American, he has a French name but so do a lot of people, you know Dorian is a vampire he has a French name, his family just sort of ended up with the name. A lot of vampires and and monsters, a sort of end up with the names. It’s a mishmash, at least in the region of the world that this story takes place, is a mishmash of like Spanish and French and Creole and yeah the name you just sort of end up with is this a name you end up with you know it’s all just this melting pot, you know and monster system don’t get to choose their names it’s just named at the end up with you know because of as assimilation and they learn English and a sort of just learn English and bits of Spanish and bits about the things that just becomes the sort of identity that they construct, but they have no, they have no relationship to like human colonialism, they don’t know where any of this comes from it’s just handed to them and they had to take.

In Cash’s case you know he is between two worlds, his father was what they call a civilian and his mother was a monster hunter. You know he’s Mexican-American you know he’s so direct to a lot of different tensions, you know, and then on top of that he’s a monster hunter he doesn’t make a lot of money it’s a dangerous stupid job and they don’t live very long so it’s kind of like you know, there is no, even though he is basically part of like a fantasy class, you know because monster hunters aren’t real, they have their own like insular culture and values and and history and wasn’t all that stuff like you know he’s still can’t divorce himself from the reality of you know, being a gay Mexican-American kid from Texas.

I guess it’s just sort of like honouring the things that I’ve seen and the people that I’ve met in my life, who I know have very similar sort of like class backgrounds and relationships with structures of power and like race and all that stuff.

CMR: Yeah and the main story is not about that, it’s about him killing monsters right.

MC: Yeah there’s only so much I can get into when it’s like you know, this is not an authentic story about a man’s trials and tribulations, he does kill monsters for a living and he hangs out with a vampire. So you know, we can only go so far.

CMR: yeah exactly, and I think like and Dorian and Cash’s relationship is a really interesting one, and you’ve got that – well it’s not exactly slow-burn, is it, but they do have a foundation of friendship to start off with, don’t they, like they kind of grow on each other, I guess, but it’s like that healthier kind of couple, as opposed to the Gothic horror couple where it’s all very toxic. You could easily have gone that way, I think, with those sorts of dynamics, like a monster hunter and a vampire like and you’ve got potential power dynamics and power and balances at play and considering where monsters are in the whole social structure so like you’ve got those elements to play with, and I think it’s it’s really interesting that they’ve got like such a nice relationship like it like a relatively much healthier one. So is that again something that you wanted to do on purpose, because you wanted it to be a healthy romance?

MC: Yeah it’s it’s kind of like a weird route how I got here because, like I said the the whole thing was originally based on like a short story.

CMR: Yeah, yeah.

MC: It was it was just like a fun little snapshot and it wasn’t particularly developed, but they always had that like fun best friends sort of like buddy-cop sort of relationship, you know from you know because, like the crux of their whole thing is that, like they hang out at like karaoke bars when they’re not at work, you know, hang out at diners and they go eat at like food trucks and they just they just hang out and they just banter constantly because you know Cash is the very calm, laid back, relaxed character and Dorian is completely anxiety-ridden and he’s very smarmy and they just make fun of each other constantly but it’s always very good natured bickering.

That was always sort of like the foundation that I always had in mind even like when the first short story first came out.

I stumbled into the sort of like web of you know class and power, and you know the hierarchies and and all that, like, as I was developing the world and shifting from like the short story, because I originally wrote like a ton of short stories, but I was like there’s so much more here and I can’t get to it with just some like fun short story. From there I shifted gears into creating the Southern Gothic universe, and I still wanted them to have that very fun flirty casual and complimentary dynamic.

It morphed into this other thing because they are an interspecies, like, paranormal romance you know, human and vampire it’s just like that’s not the problem you know, like vampires and humans have like kind of a – I should say vampires and hunters have a Like okay sort of relationship like mostly vampires just don’t like them very much but they understand their function and what they’re like whatever you know they’re ambivalent.

The relationship between vampires and humans is that they do hate and fear them. So much so that vampire religion is basically like an apocalyptic cult. They’ve created this mythos where the first day Empire was like murdered by by humanity and he was like return to the great goddess’s womb to be reborn again and then smite the humans and, once he comes back and destroys all the humans, they will take their place as like the rightful heirs of this planet, so they like they see themselves as like stewards of the earth, the rightful life forms, you know and humans are just as these nasty things and have got the upper hand on them and will someday – someday! – be destroyed, so you know they are fearful of them.

[The] vampires are living in these slums and are far away from humans, under the rule of either like the vampire mob, which is in Dorian’s case, that’s the power structure that controls where he lives, or other parts of the world where it’s like a vampire monarchy. they’re taught to just if they see human to just like close up shop lock your doors close the windows don’t talk to them. They wear sunglasses and hats and they cover their eyes and they cover their ears, because they have like long pointed ears are very like Nosferatu-like. They cover themselves and they don’t talk to humans and they tend to decorate their shops in like like their regional like vampire languages that humans don’t don’t even know.

So the relationship is kind of ambivalent, it’s not like you know it’s not a tortured, I can’t possibly love a human or I can’t possibly love a vampire it’s just like these are there sort of just tossed into this soup that they don’t understand but that’s just the world that they live in, so you know the the the tension between them as a human and vampire is more of like the emotional and internal struggles that they have together and separately than some sort of like animosity between humans are vampires.

In Dorian’s case the thing that drives him is his fear of abandonment, because you know vampire families are subject to intense poverty and in his case you know he had a single mother who raised him and his older sister – he doesn’t really know who his dad was. His dad kind of came and went until he was six years old and his dad disappeared his mom just said that his dad had gambling debts and dipped out. His sister who is kind of resentful of their mother for never really being there for them, doesn’t want to grow up and become or do that to her own children, leaves when she’s like 17 and leaves Dorian alone with his mother and then you know one day he comes home to find all the doors locked and the locks changed and his mother’s is gone and he’s like on his own, so his whole life has just been people slowly leaving him and him never knowing why.

Which is unfortunately … yeah which is sort of like the unfortunate reality of you know, again like as someone who’s kind of lived in or around some very crushing conditions, you know that that people do kind of come and go, because poverty – it kind of breeds a very transitory kind of life … people come and go because of jobs, they come and go because of divorces, they come and go because of prison and jail. I’ve had people kind of come and go out of my own life be for similar reasons, and sometimes I know why, sometimes I don’t and and even if it wasn’t that happened to me personally it’s a story that I heard enough.

Yeah you know and it’s like addiction and all that stuff which I glossed over, but you know there’s a lot of reasons why people do abandon you and it’s not always malicious but sometimes it is and he’s kind of gone through his like whole life now he’s like at 26 you know, having spent the last decade, trying to stay off the streets doing whatever he needs to to survive to his own detriment sometimes.

And now he has this friendship, you know yeah you know he is his previous best friend, you know Marcie who is in this book and appears in some other books as well, like took him in when he was like 16 so like it’s fine he does have friends and people who love him like he’s not totally alone, but in terms of like any sort of like stable, honest, open relationship that could be like more than friendship like it’s like slim pickings so he’s used to kind of being alone and his biggest fears being abandoned.

And so, with Cash kind of just showing up, kind of ruining his life, whatever, but then taking him under his wing and pulling him out of that pit into this economically shaky, socially reclusive job… It does mean like a lot, it does help him out of that situation and you know, it is very clear that it’s something that Cash has to deal with in this book and then like later books. His [Cash’s] role in the world is pretty far down the ladder like he’s not doing great in the scheme of things, but he still has way more mobility then Dorian does and Dorian is always going to be relying on him to move through the human world, no matter what.

So that’s where the tension is, and that does kind of come and go throughout the series, because it is an elephant in the room, you know, you can’t not address that sort of thing, but on the other hand, like Cash’s whole thing is that you know he lives a very empty life as a hunter, you know they have this very cloistered conservative, you know family comes before everything. Like life and everything you do is for the betterment of the group, and you know your job is to kill monsters and make more make more baby hunters to pass on the mantle to, and then it doesn’t really afford him a lot of opportunity for relationships, because they can’t they don’t do with outsiders, they only deal with, like other hunting families so marriages are kind of like arranged essentially like do you don’t get a lot of options and whatever like whatever hunting family that your family is allied with you will most likely end up with one of those 12 kids, so…!

He comes from a pretty big hunting family which we get way more into in the second and third books. And you know he can’t really talk to outsiders he can’t really have conversations he’s he was homeschooled and his job is hunting and killing things that’s all he was ever taught to do you know as a kid and so he doesn’t really have hobbies that he can talk to people about he can’t really talk to people about his work, because that involves getting into like Okay, so you know how werewolves are real… Anyway, that’s how that’s why my face is all messed up because I kind of got hit …. it’s like there’s no way you can talk about your job, you know.

Yeah so when he does try to have – because you know in this book he is sort of like in this on-again off-again situation with an ex-boyfriend named Max. It’s like he has to lie, and it’s very like empty kind of lying where he just kind of pretends that he has his normal life with a normal family, And he has like he works in like blue collar job or whatever, but it’s just like he can never be honest about himself. And it’s an intensely lonely life, you know, because you know, there is there just isn’t much there, and you can’t really have friends outside of hunting and those like weird little political tensions, you know within the hunting world and hunting culture.

He wants more for himself and what he wants is ultimately like a very normal like he just wants like to get married have kids that’s what he wants but that’s really not possible, where he is and Dorian is the only like real friend that has ever made outside of like the hunting world and old people that he knew growing up that like just kind of you end up becoming friends with the family, friends and then that’s it, you know so it’s like his first real adult relationship and a lot of ways. You know, he does put Dorian on a pedestal and they they work on that, you know they kind of put each other on pedestals, because Cash is like Dorian pass to freedom, but then like Dorian is Cash’s only like real human companion and friend and everything.

So yeah it is a little shaky in the beginning, because, like they do represent so much for each other, but they also that’s why it’s so hard for them to commit to an actual relationship, because they have so little going in. Each one of them represents so much.

It is kind of slow burn because it’s them like trying to figure out like “I have so many intense feelings for this person, but we can’t do this”, you know Dorian’s whole thing in the whole book, the whole like first two-thirds I think, is just like we can’t do this, I have the sentence for you, but we can’t do it will never do it it’s not gonna work.

And Cash not really understanding why it’s not going to work because Dorian has never explained why it’s not going to work. So it’s kind of like you know one is intensely into pursuing this one just keeps pulling back, but and the fear is that if they commit to a romantic relationship, then they sacrifice the friendship. And the friendship means so much that they’re kind of willing to be unhappy in a friendship if it means never pursuing that that romance.

It’s a very weird tug of war between like Yes, it is absolutely a friendship built on trust and respect and love for one another understanding how important the other one is in wanting to keep them happy and not wanting to threaten that happiness with your own feelings, but then also shutting yourself off from any potential happiness in the process.

No, it does have a sketchy foundation, they do work through it and the rest of the series is them working you know working through things and that relationship maturing and developing from you know, I’m in love with my best friend and I have to act on it right now versus like a mature adult relationship and companionship between people who you know make reasonable choices for the benefit of each other.

CMR: Oh the pining… the pining!

MC: The pining, yes. Delicious pining.

[they laugh]

MC: It was important to me to make sure that that that yeah, it is a flawed relationship and they’re working on it, but yeah it was really important to me to like start off with that foundation that that it is love trust and respect, that is where we’re starting from, and it is built under friendship.

I did want to give them stuff to work on through the series, and they have a lot of problems. But it’s all internal stuff that they work on together and they talk through it together and it is romance of the end of the day, and you know, to your point about it being like a very healthy and like positive relationship, like kind of like my working ethos for the series, is that this is a very dark bleak world. They have their stupid jobs and there’s no way out, it’s bad, it’s bad times, but I want – I always really wanted them to be this very like bright warm place in that universe.

Even if the world itself is not hopeful and mostly just them like navigating that dealing with that making the best decisions that they can with the information that they have like they will always have each other and it’s you know it will be a happy ending for them, even if the world carries on being crap.

CMR: That’s like the Hopeful Gothic kind of thing which I love like it’s it doesn’t have to have that tragic ending, it doesn’t have to be a tragic, you know you don’t have to sort of rip people’s hearts out by going, “and one of them’s now died!” [laughs] You know, or they can no longer be together because of angst, and you know, like, I quite like that, that you’ve got this sort of core developing hopeful centre to the novels that’s just it’s like that the heart of them, and I think that’s really lovely, especially as you’ve got like this the sort of the decaying settings and social deprivation and you know a lot of people getting their hearts ripped out and blood all over the walls.

MC: Quite literally, yeah.

CMR: I quite like that, I quite like they’re being the central domestic relationship that and I think like it would with the backgrounds that both of those characters have which are very kind of dark and explore very typically kind of Gothic themes, particularly in Dorian’s case and the abandonment issues that he has, like I find that very relatable, and I think it wouldn’t work as well you know if it was just a very quick romance and it was a happy ever after kind of thing. I think I think you’re right, I think it wouldn’t work in a different genre.

You know, because you need the space to explore all that darkness and that difficulty and the grappling otherwise it doesn’t actually work as a character dynamic right? It’s not a believable development.

MC: I waffled a lot about how dark I want the world itself to be in in the exact kinds of things in their backstories that they have to deal with, and yeah I definitely agree that, like I don’t think that this would work if it was just a light happy romance that just happens to be in a dark space, like they really have to you know, like sometimes those stories are fun if it’s like a brisk little like horror subversion, or whatever you know, like a little dark Rom-Com, like those things are fun.

CMR: Yeah, definitely.

MC: Yeah but I definitely wanted to like sit with this and not because… yeah I mean theoretically, we could end it I could have ended it with it with Book One and, like yeah they live happily ever after, but like there’s just so many unanswered questions you know.

And those are the questions that like really, really drive the rest of the story, and how they engage with the world because as we go through the rest of the novels like we get to see more of like how the empire culture works and like from like the the weird intricacies of like the vampire mob like the vamp some of like the simple like the vampire like monarchy and how those two power structures fight for domination and where that’s left vampires and like can how those power structures have affected the lives of hunters who are compatible, their whole business model and culture hinges on what monsters are doing and what monsters are doing to each other. You have these like driving like socio-political factors, basically, you know that that shape how the characters got to where they were in when the story first you know begins with this with this novel and everything and then how those factors play out and as Dorian goes back and learns more about his place in the world and his family and how that family dissolved and everything, you know… Those are the things that really drive the plot, but their relationship is still the main focus.

And yes, it will end happily ever after… but it’s gonna be a trip to get there!

CMR: I’m really looking forward to it now! On that note, and is there anything that you’d like to promote that’s coming up and any projects that you’re currently got going on that you want to promote right now, or any upcoming releases?

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Magen Cubed (@magencubed)

MC: I just put out some a novella in September, which is a sort of sapphic Medusa reimagining.

CMR: That’s on my TBR [To Be Read] actually. Got that lined up!

MC: Excellent yes. In the Bedroom of Medusa sort of like my weird, again very class oriented, exploration of the gorgon story, and the idea of Medusa as a character in history and how her story has been told how people see her and how she sees herself. And, basically, just like the terror of being seen you know by by your lover and all that stuff so that’s that’s just came out ahead of another short story that came out in October which is a gay polyamorous werewolf pack short story called Found Among Wolves, which is about a man who has this relationship with a wolf pack essentially.

It’s sort of like, monstrous desires put him at odds with with the men that he tries to date and he stumbles into this relationship with a bunch of wolves and has to navigate that.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Magen Cubed (@magencubed)

The rest of 2021 to 2022 I will be working diligently on the Leather and Lace sequel which is called Black Diamond. I am hoping against hope to have that out late 2022 or early 2023. That’s going to be the direct sequel to Leather and Lace, it picks up just a couple months after that. It involves murderous vampire cults, angry monster hunting in laws, the occasional killer mermaid, and Dorian feeling his feelings and slowly adjusting to this like domestic life that he’s now in… And all of the things that that entails for someone who tends to run from their problems rather than dealing with it, so.

That’s going to be really interesting and then at some point next year, I want to put out a anthology of a monster romance short stories dealing with like ghosts, demons, some more Greek myth stuff like the minotaur… vampires, werewolves, potentially ghouls… sort of like a big grab bag of archetypes and ideas and monsters, and the people who love them, so that’s pretty much everything that I have out or coming out soon.

To keep up with me, you can always subscribe to my newsletter which is at which may move to ButtonDown, but for now is magencubed.substack.com, and my website is magencubed.net.

I try to have you know all the new releases lined up there, or you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter as /magencubed, as I always always always obsessively promote my work and so you will never be left out of the loop, I promise, for all the stuff that I have coming coming out next year.

CMR: Yay I’m really excited! I love Medusa as well, so I’m really looking forward to reading that one.

Yeah so that’s all we’ve got time for, and thank you again for coming on the show it’s been really lovely to have you.

MC: Thank you so much for having me, it’s been a blast.

CMR: I love it, I just love it when I can just ask a question and people will just talk about their stuff and I don’t have to do anything, it’s great and it’s such an interesting thing to listen to, so thank you very much.

Podcast S02E09 Thirteenth ~ Part 9

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

In Part 9 of the serial, we get through the whole of Chapter 5: Persuasion. In this chapter, Wes receives an ultimatum that will bring him back to Pagham-on-Sea and recalls a bad memory.

In the eBook and paperback, there’s a cool illustration by Tom Brown called The Vote nestled between the end of Ch 5 and the start of Ch 6.

CWs: depersonalisation and derealisation, self-harm (hitting self violently/repeatedly), bullying older relatives, death threats against loved ones, estranged father/son relationship, implied struggles with self-loathing.

listen nowChapter 5: Persuasion

If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818)

Every chapter of Thirteenth has a chapter heading that is a title of a novel or a play, with a corresponding quote from that novel/play underneath. They all relate – sometimes ironically – to the general theme of that particular chapter, and they are all books/plays that can be found in Fairwood House. Katy noticed a few when she was in the cellar but didn’t tell us the titles of any of them. The one she picked up was Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, the 1997 Penguin Classics edition (she describes the cover image, if you want to check), and that was the chapter heading of a chapter that got cut.

This one is Persuasion by Jane Austen, and the quote contrasts with Wes’s predicament: he can’t get out of his own disagreeable situation, no matter how hard he tries. The full quote is from Persuasion Ch. 7:

This is always my luck. If there is anything disagreeable going on men are always sure to get out of it, and Charles is as bad as any of them. Very unfeeling!

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818), Ch. 7, p.48 – http://www.literaturepage.com/read/persuasion.html

Mary Musgrove, who says this about her husband Charles, is Anne’s (the protagonist) youngest sister, who is proud and prone to spoiling her children, and criticising her husband in public about his child-raising methods, while Anne is more inclined to be sympathetic to him rather than Mary.

I quite liked this for Wes, because he’s really trying but that’s not always what the other characters assume or see, and it’s ironic, because whatever he does, he’s screwed. Or is he?? The memory section that follows his phone call from Uncle Marcus, the new Head of the Family, shows what happened when Wes tried to wriggle out of his impending doom.

Read Along