'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 29

Short Stories 366:305 — “Skin,” by Christian Baines

The end of October! Hallowe’en itself! This novella is the perfect mix of dark psychological/paranormal for me. I feel like I’ve repeated all month long my squeamishness with horror and how it often leaves me struggling to find horror I enjoy that doesn’t cross the line too far, but I’ll trot it out one more time because finding a paranormal nudging the edge of the both borders is a rare, rare treat for me, and Skin is the best example of this I’ve read in years.

I’m passing the baton today Christian Baines, to talk about his novella, Skin—which is excitingly now available in paperback—and holy flying crap, what a ride. So richly written, so incredibly twisted, timelines leaving you guessing, and so rewarding to me. If it’s possible to be darkly satisfied and still raw, that’s what Skin delivered. Grab it. Give it to all your friends who want to read something shadowy and twisted and vengeful.

As I said, I was also lucky enough to touch base with Christian Baines to blog about this novella, and here’s what he had to say:

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A City Under Your Skin

Exploring Darkness and Deviancy in New Orleans

Hi everyone! Hope you’re all keeping well and safe, and finding ways to stay connected. Thanks for stopping by, and a huge thank you to ‘Nathan for having me on the blog. Always a pleasure to share inspirations and thoughts with you. Today, I’m sharing a bit about the setting of “Skin.”

New Orleans is a place that feels almost too charismatic to exist. I’ve had the privilege of visiting half a dozen times, of spending time with locals and cultivating friendships there. I’m continually fascinated by its literary history, its unique blend of cultures and spirituality including its rich Voodoo history, its ‘anything goes’ attitude (including its gay life), and its inescapable precariousness. From petty crime to hurricanes, New Orleanians know all too well what it’s like to live with the darker side of life, even while the city’s famed bons temps are rolling.

To a storyteller’s imagination, even if it seems like everyone’s written a story about New Orleans, there’s always somewhere new to go, provided you’re faithful to the city as a unique setting beyond the cliches. I was lucky enough writing “Skin” to have some great local Nola writers who kept me honest in that respect.

New Orleans’ Voodoo culture had fascinated me since I was a child, so I decided to combine it with the local gay life into some kind of story. I had routinely read and learned as much about that as I could about New Orleans Voodoo, trying to sort the spiritual and factual from the sensational and hokey. I wanted to explore some of the queer aspects of Voodoo lore, with one the strict rule – while this would be a horror story, Voodoo would not be its villain.

When it came to gay bar life, one thing about New Orleans I definitely wasn’t used to was the presence of hustlers. Curious and naïve, I got talking to some of these guys, plying their stories for the price of a drink and trying to sift fact from fiction. Some of them hid behind a well-rehearsed schtick designed to part you from as many bills as possible, but some were more genuine, and happy to talk. As in most stories that emerge from New Orleans, there would always be some truth to discover, even if it was in what was omitted.

What better setting and what better protagonists could I ask for a queer story about the unreliable surface of things?

Skin is the only overt horror book I’ve published so far, and of all my books, it’s the most divisive. It’s a non-linear narrative, and its two main characters, Kyle and Marc, aren’t my most likeable creations, but they are in some ways my most innocent. They’re not savvy and snarky like Reylan in The Arcadia Trust novels, or Eric in Puppet Boy. They’re two deeply flawed country boys trying to do the right thing way out of their comfort zone in a city ready to eat them alive – one in a relationship that ends in tragedy, the other in one that’s a tragedy waiting to happen.

The reaction to “Skin” has run the whole gamut from enthusiastic praise to graphic revulsion, and that’s okay. I never write a story with the intention of shocking or repelling the reader for its own sake. I never want my readers to have an unpleasant experience. What I do want is for them to feel engaged, drawn into the story, and to feel something as they read, even if it’s challenging. There’s some challenging stuff in “Skin.” It starts with a horrible crime and follows a young man’s fraught, sensual, and very twisted path to revenge.

I wrote “Skin” for readers who want to dive into the underworld and explore those darkened New Orleans streets the locals warned me about, but it’s also for readers who want a little bit of that wonder that only New Orleans in all its scrappy, dangerous charm can offer. I drew on real New Orleans history, and tried to bring that to life by subverting character stereotypes – often racialized, where New Orleans and Voodoo is concerned – wherever I could. I played with the chronology of the story, which has confused some readers, but that’s also okay. What’s important to me when readers approach any of my books is that they draw from it what the story says to them or what it brings out in them.

If repeated visits to New Orleans have taught me anything, it’s to leave my preconceptions and assumptions about the city at home. I ask the same of readers who pick up one of my books. I don’t make promises as to what the story will be for you, but I do promise to make the journey worth your while and to take you somewhere you weren’t expecting.

Short Stories 366:304 — “Desiccant,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

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I’m a little peeved at myself for only bumping into Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire near the end of October, because after only the first tale, I already know I’ll find some amazing stories in here perfect for the month-of-horror. We begin with Craig Laurance Gidney, who I’ve mentioned loving before in this project, and as opening stories for anthologies go, it sets a really clear tone on so many levels, not the least of which is in Tituba, the lead of the story being a Black trans woman.

We meet Tituba taking control over her life as best she can after leaving her sister (who fell far, far short of support in a crunch) and finding her own place in a tower that’d be charitably described as borderline. Still, she’s on her own, she’s there for a year, and she’ll move on up thereafter. Her strength, however is tested almost immediately. The place is dusty, she stops sleeping well, her friend notices she looks tired and ashy… Something is wrong with this building, on a fundamental level.

What follows is a truly creepy take on vampirism, and a story that is so very much about refusing to let go/give up/give in rather than any sort of battle. It’s very much a character piece, and even up to the last moments of the tale, I was right there with Tituba, jaw clenched, behind her all the way. If anyone is going to fix this, or fight this, it’s going to be her. That Gidney ends the story right where he does put all the more focus on that drive, and I think it’s one of the first times I’ve read this sort of ending and felt triumph.

Short Stories 366:303 — “Chaya and Loony-Boy,” by Rati Mehrotra

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A favourite from Playground of Lost Toys, “Chaya and Loony-Boy” walks this fine line between a youthful ghost story, creepy “dolls are live when you’re alone with them,” and something altogether charming and compassionate. We meet a little girl who has broken something of her grandmother’s—or, rather, her somewhat petulant and ill-behaved doll, Chaya, has done so but the blame is placed on her—and is sent to the attic as punishment, where the Grandmother declares an attic ghost will make sure she learns a lesson.

Yeah, the grandmother is not the warm-and-cuddly sort.

At first the duo have some bluster to them, but once things start moving and making sounds, the doll declares they must go, and the girl agrees. They can’t go back the way they came, but they can go in a different direction: to the roof patio that puts them on even keel with the neighbouring houses, including the house where “Loony-Boy” lives (an oversized grown adult son of a woman who is rarely seen, but sometimes his cries are heard).

This turn of the story is more of a “from the frying pan to the fire” than an escape, and leads to the story’s final turns. For a ghost story complete with a cruel grandmother and a creepy not-quite-alive-but-alive-enough doll, the tone at the end shifts to one of approaching adulthood, sacrifice in the name of empathy, and while the ghosts still thump in the attic, and the girl is still very much aware of the horrible things around her, this tale ends with just enough hope—or something like it—that I was left feeling not depressed or morose, but a tiny bit comforted.

Short Stories 366:302 — “Chasing Lights,” by Naben Ruthnum and Andrew F. Sullivan

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me put qualifiers on my horror reading this month, as I’m not generally the type to wade into dark/disturbing stories, but holy flying crap, this story. “Chasing Lights,” which you can read over on Hazlitt, is hard to put forth in a précis, but here’s my best shot: an anti-paparazzi movement (which seems rather a decent idea, on the face of it) begins with one man’s assault on not the paparazzi, but their cameras. This sparks something, a kind of movement, and it’s not long before two groups are targeting the same ideal, only… well. Things degenerate, as they’re likely to do.

What follows is a really disturbing descent-into-something-worse-and-worse told through one man’s POV, a member of the group (or, well, groups, perhaps) as he explains how the movement began with that single video of the initial attack on the cameras, and then step by step, each not seeming too much further from the last but growing more violent and dangerous as a whole. It’s dark, and grim, and definitely all the moreso for having that consistent vibe of ‘yes, this is wrong, but I understand why’ worming its way under your skin.

Ultimately, the delivered whole lands on a few shudders, and I sort of sat back from reading this one with a sense of disquiet and something akin to worry. It’s one of those stories about violence and death and the progression of both that feels far too easy to believe. Too plausible. And the story does this last little twist of the knife of leaving the reader in this fictional place where it’s not entirely incorrect to feel like the violence and death might have been… worth it? Like I said: shudders. So well played.

Short Stories 366:301 — “Waiting for Jenny Rex,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes

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I’ve mentioned before how approaching zombie-themed fiction makes me nervous (I’m so very, very done with stories about humans making poor choices in zombie outbreaks, and it feels like so many authors take that easy out to get to the action), but when I see Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s name on an anthology as the editor, I’m in. So, it wasn’t a complete surprise to find Melissa Yuan-Innes’ story, nor to be really intrigued by the direction and idea Yuan-Innes went with, which was by no means a kind of story I’d read before.

To the point: a woman comes back from the dead, shows up to a newspaper, and says, basically, “Listen, I’m dead, but I’m back. I’ll give you the exclusive if you promise to devote more of the coverage to Eating Disorders and the dangers they cause—which led to my death—than my actual being dead but still moving.” They do testing, of course, but it’s true: she’s a zombie. She’s back from the dead. And she has a message and an awareness campaign in mind: the dangers of Eating Disorders, the causes thereof, the damage done by images designed to make people feel bad about their bodies, etc.

What follows is a story about the man who first interviews “Jenny Rex” (as she’s dubbed), and how he, well, falls for her, but then what happens when the next dead person rises from the grave. And the next. It’s a cleverly told story, as much a love story as a political and social discourse, and is probably the first zombie story I’ve read in ages that had me pondering the ideas behind it for hours and hours after, rather than letting it slip away.

Short Stories 366:300 — “The Fixation,” by Mark Morris

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The second story in Hammer Chillers from Bafflegab, “The Fixation,” had exactly the right level of creep-factor for me. Mark Morris brings us a typical insular British family in a part of the city where things are maybe going a bit to pot, and especially a father who is just Fed Up with the trash people are leaving around everywhere. So, he organizes a couple of friends, and they set about trying to tidy up a bit. No biggie, right?

Wrong.

It’s starts out slow: a teen in a hoodie is rude to the fellow when he asks him not to dump stuff in his front yard. At their clean-up efforts, people stare. Then throw things. Then threaten. Someone sets fire to their van… And if it wasn’t for the sheer pig-headedness of the father of the family determined that no, he will not be bullied, they might have given up. The threats escalate further, they involve the police and…

Well.

As horror stories go, “litter” isn’t an in I’d ever considered before, but every time Morris twists the tension up a little further, I was definitely buying the whole “something really creepy is going on” vibe, and the escalation—and the ultimate reveals—were on point. It’s not a tied-up-with-a-ribbon ending, but rather a cumulation story that ends in a horror fashion without a whole lot of explanation, but the result is effective.

Short Stories 366:299 — “The Creep,” by Michael S. Chong

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This shudder-worthy story from Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories is a psychologically dark entry in the anthology, and definitely worthy of an October entry. It starts with what could be a moment of a man realizing he has a power and could use it for good, but the good he could do starts to shift by short steps, and, well. He has the ability to hold onto time for brief moments—to everyone else, it’s like he moves as a blur, if they see him at all—making the world stop and letting him move around and do as he wishes. He calls it his “creep.” This power starts smaller, taking a lot of effort, but as he practices, he gets better at it, being able to hold onto a moment for longer and longer.

And there’s a woman. A woman he knows is in a bad relationship. At first, he just watches, but when it becomes clear that the man she’s with isn’t going to leave her alone, and that she doesn’t have a way out herself (or the inclination to leave), he… deals with it. Then he realizes that she needs time to get over it, but there are other people who care about her and he doesn’t want them interfering, so… Well. It’s a downward spiral, and the woman has no idea who is the architect of so much going on in her life, and the whole thing is one-hundred-percent creep factor, allowing for the punny title.

One of the few tales in the collection to leave the reader in a hopeless sort of place, “The Creep” is wholly effective. You are definitely inside the mind of a really disturbed man who believes he’s doing a good thing, and the glimpses you get of the woman involved notch up the tension bit by bit. The final moment of the story left me with a shudder. This is the kind of “horror” I find the most effective as a reader: broken people doing things they think are right. It’s probably so effective because I can imagine it so easily, and then adding in a super power on top nudges just adds to the bleakness.

Short Stories 366:298 — “A View from a Hill,” in the style of M.R. James

[image error]The last of the quartet of The Conception of Terror, in which audio dramatizations were created in the style of M.R. James, “A View from the Hill” is probably the one with the most traditional horror story vibe of the bunch, in the sense of what I expect from the genre (especially in short fiction). The set-up is simple enough: a couple who have survived (barely) the loss of their child take their first vacation since their child’s death, and try to cope in their own ways.

For the husband, Paul, a former comedian/actor who had middling success, this takes the form of recording a podcast he’s been working on since the loss of his child, specifically about the loss of his son and how he and his wife are coping. Sarah, his wife, rather resents this, though she tries to rise above that feeling, as she doesn’t like how their pain is out there for anyone to listen to (she does agree that others in the same position can and do benefit, but stresses it’s more that there’s no way to stop others with worse reasons from listening). When she realizes he intends to keep recording on this break where he said they’d be getting away from it all, she’s by no means pleased, but relents and they take a good long walking tour—the reason they picked this place being the many walking and hiking trails. From one hill, they see a monastery that’s not on the map (though there is, on the map, an unmarked listing for monastery ruins) and they decide to cut across the valley to go explore.

And, of course, this is where the horror begins. What works really well in this story is the almost “infectious” way the horror navigates, seeping in at first through Sarah, who is more fragile, before attempting to reach Paul once Sarah suffers a setback. More, there’s the whisper network of the people in the area, and a great example of how whisper networks can fail so badly. “Everybody knows” this place is bad, but that means visitor’s don’t, and “everybody knows” what happened there, but the truth isn’t the story most often told, etc. The end results are horror done darkly, and while by no means did the story have even a hint of triumph to it, it managed to captivate me and it did exactly what it set out to do.

Short Stories 366:297 — “No Sleep in Bethlehem,” by Matthew Bright

[image error]I’ve kind of hopped around a lot over this year with reviews from Stories to Sing in the Dark, and I’m going to discuss the last story today—the novella length “No Sleep in Bethlehem”—while leaving one more for December, but if nothing else, please by now understand my message throughout the journey in Stories to Sing in the Dark has been this one: go read it.

Okay, that said, “No Sleep in Bethlehem” closes the collection with such a brilliantly queer and dark and knife’s-edge-of-tension mix I cannot even tell you. This story would confidently share space with tales penned by Shirley Jackson, and weaves such a contemporary queer horror into its historically set ghost tale with such a seamlessly, shudder-worthy grace the reveal had me flinching outright.

This is a ghost story, yes, and more: it’s a queer ghost story. It’s also a love story, though the reader spends most of the time wondering if everything will turn out well for anyone involved, while Bright drops breadcrumbs of hope and darkness with equal verve. I normally shy away from tension-filled narratives, but I needed to know how this one would end. More, the characterizations of its narrator—and his sly tendency of regarding his lover through the creation of a new kind of Tarot deck—was so effortlessly charming I cared. It’s a brilliant novella. And it closes a brilliant collection.

Short Stories 366:296 — “Kill Me Baby, One More Time,” by Michael Matheson

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A second superhero story during my attempt to talk horror/darker fictions during October? What? Have I lost the plot?

Nope!

Okay, this is the first time (of many, I’m sure) I’ll be visiting Powered Up!: An Earth Prime Anthology, which is a collection of short fiction based in the Mutants and Masterminds tabletop RPG universe of superheroics. To get back to that horror/dark story thing, we begin with Jane Dolan’s first death. That’s right, her first. See, Jane has a superpower. It’s not a great superpower, but it is a superpower. After she dies, she comes back. (Also, her clothes are restored too, the reasons for which she hasn’t figured out, but hey, it’s kind of a nice bonus). Anyway, the first time she died it was because werewolves ate her, and she wants revenge, but she needs to work up to it, so alongside emotional help from her girlfriend (who is super-supportive in all the right ways) she starts training, dies a lot (for justice!), and does, indeed, start to help people.

She’s still planning on taking down those werewolves, though. And when she feels she’s ready, things get complicated because people are going missing and Jane is sure it’s the werewolves, but what if it’s something worse? Oh, and then they take her girlfriend.

Matheson’s story has this delicate balance of dark and funny and I was so very there for it. They have a brilliant way with dialog, and I chuckled more than once as well as getting a bit choked up at one point when Jane and her girlfriend are talking her through some trauma fallout. It’s a great story, and the werewolves would be horror enough in my book, but Matheson raised an eyebrow to the werewolves and decided to toss in a whole other level of bad. And it works.