L. Andrew Cooper's Blog, page 9

Interview with Author JG Faherty: Ragman and Songs in the Key of Death

Accomplished author of dark literature J.G. Faherty has graciously granted my request to answer questions about two of his newest works, terrifying novel Ragman and spellbinding poetry collection Songs in the Key of Death.

Ragman
Part supernatural terror, part police procedural. I wanted to write a book about mummies for a long time, but I didn’t want it to be the same old stuff. So I came up with this:
In 1882, a group of British soldiers plunder an Egyptian temple and kill the high priest. The priest vows revenge and is finally revived in the present day. He finds the great-grandson of the man who killed him, but they form an uneasy partnership to get back all the stolen artifacts and send all the descendants of the other soldiers to the Underworld. Two police officers, former partners who had a falling out, must put aside their differences as they go from trying to solve gruesome, unexplained murders to risking their lives to stop the supernatural mummy the priest has called forth.

Click the pic to order from Amazon!

Songs in the Key of Death
I never considered myself a poet (still don’t), but over the years I wrote some stuff here and there, and this year I realized I had enough for a collection. My poetry tends to be dark, sharp, and short. Here’s a review:
“I love the way JG Faherty’s extraordinary poetry collection plays with language, form, and emotion. These pieces are by turns frightening, melancholy, disturbing, smart, and darkly witty. Songs in the Key of Death is a hit!” —Lisa Morton, six-time Bram Stoker Award® winner

Available Oct. 3! Click the pic to pre-order!The Interview

(1) Procedural Wraps. What inspired you to combine elements of police procedural with a tale of revenge from beyond the grave and a supernatural mummy? How did the combination feel while you were writing?

JGF: I didn’t set out to write a modified police procedural; that kind of just happened as I worked out the plot details. My first thoughts were, I want a mummy in modern times, and I want it to be different than any other mummy story/movie ever done. So, I researched mummies and discovered this one called an ushabti, which is more like a golem in that it can be called forth at will and then sent back to the underworld. It’s sort of a mummy hitman for Osiris. But then I needed a reason for it to be called forth, which led to revenge as a subplot, and a second mummy who awakens in the modern world. So, mummies and murders. Originally, I was going to set it in a small town, but then NYC seemed a better choice, because of different settings, the crimes not being as noticeable, etc. Which is what led to police officers – someone has to investigate the locked room murders. Thus, police procedural.

(2) Bloody Mummy. I find some procedurals to be gorier than most mainstream horror. How “gruesome” does Ragman really get, and how do you feel about writing the explicit, nasty stuff?

JGF: Not really gruesome at all. There are some bloody scenes – depictions of a dismembered body, etc. – but they’re brief. This is not Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Saw, it’s more Silence of the Lambs or Se7en; in fact, if this were a TV show or movie you could watch it on regular TV. I’ve written some gory, nasty stuff in the past, and I have no problem with it if it’s appropriate to the story, but in this case, it wasn’t. I was more focused on building tension, creating suspense, than shocking people with blood and guts. If you want that from me, read my novel Hellrider. That gets explicit!

(3) Ragtime. Multi-part question with obnoxious intro. Your choice of the year 1882 shows you’ve done your research, so you undoubtedly know that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonialism and a craze for Eastern relics led to demand for English-language stories with African, and especially Egyptian, connections, spawning classics such as Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903, probably the most famous mummy novel, Anne Rice notwithstanding) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897, my personal favorite). Did this period’s fiction influence Ragman, and if so, how? You’ve chosen a contemporary setting for most of your novel’s action, a time when Western relations with Egypt are quite different. How does Egyptian lore mix with current realities, and how will readers relate to a mummy taken so far from its typical context?

JGF: Let’s break that down. First, I hate research. I do what’s necessary for the plot of the book, but I don’t do deeeep delves. So, once I knew my intro – British soldiers plunder a tomb in the Victorian days – my research consisted of looking up the time period when the British occupied Egypt, and when they happened to be near some of the major areas of relics/pyramids, etc. Giza’s been used too many times, so I chose a lesser known (to the general public) area of ancient worship and tombs. Then I looked up a couple of newspaper clippings from the time to get a feel for the language. That was it. I purposefully didn’t go back and read Rice’s book, or The Beetle (I didn’t know about Stoker’s book, now I have to get it!), because I didn’t want those influences in my head. Since I’ve been wanting to write a book involving mummies for years, I already had all sorts of research in my files about the underworld, the gods, the mummification process, etc.

I chose a contemporary setting because I felt it would make it more exciting and interesting, plus all the other mummy books and movies focused on either ancient Egypt or the 1930s. Always try to be different! Aside from the intro, everything else takes place in modern NYC or the Egyptian afterlife. That required some research, too! But it was interesting.

I don’t think I really incorporated current Egyptian socio-political concepts into the book; it’s more about modern life in NYC and relationships and criminology; because the murders are individuals, there’s not even a step into terrorism territory. I didn’t want that, just like I didn’t want any focus on the pandemic, so I set it after that was over.

I’m hoping readers are good with my mummies in modern NYC rather than ancient Egypt; I want them to relate to the setting, feel comfortable with it, so it becomes just part of the background, and they can focus on the action and mystery and characters. Readers have no problem with werewolves or vampires or ghosts in modern life, so why not mummies?

(4) Mummy Movies. You might boil this question down to this tri-lemma: Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, or Brendan Fraser and co.? Which mummy movies are your favorites and why? How did the movies influence Ragman?

JGF: Well, I enjoy the Universal mummy movies (the old ones) because of the nostalgia factor, but let’s face it. They were the dullest of all the classic Universal movies. Most of them moved at a snail’s pace. The first two Fraser movies are among my favorite supernatural-thriller-action movies of all time (they’re not horror!), right up there with the Indiana Jones movies and Van Helsing. They’re good fun, popcorn movies.

But I didn’t want that. I wanted suspense, chills, and mystery. So, really none of those movies influenced the book. However, they did influence my love of Egyptian lore, just like Rice’s book, and made me want to write my own, very different tale.

(5) Songster. You’ve put together a collection of poetry, but you say you still don’t consider yourself a poet. Why not?

JGF: Because it’s not something I do very often. It took years for me to write enough poems to make a collection. Probably only 5 or 7 of them were previously published. I’m a writer, and occasionally I write poetry. I mean, does that make me a poet? I write novels, short stories, and novellas. Am I a novelist? A storyteller? I’ve written a few essays – am I an essayist? I’ve got two scripts I’ve written but never sold. Am I a scriptwriter? I just go with “writer” and kind of leave it at that. To me, saying poet or novelist kind of indicates you specialize in that form.

(6) The Key of Dark. What makes your poetry “dark?” Imagery? Subject matter and/or themes? A combination? Something else? An example or two might be nice.

JGF: Yeah, definitely the subject matter and themes. Originally, the book was going to have a much longer, quirkier title (Anatomies, Anomalies, Anemones) because the first several poems dealt with mad scientists experimenting on bodies, alien life forms, and undersea civilizations. But then as I added more, the subject matter became more varied (suicide, ghosts, brain parasites, serial killers, and so on), and when I looked at it broadly, pretty much everything dealt with death in some manner. And I have this “thing” for titles that are twists on famous albums. My last short story collection was Houses of the Unholy. And for this, I remembered how Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life was such an uplifting album, and my poems were the opposite, so… Songs in the Key of Death. And then Lycan Valley Press did a great job with the cover art.

(7) The Key of Form. Lisa Morton praises you for playing with language and form. What are your favorite kinds of linguistic play? How would you describe your poetry formally? Do you use established forms or stick with free verse? Why?

JGF: And this goes back to me not being a poet! I don’t know much about the forms of poetry. Don’t ask me about pentameter or this kind of poem vs. that kind of poem. I’d have to look up how to write a haiku, and those are only a few lines! What I do know is that I like my poems to be short and impactful. Sometimes they rhyme, sometimes they don’t. Some are broken into almost choruses and verses, like a song. Others keep the same pattern throughout. I’ve always been a storyteller, so all my poems tell a story. Some probably read almost like flash fiction, but without the sentence structure and punctuation. The other thing is, just like what I write (and enjoy reading), I want the poems to be understandable. I don’t go crazy with allusions or comparisons or vague inferences. I hate books and movies with no clear endings, and I hate poems where you don’t actually know what it’s about. I guess you could say this is working man poetry.

(8) Hit Music in the Key of Death. Audiences for poetry often differ from audiences for narrative (and especially speculative) fiction. How much do you think the audience for your fiction will overlap with the audience who will enjoy your poetry? Why?

JGF: We’ll see, won’t we! I honestly have no idea. I hope they like it. My advance readers all did. None of them (and I’d have trusted their opinions) told me it sucked. I suppose if you only read novels or short stories, poetry isn’t your thing and you won’t read it. But if you read other horror poetry, I hope that people will like this. It’s different, just like my books. And people read those.

(9) Hit Writer J.G. Faherty. I’ve read your work and admire your highly readable style and refined voice, and I’m also impressed by your list of accomplishments. I therefore have to ask a fairly typical interview question: what advice do you have for writers still honing their crafts and looking to break out?

JGF: Thanks – people should know that we got to know each other when you published one of my stories in Reel Dark. Which was a great anthology! My advice is: Write. Practice the craft. Don’t worry about word counts per day. Do what you can. Sometimes writing is just sitting there and trying a bunch of stuff until something clicks. Some days I work on stories, other days on whatever novel I’m writing, whatever I’m in the mood to do. And read, read a lot. Too many young people today think that anything written before 2010 is no good, and that any writer over the age of 35 doesn’t have any useful advice. Well, I’m here to say it’s the opposite. Those older folks have learned this business the hard way – they’ve gone through the rejections, the edits, the practice, the ups and downs of the biz. They know how to craft a submission letter, how to pitch a book in 3 sentences, and most importantly how to use the language in a way that people want to read. So read, write, and take advice without arguing or laughing it off. And finally, don’t be afraid to submit. Writing is like baseball – you will fail way more often than you succeed. You need a tough skin. Submit, get rejected, and submit again. Over and over until you build traction. Self-publishing is easy, but you’ll never know if you’re actually good or not. Save it for after you’ve sold some stories or books to professional markets and established a readership. Then you can publish yourself.

(10) Access! How can readers learn more about you and purchase your works (please provide any links you want to share)?

JGF: I’m pretty active on social media. Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram – I’m jgfaherty on all of them. My website is www.jgfaherty.com. And, of course, look for JG Faherty on Amazon or Barnes & Noble for all my books. As always, thanks for reading!

Note from Andrew: If you’re interested in contributing a guest post or interview to this site, contact me!

About the Author

JG Faherty is the Bram Stoker Award®- and ITW Thriller Award-nominated author of 19 books and more than 85 short stories. He writes adult and YA horror/sci-fi/fantasy, and his works range from quiet, dark suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness.

A lifelong resident of New York’s highly haunted Hudson Valley region, JG grew up amid Revolutionary War graveyards, haunted roads, and woods filled with ghostly apparitions. His varied professional career includes working as a resume writer, laboratory manager, accident scene photographer, zookeeper, scientist, and salesman. He began writing fiction in 2001, and his short stories, poetry, and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

The post Interview with Author JG Faherty: Ragman and Songs in the Key of Death appeared first on L. Andrew Cooper's Horrific Scribblings.

Seeking Contributions from Artists with Dark Aesthetics!

ATTENTION AUTHORS, FILMMAKERS, AND OTHER ARTISTS!

If you work with horror, the supernatural, the surreal, or other unquestionably “dark” aesthetics in prose fiction, poetry, film, or other media, I probably want to host you for a guest post or interview.

GUEST POST? I am open to suggestions, but a guest post would likely be about a distinctive angle on your work. Promote freely, but avoid mere plot summaries and plaudits. Examples: How does the work challenge its (sub)genre? What’s compelling about its inspiration? You’re a creative. Be creative!

INTERVIEW? Send me (publishable) descriptions of the one or two work(s) you want to focus on, along with a brief bio, and I’ll send you 5-10 questions that I’ve attempted to tailor to you and your work. The goal is to promote you and to find angles of interest a little sharper than typical blurbs.

Posts should run 1,000 words or fewer. I might reject a piece for poor writing or excessive length. I don’t intend to interfere with style or content, but I will edit for grammar, etc., and except in rare cases, I won’t seek author approval for my edits. R-rated language is fine, but I reserve the right to reject a piece for using hate speech and related material. Otherwise, I want to accept everything I can.

I do not pay. I do not charge. This site does not sell ads or otherwise generate income. I do provide sales links; if you’re a guest, I hope you’ll provide sales links. My goal is to make connections and share a promotional space that I’ve just invested in updating and don’t want to keep underusing.

If you’re interested, contact me about your interests, and we’ll go from there. I hope to hear from you!

The post Seeking Contributions from Artists with Dark Aesthetics! appeared first on L. Andrew Cooper's Horrific Scribblings.

The Middle Reaches: What It Is, Where It Came From

The banner image for The Middle Reaches, Cycle One: Shadow Man shows the titular dark figure standing across the creek, beckoning.

Currently, The Middle Reaches is my serial story on Amazon Kindle Vella, which, if you’re not familiar with it, is a pretty cool digital reinvention of the type of one-short-installment-at-a-time storytelling that peaked in the heyday of Charles Dickens. I’ve been publishing one episode every Monday since the end of February 2023. I’m writing in fifteen-episode “cycles,” comparable to TV seasons. Cycle One: Shadow Man, just ended; Cycle Two: A Rift in Time and Space started this week. I find this type of storytelling exciting and didn’t want a break. Cycle One is, taken together, like a longish novella, so you can binge it and catch up quickly.

The banner image for Cycle Two, A Rift in Time and Space, combines elements from Cycle One with new elements, such as an image from the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, evoked in the nightmarish chase that opens Episode 16.

The story as a whole deals with a surreal, otherworldly place, horrific but drenched in an inexplicable erotic allure, that calls people to venture more deeply into its secrets while it tries to devour them psychologically and physically with assaults from distorted monstrosities. I’ll get into more particulars of the cycles momentarily.

Before The Middle Reaches became a prose fiction serial, however, it was (and still is!) a screenplay by the same title, which I adapted into Cycle One. The screenplay has won some awards; I’m most proud of Best Horror Script from Hollywood Horrorfest (nice people, and the fest is basically in my neighborhood). It’s one of my favorites from among my many creative offspring. It’s basically a road narrative, which seemed like it would lend itself well to a serial structure. For these and other reasons, when I learned about Vella, the idea of adapting it seemed natural.

The proud papa of The Middle Reaches screenplay shows off his Hollywood Horrorfest Best Horror Script laurels.

This apparent naturalness—and the reason why this story ranks highly among my favorites—require scrutiny. First, it’s my most successful engagement with the weird tale, for which Lovecraft is known, and creating such a thing was something I’d long wanted to do. I wanted tentacles, damn it!

My psychological investment was more than tentacular, however.

The setting is key. To get to The Middle Reaches and what lies beyond, you start in an overgrown area into which two streets with the same name, Acton Way, dead end, and then you follow the creek that runs through it. The same creek runs through the backyard of a boy who disappeared in The Middle Reaches, Sheldon Vere. The creek also runs through the backyard of Steven Marks, who, with his older brother Gordon, killed some kids in his basement. Before that happened, Steven used to play in his backyard, as well as at the dead end of Acton Way, with Bobby Lightfoot, who disappeared years before Sheldon. People generally assume Gordon killed him.

The overgrown area between the two Acton Ways and the creek, as well as the Marks boys and Bobby Lightfoot, appeared in my first, still unpublished (at this point quite deliberately so), horror novel, Curiosity. More on said novel after a brief, very important, note.

Before I wrote about the two Acton Ways and the creek, I was a kid who lived in a house with a creek in the backyard, and the creek ran down to where my street dead-ended, an overgrown area on the opposite side of which another street dead-ended. Both streets had the same name, a name very similar to “Acton Way.” If I followed the creek, I ended up in increasingly wild woods that always engaged my imagination.

Dead Ends are often strange beginnings.

So, in Curiosity, I used a central location of my childhood as the setting, as the imaginative world, for some of the most horrific stuff I’ve ever written. That novel came from a really bleak time of life recollected in relative tranquility. About a decade later, in another bleak time, I wrote another handful of stories in which the creek, the Acton Ways, and the Marks boys showed up. You can read those stories in the last “blot” of Stains of Atrocity. I also published (though it’s no longer in print) the first chapter of Curiosity as a standalone short story called “The Family Pet.”

The new stories linked my first imaginative horror world to my next, the world of Dr. Allen Fincher, featured in my published novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines as well as in short stories that appear in Leaping at Thorns (out of print), Peritoneum (out of print), and, again, Stains of Atrocity (it’s got the best ones from Peritoneum). The new stories, in contrast to Curiosity, have a much more fantastic flavor… the flavor I wanted for The Middle Reaches.

This imaginative world of dead ends and a creek, a world with roots as deep as possible in my writing and almost as deep as possible in my life, became the world of The Middle Reaches. If I needed a world for a serial, which could go on and on… I thought I might as well make it one that intersects with a lot of my life and preexisting work…

… and if you happen to have read my novel Crazy Time as well as Cycle One of The Middle Reaches, you probably noticed that Leslie Jarndyce is working on a case for MFS (Mansworth Futures and Securities), the corporate shadow falling across Crazy Time hero Lily Henshaw’s life. So, I’ve brought in the potential to use even more preexisting work… and I’m not going to squander it… I have plans, people, plans…

The Middle Reaches are a bridge between realities. So, too, do they connect my realities.

I also borrow from Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers. Oh, yeah, and probably Lovecraft, too.

Cycle One, Episode 8, “Carcosa,” refers to Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers… but not as if their works were complete fiction…. the King in Yellow seems connected to The Middle Reaches, too.

Cycle One of the serial introduces the place, aspects particular to this cycle as well as aspects that span cycles, as Sheldon Vere’s old friends reunite and try to figure out what happened to him when they were all teenagers and spending time between the two Acton Ways. They become mired in The Middle Reaches, and mired in longing that mixes the adolescent with the present, lured onward but terrified by the monsters that haunt them at each step. The serial deepens characters and relationships from the screenplay while adding more touches of both horror and dark fantasy.

The Shadow Man is important in Cycle One–and beyond–in ways that characters can barely grasp.

Cycle Two, now in progress, goes deeper into the lore of The Middle Reaches, bringing in Bobby Lightfoot, Gordon and Steven Marks, and others, most of whom are teenagers. Drawn toward different ends but following the same creek and dealing with the same tensions between horror and desire, groups of characters play out what seems to be a more cosmic game as they go farther into the otherworldly place that wants them.

The Man in the Grinning Mask was a boogeyman in Bobby’s make-believe world, but in Cycle Two he seems to be real… and he has a deadly agenda in The Middle Reaches.

FYI, I plan for the series to run for four cycles. The audience so far is small but growing. If you read it (and if you haven’t, please do!), I hope that, with all its jumbled timelines and bizarre details, it still seems like a natural fit for your episodic yearnings. However, if it ever seems a little overwrought—kind of like this blog post—please remember that it twists together an awful lot of me.

Free Atrocities on Amazon!

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Until May 23, 2023, my collection Stains of Atrocity: Twenty Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy is a FREE ebook to download at Amazon. In case you don’t remember or don’t feel like scrolling down, Stains of Atrocity’s twenty horrific tales vary in style and extremity–some are mild, some are off-the-walls, some are even funny–but each aims to leave an unusual, dark, and lasting impression. It begins with “Silence,” a surreal haunting about a woman who visits a strange house and then quietly loses the people closest to her, and it ends with “Mandy Schneider Makes Friends,” a taboo-breaking account of three psychopaths who form an alliance and then torture a group of campers and their chaperones. Arranged into five sections or “blots” that might stain your psyche in different ways with the atrocities they depict, the stories explore distorted responses to tragedy, strange connections that form when people give in to chance, political anxieties acted out through rent flesh and spilt blood, miraculous feats paid for with massacres, and a crime that lives on in a place and in people devoted to human violation.

Okay, that last bit was borrowed from what you’ll see when you go to Amazon to get your free copy. If you want a more inside scoop, read my post here. My point is that, though I’m pretty consistently weird, I cover a broad spectrum of horrific affects, so there’s a good chance you’ll like something. And even if you don’t, what have you got to lose? It’s FREE!

Mapping Stains of Atrocity: Twenty Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy

A book cover of colorful stains

This post provides some generally spoiler-free commentary about the stories in Stains of Atrocity, comments I left out of the book in order to keep it from getting any longer (and more expensive–now, the e-book is $2.99, and the trade paperback is $19.99). As for the book as a whole, I take the business of horror seriously. This book wants to horrify and offend you, to stretch your mind with the surreal and the grotesque until your assumptions break. If the sensation is always pleasant, I’m not doing my job. Prepare for twenty flavors of the outré and outrageous.

Blot One: Stains of Loss

“Silence”

After a roadside mishap, a woman visits a strange house to seek help. Later, the people around her disappear inexplicably. This story, one of the oldest in this collection, has long been a personal favorite because I find the sadness of the protagonist’s surreal predicament scary. This version differs from previously published versions: it includes expansions from the award-winning screenplay adaptation.

“House of Butterflies”

Two sisters meet at their uncle’s house to prepare for their mother’s funeral and discover that their family is the target of a bizarre supernatural phenomenon involving… butterflies. Another older story, this one is mostly the same as earlier published versions. I’m fond of the imagery—never seen anything quite like it—and like that the characters are American royalty, from a echelon of culture I rarely touch.

“Your Neighbor”

An entity called The Grizzle Man tells a woman she will kill her neighbor, and she becomes obsessed with the idea of doing it. The protagonist’s psychological perspective makes everything feel off, even to me. This story is previously unpublished, and like all seven previously unpublished stories in Stains of Atrocity, it is relatively new.

“David Langley and the Burglar”

A burglar fantasizes about hurting the people he robs while his latest mark tries to comprehend the supernatural force that ensnares him. Maybe the title should be “The Burglar and David Langley” because the first half is from burglar’s perspective, the last from David’s. The surreal convergence of the ending, however—if it works for you—is what the story is really about.

Blot Two: Stains of Collusion

“Highway Romance”

A truck driver feels drawn to a boy he sees in a car on the highway, and the boy seems just as drawn to him—but their attractions take a violent turn. Readers who don’t get the (unsubtle) references to Lolita and Poe-via-Nabokov will get less out of the story, but an early reader in such a position still liked it. The final section is stream of consciousness, but it’s accessible. Previously unpublished.

“Lizard Chrome”

Supernatural lizards descend upon a popular nightspot in downtown Louisville and cause a frenzy of murder and mayhem. This story’s goal is fun, assuming you can take your fun with some extreme gore infused with questions about color that might be connected to race. Of course, I am also thinking about all those reptilian conspiracies out there. I provide a sort of cameo.

“The Long Flight of Charlotte Radcliffe”

A young woman falls back into the clutches of her abusive uncle. Charlotte takes a long flight, but this story is very short. For readers who don’t pick up on layered references, I think the story is mostly about the ending. However, “Charlotte Radcliffe” is a nod toward Charlotte Brontë and Ann Radcliffe, and the story is thinking about the history of tales about women in peril and a radical direction for the future.

“Jar of Evil”

A scientist of sorts captures the essence of evil in a jar, drops the jar, and chases it, hoping to catch it before it starts the apocalypse. Humor masks horror here, and narrative style overpowers narrative content. Nevertheless, if you’re able to step out of the protagonist’s warped perspective and envision what he’s actually doing, the sickness will shine through the silly veneer.

Blot Three: Stains of Allegiance

All the stories in this section are previously unpublished.

“Dinner for Two”

A young man obsessed with online exposure decides to commit and stream a mass shooting, and one of his followers, enchanted, decides she’ll join him. The very real-world horror and apparent cheapness of life in this story will likely make it one of the book’s most difficult to take. I developed the lead characters first in two short scripts (one award-winning, one kept private). Terrifying people.

“Undying Support”

A group representing different minorities decides to strike back at the white supremacist terrorizing their neighborhood, but the murderous bigot refuses to die. I imagined this story as a kind of inverted slasher, with the emphasis on the “good guys” hunting the unstoppable bad guy instead of the reverse. While the tale offers suspense and gruesome violence, much of it is tongue-in-cheek.

“Around Your Neck”

A psychic gets pulled into a plot involving murder, human trafficking, and a supernatural “familiar” with a taste for slaughter. Although there’s not much mystery, this one ended up with a neo-noir-ish edge that pleases me. Marty the psychic and Vorzien the monstrous familiar are characters I’ve already used in a feature screenplay and might use again. This point is not a spoiler about who/what dies when.

“Food for Flies”

A white couple with racist tendencies accidentally (?) kills a brown young man, and after they dispose of the body, swarms of flies appear with a gruesome agenda. This story is the most recent in the book. Some readers will find one of its scenes to be the most disgusting—but a couple of early readers found said scene to be hilarious as well, so hey, find out for yourself. Call this one “body horror.”

Blot Four: Stains of Will

As I mention in the book’s brief foreword, the last eight stories will make more sense (which isn’t to say they’ll make sense) if you read them together. The stories in this blot relate to the universe I’ve built around a character named Dr. Allen Fincher and his book The Alchemy of Will, a universe reflected in my novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines as well as my story collection Leaping at Thorns.

“Blood and Feathers”

At the dawn of the 20th century, Dr. Allen Fincher confronts Dean Elijah Eagleton at Harvard about nefarious activities. After a display of power, Allen lays out a plan for cooperation and human sacrifice. This story plays in a weird register, more dark fantasy than horror but plenty horrific if you think about what happens and what it portends. The middle is pretty goofy, making the whole rather unbalanced.

“Kindertotenlieder” (Songs for Dead Children)

In a reimagining of “Pied Piper” tales, a town ends up with a glut of babies that couldn’t belong to their mothers’ husbands, who are off fighting World War Two, so they turn to a woman with mystical powers for help, unaware of the price they’ll pay. The story features Matilda Roan, a key player in several Fincher tales. I’m very fond of the imagery.

“Year of the Wolf”

A man lets a friend kill him so that his essence can travel back to the 1943 Pacific Battle of Tarawa, where he takes the form of a monster that hunts both sides. The man in question is Louis Jardin, a Fincherverse regular. His friend is Matilda Roan. To me, the story stands out because it’s supernatural historical fiction that climaxes with a scientific oddity made grand. The teeth recall “Silence.”

“The Broom Closet Where Everything Dies”

A boy with access to arcane powers summons creatures from fiction and catches the attention of a mentor who leads him toward more destructive goals. This story connects to a lot of other fiction, my own and others’, and links the Fincherverse with TR4B, which I’ll get to in a moment. At its heart, though, it’s a sweet story about an imaginative boy who gets a taste for killing.

Blot Five: Stains of Curiosity

The stories in this section all relate to crimes committed by two boys at a house known as TR4B. In the aftermath of those crimes, the house has become a place of supernatural distortion, which makes most stories about it rather surreal. I wrote about the original crimes in an unpublished novel, Curiosity, twenty years ago, but I wrote these tales knowing no one has read it. Curiosity remains a theme.

“Eternal Recurrence of Suburban Abortion”

A young woman travels to a house notorious for the crimes committed there in order to have a medical procedure, and she ends up on a surreal journey between life and death. This story is about pain, giving up, and becoming something you’d never have imagined. I think it’s either poignant or gibberish. The… surgeon?… is from “Heart on a Stick,” in Leaping at Thorns, but you don’t need to know that.

“TR4B”

The mother of boys who committed unspeakable crimes in their house takes a hallucinatory walk through her basement that transforms her. For the most part, this story begins in a shaky but traversable perspective and then dissolves into surreal imagery, but it still manages to shed light on “Eternal Recurrence” while presenting a dark character arc.

“Door Poison”

A young man and woman who met on the internet visit a house famous for atrocities committed there and find themselves trapped in a bizarre and deadly game. Even though the imagery is extreme, and the storyline is mind-bending, this story shows that even TR4B can be a little silly. The tale probably works better if you know about Schrödinger’s cat and/or Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection.

“Mandy Schneider Makes Friends”

A budding psychopath meets two older boys, brothers famous for rape and murder, and after a bizarre initiation, the three turn their attention to a group of campers and their chaperones. Previously unpublished, this story is the most extreme in the book, also the longest. It is the one most likely to get me accused of being a terrible person. In the foreword, I advise you not to read it. Here, I’ll say that—if you can handle it—you might find that it’s quite good. But I don’t think most people can handle it.

Being Surreal(ist) a Century Later

A pleasing consensus so far about my novel Crazy Time is that it’s pretty darned surreal: one reviewer calls it “not just a horror novel, but a surreal world,” which makes my heart race a little. I was certainly going for effects I think of as surreal, but now that I’m accepting the surreal as part of my brand, I’m thinking more about what makes the surreal tick and how I feel about Surrealism in general. For help, I went back to a text I hadn’t read in more than 25 years, André Breton’s The First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). The reread made me realize that, although I agree with many of Breton’s fundamental points, having explored a century of writing since his manifesto, I simply can’t agree with one thing: his concept of Surrealism! So, I’m going to do a few things. I’m going to say what I have in common with Breton. I’m going to say why I break with his Surrealism and propose a way of approaching the surreal informed by more recent thinking. To exit, I’ll make a few notes about how I attempt the surreal in my writing. I am not seeking a revisionary manifesto-level performance here; I just want to get some thoughts out.

So, to begin, Breton struck me with his wit and insight; we have a lot of snarky things in common, not merely a love for Matthew Lewis’s forever-iconoclastic Gothic novel The Monk (11). Here are two major points from his manifesto that I can’t deny:

“The realistic position… appears to me to be totally hostile to all intellectual and moral progress. It horrifies me, since it arises from mediocrity, hatred and dull conceit” (5). Don’t get me wrong. I love some (R/r)ealist art. However, an insistence on the realistic combined with the uppity assumption that the best works hold a mirror up to “nature”–whatever that means–is about as dull as that Hamlet reference.“In the realm of literature, the marvellous alone is capable of making fertile those works which belong to a lesser genre such as the novel…” (11). Okay, now Mr. Breton’s being a little snooty about the novel, but he mostly means realistic novels, and in any case the good point here is what he says about the marvelous, meaning the fantastic, the supernatural, that which stretches the imagination rather than relying on regurgitation of the quotidian… this stuff is what makes for the richest lit, not the pretension to capturing “life as it really is”–whatever that means. The marvelous opens doors to new possibilities. An attempt to nail down life within imaginatively bereft boundaries denies more possibilities than it allows.

So, Breton looks to counter realism with the marvelous, acknowledges the Gothic already does that to an extent, and wants to go further. What he wants is more psychologically involved, more opposed to conventional thought. He complains, “We are still living under the rule of logic… in our day, logical procedures are only applicable in solving problems of secondary interest” (7). His primary interest is in what lies beyond the merely rational, which stretches the purview of the traditional Gothic (and of contemporary horror), and in that, he and I are allied.

To go beyond the rational, Breton turns to “the omnipotence of dream” to access “the superior reality of certain forms of neglected association” (19). He gives “thanks to Freud for his discoveries” (7). The Surrealist turn to dream associations as an alternative to rational associations is incredibly productive. The marvelous permeates dream. Moreover, dream and the dream-like involve connections among words, images, objects, concepts, and experiences that unseat rationality as the only possible way of constructing and understanding worlds. The ruling regime of the rational is tyrannical; dream is liberatory. “Liberatory” is as far as I’ll go, however. I can’t agree with Breton about any “superior reality,” and though I’ve read and enjoyed more of Freud’s work than is healthy for any individual, I can’t link Freud to anything like what Breton eventually calls “absolute truth” (28). My rejection of Freud comes not merely from his myopia with regard to human diversity, nor merely from his limited understanding of how dreams might actually operate. The main reason is simpler. The notion of truth, especially an absolute one, and the notion of a superior reality–notions prized by both Freud and Breton–are not notions I, having survived in the postmodern condition, find tenable. Surrealism’s dreamy alternative to rationality points to a plurality of thought models, a plurality of realities, not a higher, “omnipotent” truth. Breton refers to madness and madmen several times, perhaps inadvertently positing mental illness as a third thought model to go along with dream and rationality. In one of several definitions of the surreal, Breton claims, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, seemingly so contradictory, of dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak” (10). In the absence of absolutes and confronted with pluralities, I must revise and extend Breton’s claim into one of my own about what constitutes surreality. I believe in the concurrence of these two states, seemingly so contradictory, of dream and reality, in dreams as realities among other realities that expose the fragile illusion of a single, rational “real.” That process of exposing illusion creates a surreality, so to speak.

I suppose I might seem hypocritical by making the surreal superior in its faculty for exposing rationality’s claim to monolithic truth as illusion. Yet I am not saying rationality is an illusion, inferior to dream or to that which would expose its claim to being the singular reality as false. Rationality, too, is a reality among other realities. The surreal is a leveler that destroys claims to singularity and the absolute with unexpected associations, of which dream associations are exemplary. The surreal unsettles by disrupting hierarchical relations, but otherwise, it doesn’t play hierarchical games.

Breton holds up automatic writing as a process likely to achieve surreal effects. It allows the writer to channel thought while staying ahead of rational calculation and self-reflection, and in that, I can’t argue with its validity as a leveler. I don’t have much interest in it, though. I find the concurrence of different thought methods–such as rationality, dream, and different manifestations of psychosis–far more productive, and frankly, I think calculated effects work out better (I believe calculation, perhaps combined with other types of association, lies behind the most effective early Surrealist art as well). Here are some ways I calculate for the surreal in Crazy Time and other writings:

Broken causality. Realistic narratives, and even most narratives that indulge in the marvelous, rely on chains of cause and effect to tell their stories in ways that make enough sense to keep readers comfortable (and paying). A causes B, which causes C, and so on, until the story reaches a logical and satisfying conclusion. To create the surreal, I break causal chains, withholding causes, supplying effects that have unclear or distorted connections to their apparent causes, etc., failing to provide sense and comfort. When rational, causal explanation is unnecessary, very strange things can happen. Writing seminars will tell you that you have to provide logical reasons for the things that happen in your stories and clear motivations for characters’ actions. I’m saying you don’t, but I’d add that causality shouldn’t be broken all the time. The broken stands out when it disrupts the unbroken.Unresolved multiplicities. The flip side of broken causality, which is an absence of conventional narrative logic, is an abundance of causality, or multiple explanations for events and behaviors that coexist simultaneously, in tension with each other, while none has clear priority. This multiplicity is not the same as having multiple theories in suspension until a mystery is resolved. This multiplicity proves to be unresolvable, and it works best when at least some of the explanations in play are irrational, absurd, or all-out batshit crazy.Uncontrolled resonance. Repetition always involves difference, and as elements in a story repeat and transform, we tend to like to infer causal connections that motivate the repetition and spur the transformation, but such inferences can be difficult or even impossible. I tend to repeat words, phrases, images, and events, sometimes with premeditation and sometimes without, so that all the instances of the recurring elements resonate (often eerily) with each other. The resonance can accumulate into a theme, but it’s surreal when it prompts a reaction along the lines of, “Why the hell is this showing up again here, now, in this context?!?”Unreliable physics. So-called “nature” is supposed to follow laws. The core physics class I took in college was called “Space, Time, and Motion.” We talked a lot about smart people who formulated some of those natural laws, which we expect to function in a way that keeps the universe more or less rational and orderly. Ergo, breaking those laws–having space, time, and motion misbehave–can produce surreal effects. Perhaps I should have titled this bullet “unreliable science.” Unreliable biology can produce rather surreal effects as well, but that might fall mostly under…Imagery, imagery, imagery. Breton devotes space in his manifesto to making fun of the tediously detailed imagery of realistic writers. I take his point, but I nevertheless think that, while much great writing aspires to the condition of music, surreal writing aspires to the condition of painting (or graphic arts). By the time they learn to read, most people have prejudices about how “real” things appear to their senses. Describing people, places, things, movements, sounds, smells, etc.–but especially visual images–that fall outside most people’s understanding of the real provides a challenge to complacent thought. It can also accomplish the surreal at its most twisted, majestic, beautiful and/or sublime.

“Surreal” is a word tossed about in a way that often simply means bizarre, unusual, or weird. Breton helped popularize “surreal” and “Surrealism” with much more specific ideas. Rereading him, I know I can’t call myself a true Surrealist in the 1920s meaning of the term, but if you will accept my modified understanding, I’d be happy to call myself a centennial Surrealist, still working to overthrow the tyranny of logic in 2022.

CRAZY TIME and… Romance???

Kirkus Reviews refers to my novel Crazy Time as having “a side of romance,” which gave me a jolt when I first read it. I don’t write romance! I don’t read romance, and romantic comedy is the one genre of film I categorically avoid. I respect romance writers quite a bit, as theirs is a competitive market and the industry standards have a significant learning curve, but that’s just another reason why I’m not one of them… except… I did put a love story pretty near the center of Crazy Time. Since Crazy Time is crazy Biblical anyway, I’ll echo the Song of Solomon and say it’s one of those “love is strong as death” love stories, if not “love is stronger than death,” as the verse is often misquoted. My novel is primarily the story of Lily Henshaw, secondarily the story of Lily Henshaw’s relationship with Burt Wells, her boss who becomes her lover, as well as someone who protects her and whom she must protect on her quest.

I introduce Burt with the flames already kindled, at least on his side: he and Lily have had a long employer-employee relationship, and he has long been attracted to her, but he has always behaved appropriately. She is aware of his feelings but has never made a move beyond friendship, but when her life starts falling apart, she finds she can turn to Burt, and she does, repeatedly, and he is there for her, even when doing so gets him in trouble (even leading to his arrest at one point). He stays by her side through behaviors and events that would make almost anyone abandon her, and he believes the impossible when she needs him to. After they become intimate, a horrific incident makes Lily’s apartment uninhabitable, so she goes to stay with him—and realizes they are now a couple. Her reliance on him becomes something more, and when, in time, he needs her, her response is passionate. That’s all I’ll say. Read the book to find out whether my lovers achieve the ending romance novels are supposed to have.

Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say one thing more. That Lily and Burt are an interracial couple (Lily white, Burt black) becomes important in several ways. First, there’s the arrest I mentioned: Lily has just been assaulted, Burt arrives to help moments before police, and when the police arrive, they arrest him basically because he’s black, despite Lily’s objections, which leads to other plot developments. More important, though, is Lily and Burt’s battle against the corporation Mansworth Futures and Securities, which is very, very white. They treat Burt dismissively and, later, violently… I’ll sum up by simply saying that in the “working world” to which Lily Henshaw becomes “ambassador,” race is a concern that Lily’s choice of partners helps to highlight.

So, the romance storyline serves multiple functions, but mostly, it raises the emotional stakes, and it makes the characters more compelling. Their need to survive might make you turn the pages, but their need for each other—that might make you hold your breath.

Find Crazy Time at https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Time-Bizarre-Battle-Darkness-ebook/dp/B09QCVHRBJ/

CRAZY TIME and (Video) Games

Referring to my novel Crazy Time’s opening chapter, in which the protagonist Lily Henshaw and three friends are menaced on the highway, a recent Readers’ Favorite Book Review summarizes, “Two men in a pickup truck pursue and engage them in a brutal and deadly game called Crazy Time.” The reviewer is correct in that the two men, who call themselves Earl and Rob, are playing a game, and Earl does call what’s happening “crazy time,” but I never thought of what they’re doing as a game called Crazy Time, which would make the title of my book the name of a game (among other things). I may not have planned that dimension of the title, exactly, but I’d say it’s appropriate, as ideas related to gaming run throughout the book. Earl and Rob treat their assault on Lily and her friends as if it has rules to follow, beginning with the recitation of a kind of nursery rhyme and ending with murder, and they have lots of fun along the way, using a cell phone to take video of the proceeding, presumably so they can savor the event again and again. For them, the novel’s opening horrors become a digitally mediated gaming experience.

Lily’s nephew Donnie is inseparable from his handheld video games, but otherwise, no one in the novel is involved with literal “games.” A game is at the story’s heart, however. Lily goes through so many traumas that she concludes she’s suffering from a curse like in the Book of Job, which she understands as centering on a bet, or game, between God and Satan, who basically play to see how unimaginable suffering will affect a person. Lily refuses to be a passive participant and does all she can to become a real player, trying to learn the rules from a psychic, a Satanist, and others. To take an active role, she discovers—about midway through the book—that she must go to a skyscraper that houses a shady company with mysterious connections to the supernatural forces destroying her life.

I don’t want to drop significant spoilers about the second half of the book, but since video games were very much on my mind as I crafted it, I’ll make a few comments. First, about illustrations: there are five images in the first half, five in the second, and two out of the second five show elevators. The skyscraper’s elevators become crucial to both story and structure because Lily arriving at a new floor of the building generally means facing a new challenge, after which Lily must go to an elevator (often at the end of a chapter) to go to another floor for another challenge. Yes, I’m saying floors of the skyscraper are like levels of a video game. Some of them even have boss battles. Near the end, there’s a reference to the video game God of War that I expect that game’s fans to enjoy.

So why this emphasis on games? Perhaps, in the tradition of the film Funny Games (either version), the malefic and/or irrational forces that treat Lily’s suffering as “play” trivialize and dehumanize her, and by extension people like her, and maybe by extension all people, revealing the brutality of the universal order. But maybe it’s more interesting to think about the phenomenal successes of The Hunger Games (which I knew prior to Crazy Time) and Squid Game (which I encountered after), both of which rely on video game narrative conventions, and both of which use games in their stories for social critique. Such stories suggest that we’re taking our games more and more seriously, relying on them to express ourselves and to interpret our lives. These games are about survival. Lily might not want to play the game of Crazy Time that Earl and Rob initiate, but to keep herself going, she learns what every visitor to Las Vegas knows: you’ve got to play to win.

Find Crazy Time for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Time-Bizarre-Battle-Darkness-ebook/dp/B09QCVHRBJ/

CRAZY TIME Goodreads E-Book Giveaway!

“Not unlike a Dali painting, L. Andrew Cooper’s latest… is a strange fusion of surreal horror, dark fantasy, and spiritual speculation… powered by stunning imagery and laudable in terms of plot audaciousness… a bizarre and sometimes grotesque narrative.” – BlueInk Review

“A series of traumatic events leads a woman into a battle between good and evil… supernatural twists subvert… expectations… poetic prose… is both unsettling and absorbing….” – Foreword Clarion Reviews

Between March 3 and March 31, 2022, I will be giving away 50 Amazon Kindle editions of Crazy Time on Goodreads. I honestly don’t know whether demand will reach the giveaway supply, so I’d say chances of winning a copy are pretty darned good. Please enter, and if you get a copy, please read and review!

Goodreads Book Giveaway Crazy Timeby L. Andrew Cooper

Giveaway ends March 31, 2022.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway

Mental Illness and CRAZY TIME

Lily Henshaw, the central character in my novel Crazy Time, suffers so many traumas in such a short time that she becomes convinced that she’s a target for God and Satan, similar to Job in the Bible. The first chapter describes one of those traumas in detail, and the second chapter opens with a sentence stating unequivocally that, three months later, “Lily [is] not okay.” As she associates environmental triggers with her earlier trauma, bringing on a panic attack, astute readers might guess that Lily has PTSD, and indeed, PTSD and its effects are a major concern of the entire book. I wrote it while coming to grips with my own diagnosis of PTSD and struggling with a long depressive dip in the rises and falls of my bipolar disorder (type two). Although Lily’s traumas and mental experiences are far more extreme than my own, I can still claim that we overlap. “Crazy” is a pejorative word for the mentally typical to use as a description for those of us with mental illnesses, but to use it as an in-group term: Lily’s crazy time is in many ways my crazy time. Maybe that’s why she’s closer to my heart than virtually all my other characters.

The key feature of Lily’s experience with PTSD is repetition, which manifests in several different ways. The most famous kind of repetition tied to PTSD is the flashback, a kind of full-on replay of the original trauma. I didn’t write any long, involved replays for Lily, in part because such moments would be boring in a novel and in part because my dealings with trauma, like Lily’s, have involved multiple incidents, and my repetitions don’t work with cinematic scenes of primal moments. Don’t get me wrong. Associating the right trigger with a traumatic incident can send me briefly back to the horrible moment, and likewise, if Lily sees something she associates with (for example) one of the men who attack her in the first chapter, her mind will briefly take her back to relive some of the first chapter’s circumstances. However, going back doesn’t have to involve a sensory replay, and it doesn’t need an environmental trigger, either. Repetition also occurs through seemingly random, intrusive thoughts. Unbidden, a thought related to a trauma might simply pop into Lily’s (or my own) head, and then it will be there, summoning all the negative emotions associated with it. Intrusive thoughts relate closely to what my therapist calls “obsessive rumination,” what happens when the trauma-related thoughts get into Lily’s and my heads and run around in circles, refusing to leave. The idea of “crazy time” itself, which Lily’s attackers bring up in the first chapter, intrudes on Lily’s regular thinking and circles around, haunting her and gathering new meanings as she tries to make sense of it and dispel it. As she obsessively ruminates, her thinking evolves coping strategies. The repetitions are deep ruts, hard to escape, but each repetition at least has the potential to be a repetition with a difference.

PTSD, the associative nature of its triggers, the seeming randomness of its intrusions, and its obsessive lingering become structural principles for Crazy Time. The novel doesn’t follow a standard narrative line, which would rely on a causal chain of incidents (A happens, which causes B to happen, which causes C to happen, which causes D, etc.). In a standard horror novel, some big bad shows up at the beginning, and a chain of events leads to the big bad being shut down at the end (or, less often, the big bad achieving total victory). Again, not so in Crazy Time. The opening chapter might seem to carry the weight of a causal, original incident, but on the surface, it doesn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the story—except the trauma it causes repeats and shapes Lily’s thinking, which shapes the path she takes toward improving her situation. Indeed, from the first chapter on, Lily’s traumas seem to lack a logical, traceable tree of causes, and a remedy for causality’s absence gives Lily something else to obsess about. A major example of a traumatic phenomenon that seems to lack logical causality but affects Lily repeatedly is suicide. People close to her and people she randomly encounters keep killing themselves. Suicide makes a kind of thematic sense because her traumas leave her depressed, but because she can’t see a more logical, common root for the suicides to be happening around her, she concludes, ““Suicide [is] a rhizome, like certain mushrooms and plants, popping up in bunches here, bunches there… clusters of crazy-time mushrooms” (and yes, I am tipping my hat to Deleuze and Guattari).  Other events and images, such as the intoning of nursery rhymes, seemingly lack logical reasons to recur but do in crucial ways for the story’s development.

Due to a relentless self-reflection that comes with obsessive rumination, Lily at least sometimes recognizes this structure governing her life and book, but she rejects it, insisting on finding a root for the tree that she believes should causally connect her experiences. Her search for the root, which she hopes will point to a remedy, leads to the craziest of her adventures, but she is not wholly resolute in her quest. Doubt follows her everywhere, as she knows “she [has] good reasons… to be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and couldn’t that involve hallucinations?” She doesn’t trust her mind or her senses, and others doubt her as well. Such doubt can be one of the cruelest aspects of mental illness—feeling you might betray yourself, and that others don’t take you seriously—and it deepens her desperation while strengthening her determination to discover an all-revealing root for her difficulties.

No matter how mentally ill Lily may be, her strength when faced with doubt and circumstances that lack traditional sense make her heroic. A mentally ill hero—especially one so smart and self-determined—is a rare creature in any form of fiction, especially in the horror genre, which too often uses “the crazies” as villains. Despite the fact that most people with mental illnesses are no more likely to be violent or dangerous than people without, many horror writers are ignorant, prejudiced, and/or just plain lazy. I encountered enough prejudice and hate associating with certain horror writers that I mostly avoid them now. Lily would gladly show them her middle finger and then go about her quest. She’s admirable, much more so than I. She’s a hero both apart from and because of her struggle with mental illness, which gives her a good chance of coping with her history and, if you’ll give her story a try, having a bright literary future.

Find Lily and Crazy Time on the Amazon Kindle or in paperback.