Lucy Taylor's Blog, page 3
December 3, 2016
INTO PAINFREAK: A JOURNEY OF DECADENCE AND DEBAUCHERY
Readers of hardcore horror fiction were first introduced to Painfreak in a collection of short stories by author Gerard Houarner in 1996. Now Houarner is both a contributor to and editor of the new anthology INTO PAINFREAK, published by Necro Publications, Bedlam Press & Weird West Books.
INTO PAINFREAK features all new stories from some of horror’s top authors, including a new novelette by Edward Lee. Contributors include Monica O’Roarke, Wrath James White, K. Trap Jones, Linda Addison, Charlee Jacobs, and many others. I’m delighted that my own story “He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life” is part of the line-up – in my version of this Land of Erotic Enchantment, the entrance to Painfreak is a casita near Gallup, New Mexico.
For those not already familiar with the terrible delights of Painfreak, this entry from the blog of David G. Barnett, publisher, will give you an idea: “Welcome to Painfreak, the traveling club that arises out of the dark and calls to those seeking the ultimate in pleasure and pain. Many come to experience the ultimate in decadence and debauchery. And many get lost in a labyrinth filled with depraved sex, beautiful death, and wonderfully horrible sights. You’ve been given the mark, now step into the heart of…PAINFREAK.”
INTO PAINFREAK will be available on 12÷12÷16. Look for it at http://necropublications.com/p...– and become lost in its seductive monstrosities.
INTO PAINFREAK features all new stories from some of horror’s top authors, including a new novelette by Edward Lee. Contributors include Monica O’Roarke, Wrath James White, K. Trap Jones, Linda Addison, Charlee Jacobs, and many others. I’m delighted that my own story “He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life” is part of the line-up – in my version of this Land of Erotic Enchantment, the entrance to Painfreak is a casita near Gallup, New Mexico.
For those not already familiar with the terrible delights of Painfreak, this entry from the blog of David G. Barnett, publisher, will give you an idea: “Welcome to Painfreak, the traveling club that arises out of the dark and calls to those seeking the ultimate in pleasure and pain. Many come to experience the ultimate in decadence and debauchery. And many get lost in a labyrinth filled with depraved sex, beautiful death, and wonderfully horrible sights. You’ve been given the mark, now step into the heart of…PAINFREAK.”
INTO PAINFREAK will be available on 12÷12÷16. Look for it at http://necropublications.com/p...– and become lost in its seductive monstrosities.
November 3, 2016
THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT by Mariko Koike
THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT was first published in Japan in 1986 and is considered among Mariko Koike’s best novels. With the English translation recently made available, she will surely find a wider audience for the horror and detective fiction for which she is known.
Readers looking for mayhem and a plot twist on every page may find the events in THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT unfold too gradually for their taste, but those willing to immerse themselves in the tale of a family trapped in an apparently haunted apartment building will find much to admire in this sleekly crafted novel of psychological horror.
Misao, her husband Teppei, and their daughter Tomao are a young family newly moved into an apartment whose sole drawback appears to be that it faces a graveyard. The fact that Tomao’s pet finch dies on the day of the move-in – and that Tomao claims she and the bird still converse – is just the beginning of a series of ominous goings-on, including an elevator apparently under the sway of malevolent forces.
The sense of dread is augmented by a guilty secret the couple shares, a tragedy that they’ve presumably put behind them. Or perhaps not, and it’s suppressed guilt blurring their judgement, because really, would a young couple with a child move into a building where smoke from a crematorium occasionally wafts toward the windows and gradually, all the other tenants are moving out? If you’re willing to accept that premise, however, the horror of an apartment building surrounded by the dead can gradually seep under one’s skin.
That said, however, THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT follows a well-trodden path, with obviously creepy occurances that escalate inevitably to the novel’s genuinely unnerving conclusion. Not a book to be savored alone at night or for apartment dwellers who dread a trip down to the basement.
Readers looking for mayhem and a plot twist on every page may find the events in THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT unfold too gradually for their taste, but those willing to immerse themselves in the tale of a family trapped in an apparently haunted apartment building will find much to admire in this sleekly crafted novel of psychological horror.
Misao, her husband Teppei, and their daughter Tomao are a young family newly moved into an apartment whose sole drawback appears to be that it faces a graveyard. The fact that Tomao’s pet finch dies on the day of the move-in – and that Tomao claims she and the bird still converse – is just the beginning of a series of ominous goings-on, including an elevator apparently under the sway of malevolent forces.
The sense of dread is augmented by a guilty secret the couple shares, a tragedy that they’ve presumably put behind them. Or perhaps not, and it’s suppressed guilt blurring their judgement, because really, would a young couple with a child move into a building where smoke from a crematorium occasionally wafts toward the windows and gradually, all the other tenants are moving out? If you’re willing to accept that premise, however, the horror of an apartment building surrounded by the dead can gradually seep under one’s skin.
That said, however, THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT follows a well-trodden path, with obviously creepy occurances that escalate inevitably to the novel’s genuinely unnerving conclusion. Not a book to be savored alone at night or for apartment dwellers who dread a trip down to the basement.
October 22, 2016
Interview with Shane Douglas Keene, editor/writer for Shotgun Logic
Horror author Lucy Taylor is a relatively new discovery for me. I first read her work in the phenomenal Grey Matter Press anthology, Peel Back the Skin, in the form of her story, “Moth Frenzy.” That story, one of the best in a book full of brilliance, impressed me so much I went seeking out more of her stuff and, while I’ve yet to read any of her longer work, I have had the opportunity to read several of her short stories and I recommend you read her soon. “Moth Frenzy” is no fluke. Lucy’s work is consistently exceptional, emotional, visceral, and terrifying. Her prose is beautiful and her stories have real staying power. I can still remember the content and the outcome of every story I’ve read by her, which is something I’m rarely able to do. If you haven’t read her work yet, I suggest you check out her stories “Things of Which We Do Not Speak” and “Blessed be the Bound,” both in Nightmare Magazine. I’m confident you’ll find yourself looking for more of her work shortly after you finish those. But before you go, take the time to check out this interview we did together. Lucy is a wonderfully candid individual and it’s always a delight to interact with her. I hope you enjoy this as much as I have.
SDK: First off, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
LT: Well, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, a former Confederate capital with meticulous standards of gentility, decorum, and female subservience—in short, a hotbed of seething repression and nutty relatives shackled in the attic, metaphorically or otherwise. I was taught the two highest virtues are punctuality and impeccable grammar. Other stuff, not so much. My household of origin was full of material possessions, but lacking entirely in everything important: pleasure, love, humor, kindness, generosity, creativity, spirituality. Suffice it to say, ’More is never enough’ became my motto early on.
Since Richmond, I’ve lived in in Florida, Japan, (English-teaching in Tokyo), West Virginia, Colorado, and California, then three years ago settled down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I’d like to think is the last stop on the tour. I love New Mexico; it’s the physical expression of what I’d like to imagine my inner landscape to be—stark, spacious, exuberantly primal and wild. I feel like I’ve been looking for this place all my life. Kind of wish I’d found it sooner, in fact, but I wouldn’t have been content without that stop in California, because I wanted to live near the ocean.
What fills my life and nurtures my creativity are my animal companions (five Zen master cats), my lover Richard, and my activities as a longtime member of a 12-Step community that is particularly rich and close-knit here in Santa Fe. For all the wonderful people, places, and things in my world, I’d say what I find most gratifying about living here is the emptiness, the space. The sheer vastness of the skiy. I live on two acres, drink my coffee watching the birds in my yard and the resident gopher growing fat on my sunflower seeds because, as they say, ‘winter is coming’. I never foresaw this kind of life, but couldn’t ask for a better one.
SDK: When did you decide that you wanted to write fiction professionally?
LT: Actually by the age of five or six, before I learned how to write, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I worried a lot about death and apparently, the potential for creativity in the afterlife, and once asked my mother if there were “typewriters in heaven”? This, apparently, was a theological question that actually concerned me.
My maternal grandfather, who worked for the C&O Railroad, was a frustrated writer. He wrote short stories with an erotic bent that would be considered prim by today’s standards but were unacceptable in that era. So I was familiar with the concept of someone shut away in their room with a typewriter, making up stories. Then later, when I was ten or eleven, I started writing “books” on a typewriter I persuaded my mother to buy me. These books always featured animal protagonists and many of the human characters met ghastly ends, which pretty much summed up my priorities then and now.
I wish I could have kept those early efforts, but when I was fifteen, after some terrible things took place in my life, I didn’t think it was safe to have my fiction available where my mother could read it and perhaps use it as evidence of instability on my part, and I destroyed them all.
SDK: What made you choose horror as the main outlet for your creativity?
LT: I’m not sure I ‘chose’ horror. It’s what has always resonated with me, what calls to me and enchants me. For one thing, because of my early life, I constantly questioned my reality and the natures and true intentions of the people around me. I knew this could not be ‘all there was’. I knew what it felt like to be trapped with people who did not have your best interest at heart,, and I spent many years in a state of anxiety and fear, feeling like I had landed on an alien planet. So I knew a lot about demons and about fine-tuning the ability to present an acceptable self to others while guarding one’s true self from the world—or at least from those one knows are untrustworthy.
And horror writing is, after all, so very satisfying. As the writer, I’m in control, I get to decide who lives and who dies, who has a .357 hidden at the bottom of her handbag and what lies in the creepy casita out on Old Agua Fria. Writing (and reading) horror lets me explore my worst fears in a controlled atmosphere, to make a game of the things that might otherwise terrify me.
SDK: Is horror the only genre you write in?
LT: With a few exceptions, it is. In the early 2000’s, I wrote three mystery-suspense novels (NAILED, SAVING SOULS, and LEFT TO DIE) for Penguin-Putnam. The novels did all right and I don’t regret the experience, but what I learned was that above all, I’m a horror writer. That’s what I love, what I’m attracted to. Mystery-suspense was an interesting dalliance, but horror is the one I come home to.
SDK: Name some creative influences/inspirations.
LT: Well, of course, Clive Barker, Dan Simmons, Margaret Atwood, all of whom I admire tremendously, and there are so many others. Among them but by no means inclusive: Laird Barron, John Langan, Margo Lanagan, Gemma Files, Ray Garton, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Livia Llewellyn, Pat Cadigan, Angela Slatter…there are so many amazing horror and dark fantasy writers out there!
And, of course, there are those people who may not be writers, but who influence me simply by their presence in my life– they incarnate some aspect of a character I’m working with or a particular viewpoint on life, they embody some element of a story. Strangers, too, inspire: I’ve been given a theme or an opening line by a comment overheard on a train or a snippet of conversation in an elevator.
SDK: What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever been given?
LT: Honestly, if I’ve ever been given truly bad writing advice, perhaps I forgot it, because nothing comes to mind, but there is a ton of good writing advice that I wish I’d been given along the way. When I look back at work I did starting out, some of it still pleases me, but other things, it’s like, wow, this could have been so much better, or why didn’t somebody point such and such out to me before this ever saw print. And who knows? Maybe somebody did, and I didn’t listen.
SDK: If you could give one piece of advice to a fledgling author, what would it be?
LT: I’d say be clear on what it is you’re trying to do. What is your endgame? Are you writing this just for yourself or are you aiming to publish it and, if so, in what market? For what audience? I’ve run into people who have real writing talent, but very little idea or interest in the audience they’re trying to reach. They’re just shooting arrows sort of blindly, thinking they’ll hit something eventually, but that’s not usually how it works.
So I would say, know what your goal is, then read everything you can and try to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and why. Don’t be afraid of rejection. That’s part of the deal. And when you do get published, treasure—I mean truly treasure –the very best editors, the ones who will call you on every clumsy phrase, every not-quite-right word, every tiny incongruity of character or plotline. They are rare and they are invaluable.
SDK: You just returned from France recently and it’s obvious from your bio on your website that you have a passion for travel. Does that generate story ideas for you?
LT: It does, but perhaps less so in the details of a specific place than the way characters might adapt (or not) to a radically unfamiliar environment. Wandering and wanderlust intrigue me, as does that peculiar frisson of horror, awe, and excitement that comes from realizing you’re totally out of your element, surrounded by strangers, listening to languages that mean something to everyone else but are only so much birdsong to you. In alien surroundings, people take chances, become reckless, face or run away from challenges. It lays bare parts of the personality that might otherwise remain concealed, which makes for a lot of possibilities in fiction.
And just parenthetically, I was fortunate to have stories in each volume of the EXOTIC GOTHIC anthology series, edited by Danel Olson, where writers combined various aspects of the Gothic motif with exotic locales. The stories I did for EG, along with several previously unpublished stories, became the collection FATAL JOUNEYS.
SDK: In PEEL BACK THE SKIN from Grey Matter Press, your story ‘Moth Frenzy’ (which I would file in the “brilliant category) was set in New Mexico where you currently reside. Is New Mexico the setting for a lot of your stories?
LT: First of all, thanks so much for the kind words about “Moth Frenzy”. And yes, I do write about New Mexico quite a lot. It’s a wonderful setting for horror: stark, macabre, a seductive place with mysterious people. A friend who’s lived here twenty years told me he decided to move to New Mexico because “it’s the closest you can get to living in a foreign country while still being in the States.”
In addition to the stunning landscape, there are so many fascinating people here, ‘characters’ in themselves—Anglo transplants seeking to reinvent themselves, Native Americans with their rich culture and art, and gripping, often tragic, histories, the Hispanic community, some of whom trace their ancestry all the way back to Spain when their families received land grants to settle here.
In short, I would say New Mexico is a place where the outlandish is celebrated, the eccentric is embraced, and the lovers of extremes often find what they came for.
SDK: Is there a particular work of yours that you would recommend to new readers?
LT: Well, I’d love them to pick up a copy of PEEL BACK THE SKIN and read “Moth Frenzy” as well as all the other wonderful stories in that anthology. And I’d recommend my collection FATAL JOURNEYS, horror stories in exotic settings, from Kyoto to the Bahamas to Papua New Guinea. I might add that, since one of your questions was do I ever write outside the horror genre, the novelette “How Real Men Die” from FATAL JOURNEYS is pure erotica/suspense: three aging Detroit buddies off to have a last hoorah in Bangkok before one of them croaks.
SDK: I’ve only read short work by you up till now, you’ve written several novels as well, including a Bram Stoker winner. Talk some about your longer works.
LT: My best known novel is THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES, which won a Bram Stoker for Best First Novel. It’s a hardcore erotic fantasy, a graphic journey into a metaphorical land of sex addiction. The protagonist Val makes a harrowing journey into The City, a kind of hellscape where the most depraved individuals indulge their darkest appetites. The title speaks to the odd kind of solace I’ve always found in places completely alien and unfamiliar.
My other novels include DANCING WITH DEMONS and SPREE, both of which are heavy on the sex and violence. ETERNAL HEARTS is a vampire novel I did for White Wolf Publishing that includes lush, graphic illustrations by artist John Bolton, and as mentioned earlier, NAILED, SAVING SOULS, and LEFT TO DIE are mystery/suspense novels.
SDK: Do you prefer short form or long form fiction when it comes to writing?
LT: I think both forms have their advantages. I tend to have a lot of ideas spinning around at once, so often I find myself working on a new short story even when I’ve got a novel in the works. The longer forms, of course, allow for a more expansive storyline and multiple viewpoints, so the writer can develop a much deeper, richer fictional world. There’s a greater opportunity for complexity and experimentation.
A short story, not unlike a summer fling, offers instant gratification as well as characters that, unless brought back in some later work, pass quickly through one’s fictional universe.
SDK: This is like asking someone to name their favorite child but I’ll ask anyway. Do you have a personal favorite among your works?
LT: Sure, I think all writers do. At the moment, I’d say two of my favorites would be “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” (Tor.com, July 2015), and the story you mentioned earlier, “Moth Frenzy” from PEEL BACK THE SKIN.
“In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” required a lot of research because the story takes place almost entirely inside a cave system, and starting out, I knew very little about caves. The nicest comments I got were from a couple of people who were actual cavers. Both said they had to stop and take a break when they got to one particularly harrowing scene where the protagonist is trapped in a most unpleasant fashion; both guessed I must be a caver myself (no way!).
As far as “Moth Frenzy”, I discovered the term in a book on Navajo superstitions when I was researching another project. The term was used to explain an epileptic seizure; since epilepsy was not understood at the time, the frantic gyrations were thought to be the result of some type of sexual abuse, possibly incest. The story deals with sexual obsession, one of my favorite themes, since it seems to me lust is never more all-consuming than when its object is that which will kill us. (Which probably explains why I never wrote romanceJ).
SDK: Are there any exciting projects or works in progress that you’d like to talk about?
LT: Well, I’m thrilled that Ellen Datlow recently accepted my science fiction novelette “Sweetlings” for Tor.com.
I can’t say much about “Sweetlings” because it won’t be out until May 3 of next year, but it’s a post-apocalyptic novelette set on the east coast during a period when life on earth is heading down a new and potentially terrible evolutionary path. I did a lot of research for “Sweetlings”, everything from various forms of extinct sea life to the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
My story “He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life” will appear in David Barnett’s INTO THE HEART OF PAINFREAK anthology, edited by Gerard Houarnier and due out this fall.
And I’m delighted that The Overlook Connection Press will be reprinting THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES with illustrations by renowned horror artist Glenn Chadbourne. There’s a signed limited edition available as well as a great offer for those interested in buying the novel along with a copy of FATAL JOURNEYS.
As far as WIP, I’ve got a novel set in New Mexico in the works and a short story about a strange old man who walks the roads near Santa Fe and the wealthy builder whose “Turquoise House” has caught the walker’s eye.
SDK: Is there anything else you’d like to discuss before we wrap this up?
LT: I’d like to mention that anyone interested in learning more about my work can do so at www.lucytaylor.us.
Other than that, it’s been a pleasure, Shane. Thanks for the interview.
SDK: Thank you so much for talking with me today, Lucy. I look forward to reading more of your work soon.
Buy Lucy Taylor’s Bram Stoker award winning novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities
Buy Peel Back the Skin from Grey Matter Press
SDK: First off, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
LT: Well, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, a former Confederate capital with meticulous standards of gentility, decorum, and female subservience—in short, a hotbed of seething repression and nutty relatives shackled in the attic, metaphorically or otherwise. I was taught the two highest virtues are punctuality and impeccable grammar. Other stuff, not so much. My household of origin was full of material possessions, but lacking entirely in everything important: pleasure, love, humor, kindness, generosity, creativity, spirituality. Suffice it to say, ’More is never enough’ became my motto early on.
Since Richmond, I’ve lived in in Florida, Japan, (English-teaching in Tokyo), West Virginia, Colorado, and California, then three years ago settled down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I’d like to think is the last stop on the tour. I love New Mexico; it’s the physical expression of what I’d like to imagine my inner landscape to be—stark, spacious, exuberantly primal and wild. I feel like I’ve been looking for this place all my life. Kind of wish I’d found it sooner, in fact, but I wouldn’t have been content without that stop in California, because I wanted to live near the ocean.
What fills my life and nurtures my creativity are my animal companions (five Zen master cats), my lover Richard, and my activities as a longtime member of a 12-Step community that is particularly rich and close-knit here in Santa Fe. For all the wonderful people, places, and things in my world, I’d say what I find most gratifying about living here is the emptiness, the space. The sheer vastness of the skiy. I live on two acres, drink my coffee watching the birds in my yard and the resident gopher growing fat on my sunflower seeds because, as they say, ‘winter is coming’. I never foresaw this kind of life, but couldn’t ask for a better one.
SDK: When did you decide that you wanted to write fiction professionally?
LT: Actually by the age of five or six, before I learned how to write, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I worried a lot about death and apparently, the potential for creativity in the afterlife, and once asked my mother if there were “typewriters in heaven”? This, apparently, was a theological question that actually concerned me.
My maternal grandfather, who worked for the C&O Railroad, was a frustrated writer. He wrote short stories with an erotic bent that would be considered prim by today’s standards but were unacceptable in that era. So I was familiar with the concept of someone shut away in their room with a typewriter, making up stories. Then later, when I was ten or eleven, I started writing “books” on a typewriter I persuaded my mother to buy me. These books always featured animal protagonists and many of the human characters met ghastly ends, which pretty much summed up my priorities then and now.
I wish I could have kept those early efforts, but when I was fifteen, after some terrible things took place in my life, I didn’t think it was safe to have my fiction available where my mother could read it and perhaps use it as evidence of instability on my part, and I destroyed them all.
SDK: What made you choose horror as the main outlet for your creativity?
LT: I’m not sure I ‘chose’ horror. It’s what has always resonated with me, what calls to me and enchants me. For one thing, because of my early life, I constantly questioned my reality and the natures and true intentions of the people around me. I knew this could not be ‘all there was’. I knew what it felt like to be trapped with people who did not have your best interest at heart,, and I spent many years in a state of anxiety and fear, feeling like I had landed on an alien planet. So I knew a lot about demons and about fine-tuning the ability to present an acceptable self to others while guarding one’s true self from the world—or at least from those one knows are untrustworthy.
And horror writing is, after all, so very satisfying. As the writer, I’m in control, I get to decide who lives and who dies, who has a .357 hidden at the bottom of her handbag and what lies in the creepy casita out on Old Agua Fria. Writing (and reading) horror lets me explore my worst fears in a controlled atmosphere, to make a game of the things that might otherwise terrify me.
SDK: Is horror the only genre you write in?
LT: With a few exceptions, it is. In the early 2000’s, I wrote three mystery-suspense novels (NAILED, SAVING SOULS, and LEFT TO DIE) for Penguin-Putnam. The novels did all right and I don’t regret the experience, but what I learned was that above all, I’m a horror writer. That’s what I love, what I’m attracted to. Mystery-suspense was an interesting dalliance, but horror is the one I come home to.
SDK: Name some creative influences/inspirations.
LT: Well, of course, Clive Barker, Dan Simmons, Margaret Atwood, all of whom I admire tremendously, and there are so many others. Among them but by no means inclusive: Laird Barron, John Langan, Margo Lanagan, Gemma Files, Ray Garton, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Livia Llewellyn, Pat Cadigan, Angela Slatter…there are so many amazing horror and dark fantasy writers out there!
And, of course, there are those people who may not be writers, but who influence me simply by their presence in my life– they incarnate some aspect of a character I’m working with or a particular viewpoint on life, they embody some element of a story. Strangers, too, inspire: I’ve been given a theme or an opening line by a comment overheard on a train or a snippet of conversation in an elevator.
SDK: What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever been given?
LT: Honestly, if I’ve ever been given truly bad writing advice, perhaps I forgot it, because nothing comes to mind, but there is a ton of good writing advice that I wish I’d been given along the way. When I look back at work I did starting out, some of it still pleases me, but other things, it’s like, wow, this could have been so much better, or why didn’t somebody point such and such out to me before this ever saw print. And who knows? Maybe somebody did, and I didn’t listen.
SDK: If you could give one piece of advice to a fledgling author, what would it be?
LT: I’d say be clear on what it is you’re trying to do. What is your endgame? Are you writing this just for yourself or are you aiming to publish it and, if so, in what market? For what audience? I’ve run into people who have real writing talent, but very little idea or interest in the audience they’re trying to reach. They’re just shooting arrows sort of blindly, thinking they’ll hit something eventually, but that’s not usually how it works.
So I would say, know what your goal is, then read everything you can and try to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and why. Don’t be afraid of rejection. That’s part of the deal. And when you do get published, treasure—I mean truly treasure –the very best editors, the ones who will call you on every clumsy phrase, every not-quite-right word, every tiny incongruity of character or plotline. They are rare and they are invaluable.
SDK: You just returned from France recently and it’s obvious from your bio on your website that you have a passion for travel. Does that generate story ideas for you?
LT: It does, but perhaps less so in the details of a specific place than the way characters might adapt (or not) to a radically unfamiliar environment. Wandering and wanderlust intrigue me, as does that peculiar frisson of horror, awe, and excitement that comes from realizing you’re totally out of your element, surrounded by strangers, listening to languages that mean something to everyone else but are only so much birdsong to you. In alien surroundings, people take chances, become reckless, face or run away from challenges. It lays bare parts of the personality that might otherwise remain concealed, which makes for a lot of possibilities in fiction.
And just parenthetically, I was fortunate to have stories in each volume of the EXOTIC GOTHIC anthology series, edited by Danel Olson, where writers combined various aspects of the Gothic motif with exotic locales. The stories I did for EG, along with several previously unpublished stories, became the collection FATAL JOUNEYS.
SDK: In PEEL BACK THE SKIN from Grey Matter Press, your story ‘Moth Frenzy’ (which I would file in the “brilliant category) was set in New Mexico where you currently reside. Is New Mexico the setting for a lot of your stories?
LT: First of all, thanks so much for the kind words about “Moth Frenzy”. And yes, I do write about New Mexico quite a lot. It’s a wonderful setting for horror: stark, macabre, a seductive place with mysterious people. A friend who’s lived here twenty years told me he decided to move to New Mexico because “it’s the closest you can get to living in a foreign country while still being in the States.”
In addition to the stunning landscape, there are so many fascinating people here, ‘characters’ in themselves—Anglo transplants seeking to reinvent themselves, Native Americans with their rich culture and art, and gripping, often tragic, histories, the Hispanic community, some of whom trace their ancestry all the way back to Spain when their families received land grants to settle here.
In short, I would say New Mexico is a place where the outlandish is celebrated, the eccentric is embraced, and the lovers of extremes often find what they came for.
SDK: Is there a particular work of yours that you would recommend to new readers?
LT: Well, I’d love them to pick up a copy of PEEL BACK THE SKIN and read “Moth Frenzy” as well as all the other wonderful stories in that anthology. And I’d recommend my collection FATAL JOURNEYS, horror stories in exotic settings, from Kyoto to the Bahamas to Papua New Guinea. I might add that, since one of your questions was do I ever write outside the horror genre, the novelette “How Real Men Die” from FATAL JOURNEYS is pure erotica/suspense: three aging Detroit buddies off to have a last hoorah in Bangkok before one of them croaks.
SDK: I’ve only read short work by you up till now, you’ve written several novels as well, including a Bram Stoker winner. Talk some about your longer works.
LT: My best known novel is THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES, which won a Bram Stoker for Best First Novel. It’s a hardcore erotic fantasy, a graphic journey into a metaphorical land of sex addiction. The protagonist Val makes a harrowing journey into The City, a kind of hellscape where the most depraved individuals indulge their darkest appetites. The title speaks to the odd kind of solace I’ve always found in places completely alien and unfamiliar.
My other novels include DANCING WITH DEMONS and SPREE, both of which are heavy on the sex and violence. ETERNAL HEARTS is a vampire novel I did for White Wolf Publishing that includes lush, graphic illustrations by artist John Bolton, and as mentioned earlier, NAILED, SAVING SOULS, and LEFT TO DIE are mystery/suspense novels.
SDK: Do you prefer short form or long form fiction when it comes to writing?
LT: I think both forms have their advantages. I tend to have a lot of ideas spinning around at once, so often I find myself working on a new short story even when I’ve got a novel in the works. The longer forms, of course, allow for a more expansive storyline and multiple viewpoints, so the writer can develop a much deeper, richer fictional world. There’s a greater opportunity for complexity and experimentation.
A short story, not unlike a summer fling, offers instant gratification as well as characters that, unless brought back in some later work, pass quickly through one’s fictional universe.
SDK: This is like asking someone to name their favorite child but I’ll ask anyway. Do you have a personal favorite among your works?
LT: Sure, I think all writers do. At the moment, I’d say two of my favorites would be “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” (Tor.com, July 2015), and the story you mentioned earlier, “Moth Frenzy” from PEEL BACK THE SKIN.
“In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” required a lot of research because the story takes place almost entirely inside a cave system, and starting out, I knew very little about caves. The nicest comments I got were from a couple of people who were actual cavers. Both said they had to stop and take a break when they got to one particularly harrowing scene where the protagonist is trapped in a most unpleasant fashion; both guessed I must be a caver myself (no way!).
As far as “Moth Frenzy”, I discovered the term in a book on Navajo superstitions when I was researching another project. The term was used to explain an epileptic seizure; since epilepsy was not understood at the time, the frantic gyrations were thought to be the result of some type of sexual abuse, possibly incest. The story deals with sexual obsession, one of my favorite themes, since it seems to me lust is never more all-consuming than when its object is that which will kill us. (Which probably explains why I never wrote romanceJ).
SDK: Are there any exciting projects or works in progress that you’d like to talk about?
LT: Well, I’m thrilled that Ellen Datlow recently accepted my science fiction novelette “Sweetlings” for Tor.com.
I can’t say much about “Sweetlings” because it won’t be out until May 3 of next year, but it’s a post-apocalyptic novelette set on the east coast during a period when life on earth is heading down a new and potentially terrible evolutionary path. I did a lot of research for “Sweetlings”, everything from various forms of extinct sea life to the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
My story “He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life” will appear in David Barnett’s INTO THE HEART OF PAINFREAK anthology, edited by Gerard Houarnier and due out this fall.
And I’m delighted that The Overlook Connection Press will be reprinting THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES with illustrations by renowned horror artist Glenn Chadbourne. There’s a signed limited edition available as well as a great offer for those interested in buying the novel along with a copy of FATAL JOURNEYS.
As far as WIP, I’ve got a novel set in New Mexico in the works and a short story about a strange old man who walks the roads near Santa Fe and the wealthy builder whose “Turquoise House” has caught the walker’s eye.
SDK: Is there anything else you’d like to discuss before we wrap this up?
LT: I’d like to mention that anyone interested in learning more about my work can do so at www.lucytaylor.us.
Other than that, it’s been a pleasure, Shane. Thanks for the interview.
SDK: Thank you so much for talking with me today, Lucy. I look forward to reading more of your work soon.
Buy Lucy Taylor’s Bram Stoker award winning novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities
Buy Peel Back the Skin from Grey Matter Press
September 12, 2016
THE FISHERMAN by John Langan
A brilliant and mesmerizing novel by John Langan, THE FISHERMAN begins as a tale of two widowers and their attempts to come to terms with unimaginable grief. The narrator, Abe, lost his wife to cancer some years earlier; his friend Dan’s loss is more recent and, arguably, more brutal. Next to friendship, fishing is the greatest gift Abe has to offer Dan. In the search for new places to try their luck, Dan comes up with Dutchman’s Creek, which ominously enough, seems not to exist on any map and figures prominently in local lore.
Here Langan diverges from his original plot and goes into a lengthy, sometimes meandering story told by the owner of a diner where Dan and Abe stop on their way to Dutchman’s Creek; it’s a dark tale of sorcery and the fate of a man named Rainer and sets the background for what is to come.
With the history of Dutchman’s Creek established, Langan returns to Dan and Abe, their battle against the Fisherman, and the cosmic forces in league against them. Here Langan sweeps the reader into a mythic realm of monstrous sea creatures, surreal seascapes, and shapeshifters capable of changing from hideous denizens of the deep into that for which the men might sell their very souls.
Even with its fantastic imagery of a creek flowing through hell itself, THE FISHERMAN transcends genre. Above all, it remains a very human story of loss, friendship, and redemption that is sure to captivate a wide variety of readers.
Here Langan diverges from his original plot and goes into a lengthy, sometimes meandering story told by the owner of a diner where Dan and Abe stop on their way to Dutchman’s Creek; it’s a dark tale of sorcery and the fate of a man named Rainer and sets the background for what is to come.
With the history of Dutchman’s Creek established, Langan returns to Dan and Abe, their battle against the Fisherman, and the cosmic forces in league against them. Here Langan sweeps the reader into a mythic realm of monstrous sea creatures, surreal seascapes, and shapeshifters capable of changing from hideous denizens of the deep into that for which the men might sell their very souls.
Even with its fantastic imagery of a creek flowing through hell itself, THE FISHERMAN transcends genre. Above all, it remains a very human story of loss, friendship, and redemption that is sure to captivate a wide variety of readers.
August 24, 2016
THE NATURAL WAY OF THINGS by Charlotte Wood
Charlotte Wood’s new novel, a tale of brutal misogyny set in the Australian outback, is both rivetting and, at times, almost painfully intense. Ten young women are drugged, imprisoned, and forced to toil at backbreaking labor under the supervision of two men, one a not-too-bright yoga practitioner (when he isn’t playing at prison guard), the other a sadist obsessed with which of the women he’d rape should his mysterious ‘boss’ give him the go-ahead.
The reader soon learns that each of the captives has somehow transgressed the societal rules governing the proper conduct for women, especially in matters sexual. One slept with a priest, another took part in an orgy, yet another had the misfortune to be gangbanged. Wood focuses on two of the women, the brainy Verna, who tries to believe she is ‘different’ and that her lover Andrew will eventually rescue her, and the wily, physically powerful Yolanda, who knows full well no one coming to save her and, over time, returns to a feral state, hunting rabbits and dreaming of “pushing her sharp teeth through the soft belly flesh of a zebra”.
Wood’s writing is vivid and often lyrical, as when she describes a magical invasion of hundreds of kangaroos, who bound across the camp in ‘thumping syncopation” or a flock of cockatoos that resemble “white laundry on a line.” Even in scenes involving great suffering, both human and animal, her prose often captures a kind of transcendent beauty.
As powerful and disturbing as this novel is, however, I must admit I found the ending disappointing. The image of the women swooning over designer bags and lavish make-up products, items that were trophy possessions in their old lives, rang false to me. On the other hand, given the society in which we live, I can see how others might find Wood’s ending not only shocking but utterly satisfying.
Definitely a book that needs to be read and discussed by women and men alike.
The reader soon learns that each of the captives has somehow transgressed the societal rules governing the proper conduct for women, especially in matters sexual. One slept with a priest, another took part in an orgy, yet another had the misfortune to be gangbanged. Wood focuses on two of the women, the brainy Verna, who tries to believe she is ‘different’ and that her lover Andrew will eventually rescue her, and the wily, physically powerful Yolanda, who knows full well no one coming to save her and, over time, returns to a feral state, hunting rabbits and dreaming of “pushing her sharp teeth through the soft belly flesh of a zebra”.
Wood’s writing is vivid and often lyrical, as when she describes a magical invasion of hundreds of kangaroos, who bound across the camp in ‘thumping syncopation” or a flock of cockatoos that resemble “white laundry on a line.” Even in scenes involving great suffering, both human and animal, her prose often captures a kind of transcendent beauty.
As powerful and disturbing as this novel is, however, I must admit I found the ending disappointing. The image of the women swooning over designer bags and lavish make-up products, items that were trophy possessions in their old lives, rang false to me. On the other hand, given the society in which we live, I can see how others might find Wood’s ending not only shocking but utterly satisfying.
Definitely a book that needs to be read and discussed by women and men alike.
July 30, 2016
HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
HEX is the first of Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s five novels to be translated into English, a powerful and riveting tale of witchcraft and a town’s slow and ghastly descent into madness.
In 1664 Katherine van Wyler was forced to kill her own child and then sentenced to death for witchcraft in the Hudson Valley town of Black Spring – a crime the townspeople have been paying for ever since. Katherine’s ghost pops up everywhere, in the midst of a town festival, at the bedside of a child, in plain view on Main Street. She makes for a pathetic figure, bound in iron chains, her mouth and eyes sewn shut to prevent her from causing more havoc.
Yet havoc she does cause. Residents of Black Spring may leave the town for short durations, but for those that linger too long in the outside world, the urge for suicide becomes overpowering. You buy a house in Black Spring, as one newly arrived couple learns, you never get to leave.
Teenager Tyler Grant finds the limitations of life in Black Spring intolerable. He recruits some friends, including one budding sociopath, to help him post videos of the witch on the internet, thus violating Black Spring’s most powerful taboo – thou shalt not let the outside world know about the witch. What begins as little more than a prank unleashes an ever-widening circle of hell, one that sweeps Tyler and his family up in a horrific chain of events.
Heuvelt rewrote the Dutch version of HEX for an American audience, changing the setting to the Hudson Valley and, according to the author, writing a new and even more shocking ending. Whatever the language, it’s a chilling novel on many levels – from cruel seventeenth century customs to a harrowing and deeply disturbing vision of human nature.
In 1664 Katherine van Wyler was forced to kill her own child and then sentenced to death for witchcraft in the Hudson Valley town of Black Spring – a crime the townspeople have been paying for ever since. Katherine’s ghost pops up everywhere, in the midst of a town festival, at the bedside of a child, in plain view on Main Street. She makes for a pathetic figure, bound in iron chains, her mouth and eyes sewn shut to prevent her from causing more havoc.
Yet havoc she does cause. Residents of Black Spring may leave the town for short durations, but for those that linger too long in the outside world, the urge for suicide becomes overpowering. You buy a house in Black Spring, as one newly arrived couple learns, you never get to leave.
Teenager Tyler Grant finds the limitations of life in Black Spring intolerable. He recruits some friends, including one budding sociopath, to help him post videos of the witch on the internet, thus violating Black Spring’s most powerful taboo – thou shalt not let the outside world know about the witch. What begins as little more than a prank unleashes an ever-widening circle of hell, one that sweeps Tyler and his family up in a horrific chain of events.
Heuvelt rewrote the Dutch version of HEX for an American audience, changing the setting to the Hudson Valley and, according to the author, writing a new and even more shocking ending. Whatever the language, it’s a chilling novel on many levels – from cruel seventeenth century customs to a harrowing and deeply disturbing vision of human nature.
July 8, 2016
ODD MAN OUT by James Newman
There are many ways a novelist can write about the unraveling of civilized impulses, but for sheer horror, nothing rivals the LORD OF THE FLIES-style barbarism of the young and ‘innocent’, who we may naively imgaine have not yet attained their full capacity for sadism.
In James Newman’s riveting ODD MAN OUT, the degeneration into savagery takes place at the Black Mountain Camp for Boys, where Dennis Munce, the fifteen-year-old narrator, has been deposited by his globe-trotting parents. His one friend is the shy and effeminate Wesley Westmore, who becomes the target of relentless bullying. At first Munce tells himself the name-calling and crude homophobic jokes are not serious: after all “it was all in fun. Just words.” But as the abuse escalates, he’s torn between his own inherent decency and the urge for self-preservation.
With two camp counselors sidelined due to a car accident, the boys are basically unsupervised. Munce fantasizes about taking a heroic stand against the psychopathic pack leader, but when his own safety is on the line, the choice is clear: “Standing up to a bully in defense of a friend meant signing your own death warrant.”
Years after the week at Black Mountain Camp, Munce still struggles with what happened and tries in small ways to make up for his complicity in the tragedy. But can he ever really atone?
ODD MAN OUT is certainly a page-turner, but make no mistake: it’s not only engrossing, but deeply disturbing.
Read more …
In James Newman’s riveting ODD MAN OUT, the degeneration into savagery takes place at the Black Mountain Camp for Boys, where Dennis Munce, the fifteen-year-old narrator, has been deposited by his globe-trotting parents. His one friend is the shy and effeminate Wesley Westmore, who becomes the target of relentless bullying. At first Munce tells himself the name-calling and crude homophobic jokes are not serious: after all “it was all in fun. Just words.” But as the abuse escalates, he’s torn between his own inherent decency and the urge for self-preservation.
With two camp counselors sidelined due to a car accident, the boys are basically unsupervised. Munce fantasizes about taking a heroic stand against the psychopathic pack leader, but when his own safety is on the line, the choice is clear: “Standing up to a bully in defense of a friend meant signing your own death warrant.”
Years after the week at Black Mountain Camp, Munce still struggles with what happened and tries in small ways to make up for his complicity in the tragedy. But can he ever really atone?
ODD MAN OUT is certainly a page-turner, but make no mistake: it’s not only engrossing, but deeply disturbing.
Read more …
July 4, 2016
THE LIFE WE BURY by Allen Eskens
Is the same man who risked his life to save a friend during the Vietnam War also capable of raping and murdering a fourteen-year-old girl? Does one act of herosim make impossible the one of savagery? Or is character so fluid and personality so elastic that anyone may be capable of anything?
These are some of the questions college student Joe Talbert finds himself dealing with when he opts to fulfill an English assignment by interviewing and writing a biography about Carl Iverson, convicted murderer, now an old man dying of cancer in a nursing home. Joe’s burdens extend far beyond the academic ones: his alcoholic mother spins in and out of his life like a recurring car crash, leaving Joe to take care of his autistic brother Jeremy.
At first, much of Joe’s interest in Iverson lies in the fact that a pretty neighbor, Lila Nash, finds the case fascinating, but little by little, he comes to question Iverson’s guilt. With his mother in a downward spiral, Joe also has to decide just how much he’s willing to sacrifice for his brother. Eskens’ narrative is gripping, his characters endowed with all the frailities and contradictions of human nature. By the end, I found myself rooting for a happy outcome for both Joe and Jeremy, who despite his mental challenges, helps Joe and Lila uncode a diary that’s vital to Iverson’s case.
By the final chapters of the book, the plot twists ratchet up the suspense as Joe makes a harrowing escape from the clutches of a religious zealot and Lila faces an even deadlier threat from an unexpected source. The ending may strike some readers as a bit too ‘storybook’, but after everything Joe, Lila, and Jeremy have been through, I found it satisfying.
Although THE LIFE WE BURY was published in 2014, I discovered it only recently. Having read it, now I’m eager to begin reading Eskens’ other novels.
These are some of the questions college student Joe Talbert finds himself dealing with when he opts to fulfill an English assignment by interviewing and writing a biography about Carl Iverson, convicted murderer, now an old man dying of cancer in a nursing home. Joe’s burdens extend far beyond the academic ones: his alcoholic mother spins in and out of his life like a recurring car crash, leaving Joe to take care of his autistic brother Jeremy.
At first, much of Joe’s interest in Iverson lies in the fact that a pretty neighbor, Lila Nash, finds the case fascinating, but little by little, he comes to question Iverson’s guilt. With his mother in a downward spiral, Joe also has to decide just how much he’s willing to sacrifice for his brother. Eskens’ narrative is gripping, his characters endowed with all the frailities and contradictions of human nature. By the end, I found myself rooting for a happy outcome for both Joe and Jeremy, who despite his mental challenges, helps Joe and Lila uncode a diary that’s vital to Iverson’s case.
By the final chapters of the book, the plot twists ratchet up the suspense as Joe makes a harrowing escape from the clutches of a religious zealot and Lila faces an even deadlier threat from an unexpected source. The ending may strike some readers as a bit too ‘storybook’, but after everything Joe, Lila, and Jeremy have been through, I found it satisfying.
Although THE LIFE WE BURY was published in 2014, I discovered it only recently. Having read it, now I’m eager to begin reading Eskens’ other novels.
May 31, 2016
THE LURE OF DEVOURING LIGHT by Michael Griffin
Michael Griffin’s THE LURE OF DEVOURING LIGHT is the short story collection of an exceptional writer, whose evocative, lyrical tales are impossible to forget. Griffin’s work has been described as “quiet horror”, a subgenre of Weird Fiction. Considering that Griffin’s prose is both bold and often graphic, the description may be somewhat misleading.
Nature – seductive, tantalizing, and ultimately unknowable – is frequently the setting of these stories. In “Far From Streets”, city dwellers Dane and Carolyn seek renewal by spending weekends at a cabin Dane built by hand. Sinister omens abound – from the bird that beats itself to death trying to escape the newly finished cabin to the starving young man who seems to be keeping watch on them. In the middle of this daunting landscape, Dane and Carolyn become lost in more ways than one. As Griffin writes of the beleagered Dane, “Nothing had prepared him for the possibility of meanings deeper than office toil, with short breaks for television.”
In “Dreaming Awake In the Tree of the World”, the enigmatic Nomia appears to be a tree-dwelling nature sprite, a kinswoman perhaps to Rima in GREEN MANSIONS. She has rescued the ill-fated Tomas and nursed him back to health high in the treetops. But in Griffin’s work, reality is rarely what it seems. Is Tomas safe in the heart of lush, wild nature or is he facing something altogether different and more deadly?
In “The Accident of Survival”, a terrifying near-miss on the highway leaves two people badly shaken. As they continue to their destination, however, it becomes increasingly unclear who’s survived and who perhaps hasn’t, and how people “shaken loose from life” can struggle to reclaim reality.
Griffin’s prose sings, but his formidable power resides in his ability to make us doubt our own senses, his ability to explore the deeply unstable and shapeshifting nature of what we blithely consider ‘reality’.
Nature – seductive, tantalizing, and ultimately unknowable – is frequently the setting of these stories. In “Far From Streets”, city dwellers Dane and Carolyn seek renewal by spending weekends at a cabin Dane built by hand. Sinister omens abound – from the bird that beats itself to death trying to escape the newly finished cabin to the starving young man who seems to be keeping watch on them. In the middle of this daunting landscape, Dane and Carolyn become lost in more ways than one. As Griffin writes of the beleagered Dane, “Nothing had prepared him for the possibility of meanings deeper than office toil, with short breaks for television.”
In “Dreaming Awake In the Tree of the World”, the enigmatic Nomia appears to be a tree-dwelling nature sprite, a kinswoman perhaps to Rima in GREEN MANSIONS. She has rescued the ill-fated Tomas and nursed him back to health high in the treetops. But in Griffin’s work, reality is rarely what it seems. Is Tomas safe in the heart of lush, wild nature or is he facing something altogether different and more deadly?
In “The Accident of Survival”, a terrifying near-miss on the highway leaves two people badly shaken. As they continue to their destination, however, it becomes increasingly unclear who’s survived and who perhaps hasn’t, and how people “shaken loose from life” can struggle to reclaim reality.
Griffin’s prose sings, but his formidable power resides in his ability to make us doubt our own senses, his ability to explore the deeply unstable and shapeshifting nature of what we blithely consider ‘reality’.
May 28, 2016
THE VEGETARIAN by Han Kang
This remarkable, even mesmerizing, novel was first published in South Korea nearly a decade ago, where it became an international bestseller. Only recently has the book gained wide acclaim in this country, after being translated by British translator Deborah Smith.
While not horror in the traditional sense, THE VEGETARIAN contains plenty of surreal images and graphic, often disturbing violence and sex. Yeong-hye is a melancholy and submissive housewife whose bland life is upended when dreadful dreams of butchered animals drive her to throw out all the meat in the freezer and announce that she is henceforth vegetarian. This seemingly innocuous decision sends her rigidly traditional family into a tailspin.
Clearly the social mores of Yeong-hye’s world constrain females to a lesser status. Her authoritarian father, in a fit of rage, tries to force pork into her mouth. Tellingly, when Yeong-hye snatches up a knife, it’s not to fend off his brutish attack, but to slash her own wrists.
The book is told in three sections, the first narrated by Yeong-hye’s clueless and indifferent husband, the second by her smitten brother-in-law, the third by her sister, who struggles to save Yeong-hye and keep the family together. Yeong-hye’s own voice is seldom heard, as she retreats more deeply into a delusional world of silence and self-starvation.
Tube-fed in a psychiatric hospital, Yeong-hye fancies she can turn herself into a tree. As her frantic sister offers her one favorite food after another, each of which is rejected, Yeong-hye asks, “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
Why indeed? In one poignant passage, doubt is cast as to who is the prisoner and who isn’t, as Yeong-hye’s sister admits she is unable to forgive Yeong-hye for “soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.”
The reader is left with a haunting image of Yeong-hye, still clinging to life, being rushed to yet another hospital. Her bizarre obsession with becoming a tree has destroyed her body. Whether or not it has also freed her from something even worse appears to be still in question.
While not horror in the traditional sense, THE VEGETARIAN contains plenty of surreal images and graphic, often disturbing violence and sex. Yeong-hye is a melancholy and submissive housewife whose bland life is upended when dreadful dreams of butchered animals drive her to throw out all the meat in the freezer and announce that she is henceforth vegetarian. This seemingly innocuous decision sends her rigidly traditional family into a tailspin.
Clearly the social mores of Yeong-hye’s world constrain females to a lesser status. Her authoritarian father, in a fit of rage, tries to force pork into her mouth. Tellingly, when Yeong-hye snatches up a knife, it’s not to fend off his brutish attack, but to slash her own wrists.
The book is told in three sections, the first narrated by Yeong-hye’s clueless and indifferent husband, the second by her smitten brother-in-law, the third by her sister, who struggles to save Yeong-hye and keep the family together. Yeong-hye’s own voice is seldom heard, as she retreats more deeply into a delusional world of silence and self-starvation.
Tube-fed in a psychiatric hospital, Yeong-hye fancies she can turn herself into a tree. As her frantic sister offers her one favorite food after another, each of which is rejected, Yeong-hye asks, “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
Why indeed? In one poignant passage, doubt is cast as to who is the prisoner and who isn’t, as Yeong-hye’s sister admits she is unable to forgive Yeong-hye for “soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.”
The reader is left with a haunting image of Yeong-hye, still clinging to life, being rushed to yet another hospital. Her bizarre obsession with becoming a tree has destroyed her body. Whether or not it has also freed her from something even worse appears to be still in question.
