Friday, November 1, 2019

Positive review of 'The Plague Victim'

In what might be the first ever 'review' of my work (really a comment on a blog post) D.F. Lewis has some very kind words for my story 'The Plague Victim' in this year's Nightscript.

You can read read Lewis' thoughts on 'The Plague Victim', and all the other stories in Nightscript V, here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/nightscript-volume-v

Monday, September 30, 2019

Nightscript V is out!

My short story 'The Plague Victim' has been included in this year's volume of the annual literary horror anthology Nightscript, which is out now.


Nightscript V can be bought as an ebook or paperback here.


Friday, September 13, 2019

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Some Thoughts on 'Midsommar', 'Hereditary' and 'The Ritual' and Folk vs. Cosmic Horror

The most effective, and scariest, works of horror are those that are so 'clean' that they could just as easily be considered nonfiction as fiction. Those that seem like like nothing more than a window into our own world. Ari Aster has taken two somewhat different approaches in his two films 'Hereditary' and the recent 'Midsommar'. Some thoughts on these films, as well 'The Ritual'.

This is one large central craft choice in a work of horror that has a significant effect in its execution: whether or not to expose the supernatural or metaphysical aspect of the horror. In 'Hereditary' we get this pretty decent dose of the cult's practices and beliefs (something to the effect of "'Paymon' has been conjured by the grandmother who has passed his presence down through her lineage in order to get those in her coven benefits, like good familiars etc..."). It is a cool premise. In 'Midsommar' the metaphysics (if there are any) are a lot more impressionistic. Presumably the gods and forces have a  Scandinavian Pagan origin, but as they elders point out, their book of lore is always evolving, always growing, and are channeled through the 'unclouded mind' of the inbred savant Reuben. The reason behind the sacrifices is vaguely described as perpetuating the health of the community (maybe allowing nine more children to be born into the community(?)) but the mechanism here is kept obscure. There is sort of this cinematic parallel to what the viewer is afforded: in 'Hereditary' there is a scene where Annie opens one of her mother's books and flips through, getting a vague idea of the metaphysics of the cult (and the world) which provided the viewer with some insight, but in 'Midsommar' when Josh asks to read their book of lore, is provided entrance into their world and tries to plumb the mechanisms of their cult, the elder 'closes the book' and prevents Josh from reading it (and while he does take some pictures he - and we - never get to view them) and the metaphysics are closed off from us.

Granted Paymon is never shown in his true form in 'Hereditary' but there are enough little sparks flying around to ensure that the overt supernatural is meant to be considered an essential part of that world. Of course, too, the proximate comparison for 'Midsommar' is 'The Ritual' another recent Scendinavian folk horror film wherein the monster-god is clearly seen a half dozen times and the supernatural is clearly invoked. Inn 'Midsommar' we are primed a bit to expect something in that yellow house, something beyond the bounds of reality. But when everything is said and done any supernatural elements in 'Midsommar' can be foisted off onto the psychoactive herbs and mushrooms that are freely distributed to the attendees.

This is an interesting decision, and 'Midsommar' prevail and suffers in various ways because of it. The story of the Harga - its history, past and future - never feet fully fleshed out. We don't know if the commune is seeking some 'omega point' or if they just want to perpetuate their happy way. In some sense it is more ominous than the coven in 'Hereditary', it has a sort of 'Stepford Wives' forced utopianism about it. On the other hand it is far less menacing than this group that is actively moving to bring genuine agents of hell to earth.

As practitioners of supernatural horror, we generally have to make this choice. Revealing the supernatural is playing a strong card, one that cannot be unplayed. It has dual effects: we pull the reader further from this reality, which inevitably makes the story less believable (though not utterly so, if executed appropriately). The card must be played very judiciously. But then playing this card well can add so much depth to a story. By not playing it, by keeping things open, there is room provided for interpretation on the part of reader. There is a lot of arguing back and forth that can occur, and the option for greater depth in this way. What would have happened in 'Midsommar' if 'the source' had been revealed more fully? Would it have added more to the movie or detracted from it? Granted 'Midsommar' is more of an image driven film (not relative to 'Hereditary' which is deeply image drive, but just in general).

In an image driven work like 'Midsommar' overplayed metaphysics can detract from the work, in the sense that the images take primacy and a lot of backstory can get in the way of the elegant presentation of the images. Stated differently: the images and the metanarrative can compete for the reader's attention, and a strong set of images will, or may, be muted by a strong underlying structure.

'The Ritual' shows another, somewhat different take on this balance. The imagery is strong throughout the movie, having a sort of disconnected feeling at first, until near the end of the film where things congeal. The creature (described late in the film as 'a bastard child of Loki' who provides the rural group with eternal life in exchange for the sacrifice of outsiders) is only hinted at for much of the film but is then revealed, in full, in the last act where while pursuing the last living character. The film, in this case, seemed to suffer for it. While the monster is very cool - and pretty scary - by revealing its true nature, what it looks like and how it works, its lurking nature is replaced with a somewhat mundane explanation. It seems to to be bound by the confines of the remote forest in which it lives. In this case, the monster is 'bound'. It is not some cosmic entity that transcends the boundaries of the human mind, but one that is caught in the boundaries of human thought (inside the forest: unsafe; outside the forest: safe). This is not an uncommon trope folk horror, in fact it is sort of a hallmark of folk horror: when you are in the village you are bound by the village's rules, you are subject to the village's monsters, but outside the village you are freed from the village's traditions and can go about your way unharmed, unpursued. In Cosmic horror, almost by definition, you are never safe. The horrors are specifically unbound by human thought, because they are existentially outside of human thought, concerns and boundaries. A question arises: are folk horror and cosmic horror incompatible?

I loved this resonance in the endings of 'Midsommar' and 'Hereditary' this 'final room' with the bodies all blooming and rotten. The juxtaposition between the living and who we had thought were the dead, but are really the eternally living. Whether this is 'saying' anything or not is hard to decide, though it is a beautiful and horrifying image, the sort of thing that stick with the viewer long after the movie has ended. A dark alter. In 'Midsommar' the yellow house is burned down, the bodies (living and ritualized) are destroyed, or transmogrified into glory for the commune. It is a very folk horror ending, in line with 'The Wicker Man'. In 'Hereditary' the film ends on an ambiguous, or resonant note. Paymon is present in the treehouse with the cult and the bodies. Something new has come and the alter will persist even after the movie has ended. Its presence is present and inescapable. It is sort of a nod toward cosmic horror: the room is out there and it is also in us. It has planted its germ and it is only a matter of time before it spreads. We will never find the burned ashes of the yellow house in Halga: it has been tilled into the soil and it influence will stay there, the alter in the treehouse however is somewhere, and it is spreading. We may look for it and we may find it, but even if we try to hide from it, it is still there, somewhere, working its strange force.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

The Dystopian Strangeness of being suspended on Twitter

I abhor these kinds of things, at this point pretty much on principle. I don't want to be one of those people that brags about not having social media, but I came to a point in 2014 where I realized they were not worth the effort and deleted Facebook and Twitter and maybe one or two others. It was a good thing.

I 'successfully' had a twitter account for maybe six months in 2013. I followed a few writers, a lot of dumb weird twitter accounts (is weird twitter still a thing?) and had the pinnacle of my social media fame when I just tweeted something like 'My favorite radical feminist is Andrea Twerkin' and got four likes.

At this point twitter feels almost like an anachronism. Like something that should be in the history books as having lived its life and now out to pasture. But there are a lot of interesting writers who post updates exclusively on twitter so, a few months back, I semi-grudgingly attempted to create a new twitter account, for the express purpose of following writers and journals that I found.

The process, of course, was very easy. I got on and went on a bit of a spree, following these folks that seemed interested. Shortly afterwards I was asked for me phone number, to validate my identity. Sure, fine, I put it in, but since I was in the middle of rural Utah I didn't have any service and couldn't respond to the verification code.

Twitter, being near the very bottom of my life priorities, was forgotten for a few weeks until I had phone service to verify the code. When I opened the page there was a notification that my account was suspended. If I remember correctly, it didn't actually tell me until I tried to follow someone, at which point the little banner popped up in the bottom of the screen. Again, low priorities, I forgot about it and figured it would resolve itself.

Yesterday I tried it again, filed an appeal, explained the situation which, I figured, was common and innocent enough that it would be sorted out without issue. How naive. I was informed, shortly after, in a terse and stern e-mail that my account had repeat violations of Twitter's policies (I had not sent out a single tweet) and that I should not attempt another appeal or seek further information.

So I am locked in this strange place, where I can see my account, click around on the page but am unable to send out, or receive any information (all the account that I followed have been unfollowed). I even attempted to deactivate the account, just, you know, sadly place my tail between my legs and limp out the back door. But the beautiful thing is, when I went to deactivate the account I was told that this is not allowed, because my account is suspended.

This, I feel, is where the absurd arrives. Unable to actually do anything, even the one benign thing I had hoped to do: learn about what other writers were up to, I am forced to wallow in shame at some sort of altercation. I'm not indignant. Life will go swiftly on without Twitter. It is just a strange place to be, turned away and locked out for no apparent reason, and unable to discover why.

Friday, July 19, 2019

'The Sculptor' accepted for publication in Vastarien

A short story I wrote titled 'The Sculptor' has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the literary journal 'Vastarien'.

'The Sculptor' follows a journalist as he travels to interview a reclusive Sculptor whose work has a strange effect on those who view it. During their interview the Journalist realizes that the Sculptor has either gone totally insane, or is in contact with something much greater than he had originally realized.

The story is concerned with the power of art, the malignant deity and the meagre space that separates dream and reality.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Essay: The Proximity of Horror, and its therapeutic effect


There is a strange memory I have, the sort of memory that is so dreamlike in nature, yet so real in feeling, that I am not sure, after the intervening years, whether it actually happened or not. It's not uncommon to have these sort of things in our childhood, these memories that are likely either dreams, or so wildly distorted by mist of memory as to have taken on the tenor of a dream. But this event happened when I was eighteen, and I recollect it so well that I am almost positive that it happened.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Unpublished Story - The Detritus


[Over the past four years or so I have written a number of short stories. I submitted these stories to a magazines and literary journals but they were not accepted for publication. I figured I would put them up here.]

Edward had surrounded himself with the detritus of many ages. 
Not garbage but tools he did not know how to use yet. Old quiet cat cable and network switches. Fried display systems and half used packets of proprietary documentation stationary. In the bathroom, perched on the sink side: gallon jugs of laboratory calibration solution concentrate, long expired and off-color. Screw top vials, empty and clean. Cast off glass-headed vacuum tubes, chip boards and diodes. Notebooks and binders filled with sketches and observations. Hard-handed and cryptic ink. Obsolete, already transcribed and worthless. 

Unpublished Story - Wendy

[Over the past four years or so I have written a number of short stories. I submitted these stories to a magazines and literary journals but they were not accepted for publication. I figured I would put them up here.]


Nearing thirty, he found himself living a mundane and pointless life out in the forgotten expanse of the country. It was good, and he wasted his days reading and writing and not doing much at all. When he tried to remember how he had come out there, what decisions he had made that led him to that place, he had a vague recollection of escaping some strife, of trying to make a move for the better but these decisions seemed far off now and made by someone else entirely.

Monday, May 13, 2019

Insomnia 13 May 2019

Frequently I'll wake up in the middle of the night and lay in bed for an hour or two just thinking. I have heard this happens to old people a lot.

Mostly my thoughts are negative. This is probably not a good thing, to be stewing in your hatred in the dark like this for an extended period (or at all).

But it is sort of a bad and a good thing. Being all alone in the dark like that reminds you of the base state of life: inaction, solitude, emptiness. It is almost a religious state.

I hated it when this happened what I had a job: it meant I would wake up in the morning and still be exhausted but would have to go through all the motions of the day, push through the commute and work and small talk on reduced rest.

Now - when this insomnia happens - it is still offputting, but I can work with it.

I'll put down some of my thoughts here, thoughts that I had while in that state.

No claims that they are interesting. I figure it is sort of like looking through a kaleidoscope in an unlit room.


Sunday, April 14, 2019

A short Essay on Horror and the Environment


         The wilderness is undoubtedly a place of immense beauty. This beauty may be found easily in a bloom of wildflowers or by watching an eagle soar overhead, but it also comes in a more gripping and challenging form in that sense of grandness and awe generated in us when we experience it in a deep and untamed way. That sense of awe is ineluctably tinged with the edge of fear, with the sense of our utter insignificance and fragility. It is only natural then, that some of the great works of horror fiction take place in wilderness and bring to the fore that sense of fear, seminal works of Cosmic Horror like Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’, Jeff Vandermeer’s fantastic Southern Reach trilogy along with folk and environmental horror cinema like ‘Stalker’ , ’The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘The Ritual’. 

Generally the source of the horror in these works is one not just located in definable monsters or murderers, not just in creaking mansions or derelict asylums, but in the very land itself, in the gravitas of the landscape and the indefinable characteristics that it holds, in a simultaneous sense of emptiness and immanence, and the precarious place that we have among the landscape. Death does not loom so much as the feeling that, just underneath the surface, just over the next hill or lurking just beneath the water a terrible understanding may reveal itself. Another understanding occurs, one which is immediate and tangible: when we set foot in a place where no human structure may be seen, no easy convenience had, we see that our artifacts, from the buildings we inhabit to the languages we use, the societal rules we follow and the measures we use to mark time are feeble to the point of evanescence. To stumble across something as simple as an animal freshly deceased from no cause discernible to our eye provides inescapable evidence that our own rules and our own rule may end without cause at any moment. 

Over the past two decades the use of public lands in the US has skyrocketed. Hordes of giddy city dwellers have flocked to these places to to escape the suffocation of sedentary life, many of them ill-equipped and with little understanding of  those hazards to be found in the outdoors, even those common ones. As we sink ever further into the horror of the mundane we seek out these far places in order to find some escape and instead face the horror of the unknown, the horror of the immense and unthinkable. Some, confronted with the immensity of nature, retreat immediately to what they know: some cocoon themselves within massive air-conditioned RVs; others take endless nature selfies, confining their view to the four square inches of their smartphone screen. For those able to face nature head on the thrill of experiencing the wild is invigorating and life-giving but with this increased use has come an increased number of injuries, deaths and disappearances, some of which occur in circumstances so unaccountable that the supernatural seems the only possible source.
We are in the midst of an exiting and terrible time, where out concept of nature, as something to be revered, respected and - to the extent our meager efforts are capable - protected and restored, are rapidly evolving. Parks and educational centers at the edges of these wildernesses do a wonderful (and sorely under-praised) job at showing the public those aspects of nature which are easily digestible: the plants and animals, the geology and history. But the true heart of nature lies within and beyond these places. No park Ranger is going to attempt to teach a class of children about the thousands of acres of wild land that churn with terrible life beyond the edges of the interpretive trails, no pamphlet can contain the millions (or in some cases billions) of years of tumultuous and violent history that formed these places. Even most adults choose to pass through our public lands in the safety of their cars, not setting foot off of pavement, taking the same pictures as thousands of others, rather than walk a few yards into the park to see it up close and gain a true sense of what these lands hold. Gazing up at the stars at night can be a fun and educational pastime, until one understands (as Lovecraft did, and attempted to convey in his work) that the celestial dome we see is not some flat projection just beyond the edge of our precious air but a theater of such staggering depth that the mind reels when attempting to process it. 

Even the finest pictures and paintings of an unlimited desert plain, or a documentary film of a mountain ascent or benthic dive fail to capture the reality of these places. Factual accounts of wilderness and nature are of great importance, but the true heart of our relationship with nature exists in our symbolic and mythical conception of it. As our literal and existential distance to - and our correlating ‘recreational’ use of - these lands grow so will our need to process them, to analyze them, to make some sense of them. Fiction - the transcendent capabilities of the imagination and the words which spur it on - serves as an unusually efficient method to pass on that feeling of being stranded on a marshy island in the midst of a wind storm or among the world shattering crevasses of an antarctic sweep, to document and describe the ineffable qualities of nature, like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. As with all things that we fear and fail to grasp fully, the sense of horror - and the existing and potential methods we use to express horror - serve as among the most worthy tools we posses to process that ineffable part of nature. It is up to the brave, the ill-advised and the truly honest thinkers to step out into these places, to fully grasp their terror and awe, to step beyond the comforts of the cozy cabins and OHV tracks, and to return with some truths: that there is something out there and that it doesn’t give a damn what sort of fun we want to have on our long weekends, that as we push out further and further the bounds of our technological hubris we are playing under the nose of a sleeping deity who may awake at any moment and swat us like the flies we are, that the true heart of nature is not kind or cute or logical but acts on a set of rules we could never hope to comprehend. It is up to the myth makers of the present and future to, if not save humanity from the illogic and devastation of wilderness, as least offer a clear-eyed account and warning of its capabilities. Somewhere along the way we lost these useful myths and need new ones to fill their place.

Should the average person hold an irrational fear of a wide open or wild place? Should they be afraid to spend a night in the backcountry or (god forbid) drive a few miles to take a walk in their local state park because they read a horror story or saw some sensational account on the nightly news? Certainly not. But a healthy fear, that is: a genuine understanding of the true nature and depth of the wilderness and a respect of those qualities, is sorely lacking in many people who visit these places. Perhaps a more accurate sense of the horror and power of nature could serve to do the best thing we could possibly do: keep us at a respectable distance from it. We do not agitate that which might destroy us. We do not attempt to conquer or subdue that which we fear. A reverence and respect for something much greater, much older and much more powerful than not only the individual but the totality of the human race (and its artifices) could only serve to make these places better for us all and help avoid the sort of catastrophe that prevents us from visiting them forever.

Monday, March 4, 2019

EarthWorks Sounds: A series of field recordings of monumental land art in the US

I am currently working on a series of field recordings of monumental land art in the US.

This project will be ongoing for at least the next year but I will be uploading recordings as I make them which can be found as a sound map on Radio Aporee 

So if you ever wanted to who what it is like to lie in the middle of Robert Morris' 'Johnson Pit #30' (distant jet engines and car noise) or Michael Heizer's 'Levitated Mass' (cars honking and teenagers taking selfies) then you are in luck.

I originally conceived of this project as a way to structure visiting these works. It has (sadly) turned into a study of encroaching noise pollution and the loss of the serenity and solitude that many of these works once held. Nevertheless, as bad as the anthropogenic noise in these recordings is now, it will almost certainly get worse and worse as time goes on and hopefully these will serve as some sort of documentation of what these works are now.

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Short story 'The Plague Victim' forthcoming in Nightscript V

I'm excited to announce that a short story/novel excerpt of mine entitled 'The Plague Victim' will be published in Nightscript volume V.

Nightscript is an excellent annual anthology of original literary horror fiction produced by C.M. Muller. It is an honor to have my work included.

'The Plague Victim' follows an unnamed traveler as he confronts rumors of a macabre plague in a rural village and witnesses a fatality caused by it. 'The Plague Victim' is a stand alone excerpt from a novel length manuscript I have been working on for the last few years tentatively titled 'The Traveler'.

Nightscript V will be released this October in paperback and e-book formats. The previous volumes of 'Nightscript' are certainly worth checking out in the meantime.