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Friends,
I’m so excited to share this episode about horror, free will, and compassion with novelist Paul Tremblay
Paul is the author of multiple bestselling horror novels – including The Cabin at the End of the World and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock which are my two favorites – two hardboiled detective novels, and a whole lot of short stories.
ON THIS EPISODE
- Horror as a balance between free will and determinism
- Horror as the withdrawal of love
- The dreaded return to sociability
- Kitchen table horror versus Irish Midlands horror
- Slasher vs supernatural horror
- Books that stand on the precipice of the supernatural
- Does Paul believe in ghosts?
- “What if there’s a God/Reader/Writer and he’s an asshole?”
- The book you write has to be beyond you
- The unreality of facts
- Respecting violence in fiction and why bad art is worse than the content it portrays
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Paul, go to his website. Here’s a good interview with Paul at Gridmark Magazine, and another one in legendary horror magazine Cemetery Dance.
• One of my favorite episode of the show is AEWCH 93 with Sara Maria Griffin (and also, I was on Sara’s podcast, Juvenalia, talking about Clive Barker). And here are a few other horror-themed episodes of AEWCH: AEWCH 23 on postmodern horror with Brian Evenson, AEWCH 40 about horror and poetry with Zachary Schomburg, AEWCH 44 on the vampire as a theory with Kelly Link and Jordy Rosenberg, and AEWCH 58 on horror films with screenwriter (of The Invitation and Destroyer, among other things) Phil Hay.
• Paul and I both love Sara Gran’s absolutely scary novel of possession, Come Closer. And Sara was on AEWCH 61, talking Lacan and detective novels. It’s one of my favorite episodes.
• Paul mentions using George Saunders’s book on writing, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. That said, the best writing book out there, I think, is a bit of a best-kept-secret thing. It’s Stuart Spencer’s The Playwright’s Guidebook.
• The (fun!) cellphone horror novel is Ghoster by Jason Arnopp.
• Weird Studies is one of the best podcasts around. Listen to it. The great quote from the cohost, JF Martel, is “The hope is that (art) saves us in reality by damming us in art.”
• “The Eighth Episode of Twin Peaks: The Return Is Horrifyingly Beautiful“
• Lake Mungo is a great horror movie. Here’s the trailer.
Until next time friends, hold each other close in the dark,
CH
(oh, and stop tormenting Grover)
Conner Habib 
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