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Friends,
When I was on my book tour for Hawk Mountain, I did an event with Andrea Lawlorwhere we spoke, at length, about horror. In the Q&A, someone raised a hand and asked:

“What is horror?”

Andrea and I both laughed. We found ourselves at a loss.

Horror :
Once you consider it, it’s not clear.
There’s the assumption that horror is scary. Sometimes that’s true. But obviously what’s scary for you might not be scary for me, and vice versa, so that can’t define the genre. We say horror has certain elements, but there are different kinds of horror to define its contours, whether it’s body horror, slasher horror, cosmic horror…
We might turn to the familiar face of horror – the monster – to see what they reveal to us. But while vampires, werewolves, zombies express, through their differing powers and weakness, different theories about horror, they can’t give us a picture of what it is really. They’re contained by it.

Horror: Always on, always available, always around us. So… what is it?

I asked my friends PHIL FORD and J.F. MARTEL – the cohosts of the WEIRD STUDIES PODCAST – onto the show to walk into the dark – or is it the blinding, malevolent light? – with me, and with you, to see what we would find there.

Weird Studies is, in my experience of it, anyway, a horror podcast. In fact, my last conversation with Phil and J.F. was on Weird Studies and about horror: on Weird Studies 144, we looked into Clive Barker’s Hellraiserand the book it’s based on, The Hellbound Heart.

But it’s not a horror podcast because it’s always focused on horror; many episodes are about topics and artworks that seem less than horrific (their series on each card in the major arcana of the tarot, for instance, or their episode on Herman Hesse’s novel about enlightenment, Siddhartha).

But there is a quality on each episode – a quality which we discuss in this conversation – of the threat of art, philosophy, image and sound. The way they invade our lives. Rearrange our organs Destroy the world we knew. 

In other words, we might think of horror as a position in time, something approaching or orbiting. Or as something creates shadows by blocking the light, or by creating a void where an object once was. 

You can hear me going in many directions again. Conversation with Phil and J.F. inspires that in me – being pulled in many directions at once. That’s another way of thinking of horror: horror as blob; as spreading epidemic, as destroying giant, vaster than the safety of our shelters.

This is what I love about talking with Phil and JF and about Weird Studies, and also why I often think of their podcast as the only true sibling to mine. In conversation with them, everything a springboard for everything. A web of connections. Or maybe better said, a transforming activity, everything metamorphosing into everything else through membranous, visceral, and expansive moves.

BOOKS AND OTHER ART MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE

• The King in Yellowby Robert W. Chambers
• If you want to feel responsible for the horror that’s happeing in a novel, read The Slutsby Dennis Cooper.
• Phil talks a bit about how The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritchby Philip K. Dick is a sort of disorientation horror.
• Whiteby Richard Dyer
• A great science fiction story that is also a truly fcked up horror story is “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, which you can find most readily in a newer collection of his works, Greatest Hits.
• Grateful that J.F. mentioned my novel, Hawk Mountain, as a horror novel!
• Helen Keller’s book on spiritual reality and Emmanuel Swedenborg is My Religion.
• Start wherever you like with H.P. Lovecraft, but the Penguin collections of stories are great. As a maybe starting place, here’s The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories.
• “Doll Hands” is found in Adam Nevill’s Some Will Not Sleep.
• Since Rudolf Otto comes up a bit, I’d say look into Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology
• Beauty and the Beastby Michael Taussig
• Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticismis one of the best books on esotericism ever written. It’s “anonymous” but we now know it’s by anthroposophist-turned-Catholic, Valentin Tomberg.
• Phil reads at length for David Foster Wallace’s contemporary classic, Infinite Jest.
• Janina Wellman appeared on AEWCH 266, and her two amazing books are Biological Motion: A History of Life and The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830.
• Here’s a playlist of different performances of Ave verum corpus by Mozart.
• If you haven’t seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Aliens, or the excellent Suspiriaremake, I’m not sure what you’re waiting for!
• Fassbinder is my favorite filmmaker, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul isn’t a bad place to start.
• Hereticis a fun, flawed, clever film
• This episode is the second in my epsiodes on horror this Halloween season. The first was with two other podcasters I love, Justin Decloux & Will Sloan of the IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB PODCAST. You can listen to it here.

MORE ON WEIRD STUDIES

• J.F.’s book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artificehas just been re-released, with an introduction by Donna Tartt (author of The Secret History)
• Aside from the episode of Weird Studies mentioned above, there’s been a lot of AEWCH/WS crossover.
  On Against Everyone with Conner Habib, the guys appeared on AEWCH 166 to talk at length about weirdness. And then they came back for a massive two-art conversation called “The Problem with Magic” on AEWCH 202 and AEWCH 203.
  On Weird Studies, I appeared for the first time on episode 107 to discuss Joy Williams’s excellent novel, Breaking and Entering.