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Friends,
Celebrating the release of my novel Hawk Mountain in paperback, I’ll be talking with creators of my favorite genre, HORROR. There are few genres that have inspired such a furor of regulation, stigma, and anger. Horror is regulated by governments, has been the topic of countless moralistic exams rations and moral panics, has been blamed for disintegrating societies, and more. Horror itself horrifies. And when horror does become accepted, at best it is said by critics to “transcend the genre.” Which means it’s really just transcending the stigma the critics have by re-asserting it. But who am I to talk about beleaguered horror? The fact is, it is also wildly popular. Even a terrible horror movie can be quite popular, and the most consistently bestselling author of all time is a horror writer. What does that mean? Across these episodes, I’ll be talking about horror in its many forms: cosmic horror, body horror, suburban horror, monster horror, possession horror, and more.
The first episode in the series was AEWCH 232, with cosmic horror writer and scholar Matt Cardin.
Partially inspired by the 1990 Horror Cafe on the BBC2 featuring Clive Barker, John Carpenter, Roger Corman, Lisa Tuttle, Ramsay Campbell, and Peter Atkins, we’ll be investigating deep questions about horror together, and seeing what unlit paths they lead us down. What is horror for? Why do we condemn it even as we flock to it? What is the horror-nature of being? What happens when the imagination explores the violence, the darkness, and the screaming in the inner landscape and when we conjure it into art?
You don‘t have to know much horror or even like horror to follow along with these episodes; each one will reveal a horror of life, of being human.
As a writer of the horrific myself, I wanted to talk with other writers about the inner navigation of wanting to explore and depict and share cruelty, fear, fantastic and upsetting violence. It’s not just that I wanted to talk about the moral navigation of these images – after all, those sorts of images and themes exist in the sacred scriptures that form much of our ideas of morality. I wanted to also talk about the impulse to move into those images, and the differing ways in which authors walk through that inner landscape and figure out what to share and what to leave behind.
Furthermore, how much of what we are depicting is reflective of reality – not just the darkly imagined versions of real-world violence and tragedy, but of the supernatural and the strange?
To talk about this, I asked two masters of the weird and of horror onto the show.
Sara Gran is the author of the horror classic, Come Closer and the erotic occult detective page turner, The Book of the Most Precious Substance.
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of one of the greatest collections of short horror fiction ever, North American Lake Monsters. His most recent book is The Strange, an adventure on Mars that does the remarkable work of balancing science fiction, mystery, Western, and horror.
Both Sara and Nathan write across genres and for multiple mediums – film, TV, audible stories, and of course novels and stories.
We talk about the pleasure of creating horror and of reading it. We also talk about the fact that horror fiction rarely actually scares us, as opposed to horror films – instead it upsets or disturbs us. But when it does frighten us, how does it work?
We talk about the dream logic of the supernatural, and how much of what we depict is reflective of reality – not just the darkly imagined versions of real-world violence and tragedy, but of the supernatural and the strange?
This is a deep and dark episode. I’m so excited to share it with you.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO?
In some ways the first episode in this series is really AEWCH 201, on the Spiritual Life of Horror. Horror offers spiritual insight and can be a doorway to spiritual growth. I hope you’ll listen to and find some meaning there.
WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
For an unrelenting horror novel that is not thought of, generally, as a horror novel, I suggest James Purdy’s masterpiece, Narrow Rooms. I read it in one sitting and cast it across the room when I finished, repulsed and so, so thrilled to have found it.
MORE ON NATHAN
Many of the stories in North American Lake Monsters were adapted for the Hulu series, Monsterland. He’s also the author of Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell which contains the story “The Visible Filth” that inspired the film, Wounds, starring Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson. Here’s Nathan’s website, which is a little out of date as of this post, but still has a lot of great stuff.
MORE ON SARA
Sara is a frequent guest on the show, and her most recent appearance was on AEWCH 200m part in conversation with myself and Una Mullally. You can now preorder a new (beautiful + scary cover!) edition of Come Closer. She has her own publishing company, Dreamland Books. And she is the write of the audio ghost story, Marigold: An Investigation of an American Haunting, read by Zoe Kazan. And she is perhaps best known for her weird detective series featuring the psychoanalytic-meets-magick investigator, Claire Dewitt.
Conner Habib 