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We firmly believe that dark fiction is a bulwark against the forces of the world eager to reduce our human experience to dollars and cents. Horror, dark fantasy, and all kinds of weird and bizarre literature is powerful nutrition for the creative soul.
I think there’s definitely something to the cyclical nature of trope and subversion within storytelling, whether it’s in horror, comedy, romance, or any other genre. The saying goes that there are no new stories under the sun, but there’s always a new way to tell them.
No, Adam-Troy Castro doesn’t recommend Primate. But he loved one particular performance in the film that he thinks you ought to check out. He also talks about some recent reads—so check out his book discussion, too.
The writing of the story is an exercise in scaring myself.
I can pinpoint one of my earliest moments of existential unease. I was nine years old and, defying my religiously conservative parents, snuck into the local movie theater to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I didn’t understand the social politics of the movie at the time, and while faintly aroused by Jessica Rabbit I remained thoroughly confused by the idea of bestial human/toon marriage.
As violence, corporate greed, and international tension rise, we are all asking: What’s really going on beneath the surface of our society? Are we really as safe as we have been led to believe? And holy crap, how f*cked up is everything, really?
I’ve always been interested in the idea of the absurd and doomed endeavor. A useless task undertaken on faith, perhaps, or even just lack of imagination or options is fascinating to me. These are also dramatically interesting situations to put people in and see how they react. Here, as I wrote Bailey and found a counterpoint in Heck, the kind of energy it would take for her specifically to persevere began to emerge.
Throughout its history, horror literature has frequently mediated its eponymous affect through an obsession with the act of writing. The field is replete with writer protagonists, with depictions of the writing act (through epistolary framing devices and metatextuality), and with written objects.
The narrator is driven to pursue her passion, but often our passions and the mundane need to make a living refuse to align. The termite lab is a space for dreams just fallen short. It’s close to the mark but still misses the heart.
Southern Gothic lingers impolitely in doorways. Forget theme; the genre itself is liminal, slouching somewhere between literary fiction and the h-word: lauded and discarded, high-brow and tawdry, praised and shamed. Tell about the South, right? But for all its liminality, Southern Gothic seems obsessed with physical location.
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