I really enjoyed the use of “The Idiot” as your mechanism for the end of the world. Your portrayal of this entity (creature? demigod? space jelly?) does well to elicit a number of different thematic lenses through which readers can experience the story. First, we can view The Idiot as derived from the original Greek roots of the phrase meaning essentially “private” or “private citizen,” a term which later became associated with stupidity due to a perceived surrendering of political rights in democratic Athenian society. It certainly acts in this fashion, as it literally only eats, digests, secretes, and creates a microcosm of human reactivity to disaster in showing the behavior of the Morris County citizens beneath its shadow. In many ways, they seem resigned to surrender, to worship, or simply hope to wait out the looming shadow of The Idiot, just as many people who feel disempowered by modern events seem to be.
Alternatively, the word choice certainly comes with a modern interpretation of these looming socio-political forces who overshadow humanity through their short-sighted desire to consume and destroy. Their utter concern with “profits at all costs” are literally destroying the world, floating them above the chaos on a warm current of endless money, and leaving the normal citizens of the world to pick up the pieces and fight for the scraps back on land. Did you intend for either of these readings? A combination of both? Something far smarter than I was capable of picking up on? Or do you truly believe that every story can and should be interpreted in myriad ways through infinite lenses and therefore, choose not write with such intentions?
There is probably both less and more to the Idiot than it seems. This story began with the first few words—“The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky”—because I just liked the sound of it. Sometimes I start with something that sounds nice and build a story out from that. The Idiot at that stage was probably derived from Lovecraft’s Azathoth aka The Blind Idiot God, which sparked the idea of an uncaring, inactive but inescapable cosmic horror looming in the sky. But really it was the nice choppy sound of “idiot” followed by the swooning “loom” and “tumorous moon.”
As I wrote it, though, the Idiot became something more and less symbolic than any original conception. To me, when writing “weird” fiction, it’s important not to lock it into any one particular meaning or metaphor. I think that when readers approach a story as a “puzzle box” with a message inside, they focus on solving it rather than experiencing it. Once they find the “answer” they tend to discard the story rather than pondering it over further and judge it based solely on if they agreed with or didn’t agree with that answer.
So yeah. The Idiot could be any of the overwhelming external forces that one might live under. It could be Covid, or the Trump presidency, or living with depression, or systemic inequality, or capitalism, or generative AI, or (m)any other things. This is why the way that people cope in the story are not all in tune with any one of those possibilities—they don’t all react as if it were a disease, a political situation, a god, etc. but each have to sort of choose their own (sometimes contradictory) approach . . . none of which work entirely. There’s no wrong answer, but there’s also no right answer.
In the past, I’ve had workshop partners tell me that other stories of mine had speculative elements that were doing too much—they seemed to mix too many metaphors or it wasn’t clear what real world issues they symbolically represented. And, coward that I was, at the time I pared them back into simpler and less interesting things. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve become more certain that in horror and weird fiction a 1:1 representation is neither necessary nor even necessarily desirable.
As to how this fits into my view overall, after writing this story, I began reading more of the late author Joel Lane. His work is bleak, transgressive, and very weird, but his story “The Lost District” really helped me to clarify and articulate an idea that I’d been chewing over, which is that weird horror works best under the approach of “either/and.” The elements that don’t quite line up, that can be both and neither at the same time, these are what I think are worth grappling with as writerings and readers.
All of which is to say that the Idiot had a very boring beginning because it sounded nice, but as I applied my own thoughts of craft and the “weird,” meanings were both added in and stripped out to leave it intentionally an “either/and” entity.
In all your work, you have a knack for capturing the essence of the “small-town hero” even while address the inherent issues and discrepancies in rural communities of folk-horror narratives. You could call these types of characters “everyman” but I find that to be a misleading term, as writing a believable, “every day” character is much more difficult that it seems, especially when embracing cosmic and new-weird horror as you do in this story. What are some keys you’ve found to writing believable and relatable “everyman” characters like Bailey and Heck against the backdrop of otherworldly, apocalyptic, and utterly bizarre backdrops?
The characters I like to write are generally those who are not necessarily special people but find themselves in special circumstances. I think it’s often more interesting for me as both reader and writer to explore how the average person reacts to the intrusion of the unreal than it is to focus on overtly heroic or villainous individuals.
As to the way I write them, there are two things I try to keep in mind: specificity and dignity. Specificity is a craft technique—the balancing act of giving a character enough details in behaviors, relationships, quirks, etc. so that they come to life but also not giving them so many that they become unwieldy. These touches makes them identifiable, but as I give someone a specific trait, it also creates anchor points for the reader to start to fill in a back story. For example, Bailey thinks of Heck’s appearance as Yul Brenner in Turner Classic movies she watched with Gram-Gram—these details are just in that sentence and never elaborated on, but from that a reader can begin to feel the weight of Bailey’s life in the margins. Maybe we see her sitting on the couch with Gram-Gram and maybe we can get a sense of the relationship they had for that to be the affectionate name, what it means about the other adults in her life. Maybe we can start to feel a sense of what it must have been like to be raised on these particular movies as models of duty and honor that were already outdated (but not necessarily without their charm) and if or why they’ve sort of stuck with her. The reader hopefully feels the significance of those details and then contributes their own experience . . . or at least just feels like there’s more to Bailey than what’s here on the page. Most importantly, all of the potential backstory(ies) that the reader creates comes from just a few specific details, not a whole info dump.
The other key is dignity. When writing horror or weird fiction, there can sometimes be a tendency to fall into uncritical cliché, grotesquerie, or even absurdity. I think often, however, of an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the creative director to the Dark Souls games, where he discusses how important dignity is to the worlds he creates, even though they are steeped in horror. Specifically with regard to the design of the Undead Dragon, one of the artists recalls Miyazaki giving back the artist’s first attempted design of a dragon swarming with maggots and saying: “This isn’t dignified. Don’t rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon. Can’t you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?” To a greater or lesser degree, I think we are all magnificent beasts doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin, and so I want to find that spark of dignity in my characters, too, to make them richer.
This story rings as a powerful and topical message to the creative industry and to all creatives out there who are, no doubt, struggling to maintain control of their own motivation and hope in the ever-changing landscape of the modern world. Bailey’s steadfast determination to keep moving forward, to keep living, to keep saving innocent puppies is inspiring, even amongst the most bleak of settings one could hope to find themselves in. Do you set out with the intention to spread any certain message with this story and if so, what would that message do you hope readers will take away?
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. The idea that small things are important even when the big things are out of control is one way of dealing with things and the one that makes sense for her, as a “small” person confronting a “big” absurdity. That said, while Bailey’s approach seems, on balance, a decent one, her actions may not necessarily be entirely altruistic or noble. She may be as stubborn and self-deceptive as Heck, just in a different way. Her coping method is different, though, and both are worth examining.
Ultimately, I don’t want it to come across as me—the author—telling the reader how they to get through life. I’ve tried to put forward several different approaches or views for the reader to consider and, while one of them makes sense for Bailey, I’d hope for it to be open to consideration.
Do you believe it would be almost preferable or at least more unifying for some incomprehensible force to be the downfall of humanity, instead of humanity itself? If, instead of being destroyed by the greed of our own species, we were instead powerless to stop some malevolent demigod, we’d actually have substantially more unity on the issue? Or would such an occurrence be just as divisive as AI, politics, etc. and we’d still all form our sides and kill each other? I can take a guess, based on your portrayal of Morris County, but I’d love to hear your definitive beliefs on the question.
I’m not sure there is much of a practical difference. I lean towards the idea that external pressures merely reveal what’s already inside people, either by forcing it to the surface or providing them license to unleash it themselves. In this story, there are people who try to help each other, people who persevere out of a sense of duty, people who can’t cope, people who try to hurt others, etc. I think that all these behaviors are already there, bubbling out into everyday life, they just become more heightened and dramatized when there’s a big exterior force that draws them out.
That’s not to say, however, that I think humanity is inherently divided or violent or unsalvageable. I think that the current world we live in is the result of a long history of explicit and implicit exploitation by the ruling classes, but these are not immutable characteristics hardwired into humanity. Dignity isn’t an aberration. The stories I write are generally set in our world but facing an intrusion of the horrific or the weird, so my negative depictions of people’s responses are more reflections on how I think social structures have failed but not necessarily that humans are naturally doomed. Our current system (at large), is garbage in, garbage out, but as individuals or smaller groups, maybe we stand a chance.
At one point in this story there is an image of a chihuahua riding a pitbull, is this a shoutout to your beloved dog that is often seen perching upon your shoulder in author photos?
It is! And there are two reasons for it: First, I think that it helps in creating and maintaining an odd, off-kilter atmosphere to have bits and pieces that feel like part of something bigger but which don’t get explored or explained in the text. This little dog riding another dog like a jockey must have a story behind it, but it comes in from that one, intrudes on this one, and then disappears, leaving the reader to wonder about it and hinting at a strange world beyond the mere words on the page.
Secondly, one must find joy in the process somehow and what better way than giving your dog a cameo?
