Thank you for such a wonderful story—I found myself completely lost in this world from start to finish. You used such amazing imagery, and just the right details to evoke a world I knew, and yet one which is so incredibly alien at the same time. How did you know when you had just the right image for this particular story? Were there any descriptions or images which really stood out for you?
Thank you! It was somewhat easier than I made it look, because I’ve been lost in this world myself.
Some stories come as a cool idea about something awful happening to someone else, and some are an instinctive scream of genuine pain and an attempt to make sense of broken life. This one found me a castaway at the end of the pandemic in a weird backwater in San Diego that feels like a displaced piece of Oklahoma. You remember that one jackass at the lockdown’s outset who wore a Klan mask to a grocery store? That’s my town. But amid this sad fetishization of mythic frontier bullshit, I saw a desperate straining to create meaning when the world had left them behind, and found kinship with them if only because my own life had traced a similar arc in trying to keep up this paper-thin shell of a writer’s life in the face of unfailing failure.
Like that irascible kook in the KKK hood, anything that felt like an atavistic response to unprecedented adversity, both a feral cry for attention and an angry rejection of same, immediately leapt into the limelight. For me, the one that jumps out the most (after “wildcat paramedics” and “hair harvest”) was the CV of Nimrod, the prize bull that neutered his teenage owner. The insidious tendency to shunt our natural imperatives into things that mask our real or perceived impotence comes together for me in that image, but it’s all a shameful parade . . .
“Queen of the Rodeo” has something of a “folk horror” feel to it, though it definitely takes it to the next level. It’s visceral, snarling, and I never felt that there were flutes playing in the background or ancient spirits dancing between the trees! It has a newness within the “old ways,” which feels very American to a non-American like me. This made it even more vivid and fascinating. I’d love to hear more about some of the stories behind the elements within the story.
Americans love to think they reinvent everything they touch, which gives us license to make the same universal mistakes. But we do add a uniquely belligerent gusto to our observances that feels like misplaced pagan bloodlust, mistaken for patriotism.
Looking at our local rodeo weekend through a Golden Bough lens, I saw a host of modern nods to ancient, unfulfilled urges, and worked to line them up to delineate a nascent, stillborn religion.
The daughter of a very good old friend was selected as our queen some years back and has remained in this shadowy ad hoc group that does lots of charity and civic celebratory work. In this liminal town with no mayor or police force, they are the “they” who move the hands on the clock when God can’t be bothered. But the queen is followed in the parade by a junior queen, a junior-junior queen, and a gaggle of sacralized toddlers in tiaras, which evokes both the slimy sublimation of purity balls and the objectification of people as produce or livestock that actually feels utopian in The Wicker Man, compared to this.
The writing itself also had such a relentless rhythm, and it didn’t let up at all, which was great. I was so thoroughly drawn in. It reads like a thriller, but with a fractured jazz beat. Could you give us a little insight into how you kept the pace going so strong, and how you combined the elements of the grotesque with a little comedy at times?
For as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve struggled to winnow down the flab and frippery to get to the marrow of the story, seeking an ideal that feels like a message in a bottle, on fire with the urgency of someone trapped inside a story, and not some disinterested, lazily omniscient narrator.
In the past, I’ve had to create this effect artificially, by paring away a lot of what it takes to get through a first draft; but this one was a rare case where the story comes out lean and mean in (almost) a single session.
And I did try to accentuate the absurdity of it, because faced with the unspeakable, sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll go insane . . . But balancing comic beats with horror is a delicate ordeal of seasoning that I won’t live long enough to figure out.
Thank you for such a great read, Cody, I’m definitely going to be re-reading this one a few times. I’m pretty sure I’ll discover little details I’ve missed on the first, second, and third readings! Where can we find other work from you? What are some things you are working on right now that we may well see in the near future?
I deeply appreciate the attention you gave it. My most recent work that might appeal to those who dug this one is a novelette called “The Secret Eater” (in Psychoactive: Transformative Horror Novellas), out currently from Crystal Lake. My next novel, New Tomorrow, an alternate history epic where pulp-era vigilantes must become terrorists to save Depression-era America from Dieselpunk tech-bros, comes out from Oddness Press this fall.
