How did you come up with the concept of this story? The almost parasitic nature of the God of the Black Moon is very well portrayed.
This story came together in pieces during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first piece, and the real genesis of “God of the Black Moon,” came from a story I heard about a friend of a friend screening the experimental short horror film Begotten for a group of people who didn’t really know what they were in for. I thought forcing unsuspecting people to watch Begotten was funny (it’s not exactly a crowd-pleaser), but I also felt like something uncanny or strange could be pulled out of this concept, and I began to toy around with the idea of an infectious horror movie that spreads by word of mouth as a kind of urban legend.
The parasitic nature of the God of the Black Moon was drawn from a pessimistic thought experiment I was exploring at the time. The idea was a version of what we see in the story: romantic love as a kind of cosmic pyramid scheme intended to propagate human consciousness, all for the benefit of some unseen eldritch being. At the time of writing this story, I was thinking a lot about the emotional cost of sharing your life and experiences with another person, and the degree of stickiness that romantic relationships carry, so the God of the Black Moon’s parasitic quality was a way to investigate that idea while sort of turning it on its head and injecting it with an otherworldly, horrific quality. I hoped that using this idea as the narrative through-line would give this story a different emotional/tonal register than most expressions of weird fiction or horror.
The scene with the bearded man splitting the stomach of the female figure in the field was unique and equal parts beautiful and horrifying. Where do you draw inspiration from as you craft this imagery?
This was the hardest scene in the story for me to write, and I played around with several ways of portraying what the VHS tape actually contained. And while this might be an unsatisfying answer, most of the images in this sequence were pulled from my subconscious. I tried to let that scene unfold like a dream, and in writing it, attempted to get out of my own way, allowing the lower part of my mind to do most of the heavy lifting. With that said though, there are images from the video game Bloodborne that have been stuck in the back of my head since 2015, and readers who have played that game might notice some references in “God of the Black Moon” and the scene specifically.
Do the doorways have a metaphorical meaning to you? A meaning beyond the fiction that we should be taking with us as readers?
Some of my favorite writers of weird fiction and horror often explore the boundaries or thresholds between our world and what’s beyond it, be that the afterlife or something even stranger. Writers like Robert Aickman, Kelly Link, and Brian Evenson use both explicit and implicit thresholds that characters sometimes knowingly cross and other times cross without realizing. I love this concept, the permeability of the boundary between worlds—stumbling into something completely alien—so I think doorways were my way of injecting that idea into this story.
“God of the Black Moon” has a unique setting where it feels like the “dream”/VHS tape is the real setting and the characters move through other locations as a means of ending up there. When you mix in that with the unique relationship between the characters and the God of the Black Moon, it makes for a well-crafted piece of fiction. What is your writing process like? How do you go about stringing everything together?
My writing process usually involves the initial spark of inspiration followed by months or even years of rumination. I like to have the major signpost of a story solidified in my mind before the writing even begins. Then, as I write the rough draft, my mind tends to work ahead on its own, and I write down images and lines I think might work later in the story at the bottom of the document. This eventually forms a loose outline I’ll refer to as the draft progresses.
One of my favorite parts of the editing process is the tying together of the subterranean thematic elements that rise to the surface during the drafting process. Images or ideas will pop up in the text without prompting or intention, and then I see if they can be integrated into the story’s aesthetic framework or if they need to be disregarded. That to me is the “stringing together” of the story, and one of the most important aspects of making a narrative feel unified and thematically resonant. In this story for example, the religious imagery and the various references to ’80s horror movies arose organically throughout the writing process and eventually became foundational to the story’s larger themes.
What is next for you? Any future projects we, as readers, can look forward to seeing from you?
I’ve recently finished a cosmic horror weird western novelette that I’m trying to find a home for. It takes place shortly after the end of the Civil War in a world where the first explorers to map the Colorado River discovered a passageway to a parallel world. The story follows an expedition into this parallel territory and, as you might guess, the expedition’s run-ins with the strange things that call that territory home.
I have a few other pieces of weird fiction in the works as well and hope to have a collection finished in the near future.
