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Eric J. Guignard has gone from a short story writer to an acclaimed and award-nominated novelist (for his first novel, 2019’s Doorways to the Deadeye) to an editor and small press publisher (Dark Moon Books). Eric oversees two book lines that offer insight into horror’s history: Exploring Dark Short Fiction, which provides primers to various writers; and the Horror Writers Association’s Haunted Library of Horror Classics (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger).
I think fans can expect everything I write will have the weariness, dread, and anger of living on the knife’s edge of a failing world paired with my silly devotion to empathy. The narrator of “Home” is a monster but one that breaks my heart as much as repulses me. Fans can expect a lot of that but (usually) with more jokes. I love horror though, so maybe reader excitement will encourage more utility knife murdering. One can never say for sure.
It’s time to let the women with the long wet hair in Asian cinema and their Western remakes rest. They’re tired. Now I’m not saying the ghost herself should disappear. I think we can all agree that the images are haunting and succeed in inducing fantastical visual scares. What I’m saying is that the Asian “revenge wraith” trope needs to be updated. Misogyny in Western horror films is nothing new, but there’s been such a dramatic and positive shift with the roles of the “Final Girl” it makes me a tad envious.
I like to think of this issue as a bit of first aid for the cabin-feverish soul. We’re pulling out all the stops on ultraviolence and creepiness for . . . The Killer Issue. In related news, we are also test-driving the addition of content warnings for all of our stories! While a content warning can feel like a bit of a spoiler, I also know that even the most hardcore horror lover can still have topics they need to protect themselves from. If we’re going to help all kinds of readers find their horror groove, then we need to do a better job making sure our readers feel welcomed and safe!
I’ve always been interested in stories that begin after the epilogue—stories that acknowledge that life goes on, past the big moment of narrative catharsis. A character’s just been through a huge adventure, had a bunch of trauma dumped on them, saved the day . . . and what happens next? I love seeing characters reckon with what they’ve just been through, so I try to be really intentional about where I position a story within the broader timeline of a character’s life.
My quarterly review column “Read This!” is being replaced by “de•crypt•ed,” a space where guest authors revisit favorite books to decode their personal interpretations for the benefit of other readers. The recipe is a flavorful, well-seasoned stew of analysis and homage, with a dash of memoir in any influence the work has had on the author’s own. For my farewell column and the debut of the new I want to share a notorious Russian novel I first read in the Michael Glenny translation: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
As I thought about what I was trying to say in this story, to make it more than just a transcription of a bad dream, it occurred to me it was really about the tension between belonging and unwelcomeness, the idea that someone who doesn’t even know you can project a feeling that you don’t deserve to be in the place you call home. How much of your identity are you willing to erase in order to escape that negativity? I’m the daughter of an immigrant, so that was definitely on my mind as I wrote this story.
Do the dead still matter? Years ago they did. Very much so. Especially in the horror genre. The dead—of the shambling, ambulatory, flesh-hungry variety—led the vanguard of the genre’s social commentary in George Romero’s horror films from the late 1960s through the mid-eighties. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead captured conscious and subconscious social tensions of their times better than many stories in any genre. Racial conflict. Anti-war sentiment. Consumer culture. Cold War dread.
Apparently after all the family-centered holidays in November and December, most people are sick of their families and ready to hang out with strangers. That’s not how we’re rolling here. After all that time stuck inside with our relatives, I know a lot of us need to decompress before we can be expected to function properly again. So I’ve collected a handful of works about family—not the families we choose, but the families we’re stuck with—to ease us back into ourselves.
While I may not be a mother, there were other elements of the narrator I could resonate with in order to access her voice. In many ways, she represents qualities in myself that I’m uncomfortable with, pushed to an extreme. One of those is the instinctive voyeuristic streak that I think we all have as humans—the desire to experience someone else’s life, to know their secret business. It’s what draws us to fiction, to gossip, to pornography. What makes the story compelling is our urge to see more of the narrator’s shameful secret.
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