Editorial
Editorial, September 2015
Be sure to read the Editorial for all our news and updates, as well as a run-down of this month’s content.
Be sure to read the Editorial for all our news and updates, as well as a run-down of this month’s content.
I wanted to write about a particular time and place, but in a short story you don’t have space to actually explain the history and if it’s not one of the handful of historical contexts you can generally expect a broad anglophone readership to be familiar with, then you might as well write it as an SFnal secondary-world fantasy. So I did.
Most people never expected me to go back to Pinhead in literary form; the expectation was that I would go back to him in a movie. That never felt right to me. Pinhead is a rather literary figure. He speaks with a Shakespearean cadence, so I wanted to make sure that was in the performance, if you will, of his farewell, and I couldn’t do that on a movie screen.
“Qi Sport” is set in the same world as my novel VERMILION, and shares a character — Lou Merriwether. Lou’s a professional psychopomp, which is rather like being a Ghost Buster, in that she escorts, or compels in some cases, lingering undead to leave our world and move into the afterlife. She deals with ghosts and shades, and also geung si, which are a Chinese monster sort of somewhere in between a vampire and a zombie.
Carlos Fabián Villa is a professional artist living in Mexico. His work can be found at antiherobrush.com and zano.deviantart.com. First off I’d like to ask you a question in the spirit of Nightmare: What scares you the most? My biggest nightmare — and the most boring answer I can give you — is of course waking up […]
I don’t think that I, personally, am very susceptible to haunting. I love mysteries — I’ll devour any online article titled “Five Weird Unsolved Mysteries!” or “Ten Events Science Can’t Explain!” — but while that kind of thing creeps the hell out of me in the moment, it doesn’t stick with me for long. Having said that, the two “real-life ghost stories” that I have are both included in “And This is the Song it Sings.” I’ll leave it to readers to guess which they are.
Have you heard of the Black Death? I’d be willing to wager that you have, since it’s taught as a major part of European history, and European history is one of those subjects that’s virtually impossible to avoid (although the Black Death did enormous amounts of damage in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Europe; this was not a disease which respected borders). Most people know it as another name for the bubonic plague, that flea-borne disease that still haunts the West Coast of the United States.
I think a focus on detail just naturally works for a horror writer in several different ways. During periods of high emotion or trauma (in this case the end of a marriage, possibly the end of a life) we tend to either lose the details of our environment to an overall fuzziness, or we feel them much more acutely. It’s like the conspiracy theorist who obsesses over every little detail of a tragedy looking for causality.
Be sure to read the Editorial for updates, news, and a run-down of this month’s content.
Years and years ago, I read one of Roger Zelazny’s essays on writing in which he categorized his stories as generally coming from a strong character, a striking image, or a necessary plot, and that sometimes one-third would hang around waiting for at least one of the other two to show up. I’ve found that to be fairly accurate for me as well. “Where It Lives” started with the image from the final scene, of the house crammed full of swollen, cancerous flesh, paired with the phrase “It grows to fill where it lives.”