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On Short Stories with John Langan
240 Plays8 months ago
Christopher and Dan are joined by horror writer John Langan, whose great horror novel The Fisherman finally is out now in the UK, an inexplicable seven years after being first published in most other territories.
John talks to us about the health and wellbeing of Laird Barron, one of the other members of the modern horror brat pack, who suffered recent well-publicised ill-health.
We also talk about the methods and madness of writing short stories, touch upon a few of John's acclaimed short fiction, and the relationship between geography and horror.
Elsewhere Lieutenant Bungalow returns, enlightened, from a trip to Olympus Mons where he found the Salmon of Insight (insight, insight, insight). Captain Halfmikcarton, however, remains unconvinced.
Join us next month when we'll be joined by filmmakers Gregg Hale and Ed Sanchez, who'll be talking about Jonathan Glazer's masterful 2013 horror film Under The Skin, as well as their forthcoming project Black Velvet Fairies. They'll also be chatting to us about the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest and most original horror films of all time, The Blair Witch Project.
Image credit: Andyp89 of deviantart.
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Transcript
Mars Radio and the Salmon of Insight
00:00:17
Speaker
Mars is flat. What? I said, Mars is flat half milk cotton. Yeah, I heard ya. I meant, but what do you mean by that? I mean like, it's not round. What do you want about it? I'm on about the shape of Mars. Like, it's a frickin' disk with all the mountains and canals and untagular flumps and Mars City on the top path and rocks and shrubs underneath it. Like, you know, the undercarriage. Twist, twist for a minute now. We're back on air.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Mars Radio 14, the third best radio station in the Martian Space Force Broadcasting Spectrum. My name is Captain Half-Milkerton and I'm joined by Lieutenant Bungalow to...
00:01:02
Speaker
Why are you here, bungalow? To tell you about the fish sandwich I just ate. It was delicious. Oh, yes. The salmon of inside bungalow. Was it tasty? Oh, very tasty. The angular effect. Well, I mean, the bitter side of the angular. A bit like if you fry the raptoid flumberwackle in the juice of a cantagula glimpse armpit. You know, spicy, but nice. All right. Well, that sounds like an acquired test.
00:01:29
Speaker
And can you tell the listers how you managed to catch the Samut of Insight? The legendary Martian Samut of Insight. The creature that bestows all Martian knowledge into the mind of whatever eats it. Ah, it was up on the side of Olympus Mons, scrubbing for worms underneath the mobstacle bush.
00:01:47
Speaker
Hold it there, Bungalow. Are you telling me that you caught the salmon of insight wander around in elemental chlorine halfway up the tallest mountain on Mars? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do you ask? Well, because fish are traditionally found in water, Bungalow. Ha, ha, ha. You would say that half milk carton, simpleton. It's a typical sort of thing a geo-Indian would say. It's easy knowing you've never eaten the salmon of insight. Insight.
00:02:16
Speaker
I suppose you think gravity holds Mars in some sort of friggin' orbit. And that Mars spins on some sort of like axis. But it does! Only in the minds of fools have milk cotton. Because they have never been enlightened. Like me. Anybody else's.
00:02:38
Speaker
Grease with me. By the nine Trangulas of Bungalow, what are you talking about, Bungalow? I'm talking about the fact that gravity, it doesn't exist. Look, watch what happens when I let go of this glass. Why did you break that? Well, I didn't break anything. Mars broke it because when I let go of the glass, it became a static object in the universe and the upwardness of Mars raced towards it and caused it to smash.
00:03:09
Speaker
Mars is actually an infinite disk moving upwards at top speed. For overly gang sick bungalow, how can Mars be an infinite disk? Can you not see the roundy shape of it when you go up into space? In the space rocket? No, in the sandwich toaster. Of course in the space rocket, you know, the thing you travel in to go to other
Salmon Revelation and Podcast Update
00:03:31
Speaker
planets. Oh, that was all fake to have milk cart. Planet Earth is actually a warehouse out of the Macwell Crater, I think.
00:03:38
Speaker
You'd know that if you'd eaten the salmon of Inside! Inside! Inside! The one you caught grubbing for worms underneath a marmsicle bush halfway up Olympus Mons. Yeah? And tell me this, did the salmon of Inside have grey fur and a bit of a temper? You know, it did. Took a chunk out of my freaking elbow. See the bros in there on my anterior vestibule.
00:04:02
Speaker
The Salmon of Insight! Insight! So did that! I bet it did, bungalow, because it wasn't the Salmon of Insight you ate. It was the badger of bewilderment. It was not? You know what? That's... I'm very dis... That's the typical sort of thing. A geoidian. I would say. But face it, you're afraid of the truth. Frickin' geoidians. Ah, for Oblygon's sake. We leave it there, folks.
00:04:31
Speaker
Hello, this has been from the Quanscast. A quick update, I wanted to apologise for the delay in getting our episodes out to you. Life got in the way at the Quanscast HQ, but we're back on task now and we're excited for you to hear what we've got in store for you for 2024.
00:04:50
Speaker
For those who don't know, we're now splitting the podcast into two episodes per month, and this is going to be part two of our wonderful interview with John Langham. Just to give some context, we'd asked John about the worrying news about fellow author and friend of his, Led Barron, and this is what he had to say.
Laird Barron's Health Journey
00:05:10
Speaker
So I don't even know if there is exactly a short version of this. The long version is that Laird had been feeling poorly for quite some time and getting slowly worse.
00:05:29
Speaker
COVID, of course, increased everybody's isolation from one another. And Laird sort of is naturally a kind of a hermit to begin with. And, and also just stubborn, also just as like, no, you know, I'm missing a leg, but that's okay, you know, just a flesh wound, you know.
00:05:48
Speaker
And so I head over the course of several months last fall, observed him getting worse and worse, or I guess really listened to him getting worse and worse. We would talk on the phone and he would be coughing and this sort of stuff.
00:06:01
Speaker
Uh, it finally, um, things were getting really, really bad and, and, and, uh, I, I was quite concerned. And then he called me, I think it was like maybe January 3rd. I was trying to remember the exact date and, um, said, uh, Jessica, you know, his partner, she wants me to go to the, the emergency room and I'm, I'm kind of thinking, you know, I should, yeah. And, and, uh, I said to him, terrific, I'll meet you there. I'm on my way. Um, and just sort of gave him no chance to argue, you know, like so.
00:06:31
Speaker
And he was, he looked horrible. He had lost about 70 pounds and was really skeletal and just in a bad, bad way. And his doctors subsequently said, you know, you were right at the edge. You were if you'd let it go another day or two.
00:06:48
Speaker
So fortunately, he had an absolutely fantastic medical team. He was transferred from our local hospital to a regional medical center closer to the city. And they just, you know, it was just go, go, go. And so they did quite extensive surgery. They discovered that he had, you know, untreated diabetes that he probably had for years and high blood pressure and
00:07:16
Speaker
and a horrible kind of abscess that it forms in his chest. And so when all was said and done, he had to have very extensive surgery. They removed a third of one of his lungs and a whole bunch of necrotic tissue. And that's actually long-term. That's actually been the big problem. The diabetes is under control. The high blood pressure is under control. He's eating well. He walks about a mile a day.
00:07:46
Speaker
But, you know, when when they have to do that, when the doctors have to do that kind of surgery where they just remove that much tissue, it takes a long time for that to heal, even if you're, you know, in your 20s and in perfect health, you know, and, and
00:08:04
Speaker
Um, so it's just going to be a while. That's which, which is difficult. Um, it's difficult for him. You know, it's been at this point, geez, about seven months, I guess, and it could be another year or two. And that is difficult to be patient over, over that, over that length of time as your body repairs itself. And it's a kind of vicious cycle where, you know, when you, when you are diabetic and have high blood pressure,
00:08:30
Speaker
whatever exercise you can do helps you to manage those conditions and bring them under control. But he can only do so much because of the wound, in essence, that he still has inside of his lungs. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know, where, in general, you know, he lives across a mountain range from me, like a mountain ridge from me, about 11 miles away. And
00:08:56
Speaker
But the general area that we live in is notorious for allergens, for pollen and various other kinds of things. And so in general, we're living inside a huge valley. And this part of the valley, there just isn't much airflow and it tends to trap a lot of the allergens. So it's difficult if you have any kind of
00:09:18
Speaker
breathing issues or what have you that kind of exacerbates them. And of course, the recent wildfires over the summer from Canada, you know, all that stuff drifting down has not helped. So he's back to writing. He's writing a little bit every day, but he's not writing as much as he would like to because he just gets tired. He just his body is still using a lot of energy repairing itself.
00:09:44
Speaker
You know, the good thing is maybe not quite the right way to put it, but, you know, he recognized or he had gotten himself in a pretty gloomy place the last year or two, because, you know, he wrote his Coleridge trilogy of novels. They didn't set the world on fire the way that he wanted, as most of our work does, and at least not right away, you know, but it
00:10:11
Speaker
Um, his editor left the, uh, left the company. And a lot of times when that happens, you're, if you were especially working on a series, the books can just be kind of orphaned, you know? And, and so he finished like a sort of a trilogy, but he had a lot of ideas. He and I used to kick around ideas for, you know, what are books four or five and six going to be? And so that wasn't happening. So he wasn't in the, in the best place mentally. I think that was part of the reason he wasn't taking care of himself.
00:10:36
Speaker
Also, he had no health insurance, and you know, it's the cliche in America, if you don't have health insurance, don't get sick, you know? And so he, because we did the fundraiser, we did this, you know, this amazing fundraiser, where we raised so much money so fast that GoFund, I think it was GoFund, they actually shut it down because they thought it was some kind of money laundering scheme or something like that.
00:10:59
Speaker
of all the ways you're going to do that. And actually, you say that wasn't there some sort of scam or somebody hijacked it? Or am I making that up? Yeah, somebody some people with somebody hijacked. Oh, yeah, there were there were there were a few people who sent around these these Oh, I was so it's funny. I forgot about that. I was so I was incandescent with rage at the I'm not surprised. You know, and I mean, of course they did because that's what always happens.
00:11:27
Speaker
you know, like, like, but I was just when it's when it's your friend, you know, our family member, you know, you just so this for people who don't know this, some bad characters set up where was it a fake, a fake link to decipher money towards themselves for lead barons.
00:11:48
Speaker
uh convalescence yeah and i'm sure that he'll put him in a story yeah i think uh i'm sure the children of old leech will pay a pay a visit to them at some point yeah i mean you talk about malevolent that's pretty low isn't it
00:12:04
Speaker
Well, it's just, you know, yeah, you just feel kind of like you don't have to be that bad all the time, people, you know, just just, you know, you don't have to be a saint, but just come on, come on. Just, you know, but, you know, he's
00:12:25
Speaker
The that outpouring of support meant a lot and people sent me I was like, okay, if you want to send a postcard or get well card send it to me and I'll read them to him and there were there were just astonishing things that people wrote. There was this one woman who wrote
00:12:43
Speaker
trying to think if it was if it was a card or if it was a message online but she said you know she said my husband back before I met him he was going through a really really bad time a really really dark place and he told me that he read your stuff Laird and it sort of pulled him through that and she said I will always support the man who kept my husband alive for me to to me
00:13:06
Speaker
what do you say to that? You know, that was, I mean, it's, it's almost like one of those things where you think if someone says that to you, you've kind of justified your existence as a writer, whatever, whatever else, you know, like, like that, that one thing. So I,
00:13:22
Speaker
I am hopeful. The other thing is that Laird is enjoying the hell right now out of the Trump stuff. He said to me, I'm just glad I'm alive to see all of this because all the all the payback, you know, so he wrote, I don't know if it's still up on Twitter.
00:13:38
Speaker
But when everything was just falling apart, he wrote a series of tweets. It was a story in tweets where it was just like the Trump administration, like falling apart. And but in a sort of layered baron neo noir, maybe horror kind of thing. And it's hysterically funny, but it's also much more accurate as it turns out than anybody realized at the time. So
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah, I hope that'll be published at some point with appropriately macabre illustrations to go along with it.
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, there's no shortage of inspiration at the moment with Trump. And, you know, in our country, our respective governments, Dan and I, when, when you were offline, Dan and I were just talking about Black Mirror. Is it Black Mirror or Dark Mirror? What's it called? Dark Mirror or Black Mirror? Anyway, you know, it's Black Mirror. Black Mirror. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it seems like that was, you know, really got its finger on the pulse.
Humor and Apocalypse Scenarios
00:14:34
Speaker
for many years. I'm having a six or seven season now. Yes, I think it might be six. I can't remember. The reason we're talking about Black Mirror, I was saying to Bean that what I've been watching recently is repeats of what I've been watching from the beginning, Monty Python's Flying Circuits, because the whole thing is on Netflix at the moment. So I started at the beginning, I've been watching the whole thing. And I was just struck at
00:15:02
Speaker
fact that they could have released that whole series in the last 10 years and it still would be as relevant. The satire is poking fun at the same people, at the same figures of authority and I kind of was comforted by that. It actually made me feel quite good because it made me realise that there's always this background of incompetence to a certain degree, that there's always the
00:15:26
Speaker
figures who need to be ridiculed lurking around in the background from they could have been, you know, they
00:15:33
Speaker
They could have released those shows in the last 10 years about Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn and people like that on this side of the pond. And it would still fit. The same people they're taking the piss out of as they would have done 50, 55 years ago. And that actually made me feel quite good. You get through these. Like we said before, there's always an apocalypse. There's always something that's coming to get you through it.
00:16:01
Speaker
We go on. We move on. It depends on the apocalypse, doesn't it? Well, OK, I guess in theory, there is one apocalypse out there that actually is going to get you. But you don't know which one it's going to be. And that's that's fine. I want do I want Rulie coming out of the ocean as my apocalypse? Because zombies seems too easy. Like we've seen so much zombie content. We know how to kill zombies as well. You know, we've had so many informational videos about it.
00:16:31
Speaker
You know, how many series of Walking Dead were there, 13? We don't know. 11. Something like that. Yeah. Aliens is a bit sort of, well, we just have to see what we're dealing with when they get here. What else? You might get a nice one like E.T. Yeah, but it's also you don't. There's the logistics of invading another planet are actually very, very difficult. When I was a kid, I was a big, big science fiction fan for a while. And there was a novel by
00:17:00
Speaker
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle called Footfall, and it was their attempt to write an alien invasion novel. And that was their, their big problem was why, why bother invading? Oh, you need you need resources like you need water, you go to the rings of Saturn, and you just pluck a jacket and an asteroid sized lump of ice out of that.
00:17:21
Speaker
And there's your water. Oh, you need minerals? Go to the asteroid belt. And there's an endless supply of minerals. There's no real rational reason to invade another world. And so they tried to work out that there were these aliens who
00:17:40
Speaker
are more of a almost medieval level socially but they've inherited this this kind of ultra sophisticated equipment which allows them to to do this so it's this particular set of circumstances but um I yeah it just seems like for aliens it would be a terrible bother to to try to invade us you know I think for such technologically advanced beings they always seem to be a bit unidimensional don't they they don't have
00:18:08
Speaker
Which, I guess, you know, you need that if you're going to make Independence Day. You need that all the nuance has to be with human characters. But it's never with the aliens. Anyway, my apocalypse will, if it's the apocalypse, you know the shallows? Well, of course you know the shallows, you wrote them. I've heard of that. Do you know that story that you wrote?
00:18:34
Speaker
If I get a friendly blue crab to keep me company every day and to have... Oh no, God, because it's got that horrible... Oh God, the fruit on the... Okay, so... Okay, I could live with that... I could live with that apocalypse. I thought it was quite exciting. Like, I didn't feel fear. Well, no, you can't live with it because it's the apocalypse. That's the point. Have you read it? You wouldn't live with it.
00:18:57
Speaker
it would destroy everything. No, it doesn't. So you couldn't live with it. It's a heartbreaking apocalypse as well. There's more to do with that. So the ending is very sad and the kind of stuff I love. But yeah, that would be my apocalypse. Actually, that's probably a good segue onto our talking about short stories, if we've done with
Storytelling Techniques and Inspirations
00:19:21
Speaker
We've wanted to talk about short stories for a while, haven't we? Yeah, it's a particular interest to me simply because that's how I started and I wrote so many and then realised the difference in structure between a short story and a long form. But also, one thing I was really happy about when I discovered The Fisherman was that you have so much more out there in anthologies and stuff and they're so
00:19:46
Speaker
they're so um i just i don't want to gush but i want to um just go through a couple of titles just maybe a lot of people won't well i don't know but people might not have um known some of your shorter stuff so in paris in the mouth of kronos i um that that is a wonderful story i've i i see it as hit men set up for failure as a target in the french hotel turns out to be a little larger than a normal man
00:20:12
Speaker
Also, bonus points for including a farmyard toy in the story, which I really love. Because, you know, when you have those arsehole characters that nobody likes, and there's one that's just an arsehole, but it does something that's really cute, and you think, I can't hate you now. So that's, that's one of the characters in Paris in the Mouth of Chronos, of particular interest to Dan as well, because he has past relations, well, not relations with Chronos, but... Do I? Do I? Yes, Goya's painting.
00:20:42
Speaker
Oh. Yeah. And then there's Mr. Gaunt, and before we get off this podcast, I have to show you my Mr. Gaunt trousers. Mr. Gaunt is another one. What's he talking in code, I wondered to myself. He has a pair of trousers with your face plastered all over them. No, no, no. They just... He does. And then he goes on the one, two, three bus in London, and he does the Vogue dance.
00:21:06
Speaker
Don't mention the one, two, three buzz. And they're not vogue trousers. They're very horror trousers. Anyway, Mr. Gaunt, a Simon Butler, who's the scariest thing about him for me was like his harsh whisper of yes, that's really evocative. As you know, as a story that's, I suppose, something that really stands out for a lot of your fans, people who've read your stuff, and also your your handle on Twitter is Mr. Gaunt, which is quite troubling, actually.
00:21:35
Speaker
But is it really? No, it's not always. I always I because I hadn't read much of your short stuff at the time when I first saw you on Twitter, I assumed that it was some sort of Leland Gaunt homage from Niful Things. The funny thing is I had completely spaced that like I'd completely forgotten that that his name when I when I created my character and it was only at some point afterwards, I thought, oh,
00:22:04
Speaker
Oh, wait a minute. And I thought, well, you know, it's too late. It's been published already. It works well anyway with the character and what he is or isn't. The funny thing is that my middle sister, none of my siblings really read my stuff, but once in a while they will. And my middle sister had, I didn't even know she'd read that story, but she kept misnaming the character. So at one point she called him Mr. Bones. At another point she called him Mr. Grant. And I thought
00:22:30
Speaker
I want to write a couple of stories. I want to write a story called Mr. Bones and a story called Mr. Grant at some point. I don't know what they'll be about, but just I liked the idea that oh, those are other at another friend.
00:22:49
Speaker
who said to me, you know, we were talking about movies that we like to watch. And she was like, all your movies are five million bullets and five million tentacles. And I thought that's a title. That's a title for a story. I don't know what the story is, but that's, you know.
00:23:06
Speaker
Well, the rest of the story, so I was, well, we mentioned the shallows. For those who haven't read it, it's a post-apocalyptic tale with a lot of heart, as far as I'm concerned, and a little blue crab sidekick. I think it's my favourite, actually, that one you've written of your shorts.
00:23:26
Speaker
And it may even can tell really in it we don't know because I don't like to you know when people talk about Lovecraft and They just assume that it's gonna be cool who they assume. It's gonna be this or that Cosmic horror doesn't mean Lovecraft's pantheon of gods to me. It can mean you know a lot more other things the Unbearable proximity of mr. Dunn's balloons which
00:23:51
Speaker
I wouldn't even know how to synopsize. It's such a bizarre, horrible story that doesn't, again, do anything scary. You know, that stab doesn't come until the end. So one of the things I talk about on the forums a lot on the... It's very M.R. James, actually, don't you think? Yeah, well, exactly. You have this... I don't know. I think M.R. James can be spooky from the setup. I mean, you know this guy is wrong.
00:24:19
Speaker
What's the denouement of M.R. James? What's it called? The Wallop. I think this is where we differ in genre. Why I always moan about this on the website is I am pre-sold to long build-ups, to character, to geography, to even nothing in inverted commas happening.
00:24:44
Speaker
in terms of what I want, rather than this preponderance of stories where it's like, boom, boom, boom, shit's going down in the first act. You know, yes, you've got to have that. But I think in horror, you have to, for somebody to be for the reader to be scared, you have to, you know, relate to the character much more than is important than other genres, I would say possibly. And I think with that,
00:25:07
Speaker
that balloon story. The unbearable proximity of Mr. Dunn Dunn's balloons and it's kind of it's very Edgar Allan Poe more than for me than Mr. James. And I don't want to do the spoiler so I'm not going to but that's you know, that's something that
00:25:27
Speaker
again coming back to the permission to write what you want some of the stuff if you put it on paper as a treatment or a pitch to someone they were like well no that's a bit stupid or whatever and loads of my stuff I've written about like a leg that disembodied leg that kicks people you know like it was on paper
00:25:43
Speaker
But if Stephen King can make a laundromat scary, you know, then anyone can make it. Well, not anyone, but, you know, you could anything's up for grabs. Yeah, exactly. It's open season. And then I think probably one of the most popular famous ones is kind of a sky.
00:26:02
Speaker
Um, again, I don't really want to do spoilers. It's vampire, in inverted commas, space vampires, possibly. Um, don't want to spoil that one. I'm just, this is morally, I'm just nagging. This is just a rollout for, for the members of Crohn's really of stuff. I want them to read of yours. So I'm sorry. I'm doing all the talking. No, not at all. Not at all.
00:26:26
Speaker
Technicolor, again, this is one of my favorites. I'm a dance teacher and we did the Mask of the Red Death as a site. Yeah, promenade performance. So it's sort of immersive theater. And we divided up the dance studios with these sheets and the audience had to walk through the different colors of the rooms. Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, I had real, real love. There's a story. There's a story in that right there.
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, we, we scared the audience a lot because obviously I was producing it with one of my colleagues. She's not a horror fan, but I was. And I'm like, okay, the theme of this one is, you know, whatever. This room is going to be dolls. This one's going to be disease. This one's going to be death. This one, you know, but that's anyway, so technicolor is
00:27:10
Speaker
Really, it's one of those short stories that trips you up at the end. You're like, how did I not see this coming? And then the last one I think on my list, let me check is, oh, yeah, City of the Dog, which is a gritty, dreary, urban tale, a failing relationship. And it's got something else as I call them the hounds of $10, which is actually the hounds of tinder loss. But if you
00:27:43
Speaker
Again, there's a story prompt there as well. No, exactly. That's the thing, right? Is that there's somebody who keeps hearing it that way and doesn't realize what it actually is. The angles, the angles. Yeah, so those are my picks, just off the top of my head. I would have to say I'm very stressed that there's two of your collections I can't get in the UK. Fang, Children of the Fang, and there's another one. Is it Genealogies? Yes. Is it that one? I think I have that one.
00:27:58
Speaker
If you're dictating into your phone and you say the hounds of tinder loss, it says the hounds of $10.
00:28:11
Speaker
It's two of the newer ones anyway. I don't think I can't get the Children of the Fang. The Children of the Fang. Corpse mouth is the very newest. Corpse mouth, yeah. Corpse mouth and Children of the Fang. So I wanted to go back to sort of the way short stories are, they fit into our
00:28:33
Speaker
our practice as writers and our submission process and the viability of them. And your sort of take on that, if that's okay? Sure, absolutely. I think with stories, my concern with writing horror stories
00:28:56
Speaker
When I came back to really writing horror in full force in my very late 20s, my concern was so many horror stories seem to me varieties of what I call the trap story. The character stumbles into something and bang, it's Gotham, the monster Gotham.
00:29:16
Speaker
The story is not about character development. It's really just about, bang, the jaws of the trap snapping shut on them. And I didn't want to do that.
00:29:31
Speaker
there are writers obviously like like say you know Poe you know can write something like the telltale heart and give you this this you know in whatever it is two pages three pages can can give you this fully developed character and and you know but that's he's Poe and um so I thought to myself that that for a horror story to be effective right it needs to have compelling characters that that you know you
00:29:56
Speaker
You don't have to like them, but you have to be interested in them, I suppose. And so I thought, well, you know, so they're going to need to be longer, and they're going to need to take their time to set up the characters stuff, you know, to try to develop the character.
00:30:14
Speaker
And so in a way, a lot of what I had in mind, it's probably still true. A lot of what I had in mind when I was writing my stories were novels, you know, where things like King's Work or Straub's Work say, or other writers, you know, Faulkner or whoever.
00:30:30
Speaker
I was thinking about the way that they created character and deployed character and the way they tried to render a kind of an environment that was recognizable, quasi recognizable to the reader before introducing the supernatural element.
00:30:48
Speaker
And I thought, you know, that was the way to do what I wanted to do. As we said before, the challenge was that that left me with these stories like 40 or 50 pages long. You know, they just they weren't they weren't I mean, online stuff has just never
00:31:06
Speaker
really caught up to novellas. It's novellas still work best in print. And that kind of longer, even the novelette stuff, they really haven't caught up to. The emphasis is really still on short, short, short.
00:31:23
Speaker
you know, 7500 words and we're tapping out. And even that's a bit of a stretch. And so that's a, you know, that's a problem. I was fortunate and that when I was writing, there were still a number of print publications that would accept novelettes. And so that kind of gave me the freedom to write at the length I wanted to write at for the kinds of stories I wanted to tell.
00:31:49
Speaker
I also with those stories.
John Langham on Setting and Genre Blending
00:31:52
Speaker
Is that how you started? Was that you were there? Did that represent your first successes in in publishing? Yes, yes, I had I had been I had been writing. I had been writing since my first year of high school. I mean, actually, even before that, to be honest, when I was a kid, I in primary school, I was writing these, you know, Tolkien pastiches. But they never I've wanted to, you know,
00:32:19
Speaker
I would read a Tolkien, or especially like Lloyd Alexander, or Conan the Barbarian, who got me through fifth grade math class. And, um, apology, Sister Anne. And, um, I would... Has that been making a sign of the cross there? You know, it's, uh... Just in case. Just in case, right? For Sister Anne. But, um...
00:32:43
Speaker
But I wanted to imitate those. I wanted to, you know, it's that that impulse you have. I like something. I want to do the same thing. But I, you know, it was never very convincing in my in my case. And then and I was also a big comic book fan when I was a kid. I really I love to draw. I really wanted to be an artist. I had this wonderfully supportive art teacher in in primary school and she would put up my drawings in the art room and, you know,
00:33:09
Speaker
And I really wanted to work in comic books. That was my goal. I was distressed that all the comic book stuff seemed to happen in New York City. And so I would try to set things in my little locale of the Mid Hudson Valley, which, you know. And when I read Christine, bang, everything just kind of coalesced. And I was like, this is it. This, I guess, sort of brings everything together for me.
00:33:34
Speaker
And it set me, immediately I was writing horror stories, which, as I've often joked, were set in Maine because I thought, oh, you know, that's where horror happens, you know. But eventually I started to set them in my neck of the woods, although
00:33:54
Speaker
just because, you know, there was no real, like, I just, it was cool to have a werewolf running around my neck of the woods. It was in university when I encountered Faulkner in particular, I think, and those, a lot of the writers of the American South, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren, and also a local writer named William Kennedy, who's just a little bit north of here in Albany, who wrote a novel called Ironweed, which is a brilliant, brilliant novel about a
00:34:21
Speaker
a homeless guy wandering around Albany, the capital of New York state, seeing ghosts over the course of a weekend, or Halloween, I think it is. Anyway, and that was when I started to sort of think that the use of the landscape, the use of place, and what you were writing about, you know, that the setting could be more than just window dressing, that the setting could be
00:34:50
Speaker
really part of the story. At the same time, when I really started writing, so should I, during my 20s, I wrote a long novel, I wrote a short novel, I wrote a whole bunch of long stories, I wrote a whole bunch of short stories, none of which were ever published, or likely will be, unless I kick off right now and my wife and son are desperate to cash in on, you know, look at this.
00:35:17
Speaker
um the john langen bootlegs exactly the bootlegs the problem is i wrote most of them in pencil so they're slowly the paper was rubbing against itself and it's slowly erasing them so timing timing's having its way with them yeah exactly um but i so so when there were a few things i thought when i started to to write
00:35:38
Speaker
um when i started to write horror fiction for for real i i thought or in earnest i guess i would say i thought that i was going to write those longer stories lots of character i thought to myself a lot of my friends were like oh i want to write stories that are like movies and i thought no i don't want to do that that's why we have movies i want to write stories that then you know can only be done as stories
00:36:01
Speaker
I always liked, you mentioned Tolkien, Tolkien, we never do Tolkien, but he always seems to find his way into the conversation. When I read Lord of the Rings, the big thing about Lord of the Rings in the 80s, maybe early 90s, was it was unfilmable.
00:36:18
Speaker
yes can't make a film of it can't make a film of it and that was the draw and so i yeah i completely agree the draw of of writing is to i always try and do something that i think you won't be able to make film this i i always like to have that that sense of challenge or ambition
00:36:35
Speaker
you couldn't film this. Yeah, commercially, I think I was I was an idiot. Commercially, I'm like, yeah, whoa, why didn't you? Yeah, you should have been doing you should have been writing Christine and selling the film right. Exactly. Carpenter, where are you?
00:36:51
Speaker
But yeah, so I, I, and I wanted to be experimental I think it was the other thing was I really wanted to. I was like well what happens if you tell a horror story this way or that way or the or the next way.
00:37:07
Speaker
So I think that's still something I'm interested in. I'm more comfortable, I suppose, at this point in my writing, just writing a story, quote unquote. But there are, I have enough, I guess, faith in that method to do that.
00:37:30
Speaker
But I still, you know, I still have these projects I'm hoping to get to that are just nuts. And I'm just like, is anybody going to? Is anybody going to read this? But I that for me has always been kind of important. Peter Stroud.
00:37:49
Speaker
said in an interview with Douglas Winter, I think it was, that he said, I value virtuosity, the ability to do undoable things. And I sort of in some ways took that as a kind of a motto, that I really wanted to be able to push things to new places. I was
00:38:15
Speaker
part of a conversation with Josh Malerman, and we were talking about this, that Malerman was saying, could you write a horror story that was a horror story, but also a romance? And not just that the romance is a backstory to the horror story, but that those two things coexist with each other. And I think that that was really interesting to me because I think
00:38:43
Speaker
I do think horror is I disagree with the notion that horror isn't a genre simply because a genre is like a kind of thing and the things that you know have similarities to one another but I
00:38:56
Speaker
I do think that, and further, I think that a lot of horror stories tend to fall into certain narrative patterns. But I think it's useful to try to break out of those or break those up. And so to think, oh, well, what if you had a horror story that was, you know, a romance story? Or
00:39:16
Speaker
funny we mentioned E.M. Forrester before. Forrester has the story of a panic about this group of English tourists in Italy who encounter Pan, who encounter that sort of, the same force that Arthur Machan is writing about in The Great God Pan. And it's so many of those fantasy, echelon, early 20th century writers are writing about.
00:39:42
Speaker
And it is in some ways, it's another one of Forrester's stories about the English in Italy. And yet it's also an encounter with some kind of overwhelming, numinous force that causes you to panic, that just causes you to lose everything. You could say that about the romance books as well. As an element of horror, I think certainly
00:40:11
Speaker
there was a book written by Google engineers, the software engineers called, I think it was a million bad thoughts or a billion bad thoughts. And it was an analysis of the tropes of romance novels from with large female readership. And the what they did was they aggregated all of the male love interest trope down to
00:40:40
Speaker
one of five one of five character or character types and it was like pirate surgeon vampire werewolf and billionaire I think I think they were the five and so and they all acted as a sort of horror
00:40:55
Speaker
adversary. You know, there was something frightening about them. Was that done by men though, not women? As Google engineers, so it could be probably men, probably men. Lonely, lonely men. I think, I think, you know, I think it's a bit dangerous.
00:41:11
Speaker
ground to start saying, oh, this is what women like. It just popped into my head. No, no, I don't mean you. I just mean Google engineers probably need a few more things to help them rather than put them down in terms of their engineers. You know, this is this is what they, you know, this is what they do. So it just it just struck me as amusing that, you know, what if you could do a horror and a romance? But there is that. Think about, you know, the sort of the buildings Roman, you know, the sort of classic novel of development, right? You know,
00:41:38
Speaker
like, you know, whether David Copperfield or, I mean, the thing is that like Oliver Twist, you can absolutely, I mean, I don't know, I guess Oliver Twist is sort of behind Kipling's Just So Stories, or Mowgli the Jungle Book, and which is behind Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.
00:41:55
Speaker
And so you can sort of see how that kind of narrative could be adapted into a horror or, you know, horror adjacent setting. But something like David Copperfield, where it's like, I am born and we follow the first 30 years of my life. Could you have that as a kind of a horror structure? And I think Michael McDowell
00:42:16
Speaker
Oh, my head, the elementals, but I think his Blackwater series, you know, which is this, it's funny, the French have this term, the Roman flu, the the novel as river, the river novel. And this is a novel in which the river is very, very important. So I think McDowell was aware of that. It's kind of punning on that. But it is a family saga that set over six almost novellas, you know, very short novels, but they
00:42:46
Speaker
they aggregate to one big sprawling family saga. And I think that he was trying that. He was trying to be sort of formally inventive in that kind of way. And I... Sorry, sorry, carry on. No, no, no. I was going to say, I think that there's still, when I think about a book like that, I think, man, there is still tons and tons that we can do.
00:43:12
Speaker
There's still tons and tons to explore as a writer of horror fiction, but I'm sorry, go on.
00:43:18
Speaker
I was just going to compare, you know, talking about Michael McDowell to Charles L. Grant and the Ox Run station, all his books, which are set in the same place. And I know Dan wanted to talk about geography. Maybe that would have been better in the first part of the podcast. But the fact that you have these writers like Michael McDowell, who writes Southern Gothic yourself, we've got Albany, Upstate New York, Adirondacks, Catskills, Stephen King in Maine, HP Lovecraft in Provincetown, Rhode Island.
00:43:48
Speaker
It'd be fantastic if he were in Provincetown, but yeah, it's Providence. And Charles L. Grant created this mysterious Oxran station place, and with, going back to Michael McDowell and the Blackwater saga,
00:44:08
Speaker
he I've got so many different links here but the Blackwater saga of Michael McDowell is this family saga over these 200 years or however long it is how many generations it is that is almost like an experiment again in terms of uh you know like Stephen King did with the green mile chucking out a little book at a time a little book at a time and making the green mile and that's what happened with um the river oh no not the river um black
00:44:38
Speaker
Black water. But what it also does is it informs his other works for me now. So if I read Cold Mood over Babylon or the amulet, you understand about the politics, the social politics, as well as the politics politics in Alabama, Florida, in the deep South States. And I think I'm getting away from with that in terms of romance and horror, but I was going to
00:45:04
Speaker
link it back to using the same kind of places. There is a lot of stuff in your short stories and also I'd argue to Fisherman where it's not necessarily a love story but it is a love story that you can't remove from
00:45:19
Speaker
the story will fall apart if you remove that. So there's a thing I say to the students, when they, you know, when we're doing a site specific performance, they will just do a lot of I teach hip hop, and contemporary and they will say, they will just do those moves in front of the
00:45:35
Speaker
architecture whatever and I'm like you're not using the architecture your narrative and the dance what falls apart if I take that building away or that tube station or that bus stop or whatever it is if I take that away and you put it in a studio then you've lost the narrative that's how I think you know you kind of approach these things you have to approach these things is anything that goes in your story particularly romance or sex
00:45:59
Speaker
Sex is another thing. I feel that it's got to earn its place there. And not just from an editing standpoint, but because it's such a boring trope. This man is fighting for his wife, this wife is fighting for her kids or her man, or whatever, you know, like, it's so boring. And I think within your fiction, there's a there's a lot of stories like I mentioned the grittiness of city dog.
00:46:24
Speaker
or the heartbreak in the shallows, the heartbreak, especially the heartbreak in the fishermen. I just lost my brother before I read it and he was involved in a car accident. My sister has similarities to Dan in her experiences and I just
Themes of Love and Loss in 'The Fisherman'
00:46:51
Speaker
As far as the individual goes, who experiences love, sex and the other stuff that gets written about in horror novels, we've got to find
00:47:01
Speaker
common ground with our reader but that's lazy common ground if it's not earned and I think in a lot of your stuff love features quite profoundly as part of the plot not as something that supports the plot so I wouldn't say the fisherman is about blah blah blah flooded river valley big fish you know magician whatever I would say it's about grieving and coming to terms with the absence of love that has been your foundation and so
00:47:32
Speaker
And I've lost my point now. I've gone all around the houses. It's also about... Oh, lovely. This is similar to Pet Sematary as well, because it's trying to bring back what's been taken. But there's a Faustian pact lurking deep inside the fishermen.
00:47:53
Speaker
which is presented to not just the contemporary characters, but the characters, the immigrant characters that we see in the flashback story as well. And when you're put in that position of grief, the question is, are you going to sign that Faustian pact and essentially
00:48:16
Speaker
You're going to, well, you turn to a pillar of salt. Let's put it that way. You become the pillar of salt, don't you? That's the way of putting it. Or are you going to navigate your way through the choppy waters and find a way through to the rest of your life? And, you know, Abe and Dan, it goes badly for one of them and less badly for the other, I guess you would say, given the last paragraph of the novel, which we won't spoil.
00:48:43
Speaker
because the UK publication is coming. We can drive a few people towards the book. I have thought to myself that there is a sequel. I don't have any interest in it. A tunnel. Really? Are we talking about the tunnel? No, that there's a very specific sequel to that last scene.
00:49:00
Speaker
Which would just be a short, short story, probably from a distance at a county fair where somebody is seeing someone with some little kids getting ice cream. Can I just ask a question about that? Is there some dialogue that says, no Abe, I am your father? I don't want to spoil it for anyone but
00:49:24
Speaker
What a shock that was. And, you know, when that book came out, I actually saw that in the UK. We were visiting with with my my parents' families and I got the book. I got the movie tie in addition of The Empire Strikes Back first. And so I read that. So I knew that before like going in to see the movie. That's neither here nor there. But I bet it ruined it for you.
00:49:47
Speaker
Actually, what I remember most about reading that book was it was the British edition, so maneuver was spelled with an O. And that has never stopped screwing me up. This is like 40 years later. And I'm like, how do you spell maneuver? Isn't there an O in there? Why is there an O in there? They're a bitch to write and they're a bitch to pronounce. Yeah, just maneuver. Yeah, anyway.
00:50:11
Speaker
I think there, again, there's a lot of things to say in response to that, right? Like one thing is that, yeah, love is present in a lot of my work. I think it's often disappointed love or love that's been cut short in some way. In The Fisherman,
00:50:36
Speaker
to focus on that for a second I wanted even the character of the fisherman himself to be suffering from a loss so that so that everybody from from the narrator of the novel to the title character the eponymous fisherman is is is driven by loss is is driven by loss and driven by loss that was that that as I was writing the book that became part of of what I realized was happening in the book could happen and was happening
00:51:08
Speaker
The interesting thing about the middle, one of the interesting things about the middle part of the book, the fisherman was only always supposed to be a novella. And then the middle part just grew and grew and grew. And one of the reasons it grew was because I was like, well, I'm going to write about the construction of this local reservoir. I should really find out a little bit about it.
00:51:28
Speaker
And the more I found out, you know, the deeper I dug as it were, the more that there was there. And, you know, I had not realized that the reservoir was constructed. There was, you know, half of the people constructing the reservoir were African Americans who had largely come north. And the other half were immigrants, largely from Eastern and Central Europe. And I think for me, it became, I mean, I finished the book pre-Trump.
00:51:57
Speaker
But the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric was already ramping up. And there was something kind of satisfying to me. And there remains something satisfying to me about having this middle narrative where all of the important characters are immigrants. Because that's, you know,
00:52:19
Speaker
I mean, if I want to whatever get on my liberal soapbox, you know, that's the American story. That's, you know, we're all immigrants. We all come from from somewhere. I also think is that the middle part is the most frightening. I think that's where the meat of the horror is, even though you've got the you've got the Hollywood action sequence at the end, you've got your big set piece at the end that that feels more like a
00:52:44
Speaker
It's that's where all the stakes are. And there is the big set piece, but the middle part, the middle part where you have the the immigrant's story and you'll forgive me, I can't remember the names of the characters in the middle section.
00:53:00
Speaker
but the man who is, again, struck down by grief and he makes this, uh, Faustian pact to... Yeah, George, Helen and George, yeah, yeah. Helen and George to... to bring back what was lost and that's... that... it takes... what... Bean and I have read a lot of books and it takes a lot to... to creep us out but I would... I thought that was genuinely unsettling and there are few and far books in between that can generate that real sense of...
00:53:29
Speaker
of dread not just a set piece but something really unsettling and when the the woman who gets run down by the cart comes back and the descriptions of how she moves and how she speaks and how she's perceived by the other characters it's it's it's frightening it's brilliantly done it's it sounds
00:53:51
Speaker
Blase, you know, a horror book should be frightening, but it's very often not necessarily the case. It could be dramatic and it could be full of suspense, but it's not necessarily the same thing as as frightening. But that that middle section of the book definitely does that. Well, I'm more I'm more gratified by that than I feel I should be. You know, every time somebody says to me, oh, that freaks me out. Like, good. Yeah, yeah. What is wrong with you? It's hard. You know, Stephen King said that he goes for
00:54:22
Speaker
Uh, what is it? He goes for dread. Terrorist emotion. And I go for that. And if I can't go for that, I'll go for horror. Then it's gross out. Yeah. Yeah. I think also, um, there's something very alienating and othering.
00:54:39
Speaker
which you really don't want to do normally with a reader but when I was reading The Fisherman the first time I felt complete I wasn't lying on my bed reading a book I felt in a place that I wasn't sure of you know because I'm reading about these migrant families particularly the woman in the cart the whispering and all that it's just so horrendous and and then you have the ending as well which is kind of like the set piece bit which is very bleak and grayish sort of you know there's there's nothing that makes you feel good about The Fisherman
00:55:09
Speaker
That's going to be right there. That's the point. If you want me to write a testimonial on the front cover, I know it's a print. I can't help you. Thank goodness it has. I'm a bit of a nihilist. And I love, you know, I just love all that. And I love the fact that there's such bleakness.
00:55:34
Speaker
in the fishermen, you know, which is probably a better way of saying there's nothing redeeming about or whatever. But I think that I have, you know, also very close friends with with Paul Tremblay. And Paul has very much a kind of a punk aesthetic when it comes to the sort of stance his writing takes, I guess you would say. And he and I have talked about this a lot, that
00:56:01
Speaker
you know, his novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, which was, of course, filmed by M. Night Shyamalan as as knock at the cabin door. You know, one of the great things about all of Paul's stuff is that it doesn't look away. It doesn't back down. It doesn't give you the consolation that M. Night Shyamalan thinks he's giving you in his version, although there's actually there's a way to be made that that his is actually even worse than Paul's. Yeah.
00:56:29
Speaker
Because what he thinks is consolation is actually cosmically horrifying, but he doesn't realize that. But but and so I think that there's one of the things that I've always loved about horror fiction is this feeling that it doesn't back down that it is willing to say there is death, there is disease, there is decay, horrible things happen. And it's not
00:56:53
Speaker
necessarily like yay in a sort of Tim Burton kind of way but but it's it's more it's just an acknowledgement that these things happen and that they're part of life and that you can you can you can let them in as it were you can acknowledge them and sometimes that especially
00:57:12
Speaker
especially in the United States, which is still so youth obsessed and so reluctant to admit the body, unless that body is young and healthy, you know, suntanned, you know, like it is not willing to deal with the body when it starts to break down, let alone when it dies. There's something about horror fiction that
00:57:40
Speaker
I mean, it's funny, I go back to Melville talking about Hawthorne. He writes this review of Hawthorne's stories and he says Hawthorne says no in a voice of thunder or voice like thunder. And I can remember when I read that, you know, 19 years old or something, I was like,
00:57:56
Speaker
What the hell is he talking about? Now I feel like I get it. Now Hawthorne is saying, not so fast with your easy consolations and your happy endings. Life isn't like that. And so although Hawthorne is often quite a fantastical writer himself, there is this kind of grimness in his stuff that again, still at this age feels, I mean, I want consolation too, don't get me wrong. I'm closer to the grave.
00:58:26
Speaker
than to birth. So I'm okay. I understand the need for consolation, but there's something bracing about stories that look at the world and say, yeah, there's death, there's bad things here. And I think
00:58:48
Speaker
there was a class of reader and a class of literary critic for that matter who finds that very difficult to deal with, who sees that as immature potentially or just they kind of can't deal with it, you know. And I feel bad for them because I think that there's something that's kind of bracing about
00:59:10
Speaker
um about just something cathartic rather than cons other than consoling i think cathartic is probably yeah and it's it's just that oh thank god somebody else admits that of of all people thomas legati said that in his
00:59:25
Speaker
his introduction to The Nightmare Factory, his big collection, this essay called The Consolation of Horror. He says, and it's funny, because it's legati. He says the ultimate consolation of horror is that somebody like you make a connection with somebody else, which is so funny, you know, Mr. Anti natalist. But you know, it's just that you feel that there's somebody out there, you read their story, and you think, this person gets it. This person, I feel this connection with with this person. And if you can do that, it's like what we were talking about earlier.
00:59:54
Speaker
we were talking about about Laird Barron about that woman writing to him and talking about the the the effect he had had on her her fiance's life um or her husband's life like like to make that kind of connection with somebody um yeah we would all like to be rich
01:00:12
Speaker
Let's be honest, you know, none of us are getting paid what we're worth for the work that we're doing. But at the same time, to make that kind of connection should not be discounted. That is profound and profoundly important.
01:00:27
Speaker
I think horror deals with that so well and it's one of the soap boxes I constantly get on on the writers forum when I'm told whether it's my work they don't like or something horror they've read or they talk about films in the same breath as books is that it's the human condition it is
01:00:48
Speaker
You can't write something and I won't do spoilers because I know people wouldn't have written this but you can't have written an ending like revival by Stephen King without having a firm grasp of understanding of existentialist dread abject horror and the fact that actually when you die there might be nothing or they might be something or they might you know like the fact that the biggest
01:01:12
Speaker
bubble over our head from birth till death is death and you know like yes it's great to have kids and to you know life goes on but you don't go on physically you don't go on and i think it's just constant you can constantly plumb that
01:01:29
Speaker
for ideas and well, you don't even have to plummet for ideas. They just thrown up constantly because we live in a constant state of abject fear, regardless of our subconscious or our conscious mind telling us it's fine. Just use positive, you know, what's it called? You know, that therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy or positive mental attitude or all that kind of stuff is it doesn't matter. I mean, I've I would say I'm a fearful person, but I also say I would say at the same time I live in fear. So yeah, I think that these it's one of the arguments for
01:01:59
Speaker
the way that that that horror works I think through monsters or or magic or sort of whatever you know that that that these things I think access a kind of an emotional truth again to tie back to what we were talking about much much earlier about Christine you know in in in King's novel Christine most of that you know
01:02:25
Speaker
90% of that, 95% of that was not my high school experience.
Existential Fears in Horror
01:02:30
Speaker
There was no guy out of a 1950s movie with a switchblade threatening me or anything. He was 28 years old. I'm still trying to pass shop class.
01:02:43
Speaker
But there were people who were cruel to me. There were people who made fun of me, you know? And so King got at the way the adolescent me felt. And I think that in a novel like Revival, let's say, King gets at the way that you feel as you're getting older and as those end-of-life questions are that they're gaining a certain kind of force.
01:03:06
Speaker
And he allows that to manifest itself. So I don't believe that necessarily, oh, I read, I didn't read Christine and think everything's better now, but I felt that connection. I felt maybe a little less alone.
01:03:25
Speaker
And that, for those big existential questions about what comes next, what if it's awful, I think that knowing that there's somebody who's willing to talk about that stuff, that feels very consoling in some way.
01:03:42
Speaker
Definitely. Yes, I think we're going to have to wrap this up very soon because... Oh God, look at this. It's getting late here in Blighty. I'm sorry, I think we've, because we've followed a different thing with this, whereas in respect of, you know, we're going to talk about your latest book and then we're going to do this because this has been a bit more organic.
01:04:01
Speaker
It's left me with more questions. I hope we can get you back on the topic. No, no, I am happy. I don't have to, you know, we can, uh, I don't want to overwhelm you guys with, with what you. Oh, no, it's not, it's not for us. I just think a two hour podcast for our listeners might be, you know, like, that's where we're sort of maxing out. Yeah. I mean, it is one of those conversations where, you know,
01:04:26
Speaker
a few things have been said and it just opens up a whole other kind of worms and we could go this direction or this direction or this direction. Here's a couple of things I'll say to try to like draw some of those stories together. A lot of the stories were written in response to calls from sort of Lovecraft anthologies or Lovecraft themed anthologies.
01:04:51
Speaker
And one of the things I found on the one hand, right, Lovecraft is very much a lot of Lovecraft's imagery is very much, you know, it's about the sublime. Lovecraft is a writer of the sublime. So many of his images of the pleasing terror, you know, the vastness of Cthulhu and the vastness of time and so on.
01:05:10
Speaker
And what I find oddly perversely, maybe, is that when I think about that, I tend to go, the stories I write tend to go in exactly the opposite direction, and they tend to juxtapose that immensity with these very, very, you know, a guy living in his house and in what might be like a
01:05:27
Speaker
and a zoo enclosure or something like that for the for the cosmic monsters that are just sort of you know who knows why they're doing who knows why they let this this person or this little plot of land survive mostly and so that's something that for for any kind of Lovecraft's
01:05:48
Speaker
call for stories or whatever. I always, I always wind up coming back to that. I always wind up coming back to this, this almost like Raymond Carver-esque emphasis on the domestic and the local. And then that gets juxtaposed against, you know, whatever is happening. And I'm pretty sure it was Goethe who said that the job of the poet is to reflect the universal, but in the individual.
01:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, and it's when I teach the specific writing. It's it's it's one of the things she's a well known follower of Goethe, isn't she? His match, as I recall, that was that was one of my favorite albums. Like it was elective affinity.
01:06:35
Speaker
But the album. But I'll tell my students that it's one of the paradoxes of art, that the more specific it is, the more universal it is. And it seems, oh, if I want to write
01:06:51
Speaker
something that's going to appeal to everybody, I should just use very general world words, it was a beautiful sweater, you know, but when you think about it, like, well, what does that look like? What does that mean? It doesn't, you know, it those general words are so general, they lose their effectiveness, you know. So yeah, I think a lot of what
01:07:13
Speaker
I think a lot of what I've wound up doing in my fiction, especially in the earlier stuff, a lot of what I was trying to do was take a run at a bunch of classic monsters and invert them, twist them around, turn them around.
Anthologies and Horror Storytelling
01:07:29
Speaker
And so, yeah, the the white carnivorous sky is a vampire story, except the vampire is afraid of the dark and the vampire comes from outer space. And, you know, I was trying to just like start with with that. Yeah, the shallows is is, you know, Lovecraft, post apocalypse, apocalyptic Lovecraft, but all of that is just happening in the
01:07:51
Speaker
literally widescreen background. City of the Dog is a ghoul story, except it's also the disintegration of a relationship. And a guy who is a narrator who in some ways is so self-absorbed he doesn't realize what's actually happening, the story that he's caught up in. And
01:08:17
Speaker
I in Paris in the mouth of Chrono, same thing, people who don't quite understand everything that is that is happening to them. And that was, you know, a story like that came about because Ellen Doutlow said, I'm putting together an anthology of supernatural noir and, you know, have at it. And I was like, I have no idea what that would look like. But then it became
01:08:38
Speaker
for me a really interesting kind of challenge, and that might be one of those things we were talking about earlier, you know, the sort of absurd idea, or the weird mash-up sort of challenge, that it can be very useful for your brain to have to say, oh my god, supernatural, what is that even, you know, because then you have to think to yourself, well, in my case, well, noir always involves betrayal.
01:09:03
Speaker
that's the essence of noir is that somebody is betraying somebody else. And all the torture scandals were coming out about Abu Ghraib. And there's there's still a lot people don't know about what happened at Bagram Air Base and so on. And, and those things became like, Oh, well, okay, maybe I can do something, you know, with disgrace.
01:09:22
Speaker
people and all this kind of stuff. So I, yeah, a lot of those and a lot of my stories continue to operate that way. I'll have a story coming out in Ellen Dattlow contacted me and said, I want to do a Christmas anthology, except it's, you know, like that time of year, Yule, Christmas, Hanukkah, all this kind of stuff. There's so many different holidays that happen at that time of the year. And
01:09:49
Speaker
you know, my initial thought was, oh, I gotta write some kind of like, you know, Christmas monster kind of story or something like that. I had some ideas. And then I thought, wait, what if I write like a really dirty story? Like I've never, there haven't been a lot of stories I've written that are really, really like sexy, sexy stories. And I thought, oh, that's horrible.
01:10:11
Speaker
But, you know, but I was also kind of like pleased with myself because I thought that is, that is like, again, like sort of, okay, how do I do that then? You know, that's like sort of just outside the box, I guess. So for your listeners who are writers, who are thinking to themselves, you know, okay, how do I get ideas? How do I generate ideas?
01:10:36
Speaker
Things that you can do, look at anthologies that are out there already. There are plenty of anthologies I've missed the call for. There was an anthology of Wizard of Oz stories. I thought, man, how would I do a Wizard of Oz story? I'm still turning that over. There was an anthology of Alice in Wonderland stories. Again, missed the call for that and I finally figured that one out.
01:11:00
Speaker
God, where did it like maybe it was in Mark Morris is one of his anthologies. So, so I like like take anthology ideas, not because you think you could write for them, but because you don't know how you would write for them, and then make that your your kind of challenge. How do I write a story that that is
01:11:23
Speaker
pleasing to me to whoever I am, but that fits with this particular theme of sharks or something like that. Oh, sharks are so boring, right? Okay, now you've got to write a shark story. That's your challenge, right? You've got to write a shark story, and it's got to be interesting to you as the writer.
01:11:41
Speaker
I think we've got a few thanks. We've mentioned Ellen Dattlow. Sorry, Dan. And I was going to mention Steve Hall as well, talking of sharks and bringing it back to the low vision. I just want to come on to, we've mentioned Ellen Dattlow a few times. If our listeners don't know who she is, then shame on you. But secondly, she's just the best editor of Horror Anthology. So if I see Ellen Dattlow's name on something,
01:12:11
Speaker
just I buy instantly because there is never a weak story award-winning Bram Stoker award-winning editor really good anthologies and then the other thing I wanted to come back to is what John said about his characters and writing traditional monsters in a new way is I don't want the listeners to get the idea that you are just going to be reading a vampire story or a werewolf or whatever
01:12:37
Speaker
that is the most original horror i've read uh without a doubt and um we are not dealing i mean that's i'm not going to go into details but the end at the ending of um in chronos in the mouth in chronos in
01:12:51
Speaker
in Paris. In the mouth of madness. In the mouth of madness. John Carpenter. That ending and the description of, you know, who the target is, is just horrible because it is rooted in, I'm in a hotel corridor and I can see it just is so normal and so natural. It's different to anything we've ever read.
01:13:15
Speaker
So I just wanted to sort of put that disclaimer on something you might have said in modesty, well not in modesty, but about your own work is the fact that there was a huge amount of originality. There has never been a book like the Fisherman written, there's never been a monster like that being written. And I'm not just talking about the fish, I'm talking about the magician and everything. It's just so unique and I think, you know. We're at a point in time where there are so many
01:13:43
Speaker
There's an abundance of great horror novels and horror stories at this particular moment. And there are so many novels
01:13:58
Speaker
you know, like, like younger writers, like Rachel Harrison writes a novel like The Return, her first novel, which is a brilliant and scary and freaky novel. A novel, a novelist like Gwendolyn Keist writes a novel. Geez, what was it?
01:14:18
Speaker
her last novel whose name, oh my God, it just went right out of my head. Anyway, it's like the Immortals, somehow Immortals are in there. S. P. Miskowski writes a series of short novels set in an invented town in Washington state in the United States. There were just people who were doing these things that are new. And I mean, you can always, if you're well-read enough,
01:14:45
Speaker
If you watch enough movies, you can always find the traces of things. But you have these things that are just astonishingly ambitious. And they're written by people who have the talent to realize that ambition, which is always a nice thing.
01:15:08
Speaker
Victor LaValle's The Changeling, which is a terrific, yeah, that's the one, reluctant immortals, yeah, yeah, for Gwendolyn Keist, yeah. And this is not to turn into a sort of a listing contest, because there's always gonna be a ton, a ton of people that I'm going to leave out, but that's almost the point, that there's so much good stuff that's being done right now that I can't keep track of all of it. It almost doesn't matter which stuff you pick up.
01:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, and there's, you know, there's, I mean, I haven't mentioned a writer like Joel Lane, who was a great favorite of mine, who died much, much too young, and who left behind just an astonishing body of short fiction, and also a really
01:15:51
Speaker
Oh, who is the press? A small press brought out an incomplete book that he was writing on the horror field, which is just terrific. I think it's this spectacular darkness, maybe, I think, Tartarus Press. And you can get it. You can get an e-copy of it for under ten dollars, American, I want to say. It's it's just it's wonderful and it makes his loss all the more acute. But but
01:16:21
Speaker
Yeah, you you just have. So we mentioned Tade Thompson earlier. There's there's just there's there's so many great writers. It's and it can make you a little mad, you know, trying to keep up with everybody. Yeah. And and and as a as a writer and slash reader, just, you know, realize you're not going to be able to. But that's a cool problem to have. You know, there's one of Mahler May's poems where he's like, alas, I have read all the books.
01:16:48
Speaker
You know, it's Mather May and he means, you know, they're like, whatever, a hundred classic books. I've read them all. That sounds like Pete could say. He's read all the fantasy books. Yeah, actually. Listen, I think we're going to have to wrap this up now because we are going way over time. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, no, no. And apologize. It just means that we're just going to have to get you back to continue the conversation.
The Fisherman's Journey and Episode Wrap-Up
01:17:13
Speaker
It's not you. It's Dan.
01:17:14
Speaker
It is entirely my fault. Bad chairmanship. Maybe we should see if we can have someone else on too. We were thinking of that. We've got one or two ideas, so we'll kick that about with you. But before we go, 7th October is the UK publication date for The Fisherman.
01:17:33
Speaker
go out and buy it go out and read it it's a phenomenal book even if you're not a horror fan there is a lot of other stuff going on in The Fisherman it's a wonderful book it deserves I mean I don't know maybe one last question do you know why it's taken such a long time to have an official UK release
01:17:51
Speaker
I don't actually, I don't, it's been, it has been translated into a number of other languages, Spanish, Portuguese, there's a Czech version, a Greek version, a Russian version, a Japanese version is on the way. And for some reason, Britain and France took the longest, there's a German version.
01:18:21
Speaker
And you know, so much of my family is in the UK that I really wanted them to have access to the book. So yeah, I'm quite pleased that it's going to be more widely available. Yeah, it's brilliant. It's long overdue. Everybody should read it. 7th of October. That's when it's coming out. And everybody on our website should read it.
01:18:49
Speaker
But if you can't get the American version, because the cover is phenomenal. Albert Beatt's Puget Sound on the East Coast is on the cover of the American version, which is this painting of
01:19:09
Speaker
you can I just it's perfect for that book and then there's a new one which doesn't do as much justice I think on the new have you seen the new oh yeah because that's how this is the UK the UK version I think is I'm quite I'm quite happy with I've not seen and I love
01:19:24
Speaker
I loved the American version, but I was actually really pleasantly surprised with what they came up with for the UK version because most of the foreign editions have just borrowed the American, some version of the American cover. And I, Canelo took a, you know, they were like, no, we want to do a redesign. And what they came up with, I was like, okay, that's,
01:19:49
Speaker
that's actually I'm pleased because it gives us an excuse to I'm going to go out and buy the UK version I've got a dogged American version upstairs somewhere but I'm going to buy the UK version because it's a nice shiny design and yeah well it's nice to have that point of difference and I'm sure Bean is going to get it as well yeah well I've got it I've had it three times because I keep giving it away to people um yeah he does he does
01:20:13
Speaker
I haven't, you really should be paying him commission because he's told everyone. He wanted to have me on here so you could present me with the bill at the end.
01:20:24
Speaker
To be fair, though, I'm passing comment on something I've not seen up close, but I just love the first I the only cover of the only cover I saw your cover reveal video, but you can't really see it. I didn't really couldn't make it out wrong glasses on or whatever. I love the Puget sound cover just it's my desktop. You know, I have that on my desktop after that. I saw that book. So just, you know, I'm not serious, whoever you are, whether you're American or English buy it. And
01:20:50
Speaker
and bloody have the time of your life because it is the Star Wars of horror. Thank you. That's about the best compliment. Just to clarify, just to clarify, he also likes Star Wars. So it's OK. All right. The original movies, I hope, you know, all of them. He likes everything. Every single every every bit of even toys, the wig, the catchphrase, everything he likes all of it.
01:21:19
Speaker
Anyway, I'm going to call time now. John, it's been such a pleasure. We haven't called time because we've got questions to ask. Oh yes, sorry. Sorry. We've got three questions for you. You know what? You kind of answered one of them. We always ask.
01:21:34
Speaker
What are you reading now and what would you recommend? But you've recommended about a dozen books. Yeah. So in place of that, I'm going to ask you, what would your demon be if you were in his dark materials?
01:21:49
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question. I've thought about that sometimes. It would be a leviathan, right? That would be hysterical. And I can't ever get it through the door. I can't go anywhere because there's just this big sea monster outside. You know, that is a really, really good question. I think I feel like a cat because I grew up with
01:22:13
Speaker
He's not really, is he a crab? So I think it would be some form of cat, I think, that was sort of a temperamental cat that wouldn't always do what I wanted it to do. Ultimately, it might be some type of bird. It might be the crow, right, is the obvious sort of answer. But it might be some kind of small raptor that would just sort of look at things with a hungry expression.
01:22:42
Speaker
Or that sort of alien expression birds can have sometimes, you know? Oh well. I was hoping for something really out there, like... Well, I've already got Nudibranch, so... I told you, right? I told you to lower your expectations. I know, this has been the most disappointing podcast I've ever seen.
01:23:02
Speaker
That in and of itself, though, is that's a mark of pride for me, right? It can only get better next time, I suppose, can't it? My demon has no name because it's, you know, something like that, cosmic. Your demon's Madonna. No, my demon's a pike.
01:23:21
Speaker
Oh, nice. Nice. Shall we talk about your demon, Dan? What, the nudibranch? Judith. His demon's called Judith, and she's a nudibranch. Do you want a nudibranch? A sea slug. Oh, a sea slug. Okay, that's good. That's good. Yeah, yeah. That means I'd have to cart around a
01:23:39
Speaker
you know, portable sea salt aquarium with me. So again, logistical problems. Anyway, let's call time. John, it's been absolute pleasure, hasn't it? Really, really excellent. Super, super. Thank you so much. And Dan, I mean, say to you as well, Dan, I think you've really improved as well. Oh, thanks very much.
01:24:02
Speaker
Sadly, I cannot return the compliment. You've just nosedived this episode. Anyway, thank you so much. John, hopefully we'll see you again in the future if we can make it work. And thanks everyone for listening. Bye all.
01:24:34
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones, Christopher Bean and our special guest John Lagan. Additional content was provided by Brian Sexton and Jay Starloper. Special thanks to Brian Turner and all the staff at Crohn's and thanks to you for listening. Next month we'll be talking to the filmmakers Greg Hale and Ed Sanchez about Jonathan Glazer's masterful 2013 film Under the Skin.
01:25:00
Speaker
They'll also be discussing their new project Black Velvet Fairies, and the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest and most original horror movies of all time. Their Witch Project.
01:26:37
Speaker
You're not that bad.