A sense of place is a wonderful thing when it comes to weird fiction and folk horror. A sense of plaice, on the other hand, is an underlying fear that flat-fish have developed an obsession with you. We’ll go with the first one today. Two contemporary authors who have done much to burrow into strange places are Matthew M Bartlett and Tom Breen, with their tales of Leeds, Massachusetts and Orford Parish respectively.
Both locations are marvellously imagined, populated by everything from long-dead cultists to goblins who interfere with the sewage system. The sounds of small town America reverberate through their streets, but the tunes and words are discordant – and rather subversive. It’s also never a good idea to go into the woods.
So we decided that we would pit these two literary giants against each other in an inquisitorial combat which could yet rip asunder the very fabric of modern weird fiction and expose the underbelly of warped Americana. Or maybe just ask them a few questions and see what happened. We can’t quite remember what we were thinking about when the idea came up.
We’ll meet our charming contestants in a moment, but you may wish to know about their quaint colonial names first.
- The surname Bartlett first appears in English records in the mid 12th Century, while other early recordings include Walter Bertelot, in the Subsidy Rolls of Sussex (1296) and Thomas Bartlot, in the Poll Tax Records of Yorkshire (1379). A Robert Bartlett was one of the early settlers in New England in June 1632.
- Breen on the other hand, refers to a reclusive, powerful, and warlike race of humanoids who allied with the Dominion against Starfleet.
We’re not sure what to make of that one. So…
greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, both of you – it’s a delight to have you here. We should start with an intrusive personal question. The two of you have actually met in the flesh, and have even been photographed sharing a book-stand. How did you get to know each other?
breen: I suppose there are two ways to answer this question. The first way is what we’ve told the grand juries, the police, the nosey inquisitors of the press: Matthew’s younger brother sang for a local punk rock band in the suburbs around Hartford, Connecticut, and as someone who attended every punk show I could, I became friendly with him. Eventually, through this friendship, I came to know Matthew. That, as I say, is the public-facing answer. The True Answer involves secrets so terrible I am bound never to reveal them. Also, a Morrissey concert.
bartlett: I introduced my brother Jon to punk rock when I brought home a few records I borrowed from a classmate. He got swept up, and before long, he was fronting punk rock bands and making the most of the DIY ethos that in turn (in part) inspired me to self-publish. I’m not sure how early on I saw Tom, but it had to be the mid-to-late ‘90s. We officially met at an excellent show by Morrissey, and became close friends around late 2004. Coincidentally or not, I started writing my Leeds stories not long after.
greydog: Some of our listeners may not yet have travelled to your creations. Share with them a fact about Leeds, Massachusetts and Orford Parish that might spark their interest – or that might make them swear never to go within a duck’s spit of these places.
breen: Orford Parish, Connecticut is quite proud of its reputation as America’s Unexplained Disappearances Capital, logging over 300 vanishings per year, an astonishing per capita rate for a town with only about 60,000 inhabitants (living). “Lose Yourself in Orford Parish!” has been the city’s tourism slogan for several years now.
bartlett: For most of its residents, Leeds is a normal artsy college town, albeit, not unlike Orford Parish, with a few more disappearances than are regularly acknowledged or reported upon. But a large minority are sufficiently unlucky to be attuned to the dark history of the city, to the inner workings of black magic and demon worship that operate at a slightly different frequency than the everyday. There’s something going on in—and with—the woods, you see.
greydog: H P Lovecraft had his gambrel-strewn Arkham and surrounds, Ramsey Campbell has his brick-infested Brichester and re-imagined Severn Valley. John Linwood Grant, that opportunistic hack, writes about the dark side of the Yorkshire Wolds. When did you each first come up with the concept of your own unique place, one that you would keep revisiting?
breen: For me, it was about 10 or 11 years ago. I was living in my hometown and working at a newspaper, and feeling as if I were in the most boring place in the world. I had started reading books on English folklore by Ronald Hutton, Steve Roud, and others, and imagined that what my corner of the world needed was a dose of that kind of centuries-old strangeness. So, on a Livejournal I had, I started writing faux-travel pieces that envisioned, say, something like the Burning of Bartle transported to the hinterlands of Connecticut. From there, the contours of Orford Parish started to take shape.
bartlett: The city in which I live is very old, and that history is in plain sight in the old houses and buildings. No matter how colorful the banners and how modern the apparel and the trappings, the darker times are right there out front, in your face. You can look at a house, an alley, a park, and the stories just come flowing out. You can’t blot out the past. Add to that the simple fact of it being in New England, in a largely unremarked upon part of Massachusetts, and its hard not to use my city as a setting. Of course, bits of East Hartford, where I grew up, keep popping in as well – I just sew it right in.
greydog: We’re privileged here in that, as Britlanders, we have encountered the ‘original’ Leeds and Orford. You may already know that Leeds, Yorkshire is a quaint little settlement of a mere three quarters of a million inhabitants, and one of the country’s main financial and legal hubs.
Orford, Suffolk, on the other hand, is a pre-twelfth century town where wonders happen daily – we culled these from their local media only today: “New chairperson need for Orford Shrimps Pre-School”, “Toy found on Orford Quay”, and “Slow food now available at the Pump Street Bakery”. Do you feel the pull of these ancestral locations even as you write?
breen: Is there any local news story more pulse-quickening than “Toy Found”? Actually, that could be the start of a disturbing tale. My hometown was originally called Orford Parish by 17th century English settlers (perhaps from Suffolk), but – this is true – the name was changed to Manchester in 1823 in a pathetically obvious attempt to associate the place with the industrial powerhouse in Britain.
This means, among other things, that one spots more Manchester United apparel in my town than might be expected in a New England backwater. In Orford Parish, of course, the only sport people really follow is the ancestral game of crinkleshins, which has been banned elsewhere because of the violence, nausea, and weeks-long bouts of sleep paralysis that accompany each match.
bartlett: I leave it open—so far—as to whether the darkness came to the city with the settlers, or it was always here.
greydog: Both your locales have a mixed history as regards witch: non-witch relations. In the case of Matthew’s Leeds, it is undoubtedly malevolent, whilst the witch-hunting in Tom’s Orford seems to have been almost playful. Is this theme a peculiarly New England thing?
breen: I think that’s a fair assessment. The Puritans who settled New England in the 17th century put a lot of people on trial for witchcraft although, in fairness, they did occasionally acquit some people. Connecticut actually executed more people for witchcraft than any other colony until the 1692 panic in Salem, and lore about witches, and the ghosts of witches, has been part of the region ever since. Salem itself has turned into a sort of witch trial Disneyland, where even the doors of police cars sport jaunty images of a witch flying on a broom, silhouetted against the full moon. There’s something very New England about the ability to turn the site of a grisly miscarriage of justice into a moneymaking tourist attraction.
bartlett: The only witch: non-witch relations are with non-witches who are, put simply, bad people. Otherwise, each wants the other destroyed or captured and assimilated.
greydog: That seems reasonable enough. Now, there’s a neat story by Ted E Grau called Transmission (in The Nameless Dark), where he writes:
“Max turned on the radio, switching immediately from the dead FM presets of his last layover to the strange anonymity of AM. A veteran of the road, Max loved to scan the monophonic dial when moving through the most remote areas of the country. Amplitude modulation radio in major cities was the cozy bed of blustery right wing shitsuckers, sports broadcasting, and Madison Avenue country pop. But out in the forgotten hinterlands, especially in the desert southwest, the bedfellows become more strange, inhabited by a disparate mix of yammering Spanish, mournful cowboy crooning, random snatches of Chinese, thunderous Evangelical sermons, and UFO whistleblowers…”
And Station WXXT is a key component of many of Matthew’s pieces. Radio channels pop up in a surprising number of North American horror stories, and we get the feeling that radio in the US is more pervasive and more influential than in the UK – is that the case?
breen: Bartlett is the radio man, so I’ll defer to him. But I think one difference is that the US has never had anything quite like the BBC: there’s no real “national radio,” meaning every region has a more or less distinctive patchwork of radio broadcasters, true even in our current era of corporate consolidation.
bartlett: Tom’s right about radio—at least until syndication and satellite, it’s been an aggressively local thing. And I’m a provincial guy, so that works for me and the stories that I write. The allure of the idea of pirate stations always fascinated me: people operating beyond the rules of the Federal Communications Commission, outright defying them. Why, they could play anything, say anything at all.
greydog: We were reminded, re-reading your books, that the town book store, emporium or second-hand book shop is also a staple of many ventures into this niche of weird and horror fiction. But such places seem increasingly rare. Do they still exist outside of fiction?
breen: They do, at least in the more collegiate parts of the US. The real-life Orford Parish is down to a single chain bookseller, but the nearby Pioneer Valley, with its five major colleges and universities, has maybe eight or nine excellent used bookstores, some of them practically begging to be the setting for a tale of strange horror. The economy in places like that can sustain used bookstores even in times like these. For example, when one of the best recently closed down, in the town of Deerfield (site of a famous colonial massacre!), it wasn’t for economic reasons, but because the proprietor couldn’t stand the thought of another horrible New England winter. Naturally, the winter that followed was the mildest we’d had in decades.
bartlett: As Tom said, we have a good number of used and antiquarian/rare shops in the area. We’re lucky that way. I modeled Anne Gare’s bookshop after a small local shop in an old brick city block in the center of Florence, a village just south of (the real) village of Leeds in Northampton. The shop has a huge, quiet basement. It really was an ideal setting.
greydog: We look forward to the Anne Gare sections every time we read Bartlett. And while we have you, another line of enquiry, if you’ll permit. Tom is an active Catholic; we’ve been most things and now keep a worried eye on both God and Mammon. For all we know, Matthew is a lapsed Episcopalian with a secret altar to The Leech. And the Exorcist had a lot of priests in it. Just saying. What do you see as the role of established religion in modern horror fiction – a cheap reference point or a genuine area for exploration?
breen: It can be a genuinely fruitful area, but the problem is there are decades of clichés both in literature and on film that work against the possibility of coming up with something truly original. A related problem, at least in the US, is that people are generally fairly uninformed about the specifics of religious practice, which is how you end up with exorcism movies that feature Southern Baptists clutching crucifixes and rosaries.
People also have a tendency to resort to the easy trope – the hypocritical priest; the robed Satanists chanting in a graveyard; the ignorant redneck preacher vainly waving his Bible – rather than find something new or penetrating to say. I think Andrew Michael Hurley’s “The Loney” is a good example of how fresh religion can still be in a horror setting, but there aren’t many following its lead, unfortunately.
bartlett: I pull much inspiration from terrifying religious art. So, in that sense, I suppose I use it as a cheap reference point, for my strange cult of mystics to warp as they see fit. When you have a small, art-oriented city in the midst of forests and farmland, you draw in a lot of people who are searching for faith, or for belonging, and who have maybe found wanting the Abrahamic religions and the vague, ineffectual New Age spirituality, and damned if those people don’t have radios in their cars and in their bedrooms.
greydog: What are your proudest creative moments outside of Leeds and Orford?
breen: I once took a photograph at a professional wrestling show that the owner of the company liked so much he gave me free tickets to the next show.
bartlett: I wrote a shockingly uninformed left-wing poem that got on the cover of a newsprint ‘Zine, and was the co-host of a puerile but fitfully creative college radio show in the dim days of the early ‘90s. I also wrote a short poem that my brother used for lyrics for a song.
greydog: There’s no point in us trying to beat those, so we’ll move on. We grew up buried in Ray Bradbury and his evocations of US communities. Apart from your own works, what’s your personal favourite weird short story or novel of small-town America? Please give examples and show your working.
breen: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” gets deserved praise, but I think her lesser-known “The Summer People” is an even better evocation of small-town New England. In brief, it’s about a wealthy, retired urban couple who have been summering in a seaside town for many years. At the end of one summer, they decide they have no reason to go back to the city, and that they’d rather stay on past the traditional end of the season at Labor Day.
The natives do not react well to this decision, and Jackson expertly builds a sense of dread through seemingly small acts of rudeness which, to the native New Englander, are more like formal declarations of war, until things get very badly out of hand. “Summer people” is indeed a kind of epithet throughout rural New England, and having spent many fond summer days in towns just like the one she describes, her story rings true to me in ways that are more chilling than the overt horror of “The Lottery.” The region’s seaside idylls really are different places in the off-season.
bartlett: I grew up on King, but Maine was a little too far afield for me to relate to. It was when I read Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness,” which took place in Brattleboro, Vermont—a city I’d been to!—that I was really grabbed by the effective use of a New England setting…this small city with massive unexplored mountains looming over it. And if you’ve ever been to a seaside city in Massachusetts, the Shadow Over Innsmouth captures that part of New England all too well…and then there’s Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, a novel that took place in Connecticut, the state in which I grew up… Add the ones Tom cited, and more, and more…
greydog: You’re also appearing together in print soon, in the forthcoming Three Moves of Doom: Weird Horror from the Squared Circle. Is this a first?
breen: I believe the first time we appeared in print together was in Matthew’s early, legend-shrouded collection “Dead Air,” for which I wrote a foreword. But this will be the first time we have short stories sharing a table of contents, along with the formidable Joseph Pastula, resident of Tokyo, the furthest outpost of New England folk horror.
bartlett: Tom’s introduction to Dead Air was largely fictional, so that was the first time, but that was in 2010, a time when Verizon didn’t even have the iPhone, so it’s not worth mentioning. This will be the first, and I hope not the last, instance of our stories appearing in the same book.
greydog: Finally, we’ll link to your latest works below, but we have one last puzzler. We note, as a dedicated lurcher site, that rather a lot of authors have cats. Explain this shocking state of affairs.
breen: I thought you had to have a cat to be a weird fiction author, which is how I ended up sharing domestic space with a savage predator named Handsome Harley.
bartlett: I fell in love with a black cat in the early ‘90s. and ever since I’ve adored cats. I still have the first cat I ever got: Phoebe, who was born in 1997. Each cat is unique and comes with his or her specific set of what my wife and I call “ways.” They’re endlessly fascinating, mysterious, silly, and sweet. I think that contradiction is evident in many horror writers as well.
greydog: Oh well, we’ll keep bucking the trend with our longdogs and see what happens. Very many thanks for sparing us your time. We look forward eagerly to the next Leeds and Orford outings, and to what ever else you both concoct.
The obvious thing to do next is to find out even more about Tom and Matthew. So we’d better give you some links. Tom’s Orford Parish Books has a site here:
orford parish booksAnd Matthew can be found here:
We’ve put a couple of UK book links of the right-hand sidebar as well. We doubt that you’ll be disappointed.
Run away! We hope to see you in a few days, dear listener, and will endeavour to interest and entertain you once more…