Tag Archives: authors

Parodies & Possibilities: End of the Year Part the Last

More curiosities arising from this year’s greydogtales articles, some stumbling reflections and a bit of writing news. Oh no, it’s our final End of the Year review. This isn’t a ‘best of’ or self-congratulatory creature. Ideas and connections spark ideas and connections. Something new arose after almost every post, often something more interesting than the original whimsy.

And it is the end of the year as we know it. Except to the many people who have a different one. Some Orthodox Christians celebrate the New Year on 16th January, going by the old Julian character. Our circle of friends in Yorkshire always celebrates the Chinese New Year, which moves about around the end of January and early February. And if you feel daring, the Aztec version starts on 12th March.

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an aztec calendar for easy use

We’ll be conventional today and go for the regular one, with a last look at what emerged from greydogtales broadcasts in 2015. We gave the lurchers a good run on here a couple of days ago, so now we go hard-core (ish).

Weird Art was one of our most productive themes in this regard, and it hasn’t finished yet. Every post led to more artists being mentioned, and in some cases suggestions for (or even offers of) further illustrated features. Much to our surprise, we ended up skittering around the UK, the United States, Denmark and Argentina.

John Coulthart raised the name of Santiago Caruso, who produces strange and surreal imagery, some of which has adorned the covers of weird fiction. Caruso has described himself as “a Symbolist, who recreates the deformation of reality that the human being perceives”.

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santiago caruso

The Weird Fiction Review website has an interview with Caruso, if you want to know more:

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santiago caruso

And you might guess that Caruso is Argentinian. It has been a genuine pleasure to conspire with fellow Argentinians and creative friends Sebastian Cabrol and Diego Arandojo during the year, digging deeper into South American weird art.

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sebastian cabrol

Following frequent mentions of Quique Alcatena, Diego recently brought another of Alcatena’s works to our attention – Empire of Blood, concerning an alternate British-ruled India. More about this in later posts.

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The imagery of folk-horror came to the fore as the year started to close, mostly thanks to the work of Andy Paciorek and other enthusiasts, who are reviving and re-interpreting this area with great vigour.

Andrew Paciorek Fir Darring
fir darring, andy paciorek

We don’t usually think that the world needs more genres or sub-genres, but there is something in this one which hangs together, as exemplified in the recent Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies book mentioned here before. If you’re not interested in British countryside weirdness, think Appalachian folk studies or the film “Winter’s Bone” – the brooding darkness of small communities and their secrets.

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And what of John Linwood Grant and his misunderstood relative, J Linseed Grant? Well, we have more Good News from the Spiritualist Telegraph to slide in before year’s end. With luck and a following wind, Spring will see the publication of the Tales of the Last Edwardian novella, “A Study in Grey”, as part of 18th Wall’s Science of Detection series.

Put briefly, early on in their new career, Henry Dodgson and Abigail Jessop assist one Captain Redvers Blake in uncovering Edwardian treachery. Oh, and Sherlock Holmes plays his part. It’s been an enjoyable challenge to write a novella which is canonical to both Tales of the Last Edwardian and Conan Doyle’s creation, without compromising or screwing up either. Possibly.

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We’re also pleased to confirm that more jlg weird stories will definitely be published on the open market next year, thanks to frenetic anthology and magazine submissions between blog posts. And Sandra’s First Pony, the Enid Blyton/H P Lovecraft crossover by J Linseed Grant, continues unabated, whether people want it or not. Harrumble!

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Oh, and on the subject of harrumble, we discovered a new profanity this year – cockwomble. We can see many uses for this in 2016.

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Exploring William Hope Hodgson and Carnacki during our Octoberfest, you may remember that we raised the subject of pastiches and parodies, which led to David Langford‘s excellent collection He Do the Time Police in Different Voices. The connection is Dave’s Dagon Smythe stories based loosely on Carnacki. These parodies are witty, intelligent and often quite hilarious, whilst his pastiches can be quite loving, and we recommend them all.

timepolhe do the time police in different voices

But – the sequel to this is that as a result we went into the Magic Loft and unearthed a treasured copy of John Sladek‘s The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (1973).

21432612253_e95a175db0The connection is that Sladek includes ten great parodies of classic SFF authors. Thus you can find, between the two volumes, such pleasures as:

  • Three Isaac Asimov parodies – Broot Force by Iclick as-i-move (Sladek), Tales of the Black Scriveners and The Last Robot Story by Is**c As*m*v (Langford).
  • Classics such as The Purloined Butter, purportedly by Poe, H G W*lls story, Pemberly’s Start-Afresh Calliope (both Sladek) and a wonderful G K Chesterton Father Brown parody The Spear of the Sun, by G K Ch*st*rt*n (Langford).

Our favourite from the Sladek volume is the piss-take of Cordwainer Smith, One Damned Thing After Another, but you’d probably have to know Cordwainer Smith’s odd and marvellously different creation, The Instrumentality, to get it. Which comment should lead us on to a celebration of The Instrumentality, but maybe some other time. You can get the Sladek here:

the steam-driven boy and other strangers

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We still have deep love for classic authors, of course, especially the weird or supernatural ones, and so we introduced E G Swain, Sir Andrew Caldecott, William Hope Hodgson (of course), E & H Heron, and Henry S Whitehead, with a smattering of H P Lovecraft and M R James mentions along the way. As this theme continues in 2016, it will be scientifically based on things I find in the loft and stories I can half-remember. From thirty years ago.

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There you have it, dearest listeners. Broadcasting out of a derelict shepherd’s hut on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, and living off what the longdogs don’t get first, this has been greydogtales 2015. Thank you for tuning in, and special thanks to those creative human beans who have made greydogtales so collaborative and given up their time, artwork or ideas. We hope that somewhere along the way you have all found something to interest or amuse you,

henrymeme

Literature, lurchers and life, the weirdest things you’ll ever meet.

Next time: Our imagined calendar of what we hope to cover, and the beginning of 2016 weird…

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John Coulthart: Axioms & Other Dark Beasts

We’re delighted to be joined today by an outstanding and award-winning illustrator of what we loosely term ‘the weird’, John Coulthart. We glide through artistic techniques and influences, discussing John’s cracking website, his own writing, Lovecraft and Ligotti along the way. And we have an exclusive view of the original cover design for his Axiom project. It doesn’t get much better (unless you were hoping for a photograph of Django running into a tree).

We would say something else nice and introductory about John, but really the interview and the art tell you what you need to know. So let’s just do this thing…

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greydog: Welcome to greydogtales. For once we’re not sure where to start. Not only do you produce striking illustrations, but you also write, and you provide a website packed with fascinating articles, weird trivia and the work of other illustrators. Do you see yourself as an artist with sidelines, or a multi-media person?

coulthart: Art has always been the dominant thing, and it’s how I make a living, but I realised I enjoyed writing when I was about 9 or 10, and that I had some facility for it. The first thing I had published in any form was a poem in the local newspaper when I was 10. In secondary school I won the art prize but a year or so later I was thinking seriously about getting fiction published somewhere. I’d been writing and illustrating a lot of derivative fantasy stuff, and working on a novel that never got very far because I kept writing and rewriting the first few chapters. Shortly after that I was creating album artwork for Hawkwind but also writing another novel, a wildly uncommercial thing that was almost wholly dream sequences and “experimental” prose. I only stopped the writing when I started adapting the Lovecraft stories since that was a very labour-intensive process. I’d also realised by that point that I needed to think more seriously about why I wanted to write fiction when things were going well art-wise.

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steampunk, john coulthart

greydog: For some people, achieving a blog like feuilleton would be enough in its own right. It’s like greydogtales, but produced by someone who knows what they’re doing (greydog is an unrepentant grasshopper, and about as complex). Is the multi-layered nature of feuilleton a reflection of your own personality, or are we reading too much into it?

coulthart: Ha, I didn’t know what I was doing at all when I started. The thing appeared on a whim after someone asked me to helped them put a website together. I installed a database and WordPress so they could have a blog/news feature then realised a) that it was relatively easy to set up, and b) I could do the same for myself. It didn’t feel at all serious until 2007 when I wrote a lengthy piece one weekend about the album cover art of Barney Bubbles who I felt was under-represented on the web. That one post received a huge amount of attention, and led (indirectly) to a book of Barney’s work being published, and my name appearing in the New York Times. The discipline of making a daily post has helped hone my writing, at least where non-fiction is concerned. It’s also led to my being asked to write a few paid pieces for design magazines, something I never expected at all.

It’s very much a reflection of my personality since I don’t write about anything I’m not interested in. I like the flexibility of the form: you can write short or at great length or even only post links as I do each weekend; you can include visuals or videos or music mixes; and you control the platform more than you do in social media. I’ve found individual posts to be very useful for having a fixed statement or essay available in a public space. I’ve spent years telling people about David Rudkin’s TV play, Penda’s Fen, for example, but there’s no need to repeat yourself at length when you can send someone a link to something you’ve written.

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tentacle latitudes, john coulthart

greydog: Penda’s Fen was our introduction to Manichean dualism (we don’t get to say that often) many years ago, and left a lasting impression. If you watch it as a teenager, it raises so much about your identity, your sexuality and your belief systems – and somehow indelibly writes Edward Elgar into the mix. Everyone should see it. And you’ve written at length about David Rudkin‘s work in the recent book Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies (link on sidebar).

Back to business. We’re asking all our feature artists something about the professional process, for those who don’t work in this field. You’ve undertaken a lot of commissions from publishers. How much creative freedom do you tend to get when executing a book cover?

coulthart: It depends very much on the publisher and art director commissioning the work, but most mid-range publishers, and all the big ones have specific ideas of the direction they want to see you following. Some novels make certain cover designs seem inevitable whereas others might suggest any number of different approaches; if the book is in the latter category then it helps to have someone dictating the direction before you begin. The worst kind of job for a designer or illustrator is one where the client doesn’t know what they want but insists on guiding the project, or—worse—changes their mind once you’ve started work.

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necronomicon, john coulthart

greydog: Often the first thing that we notice when we see a Coulthart piece is the amazing intricacy of your style. With something like the interior illustrations for The Haunter of the Dark, for example, how long would a single page/plate take to be completed?

coulthart: All those Lovecraft pages took around two weeks to draw which is why I stopped using such fine pens when I started work on the Lord Horror comics. At the time I only had one Rotring drawing pen which had a 0.2 mm nib. Rotring pens are expensive precision things, and I didn’t have the money to buy a set so I got used to shading with extremely fine lines. By the time I started on the Lord Horror comics I had a few more pens so I switched to 0.5 which is still a fine line but it halved the production time.

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cthulhu, john coulthart

greydog: A number of your pieces remind us of the detailed work of Victorian and Edwardian illustrators. Gustave Doré springs to mind immediately. Is this an area you mine for inspiration, or an accidental reflection of earlier approaches?

coulthart: Yes, the atmosphere of Doré’s work was something I was aiming at when I began The Haunter of the Dark. I wanted to get away from the poor science-fiction art I’d been creating for Hawkwind, and also try and present Lovecraft’s stories pictorially with the same seriousness they had on the page. I dislike the EC style of horror comics with some chuckling host popping up at the end to crack a joke. The initial impetus came from Berni Wrighton’s Frankenstein portfolio which borrows from Doré’s Ancient Mariner in two of the plates. (He was actually working more in the style of Franklin Booth but I didn’t know this at the time.) Wrightson has done a lot of EC-style art but the Frankenstein drawings were intended as illustrations not comic panels. I’ve often said that my Lovecraft strips are really illustrated stories presented in a sequential form rather than comic-strip adaptations. I’ve never really considered myself to be a comic artist, I’m an illustrator who happened to choose the comics medium for those stories because it gave you access to every part of the story. The page layout and drawing style is much closer to European comics even though the subject is predominantly American.

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r’lyeh, john coulthart

greydog: When it comes to artwork, from which single project of yours did you gain the most personal satisfaction, regardless of reception or remuneration?

coulthart: That would be Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, the collected (“graphic novel”) edition of the Lord Horror comics I worked on with David Britton during the 1990s. Reverbstorm was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a comic series that was excessive and transgressive knowing all the time that it would still be published. My ink drawing in Reverbstorm is the best I’ve done anywhere, while the comic itself throws Modernist literature (mostly Joyce and Eliot) and Cubist/Expressionist art into a soup of material from Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan comics and the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft and Hodgson. There’s never been anything in comics that offered these kinds of juxtapositions over so many pages.

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lord horror: reverbstorm, john coulthart

greydog: Let’s escape art for a moment. We grew up on the albums Hall of the Mountain Grill, Warrior on the Edge of Time and Michael Moorcock‘s New Worlds Fair, and you’ve done cover art for Hawkwind. Were you also interested in that musical ‘zone’, or was it just another job?

coulthart: Yes, I liked Hawkwind a great deal circa 1980, and I still like the albums they made in the 1970s. I also liked a lot of other music at the time that was more of its time – groups such as Cabaret Voltaire – but Hawkwind were attractive for the loose mythology that surrounded their albums and the group. A lot of the mythology was simply the product of Barney Bubbles’ sleeve designs so the combination of those two things – design and mythology – led me to start drawing a series of Hawkwind-related pictures. In the summer of 1980 I was lucky to meet someone who knew the band so that in turn led to my being asked to work for the group shortly after. This was a great opportunity at the time but it was also frustrating as I was trying to produce designs as well as illustrations but without having access to any of the facilities – or contact with the printers – that you needed to create graphic design. The disaffection – and dissatisfaction with my own work – pushed me to quit the album cover work and do something completely different which was the HP Lovecraft comics.

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moorcock, john coulthart

greydog: And we are, at heart, a blog about weird fiction, a term thankfully hard to define. Which written works in this field stand out most for you as a reader?

coulthart: There’s too many to choose so I’ll concentrate on man-of-the-moment Thomas Ligotti. I dug out my old copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer before the new Penguin edition came out, and I’ve recently read Teatro Grottesco and Grimscribe, neither of which I’d read before. A lot of contemporary genre writing bores me because it reads the same: too many authors whose unobtrusive prose styles would render them indistinguishable from each other if you removed the names from their stories in a collection. You can’t say this about Ligotti: his prose and his obsessions are as immediately recognisable as a few seconds of animation by the Brothers Quay. Grimscribe is good but Teatro Grottesco is even better, and is essential reading. It’s disgraceful that books of his are currently out of print but then this was the case with Robert Aickman for many years, and it’s still the case with other exceptional writers.

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nyarlathotep, john coulthart

greydog: The author Ted E Grau, who we interviewed here last week, is also a huge Ligotti fan. Tell us about your own fiction. You’ve written a number of short pieces, both fiction and critical reviews, and you have a long term project, Axiom, on which you’ve been working for some time. Do you have a specific ambition as regards your writing?

coulthart: At the moment the ambition is to get my two novels published. Since 2001 I’ve been labouring on the Axiom project which has become quite a substantial thing although little of it has been made public. When you have a career in one medium it can seem like folly to be trying to pursue a separate career in another but as I said earlier, I’ve been writing fiction for years. The difference this time is that the new work is the first I’ve produced that I was at all satisfied with. The Axiom project emerged after I’d finished work on Reverbstorm: I’d spent several years collaborating with other people and wanted to return to creating something substantial of my own. Reverbstorm has an invented city as its location, and it was while working on that I realised that taking this in a different direction would give me something that reflected my own interest in real or imaginary cities, in architecture and so on.

So the first novel, Axiom, establishes a setting for a proposed series of works in different media. The frame is such that this could support a narrative with few (or no) generic features, or something that was full-on cosmic horror. A city always is a useful device if you want to tell a variety of stories, and there are many fictional precedents. Axiom (the novel) is four connected narratives that describe a year in the life of the city, the tone being dark fantasy grading to horror. I have an agent who’s tried the book with all the main UK genre imprints, including a number of places I wouldn’t have considered if I’d been sending it out myself. We did get an offer from one UK publisher, and things had reached the contract stage when they promptly went into receivership. I’ve been surprised by some of the reactions towards the sexual content: this, more than anything else, seems to have been a problem for the book being accepted. It sounds ridiculous in 2015 to say you’re being rejected on account of this but that’s what we’ve been told. One of the reactions made me wonder whether they’d read any Ballard or Barker or Burroughs. This situation has been a surprise mainly because I don’t regard what I’ve been writing as being particularly transgressive, it’s just that one of the things I’ve been exploring (which was also touched on in Reverbstorm) is what I call the Eros of the Monstrous, in other words giving your abominations a sexuality. It’s evident that some people aren’t keen on this but it’s a subject that interests me, and I’ve been working on new art and writing that explores this further.

Another stumbling block seems to have been working in an area which (to me) is midway between the genre world and the literary world. I like these hybrid zones wherever they occur but the business of publishing isn’t always encouraging of things that don’t easily fit their boxes. We took a similar approach with Reverbstorm which I’ve called a psychopathology of heroic fantasy: the trappings of adventure comics were present throughout, especially references to Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, but the narrative veers continually away from this into Modernist styles and techniques. This is the perfect way to limit your audience: you alienate the people who want the swashbuckling adventure stuff, and you get little interest from the art crowd who are put off by the vulgarity elsewhere.

The second novel in the Axiom project, Vitriol, is a 217,000-word doorstop featuring invented psychedelic drugs, sword fights, occult rituals, para-dimensional monstrosities, an alchemist war, and a great deal of gay sex. We had a very nice rejection for this one from a major UK publisher who said they loved the book but didn’t think it was commercial enough. I’m hoping this isn’t the consensus as I spent seven years writing Vitriol, creating the kind of book I’d want to read myself but which I couldn’t find on the shelves; on that level it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve done, and it’s also a better novel than the first one. Many people have assumed I’d opt for self-publishing these novels which is still an option – I design books, after all – but publishers have the advantage of marketing and distribution. In the meantime, I’ve been working on material for a new Axiom book that will combine short pieces of fiction with graphics, and also thinking about a new novel.

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original axiom design, john coulthart

greydog: We can only wish you good fortune on the whole Axiom venture. As we grew up reading Burroughs and books like Samuel Delany‘s Dhalgren (pretty wild for teens from a small Yorkshire town) it seems retrogressive that  sexual content in this sort of fiction should be a block.

Now, we love discovering new illustrators of the weird. Can you suggest someone else working today who stands out to you, someone with whom we might not be familiar?

coulthart: I think you may already know Santiago Caruso’s exceptional art (http://www.santiagocaruso.com.ar/). His finely-detailed Lovecraftian pieces were one of the highlights of the NecronomiCon art show in Providence in August. Elsewhere I’ve been impressed by Caitlin Hackett’s surreal fairytale drawings (https://caitlinhackett.carbonmade.com/projects/3016488), Jason Grim’s disturbing self-portraits (http://www.jasongrimart.com/#!photography/c24t1), Alison Scarpulla’s mysterious photographs (https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliscarpulla/page2), and Cristina Francov’s strange paintings (http://www.cristinafrancov.com/en-galeria-obras-selectas.html).

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gods of yigg, john coulthart

greydog: Glad you mention Santiago Caruso. His work is particularly stunning, and we’re currently obsessing on the range of fine South American illustrators (see earlier Sebastian Cabrol post). We hope to have more of them on greydogtales in due course. So what other Coulthart project(s) can we look forward to seeing in 2016?

coulthart: On the shelves at the moment there’s The Gods of H P Lovecraft, a collection of new stories from JournalStone Publishing, edited by Aaron French. I illustrated six of the stories, each of which concerns a different Lovecraftian creature or entity. Also out in January (I guess, because I haven’t been given a release date) is a book design for a large US outlet that I’m not saying much about at the moment since I want it to be a surprise. But it’s going to be a lavish production so I’m looking forward to seeing it. And I’ve just received a commission for another project that will have to remain mysterious but this will be an alternate history by a well-regarded author scheduled for release in late 2016. Further off, I’ve agreed to illustrate William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland for Swan River Press. There’s no schedule established for that one but I’m planning on starting work in the New Year.

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reverbstorm 3, john coulthart

greydog: Thank you so much, John Coulthart. We highly recommend John’s website, feuilleton, which is a miscellany of thoughts and wonders, and can be found through this link:

feuilleton

(Of course, we also highly recommend that you check out some of the previous posts mentioned on greydogtales as well, but our site is better described as a bucket of things we tripped over when trying to avoid the dogs. Interviews with Ted E Grau and Sebastian Cabrol can be found by checking on the left.)

Apart from The Gods of H P Lovecraft, you may also want to have a look at John’s Haunter of the Dark book while you’re browsing. The UK link is on the right-hand sidebar:

haunterHaunter of the Dark US

In but a few days we bring you one of our finds of this autumn – a  heavily illustrated feature on the terrific Danish folklore/folk-horror artist Jorgen Bech Pedersen. We’ll try to fit some more longdogs in before the end of December. And we might have a few days off, you never know…

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Ted E Grau: A Voice from the Nameless Dark

Today’s feature is a real treat – an interview with contemporary horror writer Ted E Grau. Ted was actually meant to be the classic British author H Russell Wakefield (1888 – 1964), which has probably surprised both of them. However, the talented Mr Grau responded so promptly to our outline that we decided to hold the party right here, right now. Remember listeners, carpe diem (that’s Latin for “my fish has just expired”).

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For any newcomers, T.E. Grau is an author of dark fiction whose work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, magazines, literary journals, and audio platforms. The Nameless Dark, his first collection of short fiction, was released in July of 2015 by Lethe Press. The novelette They Don’t Come Home Anymore will be published in 2016 through This Is Horror. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

greydogtales is not a review site. That style doesn’t sit well on our ancient shoulders. We merely highlight weird writing and art that takes our fancy, and wonder at the madness of longdogs and lurchers. It is fair to say, though, that The Nameless Dark is a damned fine collection, and would be very high on our recommended list if we actually had one.

Let’s stop writing and start listening…

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greydog: Hello and welcome to greydogtales, Ted.

tg: Greetings to you and your grey dogs, John, and thank you for having me. I quite enjoyed the hike up the windswept hills. Beautiful country up here round Yorkshire.

greydog: You’re even more welcome, saying nice things like that. So, we first noticed your work in 2013, and then in the 2014 anthology World War Cthulhu, with your story White Feather. Oddly enough, that anthology also included Willie Meikle and the illustrator M Wayne Miller, both of whom were interviewed here earlier this autumn. Now you have your own collection out. Have you been building up to this for a while?

tg: I have, probably longer than most. The Nameless Dark – A Collection, covers all of my short story writing starting from when I first switched from screenwriting to prose in early 2010, including my first completed piece, “Transmission,” up to my most recent (“Expat”) at the time I signed the contract with Lethe Press. Even though the earlier pieces are, well, “early” in my growth as a fiction writer, and almost exclusively deal with Mythos/Lovecraftian elements (as writing Lovecraftian fiction for anthologies was my entré into prose), I felt like it was important to include my earliest stuff all the way to the present in this first collection, if only for myself and my family and personal posterity. Basically, this collection shows my beginnings in 2010 up to 2015, covering a five year span of writing, reading, and thinking about what I wanted to say and do as a writer of dark fiction.

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greydog: A number of your protagonists do not exactly make it out in one piece, either mentally or physically. Do you see yourself as a bleak writer, or is this just realism within the context of story-telling?

tg: I suppose I see myself as a writer of bleak tales, as I’m drawn to and fascinated by bleak subject matter. Abandoned places, natural decay, weathering, geologic grind, socio/psychopaths, dead enders, tragedy, a cold, uncaring universe. I do have a shade of the pessimist in my soul, locked arm in arm with a detached curiosity for the ghoulish, and a love of the dark and arcane. That Germania gene. Somehow I balance this with a pretty cheery attitude on the day-to-day. I blame my wife and daughter for that.

Happy endings in stories work, and have a time and place (take any movie about sports, for example), but I think ending on a downer or with some horrific realization, either large or small, is more interesting, and more indicative of reality.

greydog: Outside of the more obvious weird and horror writers, have you been influenced by authors in other genres, classical or contemporary?

tg: Hunter S. Thompson is one, for sure. I was referred to him by someone who noted that our styles were similar back when I was writing a snotty humor/satire column in a local arts paper in Omaha, Nebraska while in college. When I read Thompson, I realized how much of a novice I was, but also that I wasn’t alone in the vast stylistic universe. I read a lot of Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac, Kesey, Farina, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the Beats around that time, as well, and I can still feel that particular rhythm in a lot of my writing. I have to pull it back sometimes, or chop it up, as when I really get going, some of my phrasing sounds like bad Beatnik pastiche. A lot of my rewriting is getting out of my own way, either based on my influences or just my natural verbal inclinations.

I cut my reading teeth in high fantasy and sword and sorcery in late 70’s and early 80’s, so I’m sure there’s a lot of that swirling around in the broth, as well. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard (and several Conan rip-off novels), David Eddings, Lloyd Alexander, R.A. Salvatore, Hickman & Weis, etc. Dungeons & Dragons has probably exerted the largest influence on my imagination over anything else.

In a contemporary sense, I’ve seen a bit of an influence from Laird Barron in some of my writing, and maybe some Richard Gavin, as I very much resonate with their work and masterful atmospherics and creation of authentic dread out of the seemingly mundane. I don’t find much horror fiction scary, but they are two writers (as well as Thomas Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein, Adam Nevill, Michael Marshall Smith, and a few other) who can genuinely give me the creeps. I’m so thankful for that.

Lawrence Block has influenced me in terms of the cleanness and leanness of his prose, saying what needs to be said without a whole song and dance. I heavily read Cormac McCarthy after most of my stories in the collection were finished, but I’m sure he’ll seep into my newer tales, as no one does brutality like he does. He’s a one-punch KO boxer. The Tyson of American letters.

Flannery O’Connor isn’t so much an influence as an example of an unattainable goal, in terms of her style and tone – a little humorous, a whole lot dark, possessing a keen insight into people that I don’t currently possess, and probably never will, no matter how much I listen and observe. She’s a monster in the best sense of the word. The finest writer I’ve ever read.

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greydog: Thompson and Burroughs were particular favourites of ours when we had more time to read. And, please take this as a compliment, we do see fragments of Thomas Ligotti in the collection, albeit with less dense prose and a lighter touch. Are you a fan of his work?

tg: I absolutely am. For my money, he’s our greatest living (semi-working) horror writer (T.E.D. Klein would be just below, if he still wrote). Very few write like he does, or see the world in a similar way. He’s sacrificed so much for this rare world-view, and we readers are the fortunate heirs. He’s what horror fiction should be.

As for density of prose (one of my ongoing battles with myself), I would be willing to weigh out my stuff against Ligotti’s on a specially calibrated Adjective and Adverb Scale. I think the shade of my purple would stack up pretty well against his. But as I continue this journey, I hope to see him claim eventual victory. He writes lavender better than I do anyway…

greydog: Maybe we need to dust off our scales again. Going back to The Nameless Dark for a moment, some writers build on recurring locales or characters in their work. Your collection is notable for the incredibly wide range of settings and individuals we encounter. Do you have any plans for writing more ‘serial’ fiction, in the sense of connected tales?

tg: Oh yes. I have big plans for Salt Creek, Nebraska, which made its first public appearance in “The Mission.” A collection in the coming years of all prairie and rural horror tales will feature several Salt Creek tales, as will at least one novel and possibly two that I have rolling around in my head.

Another story, “MonoChrome,” which was published late last year in the sadly overlooked but exceedingly excellent King in Yellow tribute anthology In The Court of the Yellow King, edited by Glynn Owen Barrass, is set in Los Angeles, and features a hard luck ex-homicide cop/ex-reporter/current below-the-line “fixer” and professional inebriate named Henry Ganz. I want to write more about this guy and his Los Angeles.

greydog: We look forward to Salt Creek especially, being suckers for the rural nightmare. Now, we might as well mention the eldritch, non-Euclidean elephant in the room at this point. There seems to be a Lovecraftian resurrection at the moment, not that your work is limited to that area. Is this sustainable, or do you feel that the base concepts will become mined out?

tg: I think the market will become saturated, or actually already has, so one would assume that most of the targeted readership will get bored with reading the same stuff reheated over and over again. But, it doesn’t seem to be abating at all, so what do I know?

The Lovecraftian omniverse is a fun zip code in which to live, so I get why it has remained popular all these years. Stories with a cosmic horror element that Lovecraft helped build up and codify for easier digestion will always have an appeal for curious stargazers and devoted heretics like me. A reality without benevolent gods, lacking a bearded grandfather looking out for your best interests, is a very interesting (appealing?) one to contemplate. For me, it was so different in POV than the Judeo Christian certitude in which I was raised that it knocked me back a couple of steps when I first stumbled across it. As a writer, I’m stepping out of Lovecraft Country for a while, but I know I’ll be back, as in many ways it’ll always be home, even with all its dysfunction and shame.

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greydog: Strangely enough, one of our favourite stories in the collection is the un-Lovecraftian Beer & Worms, an incredibly simple insight into human thinking (or inhuman thinking). Is this an isolated incident, or do you like enjoy twisting everyday life like that?

tg: I do love taking the normal and safe and twisting it into something terrible. Hitchcock was a master at doing this, and devoted to “ruining” the safety of normalcy by injecting horror into the commonplace. If I was better with plotting, you’d see more of these stories from me. Even so, I’ll be doing more of this in the coming years, especially in some of the crime/Noir fiction I’m slowly constructing. It’s fun to jump back and forth from the supernatural to the natural.

greydog: We hear that you have a new deal with This Is Horror. Are you allowed to say anything about what might be coming out from that source?

tg: I signed a publishing deal with This Is Horror a few months back, and I’m thrilled to be working with such a quality outfit that has published some of my favorite writers. The contract specifies one new work (in the novella range, but certainly allows for something longer), with an understanding that makes it a bit open-ended, meaning I could publish two or more works with them in 2016. The trust they’ve shown in my writing is humbling, and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to release my work with This Is Horror in the coming year.

The two pieces I’m batting around right now are They Don’t Come Home Anymore, which is my take on obsession, hero worship, legend vs. fact, and vampire culture; and a still-untitled piece set in a particularly American Doomsday Seed Vault constructed on domestic soil (patriotic Yanks certainly can’t trust those cunning, soft-bellied Euros with the future of all plant life on earth!). A third work is much more undefined and definitely Big W Weird that will be my thinly veiled tribute to Thomas Ligotti.

greydog: Clearly you are anathema to our own dark fiction ambitions. That’s why we like featuring illustrators and audio clips – we don’t do much of that sort of thing. So we’ll give you a last chance to say something nice about longdogs, lurchers and sighthounds. It might just get you off the hook.

tg: As a guy who grew up with labradors and weimaraners and pheasant-brush spaniels and all sort of farm dog mutts, who’s only seen a whippet on Los Angeles sidewalks and greyhounds in commercials, I’m afraid anything I say about longdogs will only disappoint you, so I’ll just leave this parcel of soup bones on the table and see myself out. The hills are calling for the journey back down to the sea.

greydog: Bones are always good, as long as they’re someone else’s. Many thanks, Ted E Grau.

tg: Huge thanks to you, John. It’s been fun.

Apart from his fiction, it’s always well worth dropping in on Ted’s website/blog, cosmicomicon, which can be found here:

cosmicomicon

And The Nameless Dark can be picked up now. We don’t think you’ll be disappointed (UK link on sidebar)

the nameless dark, lethe press

the nameless dark, amazon us

Coming up on greydogtales: More longdog photos, good news again from the Spiritualist Telegraph, the art of Danish folk-lore and many other related weirdnesses…

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Not Exactly Ghosts

Today we’re back in supernatural fiction mode, so we’re focusing on Javanese theatre and the Foreign Office. Obviously. Our feature piece is on the rather neglected author Sir Andrew Caldecott. This happened a bit by accident, as usual. Not long ago we interviewed Mansfield Dark, and we mentioned shadow puppetry. Imagine my surprise therefore (as they used to say) when I was flicking through Caldecott and came across a scary story of his about, yes, shadow puppetry. I love these serendipitous discoveries, except when I have to clean them up afterwards.

(I learned the word serendipity from Dr Who on the TV, of all places. Jon Pertwee used it, I think, to the lovely Katy Manning.)

by Bassano, half-plate film negative, 7 October 1947
by Bassano, half-plate film negative, 7 October 1947

Sir Andrew Caldecott (1884 – 1951) was a British colonial administrator in the early part of last century. He seems to have been a decent chap and a popular man locally wherever he served, known for an unusual ability to negotiate settlements between different ethnic groups. His History of Jelebu (in Malaysia) is crammed with folklore, genealogies, inter-tribal relationships and numerous references to previous British administrators misunderstanding local terms and customs. Much of his knowledge came from time spent directly with the local tribes:

“The Dato’ Penghulus of Jelebu liaye continued in unbroken line from the rule of Moyang Salleli to the present day. The law of succession is that the office should rotate among the three loaris berundang in the following order: Ulu Jelebu, Sarin and Kemin. The inclusion of the last two communities must have been the outcome of a pakat, as Ulu Jelebu provided the first four penghulus in succession.”

It’s not exactly known when he wrote his creepy stories. There are suggestions that at least some were written while he was posted out East in the 20s and 30s, but his first collection Not Exactly Ghosts didn’t see print until 1947. The second, Fires Burn Blue, came out in 1948. Unfortunately he died three years later.

He is often described as ‘Jamesian’ in style, but we feel that only a few of his stories fit that description. He does reference parsons, old texts and historical events in a Jamesian manner, certainly, and shares a distanced quality. David Stuart Davies cites both M R James and Algernon Blackwood as influences.

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Caldecott brings his own quiet humour to the table, however, and an approach which is almost tongue-in-cheek sometimes. The title of the first collection, Not Exactly Ghosts, is a very accurate one. He deals in possibilities and suppositions, even in the consideration of an entirely parallel world, rather than proven manifestations or creeping hairy things. In some of the stories, you cannot be sure if you have witnessed a supernatural occurrence or not. It may have been madness, a mistake, or the susceptible mind.  A Victim of Medusa is a short story which illustrates this perfectly.

We suspect that their relative lack of popularity is down to that evasive nature – he doesn’t necessarily define his chills with the immediacy of other ghost story writers. Sometimes the only true monstrosity is human behaviour, above and beyond any supernatural element (though there are scary moments).

The stories are intelligent fictions with interesting characters. An added bonus is that Caldecott’s endings are often surprisingly low key, something which he uses very effectively. He is a master of wry asides and observations. This, for example, from Quintet, where a man’s trousers stand up and walk to the door:

“Markson used to say that his first feeling of intense uneasiness, almost of fear, suddenly gave way to the sharp realisation that they were the only trousers he had with him; and that, if they eloped, he would be a semi-nudist.”

Let’s deal with the Jamesian aspect first, and cite the two obvious stories, A Room in a Rectory and Christmas Reunion.

A Room in a Rectory could easily be mistaken for a piece by old M R himself. It delves into church and clerical history, with remnants of dark practices, and introduces the Bishop of Kongea, a fictional country based on Caldecott’s experiences of Malaya and Ceylon (see later). It should work for any lover of James’ style.

Christmas Reunion is more famous than Caldecott’s other stories due to the fact that it is specifically based on a note by James in his ‘Stories I have tried to write‘ essay (1929).

“There were possibilities, too, in the Christmas cracker, if the right people pull it, and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it. They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a previous engagement of long standing would be the more truthful excuse.”

Caldecott takes this on directly and writes such a story. The fun is that he mentions M R James in the story itself and one of his characters supplies the above passage as part of it. It’s quite nicely done.

Of the non-Jamesian stories, three or four stand out. Branch Line to Benceston is an unusual tale about one worried man and two lives which we can’t discuss further without spoiling it. It is well worth reading, though. Sonata in D Minor is an essentially a study of two married people punishing each other unpleasantly, and is interesting for its twists. And the music is a crucial element.

There is, as far as we know, no such thing as Siedel’s Sonata in D Minor, or the disturbing recording of it named in the story, but in another one of those strange moments, we came across a Sonata in D Minor performed by Siedel. Heinrich Biber was a post-Baroque composer who wrote his Mystery or Rosary Sonatas in the 1670s, and Annegret Siedel is a contemporary performer. We were mildly spooked.

In Due Course is the story which introduces shadow puppetry. We had to have it in because of its details on Javanese shadow plays.

“They had been cut in thick buffalo hide and elaborately painted in gold, silver, crimson, saffron, brown and indigo; but on one side alone, the being left polished but bare: for a shadow drama is watched from both sides of a stretched sheet – one one side, spectators see the painted surfaces of the figures against the white cloth and in the full glare of footlights; on the other, the clear-cut shadows of them projected against the cloth.”

There is no doubt that Caldecott must have seen wayang kulit (shadow puppets) out east, and yet as far as we’re aware, modern wayang work is only viewed through the screen, as outlines, rendering the painting on the figures purely ornamental. But then we’re into longdogs, not complex Far East performance arts, so what do we know?

javanese

Anyway, if you like shadow shows, praying mantises and strange poetry, then give the story a go.

Poetry seems to have been a particular interest of Caldecott’s, because it crops up in a number of his tales. Much is dark and story-related, but it is, we feel, important to share this one-off with you:

To a Jelly-fish

Out of proper respect for you, Sir,

I shall call you Mr Medusa

(A name that I took

From our animal book);

Gentlemen in Debrett or Kelly

Don’t have names like Fish, A. Jelly –

The other aspect of Caldecott worth mentioning is this matter of Kongea. Six of the stories are set in Kongea, and while they have an inevitable colonial air about them, some are very effective. They reflect something of Caldecott’s understanding that ‘things are different there’. One of the more horrible of these stories is Grey Brothers, especially because it is either a study of insanity or something far more worrying.  Kongea, drawn from Malaya and Ceylon, is treated throughout both collections as entirely real, with numerous mentions of it.

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So there. A neglected author, well worth a look. We would love to link to the many editions of his works in print, but we can’t because they don’t exist, so you’ll have to settle for second hand. You can still get used copies of the Wordsworth double collection fairly cheaply.

And next time, we try to find an unknown Czech horror poet who hasn’t been translated and a breed of sighthound that no-one’s heard of and no-one likes. Total obscurity beckons…

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