Today, dear listener, we’re pleased to have a fascinating interview with author Michael Griffin. We probe the roots of his writing, stagger across troubled psychogeography, cross-question him on his latest release, Hieroglyphs of Blood and Bone, and more. In the process he neither confirms nor denies that his entire image of womanhood is based on a Triune interpretation of Irish goddesses. Nor does he mend our oven door (the handle’s come off again). But he does talk about imagery, inspiration and interpretation, which is a Good Thing. Oh, and he sets us straight on trout…
Have you ever been on a viking? Or is that a delicate question? We’re all Norse today, dear listener, because of an excellent new collection of tales, The Raven’s Table, by Christine Morgan. Also, we come from the Nordic North of England – most of the family are from around the old Viking capital of Jorvik (York, if you must). And we grew up by the North Sea, steeped in this stuff, which is something we’ve talked about before. Our rune-roots are strong, so let the rowers put their backs into it…
If you have ever felt like you wanted to fara í viking, you would have been driving your longship through the spray, and dreaming of rich pickings. You would be a vikingr, a Norse raider and trader, but not exactly the revived romantic of the 18th and 19th centuries. You wouldn’t have had too many cow horns stuck to your helmet, either.
If you doubt our expertise, by the way, here’s a genuine photograph of John Linwood Grant. Here he is dressed in his usual day clothes, taken in the late 60s in East Yorkshire.
Christine Morgan is a North American writer of many years’ experience, with a varied output from her Elf Lore books to The Horned Ones: Cornucopia and Murder Girls, shifting between fantasy, other speculative forms and horror. Perhaps most importantly, she’s been a prolific short story writer, and might be said to major in twisting history.
Now she is about to release a collection of her short stories, but this isn’t a slice through her multi-genre range. Instead, The Raven’s Table is very specifically tales of the vikings or Norsefolk. We say folk, rather than men, because the book is generously spattered with women, men and monsters. It’s an excellent read, and we really do recommend it – brutal, lyrical and fantastical. No sitting on the fence with vague plaudits. Let’s find out more…
greydog:Christine, Welcome to greydogtales. Your new book The Raven’s Table is a must-have for anyone with an interest in stories based on Nordic mythology and lore. Reading it was a great pleasure, so first of all, congratulations!
cm: Thanks so much! This whole thing, for all it’s been years in the making, still seems like a rather stunning and sudden surprise, but I’m loving it!
greydog:We know that you write horror. We know that you write fantasy. We even know snippets of your work from stories like ‘Her Father’s Skin’, in Flesh Like Smoke, from April Moon Books (ed. Brian Sammons). What we hadn’t expected was this major collection of Nordic tales. So we’d better ask a few questions. When did the idea for Raven’s Table first come to mind?
cm: Sort of light-heartedly, when I realized I was getting quite a stockpile of Viking stories… “enough for a collection already” was the thought that went through my head. But once it was in there, I couldn’t shake it, and in the meantime I kept writing and selling yet more Viking stories. I figured hey, I must be doing something right, as well as this being something people like to read. Then some of those people started asking when it was going to happen. I half-jokingly pitched the notion to Ross at Word Horde, and he went for it! Now, here we are!
greydog:We imagine there’s some serious research behind Raven’s Table. A necessity or a pleasure?
cm: Both, definitely lots of both. Including a family vacation Norwegian cruise, which gave me the chance to soak in the spectacular scenery from the comfort of a cruise ship — I am not in person rugged or outdoorsy; I’m a bad camper; the idea of doing the actual living history or re-enacting is one I love and admire but am totally unsuited for.
On that trip, we did visit an Iron Age farm, and the Viking Ship Museum, and both were amazing experiences. Being able to stand there within feet of those ships, absorbing the history and taking it all in… wow. For book-type research, it gets a little trickier because so much never got written down, but even that makes for some fascinating puzzle-piecing and extrapolation.
greydog:The collection is a mixture of previously published and new stories, but you wouldn’t know it. They read as a fairly seamless set of tales. Did you have to tinker, or did you find that they flowed nicely as they were?
cm: To my surprise, not much tinkering was required. I gathered them up mostly in chronological order of publication, which was also mostly the order in which they’d been written — many for themed anthology calls, which I adore! — and that made for an interesting variety. The others got added in wherever, finishing with the longest, the novella ‘Brynja’s Beacon.’
I’d started writing that one and realized partway in that it was, in a weird sort of way, a Viking take on the brooding gothic, where the young governess arrives at the mansion of dark intrigue and family secrets, with the mysterious handsome master and the children and the sinister relatives … except, instead of a governess, it’s Unn the slave girl, and instead of a mansion, it’s a longhouse.
greydog: Norse Gothic sounds a good route to go. There’s quite a lot of song/verse sprinkled here and there in the collection. Was this all your own creation, or a reworking of traditional lays to fit the mood of the stories?
cm: The one in ‘The Vulgarity of Giants’ is a reworking of the saga about Thor in the giant Gierrod’s hall, and the one in ‘With Honey Dripping’ is a … well … goat-smutted up variation on another traditional Thor story … the rest are pretty much mine, though some also draw heavily upon fairy tales and other influences. The thing about sagas that I find most appealing is, I love poetry but am not good at it in most other forms. Whenever I try, it locks into Dr. Seuss rhyming structure. The sagas get me away from that.
greydog:Viking and Nordic fantasy can be very cliched – a longship and some hack’n’slash raids. You seem to have teased out much richer elements, showing many different sides of their life, including domestic issues – ‘The Fate-Spinners’, as one example. Can we take it that this was quite deliberate?
cm: Oh, definitely; I wanted to look at those other aspects of life, those other perspectives. In addition to the hack’n’slash, of course; I do always love me a good battle too. When I was working on ‘Sven Bloodhair’, I seem to recall posting something about how any day I can write about grisly decapitations is a good day. But yes, I also wanted to bring in a lot of female point-of-view, as well as those of children and elders, not all the big burly warriors.
This also tied in to my love of fairy tales, a lot of which originally came from the mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers. It helped, though, that there were also a lot of strong women in Viking history and culture. They had to be, and it showed.
greydog:It would be pointless to separate these into fantasy or horror tales – many embody elements of both genres. And some are intensely dark and serious, with endings which bring a shiver. At the same time you have a touch for the earthy, rather than the high-falutin’. Troll piss springs to mind, and shockingly, people have to empty bladder or bowels. Does the mix reflect a personal preference for stories rooted in reality, rather than high fantasy?
cm: My preferences as a reader range widely, from the high-falutin’ literary artistic to the gonzo bizarro and gross-out extreme, so it just naturally goes the same in my writing. And it’s particularly apt for the Viking stuff … the stories of their gods got crass and raunchy too … Loki zinging Freya about farting during sex with her brother, or tying his testicles to a goat’s beard … Odin drinking the magic mead of poetry and then escaping in eagle form and pooping some of it out onto mortals … Thor having to put on a bridal dress to get his hammer back … the people of that time liked their ribald earthy humor as much as anyone else in history. Shakespeare and Chaucer certainly had their share.
greydog: Very true. Now, we have to mention your tale ‘Nails of the Dead’, which must be the best take on Naglfar and its role in Norse myth we’ve seen. Can you share something about that story?
cm: I’m so glad you brought that up; ‘Nails of the Dead’ is a personal favorite and I really wanted to do justice to a myth that is this fantastic evocative spooky thing of which we’re left with hardly any information. At the time, the tellers could just toss the mention out there because it was part of the general lore their audiences knew — my academic hero Professor Drout has a whole bit about this in one of his lectures — but by the time anybody got around to writing it down, the details somehow never made it.
So here’s this bit of wisdom about trimming your nails, and why, and this ship … and that’s all we get. I wanted more. What would this ship look like? How did they get the fingernails? I started thinking someone or something had to collect them, and got this image in my head of a kind of tooth fairy graverobber ghoul-type figure, going around with little pliers; from there it just wrote itself.
greydog:It is a fantastic story. And is this collection the masterwork, or mistresswork, for your Nordic plans? Do you have more in store?
cm: More, more, more! I’ve continued submitting Viking stories to anthologies; probably close to enough for another collection before too long. I’m about thirty thousand words into a Viking horror novel called ‘The Slaughter’, which I elevator pitch as Dexter-meets-Beowulf. I love historical fiction, mythology, and ancient cultures of all types, so I also dabble with Greek/Roman, Egyptian, Aztec/Maya, and others… but the Vikings is where my heart’s truly happiest. Probably because I can get away with the most outrageous purple prose; that’d earn me an editorial swat in any other genre, but over-the-top descriptions and poetic language and alliteration is all good here!
greydog:Finally, we grew up on Viking stories and films which varied from utterly naff to inspiring. What fictional treatments – film, TV or books – are you most fond of?
cm: My first Viking-type memory, like so many others of us I’m sure, would have to be What’s Opera, Doc… kill da wabbit, spear and magic helmet, Bugs Bunny as sexy Brunhilde. I learned early on that the horned helmet thing was Wagnerian license taken too far, so I’ve developed a bit of a peeve about that.
My hands-down fave for best depiction in film is The 13th Warrior; I thought the Lord of the Rings movies did a great job with the Riders of Rohan as drawn on Tolkien’s take on the Norsemen. Book-wise, Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series is part of what woke my own inner Viking in the first place, and I enjoyed the TV adaptation of The Last Kingdom. And I must give a huge shout-out to the animated series Gargoyles, not only for its many major impacts on my life but because their Vikings were proper Vikings, they brought in Odin, they did a lot very, very right.
greydog: A lovely range of choices. Many thanks for joining us, and the very best with your next project.
cm: Thank you for having me, for the great questions, and giving me space to ramble!
The Raven’s Table is out on 28th February 2017, and you can order here (UK)
Had enough period and classic scares for a day or so? No, neither have we, but it’s time to be modern again. Join us now, dear listener, as we embrace 2017 and bring you grimdark, role-playing games and horror. It took some time to find the right chains, but at last we got that prolific fantasy author James A Moore at our mercy. We say fantasy author, but there’s much more to his work. As you will find out below…
An Interview with James A Moore
greydog:Welcome to greydogtales, James. We’re partly here for your latest book, The Last Sacrifice, but we like to drift and potter about as well. So we’ll start with the broader nonsense. For those who don’t know you, tell us a bit about yourself, either as a writer, or as a mostly human being.
james: As a writer I focus on horror and grimdark, on supernatural crime fiction and weird westerns. In other words I write what ever strikes my fancy. I promised myself a long time ago that I would always aim to write the book I would like to read and I’ve stuck to that.
As a person, I am a comic book geek (I’ve written a few of those in my time, too) and I am a movie buff. I work at a local Starbucks so I don’t become a hermit and because I absolutely love medical benefits, having a 401K and stock options, you know, all of the stuff being a writer does not cover. I am a widower who lost his wife seven years ago.
greydog: Although you’ve written all sorts, including horror, a lot of people probably know you as a fantasy author. Fantasy is an enormous genre which covers everything from icky tales of nice fairy-folk to large scale disembowellings and chaotic perversions. Is there such a thing as grimdark, and if so, do you write it?
james: I tend to think that there is such a thing and yes, I write it. I love high fantasy stories, I just don’t really write them. I want swords and anger and bloodshed and fear and humor and the occasional romance (even if it doesn’t work out) and I want to study the human condition in my writings. And I think that, really, the best way to know people is to see how they handle adversity.
greydog: You caught attention with your epic fantasy series Seven Forges, which we think is now up to four books and several short stories. Is this a core work for you, or one that you were just passing through?
james: I love fantasy. I always have. I love horror, too. When it comes to Seven Forges I had an idea that simply would not leave me alone, which is what normally starts me on a book or a series. I loved the idea of seeing a massive, stagnating empire go up against a group that was smaller, but far more dedicated to winning. This is definitely a core for me. I have at least three more novels planned in the series, and likely several more short stories and novellas as well. It’s a big world and it’s going through some seriously violent changes. I love watching that happen.
greydog:You also did an awful lot for White Wolf, on their World of Darkness role playing games and supplements. We remember buying Vampire: Masquerade when it first came out. Does that mean that you are, or once were, an RPGer yourself?
james: Oh my, yes. I used to play D&D and all of the WOD games, as well as Champions (remember, comic book geek). And I was the Storyteller on a lot of the adventures I wrote for White Wolf. My players were my sounding board (or, you know, victims. It’s all a matter of perspective). I ate those games like candy. I don’t have the time to play the games any more, much as I might like to.
greydog:No, those vast chunks of time needed for serious RPGing do seem to get fewer and fewer. So, you’ve worked with writers Christopher Golden and Charles R Rutledge, amongst others. Do you find co-authoring a pleasure, or harder work than being left along to do your own thing?
james: Honestly, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it. I have projects going with Charles and with Chris both, but it might take a while to get to them, priorities being what they are. BLOODSTAINED WONDERLAND is coming out later this year with Chris, and A HELL WITHIN (A Griffin & Price novel) is coming out later this year with Charles.
For me those collaborations are like getting all of my favorite toys and having them get all of their favorite toys and then playing in the sandbox together. Only no sand in the underwear. Later this year I am also part of a mosaic novel withChristopher Golden, Cherie priest, Charlaine Harris, Jonathan Maberry, Kat Richardson, Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris, Kelley ArmstrongandSeanan McGuire…THAT is a damned big sandbox.
greydog:As an aside, are we likely to see any more stories in the unpleasant land of Bloodstained Oz, the Stoker-nominated limited edition you released some time ago?
james: Oh yes. BLOODSTAINED WONDERLAND is finished. In the coming months Chris and I will be plotting out and then writing BLOODSTAINED NEVERLAND. They are light and cheerful stories, assuming your mind is a cesspool of violence and urban decay.
greydog: Which piece of work has given you the most personal satisfaction?
james: All of them. But if I have to pick one, it’s the SEVEN FORGES series, because there’s a lot of world building going on there and I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. Or maybe DEEPER which was my first ever attempt at a first person novel. Possibly BLOOD RED, which was the fastest I’ve ever written a novel…the list goes on, seriously.
greydog:And which of your works do you wish more people had read, or knew about?
james: That is definitely an ALL of them answer. I’m delighted with the attention SEVEN FORGES has gotten, but I’d love more people to know about it, and while I’m dreaming if HBO or Netflix wants to make a series… The one I think deserved more attention than it got was SUBJECT SEVEN, which is a Young Adult series I did there were plans for more books but the sales simply weren’t there. Lots of great reviews and even some fan mail, but at the end of the day it got lost in a sea of YA novels.
James A Moore on The Last Sacrifice
greydog: On to your most recent novel, The Last Sacrifice, before we forget. It’s a dark and lively piece, with a lot of serious action and a number of key strands. What made you choose to pursue multiple characters, rather than, say, only following Brogan’s misfortunes?
james: I always prefer multiple characters and points of view, because I think it’s fun letting readers see and understand the things that a lot of the characters do not get to see. I’m writing the sequel right now and for a decent portion of the book Brogan is out of the conflict and on a quest. Meanwhile his companions are waist deep in trouble and blood.
greydog: It’s possible to sympathise with the main protagonists of Last Sacrifice, but most of them aren’t exactly innocents. Moderately ‘good’ people do moderately ‘bad’ things, for starters. Is this a moral shadowland that you like your characters to tread?
james: I love shades of gray (not fifty of them mind you). I have seldom met anyone over the age of five who could be called all good or all bad. I think it’s important to show that. Brogan isn’t a bad man. He’s done bad things and he’s been paid for it, but he’s generally a good man who loves his family, he also has to deal with his anger and grief when things go wrong and he does not deal with it well.
We’re introduced to SOME of the 20 men with him in book one, but more of them are met in the second book and the same is true of the slavers who are after him. A lot of them are pretty much like the personnel on the Death Star. They’re just doing their jobs, you know? Is it morally wrong to be a slaver? Not to them. It’s a different world.
greydog:We don’t get time to read a lot of fantasy these days, but the Undying or He-Kisshi are a new one on us (having dubious tastes, we liked them more than some of the people). Their role and their physical nature are nicely brought out through the book. How did they come about?
james: I said before that I love high fantasy, but the thing is, I need to do something different. I love me some elves and dragons and dwarves but for now I want to stay away from the tropes and come up with new threats. The He-Kisshi are some tough characters, they have limitations but they really are undying. They are the messengers of the gods and in this case that means that have the ability to act on behalf of the gods.
One of the things I wanted to do with them is show that they are, in fact, connected deeply with the gods and when the gods start going off the rails, so do some of the He-Kisshi. They get a lot more play in the second book and we get to see some of the reasons that they are so deeply feared.
greydog: We know that Last Sacrifice has only been released recently, but we assume you have many plans. Anything you’d share with us, or tease us with, on this series or other projects?
james: There will be two more books in the TIDES OF WAR series. The Last Sacrifice is only book one. Things in the works? I plan on finishing two horror novels this year, BOOM TOWN and FRESH KILLS, and I want to do a sci-fi horror story that will, hopefully, scare the crap out of people. So many books to write, so little time.
greydog: We look forward to those. Finally, dogs or cats? There is a wrong answer, but no actual penalty, though we do take notes on this sort of thing.
james: The actual answer is simple: Dogs or cats? May as well ask me if I prefer barbarian hordes or stealthy assassins. Both, of course. If given a choice of one and only one, I suppose dogs first.
greydog:What an excellent answer. Many thanks for joining us.
james: My absolute pleasure! Thanks for having me.
You can get hold of a copy of James A Moore’s The Last Sacrifice at the link below, and most of his work is easily available via one or other Amazon site. You’ll like the Undying.
Coming during the next couple of weeks: Christine Morgan’s collection of Viking tales, Lurchers for Beginners, more Women in Horror, and lots more goodies. Do join us…
Again with the troubling questions. Is author Adam Nevill secretly part of a warped cult, here to dissuade us from taking out-of-body adventures? Does he hold hidden knowledge, transmitted to him telepathically by an ancient Tibetan horror fan? Or is he a guy who writes stuff, like any mortal shell? One day we hope to interview him and find out (though possibly not, after he’s read this)…
last sacrifice, amazon uk
