Happy March, y’all. I hope you’re well. My recovery from covid moved more slowly than expected, though things have gotten better week by week. I’m deep into the “muddle in the middle” of the novel-in-progress, navigating through the bogs and trees with the help of my trusty outline.
Are you going to be in Orlando next week for the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts? I’ll be there, chairing a session and later giving a paper as part of my ongoing “what if horror, but not only scary” research agenda. At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday (3/16), I’ll give “Only The Old Dark House Again: The Use and Comfort of a Familiar Skeleton,” along with some great-looking papers from my fellow presenters in the session “She Herself Is a Haunted House”: Gothic Spaces and Places.
What have I been reading lately? Along with my slow progress through Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio (a 2024 project that may stretch into 2025), some of my usual biz:
I just watched a chipmunk scurry across the driveway. Did he worry about reviews? Whether he would make his daily wordcount? Whether he would be able to translate the dream of the mind to the vacuum of the page? No, he did not. His thoughts included:
1. Watch out for that fuckin hawk. 2. Gotta be a nut around here somewhere.
That’s it. That’s the energy I want to bring to writing in 2024. Find that acorn, avoid that hawk.
The aforementioned novel-in-progress is chugging along reasonably well. The likewise aforementioned querying is also chugging along, with no bites yet, but some positive feedback. The last ~3 weeks I had less time and ability to focus, so I spent my energy on new words more than market research.
It’s been a long couple months, in ways that have occasionally impacted my writing, though I’ve tried to keep going as much as I could. To wit:
In December I broke some toes in a minor household accident. Could have been worse, but it slowed me down for weeks, and it put a crimp on our usual holiday activities, from wintry hikes to festive events. The toes have healed up pretty well, though, with the cane is now hanging on a hook at home. Things were looking up, until…
After dodging it for nearly four years, in mid-January I came down with la peste. It was predictably unpleasant, and I’m still dealing with brain fog. It’s both better and worse than I expected, and my sympathy goes out to all of you who have dealt with this, especially folks who got it early on, pre-vaccines. I console (?) myself with the fact that apparently brain fog is so standard a side effect, it has to persist for a long time before it’s a worry for medical professionals. In the acute phase, writing wasn’t in the cards, but now I’m back in the word mines. Things are slow (words, what even are they? how is grammar?), but with the aid of a solid outline, my trusty tomato timer, and the day’s goal broken into manageable chunks, I’m getting it done.
During the worst of it all, I read a few more of Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books. They were, in their gloriously profane and violent way, a real comfort:
“Time unrolled like a map on either side of the car, Meredith seeing it in flashes as she kept checking the directions. Here, a service station with faded Nehi and Royal Crown signs hanging from salt-wracked bricks. There, beyond gnarly birches shading a hairpin turn, a slump-shouldered barn erected back when witches were thought to ride the night skies. Fields stood bare between these places, many overgrown with years of hackberry and feral dogwoods, others just as clearly waiting for the arrival of spring to send forth riotous green life again. Only a few miles from the highway, with its sprinkling of restaurants and stores, she might as well have been driving through another world.”
That’s an offcut from the current novel-in-progress, which is chugging along nicely. Some of it might find its way back in, but the whole section from which this was taken was one of those classic “throat clearing” bits. The story actually starts a couple-few pages later, though writing this did help me to think about the character, the land, and the interaction between the two.
One of my favorite types of horror story is the Bad Place story. You know the one: a person or group of people encounter a place where evil’s plain baked into the ground. The evil might have started with a person, an event, an alien, a demon—but the protagonist’s encounter is strongly localized. “The Dead Valley,” “The Colour Out of Space,” The House Next Door, The Ruins, The Blair Witch Project, YellowBrickRoad, and more: all are stories of The Bad Place (not The Bad Place, though that also features a Bad Place).
Jenny Kiefer’s forthcoming This Wretched Valley [Amazon | B&N | Bookshop.org] is the latest addition to the list, and it’s a doozy, smart and fully aware of its literary and cinematic predecessors. The tale of a rock climbing trip gone wrong, the novel features many of the elements you know and love about horror stories set in the wilderness, but others come into play, too. Some of them are telegraphed clearly, some less so, and there were even a couple points I hit while reading where I thought to myself “huh, she actually did it”—by which I mean things I’ve seen other authors try and fail to execute in stories about the Bad Place. If I told you what those things were, it would spoil the fun of encountering them, but suffice it to say this was one of my favorite reads of the year, right up there with Silver Nitrate.
This book doesn’t stint on violence, body horror, creepiness, or pathos. The advance praise comparisons to work by Alma Katsu or standouts of the genre like The Ruins are well deserved. I enjoyed reading this book, enough so that I expect to re-read it, and I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.
It’s been a long and busy year, y’all! Since last month, I tied a bow on the revised & expanded outline for THE NEXT NOVEL TO BE NOMINATED FOR ALL OF THE AWARDS, modified after much thought and struggle to develop better tension and spread the viewpoints around. What had been a mostly-from-one-VP novel has become a symphony of characters, making it both more entertaining and more complicated to write.
A couple weeks back, I went to Philadelphia for the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference. My first time in Philly for years, and (of course) the cheesesteaks, reubens, gelato, etc. were delicious. My conference paper (“Genre of a Thousand Faces: Uses of Art-Horror in a Decaying World”) was another in my series of “but why is horror?” pieces, and it seemed to go well. I’m working on a related article and hope to give another paper elsewhere next year, so… apparently I have a “but why is horror?” research agenda. Who knew?
Didn’t have too much time for sightseeing in Philly, but I made an exception for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As far as I know, it’s the largest art museum anywhere nearby and south of New York I haven’t visited, and it was a delight. I look forward to visiting again, plus seeing The Barnes Foundation collection.
Pop-up winter garden adjacent to city hall in Philadelphia. Why the bears come, I do not know.The Charlatan, by José Chávez Morado
And who, of course, could forget Halloween? A busy month meant we didn’t get around to everything that’s normal for us for the season, but we distributed candy to the usual masked press gangs, as well as touring around the weekend before in search of frightful yards. Great stuff out there in RVA, but #TheDabneyHolidays took the (bloody) cake.
J. T. Glover 