"They were found in the graveyard, springing from the decaying bodies of the women deep in the ground, and they were found in the woods, spreading themselves like a rug over the wet earth. The Beauty were small at first but they grew and took the best qualities of the dead. They sucked up through the soil all the softness, serenity, hope, and happiness of womankind. They made themselves into a new form, a new north, shaped from the clay of the world and designed only to bring pleasure to man.
But the Beauty knew form the many experiences of the women that had gone before, that men did not always love what was good for them. Men could attack, hurt, main and murder the things that came too fast, too suddenly, like love..." -- excerpt from ‘The Beauty’
It is not intuitive to
seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce
horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b)
driven my strange muses. These interviews engage contemporary authors & artists on the theme
of "Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction."
Aliya Whiteley has written over
thirty novellas and short stories in a range of genres. Her excellent novella The Beauty offers a compact dose of weird fiction in
which humanity is evolving into mushrooms. It is entirely unique, but could be
described as a mashup of Kafka’s body horror (The Metamorphosis), Golding's social dynamics (Lord of the Flies), and James' infertile dystopia (The Children of Men). “The
Beauty” is an action-packed tale saturated with philosophy on "what
is beautiful?" and "what is humanity?", a true must-read for
those who enjoy intellectual meat (shrooms?) with their adventure fiction. Let’s
learn more about Aliya Whiteley and her muses.
- SEL: You were born in and raised in southern England. Are there fungal horrors in the sea-side town of Ilfracombe that haunt you? Perhaps, you have a different muse from the area.
AW: I don’t remember finding many
mushrooms in Ilfracombe, but certainly I grew up feeling that it was filled
with strange events, from a ghost in a decaying hotel to the tall, triffid-like
plants that grew in an old explorer’s garden. These things have appeared many
times in my fiction, and I’m still writing about it now.
The Beauty is set in the Valley
of the Rocks, which is a real place close to Ilfracombe with an almost volcanic
landscape; it’s a few miles from where I grew up, and I remember visiting it
and feeling that its bare, rocky ground was more suited to a horror story than
any romantic tale (the most famous novel set in that area is RD Blackmore’s Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor, first
published in 1869). Spooky things always seemed to happen in Devon – but
perhaps that’s down to my teenage imagination, which liked to find monsters and
darkness in every situation.
- SEL: Early weird fiction masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote letters and essays on “Beauty,” and they all generally espouse that beauty is not necessarily within art (i.e., a book or poem), but it is the conveyance of a feeling. Is there beauty in horror/weird fiction? Is there beauty in the repulsive?
AW: These are the kind of questions I
think about a lot, and haven’t found any answers for! I suspect that beauty is
one of the really big concepts in human existence that deserves a lot of
interrogation. What is it? When and how does it come into existence? Does
something have to be universally considered beautiful to deserve the
description? If one person finds it hideous, does it forfeit that idea? Perhaps
everyone has different thoughts about this area, as well as having different
definitions of beauty.
There’s a moment in The Beauty where the narrator, Nate, comes across a glossy women’s
magazine from a time before the death of all women. He doesn’t recognize the
pouting figure on the front cover as beautiful because that stylized version of
beauty has now disappeared from the world. Nathan then goes on to find things
that we would consider grotesque, even horrifying, to be beautiful. It’s all
connected to his perception of what life is about. He finds beauty in growth
and change. I wonder if uncovering our own personal ideals of beauty rests
somewhere in better understanding the concepts that underpin it. So, on those
terms: yes! There can be beauty and horror in many things, simultaneously,
including weird fiction.
- SEL: Do you find “The Beauty” repulsive, beautiful, or both?
AW: Do you mean the fungal creatures that erupt in the book? I
find them to be both. And also upsetting, and horrible, and challenging, and
reassuring. They mean that life goes on, whether we want it to or not. I’m
interested in the idea that nature will find a way, but possibly that way
doesn’t have to fit any human morality, or concept of beauty. There’s a tension
between humanity and nature in the book. So often nature is described by
humanity in terms of its beauty to our eyes. I found myself wondering, while
writing this book, how much of that is another method of survival. Are we less
destructive to those things we find aesthetically pleasing? (Yet more questions
I don’t have an answer to! But I think I write to explore these questions, not
to answer them.)
- SEL: Do you eat mushrooms?
AW: I eat lots of mushrooms, and I’m a
bit perturbed when people tell me that I’ve put them off mushrooms! I love
them. I make a brilliant mushroom stew with cheese and walnut dumplings.
Although I have occasionally found non-edible mushrooms when walking my dog in
the nearby forest and felt a bit disturbed by them, if I’m honest. Particularly
if they’re yellow and strangely solid, or growing in large clumps to take on
monstrous shapes. They are fascinating, aren’t they? I remember reading an
article about the mass extinctions of life that have taken place on Earth, and
how fungus thrives afterwards, with so much decaying matter to feast upon. I
think that must have been lurking in the back of my mind when I started writing
the book.
"When [William] told me of his journey, that was how he finished it--he fitted there. I find this to the strangest of expressions--how does one fit in with other people, all edges erased, making a seamless life from the sharp corners of discontent? I don't find anything that fits in such a way. Certainly not in nature. Nothing real is meant to tessellate like a triangle, top-bottom bottom-top. The sheep will never munch the grass in straight lines." -- character Nathan speaks in 'The Beauty'
- SEL: Your body of work is eclectic, so you seem to defy the limitations of a single genre. What are our muses then? Where do you “fit”?
AW: I don’t think about fitting anywhere,
really. I’m very interested in exploring genre, so many of my books have
horror, science fiction, crime or fantasy elements mixed in with commercial or
literary approaches to prose. Another way of putting it might be to say that I
like to write whatever I want to write, and let other people worry about the
definitions when they’re trying to sell it or explain it. That suits me fine.
- SEL: Voronoi / Rorschach test: What do you see? Ok, bear with me since this is question a game/gimmick of sorts, but it may be fun. I wanted to reinforce your “fitting-in” tessellation-metaphor in a fun way. As a scientist who performs image analysis on data, I apply tessellations on photos to quantify things like particle size, or effective densities of microstructures. I took the liberty of using some Voronoi methods (typically applied on images of dispersed points) on an image you should be familiar with (I grabbed it online). Figured it would be interesting if you commented or interpreted this abstract version, and described what you see. There is no intention for any real psychological test, but this exercise may also reinforce your feelings on different perspectives.
AW: My first thought was that I was
looking at a map of some strange outcropping of land, surrounded by psychedelic
seas. It looks like my kind of place! I bet they tell good stories there… My
brain also wants to turn it into a sideways view of a face, perhaps a child’s
face, with an upturned nose and a chin resting on one finger. Lost in thought.
Can an image be a map and a person? And a mushroom, of course.
“My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump limps...Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in a lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown." -- From 'The Beauty'
- SEL: Love of Language: “The Beauty” and “Peace, Pipe” (provided as a pair in the 2018 edition) both had protagonists with storytelling/journalistic roles which affected greater society. Given your degrees in Theatre, Film and Television Studies. any other media Other Arts, you clearly like the subject matter. Your prose is rhythmic and begs to be read aloud like poetry. Explicitly having your characters take on your persona seems telling. What about language and storytelling compels you so?
AW: You’re right that I was influenced by
theatre first, and started out by writing stage plays before deciding to switch
to novels. It was all about the concept of voice. A lot of my writing is in
first person for that reason. I love being able to capture and sustain a
person’s voice, and I haven’t found any form that allows me to do that so
completely as the novel/novella/short story. It can be an immersion into
somebody else’s head, for the writer and the reader, and I find that so
powerful.
Also, the subjectivity of it is so involving. The Beauty was so much fun to write because nobody viewed these
mushroom creatures in the same way, and therefore refused to accept them into
their own narrative in the way that the storyteller figure wanted to present
them. There’s such great tension in that. Which story do we choose to accept
about our own pasts and futures? We’re all telling stories and perfecting our
own voices all the time by subtly rewriting our own experiences and feelings.
That was brilliant territory to explore.
- SEL: Beauty and attraction need not be about gender roles, but sexual attraction certainly involves beauty. There are no women in The Beauty, so you literally switched gender-perspective to write on behalf of your characters. You could have reversed the situation and had all the men die instead. Please discuss the creative process while switching gender voices, and the role of beauty in relationships.
AW: I don’t plan in advance. I sit down
with my notebook and pen and start putting words down on paper. I’d just
finished writing a novel with a female protagonist that had a repressed, strict
tone to it and so I picked up a fresh notebook and started writing and the
first paragraphs of The Beauty, in
Nate’s voice, came out. I loved his voice straight away, and I kept going,
really enjoying the freedom to let the words flow.
As I started to get a sense
of what the story was about I was nervous about the subject matter and getting
the voice right but early on in the process the thought came to me that Nate
could barely remember a world without women, so he wasn’t going to hold a lot
of set viewpoints about gender. That helped me to let go of the idea that I had
to write a man. I wrote a person trying to make sense of new things, changing
things, and finding beauty by embracing those changes.
I think it’s really interesting to
consider how the book may have been different if I’d imagined all the men dying
and the women being left behind. What decisions would they make differently, as
individuals, as a group? But Nate’s voice cropped up first, and that’s the
voice, and the story, I told. Maybe I’ll try it the other way around some time.
- SEL: Can you recommend past and/or future works of yours that would appeal to the weird-fiction crowd?
AW: For US readers, my novella The Arrival of Missives will be
published by Titan in November 2018. That’s another story which uses the
natural world in surprising ways and doesn’t belong to one genre. It’s set in
England in 1920, and begins as a coming of age story about a girl who adores
her teacher, and becomes – I don’t know, maybe science fiction? The Arrival of Missives is already
available in the UK from Unsung Stories.
For UK readers, my new novel The Loosening Skin will be published in
October 2018 by Unsung Stories, and that contains similar elements of body
horror, but intermingled with a detective story and an examination of love in
much the same way as The Beauty
examines our concepts of beauty.
Thanks
for the opportunity to give these novels a mention, and to chat about The Beauty! I enjoyed it.
- SEL: Thank you for writing intellectual fantasy and sharing your creative process! Readers can learn more about her Wordpress.
THE IMAGE REVEAL (click to enlarge):
SEL: After the interview, I provided the below Image Analysis workflow that transformed her portrait into the abstract tile. What did she see in herself?
AW: Look at that! I felt certain you'd used the image of a mushroom as your starting point. I must have mushrooms on the brain...
Aliya Whitely Bio (on Wordpress):
Aliya Whiteley was born in Barnstaple, North Devon, in 1974 and grew up in the seaside town of Ilfracombe which formed the inspiration for many of her stories and novels. She was educated at Ilfracombe College and gained a 2:1 BA (Hons) degree in Theatre, Film and Television Studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1995. In 2011 she was awarded an MSc in Library and Information Management by the University of Northumbria; her dissertation involved conducting a case study into the research techniques of modern novelists. She currently lives in West Sussex.
