Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Joe Bonadonna - Interview by SE

 https://www.blackgate.com/2022/08/14/making-weird-fiction-fun-grilling-dorgo-the-dowser/

We have an ongoing series at Black Gate on the topic of “Beauty in Weird Fiction.” Usually we corner an author and query them about their muses and ways to make ‘repulsive’ things ‘attractive to readers.’ Previous subjects have included Darrell SchweitzerAnna Smith SparkCarol BergStephen LeighJason Ray Carney, and John C Hocking. (See the full list at the end of this post).

I’m excited to corner Joe Bonadonna this round. When his Dorgo character grilled/interviewed me in 2017, the questioning began with:

Who the Hell are You?

JB: Who in the Nine Circles of Hell do you think I am? Quasimodo? Doctor Frankenstein? You mean you don’t know who I am? Have you never heard of me? Why, I’m famous the world over! Joe Bonadonna, I am. (I could never settle on a pen name, so I stuck with the name I was given at birth.)

[Aside by SE: To clarify, he often writes about Quasimodo and Dr. Frankenstein for Janet E. Morris’s Heroes in Hell series (Perseid Press). Here’s Joe Bonadona’s official Bio.]

Joe Bonadonna is the author of the heroic fantasies Mad Shadows — Book One: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser (winner of the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy); Mad Shadows — Book Two: The Order of the Serpent; the space opera Three Against The Stars and its sequel, the sword and planet space adventure, The MechMen of Canis-9; and the sword & sorcery pirate novel, Waters of Darkness, in collaboration with David C. Smith. With co-writer Erika M Szabo, he penned Three Ghosts in a Black Pumpkin (winner of the 2017 Golden Books Judge’s Choice Award for Children’s Fantasy), and its sequel, The Power of the Sapphire Wand. He also has stories appearing in: Azieran: Artifacts and Relics; Savage Realms Monthly (March 2022); Griots 2: Sisters of the SpearHeroika I: Dragon Eaters; Poets in Hell; Doctors in Hell; Pirates in Hell; Lovers in Hell; Mystics in Hell; and the forthcoming Liars in Hell; Sinbad: The New Voyages, Volume 4Unbreakable Ink; the shared-world anthology Sha’Daa: Toys, in collaboration with author Shebat Legion; and with David C. Smith for the shared-universe anthology, The Lost Empire of Sol.

In addition to his fiction, Joe has written numerous articles, book reviews and author interviews for us, Black Gate online magazine. Visit his Amazon Author’s page or his Facebook author’s page, called Bonadonna’s Bookshelf.
 



Dorgo… it is Time to Grill You! Or Am I Grilling Joe? Tough to Tell, Since Dorgo Feels like a Natural Extension of You.  Supernatural, Dark Fantasy Rarely Feels so Fun as it Does in the MAD SHADOW Series. Tell us Your Approach to Making Dark-Worlds Fun to Explore.

Dorgo is on holiday, so you’re grilling me. I hope I turn out well-done. Dorgo is indeed an extension of myself; my better half, you can say. His voice is my voice, his sarcasm and sense of humor are my own. I’ve read very little fantasy written in first-person, so I took a page from Raymond Chandler’s notebook and wrote all but one Dorgo tale in first-person. First-person allows me to make his stories more personal and, hopefully, more universal. Speaking to your question about how the “Supernatural, dark fantasy rarely feels so fun as it does in the Mad Shadow Series,” I must first thank you for that. I approach my writing the same way I approached writing music, which is much the same as Bruce Springsteen often composes: I toss everything I’ve ever heard, seen, read and experienced into a blender, crank it up and create what I hope is my own unique concoction.

I try to make it fun because my favorite books, those that inspired me or just simply entertained me, were and still are fun to read. From The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings, from de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series, I had fun reading those. And it was so much fun to discover Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle” and all his other Conan stories, not to mention King Kull and Solomon Kane. Stories and storytelling should be fun to read and write. If not, they’re like dry textbooks or novels where the authors spend more time preaching their own personal gospel than they do trying to entertain. As the Boss sang, “We learned more in a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school.” And that’s the truth. Fiction can be educational, in its own way. You learn by reading.

I just let my imagination run free and try to rein it in when something I really like strikes me as usable. My work, no matter what the genre, is a merging of everything I know and like. It’s no secret that Dorgo was inspired by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, as well as by Fritz Leiber’s work; comedy often played a huge role in Leiber’s stories, especially in his wonderful Lean Times in Lankhmar. In fact, if not for that story and a few others, I might not have written my two most light-hearted tales of Dorgo the Dowser, from the first volume: The Secret of Andaro’s Daughter and The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum, which can be read for free, right here. Although there is plenty of darkness, murder, magic, and weirdness to go around, the comedic situations and what laughs come from the characters, their dialogue and their antics, make these two of my favorite stories. I also give credit to David C. Smith and Ted (T.C.) Rypel for being the first of my “mentors” and for helping me whip that first volume into shape.

[SE aside; I’ve reviewed all the Dorgo Books (Book 3 most recently on Black Gate).  I described the first two as Mystery for the Horror Fan; Cozy Gothic Noir... they’re a great mashup of Horror/Fantasy/Film Noir. In Television terms, this would appeal to fans of the X-filesSupernatural, or Grim. Being a collection of tales, each serves as an episode. Expect: necromancy, mythological creatures — especially the hybrid horned creatures (satyrs, minotaur, etc.), pitted against our protagonist who is motivated to set things right (and make enough money to eat… and perhaps a sustained glance at a beautiful woman).]

You Have a Knack for Making Weird/Dark Fantasy Accessible to Adults and YA via Collaborating with Authors (i.e., David C. Smith and Erika M. Szabo). Fill us In on How You Write for Such a Broad Audience with Other Authors.

There really isn’t much to “fill in.” Most writers know that adult and YA audiences can be drawn into any sort of genre, if the characters are engaging and the storyline exciting. JK Rowling succeeded in that with her Harry Potter series, and certainly Tolkien, as well as Frank L. Baum and Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, to name a handful of authors. They wrote for everyone. Take Waters of Darkness, for instance. David Smith and I knew what we wanted to write, knew what to do and how to write it, and without consciously thinking about it, we just wrote what we wanted to write. Personally, I aim for a wide audience. I don’t write sex scenes for my own work, although I have done some “ghost writing” in that area for a few friends. I don’t go for excessive “foul language,” either. Too often that can destroy the suspension of disbelief.

As for the two children’s books, I had an idea for the first one, but no idea how to go about it. Erika M. Szabo, who has written a boatload of children’s books, took me by the hand and guided me along the way. We chose universal themes and characters we felt our readers could relate to. We used humor and a sense of adventure, too. We added subtle lessons for kids, as well. She reined me in on the action scenes, keeping me from going my usual, bloody and body-strewn way. She told me what we could say and what we could not say in a children’s book. We had a lot of fun writing the first book, and I learned a lot: keep it G-rated or PG-13, at most. We had so much fun, in fact, that Erika came up with the idea for the second book, and we ran with it. The key, for me was creating a world of magic and wonder, and letting our imaginations run free. As with David, Erika and I concentrated on telling good, solid and fun stories, doing our best to write something that was as unique as we could make it.

There really isn’t much more I can tell you. We just wrote the stories we wanted to tell, wrote them the way we wanted to tell them, and kept our audiences in mind at all times. We just wrote or overwrote, in many cases, and then started whittling away during the editing process. I usually write much more than I use: better to write something that is not needed, than it is to need something that hasn’t been written. I don’t believe in padding a story with unnecessary world-building and description. Describe what’s important to the plot: what can be done in three pages can often be done better in three paragraphs. In this, learning how to write screenplays is a most valuable tool.

That’s all I got. All I can tell you.



Going with the Theme that You Make Dark Fantasy Accessible, Let’s Talk About Having Fun in Hell!

You’ve been writing for the Heroes in Hell series for a long time (that’s the satirical, dark fantasy that explores the juxtaposition of deceased people across time)!  Your Doctors in Hell short story “Hell on a Technicality” is hilarious. A death panel (including Aristotle and da Vinci) convenes to discuss the nature of the soul and body in the preposterous case of Doctor Victor Frankenstein, who has had his brain switched with his creature Adam’s. So now Victor’s mind finds itself in his creation’s body… and vice versa. How else better to discuss the nature of a soul in hell then to work out this mess. The death panel erupts into an outrageous furor.  You have recurring characters of Victor Frankenstein and his creature-creation, as well as Quasimodo. Tell us why you teamed up with these hellions and your approach.

Thank you. I tried to make that story both hilarious and meaningful. The death panel evolved out of the dark-comedy “Undertaker’s Holiday” (originally titled “The Undertaker Takes a Holiday,” a play on the play and film, Death Takes a Holiday) Shebat Legion and I co-wrote for Poets in Hell, which also featured my first story for the series, “We the Furious,” or WTF, as Janet Morris’ husband Christopher called it. Shebat and I came up with the idea for a fandom convention in Hell — InfernoCon. Of course, as in all cons, there’s a panel discussion. Now, knowing that Doctors in Hell was the next volume in the series, Shebat and I created a panel of doctors, as a sort of prelude. But Janet wanted us to use poets, so I changed the characters. I later recreated the panel of doctors for “Hell on a Technicality” and thought it would be a riot to have their egos get in the way of what they were trying to decide: if Adam Frankenstein and Galatea, two damned souls who were not sired by men and born of women did, indeed, have souls.

It was Janet who, knowing my love of movies, suggested I write about Victor and Adam. She also suggested I reboot the Hellywood film industry first created by Bill Kerby back in the original series, in the 1980s. (Kerby wrote the screenplay for Bette Midler’s The Rose.) So hence, my storyline for “The Pirates of Penance,” featured in Pirates in Hell. Anyway, while doing research, I discovered that there was a Doctor Johann Konrad Dippel, an alchemist and a vivisectionist obsessed with reanimating the dead. He was born in Castle Frankenstein and was practicing medicine in Geneva, Switzerland when Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Doctor John Polidori were travelling through there. Aha! No doubt Dippel inspired the creation of Victor Frankenstein. So, my using a fictional character, which is allowed, was justified by there being a real-life counterpart.

While I pretty much stick with Mary Shelley’s novel, I use Colin Clive and Boris Karloff as “role models” for Victor and his Creature. Deciding that Doctor Frankenstein needed a hunchback assistant in keeping with the films, I looked no further than Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Doing research on Hugo’s novel, I discovered that around 2002 or so, workmen doing some remodeling at Notre Dame Cathedral knocked down a wall and discovered a small room which contained the bones of a hunchback. I also read that there was, indeed, a similar bell ringer of Notre Dame during Hugo’s lifetime, and he possibly knew the hunchback. While I use Quasimodo and his King of Fools persona for comic relief, I also endeavor to infuse him with pathos and humanity. I use Charles Laughton as my role model. Thus, I get to write about two beloved films, Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My approach is to have them interact more as a father and son, with Victor playing the eccentric, often hysterical and somewhat mad father-figure, and Quasimodo as the hapless, lovesick, innocent and childlike son. I think the two characters make a wonderful team, and I have fun with both of them.

 

How do You Define Beauty in Art/Fiction that Appears to be Repulsive (Weird/ Horror)?

Jeez, that’s a tough question to answer, Seth. I’m not even sure I can put my thoughts on this into words. I guess the best way is for me to go back to my childhood. Horror films never frightened me. I was always fascinated by and sympathetic to the “monsters.” I understood them. I wanted to be one of them. I always found a beauty and poetry in the best of the old Universal Classic Monsters, in the “grotesqueries” of characters and creatures like Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc.

In spite of having grown up and hung out with hundreds of kids, I always felt somewhat of an outsider, never quite fitting in. I never even once considered myself cute or handsome; I saw myself as being part of the gallery of the grotesque. In fact, back in 1970, when I was a young hippy and got my first apartment, my landlady’s kids called me Halloween Mask Man, a sobriquet I embraced. I even wrote a poem and later put it to music: Halloween Man. I was proud of that title. The “creatures” in, let’s say, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, have a beauty all their own: yes, they are weird and repulsive, but that does not turn me off. I find it all intriguing and, in its own way, quite attractive. Take the metamorph from Alien. So ugly, it’s beautiful in its shape and design. An intriguing lifeform.

Like many kids, I loved and still love dinosaurs, dragons, aliens and mythological creatures. I like centaurs and minotaurs, mutants and monsters of all sorts, for example, and I see the beauty in even the evil ones. Even Medusa I find beautiful in her ugliness; knowing her backstory, her history, generates sympathy in me. She was cursed by Athena, and her transformation into a gorgon is what made her evil. I feature Medusa in a new story I’m working on for Janet Morris’ Heroes in Hell series, and I portray her as aristocratic, heroic, noble and honorable, and of great inner, soulful beauty. She is not the monster history has made her out to be: that’s all a lie.

Understanding the repulsive is to see their beauty, to see beyond their physical appearance and even come to like them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I consider repulsive, with no redeeming qualities such as beauty, is what we have in the real world: racists and rapists, haters and murderers, people who lack compassion and tolerance and understanding, people who lack kindness, courtesy and manners. People who have no sense of honor and loyalty. People filled with hate for what they don’t understand and thus fear — fear of “the other” I guess all this is the best answer I can give you.

Do You Find Beauty in Your Weird Fiction? Dissect an Example.

Well, I really don’t consider myself a writer of “weird fiction.” Certainly, there are plenty of elements of the weird, of horror, in my stories. It’s difficult to cite and dissect any one example. My human characters are often the weird ones, the ugly ones. Let’s go with my Dorgo the Dowser tale from Mad Shadows-Book 2: The Order of the Serpent — “The Girl Who Loved Ghouls.” This features a witch, what I call one of the Wikku, who lost a son when he was a little boy, and now she’s become the surrogate mother and protector of a small tribe of ghouls, who are an endangered species.

The ghouls are friendly and noble; they pose no threat to the living. Now, there’s a nobleman with an Oedipus complex who, for his own political agenda, is framing the ghouls for a series of murders he is responsible for. He and his men are racist, violent men who find torture and murder to be their daily bread. He’s allied himself with a lost clan of semi-human cannibals who escaped to Dorgo’s world when their own world was in its final death throes. They are an ugly and repulsive race that is having breeding problems, and are thus dying out. This nobleman has promised them “fresh blood” in order for them to propagate and keep their race alive: namely, by giving Dorgo to their queen, with whom she will mate and produce a new breed of her species.

But these creatures are in no way as ugly or repulsive as the nobleman and his four murderous, racist henchmen. As I often write about, human beings are the monsters — i.e. Doctor Frankenstein is the real monster, not the innocent Creature he created, then ignored and abandoned, thus destroying its childlike innocence, which turned it into a thing bent on revenge.

The beauty in my story comes from the ghouls, from their kind hearts and pure souls: they are an intelligent species who just happen to feed on the dead, and not a pack of mindless, savage beasts. They are, to put a slight religious spin on it, God’s innocent creatures. They are the real heroes of this tale.

What Scares You? Is it Beautiful?

No, it’s not beautiful. What scares me is people. Books and films have never scared me; they are fiction and therefore not real. Reality scares me. War and violence. Look at what’s going on in our country today and across the globe. Ugliness, blind hatred, intolerance, misogyny, racism, violence. People can be seen as beautiful in their physical appearance. But far too often, it’s all superficial: beauty may be skin-deep, but ugliness goes to the bone. Their hearts and souls are ugly and repulsive. Kindness and compassion are fading from our world. Maybe it’s just my inborn cynicism talking, but that’s how I feel and what I fear. I’ll say no more on this lest I climb upon my soapbox and bore you and your readers to death.

Does any Formal Training or Experience Motivate your Writing?

No formal training, really, other than writing classes and such. I mean, I was “trained” to be a printer and a musician by trade and avocation. But my imagination and my experiences are what motivate me. Experiences of all kinds: my family and our history, the people I meet, the relationships forged or broken, friendships and love affairs, the movies I watch, the books I read, the music I listen to. All these provide motivation as well as inspiration. I often take movie titles or song titles and write my own stories to fit. I will even do a wordplay on a title. Take the Heroes in Hell series, for instance. In Pirates in Hell, I have a story called “The Pirates of Penance.” For Lovers in Hell, I wrote a macabre love story filled with gallows humor that I called “Withering Blights.”

For Liars in Hell, I titled my story “Hell’s Bells.” I also played with a variation on “dragon’s hoard” for Janet Morris’ Heroika: Dragon Eaters — and titled my story “The Dragon’s Horde.” For the final story in my Mad Shadows – Book 1: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, I “gakked” (stole) the title from an old Robert Mitchum western called Blood on the Moon, because I thought it fitting for my werewolf tale and did not want to destroy the mystery by having “werewolf” or “wolfman” in the title. (Well, I guess I just destroyed the mystery!) Life experiences are always part of my stories, whether obvious to the people who know me, or subtly portrayed; there’s a lot in the subtext. One can find inspiration and motivation in every facet of life, which I know is just preaching to the choir of writers and other artists.

 

Discuss Cinematic Writing! What are Some of Your All-Time Favorite Films and TV Shows?

Ah, another tough one to answer, simply by virtue of the question having many answers and opening up many windows. I always try to avoid picking favorites, the way parents avoid naming a favorite son or daughter. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip the “favorites” part of this interview; God only knows, I’m going to be long-winded. There a handful of films from the 1930s which have inspired me: Frankenstein (1931), King Kong (1933), Beau Geste, and Gunga Din. Later films, such as The Vikings and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (both from 1950), Spartacus and Jason and The Argonauts (both from 1960 or so) influenced me, of course. And there is something of Ray Harryhausen in just about all my stories.

I would like to mention Alfred Hitchcock, however. Having read a biography on the master, I was struck by his discussion and explanation of the “McGuffin.” This is the device around which most of his films revolve. It doesn’t matter whether the McGuffin is microfilm, wine bottles filled with uranium or some other artifact, relic or whatever. What matters are the characters, what each of them will do, to what lengths they will go to in order to get their hands on the McGuffin: sell it, keep it, destroy it, use it in some fashion. It’s the study of these characters and their actions. This is also how Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon works: the falcon isn’t really important, in and of itself, the story is all about the characters who are itching to get their hands on it. Stories are about characters, about people. You can have the most ingenious plot ever devised by mortal man or woman, but if you don’t have solid, realistic and engaging characters, all you have is a plot in search of a story.

You have written articles for Black Gate wherein you describes how cinema informs your style.  Prior/in-addition-to writing, you were a rock guitarist, songwriter, and even a board member of the Chicago Screenwriter’s Network. You compose as if you write for the camera, and your mind has been influenced by the masters.

Yes, and I’ve also written another article for Black Gate on my cinematic inspirations — Celluloid Heroes, which will pretty much give your readers the whole picture, no pun intended.

Terrible Inspirations: Can You Discuss How Writing Fiction can be Used to Explore? Heal? How Does One Approach Revisiting Tragedy in Art?

The haunting dedication to Mad Shadows I sets the stage for the themes of many of these stories: the dedication was extended to your parents and to “Mary Ellen Pettenon and the other 91 children and 3 nuns who became angles too soon in the Our Lady of Angels School Fire, December 1, 1958.” I learned soon after that you are a long time Chicagoan, who was in the same school system and if your birthday was a few months different, you would have been in the building that caught fire. In the book, we learn early on that Dorgo is an orphan, and many of the plots/character-motivations are based on family ties.

Yes, my date of birth “saved me.” I was down the street in one of the two houses that were used for kindergarten and three first-grade classes. However, if the dice had landed a different way, I might have been in the fourth first-grade class that was on the main floor of the building that burned down. I was lucky, and I was blessed. As far as Dorgo being an orphan is concerned . . . I did not know any orphans when I was a kid. Sure, I knew kids who had no mother or father, but I did not encounter any orphans until I was out of high school. Charles Dickens was the inspiration for my making Dorgo an orphan. It just felt right. I think being in an orphanage and then running away at the age of fifteen to become a mercenary is what widened his worldview, what made him an enlightened soul without one racist or prejudiced, bigoted bone in his body. He is the embodiment of what I strive to be, the angel of my better nature, so to speak.

[Aside by SE: Joe’s first story to appear in Heroes in Hell (“We The Furious,” in Poets in Hell), he placed the kid who started the OLA school fire in Hell, although he did not refer to him by name, just his actions].

As for how writing fiction can be used to explore and heal, and revisiting tragedy in art goes . . . I offer no advice, can’t tell anyone how to approach it. You just do it: you write what you know, what you feel, what you’ve experienced and how it affected you. There is a scene where one of Dorgo’s companions holds the hand of a dying man. After the man passes, the companion, a young, good-natured youth, looks at Dorgo and says that he was holding his mother’s hand when she died, and that’s how I witnessed my own mother’s death. Writing that helped me move pass that dark moment in 2001. In my The Man Who Loved Puppets, Dorgo has to save a group of children whose souls had been stolen. They were still alive, but just barely, and had this witch’s plot to resurrect her dead sister come to fruition, those children would have died.

To make it more personal, one of the kids, a little girl, was the daughter of one of Dorgo’s friends and former lovers. The little girl is based on Dave Smith’s daughter Lily, who was about four or five at the time: I used her mannerisms and the way she talked, her personality, to infuse my character with life. All that evolved out of that tragedy of my childhood, when I was six years old and learned that not just old people die, kids can die, too. The loss of an ailing father in my Blood on the Moon echoes the loss of my own father, who died of cancer in 1999. Just writing those scenes was a catharsis, a way for me to come to terms, after so many years, with the deaths of my parents, both of whom always believed in my writing gift and also supported and encouraged me in anything and everything I wanted to try, to do. I was extremely blessed with the parents given to me. I could not have picked two better parents, two decent and loving parents, had I been given the choice.

I explored my beliefs, my Catholic upbringing, my thoughts and ideas about God, faith and religion in Mad Shadows – Book 3: The Heroes of Echo Gate. Faith in God, and the absence or loss of that faith are at the heart of the novel. We learn all about Dorgo’s faith and how he views Life and a Higher Being. While he remains steadfast in his beliefs, he does have questions and doubts. In one scene, set the night before the first battle begins, he has a long discussion with a chaplain who had once been a mercenary. I feel this scene is one of the more insightful and heartfelt scenes in the story, as it conveys my own personal belief system, my own doubts, my own questions and theories. As I always tell people: I do not write for the head; I have no great knowledge or wisdom to impart, and nothing I can say has not already been said by others more skilled and wiser than I. I am not that ego-driven or presumptuous to think I can change anyone’s minds. I write not to make you think, I write to make you feel. I write for the heart.

Any Current or Future Endeavors We Can Pitch?

Well, in a story I’m working on for a future Heroes in Hell volume, I borrowed the title from an old war movie, “From Hell to Eternity.” But having signed an NDA (a Non-Disclosure Agreement), that’s all I can say about it. I also have a new Dorgo story in the works that I call “Rainbow Demon,” which was inspired by a song by Uriah Heep. I would very much like to do a fourth and final volume of Dorgo the Dowser tales: Mad Shadows – Book 4: The Return of Dorgo the Dowser, which follows closely on the heels of book three, The Heroes of Echo Gate, and Dorgo’s return home after the battle which is a huge part of that book.

I think a “quartet” of novels is enough: I don’t want to lose the magic of Dorgo’s stories; I don’t want him or his adventures to grow stale and repetitious, which happens with so many series. As you know, the first volume consisted of six separate adventures linked together by Dorgo and some recurring characters. Volume two is more of a novel — three novellas tied together by theme and certain plot elements that all come together in the last story. Book three is a three-part novel. If I do a fourth volume, I would return to the format of the first: six or seven separate adventures, ending where I started.

I’d also like to do a sequel to David C. Smith’s and my Waters of Darkness, and we have discussed it. Another dark, old-school, action-packed but character-driven Sword and Sorcery tale. However, we haven’t been able to come up with a good storyline, and Dave is busy with other projects, and I won’t do it alone. I have a prologue of sorts written for a second sequel to the two children’s Heroic Fantasies I co-authored with Erika M. Szabo, but again — no storyline that pleases us both has emerged.

Now, I’ve always wanted to do a Sword and Sorcery version of John Wayne’s Red River, which is about a cattle drive. I’ve got a title, “The Goblin Herd,” and it will feature a new character, Thibron the Skulker, who was first introduced in my story, “The Vampire Tree,” which was published in Savage Realms Monthly, in March 2022. I have a few characters lined up and I’m taking notes. The hard part is coming up with the incidents involved because, while inspired by Red River, I do not want to use the same plot. I have another Thibron tale in mind, set around a pair of strange jewels called “The Eyes of Bipty,” but that’s all I have, thus far. Other than that, and writing the occasional article for Black Gate, that’s about it. Real life situations, the things one must attend to, take up a lot of my time.

I hope to keep writing for Heroes in Hell for as long as I can. Writing for that series is very hard work, but it’s also so much fun and so rewarding. Janet Morris forces me to “up my game,” to stretch my boundaries, to break out of my box, and I think my stories for her are among the best I’ve written, not only in plot and characterization, but in prose style, as well. And the best part is, as long as we (the other writers and I) stick to the arc she gives us and follow the rules of Hell, almost anything goes. Our imaginations are free to run wild. Janet has become a major influence, and a wonderful teacher and mentor to me, and my writing has improved under her guidance.

So, that’s it, Seth. I’ve run out of words. But I do want to thank you for this wonderful opportunity to express myself. It’s been fun, a real pleasure and an honor. You rock!

You Rock, Joe! Long live Dorgo!




 


#Weird Beauty Interviews at Black Gate

  1. Darrel Schweitzer THE BEAUTY IN HORROR AND SADNESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DARRELL SCHWEITZER 2018
  2. Sebastian Jones THE BEAUTY IN LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEBASTIAN JONES 2018
  3. Charles Gramlich THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE REPELLENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES A. GRAMLICH  2019
  4. Anna Smith Spark DISGUST AND DESIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNA SMITH SPARK  2019
  5. Carol Berg ACCESSIBLE DARK FANTASY: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL BERG 2019
  6. Byron Leavitt GOD, DARKNESS, & WONDER: AN INTERVIEW WITH BYRON LEAVITT 2021
  7. Philip Emery THE AESTHETICS OF SWORD & SORCERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP EMERY  2021
  8. C. Dean Andersson DEAN ANDERSSON TRIBUTE INTERVIEW AND TOUR GUIDE OF HEL: BLOODSONG AND FREEDOM! (2021 repost of 2014)
  9. Jason Ray Carney SUBLIME, CRUEL BEAUTY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAY CARNEY (2021)
  10. Stephen Leigh IMMORTAL MUSE BY STEPHEN LEIGH: REVIEW, INTERVIEW, AND PRELUDE TO A SECRET CHAPTER (2021)
  11. John C. Hocking BEAUTIFUL PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING  (2022)
  12. Matt Stern BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN (2022)
  13. interviews prior 2018 (i.e., with John R. Fultz, Janet E. Morris, Richard Lee Byers, Aliya Whitely …and many more) are on S.E. Lindberg’s website

 

Friday, March 4, 2022

BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN

 BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN

originally posted on Black Gate.com 




 Photo Credits: H. Lindberg[/caption]

We have an ongoing series on Black Gate discussing “Beauty in Weird Fiction.” We corner authors to tap their minds about their muses and ways to make ‘repulsive’ things ‘attractive to readers.’  Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell SchweitzerAnna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney, and John C. Hocking. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post. This one covers emerging author M. Stern who writes weird/horror fiction and sci-fi. He has had stories appear in Weird Book #44, Startling Stories#34, and Doug Draa's clown anthology Funny As a Heart Attack. There's some strange and complicated beauty to be found in all of those. He also has published in several other markets including  Lovecraftiana: The Magazine of Eldritch Horror and flash fiction that deals with aesthetics and transgression in Cosmic Horror Monthly #19.

Friday, February 4, 2022

John C. Hocking Interview

 BEAUTIFUL PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING - originally posted on Black Gate Feb 4, 2022

To help reveal the muses that inspire weird fiction and horror writers, this interview series engages contemporary authors on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate broaching this topic have included Darrell SchweitzerSebastian JonesCharles GramlichAnna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post.

Today we corner John C. Hocking whose Conan pastiche we reviewed a few months ago.

John C. Hocking is an American fantasy writer who is the author of two well-acclaimed Conan novels and has also won the 2009 Harper’s Pen Award for Sword and Sorcery fiction for his story, “The Face In The Sea”. He lives in Michigan with his wife, son, and an alarming quantity of books. He is a nigh-obsessed reader and writer of lurid pulp fiction, the author of Conan and the Emerald Lotus, the "Black Starlight" Conan serial, and their time-lost companion, Conan and the Living Plague, and an obedient thrall of Tales From the Magician’s Skull.

For clarity, we'll actually corner him twice. Firstly, here on Black Gate, we'll cover his weird, pulpy muses & Conan pastiche; secondly, in a companion interview, we'll cover his King's Blade and Archivist series on the Tale from the Magician's Skull Blog.

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Sublime, Cruel Beauty, Interview with Jason Ray Carney

This interview appears in Black Gate (9/9/2021):

SUBLIME, CRUEL BEAUTY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAY CARNEY



 Jason Ray Carney (aka Ayolo)

Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction

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 by strange muses. To help reveal divine mysteries passed through artists, this interview series engages contemporary authors on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell SchweitzerSebastian JonesCharles GramlichAnna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post. 

This one features Jason Ray Carney who is rapidly becoming everpresent across Weird Fiction and Sword & Sorcery communities (in fact you can probably corner him in the Whetstone S&S Tavern (hosted on Discord)). By day, he is a Lecturer in Popular Literature at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of the academic book, Weird Tales of Modernity (McFarland), and the fantasy anthology, Rakefire and Other Stories (Pulp Hero Press, reviewed on Black Gate). He recently edited Savage Scrolls: Thrilling Tales of Sword and Sorcery for Pulp Hero Press and is an editor at The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, for Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery and for Witch House Magazine: Amateur Magazine of Cosmic HorrorIncidentally, Jason Ray Carney has also contributed here at Black Gate with a post on Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn character and musings on How Sword & Sorcery Brings Us Life.

Saturday, July 31, 2021

The Aesthetics of Sword & Sorcery: An Interview with Philip Emery

First published on Black Gate July 17th, 2021

This continues our interviews on "Beauty in Weird Fiction" with previous topics being:

Are you haunted, perhaps obsessed, with Sword & Sorcery?

Heroic fiction is infectious. Sometimes vicariously “being the hero” via reading is not enough to satisfy the call. Being compelled to write manifests next. Ghosts may be to blame. Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) is credited with originating the genre with his characters: Conan the Barbarian, King Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn; in a 1933 correspondence to his friend and contemporary author, Clark Ashton Smith, Howard explained his interaction with the muse that inspired his Conan yarns.

Monday, January 25, 2021

God, Darkness, & Wonder: An Interview with Byron Leavitt

 This post is synchronized with a simulcast on BlackGate.com (Jan 25, 2021 posting).

Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction

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 by strange muses.  These interviews engage contemporary authors & artists on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell Schweitzer, Sebastian JonesCharles Gramlich, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg. This one features Byron Leavitt, novelist and game-author for Diemension Games. 

Byron Leavitt is also the author of the bizarre children’s novel The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon) and the non-fiction book Of Hope and Cancer: One Man’s Story of God, Darkness, and Wonder, as well as the story content for the board game Deep Madness and its accompanying book Shattered Seas (recently reviewed on BlackGate). Byron is currently working on the storybooks for the forthcoming Deep Madness prequel Dawn of Madness, a story-driven horror experience in a board game.

“Darkness. Light. Wonder. Beauty. God. Tentacles. Those who know me best would say that pretty well sums me up.” - Byron Leavitt

Interview Table of Contents/Links

  1. WHAT’S THE SCOOP WITH YOUR ICONIC FEDORA?
  2. BODY HORROR, MUTATIONS & CANCER
  3. FINDING BEAUTY IN DARK PLACES
  4. DO YOU THINK GOD ENJOYS HORROR?
  5. RELIGION IN WEIRD ART
  6. YOUR CHARACTERS
  7. WORKING ON A TEAM, IN A SHARED UNIVERSE
  8. WHAT SCARES YOU? IS IT BEAUTIFUL?
  9. OTHER DARK ARTS, YOUR DRAWINGS
  10. MOVIE INFLUENCES
  11. FUTURE WORKS

(1) WHAT’S THE SCOOP WITH YOUR ICONIC FEDORA? IS IT HIDING TENTACLES?

BL: Definitely. Actually, I never used to like hats. But then one of my characters, who I thought was a really cool guy, wore a fedora, so I decided maybe hats weren’t so bad. I bought a fedora on a trip and have been wearing them ever since. I suppose that’s an instance of life imitating art.

Dawn of Madness - Emily Hawkins Mutations

(2) BODY HORROR, MUTATIONS & CANCER

SE: You went into remission from recurring Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and a bone marrow transplant, which you discuss in your book Of Hope and Cancer. Considering that, and your penchant for mutating characters in Deep Madness (in which characters mutate into tentacled creatures) and Dawn of Madness (in which every character/wanderer has three alternate versions of his or herself; see inset images of Emily and Lynas’s malformations), we have to delve into how your condition affected your writing. Please tell us how your cancer experience shaped your art (nightmares)?

BL: That’s an excellent question! To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t think my experiences there influenced me that much. I know that’s a boring answer, but I was pretty weird before I got cancer. Plus, I really can’t take credit for a lot of the ideas in Deep and Dawn. Roger Ho, Cherry Li, and the Diemension Games team formed the basics for most of the characters before bringing them to me to flesh out.

I can think of one area that may have impacted me, though – or at least skewed me even further in a specific direction. I’ve always loved monsters and felt a strong connection to them, but I think my experience deepened those feelings. People tend to treat you differently when you have cancer (or likely any serious disease or condition). Or, rather, they don’t know how to treat you. You become diseased, unusual, and scary to them. You transform into an outsider, and others lose all sense of how to handle this “new you.” They don’t mean anything by it, and it’s not even necessarily a conscious action, but looking at you is just too close to staring at their own mortality. So, in a sense, you become a monster to them: a cautionary tale that is easiest to deal with if avoided, or a dark specter they know is real but which they want to put out of their minds. I think it’s very likely that this influenced me, drawing me even closer to empathizing with those on the fringes: the outsiders – and the monsters.

(3) FINDING BEAUTY IN DARK PLACES

SE: I post an excerpt from your book Of Hope and Cancer in which you describe finding beauty from places everyone else runs from. Given this, and your passion for horror, can you speak on the appeal of art that many may feel is repulsive? What joy do you get from playing in bloody rain?

Beauty in the Rain: Oftentimes when it begins to rain, I will decide it is time to go for a walk. I will put on my coat and my hat, and as everyone else flees indoors I will step out into the downpour and tumult to begin the trek down our long gravel driveway. I smell the freshly cleaned air. I hear the rain colliding with the leaves, the branches, the road. And I feel the beauty of something greater than me. I find myself steeping in awe, being consumed by wonder. … Don’t get me wrong: I know that the rain is wet and cold and at times even oppressive. I understand why people would want to avoid it. I even do myself sometimes. But I also think that by not stepping out into the rain, by not taking that chance of getting wet, we sometimes miss out on the beauty that is as fresh as a glistering raindrop on a flower.” - Byron Leavitt

BL: I have a dirty secret: my main goal is not to scare people with my writing. (Except for Dawn of Madness – though even that one has layers.) I am much more interested in taking readers to places they’ve never been and filling them with a sense of wonder and awe. Then, any other emotions or feelings accompanying those two sensations are a bonus that comes with the territory. I have heard other authors and creators who I respect say something like this as well. Junji Ito comes immediately to mind (who everyone should read whether they like manga or not.) In the realm of film, Guillermo del Toro has expressed similar sentiments. I think Lovecraft himself must have felt similarly to some degree, which is one reason why I believe his stories still resonate with people despite all the hang-ups and roadblocks that now exist between him and new readers. He took you to places you had never seen before. He stole your breath away first with the setting, the adventure, and the dazzling, wondrous “what if.” Then he crushed your lungs with the massive, incomprehensible otherworldliness of it all when you finally realized what was going on. This is the kind of horror that really gets me: the stuff that causes its reader to say, “Whoa…” before it makes her yelp, “GAH!” And if the two can be intertwined along the way, all the better. (The movie Annihilation is one of my favorites for this very reason.)

I am implacably drawn to awe. I feel like my life’s mission is, in a sense, to cultivate wonder. And I think these emotions are almost always tied to discovery, which very often plumbs life’s uncharted dark fringes. Exploring the unknown can be a truly exhilarating, life-changing (or affirming) experience. But it’s also one of the things that scare us the most. A massive chunk of horror revolves around the fear of the unknown and what exists in that nebulous, uncharted place – whether that place is the woods, the ocean, another planet, a long-forgotten temple, or just in the darkness itself. What exists beyond our solid, everyday walls of concrete and steel? What happens when you peel back the skin of what we perceive as reality and peer underneath? It’s very easy when exploring to find something absolutely breathtaking. But, at the very next moment, that same beautiful discovery can reveal its wild unearthly underbelly and send a thrill of terror shivering down your spine.

Dawn of Madness - Lynas Gershwin Priest Character

(4) DO YOU THINK GOD ENJOYS HORROR?

SE: You have written that you see God as “co-authoring” your destiny/fate. So it seems you have a spiritual god/muse who likes to write. Many may laugh at that, and it is funny I suppose, but many horror writers are not promoting violence or wishing fear on others.  So why would God want to write in the horror genre?

BL: Writing is a form of creation, and the Judeo-Christian Bible starts with God doing just that: creating. And I don’t personally think he was just forming what we would typically consider beautiful: He was fashioning the dark, squirmy things like the angler fish, the eel, and the spider. And I consider that a comforting thought. In fact, when I was growing up, the two things that made me think I wasn’t wholly deranged were deep-sea life and the book of Revelation from the Bible.

Some things are absolutely terrifying to us without being innately evil or devious in themselves: they’re just not a part of our framework or within our comfort zone. For example, the book of Revelation is chock full of uncanny, horrifying beings – and most of them are the good guys. Actually, the stuff in there (as well as in other places, like Isaiah and Ezekiel) is so extreme that some people think I’m borderline blasphemous when I discuss it with them. For instance, there are angelic beings (possibly the Seraphim or their relatives, though they aren’t explicitly named) who are entirely covered with eyes. As in, they have dozens (or hundreds) of eyes blinking all over their bodies and six wings. Plus, only one of them has a human face, and I’m not sure any of them has a human shape. Then there’s Jesus, who is depicted in several ways. One is as a lamb who has been cut open – who also happens to have seven eyes and seven horns. He takes and holds a scroll, too, making me think he must have hands. And it further seems likely to me that he must be standing on two legs as he opens and reads the sealed scroll. Then, in another place, he has white hair that glistens like snow, eyes that burn like flames, a face as bright as the sun, and a literal sword for a tongue. He holds seven burning stars in his hand and, when he speaks, his voice is as loud and layered as multiple rivers rushing at once. “Meek and mild” my butt.

To actually answer your question, though, I don’t know that God so much likes to write in horror as that he just specializes in the strange and unexpected. Having said that, I have often felt like watching horror has brought me closer to God, or at least made me consider the world in a different way. I know that sounds patently ridiculous, but hear me out. Horror is, in my opinion, the genre most likely to step beyond the bounds of normalcy – even more so than science fiction or fantasy (though both of those can and do.) And it’s outside of that space where I am most likely to experience something beyond myself. So, I am more likely to see or consider something that makes me look at things in a different way while watching horror. (This is not always the case, obviously, and it might not even be the truth most of the time. No one has ever had an epiphany while watching a Jason movie, for instance.) It also doesn’t hurt that many horror movies have what I would call a spiritual component. Some are more blatant – and more of a gut punch – than others. The Conjuring films come immediately to mind, and so does The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Or the indie movie Ink. Or the Japanese picture Re-Cycle. Even The Exorcist itself (and certainly The Excorcist TV show.) There’s also the Showtime show Penny Dreadful. Alternatively, in books, many of Stephen King’s works have a spiritual aspect, such as The Stand. I’m not saying these things are common in horror, but they may be more common than in any other genre right now.

Light is most discernable in darkness. So, in my mind, the darkest genre can be a wonderful place to find (or create) sparks of light. I guess I’ve always just seen “wondrous” and “terrifying” as siblings, or two sides of the same coin – much like light and dark. And I can easily draw one out of the other. Furthermore, if the Bible is to be believed, then so can God: “…Darkness was over the face of the deep… And God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

(5) RELIGION IN WEIRD ART

SE: Sticking with the religion theme. Your website has a tab for Weird Church that is awaiting content, and Shattered Seas features an Irish priest with Connor Durham...and Dawn of Madness will feature Lynas! Please discuss how/why you feature religion in your work?

BL: Religion is a huge part of me, and so is weirdness. I felt for a long time like I was living in two worlds: in one I had to fit in a square hole, and in the other I was pushed into a round one. The problem is, I’m more of an octopus shape. Octopuses are good at squeezing into a variety of spaces, but every once in a while they just want to be an octopus. So, Weird Church is going to be my attempt to unite those two worlds. A lot of my writing, too, is really me trying to merge those two realms, or at least play in both at once. I don’t think they have to be exclusive domains. In fact, I think in many ways they are surprisingly complimentary.

Lynas actually was a creation of the team, so I can’t take credit for him. Connor, however, is entirely mine. Whether I create them or not, though, I usually seem to find anchor characters in most projects I work on who can kind of ground me in whatever I’m doing. Connor was that character in Shattered Seas for me. Samuel was that investigator in the main Deep Madness game. And Lynas is probably that wanderer in Dawn of Madness. Beyond that, though, I often try to interweve themes into my stories like redemption and sacrifice, or things that will offer glimmers of light in the claustrophobic emptiness. Those foundational Judeo-Christian bedrocks are what often makes a character and a story compelling to me. That doesn’t mean things always go well: actually, it seems like they normally go pretty terribly. But having those flickers of hope in the darkness and seeing how the characters respond to adversity is, for me at least, what gives the work a depth it would otherwise lack.

There is a mystery, a sacredness, that I feel is missing from our world today. We have lost that weighty sense of Other in our largely empty materialistic lives. I find the wonder, the beauty, we have lost in religion and myth. That isn’t to say I discount science or anything of the like: I love studying science. But I do have a major problem with materialism. It is very hard for something to nourish the soul when it doesn’t believe or acknowledge that the soul exists. I believe religion and the sacred fill that cavernous void left by the yawning emptiness of our materialistic worldviews.  

(6) YOUR CHARACTERS

SE: Which character do you identify most with? The writer in Dawn of Madness?  Connor Durham or Lucas Kane from Shattered Seas? And I need to learn more about Dr. William West who emerges as the most interesting non-playable character and even antagonist in Shattered Seas, the core Deep Madness story and its Oracle’s Betrayal expansion. He obviously resonates with you. Tell us about him.

BL: There’s a little bit of me in most of my characters, and I love just about all of them for different reasons. My favorite for Shattered Seas is probably Connor Durham, though Charles Ryan (the closest I’ll likely ever come to combining Jason Momoa and a Bioshock Big Daddy) is definitely up there, too. After them, probably Min Wang and Mitsuko Takenaka, and then maybe Regan Waite and William West.

William was a creation of the team (as were all of the Deep Madness investigators,) and they had the basic structure for him in place before I came along. But he’s definitely a fun character to play with. Roger Ho (Diemension’s lead designer/creative director/CEO/fearless leader) was a little surprised by how evil William ended up being in Shattered Seas, but he’s always been that level of monster in my mind. It’s always a kick playing with a character who is simultaneously brilliant, deranged, and deluded like William. It’s also fun playing with characters who are in more of a grey area, like Regan Waite. I don’t think I’ve really done more than scrape the surface with her. I’m honestly still not entirely sure if she’s good or evil, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

(7) WORKING ON A TEAM/SHARED UNIVERSE

SE: With Shattered Seas Leavitt extends the world created by the Diemension Game team (with designers Roger Ho, Cherry Li, Chauncey, and Yichuan Wang, whom Byron dedicated the book to… in addition to the KS backers).  How does the creative process work with the team (game designers, artists, writer/you, your backers)? Like, do you have any input on character design or creation, or just the story? Can we expect more novels associated with Diemension Games?

BL: Working with Roger, Cherry, and the gang is fantastic. It’s certainly the best experience I’ve had working on a team. Most of the time, the characters are created by Roger and Cherry and then sent to me to flesh out. I work closely with Roger to make sure the stories are in-line with their vision, and usually put a bit of my own spin on it. One barrier we have is that we live in different countries, so it can be difficult for us all to follow along with every step. But we manage.

As for if there will be more Diemension Games novels, I certainly hope so. We have a lot on our plate right now between Dawn of Madness and Celestial, but I would certainly love to dig deeper into our different worlds in the future if the chance presents itself.

(8) WHAT SCARES YOU? IS IT BEAUTIFUL?

BL: A number of things make me cringe or tense up, but I think the thing that actually scares me is probably the idea of oblivion: Specifically, the idea that, behind everything, there is ultimately nothing but true unending emptiness. I think it’s an easy thing to romanticize and treat as beautiful, and I’ve seen many people attempt to do it. But to me it’s not. By its very definition, it would be cold, empty, and void. It would be anti-being. The very idea of beauty is meaningless there, and so is everything else. I think this should scare every intellectually honest person, and if the nihility itself doesn’t then the lines of thought birthed from its implications certainly should.

(9) OTHER DARK ARTS: YOUR DRAWINGS

SE: Do you practice other arts other than writing (spellcasting counts)? If so, can we share them (i.e., images of fine or graphic art) or mp3s/videos (of music). Likewise, can you discuss how art can from one medium can inform/inspire another?

BL: Ha! I don’t know that I’d call anything I’ve done “fine art.” I create a lot of different things, but the only one I would consider myself even halfway passable at is writing. What makes it even worse, perhaps, is that most of my work outside of writing has been the product of necessity. I don’t know, maybe that makes it more forgivable, but regardless, I’m definitely all about that guerilla DIY and duct tape.

Having said that, I do many things (even if not very many of them well.) I love creating in whatever form presents itself at the time. I’ve dabbled with art, mixed media, book design, web design, graphic design, sculpture, miniature painting, and other stuff. I sing, but I don’t have any instrument that I can say I’m particularly good at. I would love to get significantly better at many of these things I’ve mentioned. I guess time will tell if I succeed or not. Having said that, you asked, so here are a couple of sketches I made for my upcoming book The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon). Like I said, they’re pretty mediocre. But hopefully the subject matter will at least be interesting.

As far as how different mediums can influence one another, I find that I’m an awful lot like a sponge. When I’m writing, I absorb stuff from wherever I can and then squeeze it back out into the story. Sometimes it’s from a board game miniature, or an art book, or a movie, or a video game. I can’t tell you how many items I ”sponged” for Shattered Seas, but there were a ton, including the video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, a book of sketches used in Alien: Covenant, both the movie and the book Annihilation, the movies Silent Hill and Prometheus, bits and bobs from Guillermo del Toro, the news (part of it was written during the pandemic’s early days), and a bunch of miniatures (both Diemension Games stuff and others.) Furthermore, I’m constantly listening to music when I’m writing. Interestingly, when I don’t listen to music, my output is almost always significantly lower than when I am. It’s almost like I must have something going in to get something out. I know there are some writers who have to work in utter quiet. I am not one of those writers. In fact, I almost can’t do it.

(10) MOVIE INFLUENCES

SE: Reading Shattered Seas, there is a scene that evoked the 1980 Superman 2 movie with Christopher Reeve. The villains (General Zod, Ursa and Non) were banished from Krypton into a 2D plane called the Phantom Zone. Also, the exhuming of the mysterious, submerged Sphere in Deep Madness reminded me of the 1987 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s “Sphere.” How have movies affected your work?

BL: Oh, man. I almost can’t quantify to what degree movies have influenced my work. They’re huge for me – and for the rest of the Diemension Games team, too. I don’t know that anyone actually has an accurate count of the number of references and influences there are in the Deep Madness board game. I think we regretted some of them later on, specifically when we decided we wanted to go in a more serious direction and expand the game’s setting into its own universe. But it doesn’t change the fact that those influences are all over the place.

Personally, I’m influenced immensely by a variety of directors and films. My favorite director is Guillermo del Toro, not just for his films but also for his take on monsters and some of his views on life and art. I think of him as a kindred spirit in many ways. I’m also influenced by many other directors and films. I love Darren Aronofsky, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and anyone or anything that is weird and awesome. The list of movies that have inspired me is too long to write down for this interview.

As for Sphere, that reference is certainly intentional, though I’ve tried to steer us away from straight-up mimicry of it. (Whether I’ve succeeded or not is up to others to decide.) Sadly, the Superman 2 similarity is purely coincidental, as I’ve never seen it.

1980 Superman 2 Movie Snapshot

(11) Future Works

Outside of Diemension Games, your website mentions a world of Alayaka, and has a tab for Weird Church. Do tell! Or perhaps stay in the Diemension Games scope and tell us about your part in Celestial or Twisted Fables.

BL: On the personal side, Weird Church is currently a little Facebook group I’m starting for those geeks, artists, nerds, and weirdos who also want to pursue God, wonder, weirdness, and something beyond ourselves. It’s not actually a church, but it is definitely weird. Apart from that, the next novel I’m going to release will be the previously mentioned The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon), which is a very strange, quirky little book about a boy named Jonah and a talking salmon named Stuart who strike out across the dimensions to stop the demon responsible for eating Jonah’s parents. After that, I hope to release my epic novel Alayaka, which is kind of a cross between dark fantasy, steampunk, body horror, and The Chronicles of Narnia. (A lot of writers have that one book they’ve obsessed over for years, and Alayaka is that for me.) I also have a bunch of short stories I’d like to get out if I can, including one of my favorite stories called “The Dance of the Krakens.” We’ll see how all of that goes.

On the Diemension Games side, our big projects right now are Dawn of Madness and Celestial. Dawn of Madness is a story-driven horror game that we hope will actually scare people (which I’m writing a bunch of books for), and Celestial is an epic game for 1-2 players that I like to describe as a cross between Chinese mythology, cyberpunk, steampunk, Lovecraftian horror, and Game of Thrones. Twisted Fables is a smaller 2 or 4-player fighting game that features reimagined fairytale heroines such as Red Riding Hood the cybernetic assassin and Little Mermaid the harbinger of the Kraken. It’s currently being manufactured. We’re also hoping to expand on our first game, Deep Madness, in the near future.

If you’d like to learn more about Diemension Games’ projects, you can find us on our website at https://diemensiongames.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/diemensiongames. If you’d like to follow me specifically, then you can find me on my website at https://byronleavitt.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ByronCLeavitt. You can also email me at byron@diemensiongames.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Last of all, I just wanted to say thanks, Seth, for the chance to do this interview. It’s been a blast!

Thank go to you, Byron, for sharing!


Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Interview: Making Dark Fantasy Accessible - Carol Berg

This article is simulcast on Black Gate.com
BergCate_IllusionOfThieves BergCate_2

Let us welcome Carol Berg (and Cate Glass)

Carol Berg majored in mathematics at Rice University, in part so she wouldn't have to write papers. But while earning her mathematics degree, she took every English course that listed novels on the syllabus, just so she would have time to keep reading. Somewhere in the midst of teaching math for a couple of years, raising three sons, earning a second degree in computer science at the University of Colorado, and a software engineering career, a friend teased her into exchanging letters written "in character." Once Carol started writing fiction, she couldn't stop. Carol's fifteen epic fantasy novels have earned national and international acclaim, including the Geffen Award, the Prism Award, multiple Colorado Book Awards, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. She has been twice voted the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Writer of the Year. Carol's newest work, written as her alter ego Cate Glass, is a fantasy adventure series called Chimera about a rag-tag quartet of sorcerers who take on missions of deception and intrigue in a world where magic earns the death penalty. The first book, An Illusion of Thieves, was released in May 2019 by Tor Books (A Conjuring of Assassins is due out Feb 2020). Carol lives in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains with her Exceptional Spouse. She routinely attends conventions and was recently a special guest at the 2019 GenCon Writer’s Symposium. Carol Berg makes dark fantasy fun and accessible, a perfect candidate for our interviews on “Art & Beauty in Weird Fantasy” (see previous interviews listed below). Most authors who produce horror/fantasy are (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven by strange muses. Let’s tap the mind(s) of Carol Berg and Cate Glass.

Your epic fantasy is infused with grim reality — it is not simple good-vs-evil fantasy, nor is it over-the-top grimdark. How would you describe your style?

Yes, I would call most of my work dark fantasy — reflecting that grim and gritty reality you mentioned — and epic, because the stories deal with world shaking events. But my stories are told through a very personal lens. To me, when I am looking at these great events through the eyes and mind of a real, complex human (or almost human) being – someone I want to spend several years with -- I can always find threads of hope and light through the story and especially at the end of it all. I begin with heroes or heroines who have plenty of reason for angst—enslaved, exiled, a failure, entire extended family massacred, father a convicted murderer, or just released from a horrific, seventeen-year imprisonment. But for this individual to feel real to me, there has to be more than angst. Dark secrets, a dark side, or grudges are fine, but I want to interweave that with lots of other human characteristics: wit or humor, a soaring intellect or an inability to read, curiosity or superstitions, maybe phobias or maybe a truly romantic view of the world. Weird family histories are fun to incorporate. I enjoy protagonists who have interior conflicts: oath-sworn warriors driven by compassion, intellectuals with a penchant for violence, necromancers whose magic is based on an understanding of the natural world. A sorcerer might embrace magic with all its possibilities and find that the restrictions on his life are worth the wonders he can work. But other sorcerers might despise and detest the power that lives in them, and feel that those restrictions are “slavery with golden chains.” Some would-be sorcerers just can’t find their way to the magic they just know lives inside them. Sometimes the most “magical” character who fires a plot is the one who has no extraordinary power at all, but rather the personal characteristics to marshal the talents of those around them who do. I like to confront interesting, creative people like artists, singers, or librarians with events that stretch their abilities as well as push them into a life outside of their imagining. And every character must have the capacity to change. It’s up to me to figure out how to make them do that. Through events, through difficulties, through other real people who show up in the story. Around these complex characters, I aim for complexity in the world — many intersecting threads that have created the status quo — often with conflicting stakes that are not necessarily apparent to begin with, but ratchet with the action. Those ratcheting stakes need to be significant, not just for the world, but to the characters themselves. And in answer to the common queries: neither characters nor world are fully defined before I start writing, though the characters always are the seed of the story. Oftentimes I know just enough of the world to start writing. Both characters and story evolve as I go.
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Any professional tips for maintaining a good balance of tension? How can you brutalize protagonists while keeping appeal to wide audiences?

I can definitely be tough on my characters — mostly my protagonists. I put strong people in impossible situations, which means they have to go through some very dark times in order to see and understand and accept what has to be done to fix the problems I’ve set them. Sometimes that means changing themselves in ways they detest. I like to think that through these very gritty events, they are able to find a path of grace that leads to a hopeful — if not perfect — resolution. Writing those difficult situations is a perpetual teeter-totter. Some people think I chicken out. Some readers think I go too far. Some tell me that they had to take a break when Lucian went through his prison ordeal in Dust and Light or when Seyonne got trapped in the daemon dungeons of Kir’Vagonoth in Revelation. But I believe that epic events must impact people in lasting ways, and that it takes a great deal to make strong and stubborn people change. These are the fires that temper the blade… or ruin it. A few personal rules of thumb in what I put on the page:
  • I try not to minimize terrible truths of human history like slavery, war, or fanaticism. That being said, there are certain lines I will not cross and places I will not go in the events of my stories, especially with regard to children and to sexual violence.
  • When violence or brutality is necessary to the story, I try to show results — both physical and emotional — more than graphic details. I also try to portray the cost of violence, both to the subject and the perpetrator (if this perpetrator is a significant actor in the story).
Sociopaths or psychopaths or people driven solely by revenge don’t interest me all that much. Over the years I’ve found that villainous people are much more interesting if they have complex motives (sorry Sauron), some of which I – or my protagonist – might actually support. With some I like to imagine that with some small difference in experience or human intervention, that person might have turned out to be a good person. One of the best villains I have ever read comes from a story called The Heaven Tree by Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters of the Brother Cadfael Chronicles). The Heaven Tree is a trilogy of historical novels set in twelfth-century Wales. The noble named Isambard is one of the most black-hearted villains you will ever find — a very cruel and personal villain — and yet, by the end of those books you might find yourself weeping for him. How did the writer DO that? I am still striving to be that kind of writer!

As an engineer by training, you must be concerned about mass, heat, or energy balances. Is magic a conserved quantity for you (or is it a boundless source)?

First off, just to be clear, I was a software engineer, much more concerned with logic, languages, and software processes than with thermodynamics or mechanical processes! But my engineering background did indeed make me want to deal with technical issues correctly. You will never see any of my characters hauling about bags of gold as if they are bags of wheat a la Treasure of the Sierra Madre (that much gold would have collapsed the horses!) In the same way, in the Books of the Rai-kirah, when I was dealing with shapeshifting, I wanted to get the mass/energy balance right. Thus when a certain cursed person changes from a man to a lion, all the heat is sucked out of the vicinity. When he changes back, he is the one left shivering while the room warms up. As for magic, each of my worlds (the Rai-kirah books, the Navronne books, the D’Arnath books, the Collegia Magica books, Song of the Beast, and the Cate Glass Chimera books) has a different magic system. Sometimes magic derives from the individual’s blood, sometimes from genetic heritage, sometimes from magic infused into the land by actions of semi-divine beings. Sometimes from a combination of those things. In one series, the actual magic resides in objects in the natural world, while the power to use it and shape it comes from the individual sorcerer’s strength of will and clarity of insight. In all cases, however, I do impose limits on a sorcerer’s ability to make use of magic. That might correspond to physical or mental exhaustion that can be restored by eating, drinking, rest, or an infusion of hope or faith. Sometimes a sorcerer’s expenditure of power has to be renewed by particular actions that this person has learned to replenish the gift. So, in essence, yes. And no.
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Protagonists empowered with taboo-sorcery seem central across your varied worlds: i.e., Romy (Illusion of Thieves in Chimera); Seyonne (Transformation in Books of the Rai-kirah); Karon (Son of Avonar in The Bridge of D'Arnath); Lucian (Dust and Light in Sanctuary Duet). Can you shed light on forbidden magic and your sympathetic muse toward sorcery?

I must preface this answer with one of my mantras: Trope is not a dirty word. Literary tropes are stories, themes, or plot devices that have become embedded in our human DNA throughout millennia of storytelling. The Romeo and Juliet story, for example, or “the common man drawn into great events” story. Among plot elements you would find the unknown twin or the evil step-sibling or the alcoholic ex-cop private eye. Certain stories or plot elements become tropes because they engage and satisfy us on an emotional level. What differentiates a trope from a cliché is the treatment — the originality that comes from unique characters, settings, motivations, and plot twists. West Side Story is a retelling of the R&J tragic love story — one of thousands — but its reimagining is wonderful on its own. There are hundreds of fantasy tropes, whole websites devoted to listing them. Taboo sorcery is definitely one, and it’s one that speaks to me, I think because of the challenge of possessing a skill so awesome and marvelous, in a world that forces you to cripple yourself or die. It builds in major conflict and tension that I can use as a superstructure for all sorts of other conflicts. And the circumstances and origins of the prohibition are fodder for many interesting plot twists. In each of the cases you mention above, the prohibition arises from entirely different circumstances and plays an entirely different role in the overall plot.

Isolation is another theme, with your protagonists being torn from their communities either enslaved, outcast, or exiled. Does this reflect your own fears?

Thank goodness I’ve never had to face these challenges in my own life as so many have throughout history and still do in present day. But isolation can be a very powerful torment, especially when one’s heart is entirely rooted in strong, positive bonds to that community, as with Lucian de Remini and his family in the Sanctuary books or when one’s whole identity is rooted in a cultural mandate that protects an unknowing world, as happens with one of my protagonists. Even when that isolation is voluntary, as with the runaway rogue, Valen de Cartamandua-Celestine, an extrovert party guy who comes to the realization that he has never truly had a friend. But as I said earlier, I look for circumstances that force my characters to see the world in an entirely different way. Often we can’t do that unless the comfortable buffers of family, culture, or belief are ripped away. It is my task as a fiction writer to learn how this (or any other challenge) might affect the human person I am trying to create, and to share those effects on the page. Another subject I find myself returning to is the nature of memory. Does it live in our physical body or is it something that can be removed or shared or replaced? One reason I love writing fantasy is the opportunity to explore that kind of what ifs. The answers one finds in Ash and Silver (in the Sanctuary Duet) are something very different from those one finds in Guardians of the Keep (in The Bridge of D'Arnath).

Do you practice other arts (drawing, music, etc.)? What other types of art inspire you?

Alas, my nattering on the piano fell victim to the writing passion along with gardening, needlepoint, furniture refinishing, and a handful of other sidelines to day job and family. Eventually the day job went away, too. But I’ve always drawn inspiration from music of many kinds. I grew up with classical music, especially wonderfully emotional varieties like Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Tschaikovsky and Dvorak. And though my “regular life” has been filled with everything from the Doors to Dylan to Alison Krauss to Miles Davis, those are not writing related. I can’t listen to symphonic music, jazz, rock, or much of anything with English words, because those demand attention. But sometimes I find a particular set of tracks that puts me right in the imagination groove for a particular series. With the Navronne books, it was medieval chant that put me right into Gillarine Abbey, as well as secular court music from the courts of Malta, the Seattle Medieval Women’s choir, and Project Ars Nova. For the Collegia Magica books it was 17th-century music from France and Loreena McKennitt. Somehow with the Chimera books, it is the soundtrack from Blood Diamond and the evocative moody background music to the video game Braid that I pull up when I need to go deep.
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You’ve had several well-known cover artists (Luis Royo, Matt Stawicki, and most recently Google Doodler Alyssa Winans) depict your characters & worlds employing very different styles. Did you get a chance to guide cover art?

Sadly (in some cases) and fortunately (in other cases) I have had very little say in my cover art. Publishers are notoriously reluctant to leave marketing considerations in the hands of authors – and covers are totally marketing. Some of my covers have been gorgeous. Even the ones I most regret were well executed. I totally admire anyone who has visual art skills and can come up with an excellent cover design, and the marketing aspect often escapes me entirely. I live in horror of having to tell an artist what I want. I just know what I like when I see it.

After establishing fifteen books over two decades, your alter ego emerged: Cate Glass. Why the pseudonym now?

In short: new publisher, new type of story. The Books of the Chimera are episodic adventures with continuing threads, rather than a single epic story told in multi-volume set. After we signed the contract for the Chimera books, the publisher asked if I would consider a pseudonym. It gave them the opportunity to promote the Chimera as a debut for industry purposes such as expanding my audience, while leaving the identity open (not a secret), so my current readers could find me. Their proposal made sense and I agreed. Hopefully, Carol Berg will be bringing more stories to life along the way as well.
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Let’s discuss a character who is an artist too: Lucian de Remeni-Masson (Dust and Light and Ash and Silver). Can you describe how he sketches souls?

Lucian is specifically a portrait artist. At a sitting, Lucian observes his subject—not only physiognomy, but movements, attitudes, speech, posture, and emotions. He begins sketching on paper — line, light, and shadow — while simultaneously building the person’s image in his mind. As he works, he uses these sensory connections with the subject to ignite his magic, which shifts that image in his head into what he calls a true image that will linger in his mind for a very long time. In turn, this true image guides his fingers to refine the sketch into a full portrait. By the time he is finished with the portrait, his magic has imbued that portrait with truth, so that it can be used to identify that person inerrantly. Of course, sometimes people don’t want to see the truth of themselves. Uh oh. When Lucian is contracted to draw portraits of the dead so that they can be identified, the only sensory connections he can make with his subject are those of his eyes and his hand. He has to dig deeper into himself and the magic to create that internal image that enables him to draw truth. And the results are very interesting.

Do you find any fiction beautiful? If so, what made it so?

Absolutely. In fact, I would call most of my all-time favorite books beautiful. Example? Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer. The vivid, believable characters. The language that creates perfectly individual voices for the protagonists, as well as creating the real world version of a fairy tale. The books draws you into the emotional nuances of a man cursed to answer any question with the truth — not a simple prospect at all, because sometimes we tell lies in order to give comfort, or we avoid or obfuscate to protect the questioner. True Thomas doesn’t have that luxury. For something completely different… I thought Christina Henry’s Alice was beautiful fiction. A fractured world from the viewpoint of a woman who wakes up in a mental hospital, and a fantastic, sometimes grotesque city can be beautiful in the way a painting by Mondrian or Hieronymous Bosch can be as beautiful as a Renoir. Again it was the way the author used language and nuance to create the vivid characters of Alice and her Hatter, and an adventure you were never quite certain was real. But a book doesn’t have to be a fairytale retelling in order to be beautiful. Dick Francis’s mysteries are beautiful in the way he could take three sentences to evoke the feeling of Cheltenham Racetrack on the damp, cool afternoon of the biggest horse race of the year. Three more will tell you everything you need to know about his latest detective. And then you are off on a non-stop adventure. It’s all magic.
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You’ve obviously mastered first-person perspective. Is that your natural voice or a strategic choice?

I wrote for a number of years for my own enjoyment before imagining anyone would ever be interested in reading any of it. My first few attempts were in first -person because they grew from a series of letters a friend and I were writing to each other in character. That was fun (and some very awful writing no one will ever see). Once that was finished, I started something new, this time in third-person. It took me a while trying to figure out why the new story just wasn’t working in the way the admittedly awkward first books did. One problem was that I felt like the story was taking place at arm’s length. So I tried switching to first-person – essentially went through and replaced “she” with “I” and so forth. What resulted was ridiculous. The narrative was stiff as a board. It was at that point that I realized that almost every one of my favorite books—whether fantasy, mystery, historical, or spy thriller — was written in the first-person. First-person just came more naturally, especially as my writing matured and I figured out how to go deeper into my characters. Turned out that the kind of stories I wanted to write were all told through this personal lens, and first-person just fits.

You describe your writing process as being “organic” (not a pantser per se). What does that mean?

To me, the word “pantser” implies that you sit down with a blank page with no end in mind except the end of the book. Instead of that, I start with a seed: a character, a setting, and a destination in mind. I need to get the slave back to the prince’s house. I need to get Portier into the king’s service to investigate a murder. I need Anne to see where her sister was found dead. Whatever. Then I start writing. As I write I set the event in motion and think – at that moment – how does this character react to this event? What does that reaction tell me about that character? Who else is there and why? As I write the scene, I decide what else I need to include in this setting to make the scene more sensory. More vivid. And then, how do those details inform the world that includes the setting? Etc. Etc. That isn’t flying by the seat of your pants. That is growing new things from known things.

The sequel to An Illusion of Thieves, A Conjuring of Assassins, is due out Feb 2020. What illusions can we expect?

Each of my little cadre of sorcerer/spies has a unique talent. Because sorcery has been mostly exterminated in the Costa Drago, they’ve no idea of the possibilities or varieties of magic in the world. It’s also very dangerous to experiment. But in the short timespan since the events of Illusion, they’ve tried a few things. Rather than channeling their power through the particular shape of their talents, they’ve had some success drawing on the raw power itself to do a few things. Sort of like using white gas to start your campfire or to clean the sap off your boots, rather than simply pumping it through the campstove for a single purpose. This enables the possibility of everyone pouring their “white gas” into the single purpose…. hmmm, does that work? The biggest revelation comes though when they encounter someone who is talented in entirely different ways. Any more would be telling!

Previous Black Gate interviews on “Art & Beauty in Weird Fantasy”:


S.E. Lindberg resides near Cincinnati, Ohio working as a microscopist by day. Two decades of practicing chemistry, combined with a passion for the Sword & Sorcery genre, spurs him to write adventure fictionalizing the alchemical humors (under the banner “Dyscrasia Fiction”). With Perseid Press, he writes weird tales in the same vein (Heroika and Heroes in Hell series). He co-moderates the Sword & Sorcery group on Goodreads, and invites all to participate. He enjoys studying Aikido and creates all sorts of fine art in the family workshop. Touch base via Face