Praise for Twisted Tales Events

'In the past few years Twisted Tales has become a major force in the promotion and appreciation of horror fiction. As well as putting on author readings and signings at bookshops it has expanded into organising larger events, bringing authors and critics together for discussions of the field. I've been involved in quite a few of both and have found them hugely enjoyable and stimulating - I believe the audiences did as well. May Twisted Tales continue to grow and prosper! If you love the field, support them! I do.' - Ramsey Campbell

‘Twisted Tales consistently produce well-organised events for writers and readers of horror. What really distinguishes Twisted Tales for me is the intelligent themes and investigations they pursue, and the high quality of the discussions they always stimulate. As an author I've been invited to three of their events and have been pleasantly startled, to near shocked, by the attendance levels - two out of three were even sold out. I salute anyone who contributes so much to the literary and cultural life of horror fiction.’- Adam Nevill

'Twisted Tales events are wonderful... a great way of promoting 21st century horror fiction. Supported by Waterstone's Liverpool One and really well organised, Twisted Tales brings together established names in the genre as well as new voices and of course readers. Looking forward to much more to come...' - Alison J. Littlewood

Monday 26 August 2013

Xavier Aldana Reyes interviewed by David McWilliam

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Research Fellow in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he has been helping to build the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and where he teaches on the MA programme ‘English Studies: The Gothic’. He is working on the monograph Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, to be published in 2014, and, with Dr Linnie Blake, he is editing a collection on digital horror entitled Digital Nightmares: Wired Ghosts, CCTV Horror and the Found Footage Phenomenon. Xavier has published widely on the Gothic, horror film, corporeality, contemporary literature, and affect theory.




DM: What initially attracted you to body horror as a reader?
XAR: As a teenager, I was very interested in Stephen King. In fact, it is probably fair to say that I went through a phase where I read his work and not much else. My favourite novels and stories tended to be the ones that involved extreme corporeal experiences (‘Survivor Type’, 1982) or living body parts (‘The Moving Finger’, 1990). These felt ‘real’ to me in ways that his more overly fantastic did not – they were raw, intense, and visceral. At the time, I thought this corporeal material was a departure from the more classical horror writing (Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft) that otherwise fascinated me. It was explicit. It was trying to do something to my body.

Strangely enough for someone who researches the gothic, I have always found it difficult to engage with supernatural fiction that is not nihilistic or macabre in essence. My attention would inevitably revolve around the gory bits. This was, as I remember it, not a fascination with the infliction of pain upon others. Often, as in The Green Mile (1999), I did not want the characters to be harmed at all. Rather, I would say I always felt drawn to descriptions of open bodies – a species of anatomical curiosity, if you like – and the transformations that human flesh is capable of undergoing. Naturally, a fascination with Clive Barker, particularly his Books of Blood (1984-1985) and The Hellbound Heart (1986), followed shortly after. As a literature student, I encountered the works of Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z. Brite, Dennis Cooper, and, above all others, Chuck Palahniuk. Their fiction cemented my interests in corporeal fictions in ways that I never expected and helped me develop them beyond the horror genre.


DM: How did this then become the focus of your doctoral research?
XAR: I am still fascinated by visceral works, whether filmic or literary, and the power of what is deemed too graphic and therefore offensive. Looking at this type of material reveals, for me, the taboos that still surround our bodies and the social practices that govern and construct them: what can or cannot be shown, what is deemed ‘gratuitous’, what causes strong physical reactions, and so on and so forth. But, most importantly, I feel drawn to the fact that certain material can have the ability to affect us strongly despite the fact that we know it is fictional. People like to criticise shock because they see it as something cheap, easy, or purely sensationalistic. For me, studying transgression helps us understand its historical specificities. It is actually very difficult for artists to paint truly disturbing mosaics of imagination, particularly now that we appear to have seen it all already.

What kick-started my doctoral thesis was an encounter with two different texts that affected me deeply. One of them was Palahniuk’s ‘Guts’ (2005), which I still think is one of his most powerful works. I was already familiar with his novels up to this point, but the controversy surrounding the spate of faintings – allegedly over sixty – during public readings of  ‘Guts’ caught my attention. Around the same time, I had also gone to see Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). The film was so overwhelming, both visually and in terms of its message, that I had nightmares for days – and I am not easily disturbed! Like the grand guignol, a theatrical subgenre that I went on to study in depth, these texts seemed to have the capacity to work on the bodies of viewers through the affective and realistic destruction of others. Having taken Adriana Craciun’s fantastic ‘Gothic Bodies, Foreign Bodies’ MA course at Birkbeck College, I had wanted to explore notions of corporeality in contemporary gothic texts in relation to my early interest in visceral literature. I was instantly taken with the prospect of trying to ascertain the workings of texts such as Hostel or ‘Guts’. I wanted to see whether they could be seen to belong to what I still consider an artistic continuum predicated on shock, taboo, darkness and excess.


DM: What are the key differences between the body horror of the 1980s associated with the splatterpunk movement (most notably in the work of Clive Barker) and what you have termed 'post-millennial torture-horror'?XAR: I will try to reply succinctly here, but I dedicate some space to the distinctions between these subgenres in my forthcoming Body Gothic (University of Wales Press) and interested readers are advised to check this out for a more thorough and informed answer.

My concern with exploring the differences and similarities between several visceral subgenres came from a general dissatisfaction with the appellatives that torture porn was receiving. To call Saw and Hostel ‘body horror’, as some critics and journalists have done, is problematic. There is very little in common between David Cronenberg’s work (say Videodrome [1983], perhaps the closest thematically) and the films I have mentioned, beyond a fascination with evisceration or destruction of the body as we know it. In body horror (The Evil Dead [1981], The Thing [1982], The Fly [1986]), the focus is contagion, mutation and helpless transformation, as Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan’s recent anthology has pointed out. Torture-horror (and I should clarify the term is actually Jeremy Morris’s) is more interested in the cloying horror of being reduced to a body, of being meat, of being carnally punished.

The differences are also related to context, nomenclature, marketing and artistic purpose. 1980s body horror and torture porn, as well as the new avant-pulp or splatterpunk, all show specific concerns with the body that I think are distinctive and speak to modern and contemporary notions of corporeality in the West. They resonate with a number of general cultural and social shifts pertaining to the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century: a gradual process of secularisation is perhaps the most obvious of them, but there is also the turn to biopolitics, or a pronounced interest in anatomy and, perhaps as a result of all of these, the desacralisation of death. One of the main differences between the various visceral subgenres I name is their approach: body horror, despite its dependence on solipsism and disease, often paints transgression in liberating or positive terms. The body is supernaturally transformed beyond its usual dimensions in order to explore its limits, possibilities and even life after death (as in Re-Animator [1985] or Hellraiser [1987]). In post-millennial torture-horror, the body becomes a prison, and the violence visited upon it has a clearly nihilistic (read also bleak or pessimistic) end. In Body Gothic, I read this new focus as one tell-tale sign, among others, that our engagement with the material reality of corporeality has become even more pronounced than it was before. Put simply, we have always been fascinated with our bodies; the focus in genre film seems to have turned to the horrors of embodiment. Of course, all of this may need redefining in view of the even more recent interest in paranormal nightmares, although I should say I still find these new ghosts troublingly physical.


DM: How does your theory of the affective power of torture-horror depart from more traditional psychoanalytic models of Gothic criticism?
XAR: Again, there is no short, simple or easy answer to this question. I have tried to address this in ‘Beyond Psychoanalysis: Post-millennial Horror Film and AffectTheory’ (Horror Studies 3.2, 2012) and am developing my ideas through a reworked version of my doctoral thesis, Horror and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (Routledge). Although I should clarify that my ideas are thoroughly theoretical in nature, I have been arguing for a parallactic approach to Horror Studies that has been influenced by the work of Julian Hanich, Steven Shaviro, Vivian Sobchack, Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari, Laura Marks, Jennifer M. Barker, and a host of affect theorists that include the fascinating work of Marco Abel. The core of this approach does not attempt to negate representation, but to sidestep it with an eye to understanding what is left out through judgemental viewing or reading practices.

Phenomenology has been trying to do this by drawing attention to the ‘I’ that sees, reads and, in the case of the academic, critiques, contends or challenges. I have been preoccupied by torture-horror (or torture porn), but only to the extent that it makes explicit the affective dimensions of horror. In a sense, I find it useful to explore the side of horror that affects viewers directly, bypassing cognition and reflection. The shift is towards a theory or mode that privileges somatic response (via corporeal identification, for example) in order to gain an insight into what it means to feel that type of shiver that gory horror produces. This is an area that also interests me because, as I have pointed out, it is generally deemed to be of little interest due to its connections with low orders of the body. I do not mean to suggest that symbolism is not useful, but torture-horror does indicate that there are other affective means by which horror works on viewers.


DM: Do you think that the preoccupation with torture in recent horror films is in some sense a response to the debates surrounding its efficacy and ethics in relation to the post-9/11 War on Terror?
XAR: I have found recent work on this area, namely Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller’s Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (2012) – and within it, Matt Hills and Catherine Zimmer’s chapters – or Adam Lowenstein’s article on the topic, all very useful. Since my work is very theoretical in nature, I welcome approaches that prioritise the socio-historical or industrial contexts of filmic or literary productions. However, and as persuaded as I often am by new historicism, I do think it has its potential downfalls. Kevin J. Wetmore’s book Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (2013), lucid in places, runs the risk of seeing terrorist metaphors everywhere. It is undeniable that 9/11 has had an obvious effect on contemporary horror. For instance, I think the continued success of found footage has been influenced by the all-too-recognisable aesthetic of the disaster in real time of the fall of the Twin Towers. Some films, such as Cloverfield (2008), have gone as far as to negotiate 9/11 more or less directly. I would hesitate to argue, however, that this means contemporary horror needs to be understood as part and parcel of these debates. There is an affective side to horror that is independent of content, even if necessarily context-specific (i.e. bound by the historical specificities of viewers, what is considered taboo, and so on and so forth). So, whilst we can read Abu-Ghraib into Hostel and even trace aesthetic influences, it is not essential that we do this in order to understand or feel the horror intrinsic to that film.


DM: What research projects are you currently working on?
XAR: I have mentioned the monographs Body Gothic and Horror and Affect, which will keep me busy for some time. They are both helping me round up my investment in corporeality, visceral subgenres and contemporary popular culture. I am also editing a collection with Linnie Blake, Digital Nightmares: Wired Ghosts, CCTV Horror and the Found Footage Phenomenon, that includes papers by renowned scholars in the field and which will examine new directions and developments in contemporary horror film. I am developing some chapters for edited collections that have grown from my previous work (on affect and the Gothic, the Saw series, snuff mockumentaries) and working on a talk on surgical horror for this year’s BFI’s Gothic season.

From an organisational point of view, I am heavily involved in a city-wide festival called Gothic Manchester, supported by the 2013-2014 Humanities in Public programme and the Institute of Humanities and Social Science Research at MMU, and am organising a series of public lectures on Contemporary Gothic that include papers from leading academics in Gothic Studies such as Fred Botting, Catherine Spooner, Isabella Van Elferen, Stacey Abbott and Linnie Blake. These are both initiatives that are growing out of the new Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, which, all things being well, should be very active over its first year of existence.

Beyond the gothic, I would be very interested in pursuing my interest in transgression in literary fiction, perhaps through a return to Chuck Palahniuk. Whatever specific shape this project ends up taking, it will definitely involve the disturbing and the dark.

Links

Academia.edu Profile: http://mmu.academia.edu/XavierAldanaReyes

Departmental Website: http://www2.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/english/academic-staff/?profileID=467

Guest blogs and reviews at The Gothic Imagination: http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/author/x-aldanalancaster-ac-uk/

Twitter: @XAldanaReyes

Monday 19 August 2013

Laird Barron interviewed by David McWilliam



Laird Barron is the author of several books, including the short story collections The Imago Sequence, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and the novels The Light Is the Darkness and The Croning. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. He is a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and has also been nominated for the Crawford, World Fantasy, International Horror Guild, and Locus awards. He resides in upstate New York.

We discussed his latest venture as the first editor of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, a series currently seeking crowdfunding through Indiegogo:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/year-s-best-weird-fiction

DM: What attracted you to the weird as a reader?

LB: Thank you for the interview, David.

In my youth I read a lot of Poe, Dunsany, Burroughs, and Howard—the usual suspects. Later, that circle expanded to Smith, Lovecraft, and Jackson. I can’t discount the morbid old volumes of world fairytales with the sinister illustrations illuminating such odd, bizarre stories. In those days, my family lived in a remote area of Alaska. We were surrounded by forests and rivers. Geography defined our existence. The wilderness is a component of a certain strain of weird tale: Blackwood’s 'The Wendigo' and 'The Willows', and Lovecraft’s 'The Whisperer in Darkness' being exemplars. I identified with that as a child. It served as a gateway. Now, I’m as likely to become lost in the urban phantasms of Joel Lane or Robert Aickman as I am anything else.

DM: What opportunities does it offer to you as a writer?
LB: Any sort of writing represents the opportunity of expression. Weird fiction, as with all fiction, is a lens to view reality. It’s a filter.


DM: Do you think that, in the wake of the New Weird and with the rise of H.P. Lovecraft's status in popular culture, we live in a new golden age of weird fiction?
LB: To me, the weird is simply the weird. I am skeptical of the term New Weird as anything other than a convenient literary classification for booksellers and certain individuals within the cultural mainstream. We’ll see what the consensus is in another twenty years. If there is a legitimate movement, we’d do well to credit the actual innovators—Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, Michael Shea, Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman, Jack Vance… That crowd was redefining weird fiction long before the genre was stamped with a big NW marketing label.


DM: What do you hope to achieve with the Year's Best Weird Fiction series?

LB: Ultimately, I hope it means a broader audience for this classical genre and a sharpening of focus on those who often toil in obscurity. Michael Kelly, the publisher of this new series, perceived a gap in the year’s best anthologies between fantasy and horror. There’s always cross-pollination, but the weird is in dire need of a showcase that explicitly represents what it can do. A certain amount of vital work in this region of genre gets marginalized every year precisely because it’s too strange or too subtle. This is an opportunity to plant a standard and hold a line. If the series flourishes, as I suspect it will, a number of previously unknown or overlooked authors will gain recognition. 

DM: How did you become involved as its first editor?
LB: Michael Kelly of Undertow press contacted me. He laid out his plans and I seized the opportunity to helm the inaugural book. It’s an honor.

DM: What are you looking for in submissions?

LB: My taste is diverse—it encompasses a spectrum from Livia Llewellyn and Stephen Graham Jones to Gemma Files and Michael Cisco; from violence and psychosexual madness, to the glacially calm and austere. I’m looking for material that fits in the cusp between pure horror and pure fantasy. I’m looking for stories that skew my perception of reality, that leave me with a sense of unease or dislocation. I’m not interested in work that mimics Aickman, Ligotti or any other masters of the genre, but rather work that rivals what has gone before. I want writing that contributes to the canon.

DM: What new weird fiction are you working on and have planned for the near future?

LB: Night Shade Books recently brought out my new collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. I’m working on several projects, but Ardor, the Alaska-themed collection, is definitely in the wheelhouse of weird fiction. I hope to hand it in to my agent next spring.

Thursday 15 August 2013

COMPETITION: Win Beyond Rue Morgue Poe Anthology

To enter our competition to win one of four copies of Beyond Rue Morgue (2013), edited by Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec, simply send your name and postal address to twistedtalesevents@gmail.com by Friday 13th September 2013. Winners will be selected at random and announced on the blog. Their details will be forwarded to the publishers, Titan, who will send out prizes directly.

To give you some insight into the anthology, we interviewed one of the editors, Paul Kane, to ask why they have returned to Poe's detective in 2013.



DM: What was the inspiration behind this anthology?
PK: I’ve been a big fan of Poe’s work since I was in my teens, and in particular the Dupin stories because I love both horror and crime. Appropriately enough – as we included this in the anthology – Clive Barker’s ‘New Murders in the Rue Morgue’ led me to Dupin, as I wanted to read the original before diving into that one. It always amazed me that Dupin hadn’t reached the kind of superstar detective heights of Holmes or Poirot, in spite of the fact that he came first – and actually set the template for the detective story. I did a bit of research and tracked down the Dupin stories Michael Harrison wrote for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine back in the 1960s, but was surprised there hadn’t been any more tales since then. So, as with Hellbound Hearts, it was just a matter of creating something because it didn’t exist and we wanted to see it. I’d been trying to get it off the ground for a little while when my co-editor Charles Prepolec, came on board – I’d got to know him when I wrote ‘The Greatest Mystery’ for his Holmes anthology Gaslight Arcanum, then met him at WFC 2009 and we got on like a house on fire; to my mind he was the perfect partner to have for this one. Thankfully, we managed to gather together some of the best contemporary writing talents who luckily happened to be fans of Dupin, plus Titan saw the potential in the project and backed us all the way. Hopefully we’ve fulfilled a need that was clearly there, judging from the response from readers and reviewers anyway. And that’s a really nice feeling for any editors.   

DM: What do the contemporary horror authors in Beyond Rue Morgue bring to Poe's iconic detective from 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin?
PK: Each brought something different to the table, and they had pretty much free rein to run with their ideas – as long as they weren’t too similar to each other - which gave the whole book a great energy. As I say, they’re all fans of the original stories, so were able to remain true to the spirit of those while putting their own individual stamp on things. What we ended up with was a great variety and richness of tales, which explored everything from the criminal underworld to supernatural occurrences. Some are set in Dupin’s time and used the original characters, while others explored what might have happened to his descendents. This was something that originally drew me to Clive’s story, so it was kind of like we were coming full circle.

DM: In light of James McTeigue's film The Raven (2012) and Kevin Williamson's television show The Following (2013-), why do you think there has been a recent surge of interest in the intersection of crime and Gothic horror in Poe's work?
PK: I think the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birthday in 2009 had a lot to do with it – which was a big thing at the aforementioned WFC in San José, that Charles and I attended. There were a whole bunch of anthologies and novels released around that time which sparked things off, including Ellen Datlow’s POE from Solaris and Horror Bound’s Return of the Raven – which included my sequel to ‘The Masque of the Red Death’: ‘Masques’ (recently included as an extra with the e-version of my short novel Sleeper(s)). But I don’t really think he’s ever gone away – the stories have always been popular, and films based on them crop up in every generation. I remember seeing the Roger Corman adaptations when I was very young, then later watched and loved the Stuart Gordon ones – including ‘The Black Cat’ episode of Masters of Horror in 2007 – and now we’re getting more Corman-produced Poe movies, including remakes of House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death… Good stories and good writers will always come back and always inspire again and again. Personally, I was delighted to see the Poe influence in The Following, and to see filmmakers do something different with the man himself in The Raven – which I thoroughly enjoyed. Long may it continue, and it’s great that we’re helping to contribute to that with Beyond Rue Morgue.  



Paul Kane is an award-winning writer and editor based in Derbyshire, UK. His short story collections include Shadow Writer, The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, The Spaces Between and Ghosts. His novellas include Signs of Life, The Lazarus Condition, RED and Pain Cages. He is the author of such novels as Of Darkness and Light, The Gemini Factor, Sleeper(s) and the bestselling Arrowhead trilogy (collected recently as the sell-out Hooded Man omnibus). His latest novels are Lunar (which is set to be turned into a feature film) and the short Y.A. novel The Rainbow Man (as P.B. Kane). Paul is co-editor of the anthology Hellbound Hearts, The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, A Carnivàle of Horror, and Beyond Rue Morgue. His non-fiction books are The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy and Voices in the Dark. His work has been optioned for film and television, and his zombie story ‘Dead Time’ was turned into an episode of the Lionsgate/NBC TV series Fear Itself, adapted by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II-IV). He also scripted The Opportunity, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Wind Chimes (directed by Brad ‘7th Dimension’ Watson and sold to TV) and The Weeping Woman – filmed by award-winning director Mark Steensland and starring Tony-nominated actor Stephen Geoffreys (Fright Night). You can find out more at his website www.shadow-writer.co.uk.

twistedtalesevents@gmail.com

Wednesday 14 August 2013

NEW EVENT: An Evening with Christopher Ransom [Cancelled]

Note that due to circumstances beyond our control this event has had to be cancelled. 
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.




Join us as we welcome internationally best-selling horror writer Christopher Ransom (The Birthing House, The People Next Door, The Fading) on a rare trip to the UK. Chris will be reading from and discussing his latest novel The Orphan.
7pm Tuesday 29th October 2013
Waterstones Liverpool One
12 College Lane
Liverpool
L1 3DL

Tickets are £4 (£3 for Loyalty Card holders) and are available in-store.

To book please visit the shop or call on 0151 709 9820




7pm Tuesday 29th October 2013
Waterstones Liverpool One
12 College Lane
Liverpool
L1 3DL

Tickets are £4 (£3 for Loyalty Card holders) and are available in-store.

To book please visit the shop or call on 0151 709 9820


Facebook Event Page - See more at: http://twistedtalesevents.blogspot.co.uk/#sthash.iYFAElVq.dpuf

Friday 2 August 2013

David Simmons interviewed by David McWilliam




Over the past few months, my personal fascination with Lovecraftian horror has become a full-fledged research interest while writing an essay on Ridley Scott’s Prometheus for Carl Sederholm and Jeffrey Weinstock’s The Age of Lovecraft: Cosmic Horror, Posthumanism, and Popular Culture. In this interview, I discuss the rise of Lovecraft in academia with David Simmons, editor of New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (Pan Macmillan, 2013). DM  

David Simmons is a lecturer in American Literature, Film and TV at the University of Northampton. He has published extensively on twentieth-century American literature and culture, including the monograph The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut (Palgrave, 2008), the edited collections New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut (Palgrave, 2009) and Investigating Heroes: Truth Justice and Quality TV (McFarland, 2011). In addition to these, David has written a number of articles on the work of H. P. Lovecraft (in the academic journals Critical Engagements, Symbiosis, The Romanian Journal of American, British and Canadian Studies, and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts). David is currently co-editing a collection on Anglophone Horror fiction for publication by McFarland in 2014.


DM: What is it about Lovecraft's fiction that captivates you, as a reader and as a critic?
DS: I came to Lovecraft relatively recently; in fact, I had a coach trip down to London several years ago, was looking around for something to read and chanced across the Penguin Modern Classics editions with introductions by S.T. Joshi. I thought I would take The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories to occupy my time and one coach trip later, I was hooked! I spent the whole coach trip with my head in the book, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend who accompanied me and had to spend several hours talking to the side of my head. I quickly got hold of the other two volumes and my obsession with Lovecraft spiralled from that point onwards.

Shortly thereafter I decided to write about Lovecraft in an academic context, publishing a couple of journal articles. Two things drew me in: firstly, I was interested in the writer himself; Lovecraft was such a blessedly odd character yet strangely representative of the times he lived in, even though he is often painted as something of a misanthropic recluse; and secondly, of course, the stories which still possess such a power to horrify; Lovecraft managed to successfully imbue the horror story with a existentialist dread that seems to become more and more prescient as time goes by.


DM: Why do you think that there was such reticence from academics to acknowledge his importance within the Gothic horror tradition?
DS: This is one of the topics that are tackled in the book, both in my own chapter and in those of many of the contributors. I think that while it is easy to point the finger of blame at the snobbery of critics, there were a number of reasons that lead to the elision of Lovecraft from academic discussions of the Gothic (it is important to remember that Joshi has been devotedly championing Lovecraft for a number of years now). Firstly, Lovecraft's writing is popular rather than classical in persuasion, yet it often blurs generic boundaries; he consciously sought to move away from the tired tropes of nineteenth century supernatural horror (vampires, ghosts etc), and this means that his work can be difficult to categorise, as it  tends to fall between genres and therefore gets left out of genre-centred criticism. The incorporation of elements such as cosmology, of 'The Old Ones' (a race of non-human extraterrestrial beings that threaten to return and wreak havoc on humanity) and of the numerous tentacled monsters that inhabit his New England settings inevitably lead to issues of taxonomy. Is his work Gothic, horror, science fiction, weird (a term largely originated to better classify Lovecraft and the work of his contemporaries) or a combination of all of these and more? Secondly, the evocation of fear in some of Lovecraft's writing undoubtedly relies on deep-seated anxieties concerning gender, and, perhaps more significantly, ethnicity and race, that modern readers can find distasteful. While I have no desire to mount a defence of these elements of Lovecraft’s writing, I do feel that to attempt to ignore this element in the development of U.S. popular fiction is misguided and risks doing a disservice to the important place such prejudices have played in forms and genres such as the Gothic and the horror story. Lastly, following Edmund Wilson's infamously scathing 1945 article on Lovecraft ‘Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous’, in which Lovecraft was painted as a poor writer, overly reliant on adjectives and a purveyor of lurid purple prose, most 'respectable' scholars turned away from the writer and his work. It has taken a while for these criticisms to be reassessed and for academics (notoriously conservative at the best of times) to begin revising their opinions of Lovecraft's short stories.


DM: What do you think has changed in recent years?
DS: The resurgence of Lovecraft and his writing is, in part, a result of this aforementioned wider critical re-appropriation; certainly the advent of postmodernism allowed many academics to set about reassessing a whole host of popular genre writers as possessing worth, even if only through virtue of what their work can tell us about the period it was published in. It is also significant that many of those who now find themselves in academic posts, especially in the U.S., grew up reading Lovecraft; they have taken this adoration of his work and written about it in ways that previous generations might not have considered or been open to. Interestingly, in his influential book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq claims that Lovecraft is fascinating to a contemporary readership because his values are so completely antithetical to our own: ‘He was fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorified puritanical inhibitions, and evidently found all “direct erotic manifestations” repulsive. Resolutely anticommercial, he despised money, considered democracy to be an idiocy and progress to be an illusion’. While I am not sure things are quite so clear cut (Mark Jones in his chapter in the collection, suggests that something closer to the reverse may be the case) there would appear to be some truth to the suggestion that Lovecraft's ideological distance from today's contemporary mainstream lends his work a kind of subcultural capital that is appealing to many readers.


DM: Why do you think Lovecraft’s work has enjoyed such a huge influence on twenty-first-century popular culture?
DS: As several of the chapters discuss, Lovecraft’s influence on twenty-first-century culture has been huge and seems to be growing all the time. With comics such as Alan Moore’s Neonomicon and the upcoming Providence, and films such as Prometheus, Lovecraft seems to be everywhere. There is an irony in all this, as it is well known that Lovecraft himself suggested he would have preferred to have lived in a bygone (and somewhat romanticised) combination of the Augustan, Edwardian and Victorian ages. While it is not necessarily the case that this meant he disliked the trappings of modernity that he discerned at the start of the twentieth century, this is how many critics have interpreted his comments. It appears therefore, somewhat incongruous that his work should now be such a part of popular culture, with Cthulhu tee-shirts, board games and Plushes freely available. Perhaps this is a result of commercial imperatives; after all, Lovecraft’s monsters provide an interesting alternative to the more standard trappings of the vampire and zombie that seem to have been exhausted in recent years. Similarly, in this Mythos-eager age, in which every TV show and film seems intent on creating the impression that it is part of a wider universe, the Cthulhu stories (while not strictly collated into a cohesive whole by Lovecraft) provide a ready-made world which writers and film-makers can exploit in their attempts to attract and retain an audience eager for the next big thing. Lastly, we must not forget that while Lovecraft’s writing has been attacked for racism, misanthropy and for being overly reliant on purple prose, his best stories still hold the ability to enthral, shock and terrify; they are simply well-written examples of horror (or weird fiction) that continue to prove how effective he was at engaging his readers.


DM: Specifically looking at the Cthulhu Mythos, what distinguishes Lovecraft’s monsters from those of traditional Gothic horror and science fiction?
DS: Those monsters that have come to be associated with the Cthulhu Mythos: Dagon, Hastur, Mi-Go the Fungi from Yuggoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Cthulhu itself (to name but a few) all offer something distinctly different to those monsters that we more traditionally associate with the Gothic and science fiction. For me, it is the sense of otherness that really makes these figures work; they are unlike anything that had come before them (though of course, Lovecraft did draw upon select aspects of Dunsany and Blackwood in formulating his Cthulhu stories). That is to say that they do not really have human traits. Indeed, while Lovecraft is often criticised for the ‘indescribable’ nature of his monsters, I think that this is a strength; it is much more conducive to imagining something horrific than simply being told what Nyarlathotep looks like in precise and exact detail. I also think that the sense of indifferentism that Lovecraft imbued his stories with also helps differentiate these creatures; it is one thing to have a vampire or zombie who needs humans, if only to feed on them, but it is quite another to have a monster that could not care less about us. This sense of insignificance is much more frightening to many readers; there will never be a sympathetic, sparkly version of Cthulhu!


DM: How did you hope to contribute debates on the author with New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft?
DS: As I have mentioned, Lovecraft is a challenging writer in a variety of ways, and while a select band of scholars have been exploring the artistic and critical nuances of his work for a number of years, this work has tended to be released by niche publishers and read by hardcore aficionados. With New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, I hope to open Lovecraft up to a more academic audience, while hopefully not alienating those outside the academy. To that end, we have an exciting mixture of established experts (Joshi, Robert Waugh, Donald Burleson) and leading scholars who approach Lovecraft and his work through recognisable frameworks (the Gothic, gender, modernism) offering an intellectually rigorous yet accessible range of chapters.

I also really wanted to document Lovecraft's legacy which seems to grow and grow as more people discover his writing. Therefore, we have chapters that examine Lovecraft's influence on not only more recent contemporary fiction but also art forms including Heavy Metal music, comics, film, television, and board games (to name a few). Indeed, it seems fair to say that traces of Lovecraft can now be found in almost every facet of popular culture, testifying to the power of the writer's work.


DM: Do you have any plans to develop your research interests in Lovecraftian horror further in future?
DS: Yes, Lovecraft’s work is full of returns, be it the return of one of ‘The Old Ones’ or the discovery of some sort of forgotten knowledge that sends a protagonist insane, and I am hoping to keep on in that spirit. I am currently working on a journal article exploring the use of Lovecraft as a character in fiction, centring on comics and graphic novels. I am also at present co-editing a collection on horror fiction (including Lovecraft, of course) with Dr Steve Barfield that should be released in 2014.


New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (Palgrave, 2013) is available now from all good book sellers!