In this interview, Craig Laurance Gidney talks about genre mashups, writing workshops, telling Mom which of your stories to avoid, and so much more.
Craig Laurance Gidney (he/him/his) is the author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories; Skin Deep Magic: Stories; Bereft (a YA novella); and A Spectral Hue (a novel). He has been a Lambda Literary Finalist three times, was a Carl Brandon Parallax Award Finalist, and won the inaugural Joseph S. Pulver Sr. Award for Weird Fiction. The Nectar of Nightmares is his most recent collection. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room; Go Tell It on the Mountain; If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
The Uncanny – Sigmund Freud
A Ring of Endless Light; A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
Black Light – Elizabeth Hand
The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus – Joel Chandler Harris
“The Golden Pot”; “The Sandman” – E. T. A. Hoffmann
Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” – Franz Kafka
Delirium’s Mistress – Tanith Lee
“The Outsider”; “The Rats in the Walls” – H.P. Lovecraft
“English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee began dropping breadcrumbs toward the dark woods of the World Wide Web in 1989. He originally theorized the Web as a means of “universal access to a large universe of documents” that would combine three key components: hypertext, transmission control protocol, and a domain name system. His vision materialized in 1994, the “Year of the Web,” when websites began opening to the public. This development set the stage for the 21st century’s postmodern chaos — outsourced cognition leading to progress and disintegration in equal measures, facts and lies entangling in a collective frenzy of paranoia, rage, and disorientation.”
I read 101 books in 2023. Here are my favorite first reads (pre-2023 releases only).
The top twenty are organized chronologically (I restricted myself to one per author). The rest are organized by authors’ last names.
Top twenty:
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851) Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856) The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (1860) Roderick Hudson, by Henry James (1875) Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891) Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904) The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton (1905) The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907) The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938) Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940) The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946) Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil (1947) The Road Through the Wall, by Shirley Jackson (1948) Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin (1956) The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever (1957) The Collector, by John Fowles (1963) Julia, by Peter Straub (1975) The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978) The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984) Soul/Mate, by Joyce Carol Oates [as Rosamond Smith] (1989) Paradais, by Fernanda Melchor (2021)
Other standouts:
Poetics, by Aristotle (335 BCE) Inner Experience, by Georges Bataille (1943) Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text, by Brad Baumgartner (2021) Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica (2017) The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1906) The Lure of the Unknown: Essays on the Strange, by Algernon Blackwood (2022) Drop City, by T. C. Boyle (2003) The Hungry Moon, by Ramsey Campbell (1986) The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940) The Wapshot Scandal, by John Cheever (1964) Falconer, by John Cheever (1977) Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi (2019) A Short History of Decay, by E. M. Cioran (1949) The Vet’s Daughter, by Barbara Comyns (1959) The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns (1985) Americana, by Don DeLillo (1971) The Names, by Don DeLillo (1982) God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria Jr. (1972) The Lost Daughter, by Elena Ferrante (2006) The Magus, by John Fowles (1965) Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill (2005) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, by J. Jack Halberstam (1995) Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris (1981) Last Summer, by Evan Hunter (1968) The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson (1949) Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951) The Bird’s Nest, by Shirley Jackson (1954) Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, by Stephen King (2000) The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle (2016) The Moral Essays, by Giacomo Leopardi (1832) Hieroglyphics and Other Essays, by Arthur Machen (2022) Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (1973) The Beetle, by Richard Marsh (1897) A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell (2020) A Garden of Earthly Delights, by Joyce Carol Oates (1967) Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates (1993) The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, by Joyce Carol Oates (2003) Jack of Spades, by Joyce Carol Oates (2015) The Anthrobscene, by Jussi Parikka (2014) Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, by Paul Schrader (1972) EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013) The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, by Clark Ashton Smith (2014) Motley Stones, by Adalbert Stifter (1853) Marriages, by Peter Straub (1973) Koko, by Peter Straub (1988) Sides, by Peter Straub (2007) After Life, by Eugene Thacker (2010) Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles (2021) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff (2018)
“Over the past few years I’ve had the privilege of enjoying an ongoing dialogue with one of my major creative influences, award-winning writer Kathe Koja. Two years ago, she and I discussed genre and process during the virtual launch for my second short story collection, Peel Back and See. Last year, we discussed our work’s relationship with cinema for In Review Online. While brainstorming about topics for future conversations, we decided to pursue the concept of numinosity: its permutations in literature in film and the role it plays in our own creative projects. This article is the result of our email thread on the subject.”
Film adaptations of Stephen King’s work often suffer from genre misidentification. This isn’t to say that filmmakers mistakenly read King’s work as horror fiction — much of it undoubtedly is horror fiction. The primary shortcoming of many adaptations — including Andy Muschietti’s 2017/2019 It duology — is a limited perception of what the horror genre is, what it can do, and how it interfaces with other literary and cinematic traditions. It (1986) might well be King’s most horrific novel, its title representing the numinous and multifaceted object of fear itself. It’s as replete with monsters and grotesquerie as anything the author has written, but it also might be his most thematically and structurally ambitious work.
Mike Thorn 