In this interview, we chat with Gemma Files about horny monsters, Lovecraftian Airbnbs, the female gaze, and so much more.
Previously a film critic, journalist and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She’s best-known for her novel Experimental Film (Open Road Media) and her collections of short fiction, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning In That Endlessness, Our End and Blood From the Air (both from Grimscribe). Her next book, Little Horn: Stories, will be out in October from Shortwave. She is the autistic mother of an autistic son. For fun she sings, and doodles pretty monsters.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Empire of the Sun – J. G. Ballard
D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths; Norse Gods and Giants – Edgar Parin d’Aulaire and Ingri Parin d’Aulaire
Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
The Rotting Room – Viggy Parr Hampton
Barrowbeck; The Loney; Starve Acre – Andrew Michael Hurley
Bright Dead Star; Zoetrope Bizarre – Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
In this interview, we chat with Naben Ruthnum about character development, avoiding TV-brained writing, making sense of first-reader notes, and so much more.
Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based writer of fiction, cultural criticism, film and TV. His novel A Hero of Our Time was released by Penguin Random House and was optioned for development by The Littlefield Company. His books include the YA novel The Grimmer, the World Fantasy Award-nominated horror novella Helpmeet and two thrillers penned as Nathan Ripley, both of which have been optioned for development and were published internationally. He has written for Canadian television series including Murdoch Mysteries and Cardinal. As a feature screenwriter, he’s collaborated with Kris Bertin for feature and TV projects in development at Oddfellows, BoulderLight Pictures, Automatik, Skybound, and Blink49. Kris and Naben’s script Road Test made the 2024 Black List.
Books mentioned in this episode:
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Sorceress in Stained Glass & Other Ghost Stories – Richard Dalby, ed.
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Black Dahlia; Killer on the Road; L.A. Confidential; My Dark Places – James Ellroy
Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
The James Bond series – Ian Fleming
The Collector; The Magus – John Fowles
The Green Carnation – Robert Hichens
The Americans; The Tragic Muse; The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
Supernatural Horror in Literature – H. P. Lovecraft
The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions
A Fatal Inversion; Master of the Moor – Ruth Rendell
Flicker – Theodore Roszak
The Tempest – William Shakespeare
Ghost Story; If You Could See Me Now; In the Night Room; Koko; The Throat – Peter Straub
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
A Dark-Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs – Barbara Vine
Peter Straub: New Critical Perspectives (edited by Mike Thorn)
In his introduction to John C. Tibbetts’s The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub (2016)—the only academic, book-length study of Straub’s fiction currently in print—Gary K. Wolfe argues that “[p]erhaps more than any author of his generation—Stephen King included—Straub extended the literary possibilities of horror fiction.” Despite Peter Straub’s legacy as a leading figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century horror fiction, and his influence on dark fiction writers ranging from Caitlín R. Kiernan to Stephen Graham Jones, there is currently a scarcity of scholarship on his oeuvre. Since his passing in September 2022, Straub’s work has seen increased attention. Penguin Random House is rereleasing most of his books in 2025 and Subterranean Press is scheduled to publish his unfinished final novel, Wreckage, later this year. Stephen King, who co-authored The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001) with Straub, recently announced that he has completed the final instalment in their collaborative trilogy, and in 2022, Emma Straub published This Time Tomorrow, a celebrated novel about her father.
Mike Thorn is collaborating with the University Press of Mississippi to publish Peter Straub: New Critical Perspectives, which will offer the first multiple-authored academic anthology on Peter Straub. This volume will provide an array of critical perspectives on Straub’s robust body of work, addressing the author’s place in the Gothic and Weird traditions and examining his thematic fixations, including national and individual traumas; abusive mentors and authority figures; supernatural manifestations of material misdeeds; America’s mythologizing of serial killers; the fraught distinctions between “literary” and “commercial” fiction; the vexing instability of assumed “truths” and “realities”; and the infinitely complex nature of narrative as such—its formal malleability, its capacity for phenomenological and ontological rupture, its social functions, and its potentials and dangers. The collection will address Straub’s previously understudied pre-Gothic poetry and novels, Marriages and Under Venus, as well as his popularly celebrated and award-winning novels (including Ghost Story, Floating Dragon, and Koko), his collaborations with Stephen King (The Talisman and Black House) and his short stories and critical essays. The book will be geared towards a broad readership—from undergraduate and graduate university students, to interested general readers, to scholars and researchers seeking original insights into Straub, the American Gothic, and horror fiction writ large.
Proposal Submission Details
Mike Thorn seeks proposals of no more than 500 words for essays (5000-7000 words) on or related to the topics listed below (proposals should include descriptive titles and preliminary reference lists). He is especially interested in essays addressing multiple Straub-authored novels and stories, and in analyses of under-studied works, such as Straub’s poetry collections; Marriages; Under Venus; If You Could See Me Now; Mr. X; and In the Night Room. He might consider close readings of individual novels or stories in some cases, but he will give preference to proposals referencing multiple texts. Please include a brief, 100-word personal bio. Send proposals and queries to mikethorn@live.com.
Chapter Topics
Pre-Gothic Straub: On the Poetry and Early Literary Novels: Proposals should address Marriages and Under Venus; they might also draw on Straub’s poetry collections.
The Early American Gothic Sequence: Proposals should address Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and Ghost Story. They might also consider Under Venus.
Narrative Unreliability and Genre-Slipperiness: On Straub’s “Blue Rose” Novels: Proposals should address Koko, Mystery, and The Throat; they might also consider The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories.
Straub Gets Weird: On Straub’s Engagements with H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tradition: Proposals should address the novels Mr. X and Floating Dragon. They might also consider A Dark Matter, The Talisman, or other novels or stories deemed Weird or Weird-adjacent.
American Serial Killer Mythologies: Proposals should address The Hellfire Club and A Special Place. They might also consider other novels or short stories depicting serial killers, including the “Blue Rose” novels (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat), The Green Woman, Black House, Mr. X, “A Short Guide to the City”, “Ashputtle”, and “Bunny is Good Bread.”
The Metafictional Straub: Intertextuality and Narrative Self-Reflection: Proposals should address lost boy lost girl and In the Night Room. They might also address the preceding Timothy Underhill “Blue Rose” novels (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat) and other metafictional works, such as The Buffalo Hunter and The Hellfire Club.
Straub’s Short Fiction: Proposals should address at least one story or novella from each of the following collections: Houses Without Doors; Magic Terror; Interior Darkness.
Writers and Writing in Straub’s Fiction: Proposals should address The Hellfire Club and at least one of the Timothy Underhill novels (Koko, Mystery, The Throat, lost boy lost girl, and In the Night Room). They might also consider Ghost Story or other novels and stories representing writers and writing, including Mrs. God, “The Juniper Tree” and “The Geezers.”
Gothic Trauma: Proposals should explore depictions of individual and collective trauma in Peter Straub’s fiction. They might address personal traumas in stories and novels like “The Juniper Tree”, “Bunny is Good Bread”, Julia, If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story, Under Venus, The Hellfire Club,and A Dark Matter, and/or representations of PTSD and the Vietnam war in Koko, The Throat, and “The Ghost Village.”
Nonfictional Straub: Critical Commentary and Curations: Proposals should consider some of the author’s essays and introductions compiled in Sides, Conjunctions, Poe’s Children, “Beyond the Veil of Vision: Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza”, and American Fantastic Tales.
Straub’s Literary Legacy and Influence: Proposals should place Straub’s work in conversation with his literary successors. Proposals should examine one or more of Straub’s novels or stories in tandem with one or more works by Kelly Link, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Elizabeth Hand, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, or another high-profile fiction writer who has publicly cited Straub’s influence.
Preliminary Publication timeline
Deadline for proposals: November 30, 2025 Deadline for papers: January 1, 2027 Editor feedback: March 1, 2027 Deadline for final, revised papers: July 1, 2027 Manuscript submitted to University Press of Mississippi: September 1, 2027 Tentatively scheduled publication date: September 2028
Editor Biography
Mike Thorn, PhD, is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in American Gothic Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson, The Weird: A Companion, American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the writing-themed Craftwork podcast with Miriam Richer.
In this interview, we chat with Sarah Bernstein about contemplation, finding time for writing, capturing the rush of language, and so much more.
Sarah Bernstein is the author of two novels, The Coming Bad Days and Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is from Montreal and lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
Hysteric; Whore – Nelly Arcan
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Moonstone; The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
“A Mown Lawn” – Lydia Davis
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life – Ruth Franklin
The Book of Questions – Edmond Jabès
The Haunting of Hill House; “The Lottery”; The Sundial; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Place of Shells – Mai Ishizawa
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
In this interview, we chat with S. P. Miskowski about Asian horror cinema, the power of grief, the relentless desire to shape the self, and so much more.
S. P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017 and is available via Audible. An omnibus of her books set in the weird fictional town of Skillute, WA is forthcoming from Broken Eye Books in 2025.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales – Alfred A. Knopf, pub.
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 – S. A. Cosby, ed.
D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths – Ingrid & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman
Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney
The Haunting of Hill House; “Maybe it Was the Car”; “The Summer People”; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; “The Witch” – Shirley Jackson
None of This is True – Lisa Jewell
Audition – Ryū Murakami
“Bluebeard”; “Cinderella” – Charles Perrault
“The Black Cat”; “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
The Last Party – A. R. Torre
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 – Lisa Unger, ed.
In this interview, we chat with Fawn Parker about showing the reader around the room, finding the right tense, protecting your writing time, and so much more.
Fawn Parker is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It’s Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
The Mountain and the Valley – Ernest Buckler
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Guest – Emma Cline
Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
“Themes of adolescence, rage, toxic masculinity and addiction are portrayed in a terrifying but comprehensible way, and the book manages to succeed in pulling at empathetic heartstrings while simultaneously delivering a very dark, surreal story that will occupy minds for ages.”
In this interview, we chat with Rod Moody-Corbett about tonal dissonance, sponging up influences, writing from memory, and so much more.
Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Experience – Martin Amis
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World; The Hundred Brothers; The Verificationist – Donald Antrim
Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolaño
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
My Education – Susan Choi
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
Erasure – Percival Everett
Bad Behavior; Because They Wanted To; Don’t Cry – Mary Gaitskill
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me; Jernigan – David Gates
Airships – Barry Hannah
The Road Through the Wall – Shirley Jackson
Get Shorty; Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard
Last Resort – Andrew Lipstein
The Sentence is a Lonely Place – Garielle Lutz
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Ice Storm – Rick Moody
Lectures on Literature – Vladimir Nabokov
A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas; Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family – Nicholas Pileggi
Monkey Beach – Eden Robinson
The Life of the Mind – Christine Smallwood
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne
Fredericton’s monthly reading series, ‘The Catch-Up,’ curated and hosted by acclaimed writer Fawn Parker, returns with readings by local authors Alison Taylor, Chuck Bowie & Mike Thorn!
The reading will take place here at the bookshop on Sunday, January 26th, 2025, @ 3pm.
Alison Taylor (they/them) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Fredericton. Taylor’s short stories have appeared in various journals, and their debut novel Aftershock, published by HarperCollins Canada, received the Atlantic Book Awards John and Margaret Savage First Book Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. They received the 2024 Douglas Adams Richards Prize for Fiction for their work-in-progress, Confessions of a Binge Drinker (working title). They have edited a hundred-plus hours of television and many award-winning short films and music videos, and their own experimental films have screened at festivals internationally. They currently work in the editorial department at Goose Lane Editions and as a freelance editor of both books and film and video, and are working to complete a draft while two cats yell at them and a 70-pound boxer whines in their face.
Mike Thorn is a SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of English (Creative Writing) at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His writing has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and podcasts, including NoSleep, Vastarien, In Review Online, and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper. He co-hosts Craftwork, a writing-themed podcast, with Miriam Richer. Website: mikethornwrites.com.
Chuck Bowie is both a writer and an author, with thirteen books/novels published and one just underway. While he enjoys writing mysteries: Suspense-Thrillers and Cozy Mysteries, he also writes short stories. All of his books are well-reviewed, and he has sat on the boards of the Writers’ Federation of NB, The Writers’ Union of Canada, is a Fellow of the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts, as well as being acknowledged as a member of the Miramichi Literary Trail. His thriller series chronicles the adventures of Donovan, an international thief for hire, while his cozy series (written as Alexa Bowie) follows the adventures of the owner of an arts centre as Emma solves the crimes that swirl around her centre: The Old Manse. http://www.chuckbowie.ca
Daisy Miller, by Henry James (1879) A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908) Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1912) The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton (1913) Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker (1962) Another World, by Pat Barker (1998) Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016) Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates (2022) The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)
ADDITIONAL STANDOUT READS
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022) This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947) The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot (1955) The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot (1980) Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury (1957) Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798) Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) The Sublime and the Beautiful, by Edmund Burke (1757) The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen (2023) Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021) The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895) Don’t Look Now, by Daphne du Maurier (1971) Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (2016) Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, by Craig Laurance Gidney (2008) Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860) The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith (1955) The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983) The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956) Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015) Burn Man: Selected Stories, by Mark Anthony Jarman (2023) Man and His Symbols, edited by C. G. Jung & M.-L von Franz (1964) Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2013) The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009) The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King (2003) Something Like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa (1981) What Are You, by Lindsay Lerman (2022) Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas (1947) Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, by Lorrie Moore (1994) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison (1992) Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (1990) Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992) New England’s Gothic Literature, by Faye Ringel (1995) The Gothic Literature and History of New England, by Faye Ringel (2022) The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, by Julie Salamon (1991) The Last Man, by Mary Shelley (1826) The Craft of Writing, by William Sloane (1979) Lost Boy Lost Girl, by Peter Straub (2003) The Door, by Magda Szabó (1987) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970) A Fatal Inversion, by Barbara Vine (1987) The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (1982) Star-Begotten, by H. G. Wells (1937) Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937) The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987) Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978)
Mike Thorn 