Scott Nicolay |

Author: Scott Nicolay (page 16 of 25)

Stories from the Borderland #9: “Feesters in the Lake” by Bob Leman

Several years ago John Pelan and I were shooting pool at Sammy C’s in Gallup, New Mexico. As usual, he was running the table, and also as usual we were shooting the shit about Weird Fiction. I put forth the proposition that H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre really only offered at most half a dozen or so genuinely great stories, and after that the drop-off comes on steep as the continental shelf—for the record, my picks are “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Outsider,” and maybe “The Music of Erich Zann.” I’m open to a discussion of “Pickman’s Model,” “The Festival,” and maybe a few others, but that’s pretty much it. Continue reading

Stories from the Borderland #8: “Horrer Howce” by Margaret St. Clair

April 14, 2016 / Scott Nicolay / 0 Comments

Margaret St. Clair seems poised on the edge of rediscovery. Certainly few writers in speculative fiction are more deserving of a revival—or more undeservedly neglected. I know I am not alone in thinking this way, as the VanderMeers included her work in both The Weird and the forthcoming The Big Book of Science Fiction. She receives cover billing on the latter, sixth in a list of eleven, above Philip K. Dick, Ted Chiang, and other brighter draws. Since she is hardly well enough known to serve as a draw, one might interpret their editorial intent as an effort to reestablish her name, half a century past her heyday. Perhaps the revival has already begun. Continue reading

Stories From the Borderland #7: “A Walk in the Dark” by Arthur C. Clarke

April 6, 2016 / Scott Nicolay / 1 Comment

I was lucky enough to grow up only a few blocks from my hometown’s public library. By the time I was eight or nine and allowed to cross Middlebrook’s busy main street on my own, I became as frequent a visitor there as my father. My family was so familiar to the regular librarians that they never had to look up our number when we checked out books. By the Sixth Grade I had graduated to the adult sections, and I became a habitué of that one aisle just past the entrance on the right, where all the books on one side were marked with blue cloth tags depicting a pipe-smoking mustachioed sleuth, while those opposite bore white squares emblazoned with a red rocketship at the nucleus of a lithium atom. Continue reading

Stories from the Borderland #6: “Men Without Bones” by Gerald Kersh

March 30, 2016 / Scott Nicolay / 0 Comments

Gerald Kersh’s “Men Without Bones” presents a virtual case study in the awkward position of midcentury Weird Fiction. A truly—literally—pulpy tale, its original publication in 1954 came not in Weird Tales but in Esquire. By that time the pulps themselves were moribund, while new markets were arising. Michael Kelly and I recently discussed on The Outer Dark how mainstream literary journals are currently publishing some of the best Weird Fiction, but here we find ourselves more than 60 years back with a classic of unfiltered cosmic horror in a magazine whose literary reputation was already established by authors including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Gide. Despite such an auspicious initial placement, regardless of at least two dozen reprints since, or the fact that it remains in print today, I will wager “Men Without Bones” remains unknown to much of The Weird’s contemporary readership. Continue reading

An Outer Double: Mike Allen: Decruiting the Normal & Nicole Kornher-Stace: About Ghosts in a Way That Most Books Are Not About Ghosts | The Outer Dark: Episode 33 — MARCH 25, 2016

March 25, 2016 / Scott Nicolay / 0 Comments

Double the Weird with Mike Allen, author of Unseaming and the forthcoming collection The Spider Tapestries, AND Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Nebula Award-nominated The Archivist Wasp.

First, Mike Allen ruminates on possible comparisons between The Spider Tapestries and Clark Ashton Smith, writing “cubist” stories about unrecognizable futures, the unexpected Weird influence of Italian artist Alessandro Bavari, egotastic poetry and his poem book about famous paintings come to life Disturbing Muses, his love for stories that blow your mind, Nicole Kornher-Stace’s introduction and challenge to write writing a story the way he would compose a poem, differences among the “transformed people” in his science fiction, fantasy and horror stories, his passion for “really big monsters” and experiencing the human concept of a God, reproducing his vivid surreal dreams, common themes and “fleshy” connections among his stories, his formative ‘80s teenagehood, creating the “single grossest scene I’ve ever written,” the origins and editing of the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series of edgy “surprising juxtaposition” stories, Charles Olson and Jackson Pollock, his forthcoming novel which is a sequel to The Black Fire Concerto and more upcoming projects, his recommended writers including Nicole Kornher-Stace, CSE Cooney ( Nebula Award-nominated Bone Swans) and Livia Llewellyn, as well as a reading of the title story of The Spider Tapestries.

News From the Weird: Guest co-host Michael Griffin (The Lure of Devouring Light, Word Horde, April 2016) stands in for Justin Steele with a review of Livia Llewellyn’s new collection Furnace (Word Horde) and announcements about Dim Shores Press, Shock Totem Press, Word Horde’s Eternal Frankenstein anthology, author reveals for Lost Signals (ed. Max Booth III/Perpetual Motion Machine Press), and more.

Then, Nicole Kornher-Stace muses about the challenges of writing Archivist Wasp, a non-marketable genre-straddling YA novel that ended up scoring a Nebula Award nomination, how it somewhat magically ended up at Small Beer Press thanks to Ysabeau Wilce, melding a “weird mix of stuff” into a post-apocalyptic novel unlike any other, avoiding and overturning YA tropes and her hope that her success will open doors for other YA authors to find markets for more crazy genre-bending works, why much YA is insulting to teenage readers, imagining future anthropology in her story “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse” (Clockwork Phoenix #4) and Archivist Wasp, expanding Archivist Wasp into a trilogy, not naming and naming characters, mythology as hobby and flipping the bird to Joseph Campbell, a “strange” way of writing and trusting characters she’s had in her head since she was a teenager, Gene Wolfe and dream logic, discovering spec-lit at age 10 and selling her first short story, “Pieces of Scheherazade” (Zahir, Best American Fantasy 2007) at age 18, discovering Weird/slipstream and a market for her own work as facilitated by the small press boom, her fan fiction fantasy, feedback from teen readers, some love for Molly Tanzer’s Vermillion, The Bog People and the archaeology of death, writing combat scenes before and after studying karate, and her recommended other writers who, like her, write about ghosts in a way that’s not about ghosts including Karina Sumner-Smith (Towers Trilogy), Patty Templeton (There Is No Lovely End), as well as a reading of the Prologue of Archivist Wasp.

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

Next week’s guests: Michael Kelly and Kathe Koja talk about editing Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2, and the vision behind the Year’s Best Weird Fiction series.

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