Scott Nicolay

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Tag: Amanda Downum

Orrin Grey: Who’s Afraid of the Painted Monster? | The Outer Dark: Episode 19 — NOVEMBER 11, 2015

pm-cov72dpiOrrin Grey, author of Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, shares the secret origins of his latest collection including how artist Nick Gucker deftly worked details from all the stories into a monstrously macabre cover, the dialogue with horror cinema from Universal to Hammer to giallo that runs through his wonderfully plotted works, what he describes as a “Clive Barker influence,” exploring “philosophy” through narrative, using tropes as shorthand but in surprising, unconventional ways, ghost stories not about ghosts as we expect them to be, similarities to Robert Aickman, acknowledging and celebrating dramatic influences from William Shakespeare to William Castle, the extraordinary significance of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets starring Boris Karloff and how that film juxtaposed an older Gothic, creepy school of horror with the modern paranoia-laced violent horror of the Sixties, scholarly approaches versus jazz riffing on many different traditions of horror film and literature especially in the title story, his love of wax museums, the dialogue between the stories in both of his anthologies, John Langan who wrote the introduction, his obsession with obsession, The Prestige, twin novella finales about selling your soul to the Devil, what he learned about pacing from Mike Mignola and giving the Golem the Universal treatment via Hellboy pulp expressionist styling, affinities with Belgian Weird author Jean Ray and buried Malpertuis in “Painted Monsters,” Old Dark House movies, death as a recurring theme in every single story, what’s next for Orrin Grey including stories, novellas, and a nonfiction book about horror films, talking movies with Gemma Files, musing about seeing his own work someday on film, and his recent reading recommendations including previous The Outer Dark guest Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Amanda Downum.

Justin Steele reviews Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, and joins Scott for this week’s installment of News from the Weird including coverage of World Fantasy Convention 2015 and the World Fantasy Awards, as well as exciting upcoming collections, novels and other works by some of the biggest names in Weird.

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.

More Links:

https://www.patreon.com/orringrey?ty=h

https://www.paulchadwick.net/

https://www.strange-aeons.com/

Next week’s guest: Mike Davis, editor/publisher of Lovecraft eZine. and the upcoming anthology, Autumn Cthulhu.

Craig Laurance Gidney: Writing the Beautiful Mess | The Outer Dark: Episode 14 — OCTOBER 6, 2015

12120007_625217597615975_7812391686514725385_oCraig Laurance Gidney recalls pivotal early experiences at Clarion West 1996 under the tutelage of a blockbuster roster of teachers from Jack Womack to Ellen Datlow, as well as studying under Samuel R. “Chip” Delany in college, remembers recently deceased literary titan Tanith Lee, the transgressive and neodecadant qualities that drew him so passionately to her writing, her courage portraying gay characters and the impact of her work on his own, his most recent anthology, Skin Deep Magic, from Rebel Satori Press, including specific stories such as writing about Richard Bruce Nugent, a gay figure in the Harlem Renaissance, in “Conjuring Shadows” and “Coalrose” which was inspired by Nina Simone, the influence of Aimé Césaire, surrealism and the Négritude movement in skin-deep-magicFrancophone literature, exploring his fascination with lucid dreaming in his latest story The Nectar of Nightmares forthcoming from Dim Shores, writing in the “Beautiful Mess,” engaging with racist imagery, epithets, stereotypes and ideology in stories such as “Lyes,” why he feels it’s okay to like problematic fiction—including HP Lovecraft—as long as you don’t deny the problem, horror as intrinsic to the experience of African Americans, women and other liminal groups versus being about the fear of the other, Toni Morrison‘s Beloved as a horror novel, the current boom of diverse writers in fantastic literature, the often overlooked gay weird, writing from every perspective, why everybody should read Queers Destroy Horror!, ssmhis next novel currently titled Invocations—a contemporary fantasy about a family of outsider artists, and his current reading recommendations including Tom Cardamone, Chesya Burke, Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, and Tanith Lee’s posthumous collection Dancing Through the Fire, which has a theme of coming to peace with death, and A Different City, published just before her passing which he calls “classic top-notch over-the-top gothic goodness” set in Marseilles—“Flaubert if he wrote dark fiction”!

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.

bereft_1_full_nameMore Links:

https://www.lethepressbooks.com/

https://www.tinysatchelpress.com/#!__whats-in-the-satchel

https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/04/wandering-spirits-traveling-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/

Next week’s guest: Gemma Files, author of The Worm in Every Heart, We Will All Go Down Together, the Hexslinger series, and the forthcoming novel Experimental Film.

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