At the Edge of Waking, a collection of short stories from Sunburst Award-winning Holly Phillips, with an introduction by Peter S. Beagle, to Sean Wallace at Prime Books by Sally Harding of The Cooke Agency for publication in September 2012.
Year’s Best Interview #19: Tananarive Due on “The Lake”Sean Wallace | May 24, 2012 in News
This story has a very southern gothic feel to it. What do you think it is about southern settings that inspires so many gothic stories? “The Lake” is set in the fictitious town of Graceville, Florida (not to be confused with the real Graceville, Florida), and it’s part of an ongoing series of short stories I have written set in a town where characters experience paranormal experiences during the summers. Another of my Graceville stories is a novella called “Ghost Summer,” in which some children come across the ghosts of missing black boys whose disappearance sparked a race riot in the 1920s. Townspeople believed the boys were the victims of racial violence, but they’d been chased into the woods by a loose dog and fallen into a well. The town suffered a lot of bloodshed over that misunderstanding. There was so much pain, so many untold stories, buried in the South. As writers, we feel those secrets whispering to us. Year’s Best Interview #18: Tia Travis on “Still”Sean Wallace | May 23, 2012 in News
There’s a sort of quiet foreboding to this story, almost a freezing of time, which is also reflected in the title. What inspired this tale? I grew up on the prairies, in the provinces of Manitoba and Alberta. I lived on a farm where my dad tried (and failed) to make a living growing grain; in trailers in the middle of nowhere (including my uncle’s pasture); in a series of small towns; in a mining community in Northern Manitoba where family friends lost their lives before we moved on. We were always moving, but one of the constants of that semi-nomadic lifestyle was the beautiful, melancholy, often harsh reality of the rural Canadian landscape. Some of these memories—running through endless fields, catching wind in empty jars—infuse this story. One memory stands out as inspiration for “Still”: that of racing home in a panic to inform my mother that my brother (I was four, he was three) had hooked his snowsuit on a barbed-wire fence that ran through part of frozen Snow Lake. I was too small to unhook him, though I struggled as much as a four-year-old could. (This was the 70s, pre-helicopter parenting, probably the last decade when kids ran wild and unsupervised until the streetlights came on.) I recall the guilt: the dread knowledge that I failed in my responsibility as protective Big Sister. I was sure when I returned with my mum that it would be too late: my brother would have fallen through the ice and drowned or bled to death from puncture wounds. And it would be all my fault. Lafe was cold, wet, scared, but no worse for wear except a rip in his snowsuit. We had preternatural luck in those days. And I shudder when I say that. But yes, there’s a little personal experience blended with this story’s imaginings. MORE: Read the rest of the interview here! Year’s Best Interview #17: Elizabeth Hand on “Near Zennor”Sean Wallace | May 22, 2012 in News
Dread is the theme that pops to mind most readily while reading this: it’s almost more terrifying than an actual horror. How important is the buildup in a story? I’ve long wanted write a Robert Aickman-style story — his work is so brilliant and utterly sui generis, and no matter how often I read his work, I can never figure out how he does it. It’s like trying to figure out how a master magician performs a seemingly impossible sleight-of-hand. I think that genuine dread is a more difficult emotion to evoke and sustain than horror, so I set myself the challenge of trying to write something that relied on a burgeoning sense of unease, culminating in the horror vacuii that Jeffrey experiences at the end. It’s a long slow build, and mostly I just drew on my own recent memory of wandering the moors on the cliffs surrounding Treen, looking for ancient barrows and standing stones with the wind tearing up off the ocean, and grieving for my friend. MORE: Read the rest of the interview here! Year’s Best Interview #16: Norman Prentiss on “Four Legs in the Morning”Sean Wallace | May 21, 2012 in News
“Four Legs in the Morning” revolves around the ancient Oedipus Rex play. What is it, you think, that causes some stories to last and deepen in meaning while others disappear? I’m going to answer this question as a horror author, and say that the lasting stories often have some element of horror in them, even if they’re not technically classified as horror. They connect with readers’ deep fears. Oedipus Rex is a play about identity, with a great man doing his best to escape an unthinkable fate—and then slowly realizing he’s failed. I think Oedipus experiences a sense of growing cosmic dread similar to what Lovecraft writes about. Then again, a comedy or romance writer would answer the question differently! MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!
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