Two Horror Peeps at Malarkey
Lauren Bolger in conversation with Eric Williams
Eric Williams and I sat down the other day to talk about what interests us most within the Horror genre, what inspires what we write (and a little of what scares us!). We discuss story concepts, and researching versus writing what we know. We also talked about our books, his being a Horror short story collection titled Toadstones (out now with Malarkey Books). It’s a collection of short stories firmly in the tradition of the weird tale. Mine is an Occult/Supernatural novel titled Kill Radio, out April 2023 with Malarkey.
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Lauren: I feel like this is how every horror convo starts. What was the first thing you watched or read that made you decide you loved horror?
Eric: Well, let’s see - I always loved watching classic old horror movies, like the universal classics, Dracula, the Mummy (especially the Mummy, a real underrated movie in my opinion), etc. I really like the aesthetics of them, the kinda kitschy gothicness of them. With regards to written horror, however, I didn’t really get into it until college, which is a bit more of an involved story… you know those old mall bookstores, like B. Dalton or whatever?
Lauren: I’m not sure if we have any over here! What are they like?
Eric: They were like paperback heavens, right? Not huge like the Borders or whatnot, generally smaller in-the-mall type stores, in between like Spencers gifts and, I dunno, those dumb hat stores or whatever. Shelves of mass market paperbacks, and next to the sci fi section (where I spent most of my time) there was ALWAYS a usually much smaller horror section there. They had the usual stuff, Dean Koontz and Stephen King sure, but they ALSO always had these Del Rey paperbacks of H.P. Lovecraft collections. They had these insane, grotesque, lurid, often very gross or gory covers, torsos on hooks, peeled flayed bodies, weird hellish monsters in awful spidery landscapes, real hardcore kinda stuff! And I remember seeing those and thinking as a kid “yikes, not for me!” THEN, the college NPR station in Gainesville Florida had a Halloween program of old time radio horror shows, stuff from the the 40s and 50s, and included were a couple of adaptations of Lovecraft stories, a Dunwich Horror from the 40s and a Rats in the Walls from the 60s I think, and they were NOTHING at all like what I expected from the grossout paperbacks i’d seen, right? They were these atmospheric, convoluted, reserved stories, much less “sloppy flesh rending horror” and a lot more weird! They were so different and interesting that it led me to special collections at the university library where I pulled a bunch of classic pulp Weird Tales issues and just read through them like mad.
Lauren: I listened to a little bit of the Dunwich horror, I think the one you’re referring to that you shared. I have only read a little Lovecraft, but yeah the contrast is striking between the covers you’re describing and just that longish well-spoken monologue with the sound effect of the whippoorwills in the background. I can totally picture being drawn in from that (which I was too).
Eric: Yeah exactly, just extremely different from the kinda 80s/90s slasher movie horror ideal that I had as a kid. How about you, where’d your horror love spring from?
Lauren: So I started kinda young. There was this book called Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I haven’t read it since I was a kid, but it’s a middle grade book about the youngest sister of three, basically becoming tricked and corrupted by a ghost, and her older sister having to step in and save her.
Lauren: In general, from age maybe seven or eight I just couldn’t stop talking about ghosts and writing these copycat ghost stories based on what I’d read. I also read lots of R.L. Stine, the Fear Street Series and Goosebumps too, and a little Christopher Pike.
Eric: It’s interesting how much horror stuff there was for kids, actually. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but as a kid I'd also read the John Bellairs books. They had these great covers by Edward Gorey and were full of what I remember as horrible dangerous ghosts and monsters and shit. Like real scary stuff, geared especially for younger kids, like elementary school aged.
Lauren: Oh wow, I’m looking those up and dang they do look pretty dark. But *cool*, haha. In hindsight I remember too, The Witches by Roald Dahl was pretty wild. I just read it to my seven-year-old thinking it was fine since it was a book, not a movie, but there actually are some illustrations in there, and the Grand High Witch was *ghastly* looking in the book (worse than the movie actually), and the written description was just very grotesque. I had to check with her after and be like “So… how’d you feel about that…” haha.
Eric: That’s a famously freaky one, right? Scarred a lot of kids! As a parent, what’s your relationship to horror for kids? Do you think it plays a role in their development or how they articulate their relationship to the bigger (and scarier) world out there, or what?
Lauren: That’s a good question! My husband and I are both big Horror fans, so I think we definitely are a bit more uh, adventurous than most parents we meet with what we show our kids, but we sort of just started by showing them mildly spooky stuff, and just following their interests. They’re really into it, and they don’t have nightmares, so we kind of figure it’s ok. And now that you mention it, I do think it could make them a bit braver in the real world as well. I remember hearing once that video games actually help young kids be less afraid of failing by giving them that practice, so I could totally see the darker subject matter in movies, helping them experience the less sunny side of things, and make it a little bit magical, too. That’d be awesome if it does!
Eric: It’s interesting, and I can only speak as a former kid here, since I don’t have any, but it’s hard to know WHAT is going to resonate or scare a kid sometimes, isn’t it? And that’s similar to readers, now that I’m saying it - like sometimes the thing that really hits is not what you’d expect? It’s an interesting aspect of the genre in that often, I feel, there’s a deep and really unpredictable kind of viscerality to it that you can’t plan or overthink, it just kinda explodes on someone. And, similarly, sometimes it doesn’t work at ALL for other people!
Lauren: Yes! It’s so hard to pick horror movies or books sometimes. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is looking up movies to watch is so difficult. It’ll have this killer cover and a description that gives you goosebumps, then you look at the rating and it’s like five or six out of ten or something. So by now like if it’s got a score of five or more I try to just go for it. But yeah definitely too, we all have our pet subgenres of horror and venturing out of those can sometimes be risky (as in, risk of us not liking it, haha).
Eric: Oh yeah, it gets real personal sometimes, right? It’s interesting how Horror as a visual medium feels extremely distinct from written horror. Like obviously you’re not going to jump scare anybody with a paragraph break (although maybe there’d be fun shit you could do with adventurous typesetting or something…). Where do you, in both your reading and your writing, find the good scary stuff?
Lauren: I love that question! So, it feels weird to say but I might be more heavily influenced by horror movies than books? One of my favorite things I did, and I think I did it more for the first book than the second, I basically just wrote down a list of my favorite *scary* things I’ve seen (or read), but I do think the examples mostly came from horror movies.
Eric: Not to break in, but HAVE you ever been SCARED in a book or story?
Lauren: YES! So, Ghost Story by Peter Straub scared the shit out of me. Have you read it?
Eric: ABSOLUTELY that was one of my examples too! Another one for me was The Haunting by Shirley Jackson.
Lauren: That’s awesome! Which parts freaked you out?
Eric: With Straub it was the real unrelenting grimness of the whole thing, just the steady buildup. Been a while, but I remember I kept having to unclench my jaw while reading it. And with Jackson, it was those moments where you feel like the narrator is losing themselves a bit, and when you can’t be sure what the reality is of what you’re reading. I guess that’s an interesting difference between the two media, movies and books - as a reader the interiority of books really lets you break down the ego a bit, makes you never really SURE about what is going on!
Lauren: I definitely get what you mean there. In books you can’t have soundtracks or visuals, but yeah you do get that interiority, absolutely. It’s such a fun tool. And I loved the buildup in Ghost Story. He’d kind of give details like bread crumbs and damn if someone says a novel can’t jump scare them, I don’t know if they’ve read Ghost Story yet. Well ok, not a literal jump, but when a dead Stringer Deadham walks up to that barn and looks his living sister in the eyes, I probably could have fallen out of wherever I was sitting at the time. And the way they found the other sister the next morning. Chills.
Eric: Oh shit the barn haha holy smokes! Absolutely, damn now I gotta reread it! So was that on your list?
Lauren: The list of scary stuff before I started my first book? Actually no, I read Ghost Story really recently, after I finished my first book. I think my second book is a bit inspired by Ghost Story, at least with presenting the town and its history as kind of its own character within the book. Two big things I drew from for the first book would have been the movie Hereditary, and Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing.
Eric: The first book being Kill Radio? Really excited that there’s another Bolger classic on the way then!
Lauren: Haha! Thank you. Yep, while Kill Radio is kind of a Supernatural/Occult book, what I’m working on now is more Cosmic Horror. What is your next big project? I’ve seen a lot of new short work out lately. Are we getting another Williams collection??
Eric: I kinda spread myself all over, but I’d like to do a couple of things first. I’m working with another writer and translator to put together a collection of the translated fiction that appeared in the original Farnsworth Wright edited version of the Weird Tales magazines (that’s like from 1923-1939). But from my own writing I’ve got a good title for a botanical horror collection, all monster plants and such, called “CHILLING HOURS” that I'm writing some stories for too. But yeah, sticking with the short stories for now (it’s my favorite genre)
Lauren: Ok, that sounds really cool. Can you tell me more about the Weird Tales project? I know you are really well versed in that subject. I heard you talk about it with Max Booth on his podcast, and learned a lot!
Eric: Yeah, boy, if you ever needed to distract me while someone robbed my house or something, just ask me about pulp magazines - I can ramble on about them forever! Weird Tales is such an important magazine, both for me personally as well as historically, and its place in the pulp pantheon is really interesting. It’s so long-lived, just decades of material, which is really unusual in the pulps since most folded very quickly. And it’s at this interesting intersection of other genres, Sci-Fi, Detective Fiction, and the classic ghost story, all while trying to create and define its own new genre of the Weird Tale. And under editor Farnsworth Wright, that’s a real concern: what is the weird tale? The usual story, or at least the impression of the history is that there’re all these big names who start creating this genre, Lovecraft and Howard and Seabury Quinn, but there’s also this editor, Farnsworth Wright, who is trying to delineate the literature, to bound it and define the discourse around it. One of the things Wright does is try and find older and non-English language weird stories (Wright himself was fluent in French and did some of the translations himself), really trying to give the genre a historical and global dimension. And that’s something that isn’t really talked about too much. It’s still early days on it, but I’m hoping to work on it over the holidays here.
Lauren: That sounds like a really beneficial project, both in bringing more attention to those stories and making them more accessible. Really look forward to reading them when they’re available! That also makes me want to ask. In Toadstones, you do have that weird tale feel throughout, but at the same time, you definitely cover a lot of subjects, a number of them with a more modern backdrop, too. I particularly love how you describe concepts in your field of expertise since you’re a Geologist. How often do you write what you already know, versus getting the idea and having to completely research the functional part of the story?
Eric: I usually get a germ of an idea, and sometimes it’s something I already know about pretty good (like well side work in the story Mudlogging) but generally I start writing and realize “oh fuck, I gotta look a lot of this stuff up…” and then it becomes a huge pain in the ass! Like in the first story in Toadstones, Haruspex, I had the idea of Schliemann using occult means to find Troy, but when I started writing, I realized I needed a lot of biography for him. Then, I ended up having to read a lot about him and the Turkish empire at the time. Real time sink!
Lauren: That story was so cool. I definitely did not even know who Schliemann was when reading so you definitely had a leg up on me there, haha. But the imagery in it and the way you worded it was gorgeous. He was close, the heavy warmth of the liver trembled as his finger moved across time and space until he found it, Troy, its spires looming over the hills of the colic impression, a wall of integument protecting Priam and his people from the Greek camp clotting around it, black with blood.
Eric: Aw shucks, thanks so much!
Lauren: Of course! There was a lot I loved about Toadstones. First off, I love the title. I had to look it up, and wow, what a perfectly weird myth to reference! Can you give a couple of details on why you chose that title, specifically?
Eric: Aren’t they cool? Toadstones are these round, kind of darkly lustrous stones that had a prominent place in medieval gemology, notable for their magical ability to either neutralize or detect poison. They were believed to come from the heads of toads, and the moral dimension of that was a big part of their folkloric attraction: that a toad, this slimy repugnant thing, could produce something so useful and beautiful and valuable was taken as further proof of the beneficence and mystery of nature.
Eric: The reality, however, is that toadstones are the fossilized teeth of a Mesozoic fish. The mineralogy of fish teeth is interesting, they’re made of extremely durable phosphate minerals, and of course a single fish makes a lot of teeth over its life, so when the fish is itself pretty common and widespread, you end up with a lot of fossilized teeth. So that combination of geology and magic and folklore always appealed to me, and I think is a good representation of the kind of multilayered weirdness I want my stories to convey. I should also note that there isn’t a story in the collection called “Toadstones,” nor do they show up in any story! I’ve kind of always hated how commonly short story collections are just titled, like, “collected stories” or “X and other stories,” real boring ass titles. Nobody ever wants a novel or a poetry collection to be titled something so dully! So it was nice to have a fun title that meant something that I could use for the collection.
Lauren: Among lots of the stories within Toadstones, I also really love the back copy. From that copy, it mentions “sheepoids” and “creepoids”. Those words are so bizarre, but awesome. Are they terms coined by you? Or did they come from elsewhere?
Eric: The back copy came entirely from Alan Good! And you really can’t beat it: “sheepoids” as a word is just *chef’s kiss.* But the idea of the sheepoids came from the ol’ medieval legend of the vegetable lamb of tartary, also called the boramez; it was supposed to be an animal that grew from plant, and it has this terrible pathos to it in that the lamb part would live only so long as the plants upon which it grazed were available in the immediate vicinity. It’d eat and eat all around its stalk, and when it ran out of food, it’d die. Just tragic! I wrote the story because it’s such an unlikely monster. I wanted to see if I could make a vegetable lamb scary or creepy. In my story it’s a lot more fungal than strictly botanical, which is maybe a cheat!
Lauren: Fungus is such a weird, appropriately alien-like life form. It was made for Horror. Or Horror was made for it. Also, of course Alan came up with that. Alan rocks. Another thing I loved in this collection was how you set these ghastly scenes against characters who react in some really lighthearted and casual ways. Waking Doctor Hatch was another story I enjoyed in Toadstones. I was going to post a quick example. I sort of picture you just sitting there chuckling as you type these out, haha.
“Did he suffer?” I asked. He looked horrible, splayed out like that.
“What? Oh,” said the doctor, “Nah. Hit him like a ton of bricks. Heart attack, I’d say. Probably all this voodoo he was doing!” He swallowed. “Good sandwich!”
Do you have a favorite horror writer (or… favorite horror movie) where you feel like blends humor really well with the horror? And why do you think they fit so well together?
Eric: With regards to humor and horror, I think they’re both really close, like in terms of the parts of the brain where they sit maybe. Like, both are always reaching for a kind of catharsis or emotional release, trying to coax a reader along to a really specific state or mind, so they kind of work along the same lines. When I read that excerpt there, what it reminds me of is like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, two classic hard boiled detective writers who always undercut the grim crimes and horrible people with kind of sardonic or callous jokes or lines. They tend to highlight via contrast the kind of ugly scenes that way. I’d never really thought about it before, but those two writers (not horror guys, interestingly) are my models for that kind of dialog!
Lauren: I love that, how just talking about what it makes you think of makes you realize the inspiration behind it. I’d imagine if someone had to be in that line of work, they’d really have to have that gallows humor muscle well developed, haha.
Eric: Yeah, exactly! I think I heard an interview a long time ago with like a crime scene photographer, and someone asked him if the movie trope of the wise-cracking det joking about the body or whatever was unrealistic, and I remember him saying something like “the only unrealistic part is that they only do one joke, everybody isn’t making them constantly, which is how it really is.” and that’s definitely a part of my view of how people would approach a really weird fucked up occurrence - like, first reaction is to be a wiseass about it!
Lauren: Ok, I really wish I could somehow experience a real crime scene where all the professionals are just tearing it up with whatever crime scene they’re working on. That’s crazy.
Eric: Yeah, although I’m way too squeamish for anything like that!
Lauren: Ok, that’s a really good point. I think I’m with you. I’d only want that “in theory”.
Eric: Right, maybe some hardboiled detectives overseeing a, I dunno, vandalism case or something…gentle like that!
Lauren: I definitely hope they’re well-versed in their graffiti-washing jokes, haha. Ok, so you mentioned Mudlogging earlier. I’m curious how you came up with that one. You describe everything so well, which like, definitely you have first-hand knowledge from your professional life, but also I imagine that was challenging to make something that is very familiar to you, so brought-to-life and accessible to the majority of readers who have never been present at an oil rig.
Eric: I’m glad you liked that one, and that it felt real and relatable. I’ve only done a couple of wellside jobs, and both were actually for a kitty litter mine in Nevada (they mined clay for other stuff too, but a lot of it ended up being used for kitty litter). It’s a weird scene, and it always struck me as a surprisingly kind of mysterious part of our day to day lives…like the materials that we use, every day, have to come from somewhere, and in my case it was a clay mine waaaay out in the middle of the Nevadan desert. So I wanted to convey that kind of weirdness, being way out in nowhere with a bunch of strangers, all there to do very specific and very technical jobs for, kind of, mysterious reasons. OF COURSE, the difference there (aside from the monsters!) was that he was working on an oil rig, and therefore doing a lot more intensive and deeper drilling than I was ever exposed to.
Lauren: Well I can definitely appreciate the graduation from drilling for clay used in the household versus an oil rig where everyone knows there’s no oil and everything is nefarious and terrifying.
Eric: The usual way I end up writing stuff is often like that - I get one idea and then just kinda stick it onto another, and see what happens. I also have always had a lot of interest in the goofy hollow earth stuff, both in terms of the more “modern” ideas as well as the folkloric/mythological things, so they kind of naturally locked in together, the modern idea of well drilling and subsurface exploration and the idea of subterranean hell worlds.
Lauren: Kind of a weird question, but speaking of subterranean hell worlds, do you have a favorite hellscape or hellscapes, in fiction?
Eric: A big influence on my whole aesthetic are the scenes of Hell from the Dutch masters, Bosch and Bruegel and Van Eyck; the cover of TOADSTONES is a riff on Van Eyck’s “The Last Judgment” even (with Reagan added in). They’re always so weird and inventive and, as a bonus, full of some of the most truly inventive monsters you’ll ever see. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t highlight the Chinese Hell Scrolls, which are a genre of buddhist literature that are extensively illustrated with often extremely gruesome scenes of the torments of Hell. The really great thing is that, in these Chinese-influenced cosmographies, Hell is envisioned as this enormous bureaucratic apparatus, with like accountants and middle managers and departments and record offices, all of them engaged in the work of this enormously complicated otherworldly court whose purpose is to accurately administer not just justice, but the machinery of the cosmos.
Lauren: Ok, I have never seen the Chinese Hell Scrolls. I have to look that up immediately. I definitely feature a subterranean hell world in Kill Radio and I’m exploring one a little more in my next book, so the more believable I can make it, the better!
Eric: I feel like I get a similar sense from where you’ve set some of your stories - Junk Soul, your piece in the In Somnio collection, had a lot of really great, really lived in junkyard scenes that felt really vital and pulled from life, and then there’s a lot in your upcoming Kill Radio that struck me as kinda fun-house mirrored from real life. Am I right, or are you just really imaginative? (you’re obviously that too! But you know what I mean!)
Lauren: Ah cool! I didn’t know you read Junk Soul. Thanks for checking it out. That one was me trying to come up with a Modern Gothic horror story, for that particular anthology. I really just search-engined a bunch of ideas that popped in my head, sometimes looking at images to set a mood I’m feeling, or other times looking for factual stuff I could turn into horror. I just keep running down rabbit holes until the light bulb comes on. For that one, I found an article about a state where there’s literally a law that you can’t have a bunch of non-driveable cars sitting on your property. And if you hit a certain quantity, you have to register your property as a junkyard. Also, that detail about the chunk of motorcycle that was just lifted up by a tree as it grew and just absorbed the thing? I actually found that online, so it exists, which was a pretty neat discovery.
Eric: That’s great, and actually a really good metacommentary on, like, the traditional Lovecraftian sort of horror that I like, which is often predicated on somebody literally accidentally stumbling on something weird that turns out to run a lot deeper than they’d ever have expected. You should write a story about a horror writer trawling the internet for ideas, only to fall in an actual horrific hole!
Lauren: Would you believe me if I told you I already did? Well, sort of.
Eric: Fantastic!
Lauren: Someone Google Earth-ed Stull Cemetery and found the devil beckoning him to “rebuild his church”. It’s just a flash piece but I’m trying to get it published.
Eric: Sounds rad as hell! Hopefully it gets in somewhere soon so I can read it!
Lauren: I hope so too! Ok, so thinking about technology mixed with horror, I also loved your story, The 23 Southbound in Toadstones. I’m curious on that one. Did you already know those kinds of details? About bus models, parts, manufacturing and distribution? You sort of forget how every industry or hobby has all this depth and intrigue to it until you come across something like this.
Eric: How nerdy do you think I am, christ!? No, I ended up having to do some deep dives into the internet to learn about buses after I made the character a bus fanatic.
Lauren: I always thought, with two horror writers gushing about their foray into the genre, the first step is to plumb the depths of our supreme nerdiness until we hit bottom, so apparently I’ve found it, haha. Well anyway, that was a very convincing bus fanatic character. I loved how you really felt immersed in that kind of abandoned part of the city, and while the reader had that familiarity with a couple college kids doing a podcast, you sort of end up tumbling, or gunning it headfirst into this surreal, spooky dead place. And then I loved that switch to the POV of the survivor, so you never find out where that bus really takes you. Really cool story.
Eric: Thanks so much, glad you dug it! I do think, and maybe this just shows my prejudice from reading so much early 20th C pulp horror, but like mechanically, from a storytelling perspective, it’s just really REALLY helpful to have ONE character be an ultra esoteric nerd about something obscure while the SECOND POV character is kind of just along for the ride. Really lets the reader look over the shoulder more easily, I guess. PLUS, podcasters aren’t that far from the classic “antiquarian in search of ancient lore” type that shows up in so much weird fiction.
Lauren: That’s true, characters with that function can be interpreted in so many ways, whether modern or not. It really helps get the background a little so it’s not always just “finding notes” and “going to the library”, haha. And it’s a lot of fun to nod to the old stuff while making it relatable from a modern (or futuristic) perspective.
Eric: That’s one of the things I like the most about the horror/weird genre, in that it, maybe more than any other genre, has these very definite kind of tropes or beats or structures that it lends itself to, and sometimes having that strict kind of “ruleset” lets you play with the ideas and stories in interesting ways. Like you know you’ve gotta have certain stuff, because the genre “DEMANDS” it, so it pushes you to try and find interesting ways to satisfy the genre conventions w/o slavishly reproducing the same old shit (hopefully!)
Lauren: Absolutely. If you throw all the horror tropes away, I mean what do you have left, haha, not much. But yeah, definitely making it into something new and acknowledging all that came before it… it’s a fine line.
Eric: This is probably super pretentious, but it always kinds of reminds me the Oulipians, you know? They’re a group of writers, French and American expats in France, George Perec and Harry Mathews and all, who would play these games with their writing, like introducing formal structures into their writing that severely limited the word they could use (or even removing letters entirely, like “no words with ‘e’ in them). And rather than being stultified by the limits, it kind of expanded their creativity by forcing them to find new and interesting ways of expressions. Not saying that’s what I do, by any stretch, but there is something very deeply satisfying about writing in genre, whatever genre, and finding ways of fitting your new story into the broader literature.
Lauren: Are you meaning like, blending Lit Fic and horror? Or also, bringing lots of world history into the story? Or just even more generally? Or all of the above haha
Eric: I think probably all of the above. There’s a way in which a horror story, no matter who is writing it or who is reading it, kind of STARTS off with certain expectations. Like, unless as a reader you’re coming at it completely blind, you KNOW the writer is going to try and spook you out or gross you out or whatever, so you START reading it with a kind of expectation. And I feel like, as a writer, it’s kind of fun to know a bit more about how the reader is going to engage with the material right off that bat. Because then you can start to play with that, or subvert it, or anticipate it and try and mix it up for them. It’s a real strength of genre fiction, I think, in that the reader almost always is approaching it from a certain perspective. I’m rambling, but I feel like there’s something there in the world of genre that you don’t get from strictly ‘lit’ fiction.
Lauren: Yep, genre fiction really feels like playing sometimes. Even more so than Lit Fic. Like we’re all just in here, geeking out together. If you’re picking up a Horror book you’re already part of the club, unless someone is holding you at knifepoint. And, I guess if someone’s holding you at knifepoint, then you’re the character.
Eric: Exactly!
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Eric Williams is a writer who lives on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. More about him can be found on his website: geoliminal.com.
Lauren Bolger is a writer and music fanatic living in some suburbs you haven’t heard of near Chicago. More on her website at laurenbolger.com.
