Before we dive into your list: what is cosmic horror?

Cosmic horror, understood one way, is a contemporary examination of the romantic idea of the sublime – of those things that are so vast that they are simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. This is manifest in cosmic horror stories.

Often it is manifest through a concern with deep time: those stretches of geological or astronomical time that are so vast as to just beggar imagination. We’re thinking about the past here, but I suppose it could also extend into the future. When we use measurements like billions to talk about years or miles or what have you, that’s one way that it’s manifest. It’s also manifest through a concern with entities which are in some way only partially knowable to humankind, and whose unknowability is itself part of the horror. We want to understand them, but we cannot fundamentally understand them – which is not to say that we cannot interact with them, or they with us. And in the process of that interaction, they could harm us to the point of not just death, but a kind of annihilation.

What draws you to such terror, as a writer?

The ironic thing is that I never thought of myself as a cosmic horror writer, until there were certain stories I wrote that people said were cosmic horror. And I thought, ‘Yes, I guess they are.’ When I published my novel The Fisherman, a number of people said it was cosmic horror, and again when I looked at it in retrospect, I saw it was. So cosmic horror seems to be something that I do without always being tremendously conscious of it. I was invited to contribute to a number of Lovecraftian anthologies, and the stories that I wrote for them tended not to be grand, sweeping cosmic vistas; they were almost Raymond-Carver-esque stories about people going through their small routines as all this cosmic stuff was happening in the background. So it’s something I’m still thinking about, and something about my own work and my own process that continues to mystify me – but not in a bad way. I feel it’s good to have some questions about your own process and your work.

Let’s look at your first choice. Could you tell us about T. E. D. Klein’s Dark Gods?

Dark Gods is a collection of four novellas. For a long time, Klein was known only for those novellas and a novel called The Ceremonies, which was published in the mid-1980s. Stephen King said The Ceremonies was the best horror novel since Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. Klein is very much a self-conscious student and descendant of such forebears as H.P. Lovecraft, and not just Lovecraft – lesser-known writers too, Frank Belknap Long among them.

In these four novellas, Klein takes us through different horror scenarios which are rooted in some of the conceits of cosmic horror. Maybe the most famous story in the book is called “Children of the Kingdom,” and it’s about a race of monsters living in the sewers of New York City. It takes as a historical reference the great blackout in the 1970s, when at least one of these things makes an appearance. My personal favourite is the last story in the book, “Nadelman’s God,” which is about a guy who discovers that he may have accidentally created a god via a poem that he wrote for his college literary journal. Someone takes that poem a bit too seriously, and in the process, this entity is summoned or created in the world.

There’s also a story in there called “Black Man with a Horn*,”* which is an epistolary story somewhat in the fashion of H. P. Lovecraft, written by a man who is supposed to have been one of Lovecraft’s correspondents. It’s an example of creeping dread: a terrible thing is seen at a distance, which is steadily moving forward as we read each letter. And, finally, there’s a story called “Petey,” which is about a particularly weird social gathering in Connecticut (which is already a weird state), and which leads to certain terrible things happening…

This is much the earliest of your choices, published in 1985 – everything else on your list is from this century. Is there a reason this one stands out to you among the more classic options?

When I was thinking about what books I wanted to pick, my initial thought was, you have to talk about Lovecraft. And if you’re talking about Lovecraft, you really have to talk about Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen; and you probably also have to talk about Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; and then if you’re talking about Lovecraft and Howard and Smith, you probably have to talk about Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber and C. L. Moore and Henry Kutner… There’s a whole genealogy. And instead I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that Lovecraft’s work – and also Blackwood and Machen for that matter – would be reasonably well known to a contemporary audience; or at least if I mention their names, it’s easy to go to Penguin Classics and find the Lovecraft or Blackwood or Machen edition. These things are widely available. And I suspect that if you were to do some type of cosmic horror search online, you would find those names popping up again and again. So I wanted to focus on works coming later in that tradition.

It’s a tradition that starts somewhat self-consciously. Lovecraft is aware that Machen and Blackwood are two of his big influences. So are Lord Dunsany and M. R. James, but the others are most immediately his forebears. And Lovecraft famously opened up his creations and his invented universe to Smith and Howard, who do the same thing. So there’s a kind of open-source universe very early on – I suspect because no one was making any money off it, so it was fine, they could all play in each other’s sandboxes. Lovecraft was writing to Robert Block and also to Fritz Leiber, and encouraging them… So there’s a genealogy, a kind of tradition, almost from the get-go.

I am very interested in writers coming along a little bit later who were reading all of that, and a lot of other things as well. Klein’s work meant a tremendous amount to me. In some ways, I was much more bowled over by Dark Gods than I was by The Ceremonies the first time I read it. Dark Gods lives on in my brain in a hideous way. It’s a particular achievement, in terms of stylistic grace, character development, and also the audacity of its imagination. And there’s a deep engagement with the substance of cosmic horror that leads these stories in some very interesting and innovative directions.

Lovecraft will come up again in your last choice, even though we’re omitting him from the list… But for now, let’s go to your second title. Please introduce Ramsey Campbell’s The Darkest Part of the Woods.

This is a novel that Ramsey wrote after having taken some time away from a long career principally writing supernatural horror of a cosmic horror stripe. He pauses to write a trio of non-supernatural suspense novels. This was something that a number of writers did in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the horror market had largely imploded, so writers had to look for other ways to express their concerns. The American writers Thomas Tessier and Peter Straub had done the same thing, and even Stephen King had played around with other iterations of the horror genre.

So having tried these things, which are very interesting technical experiments, Campbell came back to writing Lovecraft-y cosmic horror. It was in a very self-conscious way, much as Klein had done, possibly even more so.

This is a novel about a forest located in a part of England that was never covered by the ice sheets. So this is a particularly ancient place. There is an asylum on the border of this forest, and within the forest, there’s a tower, built by a man some centuries ago who was looking to engage in something terrible; and the family who are associated with the asylum are all caught up in the long-term ramifications of those earlier experiments.

Campbell manages to give us a novel where it might seem from the outside that very little is happening, but actually there are events of cosmic, galactic magnitude taking place. It’s a wonderful book that is deeply and playfully engaged with the history of cosmic horror fiction – with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long and so on – but which also manages to be very English, and concerned with where England is in the early part of the 21st century.

Can you tell, from this book, that he was recently writing suspense?

Ramsey writes about a novel a year and is still busily working away. I think that you can tell a Ramsey Campbell novel, regardless of what it’s about; there are certain quirks and narrative strategies that he deploys, whether it’s a non-supernatural suspense novel, or something about a cosmic entity that’s descending to earth.

There’s a great interest in characters who may be mishearing things, and language slips… As a very young boy, Ramsey was stamped by Lovecraft’s influence, but later on, he would discover Nabokov, and the playfulness that you find in Nabokov’s language works its way into Ramsey’s work, where characters mishear things. There are puns that are made, which add to a destabilizing effect that reality itself is falling apart.

There’s also a great interest in people who are paranoid. He also read a lot of Graham Greene – and if you think about the early Graham Greene, things like Brighton Rock, there’s a real paranoia. That shows up throughout Ramsey’s work. And he’s very good at portraying people who are aggrieved in some way, shape, or form. They may be the villains of his pieces, or they may just be assorted other characters – once in a while, one of them might be a protagonist.

You can absolutely see a through line from his very first novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother, all the way to The Darkest Part of the Woods and beyond.

Your third choice is Laird Barron’s *The Croning. *What’s this one about?

This was Laird’s first full-length cosmic horror novel. He had written a shorter novel called The Light is the Darkness, which is a strange, sprawling, Roger-Zelazny-meets-H.-P.-Lovecraft dark fantasy. The Croning concerns a man who is getting older, maybe reaching the end of his natural lifespan. He has been married to the same woman for decades, and he has realised at some point earlier in his life that he doesn’t really know his wife quite as well as he thought. At the end of his life, this grows ever more clear. They’re both older, although she does not seem to have aged quite as harshly as he has…

The novel moves back and forth in time between their younger days and their later years, and times in between. In fact, it moves all the way back to a kind of fairy tale time that Laird calls antiquity, which he’s returned to in some of his more recent stories. As part of its plot, the fairy tale character who we may know as Rumpelstiltskin is revealed to be something far worse than Rumpelstiltskin.

The novel is ambitious. It’s well-written. And it’s one of the few recent horror novels to have scared me. Laird’s stuff consistently tends to be the stuff that can really still frighten me. There’s lots of other stuff that I love, but which doesn’t have that same effect.

We talked earlier about paranoia and mishearings, forms of unreliable narration… We have another unreliable narrator here, right?

The protagonist is experiencing gaps in his memory. Those gaps may be the result of old age, or of something like Alzheimer’s – but they may be the result of things that are far more sinister and terrible.

It makes me think of your opening remarks, that unknowability is often what’s scariest. I guess these techniques build that, for the reader. In your own work, narration is often second or third-hand, narrative voices recounting a time they were told a story by someone who heard it elsewhere…

Absolutely. Years ago, a friend of mine posted a picture somewhere on social media: it was a photograph showing a man holding a picture frame, and inside that picture frame was another picture frame, and inside that picture frame… infinite regression of picture frames. And he said, ‘Hey, look, it’s a John Langan story.’ And my friends thought that was much funnier than I did – but at the same time, fair enough. I have to cop to loving nested narratives. I don’t think I’ve gone quite as far as I could possibly go, but I do love and indulge that.

It makes your inventions feel very horribly possible, because this is exactly how we hear these stories in real life…

Yes. I come from a family of storytellers. My parents were from Scotland. When they were very small, the Second World War was going on, so they grew up during the Blitz and such, and even after that, they grew up without TV, just the radio. So they developed the ability to tell stories. A lot of the stories were just, ‘This is what happened at work today’ or ‘Here’s a crazy thing that happened when I was younger’…

When my brother and I were small, we could think of no finer entertainment than a Sean Connery James Bond movie, but they were always broadcast on American TV very late at night. We would only get to stay up and watch the first half hour. But the next day, my father would narrate the rest of the movie to us in exhaustive detail (carefully censored!). So I do have this family heritage of storytelling.

At the same time, a lot of the fiction that I read… I really loved things like *The Great Gatsby, *and Conrad – so much of Conrad is all about those narrators telling stories. So you might say I’m over-determined to write this kind of narrative.

This leads us nicely to your latest collection, Lost In The Dark and Other Excursions – please tell us about these newest stories.

Lost in the Dark is my new collection of stories out from Word Horde Press. It’s a collection of stories that I wrote over a couple of years in the later part of the 2010s. When I put together a collection, my methodology is really just chronological; I find it very interesting to take all the stories that I wrote over this thirty-month period, edit them and put them together in a book, and then see what connections develop among them as I’m writing the story notes.

In this case, I noticed that a lot of the stories involve the sea or water in some kind of significant way… A lot of them were very deliberate and self-conscious riffs on earlier material. There’s a lot of stuff that looks at found-footage, both in a film sense, but also in the sense of that Dracula reliance on primary documents to tell the story. And there’s one which is a mix of a story and an essay about why I love horror. The book has an introduction by Victor LaValle, which is very flattering and makes me sound much smarter than I am, and for which I am eternally grateful to Victor.

You’ve already mentioned the recurrence of water – I did want to ask about that…

The water fascinates me. It’s one of the reasons that I write story notes for my collections. I have to spend time with them in a slightly more editorial or literary-critical way than I do when I’m writing them. Then I’m just trying to let it flow, but after, the literature student comes forth…

Some of it has to do with the fact that at the time, I was invited to contribute to a couple of different anthologies whose theme was water horror, for lack of a better word. Horror anthology publishing goes through certain phases. In the early 2000s, it was all zombies, and then in the later 2000s into the teens it was all Lovecraft, and now it seems to be all folk horror. So that’s some of it. But beyond that, water shows up in other stories in all sorts of ways, which makes me wonder, does it represent something more fundamental? There’s important water imagery in my novel *The Fisherman, *and there have certainly been other stories where water has shown up. I think of water as a particularly liminal kind of space. It’s completely frightening – beautiful and fascinating, but also frightening and imposing.

Your next choice is also a short story collection, Livia Llewellyn’s Furnace. Could we quickly talk about the art of a horror short story as a form – do you find they tend to start long and be cut down, or come fully formed?

I usually think what I’m writing is going to be very short, under 5000 words. Then, in the process of writing the story, it starts to grow. Some of it is that as I write, I’m editing, I’m adding stuff. By the time I’m done, my average length is somewhere around 10,000 words, 40-ish pages. At a shorter length, I’m much more of a hit-and-miss writer.

The great difficulty in writing short short stories is that you don’t want them to turn into simple trap stories, where the narrator walks into the equivalent of a Venus flytrap and is just eaten. You want them to be effective and weird and strange, and I find that a great challenge at the very, very short length. At greater lengths, the characters can develop and breathe: so even if they walk into the Venus flytrap at the end, it matters to you as the reader, because you’ve gotten to know who they are.

Great, thank you. Let’s talk about the stories in Furnace…

Livia Llewellyn is a secret treasure of the horror writing community. She’s written two short story collections, Engines of Desire and *Furnace. *Livia’s stories are beautifully written: she writes, more often than not, in a kind of Baroque prose. They are horrific. They are deeply, explicitly sexual. In some cases, they will go back over very familiar territory – for example, she writes a story in Furnace in which each of Dracula’s three wives gets a monologue to talk about herself and her relationship with Dracula (not in a simple ‘He was my boyfriend’ way, in a more complicated way).

There is a long, brilliant story in *Furnace *called “The Last Clean, Bright Summer,” which is written like a period piece about an American family going to a beach. The prose is much more mundane, much more pared down, and yet the family encounters something that is so bizarre and so sublime and so bonkers… It uses all its prosaic qualities to its advantage, so that when you see this incredible thing at the end of the story, you’re completely bowled over by it. You’re caught off guard.

I realise that I’m speaking in frustratingly vague generalizations, but it’s such an amazing story. Livia is one of those writers, like Nadia Bulkin, who has written more stories than she has collected and published as books. I wish more people were familiar with both their works, because they’re just astonishing talents.

There must be a real art to the ending that is bonkers enough to surprise you, without losing you or making you laugh instead. Horror writers are maybe excluded more than other genres from using an ‘expected’ ending – but the unexpected is a dicey game.

I was so caught up in the story that I did not laugh. If I had laughed, it would be in a kind of ‘Oh, my god…’ way – the laugh of gobsmacked admiration.

The expected ending for horror, I guess, is, ‘Oh, it was so terrible, I went insane. Now I’m writing in my insane asylum’ – or whatever. The writer Kate Wilhelm said that when you write a story, there is the expected ending – and she said you should probably try to avoid that – but then there’s the opposite of the expected ending, and that can be expected too. She said that what you want to try to do is find the third way: not what is expected, and not its antithesis, but some other path forward.

Your last choice brings us back around to H. P. Lovecraft. Could you tell us about The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle?

This is a wonderful novella, which is a response to one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most egregious stories, *The Horror at Red Hook. *It’s one of his New York City stories, and it’s just hideously racist, in ways that are very hard to rationalise or equivocate about – it’s these evil foreigners and dark people and so on who are going to bring the monsters back. Victor tackles that story head-on, and writes a kind of a complement to it, in which a young man is given a mission that brings him into contact with the other side of elements in the original story. The heroic law enforcement officers in the Lovecraft story become much more corrupt and sinister figures, and the evil cultists, while still evil cultists, seem no worse than the forces of systematic racism and oppression that are at work through the law enforcement and political apparatus of New York City in the 1920s. It’s a story that manages to remain true in some ways to Lovecraft’s vision in terms of the summoning of the Eldritch Horror, but does it in a way that is honestly heartbreaking. It’s an amazing achievement, and in a hundred or so pages.

Do you need to have read* The Horror at Red Hook?*

No. I had not read The Horror at Red Hook before I read *The Ballad of Black Tom. *Once you do read Red Hook, you see, ‘Oh, right, I get what he’s doing.’ But you don’t have to have read it to get a lot out of The Ballad of Black Tom.

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