It’s a pleasure and a thrill to write an essay for the exceptional Volume 1 Brooklyn, especially a (brief) memoir of growing up in a house that may (or may not) be full of ghosts. If you like appropriately ambiguous true stories of the weird, then I hope you’ll check it out!
Read the full article at Vol.1 Brooklyn.
I was in a very particular headspace when I wrote Ariadne, I Love You. Keen to explore a very particular kind of supernatural occurrence: one that could be easily justified in rational terms, without being entirely explained away. At the same time, I was obsessed with the idea of inheritance, of the scars the past leaves on the present, and a particular kind of gothic sensibility that arises when a character worries over the same fixation for decades. While I wasn’t trying to emulate any particular story or author, these five books left marks that – in one form or another – somehow found their way onto the page. They are masterworks of glorious ambiguity, of weirdness, darkness and the unexplained. They embody a particular sensibility – at once bleak and wry – that is a comfort on a wintry grey afternoon. They console with tragedy and fear, chipping away at the foundations of what you took to be real. I hope they give you the joy they have given me…
Read the full article at Big Indie Books. Then go follow them on Twitter at @BigBooks.
Have you ever seen a ghost? Or heard one? Maybe not. But perhaps you’ve had some experience or other you couldn’t easily explain, some weird occurrence which you mull on even now. Did it happen the way you remember? Or did you imagine it? That ambiguity, unfocused and inconclusive, is the essence of what we think of as the supernatural.
Read the full article at Vol.1 Brooklyn.
I once read an interview with crime writer James Ellroy, who spoke bluntly when asked if his characters were flesh and blood. He said it was disingenuous for writers to say they had no control over their creations. The choices about their behaviour, their actions and reactions, did not arise independently – each was an artistic decision, made by him.
The Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin holds a similar, albeit more extreme position, describing the tendency of some authors to impute independent agency to their characters as ‘magical thinking’ – a politely belittling alternative to calling it ‘bullshit’. To Sorkin, there is no character beyond the words on the page. Characters do not ‘live’ beyond the individual choices that he, as author, makes for them; the specific traits or behaviours or actions that he chooses to show. If a character likes to drink warm lemonade, or is a hoarder with an obsession for dog-eared National Geographics, it is because room temperature soda and thrift store magazine collections are intrinsic to some dramatic purpose of Sorkin’s design. They exist on the page, in service to the story.
In this model of the author–character relationship, the author is a god, the character a figure made of clay into which the illusion of life is breathed.
Some part of me (the part that doesn’t balk at hard-boiled materialism) knows they are right. I know it. And yet—
Read the full article over at the Horror Tree. Then go follow them on Twitter at @HorrorTree.