“Ghosts. Monsters. And Things that Linger.”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed.
In this column I explore the phenomenon of Night Time Logic and the strange and uncanny side of horror and dark fiction through in-depth conversation with authors.
My short story collection with Cemetery Dance is titled The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales in homage to Robert Aickman’s strange tales. It can be found here.
In February 2024 I spoke with Cemetery Dance’s own Dan Franklin about his new book, ghosts, monsters, folklore, and much more. You can tune into our conversation here on YouTube.
Franklin’s newest novel These Things Linger is out now from Cemetery Dance. We begin our conversation here at the very, very beginning of the book…
DANIEL BRAUM: Your new book from Cemetery Dance, These Things Linger, opens with a quote from Irish musician Hozier: “Honey, don’t feed me. I will come back.” Tell us about the song the line is from and why you chose it to open the book.
DAN FRANKLIN: Music is a central point for pretty much anything I write! I’m not particularly fast at it, so I end up taking months or years to write a book. Certain songs just sort of collect as matches for the story, night after night, while chipping away at drafts and edits. Hozier is incredible and “It Will Come Back” has a gritty, jagged energy to it that is so much of what I was hoping to pull into These Things Linger. A slower, rustic build up at the beginning that pushes into a final stretch that completely frays apart into a heavy heartbeat warning. And the lyrics hit that feeling, too. It initially pretends to be a love story, but it’s cautionary. It’s about letting things in that you shouldn’t, and how, if you do, they’re yours to keep whether you like it or not. It’s about them staying and turning ruinous and how you can’t ever really escape certain things once they get their hooks in. Until they’re, literally, howling outside your door.
I love it.
And that’s a huge parallel for the themes of These Things Linger — that parts of your past are waiting for you and you cannot afford to offer them any way in, because they can’t be put back out. In the literal case of the ritual in the story, but also as a broader concept about the things we pass down to our children, generation after generation. A whole bunch of those are terrible weights.
These Things Linger is categorized as a supernatural thriller. Can you take a stab at a definition of what a supernatural thriller is, or at least what it means for you? And why does These Things Linger best fit into that “box”?
Genres and subgenres have always been tricky for me to figure! Which I suppose is kind of silly, since I work in publishing, but to me thrillers often have a mystery component, a driving force of trying to discover what is happening and why and how things will play out, complete with twists and misdirection, red herrings and reveals as you circle the central plotline. Horror can play out a whole bunch of ways, but These Things Linger absolutely aims to keep you guessing as it rolls along.
Before we dive into These Things Linger I want to ask you about your previous novel, The Eater of Gods that was out last year from Cemetery Dance also. What is Eater of Gods about?
The Eater of Gods is a bit of an old school mummy vibe sort of book! Not the Brendan Frasier kind (I do love those movies), but from before that, back when mummies were seen as lonely figures who had their rest violated and their peace robbed away. It’s full of grief and confusion and feeling wronged by God. And a gigantic, vengeful death trap in a forgotten patch of the Libyan desert, because that’s always cool.
Professor Haas is a middle-aged man picking up his late wife’s research into the final resting place of Kiya, who was queen to the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. Before she passed, his wife told him that nothing really dies if it’s remembered, but that’s a bit of a double-edged message when Kiya should very well have been forgotten. The mythologies are awesome, and there are real mysteries unsolved. Kiya was an actual person whose life and death are shrouded in mystery.
How do the two books differ? Was it different for you writing them?
While both Eater and Linger deal with heavy topics, Eater is more about the transformative power of grief, and how there comes a point where you pour so much in and get so little out that you can turn sour and violent and deadly. Linger has more of a focus on heritage and regrets and more hope to it.
Eater was a relatively fast book to write, and the topic is very near to my heart. My father drowned on the day I turned twenty-five. Seeing that impact my mother, and my best friend losing their little brother to cancer all over the course of a year or two… there’s a line in the book about how it’s a strange and lonely thing to live while others die. And it is.
Who are some of your favorite writers? Do any of them influence your writing?
I have loads of favorite writers! Richard Matheson, Joe Hill, and Kealan Patrick Burke are a few of my favorites from the horror genre, but there are a bunch outside of the genre too. King has that magic in him, but Joe Hill’s writing has an edge to it that is just incredible, and he uses it to sneak emotional impact in without you ever putting up a guard. Matheson wrote about concepts far larger than his stories themselves, and he managed to marry them so seamlessly together that when the hammer drops you immediately want to turn back to the beginning. I Am Legend is my favorite book I’ve read due to those last few pages. And I’d put Burke up there too. He manages to coax out an emotional honesty from situations that rings true on so many levels. You take something like Kin and there’s so much depth to the characters beyond the direct cannibal-family horror tropes. They’re part of why I love reading, and writing, and they’re the highwater marks for what books can do for me, and in my mind they sit every bit alongside the traditional classical greats.
Without going into spoiler territory, there is a notion in the first chapter from the main character Alex Wilson’s Uncle Matt: “The greatest blessing is a line that breaks.”
Without giving us directly how this plays out in the book, what does this notion mean for you, in life?
Most of the time we don’t get what we want. And sometimes that’s a really, really good thing.
In addition to dedicating the book to your wife and kids, you dedicate it to those cursed by their ancestry and to those whose burden lingers. The first few chapters of the book give us Alex’s life as a teen on the border of college and pre-adult hood. Tell us about this part of his life. His ancestry and his burden.
Alex grew up poor and rural, raised by his extremely quaint uncle. His uncle tries his best, but the man is in a pretty rough place himself, and among all the positives he teaches him, little bits of the other side slither in, too. He’s an alcoholic. He has some pretty ugly views about life. He’s afraid, and angry, and he bottles everything up because he feels like it’s his burden to fix things himself. And it’s not just his uncle, it’s Alex’s whole world that stamps an imprint on him, day after day. Fair Hill isn’t a healthy little town. His childhood, his role models, all of that aims him along the course toward awful stuff.
Then I look at my own kids and I can see my own mental issues, my own shortcomings and failures stamping onto them, the same way as happens to each of us, and you can only hope you pass down the tools to survive the curses you pass along.
Tell us about the magic that Alex finds himself mixed up in. His first encounter with it, as a teen, with the character Lacey Jameson.
Alex had dabbled in superstition his whole life, but unlike most of his friends he can’t really distinguish the difference between thrill-seeking fun and genuine fear. With Lacey, he’s so caught up in puberty and in his fixation on her, that he doesn’t really draw an appropriate line between what is a game and what is way past his control until too late. It all seems reasonable until it’s gone completely bad.
The chapters “Lake” and “Revenant” finds Alex back in his small town after graduating and getting married and leaving it behind. He is an engineer and professes to see himself as living in the world of rationality.
How do the decisions he make after having the strange encounter in the lake link up to his childhood and how does it set the story in motion?
He’d effectively put his life in an entirely different area than his childhood. He’d migrated as far as possible from that scene. After his uncle dies and he takes a slight step toward it, he finds himself sliding off balance, dragged more and more back to where he started. Little cracks start forming in his mental and emotional armor, and stuff starts sliding in and widening the gap.
Folklore is introduced to the mix of the story with Uncle Matt’s friend Buzz. What is the connection between folklore and horror, particularly horror being written today? Why do you think the two go well together? What is the appeal to readers and writers?
I think folklore is largely a way to give shape and form to real, terrible threats and needs in their societies. Lately, using horror to address social undercurrents has become a heavy focal point, but in some respects it always has been. Dracula was never simply about a guy who wants to bite you. Not just as horror, either. Folklore and ritual are all expressions of something greater, of ways to take control and understand a world that can feel senseless, and that fits together perfectly with horror as the genre can take it at face value as well as prod at the undercurrents.
Let’s talk about ghosts. In part two of the novel, Alex and his wife enlist the services of a psychic. One of the notions put out there is that we see ghosts as “how they see themselves and we fill in the rest.”
Tell us about that.
Almost all the ghost stories I’ve heard detail how the ghost is dressed and that’s just wild to me. If we’re taking ghosts at face value, how they see themselves would not be the same as we see them. We see and filter things, and the dead are no longer able to defend themselves, so a lot of what we think of them is what we impose on them. There’s a delicate middle ground anchoring the two together, which is more or less true of non-ghosts too.
What are some of your favorite ghost stories? What is the appeal of the ghost story for you? Why is the ghost story such an enduring kind of story?
Pretty much every supernatural horror story is a ghost story, in some respect! Our supernatural interests almost always turn over toward either mortality or our history, because what came before and what comes after are the two big parts of the horizon and that’s ghosts. As for favorite ghost stories, that’s trickier to pick. You can go from campfire stories to Peter Straub’s book where the ghosts aren’t actual ghosts, but throughout it all there’s a fascinating fun-ness.
Things quickly escalate and get out of control. Tell us about the creature called “a ghost eater”
If something is out there, there’s always something else looking to eat it. The ghost eaters go hunting around for food, because that’s the way nature works. It also answers why hauntings aren’t all the time within the world of the book. Sooner or later the gutsnatcher comes snuffling along and feeds on them. And with the idea that ghosts remain because of unsolved mysteries and trauma, the logical step is that a ghost eater would really like those things. That gets them fed.
Without going into the domain of the spoilers we can say that These Things Linger is also a “monster book” due to a late in the book appearance.
What are some of your favorite literary monsters? What is the enduring appeal of monster stories? Why do readers love them?
Monsters are my favorite part of horror! Whether it’s folklore, mythologies, cryptids, or just plain “there’s a wild animal that wants to bite you until you are meaty mess,” monsters give corporeal body to danger. It’s something instinctive that we all understand. Comfort is looking at the world and feeling like you can take it on. Monsters are the challenge to that, real world or otherwise. Of course the classics and the whole debate on Frankenstein being the monster vs his creation, Dracula, etc, but it’s a bigger, deeper pool than that. You could take the Judge from Blood Meridian and say he’s something that is monstrous and I’d say that’s fair. You could put the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, too. As humans, we pull everything else into our world, where we’re the top of the food chain. We’re the one animal that isn’t an animal. We sit at the top… but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world agrees. That’s monster. There’s a mercilessness where people are viewed as prey, and it’s an inherently fascinating concept, especially since underneath all our technology and trappings we’re basically hairless squishy apes.
The book has a great ending that evokes one of the all-time great for me: Stephen King’s Pet Semetary.
We are not going to go into spoiler territory but I think it is safe to talk about the characters and themes you’ve put out there that allow this ending to work and feel satisfying and thrilling to the reader.
In Pet Semetary, the main character Louis Creed, a father and a husband, makes increasingly dangerous decisions. While the reader sees these as bad decisions we also see he does them out of love and desperation. Tell us about Alex Wilson and his family and what his family means to him.
Pet Semetary is absolutely one of my favorite books! King has the magic in him. Alex is in something of a parallel circumstance between wanting for himself and wanting for his family, and by the time the two come into full conflict it’s far too late for him to pull back and change his course. There’s a line somewhere about how bad decisions and good ones look wildly similar when your desperate, and that’s a theme of both books. It’s like gambling and you keep doubling down so that if you get a single win you can fix all the debts you’ve built.
The novel comes around full circle and while it feels like a circle is close it also feels like something is about to be blown wide open. This kind of structure, with revelations and actions that open up new worlds and new conflicts we sometimes see used to great effect in horror. Along with Pet Semetary, what are some of the great endings in horror stories? What are some of your favorites and why?
I’m a huge sucker for endings anchored to beginnings. Pet Semetary is spectacular for it, but King has a bunch of them, despite the reputation about his endings. Cujo is one of the hardest hitting circular endings out there. It’s damn beautiful. Matheson came up earlier, but I Am Legend has, in my opinion, the best ending in any book I’ve read. The title literally tells you the ending, but it takes the entire book for the reader to understand the gravity of it. Endings like that just make you want to start reading it again because everything that happened gets a new twist on it. I also just love patterns and cycles and finding them all over. Whether it’s in math or story rhythm or any of it. There’s something so intrinsically satisfying about them and about how it gives a resonance that continues afterwards, even if it’s a shifting pattern!
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DAN FRANKLIN is the author of The Eater of Gods and These Things Linger from Cemetery Dance. He wrote his first attempt at a horror novel when he was seven. It was terrible. He has, since, improved. The winner of several local awards for short stories and an occasional poem, Dan Franklin lives in Maryland with his extremely understanding wife, his cosmically radiant daughter, and a socially crippling obsession with things that creep.
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DANIEL BRAUM writes “strange tales” in the tradition of Robert Aickman. His stories, set in locations around the globe, explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural.
His novella The Serpent’s Shadow and short story collection The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales are out now from Cemetery Dance.
Information about his books and events, such as the New York Ghost Story Festival can be found here.
