Music and Horror, Embracing Tropes, and the Midnight Muse
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance online and over on my YouTube channel where we explore the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror, dark fiction, and more.
My latest book, Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories, out now from Cemetery Dance Publications, is full of these kind of subtle, strange, and intentionally ambiguous tales the operate with Night Time Logic.
Author Jo Kaplan is an author whose work uses Night Time Logic and she is a repeat guest on the Night Time Logic YouTube series. Her latest novel is called The Midnight Muse. I recently had a chance to speak with her about the new book.
DANIEL BRAUM: Please tell us about two of the characters in The Midnight Muse, Brynn and Harlow. When the story opens, we see them as childhood friends bonded together by the magic of creating music. They grew up and formed the band at the center of the story, Queen Carrion.
JO KAPLAN: Though Brynn is missing right from the start of the book, their relationship really sits at the core of the story. Harlow cares deeply for Brynn and is devastated by her disappearance. When we catch up with the band a year later, Harlow is not coping well. She’s drinking too much and obsessively searching for Brynn, unable to move on. We learn more about the complicated nature of their relationship as the story unravels details of their shared history.
In the beginning of the book the characters talk about the song by Rezos Seress composed in 1933, “Gloomy Sunday,” which has come to be known as the Hungarian Suicide song. How does this song relate to the Queen Carrion song “Midnight Ritual” and the plot of The Midnight Muse?
I was fascinated when I learned about the history of “Gloomy Sunday,” which is an oddly chilling tune said to have inspired listeners to commit suicide. This inspired me to create my own cursed song with Queen Carrion’s “Midnight Ritual,” which is what the band becomes known for after an incident at one of their shows when the power went out during the song, resulting in a stampede to the exit and one death. The band has carried around guilt over what happened at their show and gained some unwanted notoriety from it. The mythology of the song is that it somehow caused the darkness that fell on the venue — and that the darkness it brought was more than a mere power outage. There may be something in the tune itself that inspires madness, opens up a doorway, summons a demon… at least, these are some of the speculations listeners make in the book. Which one is true?
The novel is full of details and experiences of a young men and women in a band. An example is when one of the characters says that “the cello is the closest thing to human voice.”
How did your experience as a cello player in a modern band inform your creative process as a writer and the writing of The Midnight Muse?
What’s funny is that I actually wrote this book before I ever became part of a band. The early drafts from 2023 preceded my friend (singer, guitarist) asking me if I wanted to play cello on the songs she was writing. We released our first song as Guerra/paz in early 2024 — a haunting Spanish tune called “La Muerte Viene.” It’s a very low-key endeavor. We get together, jam, record songs, and occasionally play shows. I don’t exactly believe in manifesting, but maybe writing this book manifested my being in a band? It was honestly something I’d always wanted to do!
In any case, I’ve been playing cello for 28 years, mostly in orchestras, so music has pretty much always been an important part of my life. And being a cellist definitely inspired my inclusion of one in my fictional band. The cello really is widely considered to be one of the closest instruments to the human voice — it covers the entirety of our vocal range, at least. This is a tidbit I’ve heard for years and thought it would be something Brynn would say.
Who are some of your favorite bands? Do you have favorite rock music and band stories? Both positive ones and also those train wrecks and epic fighting between band mates that are ubiquitous in the history of rock?
My all-time favorite band is Trivium; I’ve been listening to them since high school and they have been consistently putting out metal bangers for the past twenty years. They also seem like nice guys with zero drama, which is refreshing to see in a long-running band. Some other favorites are Ghost, Queens of the Stone Age, System of a Down, In Flames, Jinjer, Avatar, Gojira, and Apocalyptica (the all-cello metal band).
I think one of the most iconic band stories is the saga of Fleetwood Mac somehow managing to put out Rumours amid complicated couplings, breakups, and divorce. At one point in The Midnight Muse, we learn that Brynn had made the sound decision never to date anyone in the band. Possibly, she was influenced by the relationship drama between the members of Fleetwood Mac, but then again, would we have gotten “Go Your Own Way” or “The Chain” without all the drama?
Relationship issues aside, I think the more people you gather together for a single creative purpose, the more likely you’ll wind up with some infighting or disagreement. And ego is bound to become an issue, too. It certainly is for Queen Carrion’s lead guitarist, who can’t stand to play second fiddle to Brynn.
Early on in the novel readers learn that Brynn goes missing after a solo venture into the Pacific Northwest forest. The band goes looking for her setting up a “cabin in the woods” situation. The trope of young people alone in isolation, usually the woods, goes back to the Evil Dead movies. What are your thoughts on this trope?
And, avoiding spoilers as you see fit, how does The Midnight Muse use the trope and how does it steer away from the trope?
I was definitely thinking about Evil Dead as I was setting this up. It’s almost impossible not to. I think I even have one of the characters reference it. The cabin itself was inspired by a real (very cozy and very lovely) cabin I stayed at once in Idyllwild. I went with a group of friends for the weekend, and we happened to get in on Friday the 13th… so you can imagine all the comments we were making about axe murderers in the woods! So it was my real experience of calling on familiar tropes that planted the seeds of the story. I picked up the guest book and thought it would be interesting to write a horror story told through guest book entries at a cabin in the woods. While that’s obviously not how The Midnight Muse is told, a guest book with some questionable entries does, in fact, appear in the novel.
I guess rather than try to ignore the obvious trope of writing a horror story about a cabin in the woods, I decided to embrace it and see how I could take it to an interesting place. As we learn more about the cabin and the mysterious growth in the woods, the book does take us in some unexpected directions, but I can’t say more without major spoilers! Early reviews have commented on the surprising twists and turns, so that makes me pretty happy.
At one point before her disappearance in an argument with her bandmates about how the band will move forward Brynn says, “I don’t want someone coming in and changing everything. I want us to stay Queen Carrion.”
This issue of identity, authenticity, and the eternal struggle against “selling out” seems to go hand in hand with bands and rock musicians.
How does this struggle come into play for the characters in The Midnight Muse?
Who are some bands from your vantage who stayed authentic? Who are some that “sold out”?
I wanted to explore this struggle not from the standpoint of a band that has “made it” and has now been given the opportunity to sell out, but from that of an indie band who has not seen a lot of success. Just as most writers do not make a living from their art, most musicians struggle to scrape by, especially with the exploitatively poor earnings of today’s popular music platforms like Spotify. For Queen Carrion, this is their art and their passion, and they would certainly like to make enough money for it to be worthwhile — but for Brynn, authenticity always comes first. In a flashback, the lead guitarist, Rhys, gives her a bit of a reality check about financial necessity; unlike Brynn, if presented with the opportunity to sell out and make bank, Rhys would absolutely take it. Rockstardom is his goal.
While I align myself more with Brynn than Rhys in terms of what I value in creative work, my hot take is that in general, I’m not particularly concerned with the idea of a band selling out. Every creator has their own goals and motivations, and whether a band is focused on just making great music or producing crowd-pleasing commercial jams that make them rich, that’s their business and it doesn’t really both me either way. Capitalism and art are a tough mix as it is. I just focus on what I like and ignore the rest.
Queen Carrion never completed their concept album titled, The Orchid. Only Brynn knew the final song which was never recorded before she disappeared.
Do you have any favorite concept albums?
I think my favorite would have to be David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. It’s kind of a perfect album. Honorable mentions include Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Green Day’s American Idiot, The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and Mastodon’s Crack the Skye. I’m sure there are more that I’m not thinking of or that I didn’t even realize were concept albums. To be honest, it’s the music rather than the concept that grabs me with all of these. I actually had to really give this question some thought, to make sure what I picked were considered concept albums. Is this an artifact of the streaming era, where we are inundated with algorithm-driven playlists rather than conceived albums? The way we experience music seems to be increasingly fragmented and decontextualized.
The dedication of the book is to “anyone who creates.”
When talking about the creative process with her band mates Brynn says, “if it’s at all worth-while it can’t be explained.”
This brought me back to the opening of the book where we see a scene from Brynn and Harlow’s childhood where Harlow bears witness to Brynn’s creativity and that spark seems like… magic.
I often think of something musician Regina Spektor said in an interview, something along the lines that she doesn’t feel a pressure to explain or chart that creative magic and just accepts it and is open to it. I also often think about the creative process of one of my favorite writers, Robert Aickman, who notoriously spoke very little to next to nothing about his process.
What is it about the creative process, particularly music that feels like magic?
Creativity is a mysterious process. Writing feels more logical to me than making music, though: I start with an idea and tease it out, peel back its layers, build on it, find the story and the characters. With music, it feels much more inexplicable. I listen to a song over and over, and then suddenly I can hear another part to it in my head, which I then have to figure out how to make into reality — into something other people can hear, too. It does feel like magic. I can understand why the ancient Greeks believed creativity came from the muses, that art and music are born from an external source because we don’t know where, inside of ourselves, it came from. I do think there is an external component to it — not that there are such things as muses, but that we have more to build on the more we take in. Great writers are voracious readers; great musicians are lovers of listening to music. We take it all in, and this gives us more to work with. The brain is a wondrous thing.
The structure of the novel is somewhat of a mosaic. Each chapter is a jump back and forth to different places in time, delivering pieces of the puzzle and mystery of what happened to Brynn and Queen Carrion.
Tell us about this structure and how it came to be.
I thought it would be an interesting challenge to see the fallout of the main event (that being the stay at the cabin in the woods) side-by-side with the telling of the event, without giving away exactly how it all ended up but offering some juicy hints that amplify the sense of mystery. Drawing out a mystery in an interesting way creates such delicious tension in a narrative, so I was trying this out to see how it worked. It is perhaps a little discombobulating at the very beginning, as the reader is getting oriented to the timelines, but I sort of wanted that as well — not to frustrate the reader but intrigue them. Adding to that, these timelines are interspersed with ephemera like pages from books, newspaper articles, blog posts, and scientific documents. I wanted these bits to add layers of detail and context to the central narrative and create that mosaic feeling you described, hopefully with the sense that it all comes together in a satisfying way by the end!
In your newsletter you often create cocktail pairings to go along with what you are reading. Will you be doing a cocktail pairing for The Midnight Muse?
Absolutely! When I announced the book last year, I did pair it with The Midnight Mule: a play on a Moscow Mule that was also inspired by a local bar called Basin 141 that has a drink with that name. I should come up with a different one for the publication, so I’ll need to give it some thought… stay tuned!
Where can readers connect and stay in touch with you and how can they get a copy of The Midnight Muse?
JK: My newsletter is on Substack, so you can find me there, along with my book and drink pairings. I also keep all my publication information and links up to date on my author website: https://jo-kaplan.com/. Otherwise, you can connect with me on Instagram @joannapary.
The Midnight Muse will be available anywhere books are sold, but I recommend supporting indie bookstores; if your local store doesn’t have it, then you can order it from Bookshop.org!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JO KAPLAN is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated author whose work has been described as “addictive… as beautiful and moving as it is creepy” (Publishers Weekly) and “immersive, chilling, and compelling” (Library Journal). She is the author of It Will Just Be Us, When the Night Bells Ring, and The Midnight Muse, as well as short stories which have appeared in publications such as Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, and award-winning anthologies. In addition to writing, she teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College and is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association’s Los Angeles chapter. She also plays cello in both the Symphony of the Verdugos and the indie Spanish rock band Guerra/paz. Find her at jo-kaplan.com
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DANIEL BRAUM writes short stories that explore the tension between the psychological and the supernatural. He intentionally adopts the term “strange tales” for his “Twilight Zone-like stories in homage to author Robert Aickman and the intentional ambiguities of his work.
His debut short story collection The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales was published by Cemetery Dance eBooks in 2016 and as a Cemetery Dance trade paperback in 2023.
His stories have also appeared in places ranging from the The Best Horror of the Year Volume 12 edited by Ellen Datlow and Shivers 8 edited by Richard Chizmar.
His latest books are the illustrated volume Creatures of Liminal Space from Jackanapes Press and Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories from Cemetery Dance Publications.
His website is https://bloodandstardust.wordpress.com.
