“Monsters as monsters”, “No God only devils”, and “Halloween”
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.
Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to run into Matthew Bartlett in conventions such as Necronomicon in Providence Rhode Island. In 2021 he was one of the readers in the Night Time Logic Summer Reading Series which can be viewed here.
I recently acquired a copy of Bartlett’s short story “Gaspar” from Dim Shores Press a sequel to the story “Rangel.”
We begin our conversation here with a discussion of “Rangel.”
DANIEL BRAUM: I love the story’s prose. May I share the first paragraph of the story here, which introduces us to Leeds?
MATTHEW BARTLETT: By all means!
Leeds, Massachusetts lived in Gaspar Bantam’s memory as a city of perpetual gloaming, of eternal October. In every memory, in every dream, the faces of jack-o-lanterns flickered from cornhusk-garlanded porches, treetops glowed orange and red under a sky of charcoal clouds, leaves crunched under your shoes like the snaps and cracks of radio static. The baskets at the farmer’s market spilled over with red and yellow peppers curled like beckoning fingers, and bulbs of garlic hung from knotted strings like clustered nests of pupae. You’d pull the comforter around you for warmth in the mornings but throw your jacket over the bike rack in the sun-seared afternoons before playing Pirates of the Woods. The whole village thrummed and hummed to the constant soundtrack of the peepers and the crickets and the whoosh of trucks on the rush and rumble Interstate. Autumn is said to solemnly herald a kind of dying but in Leeds, in that shadowy little city tucked into a curve of the might Connecticut River, the season is an ecstatic celebration of the fury of death’s rebirth.
What are some influences on your prose and prose style. Talking about on a sentence level and not necessarily a content or story level influence.
It’s really hard to say. It evolved over time and is inspired, probably, by a diverse cast of characters — Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Ligotti, and H.P. Lovecraft among them.
“Rangel” is the story of the titular named young girl’s brother, Gaspar and his return to the town of Leeds in an attempt to come to peace with her disappearance which happened 30 years prior.
The genre has seen disappeared children and the strange, weird, and horrific things that happen to them in fiction, ranging from King’s Dark Tower series to the recent film Weapons. What are your thoughts on the trope of disappeared-children stories, (if such a thing is even a trope.)?
It has been done to death, I guess, but after reading a story whose main character was searching for a missing family member and finding that story sort of wanting, I tied that kind of narrative to a prose-poem I’d already written about Halloween in New England. There’s little new under the sun, so where I can’t innovate, I try to put my personal stamp on old, irresistible tropes — missing children, black magic, grimoires, and the like.
Gaspar is a portrait of a character carrying long-term grief. What are some of your thoughts on how grief and genre fiction go together? How did you go about portraying Gaspar’s grief?
I’m not necessarily a usual practitioner of grief horror. I don’t even know if that was a talked-about thing when I wrote “Rangel.” What I did was use a little bit of family lore, something personal, and warp it beyond all recognition. I wanted to prove myself, show that I could do something a little more weighty after Gateways to Abomination, which was just balls-out horror scene after balls-out horror scene with little in the way of extended narrative. So I decided to set a personal, emotional story in this gonzo territory I’d already mapped out.
I suppose grief is popular in horror because it makes a character more vulnerable, and easily exploits that weakness. Grief is one of those universal things; we all grieve differently, goes the cliché, and so every grief story is a little different. In general, though I shy away from using a monster as a stand-in for grief. Mostly, I like a monster to be a monster, not a metaphor.
Halloween is long associated with horror and weird fiction. The story “Rangel” features wonderful depictions of Autumn in New England often by means of contract with Gaspar’s life in Los Angeles.
In what ways does the story lean into Halloween tropes? In what ways does it subvert them?
I was a Halloween kid. Favorite holiday. Dressed as Dracula, made a flat-Frankenstein head from a paper grocery bag, which is a thing I learned in a book. I think it leans all the way into Halloween tropes. I don’t know that it really subverts them, unless you consider Rangel’s transformation a kind of costume, or a take on costumes. I guess I’m not really good at analyzing my own stuff.
I found the story to be delightfully ambiguous in certain ways. By that I mean the story feels complete, satisfying, and comes to a sense of conclusion while still keeping certain elements and certain explanations, un-explained. What precisely happened to Rangel and the other abducted children is not expressly or overtly put forward and left to the imagination. We I believe are given a line on it, which is delivered “second hand” as it is from a character’s point of view. This takes a lot of skill and discipline and of course, intent. Tell us about this intent and the use of the un-explained in the story, please.
I had a pretty certain idea of the larger story, but also some parts of it that were foggy even to me. I tried to avoid info-dumps and exposition as best I could, and skim over the details. I could creep myself out more if I left some things out for readers to imagine. Some of the details you can find in other work, but I really like the idea of the whole Leeds “thing” being a huge jigsaw puzzle with many, many pieces missing. It’s more fun for me that way, it avoids the cheesiness of the “explanation,” and it allows characters to guess and be wrong, or partly wrong. I guess that might keep people interested in reading more Leeds stuff as I put it out, but I don’t do that cynically. It’s just the way I find more fun to work.
Tell us about how the story “Gaspar” came to be. What were your thoughts in creating a sequel or companion story to “Rangel” years after its release?
It was suggested to me that I continue the story. I knew I needed an outsider as my main character — someone who was related to the Bantam family by blood but not intimate with them. That outsider’s perspective, stepping back from the characters in the first story, allowed me a little more insight into Rangel, Gaspar, and their parents, and how they might be seen. Making the new character religious made his reactions more interesting. Since when I finished “Rangel” I considered it done and dusted, it was fun to ask myself how I could continue the story without it seeming convoluted.
How do you give space in a story, to allow for the places where emotion resides and resonances to occur?
It’s not really something I think about. I suppose it’s instinctive.
Tell us about the character, David. Why has he returned to Leeds and how is his experience different from Gaspar’s return?
He’s returned for the funeral of Gaspar and Rangel’s father. His experience is different because he’s not actually searching for anyone; he’s there out of what he feels is a familial obligation that his own parents haven’t honored. He’s stubborn, obstinate. In the first book, Gaspar was wounded and searching and he found what he was looking for, even if it was in a much different way than he wanted. In the second book, David sticks his neck in and discovers why his parents stayed away from the Leeds side of the family.
Tell us about Rangel’s connection to Leeds, as in what the strange old ^man refers to as particles or radio waves. How do the stories “Rangel” and “Gaspar” fit in and connect to your body of work?
Rangel would seem, at first, to have been a victim of what’s going on in Leeds, but the truth ends up being more complicated than that. The degree to which the two stories truly fit in depends on what I do with them next. So far, the only real connection to my radio station WXXT comes in “Rangel,” when Gaspar hears — or imagines he hears — one of the broadcasters interviewing Rangel when he falls asleep in his car. But I want to go back and write about the parents. There’s definitely more to be told — and more to be hinted at — about the Bantam family.
David is presented as a religious person. What are some tropes and hallmarks of religious horror and films that you dislike? How does the story “Gaspar” explore notions of religion and faith and the occult and supernatural?
I don’t like God saving the day. I don’t like good vs. evil. I particularly don’t like God and the Devil as “humorous” characters. I don’t like the religious element in King’s The Stand; for me it tainted what could have been a great book. Having said that, in the context of The Exorcist, religion works. I get dangerously close to the Abrahamic religions in my stuff, because I love the notion of the devil, but in the world of my fiction, there is no God, only devils. And whether those devils are good or bad is kind of up in the air. It’s my view, outside of fiction, that the forces that align themselves with “God” are far too often malevolent — they’re about suppressing our basic humanity and using God as a truncheon or a cudgel. And those who lean Satanic are about all the things that make life worthwhile — art, food, open-mindedness, sex, education. Not necessarily in that order. And surely that finds its way in to my fiction.
Where can readers connect with you and your fiction?
I’m on Facebook and I have a Patreon. Books, chapbooks, and rarities can be found at https://wxxt-gare-occult.square.site/.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
MATTHEW M. BARTLETT was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1970. At an early age he was given as a gift the novelization of The Omen; not long after that, he inherited a worn copy of Christine by Stephen King. He fell deeply in love with horror: with the Universal monsters, with Hammer films, with the rented videos from the horror section of that almost-gone artifact known as the Video Rental Store. He began writing poetry while in the English program at Central Connecticut State University. An abiding interest in horror fiction led him to start a Livejournal page whose posts were his first forays into fiction: bite-sized tales accompanied by doctored daguerreotypes and his own photographs taken in Leeds and Northampton, Massachusetts. These posts centered around a long-dead coven using radio waves to broadcast disturbing and dangerous transmissions from the dark woods of Western Massachusetts. His inspirations are varied and the foremost are certainly not atypical for the genre: H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein. Other authors he admires include Donald E. Westlake, Richard Yates, J.D. Salinger, and Hunter S. Thompson. He also draws inspiration from the radio monologues and shows of Joe Frank; the poetry of Philip Larkin, of Mark Strand, of Stephen Crane; the movies of Wes Anderson, of Ben Wheatley, of the Coen Brothers. He continues to write dark and strange fiction at his home in Western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife Katie and an unknown number of cats.
His website is http://www.matthewmbartlett.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.
