Horror Movies and Haunted Houses, Sea Witches and Ghosts, and Horror Stories as the New Fairy Tales
Night Time Logic is a term for the parts of a story that are 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 subtle, strange, and intentionally ambiguous tales that operate with Night Time Logic.
I recently had a chance to speak with a returning guest to the column and program, Gwendolyn Kiste.
Gwendolyn’s latest book is the outstanding short story collection titled The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. The book is full of inventive stories that I found to be extraordinary.
DANIEL BRAUM: Congratulations on the new book. The story “A New Mother’s Guide to Raising an Abomination,”operates as a great flip on the theme of the other. What is your approach to presenting that theme in your creation process?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: I really love this question, because I feel like it can be so different for each story. Personally, I don’t mind a very overt theme, because sometimes, life can be really blunt. We all have learned a lesson about something at some point where the universe was so on-the-nose about it.
With this story in particular, it was for a David Cronenberg tribute anthology, and I really just started with the question of “what if the children from The Brood just wanted to be left alone and the world wouldn’t let them live their lives?” That’s of course not what happened at all in that film, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how difficult it can be to just exist when you’re the other in some way. The world can be so awful and so cruel. From there, this story really grew into its final form. It’s one of my favorites.
I found the story, “The Girls from the Horror Movie” to be a cool reflection and examination of the horror film industry. With cool references and verisimilitude, yet also its own thing with its own emotional heart.
Once upon a time, many years ago I went to a reunion event for the Dawn of the Dead cast in the mall location in Pennsylvania. This is where I got my impressions and observations of lives of actors post-career in the film industry. What is your take on the lives of these actors? Any thoughts and observations in your experience?
Years ago, I was an independent horror filmmaker, and I used to go to horror film conventions and promote my movies. For a while, I actually found it to be a really fun experience, selling my DVDs at the table and hanging out all evening near different horror movie actors from previous decades. Eventually, I burned out on the convention experience—and on the filmmaker life—but the time certainly holds a special place in my heart.
I love that you mention the Dawn of the Dead cast reunion at the Monroeville Mall, because when I was writing this story, I was literally imagining the old Monroeville Convention Center where I would invariably have my table set up near the actors from the Romero zombie movies. They were all delightful people, at least so far as all of my interactions with them, so that was in my mind and in my heart when I was writing this story.
The story “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair” has such a cool concept. We have a real mermaid, pretending to be a human pretending to be a mermaid at an exhibit in the 1940s World’s Fair in Queens, New York.
What was it like writing a period piece? Favorite noir and neo-noir films?
It was really a lot of fun to write this particular story (and honestly, it was fun to write all the stories in the book). But for “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair,” it was truly a joy to do all the research into the 1939 World’s Fair and especially Dali’s Birth of Venus exhibition. Because that was several decades into the twentieth century, there were plenty of photographs to draw from, which was so wonderful.
In terms of my favorite noirs, I absolutely adore Laura, The Maltese Falcon, and Leave Her to Heaven. I would also call Sunset Boulevard a bit of a noir as well as a gothic horror movie. As for neo-noirs, I adore Bound, and I fondly remember my first experience of watching Two Days in the Valley when I was way too young, even though it’s not necessarily my favorite as an adult. Honestly, I can never get enough noir and neo-noir; it’s a genre that’s so closely connected with horror and the gothic, and I love it so much for that kinship.
What are your thoughts on horror as revenge? Horror as justice? Or, at the the very least, the trope of bad things happening to bad people?
I personally love a revenge tale; it’s honestly one of my favorite kinds of horror. I grew up with so many horror stories that definitely used the genre as a way to enact revenge or justice. I’m thinking of The Twilight Zone or Creepshow. There weren’t always happy endings in those stories, but many of them did see a certain kind of justice against the people who harmed others.
Fast forward to feminine revenge stories like Carrie and Jennifer’s Body, and I’ve been hooked on this kind of storytelling for years now. For “Her Skin a Grim Canvas,” I really loved the idea of exploring the world of fashion while combining it with the fairy tale of Bluebeard. I genuinely love fashion, but I also fully understand how toxic the industry can be. It seemed like a natural fit with the story of Bluebeard, especially since both Bluebeard and the fashion industry swaps out women like they’re disposable. I really wanted to change the script on that and follow a character who refused to be erased.
“Sister Glitter Blood” is written as instructions to a board game. What is it like writing in alternative and experimental formats like this?
I absolutely love how experimental you can be in short fiction. Of course, there are experimental novels as well, but I think it can be easier to maintain an unusual narrative device over the length of a short story. I’m a big fan of board games—my husband and I have played them many times together over the years—and it feels like such a nostalgic and familiar pastime. So naturally, as a horror writer, I couldn’t help but make it horrible and unnerving in “Sister Glitter Blood.”
“The Mad Monk of Motor City” opens with the ghost of Rasputin in modern day Detroit. Please tell us your thoughts about the psychogeography of Detroit in the story. How the city is a ghost of itself.
That’s such a great way of phrasing it: “how the city is a ghost of itself.” I think that’s true of a number of American cities, especially in the Rust Belt. There are these echoes of what these areas used to be. This kind of industrial promise that was very meaningful to the local economies at one point but are all but forgotten now.
I grew up in Northeastern Ohio, which is absolutely part of the Rust Belt. Those landscapes of rust and rot and abandoned or failing factories definitely were part of the backdrop of my childhood. I’d already written about Cleveland in my novel, The Rust Maidens, as well as a couple of my short stories, but I realized I’d never written about Detroit. I loved the alliteration of putting Rasputin’s nickname of the Mad Monk with Detroit’s nickname of the Motor City. I also really thought it would be interesting to compare the fall of Russia to the fall of Detroit. We don’t think of them as being similar at all, but anytime a place that once held a lot of possibility starts to crumble, that’s devastating to the people who live there. It doesn’t always have to be the fall of an empire like in Russia; it could be something seemingly quieter like the failing of the steel industry and the closing of factories. People’s lives are still destroyed and upended either way. Those ideas were all woven into this story right from the start, and it was a sad and strange but intriguing way to explore Rasputin and his own sordid history.
Some characters in “The Mad Monk of Motor City” feel like ghosts and are haunted by all sorts of loss. Are these kinds of characters hallmarks of the modern ghost story?
Oh, I love this question! I do think these kinds of characters absolutely can be hallmarks of modern ghost stories! For me, it’s such a scary prospect, how much people can be haunted by the past. While I love ghosts as a metaphor and as a device in horror, the concept of not being able to let go of something from the past is terrifying to me. I feel like human beings thrive the most when we’re able to move forward with the lessons we’ve learned. Don’t forget entirely about the past; definitely do your best to learn from it. But don’t mire yourself in it. That kind of rumination doesn’t seem to lead to a happy, healthy, thriving life, and that’s one of my biggest personal fears: not being able to move forward.
The book closes with the title story “The Haunted Houses She Calls her Own.” In the story the “Black Dahlia” is learning to “live” as a ghost and is revisiting the places, the haunted houses from her life (and murder).
What opportunities and differences did you encounter in telling and retelling this story of the Black Dahlia?
The Black Dahlia, whose real name was Elizabeth Short, is such a tragic figure, and in so many ways, she’s been flattened into an archetype or trope of a victim. I spent a lot of time researching her for this particular story, and I wanted to learn as much about her life as I could.
Unfortunately, there’s still not enough information out there about her; while there was certainly a lot of sensationalism around her murder, there doesn’t seem to be as many people who came forward and really talked about who she was as a person. That makes me so sad, and it also seems like such a cautionary tale in terms of what we do to victims. That was something I was exploring in this story, and it feels like a perfect way to end a collection about forgotten and reclaimed women. These voices are around us all the time. I feel like all we have to do is listen.
The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own is available now.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
GWENDOLYN KISTE is the four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, CrimeReads, Titan Books, The Lineup, and The Dark. She’s a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror Award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Shirley Jackson, Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts.
Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com
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 Jackanpes Press and Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories from Cemetery Dance Publications.
His website is bloodandstardust.wordpress.com
