and I was struck by the perfect clarity in which this association of images surfaced in one of the book\u2019s final and most important chapters. Nabokov is directly relevant to this discussion too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut to return to your question, I feel less like I \u201cuse\u201d doppelgangers and more like they form one of several focal points liming a central image, much like the stations of the cross. Yes, there\u2019s the uncanny element, which is clearly useful in horror, but no explanation of \u201cthe uncanny\u201d feels satisfying to me (Freud\u2019s least of all). I find myself rather in awe before the power of this image rather than an adept manipulator of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThis element of passive fascination is even more relevant to the puppet scene. It was first a dream that I recorded several years before writing \u201cSister.\u201d I tried and tried to write a story around it, but I couldn\u2019t find a way to frame it. The vast stage with the looming figure in the background was like a black hole \u2014 it swallowed everything I put near it, so I left it to tug at the back of my mind for a while, until, like the supernova in \u201cThe Toy Shop,\u201d I found a way to splice it into what was well on the way to becoming \u201cSister.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIf there\u2019s one way to answer the question of \u201cuse\u201d of images in the collection, it\u2019s this: while writing many of the later stories of <\/span>The Puppet King, <\/span><\/i>I had the image of the Puppet King Itself consistently in mind. It was a stable entity: a massive puppet with a labyrinth carved into its flesh, with mirrors for eyes, so that anyone who approaches can see that It is their twin, that It echoes the vast emptiness inside of them.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMusic and the supernatural play a large role in the third story, \u201cdevourer\u201d. There is something about the connection between music and the otherworldly and the unknowable that has made it a find its way into the stories of many authors of the strange, weird, and cosmic both contemporary and in history.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nTwo stories from Lucius Shepard, one of my favorite authors, come to mind when thinking of the pairing of music and the cosmic and weird; the novella \u201cStars Seen Through Stone\u201d and \u201cSkull City\u201d come to mind.\u00a0 I think there are as many unique takes and iterations on this topic as there are authors, each which their own unique musical interests and connections to the music. This is what keeps this variety of story feeling interesting and new to me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPlease tell us about you musical interests. What bands or kinds of music inspire you and this story? How is music used in \u201cdevourer\u201d to connect with the cosmic?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nI haven\u2019t read anything by Lucius Shepard (I\u2019ll have to change that), but I agree that music in weird fiction is always interesting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI got into metal early on. After finding a Deftones album in my collection, my parents only allowed me to buy CDs from Mardel Christian & Education through my earlier teens. Thankfully, Christian metal and hardcore was gaining popularity, so I survived on that until their divorce presented my parents with bigger problems. Like most metalheads, I eventually moved on to explore other genres \u2014 a maturation partially reflected in \u201cDevourer.\u201d Like Ulver, Kayo Dot, and other metal bands, Devourer wants to transcend the genre\u2019s limitations. The attempt takes him several steps farther than that, of course.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPerhaps it\u2019s the fact that music let me escape the narrow Southern Baptist landscape I was born in that gives it the appearance of a natural medium of communion between different states of reality. What else but music — this intangible but real and deeply affecting phenomenon \u2014 could reach across barriers of language into some otherwise inaccessible dimension? More important, however, is the fact of music\u2019s immanence, its irreducibility. It\u2019s a mystery that develops <\/span>right here, <\/span><\/i>and transportation in <\/span>real time <\/span><\/i>into what is at once a universal and highly subjective experience.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve mentioned \u201cirreducibility\u201d again \u2014 I just want to note that it\u2019s not a term I\u2019ve tended to use in the past when thinking about fiction. I have no true stakes in it. It\u2019s very possible that I would explain this in completely different terms on any other day, and it\u2019s certainly not what I had in mind when writing these stories.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s probably more realistic to say that, as in most cases, the decision to use music to connect to the cosmic in \u201cdevourer\u201d simply felt right at the time. Books, more than music itself, had put me in the mood for the experiment. I think I had recently read David Peak\u2019s <\/span>Corpsepaint,<\/span><\/i> and I had certainly been skimming <\/span>AUDINT-Unsound: Undead, <\/span><\/i>an anthology on music, to quote the Amazon description, that explores \u201c<\/span>\u2026the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead.\u201d<\/span> The latter \u2014 featuring contributions from academic writers like Eugene Thacker as well as musicians, including Tim Hecker, a favorite of mine \u2014 sits woefully underexplored in the Kindle library. I\u2019m glad you reminded me of it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nA follow up on \u201cdevourer.\u201d\u00a0 I enjoy how what the character named Devourer is doing with the music is \u201cintentionally ambiguous\u201d and thus the story operates as a strange tale for me.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nWhether there was in fact something super-natural in play or if what is happening is a perception or desire of the characters is not definitive, in my opinion. Tell me about your decision to leave this unexplained.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nI forget who says it \u2014 perhaps Joel Lane? \u2014 but somewhere, I read that good weird fiction narratives effectively teeter on the balance between causal explanation and insane delusion. (I get the feeling that Lane brings this up in connection with another critic, someone working in fantasy. At any rate, I think more people should read both Lane\u2019s fiction and nonfiction.) I <\/span>consciously <\/span><\/i>tried to do that in \u201cdevourer\u201d since I had just come across the above-cited and subsequently forgotten passage, and it hit me like a revelation. (Now I\u2019m beginning to think this is Mark Fisher in <\/span>The Weird and the Eerie, <\/span><\/i>not Joel Lane at all. Maybe it\u2019s both.)<\/span><\/p>\nI think about this less now. I\u2019ve come to accept that <\/span>I <\/span><\/i>don\u2019t even know what\u2019s real or delusion in my stories, and that trying to insist one way or the other would be disingenuous. This outlook has proven something of a relief.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAre the story titles in lower case a visual style choice of the publisher or something otherwise?<\/strong><\/p>\nIt was a mutual decision between myself and the publisher, intended to match as closely as possible the typeface on the cover. When designing <\/span>Hymns of Abomination: Secret Songs of Leeds, <\/span><\/i>Silent Motorist Media\u2019s tribute anthology to Matthew M. Bartlett, I used the lowercase typeface and liked it. It\u2019s much closer to an aesthetic impulse than anything else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHere is an excerpt from the next story \u201cthe rubber man.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\nIf she subtracts the desires of others and follows the unnamable impulse that feels much closer to an identity than her assigned roles as project manager and partner, she\u2019d find herself right where she is now, on Icarus Island. For once- storm and sun and the overwhelming smell of fish non-withstanding- she feels more human than puppet.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nTell us about the setting of Icarus Island in the story. Is there a connection to the Icarus of Greek myth, Icarus son of Daedalus, who created the labyrinth of Crete?<\/strong><\/p>\nI wrote this one after a spring break with the wife and kids in Rockport, Texas. We got there late in the evening, and after checking in to our run-down but conveniently located motel, we walked out onto a pier. It was dark, and enormous cockroaches and silverfish scuttled out of the rocks surrounding the concrete and into the moonlight. The Gulf captivated me, as it always does (something about the smell of the ocean, the limitless expanse \u2014 I\u2019m reminded of the chapter \u201cLoomings\u201d in <\/span>Moby Dick<\/span><\/i>) and it was inevitable that a story would come out of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIcarus island is imaginary, but yes, it has everything to do with Daedalus\u2019 son, who attempts to escape the Minoan labyrinth with wings made by his father. He fails of course \u2014 ends up flying too close to the sun \u2014 but, if only for a moment, Icarus sees the labyrinth from above, a rare perspective that signifies a renewed relationship to the maze.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn certain moods, I share the medieval Christian conception of life as a labyrinth. We\u2019re trapped by our own concepts rather than by our sins, however, and to see the maze from above would be to transcend it. But such a vision would come at a price. I imagine Icarus\u2019 features blanched by the sun, his eyes sightless. This is the mode of transcendence that one would describe as <\/span>annihilating, <\/span><\/i>a kind of madness suitable for the Lovecraftian dimensions of this story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI have to admit, this way of looking at the numinous has become less interesting to me lately than the possibilities afforded by allowing oneself to get <\/span>lost <\/span><\/i>in the maze, but that\u2019s another discussion entirely.\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThere is no destiny. Beauty, perhaps, but not destiny.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\nThis line appears near the end of the \u201cthe rubber man.\u201d Please tell us about this line.<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cBeauty\u201d is a strange concept given the circumstances the protagonist finds herself in at the end of the story, but it\u2019s beauty she should\u2019ve been looking for, not answers (i.e., \u201cdestiny\u201d). She\u2019s punished for realizing this distinction too late, just as we often are. This sounds close to moralizing, I\u2019m afraid.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe point is that Kaire experiences something unexplainable (UFO abduction) and assumes that it must mean something. It\u2019s particularly difficult to avoid doing this when faced with the unknown, since the imposition of meaning is an attempt to exert control on a chaotic scenario. In the story, the presence of the rubber man in her life is just that \u2014 a presence. There is nothing else. Insisting on destiny turns out to be incredibly dangerous for her. I think it\u2019s equally so for any of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat the hell, I\u2019ll go ahead and moralize here: on the macro-level, \u201cdestiny\u201d is the kind of imposition of form that gives rise to institutions that believe in some transcendent imperative to destroy what opposes them. On a personal level, it gives us permission to accept what we shouldn\u2019t accept, or to demand what we have no given right to demand. This often makes for serious suffering, individually and globally.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe story \u201cendemic\u201d has an aspect of science as its central premise so I can see classifying it, if one was looking to do such a thing, as science fiction perhaps. For you, how does the story differ from the set of stories in the book? How is it similar?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nEach story feels unique in terms of method and inspiration, but you\u2019re right to single this one out, I think. Several elements make it distinct. This was the first story that I wrote and looked back on with the feeling that I knew \u2014 at least somewhat \u2014 what I was doing. I was reading Christopher Slatsky\u2019s <\/span>The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature <\/span><\/i>and thought <\/span>aha<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>this <\/span><\/i>is how it\u2019s done. There was an element of immersion, of seemingly inconsequential detail (but not too much) that I felt my writing had been missing and which I tried to incorporate into \u201cendemic.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s also the fact that \u201cendemic\u201d was a half-finished screenplay before it was a story. Since childhood I\u2019ve been fascinated with caves, and when I read about endemism and Movile cave (mentioned in the story), my head exploded. Immediately, I went to work on the screenplay, which eventually turned into the story.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s not a lot of the Puppet King in this one, but It\u2019s there in spirit, in the emptiness of the panhandle landscape and the deterioration of reality surrounding an eruption of the unexplainable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOther readers have also described my stories as science fiction, and it probably shouldn\u2019t surprise me. Another major inspiration throughout is J.G. Ballard \u2014 that enormous Norton volume of collected short fiction of his is a perpetual delight. It never makes it too far from nightstand.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nJean-Paul Sartre\u2019s \u201cHell is Other People\u201d is mentioned in the story \u201cm.other\u201d. Philosophy and references to philosophers and authors are a recurring presence in these stories.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nHow does the Sartre quote operate in \u201cm.other\u201d? Tell us about your process to include it and other quotes and references in your stories?<\/strong><\/p>\nWhile I haven\u2019t personally gotten much mileage out of Sartre\u2019s brand of existentialism, I like his fiction. At the time of writing this one (2016 or so), I must\u2019ve been reading his plays. \u201cThe Flies\u201d is a favorite of mine, but I believe the quote comes from \u201cNo Exit.\u201d In the context of this story, the quote describes a scene quite literally \u2014 the street sign with the word \u201cHell,\u201d and the mass of people <\/span>other<\/span><\/i> than oneself (mass other = m.Other)\u2026. The irony here is that the protagonist has been creating his own hell without their help.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIf there\u2019s one thing I know more than anything, it\u2019s books. Everything I write and think is in conversation with something I\u2019ve read, and I see no reason to pretend that this relationship doesn\u2019t exist. If a work is tied to a book I\u2019m reading, and if it fits the story\u2019s universe, I include a direct reference. I think of them as \u201cfurther reading\u201d suggestions, and I know I appreciate them in books I read. There are even some books \u2014 Roberto Bolano\u2019s <\/span>2666 <\/span><\/i>comes to mind \u2014 that I essentially approach as massive reading lists. I admire how Bolano\u2019s work is nearly always about reading just as much as it\u2019s about anything else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTell us about the self-referential elements in \u201cm.other.\u201d Are they or any other elements meant as a cue to read anything as an author surrogate?<\/strong><\/p>\nEvery character, to some extent, is an author surrogate, but I feel that this is <\/span>least <\/span><\/i>the case with the protagonist here. This is the oldest piece in this collection, and I was still writing with far more didacticism than I\u2019d use now. I thought it was a story\u2019s job to punish a <\/span>bad guy, <\/span><\/i>I had been reading Lacan, and so the two elements became this unethical Lacanian psychoanalyst. Looking back, I\u2019m glad I stopped believing that stories need to operate in this way.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0In the story \u201cthe enucleator\u201d the characters encounter another labyrinth, of sorts. Can you tell us about how digital and technological elements come into play in your stories? And the recurrence of labyrinths in your work. Where did your interest in labyrinths originate and develop?<\/strong><\/p>\nTechnology poses an interesting challenge for contemporary fiction. I tend to be one of those who imagines all sorts of problems arising from our collective addiction to social media and the various low-level hamster wheels of online entertainment. On the other hand, I\u2019m aware that my skepticism certainly isn\u2019t going to make any of it go away. Since fiction is inevitably subject to the new perspectives and modes of distribution presented by technology, this relationship is worth careful attention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMy literary introduction to labyrinths was by way of Jorge Luis Borges, who I still return to frequently. Before him \u2014 even in early childhood, before books were important \u2014 I had always been fascinated by labyrinthine spaces. Caves (particularly Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico), the network of small creek beds that ran through the woods on the property I grew up on, the tangle of overpasses where the loop crossed the interstate on the way to Ft. Worth that I found so horrifying\u2026 I used to fill stacks of paper with drawings of ant formicaries, tunnels branching to various chambers, each with a specific function and human furnishings. These spaces held my mind captive and I\u2019m not sure why. Maybe it was that I visited them in dreams as well, vast cities lit with dull green lights, tunnels sloping deep into the Earth\u2026. Remembering this, I\u2019m suddenly aware that I always had an impulse to hide. I always felt safer in the dank darkness of a cave.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nLater, during a horrible year in college that ended in institutionalization, I read most of Mark Z. Danielewski\u2019s <\/span>House of Leaves. <\/span><\/i>I would never fully get that book out of my head, even though I\u2019ve been far less impressed with it in later years. I think it forged the nexus of labyrinths and horror that I\u2019m still playing with in my fiction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI realize there\u2019s no firm <\/span>why <\/span><\/i>in there. I\u2019m afraid a satisfactory <\/span>why <\/span><\/i>may not exist. There\u2019s just an abiding interest and the pleasure of rolling it over in my head.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nL\u2019appel du vide<\/i> is French for the term \u201cThe call of the void\u201d which I will briefly summarize as the human compulsion for self-destruction.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nIn \u201cthe golden thread\u201d the narrator says: \u201cI realize now that it wasn\u2019t a fear of falling that kept me huddled in the backseat of the family van. It was a mistrust of my own will, the inexplicable draw to the edge that I realized I was inclined to obe<\/strong>y. Imagine that, if you can: annihilation resounding in your cells\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nHow did you dramatize and put into dramatic structure the concept of L\u2019appel du vide<\/i> in the story \u201cthe golden thread\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\nSometimes, I like to think of events in a horror story as holes. As holes in what? In the structure of our socially constructed reality, this thoroughly <\/span>human<\/span><\/i> world we simultaneously dream and inhabit, which entails all the structures on which we depend, language, order, law \u2014 in short, as the sociologists handily call it, the <\/span>nomos. <\/span><\/i>A hole in the nomos would be any event that forms a rupture in the surface of socially constructed reality that exposes what the world of human consciousness can\u2019t manage to fully paper over (see in this connection Terror Management Theory as proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynksi in <\/span>The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life<\/span><\/i>
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DANIEL BRAUM: The name of the book is