Conjunctions<\/a>,<\/i> a journal known for fabulism and interstitial works. It is a story about two stage magicians named The Great Alpha and the Great Omega and the narrative begins with a passage on \u201cwhat is memory and what is misdirection.\u201d The story moves forward and backward in time skillfully and with great effect. At the end of the first part of the story there is a disappearance and then the story speeds up and moves 40 years forward in time for the narrator.<\/strong><\/p>\nTell me about the use of time and placement in time as a vantage for storytelling and for revealing story in a non-linear way. You do it so well.<\/strong><\/p>\nI designed the story as a kind of magic trick. I\u2019m really grateful to readers like yourself who appreciate it. It\u2019s honestly a huge relief that anybody thinks it works!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat story is one of the only things I\u2019ve ever written where I wrote out a detailed timeline, a blueprint of the story as well as of everything that\u2019s left out of the story. I wanted it to be tricksy but fair, to produce that feeling of really great magic where you don\u2019t mind being fooled, where in fact it feels like a gift to have been allowed to believe in the illusion — to have escaped, for a moment, into the wonder of belief. Ultimately, the story became something a bit other than that because in the process of writing it, I got to like the characters and want to just hang out with them, so that undercut a bit of the mechanical aspect, but I\u2019m glad of that — as much fun as a mechanical duck might be, it\u2019s more fun to see a mechanical duck transform into a live one.<\/span><\/p>\nI should note here that I think of <\/span>Conjunctions<\/span><\/i> as my aesthetic home. It\u2019s a great honor to have been published by them twice in the print journal and twice online. Brad Morrow, the astonishingly brilliant editor, has rejected vastly more stories of mine than he\u2019s published, but I feel no shame or sadness about this, because to be published even once in <\/span>Conjunctions<\/span><\/i> is the highest of honors. They have, for decades now, supported innovative, radical, strange writing of all sorts, with a truly broad vision. Brad\u2019s rejected some of my stories for not being strange enough. Isn\u2019t that wonderful?! I mean, it\u2019s no fun to be rejected, but I deeply appreciate the reminder that here, at least, is an editor who values me for my weirdness. We need that encouragement from editors and readers, because it\u2019s so easy for the insidious normalities of the world to insist on stifling our imaginations, and it\u2019s so difficult to find people who value the truly strange, odd, unsettling. (They may say they do, but in practice they show what they want are variations on old, familiar monster movies and soap operas.)<\/span><\/p>\nI like how you phrased that \u201ctricky but fair.\u201d I imagine if a story is tricky but not fair perhaps then it falls into being \u201cvague\u201d in all the wrong ways, at least for what I am after in story telling. This story, in addition to being tricky but fair in resolving and eventually explaining some of the illusion, still leaves what I call an \u201cintentional ambiguity\u201d out there, and these are things I delight in and what I feel captures \u201cthe essence\u201d of a strange tale in the Robert Aickman sense of the word, if such a thing is a thing. More about this in the next question.<\/strong><\/p>\nI don\u2019t like manipulative writing, writing that tries to pull a particular emotional response from the reader. (Although one of my all-time favorite novels is <\/span>A Little Life<\/span><\/i> by Hanya Yanagihara, one of the most emotional novels ever written, and I think a good argument can be made that it\u2019s manipulative on every page. Genius trumps rules!) Playing fair means to me allowing the reader their own space for thinking and feeling. Don\u2019t hide stuff from the reader just to hide stuff. In fact, err on the side of always giving the reader information as early as possible. Respect the reader. Assume a reader smarter than yourself. Those are principals I try to hold on to.<\/span><\/p>\nOne of the things I enjoy about the book is that the stories operate for me in the borderlands of genre and don\u2019t fit neatly in one box or any box at all. For purposes of this column I am looking at them with an eye on the horror genre and through the lens of \u201cstrange tales\u201d as Aickman might use the term.<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cThe Last Vanishing Man\u201d is a both a very effective horror story and very effective strange tale to this reader. The horror could be said to be quiet horror. The magicians perform a vanishing trick that for the purposes of the story can be said to be or appear as being real. The man chosen from the audience and one of the magicians disappears and does not return. This is a horror and a mystery and the catalyst of the tale.<\/strong><\/p>\nOne of the hallmarks of a strange tale is the element of the unexplained. Is what we saw supernatural or did it have an earthly explanation? The disappearance and how it is presented operates like this for me and thus allows the focus of the story to be on the characters and how the unexplained event impacted their lives.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat are some hallmarks of a strange tale for you? Do you have any favorites among Robert Aickman\u2019s strange tales?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nI think \u201cstrange stories\u201d are … stories that the reader perceives as strange. I don\u2019t see a need to define. I think my own are strange stories because, for better or worse, I have yet to meet anyone who\u2019s read my fiction who thinks it\u2019s not strange.<\/span><\/p>\nAickman is, indeed, a pivotal figure for me. (I wrote an essay about him for <\/span>Electric Literature<\/span><\/i> some years ago.) I am wary of the influence of Aickman, though, because it\u2019s very easy to do bad Aickman pastiche and very difficult to do good Aickman tribute. Ambiguity too often becomes an alibi. Aickman was a minor genius, and what came naturally for him was what takes mortals like me far more work and is far more likely to end up in a fizzle than <\/span>frisson<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe thing about Aickman is that ambiguity was not for him a posture or a technique. It was central to how he perceived life and the universe. I could be wrong, but I doubt he set out to write a new story with the thought, \u201cI would like to be ambiguous at the end of this tale because that seems to me a dandy technique.\u201d He did not write to simplify his vision but to expand it. He wrote from and toward ambiguity because to do anything else would have been a betrayal of his very being.<\/span><\/p>\nFor me, today, at this moment, the stories that continue to resonate \u2014 or perhaps enchant (or is it bewitch?) \u2014 are \u201cThe Stains\u201d and \u201cThe Inner Room.\u201d If Aickman had only written those two stories, he would for me still be one of the absolute greats of English-language literature, because those stories are infinite. I don\u2019t even know how many times I\u2019ve read them both and every single time it\u2019s like reading a new story. They are patterns of boundlessness.<\/span><\/p>\nBut of course, he wrote many other stories, none of them bad, a few of them a little flat, most of them quite beguiling. I often find that one I didn\u2019t much connect with will, later, in a different mood, reveal itself to me. For years, I thought \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea\u201d was kind of tinkly and silly. I reread it recently and was enraptured.<\/span><\/p>\nThe beginning of your answer reminds me of something wonderful I once heard the musician Regina Spektor say about her creativity. To paraphrase it which I am sure does not do it justice she said she does not have to understand what is happening or how it happens for her to believe in it and create. I am with her on that and with you on there is not a need to define a strange tale. Certainly no need to define it to enjoy such a story. As a reader and as a writer I enjoyed \u201cstrange tales\u201d and open ended and intentionally ambiguous and fabulist kinds of stories for most of my life before learning there were names one might use for these things if one desires. So while I ultimately would go with you on there is no need there still is a great amount of joy and satisfaction for me in playing the game of analysis and trying to name and categorize what is ultimately nameless.<\/strong><\/p>\nAickman was known for not discussing his writing and inspiration. I think what the community knows is from what little he did write about it and the recollections of those around him. There is a documentary out there which I am forgetting the name as I write this. Based on that I think you are correct in that he was writing to capture truths as he perceived them. I\u2019m glad that you mentioned \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea.\u201d It is a story that\u2026 enchants and bewitches me. It also is one that I find it very hard to categorize or even reduce into a way to communicate in a short hand. So it is even more of a strange tale to me, in several meanings of those words.<\/strong><\/p>\nThat being said what, if anything do you take away from that story? To you what do you perceive is happening in the story. That is one of the delightful things about sharing stories particularly Aickman\u2019s is the range of things we readers take away from and see in them.<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat interested me this time about \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea\u201d was that it\u2019s an allegory that doesn\u2019t really work. Which I mean as a compliment. Allegory is a clunky form unless it\u2019s somehow broken \u2014 proper allegory has a clear, one-to-one symbol system. \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea\u201d is obviously full of symbols. They scream out, \u201cI am a symbol!\u201d But what are those symbols doing? Hard to say. That\u2019s terrible for allegory, but great for a story that is unsettled and unsettling. Often, such things can get campy \u2014 think of the worst of Tennessee Williams, or the astonishingly bad-good movie <\/span>Boom!<\/span><\/i> made from his play <\/span>The Milk Train Doesn\u2019t Stop Here Anymore<\/span><\/i> and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and No\u00ebl Coward (a film beloved by John Waters). There <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> a certain campiness to \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea,\u201d but it\u2019s restrained, and it contributes to what makes the story so unsettling. Mostly, that story reminds me of J.M. Coetzee, another favorite of mine, and a writer I\u2019ve written about a lot. Coetzee got pegged as writing allegory early in his career, and I don\u2019t think he intended to be particularly allegorical, and was probably quite surprised by the accusation, but I have a suspicion he later decided \u2014 because, in my mind at least, he\u2019s a mischievous devil \u2014 to say, \u201cOh, you think I\u2019m writing allegory? Let me see what you do with this,\u201d and then wrote, for instance, the utterly bizarre <\/span>Elizabeth Costello<\/span><\/i> and, ultimately, his trilogy of <\/span>Jesus<\/span><\/i> novels, which are quite bewildering and profoundly strange and have already inspired a bookshelf of tomes from academics writing about them in an attempt to nail down \u2026 something or other. Such fiction fills me with glee.<\/span><\/p>\nPart of what makes Aickman\u2019s strange tales and his kind of story work for me is as you say, the presence of allegory but without that on the nose one-to-one lining up. I don\u2019t think there is a formula however what you point out is a hallmark I observe when thinking about these stories.<\/strong><\/p>\nMoving on back to your title story I want to point out a few stand out passages:<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201c\u2026 the place was so remote then, people who came here weren\u2019t really on vacation, they were after something else, some deeper escape\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cOf course, Alice and I were escapees. Escape artists. Literally, actually.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\nAnd this passage that follows shortly after in the narrative:<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cNobody looks carefully if we don\u2019t have a reason to. We don\u2019t really see each other, do we?\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nYour presentation of gender and the characters\u2019 relationships and feelings on gender is effortless and with verisimilitude. What can you tell us about the character of the magician, Alice? These passages evoke one of my favorite stories \u201cThe Men Women Don\u2019t See\u201d by Tiptree \/ aka Alice Sheldon.<\/strong><\/p>\nWe live in an era of very fluid gender norms in many parts of the U.S. \u2014 thankfully so! But in a time or place of more constricted rules and concepts, where, say, people called \u201cmen\u201d dress in one particular way and people called \u201cwomen\u201d dress in another particular way and there are no concepts for people other than \u201cmen\u201d and \u201cwomen\u201d \u2026 then a person whose body may be more along the lines of what society thinks is \u201cwoman\u201d could dress in the particular way of a \u201cman\u201d and not be quickly questioned because the idea of such a thing is, for most people in that time and place, literally unimaginable. This is worth remembering. It\u2019s key to some of what the title story is up to.<\/span><\/p>\nIllusion can be more important than reality sometimes. For that matter, maybe reality itself is illusion. Often, surface reality is the reality that matters most, the reality that causes the most effects in the world. I don\u2019t actually believe very strongly in anything called \u201creality\u201d because I don\u2019t think we have the brains and nervous systems to be able to comprehend whatever might be ultimate reality. We do our best with what we can know. (I know if I were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, I would almost certainly die. That doesn\u2019t mean I know what, ultimately, gravity is or my body is or death is.) We go through life trying to hop from one illusion to another without getting too lost or too banged up.<\/span><\/p>\nThe unimaginable is the stuff of magic. Gustav Kuhn\u2019s fascinating book <\/span>Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic<\/span><\/i> offers a taxonomy of misdirection, with one of the types being false assumptions, which includes the limits of imagination. For instance, if I come over to your house and you ask if I\u2019ll perform some amazing feat, I might request from you a deck of cards and you might take one out of your kitchen drawer. A familiar deck to you. Then, I would perform a trick for you with it, one where I identify cards without seeing their faces. You might try to imagine how I would do the trick. Maybe there\u2019s some sort of reflective surface behind you? (Nope. You look, but it\u2019s just a flat, dull wall.) Maybe your glasses gave something away? (I repeat the trick after you\u2019ve taken your glasses off.) Maybe I\u2019m actually psychic! (Cue <\/span>Twilight Zone<\/span><\/i> theme song. Or <\/span>X-Files<\/span><\/i>.) You are perplexed. I have not been out of your sight since I arrived. It\u2019s a random deck of cards that you almost forgot you even owned. How could I have possibly achieved this impossible feat?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat you haven\u2019t imagined is that this is not as innocent a deck of cards as it seemed. When I was at your apartment a few months or maybe years ago, when you weren\u2019t looking I carefully and almost imperceptibly (to you) marked that deck and put it back in the kitchen drawer where I found it. You would not think I would go to such lengths for a simple card trick. You would not think I would snoop around your kitchen looking for random stuff with which to perform a magic trick maybe years in the future. Thus, without my explaining the trick to you, you would likely not imagine it was possible for me to have done anything to those old cards buried in the back of a random drawer.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat is imaginable and what is unimaginable matters. That\u2019s why stretching our imaginations is vitally important for our lives. Knowledge requires strong imagination. The limits of your imagination are the limits of your world.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThe Last Vanishing Man\u201d is about magic but it is also about the kind of historical and epistemological research we do when, for instance, we seek lost queer histories. How do we imagine the past? Why? For instance, what do we make of a collection of very old photographs in which men are affectionate with each other? Were they having a sexual relationship, or did they desire a sexual relationship? Were standards of friendship between men just different in the past? Is it foolhardy to attach the values of today to the ghostly remnants of a long lost yesterday? What does it mean to say yes or no to any of those questions? Can we preserve and cherish the ambiguities, the immense wonder of all we cannot know and yet desire to know, desire to be known, desire to be true or not true?<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s what I had in mind when I wrote the story, but also, I\u2019m sure, yes, as you say \u2014 I expect I was thinking of Tiptree. I had recently been teaching Tiptree\u2019s stories in a college course on gender and science fiction, so I\u2019m sure Tiptree and Sheldon \u2014 for certainly they were different people, even if one created the other \u2014 and \u201cThe Women Men Don\u2019t See\u201d were somewhere in my mind. Also the movie <\/span>Albert Nobbs<\/span><\/i>, with Glenn Close. And the entire history of the world.<\/span><\/p>\nStretching our imagination is so, so important. So much of what in this \u201creality\u201d what we perceive or classify as \u201cmagic\u201d or the \u201csupernatural\u201d I believe is \u201cnatural\u201d phenomena we have not yet imagined or do not yet understand or have a classification for yet. Fiction can be important in this way. Thankfully one of the areas of progress in our lifetimes has been gender norms and perceptions. And things and occurrences in stories that were strange when I was young are not so strange or out of the norm for today\u2019s generations. Preserving the ambiguities and wonder in light of this seems like it might be an impossible task given the forward arrow of time but we still can cherish them and try to create or recreate that sense of wonder and danger and conflict as your title story does.<\/strong><\/p>\nWonder is hard! Too many of the roads that might lead to wonder are actually mapped by people who are enemies of wonder, who want to offer answers instead of questions. It\u2019s one of my frustrations with a lot of occult and paranormal writing, which I read a probably unhealthy amount of, always with the hope of finding something truly strange and beguiling. But too often such writing is done by bean counters, by people with less imagination \u2014 less vision \u2014 than the average poodle. Lovecraft said something similar once, about how disappointed he was when he read some occult books and discovered how utterly unimaginative they were. (But then, I feel the same thing about horror fiction. Especially how utterly Christian it all is, even when not written by Christians. So much horror fiction is only horrifying if you believe in the Christian mythology and its moralities. Something I appreciate in Thomas Ligotti\u2019s work is that he\u2019s not drawing from an idea of Christian morality as the basis of the universe. Even at the level of props, Christianity has a hold on the horror genre. I\u2019m waiting for a character in a vampire story to hold up a crucifix and the vampire responds, chuckling, \u201cSorry, I\u2019m an atheist.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\nI feel like I\u2019ve seen that scene somewhere! I also enjoy (and seek) the kind of horror that is not based on religious beliefs. In the borderlands of the genre I think is a good place to sometimes find the truly strange and beguiling side by side with the unexplainable and human fear that goes with it.<\/strong><\/p>\nThe stories in The Last Vanishing Man<\/i> are grouped into four sections. Why did you choose to group them this way? What is the significance of the quotations for each section?<\/strong><\/p>\nMy first collection, <\/span>Blood: Stories<\/span><\/i>, collected stuff that was mostly written separately. A few of the stories, though, I had long thought of as a trilogy, but didn\u2019t mark that in any way in the book, just put them one right after the other (\u201cArt of Comedy\u201d, \u201cWalk in Light\u2026\u201d, \u201cMap of Everywhere\u201d) and at least one reviewer and some other readers found the stories too similar and tedious. It\u2019s entirely possible that these folks would have thought the stories were tedious even if I had somehow indicated in the book that the resemblances were intentional \u2014 the stories rely a lot on a kind of free-floating surrealism I enjoy, but which many people have very little patience for \u2014 but I did wonder then, and wonder still, if those stories might have had a better shot at being appreciated if I had given them their own section.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight after <\/span>Blood<\/span><\/i>, I started thinking about how I might do a second collection, and I actually began trying to write stories more intentionally to be part of that next collection and not just separate things. Thus, pretty much every story in <\/span>The Last Vanishing Man<\/span><\/i> has a partner, or at least a cousin, and maybe a few.<\/span><\/p>\nPutting it together, I began by placing the partner\/cousin stories together. But this proved ruinous because a story like \u201cMass\u201d ought not to be read right before or after \u201cA Suicide Gun\u201d, even though I always thought of them as related. But their centers of gravity are too similar. They pull the reader in the same direction. They needed to have something between them to offer other directions. Most of my stories go down into an abyss, but the reader ought to be allowed a few different abysses!<\/span><\/p>\nAlso, very few people read story collections in order. I certainly don\u2019t. We read around, we hop and skip and jump. By creating sections, I could signal to the reader that there <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> some intentional organization, even if they choose to ignore it, which is entirely their right. And, indeed, there are alternate organizations of the book that I also like. (For instance, read the first story in each section, then the second, etc. and you\u2019ll get the greatest sense of variety.) The organization I have provided allows, I think, certain resonances. I don\u2019t want to say what those resonances are, however, because that\u2019s for the reader to think about. I didn\u2019t even exactly have a sense of words for those resonances. They\u2019re about tone as much as anything. The epigraphs help with that, I hope, sort of like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. Readers might learn something, too, by considering who the writers of the epigraphs are. Imagine those writers reading along with you.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cKilling Fairies\u201d is another effective horror story and strange tale to this reader. In the acknowledgments you mention the \u201cNon-fiction-speculative-fiction\u201d of author Rick Bowes. How does this come into play in the story?<\/strong><\/p>\nRick is a dear friend and a secret master. His <\/span>Dust Devil on a Quiet Street<\/span><\/i> is one of my favorite books of all time. Like Aickman\u2019s stories, Rick\u2019s seem deceptively easy to pull off and are actually feats of astonishing skill. I wrote \u201cKilling Fairies\u201d to explore for myself just how difficult it is to write like Rick.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI also wanted to preserve some of my memories of my first year of college, because there were some amazing characters. So I gave myself the task of writing a story with as little fiction in it as possible, just enough to weave together a narrative and allow some fantastical element, or at least a hint of one. The only totally fictional character in the story is Jack, the guy with the fairies. And even he was based on a kind of character I hoped to meet when I first moved to New York, a cynical and maybe dangerous guy with nothing but contempt for conventional wisdom. The sort of person my young self-imagined as a perfect boyfriend and my older self knows is a terrible boyfriend.<\/span><\/p>\nSo I set out to write the story and I did write the story but it took <\/span>forever<\/span><\/i>. Four months, six months, I don\u2019t remember. Every single sentence was a struggle. I shiver even thinking about it now. It\u2019s so much easier just to make stuff up! I don\u2019t know how anybody ever manages to write a whole book of memoir. Or how Rick manages to create glitteringly beautiful and humble stories that effortlessly mingle truth and fiction. Me, I go the lazy way and just invent as much as I possibly can.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the story the character is shown something very strange in a box that he is told is a fairy.<\/strong><\/p>\nIn folklore the fae are presented as very dangerous creatures and in this story we are told of the dark meals that are this thing\u2019s preferred food. Like in the previous story we\u2019ve discussed there is a disappearance. The ending reminds me of and evokes the ending of Aickman\u2019s \u201cThe Swords\u201d in the sense that the very end of the story is a sweeping rush forward in time and that the events of the story and what we have seen are not understood by the character nor definitively or explained to us at all. In this case the unexplained element is the thing in the box, whether it was supernatural or otherwise.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nCan it be said, in stories like \u201cThe Swords\u201d and \u201cKilling Fairies\u201d, that the danger and emotion and horror is present in some place other than the supernatural or speculative elements?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nFor me, the most horrifying moment in \u201cKilling Fairies\u201d is when the gay narrator\u2019s roommate, whom the narrator has assumed to be gay, says something murderously homophobic. And maybe it\u2019s horrifying because I lived it. Because I remember the exact moment and the exact words. I remember thinking that if my roommate knew what I was he would want me to die. That he would himself want to kill me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve never read a work of fiction as terrifying as life.<\/span><\/p>\nI am glad you mentioned this moment. I identified this moment as the most horrifying moment in the story and the most affecting to me in the book! I opted not to ask about it and here we are after you\u2019ve mentioned it. I am sorry to hear you lived this and had this terrible experience. Looking at it through the lens of fiction these human things, these horrors humans inflict on each other are so much more affecting to me and so much more frightening. Both because ultimately I don\u2019t believe in monsters, at least not with the certainty that I believe in homophobes and people who dehumanized each other. The way this happens with the narrators dreams and sense of wonder and sense of world expansion presented in the story it really just drops the floor and bottom out from you reading it. The story has such a verisimilitude and hearing your process on how it came to be it is easy to see why.<\/strong><\/p>\nYou mentioned you think Aickman was seeking to \u201ccapture\u201d the world as he saw it in his stories (and I certainly can see that being so) and you\u2019ve mentioned how you sought to incorporate a lot of truth into \u201cKilling Fairies\u201d and you mentioned your character\u2019s relationship to your thoughts on emotions. Do you think authors seek to capture their own realities and truths in their work? And if so and for those that might why do you think this is so?<\/strong><\/p>\nWe are lonely creatures, trapped in our bodies and our minds, and writing is one of the most effective ways to cross into other minds and know other people\u2019s feelings. Now and then I stop when reading an old piece of writing and have a truly uncanny feeling \u2014 the feeling of reading the thoughts and imaginings of someone long dead. As money allows, I collect old books, because to read a book that\u2019s a hundred or two hundred years old, to look at those actual pages, the actual print \u2026 it\u2019s time travel and ghost hunting and necromancy all together.<\/span><\/p>\nThat moment in \u201cKilling Fairies\u201d is absolutely real, but what I don\u2019t know is what became of my roommate. The roommate in the story has a specific fate, one I made up. This gets to the question of ambiguity. I do not know much of what became of my roommate after he moved to a different dorm. I searched for him online once, curious to see what sort of adult he became, and found a few little things, but nothing to answer the real questions I have about him and who he became. I have no idea, for instance, about his sexuality. I gave a tentative answer to that in the story because it made sense, it fits with my experience that a lot of the worst homophobia comes from people who are afraid of their own queer feelings. Reality left questions unanswered, and I wrote the story to provide myself with some answers. So even though there are ambiguities in the story, they\u2019re nothing compared to the mysteries of life.<\/span><\/p>\nPeople sometimes ask me how I read so much horror fiction and watch so many horror movies, and I say no fiction has ever horrified me as much as reading a biography of Pol Pot or reading Gitta Sereny\u2019s <\/span>Into That Darkness<\/span><\/i>, about the Nazi death camps. Those gave me nightmares.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cAt the Edge of the Forest\u201d is a narrative about life and loss. It also operates as an effective strange tale for me in that there is real tension and ambiguity in whether the events of the story are the result of the supernatural or the result of the psychological state or memory and perception of the the main character, Bryan.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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The title story of the book, \u201cThe Last Vanishing Man,\u201d originally appeared in