![\"Night](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/NightTImeLogic-web.jpg?resize=830%2C120&ssl=1\")
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\u201cGhost Stories,\u201d \u201cHaunted Victorian America,\u201d and \u201cHistorical Fiction”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Through in-depth conversation with authors this column explores the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror and dark fiction, and more.<\/p>\n My short story collections\u00a0with Cemetery Dance<\/a>\u00a0are full of the kind of stories that operate with Night Time Logic. My latest is called\u00a0Phantom Constellations<\/i>\u00a0and is coming in November 2025.<\/p>\n In June 2025, Joshua Rex was one of my guests as part of the Summer of Liminal Space series. You can hear him in conversation with the panelists as well as hear him read his story \u201cThe Caretaker\u201d here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n We began our conversation here with a question about Joshua\u2019s work as a historian.<\/span><\/p>\n DANIEL BRAUM: Please tell us about your work as a historian. How does it inform and inspire your writing?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n JOSHUA REX: I am the historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums<\/a>. My research there focuses on the Hayes family and his presidency, but also on Victorian American culture, architecture, and art. I was extremely fortunate to find a position not only in my field (they are rare), but in the very time period that was the focus of my graduate studies, and that I am most interested in.<\/span><\/p>\n My historical work informs every aspect of my writing. I am inspired by the Victorian vernacular in art, architecture, dress, literature, and music, but also generally their daily lives and the world they built, which is slowly vanishing.<\/span><\/p>\n Please tell us the concept of Haunted Victorian America: Ghost Stories<\/em> and how the project was conceived.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the introduction you compare being an author of historical fiction to being a magician — using sleight-of-hand to create suspension of disbelief. As both a reader and as a writer, how important is this willing participation in the illusion as opposed to knowing what is presented is not actual accuracy?<\/strong><\/p>\n Creating a believable setting that feels period accurate in historical fiction is tricky and daunting, though pleasurable at the same time. How does one describe a world one has never seen, and can never truly know? The L. P. Hartley quote I chose for the epigraph of this book underscores the challenge: \u201cThe past is a foreign country; they do things different there.\u201d In a way, this summarizes both the humbling reality that no matter how much a writer may research an era, he or she can never truly recreate the past. This goes for writers of both fiction and nonfiction.<\/span><\/p>\n This being said, it is possible to immerse oneself in research to such a degree that the era in question begins to draw itself in one\u2019s mind, and thus becomes realistic on the page. Walks through historic neighborhoods reveal small curiosities that help to further illustrate the differences between past and present. For instance, seeing a boot scraper on a fancy Federal-style house in New England tells you that the streets were once quite muddy, and with all the horses, quite smelly. Imagine someone tracking mud into an elegant foyer; now imagine being the servant or enslaved person that has to scrub that floor with water pumped from a well. Contextual details like these have little to do with plot, but everything to do with the verity of the story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Please tell us about the chronological sequencing of the stories and the date in each story title.<\/strong><\/p>\n The idea to assign each story with a year in order to represent each decade of the era came almost at once. And the years influenced the content. For instance, I knew that I wanted to write a story about the whaling industry, and a certain object sailors would leave for their wives while the men were away. In the late 1830s whaling was approaching its peak decades in the 1840s and 1850s. I thought it would be a great place to start. From there, I considered what made each decade unique, and what needed to be exemplified in the stories. In the 1840s for instance, photography and the Oregon Trail were two significant cultural and social aspects, while in the 1860s the Civil War was changing (permanently) everything about the United States, so I included two war-based stories there. Not all of the tales feature large themes, but they were all written with a conscious attempt to ground them in their respective timeframes to help differentiate the seven Victorian decades.<\/span><\/p>\n In the introduction you emphasize that the book is a book of ghost stories with ghosts in each of them with a particular focus on the plight of women in Victorian times.<\/strong><\/p>\n The first story \u201cHe\u2019s Come Home (1837)\u201d Is about a young woman waiting for her whaling boat sailor husband to come home. Tell us about the story and the decision to open the book with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n The decision to open the book with it was sort of made for me, as it\u2019s the earliest date of all the stories. I\u2019m not sure I would have led with it otherwise, but I don\u2019t regret that that\u2019s how things worked out. The story itself is based on an actual object known as a \u201che\u2019s at home\u201d — essentially they are clay dildos given to wives by their husbands when the men go off to sea for extended periods of time. I recall reading that someone found one in a box stuffed up a chimney in Nantucket. We don\u2019t typically think of Victorians as possessing such things, so it\u2019s interesting to consider this in relation to our contemporary times and the universal notion of longing. In the story, however, the \u201che\u2019s-at-home\u201d becomes something other than clay when the protagonist intuits that something terrible has befallen her husband. Ultimately, the story is about emptiness, and the things we do to try to fill it.<\/span><\/p>\n The book contains the ghostly and ghastly things we think of as \u201ctypical\u201d to horror stories as well as depictions of strange and unexplained happenings that we often find in the borderlands of the horror genre. Both kinds of elements are present in \u201cImmortelles,\u201d the story of Thomas, a travelling daguerreotypist. Tell us about this profession and what happens to Thomas at the conclusion of the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n Though photography had to some degree been experimented with for centuries, a process was finally perfected in the 1830s that allowed an image to be fixed on a copper plate coated with silver using chemicals and mercury fumes. These plates were called daguerreotypes, named for their inventor, a Frenchman called Louis Daguerre. Samuel B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, brought the process the United States, and by the 1840s everyone who could afford it had one of these generally small and pricey images \u201cstruck.\u201d Some took photographs of their dead as keepsakes. We think of this as morbid today, but it was regarded as quite the opposite then. Most photographers had studios where they produced such pictures, but some photographers, particularly when the wet plate process came into popularity in the 1850s, traveled around taking photos and developing them in portable dark rooms. At the end of the story, Thomas is seeing things that he shouldn\u2019t in the pictures of his dead subject. The dark room and the lens become portals, and it is unclear whether he has been influenced by the mercury, or if something more malevolent is at work.<\/span><\/p>\n Many of the hauntings and strange and supernatural encounters are presented without neat resolution or explanation. This favorably evoked the way Robert Aickman often presents the supernatural in his work. The story “The Dark Horse (1845)” comes to mind as an example of this structure and technique. Is this story inspired by a historical event from your research or is it one of your own invention?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I think many of Aickman\u2019s stories actually do end with a resolution and explanation; it\u2019s just so subtle and expertly done that it feels like a loose end. For instance, the last line of \u201cThe Hospice\u201d always struck me as the perfect final statement for that harrowing journey. It\u2019s all in how he uses metaphor. \u201cThe Swords\u201d is a great example of this, with all those men sticking dirty blades into that woman in the tent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Dark Horse\u201d was inspired by two pieces of art: \u201cPeytona and Fashion: In Their Great Match for $20,000. Over the Union Course L.I. May 13th. 1845, Won by Peytona. Time 7:39 3\/4, 7:45 \u00bc\u201d (c.1845) by Currier & Ives, and \u201cThe Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse\u201d by Albert Pinkham Ryder (c. 1896-1908). Peytona and Fashion were famous racehorses, one from the North and one from the South, who raced for what in today\u2019s money would be about $850,000 (measuringworth.com<\/a> is a great resource for translating historic currency). <\/span><\/p>\n I have always loved both pictures; they convey beauty and time in completely different ways. The Peytona and Fashion lithograph was the impetus for writing \u201cThe Dark Horse,\u201d but as I started it \u201cThe Race Track\u201d popped into my mind, and the combination of one race moving forward while the other ran backward seemed a strong metaphor for life and the ever-increasing acceleration towards death.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Please tell us how strange tales and Robert Aickman\u2019s stories inform and influence the stories in the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n I love Aickman — he himself is a strange story, and an undisputed original, like the great illustrator Edward Gorey. It seems that only those who are persistently original in their own lives can create truly unique art. And I don\u2019t mean <\/span>intently<\/span><\/i> original, e.g. trying to do something new just because it hasn\u2019t been done before. That is not, on the whole, difficult to do, and the result is almost universally boring and contrived. It is much harder to live originally, guided by one\u2019s own unique set of contrasting and often conflicting interests. This is what yields an original person, and (hopefully) original art. I find the biographies of the people behind the work almost always as interesting (and sometimes more so) than the work itself. For instance, all the canal business that Aickman was involved in. It strikes me as a decidedly odd thing to be passionate about, and yet his work in preserving them is in some ways as significant as his fiction. The randomness of one\u2019s obsessions, and the honest pursuit of them, can lead to genuine work and a deliberate life. <\/span><\/p>\n That being said, it took me a long time to approach my art with this in mind. For a long time, I did not trust my own weird confluence of interests. I had to identify these and see how they complimented each other before I could produce anything of interest. And when I say \u201cof interest\u201d I mean interesting to myself; I\u2019m not sure if it strikes anyone else as such, but it feels right to me at least.<\/span><\/p>\n Ghost stories from the 19th Century often depicted ghosts as figures from beyond the grave with a message, such as the ghost in Charles Dickens \u201cThe Signalman\u201d from 1866. This kind of \u201chelpful ghost\u201d appears in \u201cShadow Stone (1849),\u201d where an apparition of the narrator\u2019s deceased mother appears to help his journey Westward.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Later on, authors such as M R James presented ghosts as strange, frightening and even incomprehensible things, in contrast and reaction to Dickens’ kind of ghosts. These kinds of ghost stories often do not have a resolution or closure. Tell us about \u201cThe Brooch,\u201d \u201cPhantom Limb,\u201d \u201cThe Hairy Land\u201d and others in the book that operate with this kind of haunting and supernatural element.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, some of these stories certainly have that element. In \u201cShadow Stone,\u201d which takes place on a long dirt road headed west, I wanted to focus not only on the loss of the young protagonist\u2019s mother (who dies along the way and is buried in the dirt road trodden flat by wagon wheels) but his culture. It is perhaps difficult for us in the twenty-first century to imagine the shock of just how immense and alien the American West must have looked to white Europeans and native-born white Americans from the east coast who voyaged there seeking a new life. This would be particularly true for someone coming from a place such as lush Ireland, a land with its own centuries-old traditions, customs, language, etc.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A few of these stories have \u201chelpful ghosts.\u201d In \u201cThe Brooch\u201d the element is subtle, with a frozen woman returning to warn her ancestor of something hideous and predatory in the Canadian wilderness. The protagonist, Nathanial Jay, has also not been fully honest to his fianc\u00e9, bringing something back for her that should have remained, something that draws the predator south to their very door.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The opposite of this is \u201cSecond Sight,\u201d in which a blind girl named Louisa has a surprise visit from a young man, the pride of her town, who had gone off to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He is essentially a warning and premonition, but also the personification of a confession often denied to us by death. In \u201cThe Hairy Land,\u201d the ghost equals liberation, while in \u201cPhantom Limb\u201d the phantom is dumb flesh animated by the record of what its previous owner made it do.<\/span><\/p>\n I found \u201cThe Angel (1871)” to be the most \u201ccosmic\u201d or \u201ccosmic horror\u201d of the collection. The characters in the story discuss notions that there is no such thing as good or evil and that the things they are seeing are extra-dimensional entities, not angels and devils. Beyond the inclusion of ghosts, and ghouls and monsters and creatures, how does the ghost story fit in and operate with the horror genre and notions of the horrific in fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n I would say the primary element in the ghost story linking it to \u201chorror\u201d is the notion of the Unknown. One of my primary aims with \u201cThe Angel\u201d was to explore Victorian notions of certainty when it came to the afterlife, particularly a Christian afterlife experienced through the \u201cGood Death\u201d as it was called. A \u201cGood Death\u201d meant that one was in his or her own bed at home, surrounded by family, and ready to meet Jesus when death came. He or she was to confess sins to God, and purify themselves in order to be accepted into heaven. The idea of this moment arriving, only to reveal an entire <\/span>other <\/span><\/i>system or reality in place, seems genuinely frightening, especially for a society underpinned by such beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n While \u201cHome is Where the Heart Is (1875)” is set in the homestead era and setting I found it operates as an effective \u201cmodern\u201d horror story in style and structure. Tell us about the ending of this story and in the similar structure and endings of many of the stories in the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, the language of this tale is plainer and more direct, a bit more fairy tale-ish. This is the oldest story in this collection. I wrote it more than a decade ago, and the first version did not have quite the same ending. It was less bleak, and the woods themselves felt like more a destination than a harrowing unknown. Several of the pieces in this collection have similar endings as you\u2019ve pointed out. Though there is nothing wrong with an ending that wraps up the narrative in a \u201creveals all\u201d way, such endings often betray the ghost story, which explores what is <\/span>not <\/span><\/i>known and functions (if that is the appropriate word) in a manner that we cannot understand. The entire point is to enter what is unsettling, and so, in my view at least, it is better to leave things feeling as such, while simultaneously allowing the reader to feel that he or she ventured somewhere that has left them changed, though precisely <\/span>how<\/span><\/i> they might not be able to say.<\/span><\/p>\n In ghost stories such as Fritz Leiber\u2019s \u201cThe Smoke Ghost\u201d (1941) the ghost operates as a metaphor or allegory of the times.\u00a0 Some of your stories, such as \u201cThe Boarding House (1854),” deftly blend realism with allegory and metaphor. It feels like the characters have walked into an allegory of Victorian Times.<\/strong><\/p>\n Tell us more about the lack of agency and societal cages Victorian women lived in.<\/strong><\/p>\n During the Victorian Era there gender lines were defined by the \u201cThe Cult of Domesticity,\u201d also known as \u201cThe Cult of True Womanhood.\u201d This in essence determined the roles of the sexes. The woman was to be the goddess of the domestic sphere. She offered maternal love, wifely affection, and served as a Christian role model. It was a triumvirate known as \u201cMother, Home, and Heaven.\u201d The homes that women created for their husbands and children were sanctuaries. But it was up the man\u2019s role to establish the rules of the house. He was also the public-facing figure of the family, the one who worked and served as citizenship representation (voting). According to letters and diaries from the period, many women appeared to be fine with this arrangement, though not universally of course. Some women even reversed the roles and became the breadwinners of their families. A good example of this is Currier & Ives artist Frances Flora Bond Palmer, a talented illustrator who produced drawings and paintings in order to earn a living in lieu of her drunken husband.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Boarding House\u201d discusses this theme, but also attempts to demonstrate the isolation of women trapped in the domestic sphere\u2014women who are often left alone by their husbands, and eventually abandoned by their children as they grow up. These are often women who would, in today\u2019s society, achieve things similar to men, such as serving in political office, having successful careers in law or medicine, or simply choosing to be independent individuals unshackled by convention. I hasten to add that I am not trying to say that such social structures of man at work and woman at home (or vice versa) are wrong, only that people of both sexes are individuals first, and should have the freedom to follow their own courses outside of social configurations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tell us about the stories in the book where the supernatural operates as a release or resignation from or surrender to the Victorian cages and restrictions.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, \u201cThe Boarding-House\u201d certainly functions in that regard — the deliverance of a woman from the bonds of marriage and motherhood to a strange land where she may at last transcend not only her predetermined Victorian state in life, but herself as well. \u201cThe Judgment Trump\u2019,\u201d in which a group of formerly enslaved men find their way onto a steamboat headed up-river to an undetermined destination, also acts as a freeing, or a rightful escape. I suppose concerning the latter we would want to add \u201cinstitutions\u201d alongside cages and restrictions. <\/span><\/p>\n I think \u201cThe Spring Boy\u201d also is an example of a liberation, one in which a twin sister falls in love with an \u201cother\u201d and absconds with him\/it. The denial of passion and lust and the formulation of a life outside of the expectations of Victorian mores certainly is demonstrated here. <\/span><\/p>\n Then there is \u201cThe Reckoner,\u201d where a woman is forced to surrender her loved ones to Death, which played so central a role in Victorian society. The biographer of Emily Dickinson and Yale professor Richard Sewall once mentioned that in Victorian times, when you asked someone \u201cHow are you today?\u201d it wasn\u2019t merely to be friendly — the person was actually asking how you were feeling\/doing. With so many diseases and accidents waiting to take you, tomorrow you might be gone.<\/span><\/p>\n In the \u201cMourning Maker (1893)\u201d a character winds up becoming a ghost and floats away over an expansive fairground \u201cwatching time digest the moment.\u201d Tell us about the poignant line that ends the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n I suppose there is a bit of the Bhagavad Gita \u201cI am time, the destroyer of the worlds\u201d here, or as the band Low called time, \u201cThe Great Destroyer.\u201d But time seems also to function as a destroyer of itself. The protagonist in \u201cThe Mourning Maker,\u201d Lucy Bobbins, is simultaneously experiencing two ephemeral things: childhood and a marvelous fair, the latter\u2019s palatial buildings constructed of staff and wood and brick rather than the marble and stone of which they appear to be made. There are similarities between girl and faux city, as their foundations are both temporary and tenuous. <\/span><\/p>\n I suppose the Mourning Maker herself could be a metaphor for time — a thing coming for Lucy, a thing that has set up at the fair (an illusion of permanence and stability and manifold pleasures), nestled amongst the booths that showcase the greatest achievements and mark the progress of the age. Ultimately it takes not only a part of Lucy (a part that can be preserved for millennia no less), but cannibalizes all of her time to come.<\/span><\/p>\n In \u201cThe Lithographer\u2019s Chamber\u201d we travel to a Lithograph Factory where the two main characters take stock of commercial images that are a \u201cvisual catalog of an expired zeitgeist.\u201d Tell us about the line and the images it refers to. How does the fate of these two characters encompass the theme of the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n The phrase \u201cexpired zeitgeist\u201d is really just a puffy way of saying \u201cold fashioned.\u201d In this sense, it\u2019s the prints that Fogg & Co. produced that show a more bucolic, handcrafted way of life in contrast to the great industrialization that took place during the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. The prints that the protagonists Rupert and Dawes observe in the dusty old manufactory show pastoral scenes and technologies that appear quaint and outmoded compared to the great thrust of the steam engine and the seeming magic of the telephone. But there is also something eerie about the pictures left behind by Fogg; there are dark images, and as well, a series that at length explains to the two men why they have found themselves there. Whether they want to or not, there is something they must see, and the two have decidedly different reactions to what Fogg\u2019s prints reveal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On the whole, as you\u2019ve rightly pointed out, Daniel, the fate of Rupert and Dawes does indeed encompass the theme of <\/span>Haunted Victorian America<\/span><\/i>. More unnerving than their findings, perhaps, is the strangeness of things all around them in the town of Swallop Falls. A sort of eerie transience in the expired surroundings and abandoned places that we recognize in the settings of our own lives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Please tell us about the line \u201cnostalgia is a prison\u201d from the final story in the collection \u201cThe Caretaker (1901).\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s quite easy for most of us to become lost in reminiscence, particularly when we\u2019re remembering our own pasts. Childhood is especially alluring because it\u2019s a time when everything is still before us. We are generally healthy and without fear in a way that we\u2019ll never know again. I like to think of our lives as videotapes of predetermined lengths. The story is all there, and we are experiencing it in real time as it plays out. As we age, approaching the middle of our reels, we begin to long for the time when there was more rather than less of the tape left to play. The quality of the film is remembered with brightness and sharpness, with more feeling, and it features more of the people we\u2019ve loved. The impressions of those earlier moods trap us in a loop where we can only see the beauty of the first half of the story. We feel the loss of and longing for that part which we can replay but not relive, and it costs us large swathes of the rest of the reel if we\u2019re not careful.<\/span><\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHORS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n JOSHUA REX is an American author of speculative fiction and historian of Victorian America. He is the author of the novel\u00a0<\/span>A Mighty Word<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(Rotary Press), the novella\u00a0<\/span>The Inamorta<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(Weird House Press), and five collections.\u00a0His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney\u2019s<\/em>, Nightscript<\/em>, Pseudopod<\/em>, Tales to Terrify<\/em>, Chthonic Matter<\/em>, Nightscript<\/em>, and others. You can find him at the following places:<\/span><\/p>\n Website:<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>www.joshuarex.com<\/span><\/a> DANIEL BRAUM writes \u201cstrange tales\u201d, intentionally ambiguous stories in the tradition of Robert Aickman that evoke the old Twilight Zone<\/em> shows. His stories, set in locations around the globe, explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural. His debut collection from Cemetery Dance, The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales<\/em> is currently on sale for 99 cents as an eBook as part of the Cemetery Dance summer sale.<\/span><\/p>\n His all-new short story collection <\/span>Phantom Constellations<\/span><\/i> is coming in November 2025 from Cemetery Dance Publications.<\/span><\/p>\n More about him can be found at\u00a0<\/span>https:\/\/bloodandstardust.wordpress.com\/<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"cover](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/haunted-victorian-america-cover.webp?resize=219%2C350&ssl=1\")
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of\u00a0this interview series here at Cemetery Dance<\/a>\u00a0and over on\u00a0my YouTube channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"cover](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/inamorta.webp?resize=234%2C350&ssl=1\")
Joe Morey (from Weird House Press<\/a>) and I were chatting, and he asked if I had ever given thought to producing a collection of Victorian-era stories. I had written some period pieces (like my novella <\/span>The Inamorta<\/span><\/i><\/a> published through Weird House). There was not, to my knowledge, a volume that specifically addressed Victorian American ghost stories, so I thought I\u2019d give the idea a go, looking to represent many aspects and voices from the period.<\/span><\/p>\n
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