Where the Weirdness Lurks
In the course of pondering the question of whether or not I write “weird fiction,” I have been forced to delve deeper into what makes my work weird. My preconception of weird fiction probably begins with Lovecraft and his Great Old Ones; tentacle horror of the sort Michael Shea wrote so effectively in stories like Fat Face and I, Said the Fly . In my unpublished book, House of the Empty Stare , I certainly explored the sort of bizarre picaresque that Clark Ashton Smith first visited in the 1920s and that Shea buffed to a high gloss in Nifft the Lean. A bit of that sensibility carried over into my story, “Razorwings,” which got a great review by one of the most underrated writers in the weird pantheon, Brian McNaughton – author of the neo-classic, Throne of Bones . (for anyone interested, I’m planning to release a Razorwings story cycle immediately after The Carnivorous Forest ). Although I started working in the horror genre in the late 80s and remained in the field for almost...