Horror Fusionis: ‘There Is All This Camouflaged Weirdness Around that We Walk Past’

Your short story collection entitled Never Seen by Waking Eyes (2005) seems to welcome the presence of the unexpected, the bizarre and the incongruous. However, the way the stories embrace these notions does not seem to follow a jubilant dynamic. Shall we understand that light always surges from obscurity the way rays inhabit a black hole?

Not always. Sometimes there’s only darkness. J. B. S. Haldane once said that ‘the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine’. I’m delighted whenever someone discovers something new and strange, but I accept that what is strange can also be dangerous to humans, and we can’t always be adequately prepared if we’re dealing with the unknown or unimagined. On the other hand, if we don’t go out to meet it, we’ll be missing out on wonderful things as well. Also, Never Seen by Waking Eyes exists because I was asked if I’d like to put together a collection of my horror stories, and horror stories have to scare people and you can’t do that if they know that everything will have a happy ending. Not all of those stories were intentionally written as horror: I thought of myself as a writer of science fiction and fantasy until some of those works started being nominated for horror awards, but after I acquired a reputation for writing gothic and dark fantasy, I wrote more of it.

How important are cartoons in your work? For instance, you are referring to Cerebus from the Canadian Dave Sim and his comic book series. In ‘A Single Shadow’, the term Cerebus first ‘ordinarily’ refers to a Cerebus tee-shirt (worn by an Asian male character). Besides the cartoon figure, could the term also refer to ‘the Cerebus Syndrome’ since the story often moves from joviality to morbidity, romantic love to pornography? Can this syndrome impact your writing or does my reading appear incongruous to you?

Usually not very important: though I grew up reading comics, my first US publications were comics-based superhero and role-playing game scenarios, I have a modest collection of graphic novels, and I’ve worked in bookshops that sold comics (including Cerebus), it’s a relatively small proportion of what I read.
I hadn’t heard of Cerebus Syndrome before today, though I’ve known the concept for a while. The Cerebus reference in ‘A Single Shadow’ came about because I wanted something that I thought would be sufficiently obscure that the Australian owner would notice it and might assume it to be the only one in Tokyo. I haven’t read any Cerebus since working in a bookshop in the 1980s (I remember hearing a writer say ‘back when Cerebus was funny’ as though referring to ancient history, and that was twenty-five years ago), but when I did read it, the cynicism and the high weirdness appealed to me, and both have been a feature of my work for about as long as I’ve been writing. Going from comedy to dead serious is a trick I learned as a teenager from Shakespearean tragedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, and the TV series M*A*S*H, because I realized that it’s a more effective means of keeping people reading fiction than being unremittingly grim (unless you’re Thomas Hardy, anyway).
Moving from romantic love to pornography… I don’t consider any work I’ve had published under my own name to be pornographic, though I accept that some readers will disagree. When I include sex scenes in my work, it’s to say something about the characters and their relationships, and sometimes about what the cultures they’re from consider acceptable or unacceptable behavior. And sometimes, yes, it can shock readers, but I hope that will make them think about their own attitudes to love and sex.
A few of my stories are about the relationship between sex and romantic love. I’m not cynical about the existence of romantic love, I’ve experienced it, if it’s mutual it can be great (until it ends). But even though I can pinpoint moments when I fell in love and could put a memorial plaque at one of the locations, it was never at first sight. Sexual attraction, on the other hand, often does happen at first sight, and most of us have experienced that and know it can make us act impulsively, illogically, maybe even dishonestly… which makes it an ideal driver for short stories.
I sometimes like to reverse the cliché of men only being interested in sex and women in love, because it’s now much easier for people to be honest about that, to ourselves and to each other – to say, well, right now this is just sex, it might become love for one or both of us or it might not, but we don’t have to disguise it as something else. And in a story such as ‘A Single Shadow’ or ‘The Lady of Situations’, if I show the sex, that’s usually to show that, at least for one of the people involved, it isn’t necessarily about romantic love.

The Devil is lurking in the details. How important are details in your style?

Very. I can sometimes spend weeks trying to find perfect names for characters, or researching obscure details of real settings or historical characters, or doing the math necessary to work out the physics on a completely imaginary exoplanetary system. I tell my creative writing students that a writer should know much more about their characters and settings than they reveal to readers.

Several short stories from your collection Never Seen by Waking Eyes deal with the shock of the real as incongruous. Does it mean we can only get access to the singularity of the unfathomable real as an accident and sudden encounter?

Not necessarily. I suppose someone might get there by logic alone if they start from the right place. But usually, yes.
Remembering that ‘the real’ in these stories is a version of reality that I create for that fiction (I’ve written other stories, under licence, set in other writers’ versions of reality, including the ‘Doctor Who and Shadowrun’ worlds, but none of them are reprinted in this collection), which may bear no more relation to real reality than, say, an astrologer’s or a conspiracy theorist’s, and may not even closely resemble the real in the next story… the right place to start is a belief that the real may be too big to understand fully, but parts of it can be discovered by something resembling logic or scientific method as long as, like a good scientist, you’re prepared to discard hypotheses that are disproved. Most of the characters in these stories – and in what we consider ‘real life’ – don’t actually go looking for the real until it forcibly contradicts what they previously believed, what Vonnegut called ‘foma’, or harmless untruths.
In my later collection Charm, Strangeness, Mass and Spin, there are two stories of a couple who actively go looking for ghosts and sometimes find them, because they start from the ‘right place’ of accepting that some of the better-documented sightings and urban legends are true and are prepared to rigorously investigate them, but that’s unusual: most of my characters, especially in this collection, encounter the real unexpectedly and have to learn how to deal with it.

Metamorphosis seems to be one of your topics, it ‘affects’ your style, the plots, the characters. Or do I get closer to your work talking about anamorphosis or ‘weird and not weird’ things combined?1

I think anamorphosis is more applicable. One of the things that attracted me to Japanese O-Bakemono when I started writing The Art of Arrow Cutting was that they’ve adapted to urban living; they’re weird, but sufficiently not weird that they can pass as human as long as people around them aren’t particularly observant, which is why the Mujina and Rokuro-Kubi in Art have mundane jobs. I learned about Rikombyo when I was writing Art, and since I couldn’t fit one into the novel, I gave it its own story. But that’s at the core of a lot of my fiction: the idea that there is all this camouflaged weirdness around that we walk past, perhaps daily, because most of us aren’t sufficiently interested to look closely enough. And while some of it may be malevolent, I find even that much less scary than the idea of too much conformity.

In ‘Probable Cause’, the narrator oscillates between the denial of reality and the glorification of arbitrariness. His deductive logic runs idle. Does the story mean that life’s unexpectedness leaves us facing the dislocation of the real?

In his case, yes, but that story is about a man who believes, rightly or wrongly, that he’s real but is arbitrarily being moved between different realities where his existence in some form is one of the few constants. Whether he’s the one who moves from one reality to another and leaves the phantom hitchhiker behind, or whether he’s stable and she’s dislocated, is up to the reader to decide.

Is your style purposefully incongruous? I mean, is it based upon the generalized disturbance of usual (mimetic, narrative…) systems? Do you aim at disturbing the reader’s certitude? Can we say your texts reveal paths to understanding while undermining the ground under the feet of the (then awkward) reader?

Sometimes. I do occasionally try to set stories in quotidian reality, but it’s not my forte and I prefer to startle readers out of their comfort zones and maybe think about the world and themselves. That said, some of my stories are purely for fun; I don’t believe in the supernatural, and I’m not trying to convince anyone that Cthulhu really lives below the Mall of America – though if ‘Reveille’ helps them notice that there’s something unsettling about the place, I’m happy with that.

In the story ‘What You Wish for’, accurate descriptions (with superlatives and words from Greek origin) deliver up the factitious nature of the cloned feminine figures. We thus see that Roy’s phantasms and even dark fantasy as a genre lie in an overflow of words that suddenly discharges. Are grammar and etymology a key in your writing?

Yes. I’ve been fascinated by etymology since I was a kid, I’m proud of having a large vocabulary and I enjoy inventing new words for science-fiction stories. And I was delighted when I read an interview with one of my editors who said that one reason that he bought my stories was that my sentences were always beautifully constructed.

Could you give examples of some words that you invented or borrowed from relevant and plural etymological sources to illustrate or reinforce your ideas? I thought about Mara for example in ‘What You Wish for’ who might take a biblical sense (bitter waters) but also the Danish meaning (succubus). There is also the interesting term ‘callipygous’ that encapsulates an incongruous dynamic (kallos, beauty; pugé, buttocks). You use this incongruous term in ‘What You Wish for’ to describe an Asian woman the succubus wants to copy.2

English steals words from a lot of languages, and I love using words that mean different things in different languages, especially as character names. Mara, for example, is unremarkable as a woman’s name or a surname, but it’s also the root of ‘nightmare’ and the name of a demon, psychopomp, or goddess of death in different cultures and religions. Aisha is a common Arabic name, but I first discovered it in a book about ninja where it means using a person’s soft-heartedness to manipulate them, so it’s what I called a woman in my story ‘Transit’. ‘Yoko Aruki’ came from the same book, and it just means walking sideways to present a smaller profile, but since ‘Yoko’ is also a Japanese woman’s name, I thought it was an ideal alias for a female ninja.
I don’t know where I first encountered the name Mandaglione, but I’d read about the Mandylion, the ‘true image’ of Christ’s face, so I picked it for the surname of the photographer-protagonist of my novel The Art of Arrow Cutting because he learns to change reality by manipulating images. I ended up calling him Magistrale instead, with the nickname Mage, because that’s what he becomes, and named his uncle Mandaglione because I liked the name too much to discard it.
Mapurtiti is an Australian aboriginal word for spirit or ghost; the town in ‘What You Wish for’ was given that name as a warning that it is haunted, but it doesn’t mean anything to white Australians who move there, because we rarely think about the names places are given. ‘Salvation’ was named after a non-native plant, Salvation Jane, which is also known as Paterson’s Curse, because it’s good fodder for ruminants but poisonous to other animals, and I liked the double meaning, the contrast.
And sometimes the sounds of words just appeal to me; ‘callipygous’ is one which I probably use too often. On a less serious note, I’m also an inveterate punster, which is why there’s a character with a wolf totem in one of my ‘Shadowrun’ novels with the street name of Thurston Howl – which is a ‘Gilligan’s Island’ joke, but I mainly did it so I could slip in a line from Allen Ginsberg’s poem.

Are you interested in optical sciences? The incongruous and optical incongruence are close: they both designate two unmatchable realities or planes. The expression ‘incongruence of the retina’ has also been used (in optical science) as a synonym for horror fusionis. To produce meaning, are your science-fiction or horror stories enforcing the fusion of beings or entities that are not in tune?

My knowledge of optics mostly comes from my science-fiction writing and the way beings with differently constructed eyes, different optical spectra and visual fields will see the world differently, and how it affects their behaviour, but it’s not something I use often either as a metaphor or a plot device. ‘Nothing Like the Sun’ was inspired by recent attempts to create ‘bionic’ eyes and my interest in the evolution of eyes, but I’m not an expert in the field. That said, horror fusionis is a good metaphor for the anamorphic nature of many of my characters, and I may use it as a title if I do another collection.

Are you defending the idea of a fragmented vision of human beings? Or the idea that wrong ways, incongruous manners lead to harmonious congruence after error and wandering? Am I on the right track? Can we never see by waking eyes? Is obscurity necessary for us to see?

The narrator of Never Seen by Waking Eyes, a lawyer specialising in defamation cases, knows that people who look respectable may actually be monsters: horror fusionis, if you like. He learns that vampires can look like little girls who can be seen by waking eyes, but not by cameras. The story, like several of my stories, is largely about the difference between what we dream or want or fantasize about and what we will actually do; who we are when we know we’re seen and when we think we’re not; the different creatures we can be by day and by night. If there is any congruence, it’s a deal we make with ourselves, and some of us can live with that well enough, but some can’t. Or not for long.
The title Never Seen by Waking Eyes comes from a Lewis Carroll poem about Alice Liddell, who possibly haunted his dreams and not just the good ones, maybe torturing ‘the fancy that would fain be pure’, though this is guesswork on my part. Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was also an avid photographer, and the frequent distortions of size and shape in the Alice books suggest that he may have suffered from migraines and the visual disturbances that came from those. The Sylvie and Bruno books are full of nonsense rhymes by a gardener, all of which being with ‘He thought he saw…’, who then sees something very different when ‘he looked again’. I doubt that Dodgson ever actually mistook a bar of mottled soap for ‘an argument / that proved he was the Pope’, but he was aware that what we think we see when we’re awake may not be reality any more (or less) than what we see in dreams, and that it can pay us to look again.
If there’s an overreaching theme to my horror stories – and those stories were written over a span of twelve years, so there may not be – is that there’s weird stuff both around us and within us, bright wonderful weird stuff and dark scary weird stuff, snarks and boojums, and we shouldn’t close our eyes to any of it. When you think you see something, look again. Knowing about it may help keep you safe. It may even help us learn who we really are. And the dark scary stuff is going to get us all in the end anyway.

In what way are you influenced by space rock? It seems that your new collection entitled Charm, Strangeness, Mass and Spin has a link with Pulse (Pink Floyd) and the rock band Hawkwind (with their music album Quark, Strangeness and Charm). Can you elaborate on these connections? In what way can space rock influence your writing style and ideas?

I’m a fan of Pink Floyd and have snuck a few references to their music into some stories, but any Hawkwind influence would be entirely unconscious as I don’t think I’ve listened to any of their music since the 1980s.
I’m usually careful not to quote lyrics in any of my stories, because songwriters are notoriously litigious. When I mentioned an old Elton John song All the Girls Love Alice in my story ‘Never Seen by Waking Eyes’, I was warned not to use a line from the song as the title because the rights would probably cost me much more than they were paying me for the story.
That said, my story ‘Out’ in Scenes from the Second Storey is based on the song by The God Machine (with permission, as are the other stories in the anthology); I’ve used ‘On a Dark Desert Highway, Cool Wind in my Hair’ as a working title for several stories, including ‘Probable Cause’ (which mentions songs playing on the radio); and my Zombies vs Robots story ‘Farewell to the Master’ was inspired in part by The Flaming Lips’ song Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

When the term pareidolia occurs in two short stories from your new 2022 collection (‘Empathy’ and ‘Age and Hunger’), can we understand it as a metaphor for the reading process as well?

It’s an excellent metaphor, because readers attribute humanity to fictional characters who are only a collection of words, but I have to admit that it wasn’t a metaphor I had in mind at the time.
It’s worth noting that both of those stories are ghost stories, and I suspect a great many ghost ‘sightings’ can be explained by pareidolia. The ending of ‘Empathy’ was also inspired by the Kuleshov effect, a related phenomenon where we misread emotions in human faces because of external influences.