Scott Nicolay

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Tag: Robert E. Howard

Orrin Grey: Who’s Afraid of the Painted Monster? | The Outer Dark: Episode 19 — NOVEMBER 11, 2015

pm-cov72dpiOrrin Grey, author of Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, shares the secret origins of his latest collection including how artist Nick Gucker deftly worked details from all the stories into a monstrously macabre cover, the dialogue with horror cinema from Universal to Hammer to giallo that runs through his wonderfully plotted works, what he describes as a “Clive Barker influence,” exploring “philosophy” through narrative, using tropes as shorthand but in surprising, unconventional ways, ghost stories not about ghosts as we expect them to be, similarities to Robert Aickman, acknowledging and celebrating dramatic influences from William Shakespeare to William Castle, the extraordinary significance of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets starring Boris Karloff and how that film juxtaposed an older Gothic, creepy school of horror with the modern paranoia-laced violent horror of the Sixties, scholarly approaches versus jazz riffing on many different traditions of horror film and literature especially in the title story, his love of wax museums, the dialogue between the stories in both of his anthologies, John Langan who wrote the introduction, his obsession with obsession, The Prestige, twin novella finales about selling your soul to the Devil, what he learned about pacing from Mike Mignola and giving the Golem the Universal treatment via Hellboy pulp expressionist styling, affinities with Belgian Weird author Jean Ray and buried Malpertuis in “Painted Monsters,” Old Dark House movies, death as a recurring theme in every single story, what’s next for Orrin Grey including stories, novellas, and a nonfiction book about horror films, talking movies with Gemma Files, musing about seeing his own work someday on film, and his recent reading recommendations including previous The Outer Dark guest Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Amanda Downum.

Justin Steele reviews Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, and joins Scott for this week’s installment of News from the Weird including coverage of World Fantasy Convention 2015 and the World Fantasy Awards, as well as exciting upcoming collections, novels and other works by some of the biggest names in Weird.

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

More Links:

https://www.patreon.com/orringrey?ty=h

https://www.paulchadwick.net/

https://www.strange-aeons.com/

Next week’s guest: Mike Davis, editor/publisher of Lovecraft eZine. and the upcoming anthology, Autumn Cthulhu.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Never Touch the Record | The Outer Dark: Episode 6 — JULY 28, 2015

signaltonoiseSilvia Moreno-Garcia discusses her transition from short fiction to her novel Signal to Noise, the appeal of the short standalone novel, how growing up in Mexico City has influenced her writing and the importance of place, setting and neighborhood in developing her narrative, her next novel tentatively titled Young Blood, an urban fantasy about Mexican drug-dealing narco vampires (an expansion of her short story “Puddle of Blood”) which she characterizes as “the least romantic vampire romance” and a love letter to the Novela Negra, a form of crime noir in Spanish speaking countries, how spec-lit is different in Spanish-speaking countries and its social power as a literary mode to take on political issues (similar to Russian SF&F, Orwell, or Huxley), optimistic vs pessimistic/realist spec-lit and the disturbing futures of Mexico and Canada, why you should never touch the record that she’s playing, growing up in radio stations, the importance of the name Vincent, her master’s thesis on eugenics in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, Erskine Caldwell and The Dunwich Horror, C.L. Moore and her mastery of the weird tale, female protagonists, her other future projects including She Walks in Shadows, the first all-women Lovecraft anthology, and work as editor/publisher of Innsmouth Free Press, the importance of the spec-lit small press and why people should read more women writers including Livia Llewellyn. Angela Slatter, Molly Tanzer and Carmen Maria Machado, and what she’ll be up to as a guest of honor at NecronomiCon August 20-23, 2015 in Providence, RI.

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

Additional Links:

https://www.silviamoreno-garcia.com/blog/

https://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/

NEXT WEEK’S GUEST:  Damien Angelica Walters, author of Sing Me Your Scars

 

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