Scott Nicolay

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Tag: The King in Yellow

John C. Foster: On the Road of a Dark Americana | The Outer Dark: Episode 23 — DECEMBER 15, 2015

Dead-Men-updated-coverJohn C. Foster unburies the genesis of his Libros de Inferno trilogy (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing) which starts with Dead Men, playing in an ugly rough reality that is slipping and in decay, how he develops his storytelling via set pieces and way stations, his repulsion for spoon-feeding readers, his fascination with the concept of dread and creating a sense of jeopardy even for a tough guy, aiming for a dark Americana, Dead Men’s setting in Texas and northern Mexico, moving the second novel Night Roads (Oct. 2016) to Louisiana, blending hard-boiled and noir with more horrific elements, square-jawed heroes versus flawed characters in new lives, a dialogue with Frankenstein’s creation, writing as a corridor with many windows and doors, a Star Wars interlude, his influences including Stephen King, Raymond Chandler and Donald Westlake’s Parker novels, his other upcoming novel which is a dark espionage thriller called Mr. White (Grey Matter Press, March 2016), why you should “get out of the way when you see that Foster-John Smith sketchblack Cadillac coming,” using Mad Max as a structural model, epic narratives such as Gilgamesh and the notion of demi-Gods, revealing character through action, burial suits, damned books, occult versus super-science, the fearlessness of Laird Barron, what’s next for John including another novel, collection and upcoming short stories including “Dead Air” in the highly anticipated Lost Signals, edited by Max Booth III, and his reading recommendations of other contemporary writers to watch including Peter Straub (Koko), Josh Malerman (Bird Box), Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts) and Thomas Ligotti (Penguin editions).

case6.000x9.000.inddNews of the Weird with Justin Steele includes the monumental anthology Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction and the VanderMeer Winter Mix StoryBundle which also includes eBooks of Anna Tambour’s Crandolin, Michael Cisco’s The Narrator, and seven other exciting works, an exciting offer which expires on Dec. 31. Also another major story reveal from Lost Signals, edited by Max Booth III, another upcoming Laird Barron novella, an update on Lovecraft eZine’s Autumn Cthulhu Kickstarter, the Ramsey Campbell tribute anthology The Children of Gla’aki. edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass (Dark Regions Press) and new books from Dunhams Manor Press. Plus, a clue about Stories from the Borderland #3, posting tomorrow at www.ScottNicolay.com and artist Michael Bukowski’s yogblogsoth.

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.

Next week’s guest: Laird Barron and Justin Steele join Scott for a roundtable on The State of the Weird 2016.

It’s a great drug Ultram intended for the treatment of moderate to severe pain.

More Links:

https://chizinepub.com/books/license-expired

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Brackett

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

Craig Laurance Gidney: Writing the Beautiful Mess | The Outer Dark: Episode 14 — OCTOBER 6, 2015

12120007_625217597615975_7812391686514725385_oCraig Laurance Gidney recalls pivotal early experiences at Clarion West 1996 under the tutelage of a blockbuster roster of teachers from Jack Womack to Ellen Datlow, as well as studying under Samuel R. “Chip” Delany in college, remembers recently deceased literary titan Tanith Lee, the transgressive and neodecadant qualities that drew him so passionately to her writing, her courage portraying gay characters and the impact of her work on his own, his most recent anthology, Skin Deep Magic, from Rebel Satori Press, including specific stories such as writing about Richard Bruce Nugent, a gay figure in the Harlem Renaissance, in “Conjuring Shadows” and “Coalrose” which was inspired by Nina Simone, the influence of Aimé Césaire, surrealism and the Négritude movement in skin-deep-magicFrancophone literature, exploring his fascination with lucid dreaming in his latest story The Nectar of Nightmares forthcoming from Dim Shores, writing in the “Beautiful Mess,” engaging with racist imagery, epithets, stereotypes and ideology in stories such as “Lyes,” why he feels it’s okay to like problematic fiction—including HP Lovecraft—as long as you don’t deny the problem, horror as intrinsic to the experience of African Americans, women and other liminal groups versus being about the fear of the other, Toni Morrison‘s Beloved as a horror novel, the current boom of diverse writers in fantastic literature, the often overlooked gay weird, writing from every perspective, why everybody should read Queers Destroy Horror!, ssmhis next novel currently titled Invocations—a contemporary fantasy about a family of outsider artists, and his current reading recommendations including Tom Cardamone, Chesya Burke, Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, and Tanith Lee’s posthumous collection Dancing Through the Fire, which has a theme of coming to peace with death, and A Different City, published just before her passing which he calls “classic top-notch over-the-top gothic goodness” set in Marseilles—“Flaubert if he wrote dark fiction”!

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.

bereft_1_full_nameMore Links:

https://www.lethepressbooks.com/

https://www.tinysatchelpress.com/#!__whats-in-the-satchel

https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/04/wandering-spirits-traveling-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/

Next week’s guest: Gemma Files, author of The Worm in Every Heart, We Will All Go Down Together, the Hexslinger series, and the forthcoming novel Experimental Film.

Nick Gucker: Throwing a Stick at the Moon| The Outer Dark: Episode 13 — SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

KLAW Color cover 72dpiNick Gucker, AKA Nick the Hat, one of weird fiction’s most beloved artists and the designer of The Outer Dark’s logo, shares his secret superhero origin story growing up weird on the water and in the woods of rural Alaska, how he journeyed south to Seattle to study art and play in punk rock bands, his early love of Ambrose Bierce, an affection for the surreal naturalist horror of Algernon Blackwood, physicality and monsters in William Hope Hodgson’s work, strange fish and the deep abyss of the ocean in his art, peeling back and creasing the skin in anatomy class and beyond, an odd subliminal influence of Dr. Seuss fueled PaintedMonsters_cover_001_FC_smallperhaps by the more disturbing aspects of Yertle the Turtle and the sheer terror of the pants with nobody inside them, designing the logo for The Outer Dark, finding a home at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and NecronomiCon Providence, adventures in Bali and Asian influences on his art, his favorite punk rock outsider artists from Blinko to Walsby, complexity in his art as a way to entice observers to explore the image longer and more deeply, collaborating with authors/publishers/magazines/convention organizers throughout the Weird Renaissance, recent work including the cover for Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters and Other Strange Beasts (Word Horde), his commitment not to indulge in the exploitative side of pulp art, what he’s working on now and next, and his recommended artists working in the Weird today including Mike Dubisch, Mike Bukowski, Jeanne D’Angelo, Dave Felton, Chris Mars, Skinner, Paul Komoda, Josh Yelle, Allen Williams, Robert H. Knox and Liv Rainey-Smith.

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.

MythofFallingJacobMore Links:

https://esoterx.com/2013/01/09/the-fearsome-alaskan-tlingit-kushtaka-if-its-not-one-thing-its-an-otter/

“What Was I Scared Of” By Dr. Seuss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxuhKur2IYo

https://www.blancomuseum.com/

https://www.outsiderart.co.uk/blinko.htm

https://www.pusfan.com/art.htm

https://dennisdread.blogspot.com/2007/06/legacy-of-mad-marc-rude.html

https://www.brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/Home.html

https://witchhouserocks.com/

Next week’s guest: Craig Laurance Gidney, author of Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press) and The Nectar of Nightmares (forthcoming from Dim Shores)

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