An Interview with BEN PEEK

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Ben Peek?

I’m an author who lives in Sydney, Australia with my partner, Nikilyn Nevins, who is a photographer.

THE GODLESS – the first book in my Children Trilogy – is my fifth book. My previous books are Black Sheep, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Above/Below, with Stephanie Campisi. My collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories, was released earlier this year. In addition to that, I’ve done a few other things, such as a psychogeography pamphlet, an autobiographical comic, and lectured and taught at various places.

I also may, or may not, be listening to the Velvet Underground as I reply to this.

Your next novel, The Godless, is published in July by Tor UK and St. Martin’s Press in the US. How would you introduce the novel to a new reader?

The book is the first in a fantasy trilogy, and takes place in a world where, fifteen thousand years ago, a war between the gods took place. In its aftermath, the sun was broken into three, the ocean turned black with blood and rose, and the bodies of the gods fell to the ground, where they lay in a state best described as both dead and dying. In the centuries that followed, their powers seeped into the world, altering it, and altering some of the people who lived there.

An Interview with SUSIE MOLONEY

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Susie Moloney?

I’m a writer of horror fiction, and I live in Canada and the US, spending half my time in New York City with my playwright husband, Vern Thiessen. I’m a mom to two sons and a blind dog, and I love them all equally, no favourites.

I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pencil, although when I first started writing, I used to illustrate them as well, and color the pictures. Somewhere there’s a pretty epic illustrated story about a black water beetle (“Blackie’s Story”) who isn’t black, but green. No black crayon.

To date, I’ve written four novels, Bastion Falls, A Dry Spell, The Dwelling and The Thirteen. My claim to fame is that A Dry Spell received the largest advance ever, in Canada. That may have changed by now, but it was a big deal back in the day. I’ve been on the cover of two national magazines. The week my cover on Chatelaine came out, was the week that Princess Diana died. True story: I walked into an airport bookstore to pick up something to read on the plane, and there was my cover, right next to the People Magazine Princess Diana cover. I turned around and ran out. It was too overwhelming, my face right next to hers. I read the in-flight magazine that trip.

Things Withered, Stories is my very first collection. I’m no longer a collection virgin.

Guest Post: “Confessions of a Four-Color, Benday-Dot, Super-Deformed, Ultra-Compressed Science Fiction Writer” by Paul di Filippo

Paul Di Filippo is the author of Wikiworld, a great science fiction short story collection, which was recently published by (now award-winning) ChiZine. To celebrate the release of his new book, he has written the following piece about comics and their relationship with literature, and his own experiences as a reader and writer…

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My first reading, beyond the typical picture books of my era, such as Harry the Dirty Dog and Hop on Pop, consisted of comic books. Lots and lots of comics. I recall the very first comic I ever read, in 1961, in the summer between first and second grades. It was Mighty Mouse in Outer Space, and it blew my primitive juvenile brain to flinders. (I recently tracked down a copy on eBay, and had lots of fun revisiting it.) I’ve never been the same since. You might very well say that this comic was my first introduction to the literature of fantastika, and set me on the course to becoming a writer of same.

After this soon came the hard stuff. Batman, Superman, and the strange new antiheroes from Marvel. Alas, though I read them fresh off the drugstore stands, I retain no issues of Fantastic Four #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15, or similar lucrative titles. I concentrated on buying DC, while my pal Stephen covered the Marvel stuff, and we shared issues for mutual reading pleasure. Stephen, wherever he may be these days, got rich, and I got Lois Lane #53.

Guest Post: “The Delphi Room – Through the Looking-Glass” by Melia McClure

In my novel, The Delphi Room, two people watch the past of the other unfold in a mirror. Trapped next door to one another in rooms they believe to be Hell, Velvet and Brinkley are captive audience to the disturbing “home movies” that play in a mirror that hangs in each of their prisons.

Mirrors are compelling symbols and have appeared in various art forms and spiritual texts throughout the ages. The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, referenced in my book’s title, demanded of ancient Greeks “know thyself” – no small demand, and one which my characters grapple with mightily, in mightily eccentric fashion. Among other things, mirrors have historically symbolized self-knowledge and wisdom, and like the ancients who returned to Delphi again and again in search of answers to the riddles of life, countless numbers of people currently revisit a mirror as a daily reference point in the evolving construction of identity. The Delphic oracle answered seekers’ questions with riddles, and for mirror-gazers the riddles of the mind have a drastic impact on the perception of the confounding entity known as “self” that is reflected in the glass.

An Interview with CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

Very few fans of genre fiction and comics will be unaware of Christopher Golden. He has been writing for a couple of decades, now, mainly horror (or horror-inflected) work. Many will know him for his novels, his anthology work, and also his comics work – including the Baltimore books with Hellboy creator, Mike Mignola. He has a new short story collection coming out next month, through ChiZine, and has an impressive number of other projects he’s currently working on. I caught up with him (via email), and grilled him about writing, horror, and what he’s working on now…

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Christopher Golden?

At 46, you’d think I would have an answer to that, but I’m still working it out. I’ve been writing full time since 1992, with the sale of my first novel, OF SAINTS AND SHADOWS. Since then, I’ve written or co-written or edited about a hundred books, mostly fiction in the horror, fantasy, mystery, and thriller genres. I’ve written comics and short stories, video games and an animated web series, radio plays and screenplays.

Your short story collection, Tell My Sorrows to the Stones, was published by ChiZine last month. How would you introduce the book to a potential reader? Is there a unifying theme for the stories within?

I’ve written short stories for as long as I’ve been writing novels. My previous short story collection, The Secret Backs of Things, collected everything I had done up until that point. But it felt to me as if somewhere along the way I reached a point where I felt as if I’d actually sort of figured it out – this whole short story thing. I’m not saying I don’t like any of my older stories. I like them just fine, most of them. But I do feel as if I grew up a little bit somewhere in there, passed a kind of threshold where I understand the form better than I had before. I often say that my novel Strangewood was when I grew up as a novelist. I think the stories in Tell My Sorrows to the Stones represent a similar maturing, only this time in short story form. There’s more thought in them, for me. More reason for them to exist than the other ones had. A lot of them are about folklore and imagination and belief in general – not religious faith, but faith in ourselves and how dangerous it can be to misplace that sort of faith.

Guest Post: “The Shy Hero” by Steve Tem

I read my first critical work on short stories back in high school, around 1965 or ’66. It was The Lonely Voice by Frank O’Connor. To say it had a profound influence on me is an understatement. Starting with a discussion of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” the story of a friendless nonentity, an absurd take on a little man, O’Connor develops his theory concerning the difference between short stories and novels. According to O’Connor, one of the key aspects of the novel form is that there is always a character the reader can identify with, and a context that includes the concept of a normal society. Short stories, on the other hand, involve characters who are outcasts, members of submerged populations, characters who readers cannot identify with.

Even that early in my thinking about writing I thought the idea had its limitations, but it still fascinated me, and I thought there were some strong hints in O’Connor’s theory that might help me understand the relative levels and kinds of reader participation that differentiated the novel experience from the short story experience. I eventually wrote my own horrific nod to “The Overcoat” — it appeared in my first collection, City Fishing.

Interview with CHANDLER KLANG SMITH

Continuing my slow meander through Canadian publisher ChiZine’s stable of interesting and quirky authors, I bring you today a Q&A with Chandler Klang Smith, author of Goldenland Past Dark…

An Interview with KAREN HEULER

Last week I posted an excerpt from Karen Heuler’s much-talked-about and anticipated The Inner City anthology. Naturally, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to interview Karen as well, and ask her about the book, inspirations and also an old job with strange, alphabetical hiring practices…

Excerpt from “The Inner City” Karen Heuler (ChiZine)

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over sixty literary and speculative journals and anthologies, including several “Best of” collections.

She has published a short story collection and three novels, and also won an O. Henry award in 1998. She lives in New York with her dog, Philip K. Dick, and her cats, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.

Karen’s latest anthology, The Inner City, will be published on February 26 2013 (ChiZine). To celebrate the new book, here is one of the stories it contains:

“The Hair”

Truly the most astonishing thing happened when that new employee Mindy walked into the meeting wearing Paulina’s hair.

Paulina’s hands immediately went up to her head. Bald. Maybe a little patch of stubble.

Paulina gasped, but her coworkers at the meeting smiled a bland welcome to Mindy. Couldn’t they see what had happened?

Guest Post: “The Fantastical 18th and 19th Centuries, or, Dragons Dancing at Almack’s” by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Today I bring you a guest post by author Daniel Rabuzzi, who read my post on the Jo Fletcher Books Blog and had some more to add to the topic. So, naturally, I let him guest on the blog…

Thank you Stefan for inviting me to guest-post at Civilian Reader, on the occasion of Chizine/CZP publishing my fantasy novel, The Indigo Pheasant (sequel to 2009’s The Choir Boats).

I want to start by quoting you (if I may), when you guest-posted at Jo Fletcher Books in July this year:

“Is it just me, or are 18th/19th Century-style worlds absent from the fantasy genre? I don’t profess to have read every fantasy novel, so it could well be that I’ve missed a swathe of series and novels set in time periods inspired by the 18th and 19th Centuries. But, from my reading, I think their absence is a considerable oversight, and also an area for exploration and exploitation.”

Given that my novels are set in the early 19^th century (the action starts in London, and involves characters whose origins are British, West African, Chinese, Indian, German – ­and from elsewhere altogether), you will not be surprised that I agree with you.

Upcoming: “Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye” by Paul Tremblay (ChiZine)

I’m only just learning about ChiZine Publications (CZP), a Canadian “dark fantasy” publisher. The first time I heard of them was via David Nickle’s Rasputin’s Bastards, but I’ve been doing some research, and they have some pretty weird and wonderful-sounding novels. Which brings me to Swallowing A Donkey’s Eye, Paul Tremblay’s latest novel. Here’s the synopsis:

FARM WANTS YOU!

Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier. When the narrator’s single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the worst: his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, City’s all-powerful Mayor who is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and an over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad.

Whether rebelling against regimented and ridiculous Farm life, exploring the consumer-obsessed world of City, experiencing the suffering of the homeless in Pier, or confronting the secrets of his own childhood, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye’s narrator is a hilarious, neurotic, and rage-filled Quixote searching for his mother, his own dignity, and the meaning of humanity.

And I’ll admit, the main reason I looked more at this novel is because of the cover art. It’s just so weird…!

Guest Post: “On Mind Control” by David Nickle

No question about it. Mind control is more than a trope. It’s a bona fide kink.

You can verify this with a simple Google search (that you should probably do from home, when the kids are asleep or your parents are out), or you can take my word for it: The idea of bending another’s will to one’s own, for whatever purpose, is something that a great many people find fascinating, in that way.

It shouldn’t be surprising: mind control, like the most popular kinks, is all about power differentials – the savant who can exercise said control being the “top”, and the poor, usually uncommonly attractive and unattainable shlub on the receiving end being the “bottom”.

My novel Rasputin’s Bastards is all about mind control. The story covers decades in the lives of specially-selected and trained psychic powerhouses, working on behalf of the old Soviet KGB against their counterparts at Langley, in an Amazing-Kreskin variation of the Great Game. The psychics in this book engage in astral projection, and are able to enter the minds and bodies of properly-conditioned sleeper agents.

Upcoming: RASPUTIN’S BASTARDS by David Nickle

I stumbled across this novel by accident, when Madeleine Ashby mentioned it in an interview answer for CR (sorry, you’ll have to wait until next Wednesday to read the interview…). Naturally, my first reaction was to Google the book, and I found its great cover artwork:

The novel will be published in June 2012 by ChiZine, and after reading the synopsis (below), my interest has definitely been piqued:

They were the beautiful dreamers. From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and under the power of their own expansive minds. They slipped into the minds of Russia’s enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human puppets to murder, and worse. They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they might have remade the world. But like the mad holy man Rasputin, who destroyed Russia through his own powerful influence in the end, the psychic spies for the Motherland were only in it for themselves.

It is the 1990s. The Cold War is long finished. In a remote Labrador fishing village, an old woman known only as Babushka foresees her ending through the harbour ice, in the giant eye of a dying kraken – and vows to have none of it. Beaten insensible and cast adrift in a life raft, ex-KGB agent Alexei Kilodovich is dragged to the deck of a ship full of criminals, and with them he will embark on a journey that will change everything he knows about himself. And from a suite in an unseen hotel in the heart of Manhattan, an old warrior named Kolyokov sets out with an open heart, to gather together the youngest members of his immense, and immensely talented, family. They are more beautiful, and more terrible, than any who came before them. They are Rasputin’s bastards. And they will remake the world.

Rasputin’s Bastard is available for pre-order from Amazon in the US (paperback and Kindling) and in the UK (paperback and Kindling).