Murray Leeder at Luma Quarterly asks me some interesting questions here (http://lumaquarterly.com/issues/volume-two/006-fall/interview-with-gemma-files/). I also found this while surfing around randomly on YouTube, which is so weird, seriously.;) 

Two more podcast links: The Writer and the Critic dissect Experimental Film here (http://writerandcritic.podbean.com/e/episode-56-experimental-film-aickmans-heirs/), while I talk with the Unreliable Narrators here (http://unreliablenarrators.net/2016/10/26/45-0-author-spotlight-gemma-files/). As ever, the interview was a lot of fun, though we had a bit of technical difficulty here and there. I was quite amazed to find myself picked up by The Writer and the Critic, meanwhile, two very sharp cookies out of Australia. A good month for podcasts!

In other news, Kerry Clare at 49th Shelf asked me questions about Experimental Film, here (http://49thshelf.com/Blog/2016/10/27/Gemma-Files-Wants-to-Scare-You).

Me with Alex Dolan on Blog Tour Radio's Thrillseekers Podcast

Sunburst Award

So...Experimental Film won the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Adult Novel. Link here: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2016/09/gemma-files-wins-2016-sunburst-awardl.html

This has basically been a really, really good year.

StoryBundle Tie-In Interview: Kenneth Mark Hoover

Kenneth Mark Hoover is the author of Haxan, another book available in the same Weird Western StoryBundle as my own A Book of Tongues. Last night he published an interview with me, here (http://kennethmarkhoover.me/2016/09/04/guest-interview-weird-west-writer-gemma-files/), so I'm returning the favour. Mark's a gentleman and a brilliant writer, someone whose investment in the genre is both deep and genuine. I hope you all enjoy discovering something about his process, and check out StoryBundle's Weird Western package before it's no longer possible.

Mark: Thank you so much for doing this interview as well! Here are my questions.

1. Why did you choose to specialize in the weird west genre?

Thank you for inviting me, Gemma. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Well, I started in the genre when I began to listen to the old Gunsmoke radio episodes. They were very different from the television series. Much more violent, and they dealt with adult situations which television couldn’t, or wouldn’t touch. That hooked me immediately, and I decided I wanted to do something in the western genre, but with an added supernatural flavor. Not necessarily to spice things up, but to write the weird western genre in an honest way that portrayed both the people and culture with historical accuracy.

What drew you here, and what keeps you here?
I think it’s the story potential in both respects. I love the creative freedom it gives. There’s a lot of versatility available to a writer in this genre, and as a creator that definitely appeals to me. It gives me a lot of running room which I love. I often describe it as my own little corner of the universe where I can play with matches. I like the dangerous aspect of it. I think that probably says more about me than the stories I write.

2. Haxan the town appears to attract archetypes who often seem to have stepped wholesale out of other stories--myths, legends, classics of literature. Was this something you planned from the beginning, or is it an alchemical sort of idea that crept up on you in mid-writing?

I think it sort of crept in, to be honest. I wasn’t planning on that happening. But again I believe it’s a logical extension of the potential of the genre. But even when I bring these things into the story I want them to behave and react in a historically accurate manner given the culture of the Old West. I never want the West to be only a backdrop. I try to construct the stories in such a way that the West itself is a necessary character. I may not always be successful in doing this, but it’s always on my mind.

3. Quaternity is both Haxan's sequel and its prequel, not to mention a single narrative rather than a story cycle; it seems to reference Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, not so much directly as in tone--it's bleak, black and bloody beyond belief. Please tell me how the process of writing Haxan worked into writing Quaternity (if it did), and if you always had [your hero Marshall John] Marwood's back-story in your mind.

I always had Marwood’s back-story in mind when writing Haxan. I approached both novels with the same intention: I wanted to present the Old West the way it was, not the censored and sterilized view Hollywood and television has often given. It was a bleak and brutal existence. You had people from all different cultures and backgrounds struggling every day to survive. There’s nothing romantic about that. When I was writing the novels I would ask myself, “What would Hollywood do? I’ll do the opposite.” It wasn’t long before I realized I wasn’t doing the opposite. I was actually showing how these people acted and behaved. They were mean and they were violent and they lived in a land literally soaked in blood, and it didn’t bother them that much as long as it wasn’t their blood being spilled. I really liked that a lot because I personally believe that is the historical core of humanity. All you have to do is open a history book. Those are pretty powerful themes to write about, and I like exploring them from all different angles.

4. You say one of your favourite writers is Alice Sheldon, also known as James Tiptree Jnr. What in particular do you think Sheldon taught you as a writer?

She taught me through her stories how to be uncompromising and how to write honestly, even if you had to be brutal to do it. Sheldon never wrote a dishonest word in her life. She didn’t write safe stories. All her fiction stands with a firm foundation of her own beliefs leavened with a tremendous amount of artistic creativity. I can’t match her creativity, or her artistic genius, but I can match her honest belief to write as boldly and courageously as possible. I think that’s a good lesson for any writer.

5. You began by writing science fiction, then transferred genres. Do you ever see yourself going back to SF?

Certainly not in the weird west genre. I’m very particular about what genres I want to include into a western setting. No SF, no generic werewolves or vampires or Cthulhu monsters. I have always believed the most dangerous monsters are human. Those are the monsters I often try to reflect in my westerns. I do, however, have a 3-book contract with The Ed Greenwood Group coming up and they are all hard science fiction novels taking place in a shared world. I’m very excited to be a part of that and I’ll start working on them next year.

6. What do you love most about New Mexico, and why did you pick it for the background of your Haxan stories?

I love everything about New Mexico. It’s maybe the one place I feel at home. I love the people, the culture, the country, just everything about it. It’s a beautiful state, and I like the idea of Haxan, this dark and violent town, and John Marwood, a dark and violent man, placed in that gorgeous setting. It provides a very strong emotional dynamic which I like to explore in the stories.

7. Though the world of Haxan is dark, it's also often funny as hell. Is this deliberate? Do you think the Western's conventions and language lend themselves to comedy?
Oh, it’s deliberate. If all I wrote about was the darkness of Haxan I think that would be too oppressive. It would lose a lot of its emotional power and it would bore me. People aren’t just one thing. They have many sides and limitless layers of emotions to them. As a writer it’s incumbent upon me to portray that as honestly as I can. I also think, yes, Old West conventions and language definitely lend themselves not only to comedy, but the ability to portray our modern lives from a different perspective. It’s really one of the reasons I like working in this genre so much.

Thank you, Gemma, I’ve really enjoyed this a lot!

The Weird Western StoryBundle is still available here (http://storybundle.com/weird). Enjoy!

Weird Western StoryBundle

Here's the skinny:

THE WEIRD WESTERN BUNDLE

The Weird Western Bundle - Curated by Blair MacGregor

Welcome to our Weird Western Bundle, where wide frontiers, flintlocks, whiskey and revenge meet swords, airships, terraforming, magic, myths, and dragons. You'll find stories here set in the snows of old Alaska and the heat of contemporary Arizona, post-Civil War San Francisco and post-colonization planets, and places the seem as familiar as any wooded mountain or wind-swept desert... until tigers and dragons and horses that are so much more than you might assume burst into the scene. The different aspects of the Weird Western spirit in this bundle will give fans of the genre something they haven't seen before, and folks new to Weird Westerns a wide sampling of its fantastic offerings.

I was raised on a combination of SFF and Westerns. Star Trek and Gunsmoke, Asimov and L'Amour, Lonesome Dove and Battlestar Galactica. I was just as thrilled to shake the hand of Hugh O'Brian of Wyatt Earp fame as I was to meet Katherine Kurtz, author of the Deryni world. It's been a joy discovering more writers combining the genres, raising their unique voices, and upsetting the familiar with the fantastic. The result is a Western setting that respects history and the people who created it while spinning in unique powers, esoteric challenges, and the terrifying magic of discovery.

You'll learn the secrets behind the post-quarantined expanse of ranchland in James Derry's Idyll, and the reasons the man of Joe Bailey's Spellslinger is ready to make a stand. There's the subterfuge and wild ride of Gemma Files's Book of Tongues, and the smart, snappy adventure of Lindsay Buroker's Flash Gold novellas.

Dangerous wonders and determined enemies fill J. Patrick Allen's West of Pale, and Steve White's New Worldbrings chainmail and strange powers to the frontier. Kyra Halland puts rogue magery and danger in a dusty Western town in Beneath the Canyons, and Kenneth Mark Hoover gives us a time-wandering lawman in Haxan.

And I'm thrilled to share the debut of Judith Tarr's first novel of a new series, Dragons in the Earth, set in present-day Arizona, and filled with horses and dragons and the power of the desert itself.

StoryBundle let's you choose your own price, so you decide how you'd like to support these awesome writers and their work. For $5—or more if you'd like—you'll receive the basic bundle of four great novels in DRM-free ebook format. For the bonus price of at least $14—or more if you'd like—you'll receive all nine novels. If you choose, a portion of your payment will go toward supporting Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now.

The Weird Western Bundle is available for only three weeks. It's a great opportunity to pick up the stories of nine wonderful writers, support independent authors who want to twist your assumptions about the West, and discover new writers with great stories along the way.– Blair MacGregor

The initial titles in The Weird Western Bundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:

• Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover
• Dead West Vol 1.: West of Pale by J Patrick Allen
• Idyll by James Derry
• Spellsinger by Joseph J. Bailey

If you pay more than the bonus price of just $14, you get all four of the regular titles, plus five more:

• Hexslinger Vol. 1: A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files
• Horses of the Moon Vol. 1: Dragons in the Earth by Judith Tarr
• Daughter of the Wildings Book. 1: Beneath the Canyons by Kyra Halland
• The Flash Gold Chronicles I-III by Lindsay Buroker
• New World Book 2: Hair of the Bear by Steven W. White

And as special thanks to our newsletter subscribers, all of you who subscribe get New World by Steven W. White for free! Grab the free first book in the New World series before you start on book 2, Hair of the Bear, found in the bundle.

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub and .mobi) for all books!

It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

• Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.
• Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth to you. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.
• Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.
• Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now!
• Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you'll get the bonus books!

StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.

For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, tweet us at @storybundle and like us on Facebook.

P.S.: I have Launch Day giveaway codes, if anyone's interested! Please contact me (Gemma) through Facebook.

Ploughshares Article on Experimental Film

This summer is digesting my brain, bur if I haven't linked to this article about Experimental Film in Ploughshares (http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/every-movie-is-a-ghost-story-on-writing-about-film/) before, I really should've. It's quite brilliant.

Locus Review Now Up

I added a direct link to John Langan's flattering Locus review of Experimental Film, which they've now put up on the Web, possibly because of me winning the SJA. You'll find it in the side column, or here: http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2016/07/john-langan-reviews-gemma-files/

Litreactor

By the way, this is also the third year in a row that I've been asked to teach my course about writing what you fear--still cunningly entitled Write What You Fear--at Litreactor. It starts October 18, 2016, so if you've got the money and you're interested in getting feedback from me, please do sign up. The deets are here (https://litreactor.com/classes/write-what-you-fear).

My Cup of Stars

So: as you may or may not have heard, Experimental Film won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. I also came home from Readercon to discover I'd made the Sunburst Award shortlist, in the Adult Fiction category. It's been a pretty good weekend, all told.;)

This is the text of my acceptance speech, which I scribbled down about five minutes into the ceremony:

"Somebody asked me last night [it was Dale Bailey], how long did this book take to write? And I said sort of four years and sort of four months...but really, I think in a lot of ways it's a book I've been rehearsing and preparing for all of my life. It's also very personal in a way that all my other work isn't, necessarily, so for it to be received with such grace and enthusiasm has been staggering. None of this would be possible without my friend, my family, my husband and my son. I'd like to thank ChiZine Publications and the ladies of the Bellefire Club, who mothered this book into existence, and every movie I've ever viewed or reviewed. I'd also like to thank Canada, cold land of identity disorders, the source of all my neuroses and whatever power I derive from them. When I first got word of this nomination, I thought that if I could win just one award, I'd want it to be this one. Thank you all for letting me live my dream. As Eleanor [from The Haunting of Hill House] might say, I got my cup of stars."

Those of you who'd prefer to watch me fumble my way through it while looking like a tank in a dress can access Scott Edelman's Periscope video (vine?), here: https://www.periscope.tv/w/1jMKgnBDlBPxL

Readercon!

...is where I'll be, as of tomorrow afternoon. My schedule, for those who might be attending:

Thursday July 07
8:00 PM C The Works of Clark Ashton Smith. Michael Cisco, Gemma Files, Lila Garrott, Tim Powers, Darrell Schweitzer. It has been over a century since Clark Ashton Smith's first publications, when his first book of poetry appeared in 1912. He was something of a prodigy in those days, nineteen years old and being heralded by newspapers in California as a newly discovered genius, the Keats of the Sierras. He became acquainted with Lovecraft when Lovecraft wrote Smith a fan letter. We honor (and read) Clark Ashton Smith today precisely because he is unique. He spoke to us in a voice like no other, and he gave us visions of strangeness like no other. He was out of step with his times and proud of it. Join our panelists for a discussion of the works of the most recent winner of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

9:00 PM 5 The Life and Times of Mary Sue . Gillian Daniels, Gemma Files, Ben Francisco, Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Natalie Luhrs. New Republic senior editor Jeet Heer wrote, in a short Twitter essay about Mary Sues, "The popularity of the term 'Mary Sue' really says everything you need to know about sexism in fandom/nerdom." Instead of unpacking the concept of Mary Sue, we'd like to zero in on the troubled history of this term, why it's troubled, and how better to talk about "self-insertion" in fiction without the sexism.

Friday July 08
3:00 PM AT Autographs. C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files.


8:00 PM A Reading: Gemma Files. Gemma Files. Gemma Files reads from an upcoming novella "Coffle."


Saturday July 09
11:00 AM CL Kaffeeklatsch. Samuel Delany, Gemma Files.

Sunday July 10
1:00 PM 5 Tanith Lee - A Retrospective. Mike Allen, Gemma Files, Lila Garrott, Theodora Goss (leader), Sonya Taaffe. Tanith Lee authored over 90 novels and 300 short stories, a children's picture book, poems, and television episodes. In 1980, she became the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award best novel award, for her book Death's Master. Yet in 2010, Tanith Lee mentioned she was still writing novels, and consistently publishing short stories, but publishers were not interested in her longer works. Lee's impact on the genres that make up slipstream fiction was significant. What leads a publisher to look at works from an influential, established writer and decide they are not worth the shelf space? How can we keep Lee in print, and in people's minds?

Hope to see at least some of you there!

New Review of Experimental Film!

John Langan reviews Experimental Film, very favourably, in this month's Locus Magazine:

There's a cache of lost films at the centre of Experimental Film, the fine, compelling novel by Gemma Files. The movies were made in the early years of the 20^th century by a woman who herself went missing during what should have been a routine train journey to Toronto. Shot on highly unstable silver nitrate stock, the short films are variations on the same subject: a mysterious, veiled woman, her dress ornamented with beads or mirrors that make her flash and shimmer. She moves through a stylized farm landscape, bending to speak to a child labourer, when it becomes apparent that she is holding a sword in one hand.

Lois Cairns, the narrator-protagonist of the novel, first becomes aware of Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb's work at a screening of new independent Canadian films she is covering for a film publication. One of the filmmakers includes an excerpt from one of the lost movies in his Untitled 13. The result affects Lois profoundly, viscerally, leading her to interview Wrob Barney about the footage he's sampled. That conversation sets Lois on the path of investigating Iris Whitcomb's life and art. A film historian as well as critic, Lois immediately understands the earthshaking implications of the lost movies for the history of women in film, especially women who produced and directed their own work. She contacts a former student of hers, Safie Hewsen, now a budding filmmaker, and enlists her in documenting the search for Iris Whitcomb's films.

It isn't very long, however, before a series of escalatingly strange and unnerving events connected to her inquiry cause Lois to realize that there might be more to the missing movies than she anticipated. Her research reveals that the subject of Iris Whitcomb's films is a minor deity from Wendish mythology, Lady Midday, who interrogates farm labourers to learn if they are performing their work well and whole-heartedly. Gradually, Lois understands that what she at first took for dramatizations of a somewhat esoteric folk tale are in fact recreating encounters with an actual supernatural entity. What's more, Lady Midday has become entangled with Iris Whitcomb's work—especially the last piece she shot—to the extent that it can provide her a means of return in force to a world whose steady forgetting of her has reduced the deity to a fraction of her former strength.

The story of the forbidden text is, of course, a mainstay of horror fiction, from Lovecraft's Necronomicon to Barron's Black Guide. The number of works that have made movies their sinister texts is more select, but includes Ramsey Campbell's Ancient Images and Marissa Pessl's Night Film, as well as “each thing I show you is a piece of my death,” the story Files co-wrote with her husband, Stephen Barringer, and which served as something of a dry run for Experimental Film. Where this novel succeeds is in its understanding of film, from the process by which it is made to those by which it is disseminated and discussed; from its history to its culture. Lois Cairns is steeped in movies, and she incorporates her understanding into her narrative, pausing to deliver relevant information when necessary. Lois is a self-conscious narrator, always aware of how she's framing the story she's recounting, and including the reader in her strategizing. The result is an experimental novel about her quest for a set of films whose experimental qualities extend far beyond her expectations.

All of this would be impressive enough, but Files gives the story additional weight through her description of Lois's experience as the mother of an autistic child. From the early pages of the novel, Files shows the challenges Lois confronts in her son, Clark, whose autism causes him to speak mostly in quotations from popular media, and cannot communicate with Lois and Simon, her husband and Clark's father. Lois is unsparing about the trials of raising her son, but she leavens her bluntness with enough wit and warmth to bring her love for her son to complicated life. Clark's occasional distance from Lois, her remove from her idea of a stereotypical mother, expand the novel's concern with the lost, with what is missing, and give it an added poignancy.

At the same time, the novel's evocation of Toronto and the community of its filmmakers and critics results in a vivid sense of place. Details about the city's geography combine with details about the men and women who populate its film culture to create a setting that is an integral part of the narrative. Experimental Film could not happen in any other place and be the same novel: this is very much a Canadian book, concerned with the history and current state of Canadian filmmaking.

The recent republication of Gemma Files's first two collections of short fiction, Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, was a reminder of how long and how well she has been writing. The last several years have seen a welcome uptick in her output, from the cosmic horror horse opera of the Hexslinger series to the story cycle that comprises We Will All Go Down Together, not to mention her stories in any number of anthologies. Experimental Film represents the next significant contribution to what is emerging as one of the most interesting and exciting bodies of work currently being produced in the horror field. Every film, Lois Cairns writes, is an experiment. The same might be said of every novel. This one succeeds, wildly. 

Patreon Post #2: GHOST STORY and the Uncanny

I've been re-reading Peter Straub's Ghost Story and making notes about what I like to call the Haunted Mechanical Dollhouse method of horror: invent a small town full of characters with secrets like you're cobbling together some sort of spook-ride Rube Goldberg machine, lay in orbiting outliers (both threats and and potential protagonists), then make them converge to start the whole thing running. There's a clear resonance with M.R. James's "The Haunted Doll's House," obviously, because part of the machine's power comes from showing how whatever happened in the past drives what will happen in the present/future; there's a definite pattern already set, forcing characters to re-enact earlier tragedies or bring events already in motion to their full flowering.

It's a template prefaced in Stephen King's Salem's Lot, then directly mirrored between Straub's Floating Dragon vs. King's It, but going on to further replicate itself throughout subsequent horror history over and over ever since, from Michael MacDowell's Cold Moon Over Babylon to Michael Rowe's Enter, Night. I just see it as "starting" with Ghost Story, because that's my particular entry-point—my wheelhouse, if you will, particularly since I can never entirely separate my own personal experience of Ghost Story from King's own analysis of it in Danse Macabre, which essentially begins with him elevating it as a prospective cornerstone of the New Horror canon.

My love for this type of narrative set-up particularly amuses me when I realize that because I grew up in a large city, I essentially had to eventually make up a series of small towns that encapsulate every small town experience I've ever had in order to be able to do even a partial version of this story. Though what's even funnier in hindsight is that I realize I actually tried to do this set-up a long time ago, when I was fourteen and wrote an outline for a Ghost Story rip-off set in a small town in 1860s India. (There was a good portion of F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb in there, too—and as you might expect, I later boiled this outline down for parts and made it into "Ring of Fire.")

In both Salem's Lot and Ghost Story, ancient guilt and present greed combine to open the door for an incursion of outside evil into the heart of the familiar, the domestic; the same pattern repeats in It and Floating Dragon, almost to the letter, as a formerly Good Place (an innocuous place, at any rate—a normal place) is slowly converted into a Bad Place, its own troll-mirror reflection, worthy of being sown with salt. Much like a town-wide possession, all four books begin with the obsessive phase: a presentiment of fate and mortality, dreams and visions like warnings from the subconscious. This is quickly followed by a series of stalkings, accidents, suicides and murders that resonate with earlier, forgotten crimes, eventually escalating into a disaster that cuts the town off from any semblance of help before erasing it entirely. (In the case of 'Salem's Lot, Maine, this cleansing involves fire, while Ghost Story's Milburn, New York, is consumed by and entombed in snow.) Then ghosts/monsters descend, making your home theirs, primarily by revealing that invisible monsters and ghosts-to-be have in fact always inhabited it—that they have always been your neighbours, just as you have always been potentially one of them yourself.

For those who haven't read it recently, Ghost Story's basic plot goes like this: As young men, Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Edward Wanderly, Lewis Benedikt and John Jaffrey accidentally kill a woman—or what appears to be a woman—named Eva Galli, a minor Hollywood silent screen starlet who descends on their staid hometown like a hurricane in a flapper dress, intentionally provoking in all of them something that begins as idealized love before becoming something far more tainted, converting at the absolute last minute to disgusted sexual rage. Consumed with panic over the prospect of punishment, these “boys”—who will later grow up to be pillars of the Milburn community and form the Chowder Society, a club that meets monthly to drink and tell each other ghost stories—place Eva's body in a borrowed car that they then push into a nearby lake, only to be scarred for life by the horrifying sight of her supposedly dead face staring from the vehicle's back window as it sinks beneath the surface. Shaken, they take a vow to keep her death a secret, and go on with their lives.

Fifty years later, the group still lives in Milburn, outwardly prosperous and content, relying on the Chowder Society as their only method of diffusing the hovering fear that still clings to each of them. However, things start to change after Edward Wanderly dies—possibly of a heart attack, possibly from sheer fright—during a party he's elected to give in honour of a young actress named “Anne-Veronica Moore,” who later turns out to be another version of Eva. The remaining Chowder Society members experience a series of prophetic dreams in which they witness each other's deaths. Unable to admit to themselves that the shapeshifting entity they once knew as Eva has returned to haunt them, they send for Don Wanderley, Ed's nephew, a writer whose recent horror novel The Nightwatcher is based on his own experiences with Eva, known to him as “Alma Mobley.” With Don's arrival in Milburn, Eva's campaign of terror ramps up considerably, aided by two more phantoms who act as her minions—Gregory and Fenny Bate, earlier cited by Sears James in his most recent Chowder Society tale. Two more members die, after which the survivors band with Don and Peter Barnes, a young man whose mother is an early casualty of the struggle. Together, they locate and wound their nemesis, forcing her to flee Milburn and re-set the clock for another try; working on instinct, Don later manages to find Eva's latest incarnation, a child named “Angie Maule,” and finally destroy her.

A sidebar here: in ghost stories, it's always the liminal that trips you up, the literal Uncanny—a variety of horror created by endowing seemingly mundane, ordinary or familiar objects, locations, actions, scenes and people with a sort of intense uncanniness, unheimlich-ness, thus creating the sense that they suddenly and irreversibly rendered Other. M.R. James once wrote a tale that exemplifies this idea, far less well-known than most of his other offerings, called “The Malice of Ordinary Objects”; Robert Zemeckis also plays extremely well with this concept in his thriller What Lies Beneath, forever undermining his protagonist's sense of her own home as safe space by forcing her to intuitively connect the dots between a glass that breaks and the sliver which perforates her heel, thus drawing her attention to a grate in the floor inside which she discovers an earring that doesn't belong to her, thus retroactively sowing suspicion in her about what her husband may have been up to (and with who)...

Nowhere has this feeling been better explored cinematically, however, than in the movies of David Lynch, who talks in Lynch on Lynch about how everyone has their own very specific shock totems and dread fetishes, impossible to communicate to others. He tells an anecdote about a sound designer friend of his who had a recurring dream that he was watching a tire roll back and forth in a sort of decaying gravitational orbit but never quite settling, paralyzed by the inexplicably terrifying knowledge that it would eventually fall over, yet unable to predict when that would actually happen—“And that was bad, you know? Really bad.” It's an effect that's very difficult to create and almost impossible to sustain, especially over long periods of time; the trick is to try and defeat audience expectations, achieving a practical reach-around on every human being's innate pattern-decoding intelligence, especially those for whom storytelling is a habit. Thus Lynch's decision to not provide any scene-break tracks in the DVD version of Mulholland Drive, which clearly embodies his dislike of letting an audience know what they're in for, or allowing them any sort of easy escape from the mood he's working so hard to immerse them in.

But in most cases, the realm of the liminal has historically been assumed to be best occupied by female authors, which is why the ghost story was once thought of as an innately “feminine” genre. Shirley Jackson, who supported her horror novel-writing habit by turning out Irma Bombeck-style satirical autobiographies about family life, used her “I'm just a housewife” pose to inject alienation and existential despair into the simplest of 1950s gender-essentialist routines; her haunted houses are full of domestic ruin, casual impoliteness, poisonous food and cursed bric-a-brac, unruly (girl-)children and unreliable parents—the very antithesis of a spread in Good Housekeeping, on every conceivable level. The Uncanny permeates her work, rendering life's most familiar accoutrements as abruptly alien as though things have slipped sideways in time, or been caught in a certain slant of light that reveals them as profane copies of themselves.

How this background line of thematic descent translates to Ghost Story begins with Eva Galli's original refusal to conform to what the Chowder Society boys initially assume she is and/or want her to be: a helpmeet, a comfort, an enabler; an ideal, not an eidolon. From the very beginning, she makes it clear that she's not going to submit to being turned into the Angel of any of their houses, not going to allow herself to be caught and made into wife, mistress or whore—that she won't (can't) be limited in that way, or any other. And that's because essentially, Eva Galli isn't “just” a woman, no matter how often she may choose to present herself as one; she is something completely different, completely inhuman. Though her influence appears to be echoed in the ostensibly similarly nonconformist sexual freedom of Ricky Hawthorne's Noir film glamourous wife, Stella, who counters the menaces of a scorned lover by off-handedly threatening to stick a hatpin in his neck, it's proud monster Eva—the story's true femme fatale—who shatters the mold of societal expectation for proper female behaviour outright.

The element of meta underlying almost everything in Ghost Story is a quality that only sharpens and becomes more fundamentally obvious as the reader matures, in much the same way the Chowder Society seems to have been formed in part as a way for its founder to process not only what happened to them in the past but what continues to happen to them in the present, as well as subconsciously preparing for future attacks. The Society exists in order to give this quartet an outlet for their fears, a supposedly controllable forum and lens through which to view and subdue them. But the stories they tell each other, couched as personal anecdotes (“What was the worst thing you've ever done?” “I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...”), are redolent and resonant with classic ghost story echoes. Sears James's tale of the Bate siblings, for example, holds clear if gender-flipped kinship with Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw,” as well as specifically New England gothic writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edith Wharton, whose own ghost story “Afterward” makes it into the fabric of Don Wanderley's later Society submission, the memory of his encounter with “Alma Mobley.”

Similarly, it makes sense that the “nightwatchers” themselves, Ghost Story's main breed of monster-ghost, come to be understood best as a fascinating amalgam of every haunting the Chowder Society has ever told tales of, a sort of unified field theory stringing everything that scares us in any given ghost story together, then crediting that fear retroactively to the cyclical interactions with humanity of an offshoot species that appears to feed on pain, fear, misery...David Lynch's basic Twin Peaks garmonbozia mixture. Much like Lynch's Man From Another Place, the nightwatchers appear to exist parallel to us, intersecting our reality from some other dimension in a way that involves bending time and space—the realm of dream, but also the realm of death. They make jokes about history, popping back and forth between eras at will. They are beautiful and terrible, tainted and proud, vicious and vain, poetic and C.S. Lewis-style Satan-practical all at once. Some of them—Gregory and Fenny—appear to have once been human, but have chosen to sell or debride themselves of their own souls in order to live forever as zombie echoes, sowing chaos eternally. Others, like “Eva Galli,” appear to have never been entirely human at all, yet still share a kinship with and addiction to human evil. It's this same kinship that forms their only weakness, their rare vulnerability to mortality.

In other words, Ghost Story subtextually teaches us that because the only thing we know to be completely true about the state of being human is that we all eventually die, anything that's even slightly human can therefore eventually be killed if you're only willing to sacrifice enough, but not too much: retain love, retain laughter, retain the ability to make and maintain connections and to hope against hope, even in the face of utter nihilistic horror. All the things about us the “nightwatchers”—our bad dreams made creepily flexible flesh—both understand least and dislike most, the things they most long to poison and destroy.

(I could go into the problematic nature of the nightwatchers appearing to identify themselves as manitous, considering that none of the book's characters are Indigenous/First Nations people. But I prefer to think of the manitou as yet another metaphor the nightwatchers adopt in order to semi-explain themselves to their potential victims, ie: we're sort of like this, if that makes you a bit more comfortable...or uncomfortable, rather. It's yet another way to scare people, preparatory to either destroying them outright, making them destroy themselves, or tricking them into becoming a pale imitation of the thing that's currently ingesting them.)

Thus we return once more to Ghost Story's inherent refrain, possibly the inherent refrain of all ghost stories: "I saw a ghost," which becomes "I am a ghost," before finally becoming: "You are a ghost." "I am you, Don," as "Angie Maule" claims, among others. To which young would-be hero Peter Barnes indignantly replies, quoting Gregory Bate: "He said he was ME, I want to KILL him." But can we ever truly know ourselves, let alone anyone else? In a last twist, it's identity itself—slippery and liminal, innately Uncanny—that becomes the final horror at the bottom of Ghost Story's thematic cracker-box, the motor that keeps the Haunted Clockwork Dollhouse running. Nothing is what is seems on the surface, no person and no object, especially those people who most often get treated as objects by society at large: children, wives, women, possessions flipping unnoticed into possessors, shapeshifters destroying the structure which dares to try and hold them static.

Owner beware.

THE INDEFENSIBLES, INSTALMENT #1: The Collection (2012, dir. Marcus Dunstan)

Ever since I finally signed up for Netflix, my attitude towards movies I don't necessarily expect to like has changed sharply; instead of waiting for them to present themselves in a form I can financially rationalize (second-hand, on sale, late-night TV), I can just search for them or stumble on them randomly, load them, press a button and hey presto: instant gratification. If I don't connect within ten minutes, I turn them off or drift away, leaving them on in the background while I do other things. I tell myself it's free (sort of) and it's research (more likely, but not always). The good part is that I've definitely found some gems this way, films I later “back up” by buying on DVD/BluRay, but the baddish part is that I've also added substantially to my roster of not-so-guilty pleasures.

I call these movies my Indefensibles, but are they really? (The obvious answer: No.) They tend to be films with a lot of grimy grindhouse flair or vaudeville creep, often low-budget yet very physically beautiful, at least for me—appealing mis-en-scene, well-integrated production design, fine and/or eccentric casts doing good work under pressure. They give me great repetitive pleasure, even as they otherwise violate some standards of objectively “good” horror. I often end up calling them “accidental gialli,” regardless of their country of origin, because you sure don't expect a giallo to be anything other than what it very palpably is, for God's sake, nor do you penalize it for performing that exact same function...or possibly “yarn monster” movies, cf. The Werewolf Ambulance horror film podcast, on which host Katie once gave that as her rating for Don Coscarelli's inter-dimensional ghoul vs. stoner fantasia Phantasm, perhaps the most heavy metal movie I've seen aside from the Canadian werewolf law enforcement comedy WolfCop (which would also go on this list).

Like most gialli, an Indefensible has to have the total courage of its convictions, however batshit—to operate by a very specific internal logic of the sort we usually call dream- or nightmare-, yet not ever break that logic in ways which kick us completely out of the viewing experience. For example, I am a big fan of Mirrors, the gothically crazy Alexandre Aja film with Kiefer Sutherland that mostly takes place inside the world's most gorgeous burnt-out department store, a movie that almost all critics and a lot of audiences consider completely ridiculous, given it contains all of the following: ghostly entities that pursue their victims from reflective surface to reflective surface, a woman wrenching her own jaw apart with both hands like she's doing the gore version of that body-modification scene in Beetlejuice, a back-story involving demonic possession and confrontative psychiatric therapy, a climax set in a flooded underground hallway during which Sutherland punches an elderly nun in the face.

But to me, Aja himself has already demonstrated the place where ridiculous slides into truly inept with his film Haute Tension (also known as Switchblade Romance), one of the cornerstones of the New French Extremity movement, in which...spoiler alert...a woman and the friend she wishes was her girlfriend visit the friend's family cabin, only to have a grimy, hulking serial killer descend on them, slaughter the family with delirious inventiveness and kidnap the friend. Our heroine takes off after him, eventually managing to run him down and “rescue” the object of her affection, at which point the sort of twist only two French dudes in their early twenties would think is cool kicks in: turns out, our heroine was the psycho all along! Thus forcing me to sit back and wonder, baffled: Okay, so you just chased yourself for miles through the French countryside, apparently while driving two separate vehicles, then had a fight with yourself in the middle of the road while wielding a concrete saw? Both the truck and the van have to exist, since your friend was tied up in the back of one of them as you were driving the other, but if they do then who was that masturbating with a severed head in the truck's cab while you and your friend drove by in the background in the other van, right at the beginning of the movie? Was that you just thinking about doing that, or what?

“No, no,” Aja and his creative partner Gregory Levasseur want to assure me, mainly because they really don't want to go to the trouble of ret-conning all the unreliable narration they've already laid in thus far. “It looks so good, none of that matters! This twist will be the shit!” But as we all know, or should, the line between “the shit” and just “shit” is a very fine one indeed, subjective as all hell, hard to quantify except in hindsight...and crazy as they undeniably are, none of the Indefensibles actually manage to cross this line far enough to undercut themselves beyond salvaging, at least in my opinion.

So: Now all that's been established, I'm going to kick this series off with a film I would never have discovered if not for Netflix—The Collection, ostensibly a sequel to 2009's home invasion/spider-trap slasher extravaganza The Collector, directed by first-ever Project Greenlight winner Marcus Dunstan (the Feast trilogy, Saws 4 to 3D) and co-written with his own longstanding collaborator, Patrick Melton. Both films star the lugubriously handsome Josh Stewart, a career supporting/character actor probably best known for his role as Bane's right-hand man in The Dark Knight Rises, but for my money the original—much like The Purge vs. The Purge: Anarchy—plays more like a 90-minute thesis statement than a necessary adjunct, especially since everything established in it can be (and is) readily reduced to maybe three minutes' worth of newscaster exposition at the top of the opening credits sequence.

Said thesis is that there's this guy, see, known as the Collector, a buff dude in a gnarly looking plasticized skin-leather mask who turns up at people's houses or places of work, fits them out with Rube Goldberg death traps, then collects(!) one survivor at the end of the massacre, who he totes away in an antique banded trunk to some other place as yet unseen and torments them for a while. He will then commence this next massacre by dropping the latest survivor and their trunk in the middle of the scene, like a human warning system. By the end of The Collector, this last person not exactly standing was a thief, Arkin O'Brien (Stewart), who came to rob the house in question but ended up managing to save at least one person, sort of by accident, before becoming Collector-fodder himself.

The Collection, meanwhile, begins on a new protagonist entirely, deaf rich girl Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick), who visits an after-hours club with friends and finds Arkin's trunk in the bathroom. She frees him as the Collector makes literal mulch out of everyone else in the place with a ceiling-lowered thresher, then gets trunked herself after Arkin, having had enough of heroism for the nonce, jumps out the window using Elena's cheating boyfriend's not-quite-dead body as a human shield and breaks his arm badly on impact, but manages to limp away. He ends up at a hospital, where corporate mercenary Lucello (Lee Tergesen, playing a sort of good guy for once) tracks him down on behalf of Elena's dad and offers to make his legal problems go away if Arkin leads him and his team to wherever the Collector's been keeping him, so they can rescue Elena.

Arkin thinks this is an ass-stupid idea, but soon enough they're breaking into the old abandoned "Argento Hotel," which the Collector has obviously spent some time fitting out H.H. Holmes style, turning it into a triple-story murder palace that mimics the interior of his own overheated death-fetishist's brain. It's full of torture victims so drugged up they're like living zombies, starving attack dogs, a permanent girlfriend in sad Barbie doll clownface makeup whose Stockholm Syndrome makes her utterly untrustworthy (Erin Way, from the lamentably short-lived SyFy series Alphas) and the usual roster of death-traps, plus a whole wing full of crazy murder displays of a low-rent Hannibalian nature. The Collector has a thing for insects, so there are bugs made out of people, people full of bugs, and a whole elevator shaft full of random mutilated body parts that people fall down, twice.

What's great is that Elena manages to rescue herself several times over, holding her own until Lucello arrives, and that she and Arkin also manage to rescue each other during the final conflict. In a highly satisfying denouement, she shatters all the murder display cases to put out a fire Arkin's about to burn to death in, after which Arkin manages to track the Collector down on his own and stuffs him into his own personal trunk, swearing to do everything the Collector did to him a couple of times over before he finally lets him die. The Pack AD's "Haunt You" plays over the credits.

The whole film is inventively cruel and gruesome in a very Grand Guignol body horror way, with a great colour scheme and a hundred tiny twists. After three emotionally ambiguous seasons of Hannibal, meanwhile, I somewhat love what a sheer dick the Collector is allowed to be right from the get-go, all kill-crazy ego and theatrical emptiness—Dunstan and Melton refuse to empathize with him even a little bit, never dignifying him much beyond his obviously strong work ethic, characterizing him on their shared BluRay commentary track as “a thing that lives in the dark, just totally complacent about all the harm he does, like a shark: 'this is my function.'” There's this wonderful moment in the third act where he suddenly kicks open a door in a dark room and literally strikes a pose, dog on either side, brandishing a huge machine-gun, like: TA DAH!!! Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name...

And I love the utterly satisfying way that nobody else in the movie has any time for his bullshit, either—they make him pay for every wound, constantly spitting and kicking at him, giving at least as good as they get in a frantic, raging, feverish rush of refusal to end up on his walls or in one of those display cases. (It turns out he actually is an entymologist, and has a gruesome back story that's later reduced to a single line of news commentary as well, 'cause frankly, nobody gives a fuck. Screw your pain if you even have any, dude, and screw you!)

All too often in horror, the monsters get to triumph; it's become a bit of a cliche in itself, perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to the old Hollywood Code Universal horror restorative model, or a reminder that the trouble with “normal” is is always gets worse. But sometimes it's nice to see total bastards get laid on their asses, especially when the victory's particularly hard-won. The Collection delivers on that promise, and in spades.

Patreon Post #1: Clive Barker

Removed due to its impending appearance in Thinking Horror #2: The Horror Boom.

Shirley Jackson Award Nomination

So now it can be told! The nominations for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Awards are finally out, here (http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/nominees/), and I'm very happy indeed to announce that Experimental Film has been nominated in the Best Novel category. As I told my Mom, if I had to ask for one award to be nominated for, this'd be it.;) So I am basically over the moon.

Naturally, I'll be attending this year's Readercon, and look forward to receiving my stone (so I can throw it at whoever wins instead of me, ha ha, totally a joke). Yes!

Patreon and On

For some time now, I've wanted to write a book of Horror Culture reviews and essays--my own theories about the genre, as filtered through a lens of personal experience. Yesterday, I created a Patreon campaign page for this project, which will be called Dark Comforts. If you're interested in getting in on the ground floor, patronage-wise, you'll find it here (https://www.patreon.com/gemmafiles?ty=h). You'll note in the pitch that when I start to produce said reviews and essays, they'll be going up here first in rough form, so one way or the other, this blog's content will hopefully start to swell.

Meanwhile, I also need to link to an incredible new(ish) review of Experimental Film recently posted by Nina Allan at Strange Horizons (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2016/03/experimental_fi.shtml). The whole thing is great, but I'm particularly struck by this quote:

"That motherhood is hard, that it does not always come naturally, is a fact that is not addressed in literature often enough. We can infer from Files's biography that she addresses it here from a place of deep personal experience. That the writing in these sections is so direct, so rich in insight, and so thoroughly unsentimental brings an aspect that works, once again, entirely in the novel's favour. In the confessional urgency of Files's narrative, in its emotional candour, I often found myself reminded of Caitlín R. Kiernan's writing, in her novel The Drowning Girl (2012) especially. I can think of no higher praise."

Me either! This makes me happy as hell.;)

Late, O Miller: Experimental Film Review Round-Up

Because I suck, I've totally forgotten to link to Helen Marshall's amazingly flattering review of Experimental Film in the L.A. Review of Books, here (https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-spectres-of-the-silver-screen?platform=hootsuite). It's only the nicest thing anybody's said about my writing since Laird Barron called me a punk in Locus Magazine (November 2015), while reviewing the CZP re-releases of Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart! And since I unfortunately can't link to that latter review directly, here it is in full, for those who're interested:

Canadian author and film critic Gemma Files hit the ground running back in the latter 1990s with a handful of brutal and macabre tales. Nominated for an Aurora and the winner of an International Horror Guild Award in 1999 for a short story called "The Emperor's Old Bones," Files quickly established herself as a vital presence. Two collections followed--Kissing Carrion in 2003, and The Worm in Every Heart in 2004. The ever-reliable ChiZine Publications have provided us with a beefy reissue of the original books. There are 17 stories, an introduction by Caitlin R. Kiernan, a self-administered Q&A (hello, James Dickey), and literary horror author Michael Rowe closes the show with a thoughtful afterword.

In the Q&A, Files speaks about trading in romance for viciousness and the honesty of horror as a genre. Diving into this book is to leap into a deep, dark subterranean well. It's not gateway horror by any means. Vampires, ghosts, the risen dead. Terminal relationships. Love, lust, unfulfilled desires, erotic compulsions, and blood--lots and lots of blood--are some of the precincts Files explores in her debut collection.

Kissing Carrion opens with the eponymous tale, and right off the bat the language is redolent of the 1980s, with an epigraph by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and a morbid paean to the body horror of the then-reigning king, Clive Barker. Barker-esque flourishes abound throughout Files's early work, and in this story there's a hint of Sylvia Plath in the cadence and in the bubbling rage of our narrator, a revenant chained to the mortal coil by unfinished business.
"Skeleton Bitch" is another vicious. brutal story. This one concerns the walking dead and is emblematic of Files's preoccupation with sex and violence at the dawn of the latest millennium. Goth girls, drug-fueled band parties, casual sex, casual death, and casual death-sex. Low red rage simmers throughout this tale and much of the collection. Less than a third of the way into the book and anyone who has paid the slightest heed to history will recognize Files is carrying on the good work of Poppy Z. Brite and Mr. Barker and was, at that moment, light years ahead of her contemporary, Caitlin R. Kiernan. 

This is reactionary, smash-mouth art that emerged directly from the Splatter Punk scene and subsequent decline and implosion of category horror. In retrospect, Gemma Files and her hardcore style can be recognized for what it was: signs of life in a dead and buried genre; a heartbeat. And what a heart.

Her aesthetic is as punk as Black Flag, The Sex Pistols, or Alan Ginsberg, punching back against a top-heavy culture that historically demonizes the Other, the poor, and the sick. Much as British author Joel Lane hewed to a miserablist line in matters of sexuality and suffering, Files, having lived through the 1980s when HIV was the bogeyman and greed was good, but good looks were best, utters a primal scream against the politics of sex and shame and, on a meta level, sticks a shiv into the erstwhile popularity of romantic/erotic horror. Yet for all her concern with visceral topics, I hasten to add, there's no lack of humor or wit. Files is playful as a cat with prey; she smiles when she sinks in her fangs. Files's prose magnetizes:

Because, Goddammit, it was her. Same white hair. Same white lips. Same cold limbs all a-roll in their sockets, lithe as bones. And her pale, thread-veined eyes, beneath their fresh black diamonds of mascara--still shiny, still blank, like old blood under ice.

The cohesiveness of her vision is impressive. We're looking at disparate stories, rather than a novel, written over a span of years, and so the thematic consistency, the painstaking textures, the art direction--so to speak--combine to reinforce a pervading mood of real, aching horror, a psychic ague that seeps from muse to artist to page and is eventually transmitted to the hapless reader. In "Skeleton Bitch," the shore of Lake Ontario is "cold and slimy" while its piers' foundations are"slicked with chemical foam," and while "Bear Shirt" continues a focus on chilly Toronto, the style is a half-step behind stream of consciousness and stinging as the rest. A theme of degeneration persists: "Skin City" features a dream wherein a character speaks through "a mouth full of blood" and the creature of the night narrator of "Dead Bodies Possessed by Furious Motion" describes a man's ejaculation (while she chomps his femoral artery) thus:

...beads of sperm choking his auburn pubic thatch until they hung in clusters, like limp stars.

Death in life. and vice versa. But mostly the former, because life can't hope to escape the gravity well of this existence. These capsule descriptions are signposts of malignancy that permeate everything in the pages of Kissing Carrion, until each story is corrupted with squamous cells and assumes its link in a chain of cancerous DNA. This is literature and so, hyperbole notwithstanding, the ultimate effect, while potentially physically scarifying, isn't injurious, except to those predisposed to fainting or overly-susceptible to vapors arising from strong emotion. Indeed, art often results from extremes of feeling or experience. Kissing Carrion evokes extremes of both.

Along came not a spider, but a worm. In this case, Gemma Files's sophomore effort, The Worm in Every Heart. Nancy Kilpatrick provides a warm and gracious introduction this time around (the

afterword by Michael Rowe duplicates his contribution to the reissued Kissing Carrion) with an afterword by Files in the form of another self-interview (hello again, James Dickey).

I am uncertain whether even a hardened veteran fan of the genre can stomach the reissue of Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart in end-to-end succession. I am certain a brave soul who endeavors the task won't pass from this life unrewarded. Reflecting upon The Worm in Every Heart, one gets the sense that, like Ligotti 's landmark novella, Gemma Files' work demolishing certain cultural taboos of the '80 was not yet done, except now she's vastly broadened her scope (while paradoxically narrowing it) from contemporary urban settings, and concentrated her firepower upon the page of history. Now it's WWII, the French Revolution, the countryside and wilderness of older, wilder generations. and alternate realities named after demons.

Despite these welcome forays into historical milieus and an expansion upon tempering influences which include Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, and J.G. Ballard, she only continues to hack and burn and rip through issues with a steely-eyed vengeance, chewing on ideas and then spitting the bitterness out a story at a time.

Arguably Files's signature story, "The Emperor's Old Bones" is the crown jewel. Ballard provides an epigraph, then we're lost in the living dream of an old man and his recollections of 1940 wartime. Black magic, monsters, and monstrousness are the dishes on offer here and the author's self-professed roots as a fan of science fiction and fantasy are evident.

"Nigredo," which opens this tome, is another deftly consummated story nested in the sweeping events of WWII and is surely evidence that Files would develop not only into a first rate horror author, but also one with a penchant for period drama. She's lost none of her edge nor her taste for the visceral, as evinced by the opening line of "Year Zero" an elegiac counterfactual with vampires, which takes us even farther back into war-torn history to the aftermath of the French Revolution:

At the very height of the French Revolution, after they killed the king and drank his blood, they started everything over: New calendar, new months, new history. Wind back the national clock and smash its guts to powder: wipe the slate clean, and crack it across your knee.

"Year Zero" slips to and fro between the 18th and 19th centuries in a dizzying manner, mimicking perhaps the fictional bloodletting and it deleterious effects. "Beyond the Forest" is, by contrast, an almost stark bit of world building, disjointed from reality except for a reference to mythical Raum, a noble of Hell, fitting perhaps for a noble lady vampire come home to roost. 

Where Kissing Carrion was dominated by first person narrators, The Worm in Every Heart exhibits a pleasing array of narrative modes, highlighted by the aforementioned "Year Zero" and the second person viewpoint of "Bottle of Smoke." This piece jumps around in time, beginning shortly after WWII, and is something of a fairytale with mentions of djinn and a quasi-Roald Dahl tenor. Naturally, when I say fairytale, I mean the gritty, unvarnished kind, not sanitized or sterilized for 21st century consumption--but rather the gory variety, oozing plenty of explicit sex and violence. Dahl, for all his genteel comport and urbane delivery, would surely have approved of "Bottle of Smoke." I suspect he would've approved of the whole damned book.

The psychosexual dystopia that Files conjures like some depraved illuminated manuscript inhabit a universe parallel to our own, and it's worse, or better, depending on your perspective. The parallel reality bleeds into this one and becomes a labyrinth of mirrored walls. At time the savagery descends to a more primal wellspring and we find ourselves trapped in fellow Canadian David Cronenberg's nightmares of flesh and sex and mutilation, a la his landmark Rabid or eXistenZ. Other writers and filmmaker have posited humans, especially women, as puppet or dolls, posable, consumable, and disposable. Seldom has this line of inquiry been pursued with such relentlessness--hot to the touch, febrile of gaze and grin, yet bone-chillingly cold beneath the veneer. Files's smirks are snarls waiting to happen; her grin simply bares teeth yearning for a throat. 

A good artist is motivated by passion. A great artist bends that passion in service of her medium. The Worm in Every Heart is convincing proof Gemma Files consistently attains that greatness.

So, yeah. Laird, like Helen, rocks hard--as do I, apparently. Who knew?;) It's odd and flattering beyond belief to see myself placed in historical context, not to mention cited amongst such wonderful company. Nice to finally have it all in once place, too.