Hey there, email people. Hope your January and early February have been alright. Here in Buffalo, we’ve been buried under a foot+ of snow and subzero temperatures, with the first bit of warmth today in some time.

It’s been awful slow and snowy, which has given everyone a lot of time to sit with the fascist and imperialist horrors of our day, but has also come with a necessity to hibernate. In my own life, the time has been spent cooking and taking care of myself more, after a bit of a self-care collapse in the back half of the year. It’s also been about looking to the future of Evening House, and the hopeful coming day when it can be my full time job alongside Amanda. Despite the cold and lack of steady foot traffic, there’s been steady signs of growth, and I feel blessed to be surrounded by love and support in the continued existence of this space that the love of my life and I have put together in order to sell good books to readers.

I’m ready for the next step, to put my whole heart into writing and bookselling, and it seems feasible, and it wouldn’t be without all the good people I’ve met here in Buffalo and around the world. If you’re reading this, you’re likely one of them, so thank you.

To be honest, all these good things have me thinking lately I’m going to die soon, or rather that I’m more afraid of the finality of death than I have been in a long time, but that's likely just my unfortunate mind working through the motions, and that’s for me to work through. It’s certainly not the focus of this newsletter.

Earlier today during lunch, I read through an interview with the wonderful Ivy Grimes, a friend and writer whose work I deeply admire. The whole interview is interesting and worth reading, but one point took a particular hold in my head, where Travis asks Ivy about her relationship, if any, with weird horror totem Thomas Ligotti:

Ivy: That’s an interesting question! Well, speaking of grandfathers, Ligotti is one of the grandpas of horror, and I’m on the outskirts of the genre somewhere, and he’s important to us all. I think he’s really funny, too. Aside from that, I feel a sense of kinship with anyone who’s ruminating on good/evil and cosmic forces regardless of the conclusions they draw. I like reading people who disagree with me. And I definitely understand why people don’t believe in God. Things are tough, and I’ve never read a great theodicy. Anyway, let a thousand blossoms bloom or whatever, like that Australian guy said. I’m just worried about the crocodiles.

But I think it’s interesting to look at the history of different genres and prose styles and see where various pieces fit. Ligotti is part of a lineage of operatic and weighty prose stylists, along with Poe and Lovecraft. There are great contemporary writers of horror and the Weird and various other genres who also excel at this style. I love to read their books! But where I really feel I don’t belong in the Weird tradition has less to do with my beliefs and more to do with my prose. I’m odd but quick. Abrupt, even. And I connect to absurdity more than sorrow or horror, even when I’m sad or horrified.

A bit later on, Travis says:

I think that absurdity is very much part of the weird tradition. I think that to a lot of folks “weird fiction” denotes baroque prose and slime, but I see Kafka and Beckett—or Melville’s “Bartleby”—as being every bit as weird as Lovecraft. Weird Tales magazine reprinted Gogol. I continue to use the term because it feels expansive; it could include fairy tales, traditional ghost stories, stories set in outer space—whatever deals with the unknown.

I found this entire exchange to be very interesting, and it got me thinking about weird fiction and horror as traditions and genres. They are both certainly genres I enjoy and consider myself to be heavily in conversation with in my own stories, and Amanda and I very early on decided to make both core pillars of the books we carry at Evening House. Weird fiction & horror has a thriving online literary scene I adore, with some of my favorite literary communities built around it (here’s looking at you hex, ergot, Seize the Press, Interzone, Tenebrous Press, Weird Horror Magazine, and of course my child Cold Signal.)

All that being said, I can’t help but feel frustrated sometimes with the label, much like I get frustrated with every single genre and label in common usage today. When I think about genre as a broader cultural energy or tool, it seems to largely accomplish two things:

1. It functions as an interest signifier. “Like among like”. If you’re looking for something that has these tropes, these philosophies, these styles, then explore this avenue further. Good for readers, great for markets, for selling books and shelving them and categorizing them for the world to discover.

2. It offers a way to put work cleanly ‘in conversation’ with each other. E.g. Gothic fiction tends to explore stories of women trapped in rotting patriarchal institutions, haunted by the past and yearning for escape, and this new story will be speaking to previous classics from the past like Bronte or Poe as it carves its own path, or, writing a science fiction novel and echoing the work of Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler to a particular narrative end, perhaps environmental, racial or feminist in scope, to gain something in the space between the stories or authors’ work. Soft sci-fi, hard sci-fi. Cli-fi. Lo-fi. You get the gist.

So when weird fiction is used as the sole and primary label, or New Weird or weird horror, there’s often a few separate ways that people react. If they know nothing about the genre of weird fiction, they’ll laugh and go “weird fiction, huh?” (that’s not the worst place to start, if they like oddities.) If they know a little bit about the genre, they might think tentacles, monsters, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, purple prose, numinous awe, unsettling affect (often times a barrier here preventing too much exploration further inland unless it’s in those universes or directly inspired by them.) If they know a decent amount, they might think about John Langan, Laird Barron, or think about The New Weird and writers like China Mieville or Jeff Vandermeer, maybe even Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s anthology collection. Secondary world fantasies, weird ass cities, weird ass animals. Disruption of the gnostic variety. If they know a lot about the genre, they might have specific flavors and modern writers on the up and up, or follow specific publications or critics who are offering fresh and dynamic takes on the genre, all of which is very fun and engaging and good.

But despite the modern energy, much of this genre is a communication of history and preconception, some of it helpful, some of it not. For writers writing today, they may be in conversation with this history, but they likely do not want to be shackled to all of it.

More than any one genre, what I care about is writing and reading the sort of work that inspires me, that makes me excited to be alive, that feels like true expression and craft refined into a singular organic entity encased in language, and I assume several other writers today in weird spaces feel the same way.

Genres can, in certain conditions, become prisons that trap the raw alchemy of writing and storytelling into limiting tracks of thought and meaning. Even and especially the ones we enjoy. Many of the science fiction writers we consider titans today resented the label during their heyday.

Even the coolest labels can sometimes feel sterile, disconnected from the message of the present moment. In its wake, great writers today can be rendered critical footnotes to established voices at the height of the genre’s ascendency or broader cultural impact, and maybe that’s because we feel the pressure to stay within these larger associative bubbles that people, readers, feel as if they know (even if they don’t.)

These concerns are less about the market and more about art as an exciting and vital thing to build lives around, for it to leave an imprint on the readers who do find it today, to help mark the times we live in for them and future generations of writers and readers alike. To not get lost in an age of corporate and artificially generated slop engineered to engage taste clusters and play teachers pet with industry expectations. To focus instead on being alive and saying something raw and vital about it.

At my core, I’m a stubborn asshole. I want there to be more small presses nominated for awards than just the same few big dogs. I want more authors to be read and celebrated than just the biggest names of the day, even if I love the big names. For my own work, I don’t want to get pigeon holed into any one affect, into any one goal or purpose. I want freedom. As a writer, reader and editor, what excites me best is work fully constructed on its own terms, moving towards its own ends.

So while I don’t want to lose weird fiction as a label, I’d like there to be more labels, if we have to have them. I’d like fiction to be closer to music and let a thousand microgenre blossoms bloom (as Ivy referenced in her interview, a video I already think of constantly.) I would prefer genre to be suggestive more than prescriptive, and to focus more on individual authors and the specific and unique web of influences that make up their work. To not shove stories into a single bag if they’ve got half a mind to wander.

What I’d like to see is more genres like artistic movements of the 18th-20th centuries. Salvador Dali can suck shit, but the surrealists weren’t just a style, they were people, individual artists with a manifesto and a community. They were a moment in time. It grounds them, even though surrealism is an artistic concept with lasting associate value today.

So, I’d like more genres beyond my current favorites, please, and a broader, more colorful scene, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask, but if you disagree, have at it if you’d like and I’ll get back to you in the morning.

-John

P.S. For the month of February, I’ll be donating all of the proceeds I receive for ebook sales of my book FEAST OF THE PALE LEVIATHAN through Gumroad to mutual aid networks in Minnesota.

If you’d like to hear some about the book, I’m deeply fond of how NM Whitley wrote about it in his own newsletter, the very engaging Short Story Rex. I’ll block quote his thoughts below. Give him a follow!

From the beginning, my temptation was to read this not as a novel, but as a “romance”. Now, by “romance” I mean not in the modern, HEA sense but in the Gothic sense, which was taken to mean simply an extended fictional narrative of marvellous or unlikely incidents. And by “from the beginning”, I mean the table of contents. Something about opening a book and being greeted by that lengthy list of chapter titles preceded by Roman numerals called to mind HTML versions of, like, Anne Radcliffe or Horace Walpole on Project Gutenberg, and certain passages here I could totally imagine an early 19th century reader getting super titillated over…but then again, it is at the same time a book which starts with some dude named Owen who takes some shrooms and goes tubing.

It then occurred to me I might also call this “metamodern”, which is a term the YouTube algorithm has insisted I familiarize myself with recently. In a book about being swallowed by a sea monster, it’s no surprise to find some elements of pastiche: a certain old-fashioned solemnity, deliberate echoes of Melville, of Jonah and the whale. But then we wildly oscillate from mythic-adventure pastiche at sea into present-day satire on land, all radio ads and Powerpoint presentations and stale continental breakfasts and yes, eventually, a YouTube video (not about metamodernity but rather ‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next: 7 Impossible Survivors’). Meanwhile, inside the belly of the beast we discover a society of victims from different historical moments with their signifiers and values all coexisting at once, their backstories a mosaic of nautical epics and aristocratic drama and Cold War intrigues, overlapping dichotomies of good and evil, darkness and light, oppressors and oppressed, haves and have-nots. The cultural logic of cultural logics, embodied in a subacqueous humanoid giant.

But as the story takes on its true dimensions, there is one thing which becomes perfectly clear, and that is: Feast of the Pale Leviathan is ultimately and unabashedly a Genre Novel, and it does not shirk its duties on that score. Vibrant cast, artful pacing, plot twists and escalations, eyeball kicks and mindfucks, moments of operatic pathos, it’s all here. It’s a “fish-out-of-water” story (ironic, maybe, i guess), a portal story of sorts, certainly a cosmic horror story, and for all its outré imagery, its evocations and provocations (post-/metamodern or otherwise), Chrostek never loses sight of his central characters, the relatability of their struggles, and the novel is so much the better for it. Available wherever rad books are sold!

Thanks for reading and take care, pals.