Hi all! I invited Haralambi Markov to discuss his new short story collection The Language of Knives, which is out on July 7.

A murderous nine-headed monster from legend permits a podcast interview. The mall has opened its doors, and nothing, not even certain death, will keep the shoppers away. A dead man’s curse drives his descendants to drown themselves, no matter how far from home they flee. An eerie haunted house attraction receives an even more unnerving guest. A grieving widower, knife in hand, undertakes a painstaking, gruesome ritual to appease the gods. If seeking a boon from Baba Yaga sounds nerve-shattering, imagine having to live under her roof.

These thirteen tales from Bulgarian author Haralambi Markov meld Slavic mythology, pitch-black humor, and moving explorations of queer identity with vistas rooted in body horror and nightmares, yielding results that are sometimes deeply disquieting, sometimes surprisingly hopeful, and always strikingly novel.

What was your process like for choosing and arranging the stories in the collection?

I’ve wanted to put out a collection, debut as an author with a collection even, for years and was plagued by the insecurity that I didn’t have the right stories, the best stories that spoke to each other in terms of sensibility, emotion and theme. Throughout the years, I was constantly weighing which stories would go well together and how, so when the moment finally came where I felt I had a solid body of work the selection happened by itself. Putting together the collection has been an ongoing process.

It's also why the arrangement happened almost by itself. I wrote out a numbered list with all the stories and their length, and played around with different orders until I landed on the current one, which actually feels like an emotional journey through hopelessness and surrender towards hope and transcendence through sublimation. I don’t see myself as a hopeful writer and my endings are often incredibly bleak, but I chose the latter half of stories because of the tenderness in that bleakness.

Hopefully that resonates with anyone reading the collection.

How did it feel to read 10+ years of your work? What connections did you see in the stories? How has your writing evolved? 

I thought I’d hate some of my earlier works, which thankfully didn’t occur. What really surprised me most was to see how often I return to similar themes of grief, hauntings, body transformation as transgression and acts of violence against the characters, and being devoured by the horrors of the world. I think I was working something out that I couldn't process in real life at the time. 

It will be no surprise to anyone reading the collection that I have been in mental turmoil for the past decade, and I’m only now on the other side following a bipolar diagnosis and a long treatment. “Baba Yaga Helps Build a House” is actually the culmination of me getting better and thematically closes a lot of loops that I began in my earlier works. Yes, it’s gruesome, but there is a promise of a better life at the end. “Swallow” similarly finds resolution in the potential of reconciliation and ending a coercive relationship. These recent stories are a big departure from my earlier work where ruin was inevitable and almost desired.

It's been fun to also see how I've grown used to writing longer and longer when at the start of my career I used to keep my stories below 5000 words, and now I reach 10,000 words easily. Short stories are my first big love, but now I’m itching for a novella, if not a novel.

You created some collage artworks to go along with the stories in the collection. What was your process like in translating these stories from one medium to another? 

The idea for the collage series came out of necessity to talk about my work without being annoyed at myself by book promotion and without having to do TikTok, which fills me with deep terror. Going viral is a personal nightmare for me as much as I would want attention on my writing.

For the collages, I knew I wanted the text incorporated as the background and then use loose compositions to deliver the emotional thesis of each story. I am always torn between trying to be literal in telling the stories in a visual medium and trying to invoke the feeling and the aesthetic of the work. There are all these choices to be made from the color of the paper to the color palate of the visual element, composition and scale. Each story has different demands and it’s a challenge to translate that visually and keep the entire series visually cohesive.

Weirdly enough I worry about spoilers. Am I giving something away if I try to recreate key scenes from each story? Would anyone be disappointed by the actual story if they see the collage first? We’ll see if these were valid concerns. For all I know, very few people will read both the collection and see the collages. (ed: not if I have anything to say about it. Read Haralambi’s book.)

I saw you mention somewhere that this collection features a lot of Bulgaria as a liminal space. Can you say more?

Bulgaria, as most post-socialist countries, is weird as fuck. It’s a country that decidedly refuses to acknowledge the horrors perpetrated by its past regime. I live right next door to the former police and militia directorate of the Communist Party (now abandoned and covered entirely by green mesh tarp), which was where a lot of torture took place during the change in regime in 1944 and after. There’s a documentary titled “The National House of Terror” and tells you all you need to know. 

Nobody talks about this. Kind of like nobody really talks about how many of the biggest communist monuments have secret tunnels that lead to bunkers in the event of a nuclear war, which I tease a little in “Nine Tongues Tell Of”. There’s so much in plain sight that remains largely unseen during the day and becomes haunting during the night. Abandoned buildings are everywhere and “The Town the Forest Ate” is partially inspired by a nearly abandoned small town I see whenever I take the six-hour bus to my hometown on the seaside.

The past is so recent and yet we’re so disconnected from it. I’m still uncertain how to talk about it in my own work, though some flashes come through such as “Baba Yaga Builds a House,” but it would be a spoiler to talk about it as it relates to the heart of the plot.

Do you have a favorite among the stories? 

It changes! Currently, I am feeling pretty nostalgic about “When Raspberries Bloom in August” for the prettiness of the horror, and “The Midnight Feast” for the absolute, non-stop lunacy when shit actually goes down.

What authors or books do you think your work is in conversation with? Or in conflict with, if we wanna get spicy?

I don't have a beef with anyone, yet. A messy part of me wants to, but so far nothing in that vein.

As for conversation, I feel a lot of kinship to Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath for some of the weirdness, although I can only aspire to reach Tidbeck’s levels of imagination. The other books that stick with me are Georgina Bruce’s This House of Wounds and Gemma Files’ Experimental Film (honestly anything by Files; gosh do I love her work). (ed: Cosigned!)

There’s been a slow-growing wave of queer and trans horror over the past ten years. Do you have any favorite contemporary authors or books you want to shout out?

Would it be cheeky to say you? (ed: Yes. Rude!) Although, “Finna” and “Defekt” are not technically horror, I can’t understate how horrifying it is to read about working in retail. (ed: Agreed.)

I'm probably not going blow any minds by saying Eric Larocca (just finished At Dark, I Become Loathsome and was properly disturbed), Gwendolyn Kiste (The Haunting of Velkwood guts me), and Hailey Piper (Queen of Teeth is so wild). These have been my personal favorites right now. Honestly, I have a way longer TBR to read ratio than I’d like. I’m currently reading Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White, which I’m finding quite fun. I’d have turned out very differently, if this book was around when I was a teen. The unabashed queerness will send a conservative into a coma, which I live for. The progress we’ve made in such a short amount of time!

The Language of Knives (publisher link) will be available in paperback in the US, and in e-book everywhere, on July 7. Preorders are love, especially for small presses publishing weird queer horror!

You can also preorder my next novel, Every Room a Hunger (signed copies available here), see e-ARCS at Net Galley and Edelweiss, and mark it as Want to Read at Goodreads and Storygraph.