Join me online on Thurs Dec 6th! And a horror novel even for scaredy-cats
Hallo, nerds with a conscience - and thanks for subscribing!
This week’s newsletter:
Event newsflash
A horror novel recommendation, even for scaredy-cats
New video and podcast recordings and interview
My computer ate a reader’s email……
Photos of HUMANS in the wild?
Event newsflash
First, a newsflash: My next event will be a free, online talk about Humans: A Monstrous History, hosted by the lovely Linda Hall Library (science, engineering, medicine) in Kansas, Missouri, on Thursday Dec 4, at 7-8pm Central Time (convert to your own time here). Register here if you’d like to join me for the talk and q and a!
A great horror novel even for scaredy-cats
I recently finished a horror novel for the first time: George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus’s Pay the Piper (2024).
What took so long? I’m too chicken for horror. Steven King I remember trying as a child and stopping halfway through a novel (Cujo?) with a scary dog on the cover. I didn’t care for Twilight Zone and turned Buffy off before the opening credits ended after one jump scare too many.
The Alien movies are at my watchability limit. I can scare myself by playing the opening notes of the theme of one of my fave movies, Jaws.
The problem is partly the momentary scariness and partly ‘seeing’ the scary things afterwards in everyday life. I can manage this with sci-fi and science disaster movies, hence Dante’s Peak, a volcano disaster movie, is another all-time favourite. I re-watched this a couple of times while staying with friends with a giant flat screen and speakers. En route to the guest room is a large room with an exposed red-brick wall, and when I’m there I often think about a certain scene with an erupting volcano.
In summer of 2020 - of all times - I tried a couple of pandemic disaster/horror novels. Evidently I was so frit by the real world that plagues on paper no longer held the same terror. I loved Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (which becomes steadily cheerier) and got hundreds of pages through Steven King’s The Stand (carefully reading it only in the middle of the day) before the volume got buried under a mass of other books I wanted or needed to read (will return to this!).
Fast-forward to this year. By now I’d read Whalefall, a thriller by Daniel Kraus (thirty-one novels, screenplays, and graphic novels in many genres!) about a scuba diver swallowed by a sperm whale who has until his oxygen runs out to escape. (I highly recommend this, and you can watch Kraus talking about the book on the fabulous Peculiar Book Club, too). When I realized that I could meet the author in Amsterdam earlier this month and attend a masterclass around Pay the Piper, a zombie novel set in the Louisiana bayou in the 1990s, I knew it was time to read another scary novel.
Pay the Piper is Kraus’s alchemical rendering of the late horror director & writer George A. Romero’s extensive notes and some chapters into a lyrical, atmospheric, and wonderful novel. Kraus had been going through Romero’s papers, fairly recently deposited in the University System at the University of Pittsburgh, when he came across extensive notes for a novel hardly anyone one knew about. Kraus brought these to the attention of Romero’s estate, which gave him permission to turn the material into a novel.
Kraus had previously been hired to turn a Romero short story into a novel, which was published as The Living Dead (Romero died in 2017, this novel appeared in 2020). When Kraus and I met up before the masterclass, he described how Romero’s classic zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead (1968) had transfixed him as a child and undergirded his creative practice long afterwards, rather like Star Trek: TNG had for me. By the time Romero passed away, Kraus had written numerous novels and had talked about Romero’s influence on his work. Thus (if I remember the story correctly) Romero’s estate found him, and invited him to turn the story into a novel.
Romero and Kraus’s newest novel, Pay the Piper, tells the story of the tiny hamlet of Alligator Point, in a swampy part of Louisiana, whose residents are descended from the (real) Pirates Lafitte. Legend had it, a monster known only as the Piper went a-haunting around here. The novel opens as children begin vanishing, their bodies turning up looking… icky.
Pay the Piper has a cast of heart-rendingly funny, tragic, and eloquent characters. My fave is Pontiac, a nine-year-old girl who takes notes on everything and is almost totally fearless. (To my mind, when Boo from the Pixar movie Monsters, Inc. turns nine, she becomes Pontiac.)
But what I love the most is the prose: there isn’t a word out of place in this immersive world. The story unfolds from the perspective of about a dozen people. Very short chapters open by situating you alongside - or in the mind of - a character, each speaking and thinking in a distinct literary style, often in variants of Cajun dialect.
Here’s a favourite scene-setting line:
“If New Orleans had any magic at all, it was its knack for taking the world’s oddments of augury, conjury, devilry, wizardry, astrology, alchemy, necromancy, prophecy, witchery, and trickery, and stirring them into a gumbo that tasted better than any of those ingredients alone.” (Pay the Piper, p. 59.)
While this novel isn't set in New Orleans I found myself remembering trips to this extraordinary city (especially wonderful to visit as a historian of the early Americas and a jazzhead). The last dessert I had there was in my mind through at least half of this book (brain providing sugar so that I could run from zombies?).
My brain didn’t explode; nor did I have nightmares. I wonder what to credit with my new-found ability to consume horror. Part of the answer is that it’s a lot easier to manage the imagination when you’re reading rather than watching/listening to horror where jump scares are the worst. Another, I suspect, is that the real world has become such a horror show that reading horror novels doesn’t feel as scary.
New video, podcasts, and interviews
I was thrilled to make it onto a British politics show - the Prospect Magazine podcast! (This week they interviewed Serhii Plokhy, author of, among things, Chernobyl; last week it was Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister and an author).
I was the guest for the podcast’s Halloween special. I chatted with editors Alona Ferber and Ellen Halliday about monstrification: telling stories about people in ways that frame them as threats for supposedly breaking the category of normal, or for blurring the boundary between human and other things like animal, god, or machine.
The conversation touched upon everything from Aristotle to AI. I offered the lowest-tech productivity tip you can possibly imagine: bend over and touch your toes (or tie your shoelaces) while thinking of a problem. The rush of blood to your brain will blep out an answer!
From politics I segwayed to sci-fi and fantasy, appearing on the How To Write The Future podcast. I spoke with novelist and creativity coach Beth Barany about how I became interested in monsters through Star Trek and amped this up while working as a British Library curator; how ‘monster’ is a word that invents the categories around it (like ‘human’); and what makes a perfect monster in SFF. You can enjoy this episode, with video, on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts.
And integrating politics, fiction, and science, Neil Mackay, writer-at-large for the Glasgow Herald interviewed me for the Halloween essay of his The Big Read column.
I did my first Instagram Live! Anna Caig, historical fiction author of the forthcoming The Wise Witch of Orkney, interviewed me and Karen Story, author of a hilarious new novel, The Approval of Sheep. If you’re on Instagram, catch our 18-minute interview here (I appear around the 5-minute mark):
I lost a reader email about a short story!
I lost a bunch of late October emails! Methinks this was me hastily deleting hundreds of automatic notifications that flooded in after moving Mastodon instances (If you’re on Mastodon, I’m now on hcommons.social; if you’re wondering why I’m talking about an extinct pachyderm, know that this is yet another social media channel, not a Jurassic Park situation).
One of the emails that fell into the Halloween Bermuda Triangle was from a reader. If you wrote to me about a short story, please write again! Your email went up in a puff of virtual smoke.
HUMANS: A Monstrous History in the wild?
If you’ve bought HUMANS, borrowed it from the library, or recommended it to someone, thank you so much! If you feel inspired to post a photo of the book with your cat, your coffee cup, out on your summer/winter travels or any such, please feel free to tag me on social media! My coordinates are at the bottom of this newsletter (or you can always email the photo to me if you’d like me to share it places).
In case you missed it…
Fall publications (freely accessible)
A Smithsonian essay about a 16th-century painting of hell with New World and genderqueer motifs among the demons.
An essay in Reactor on why Star Trek TNG's Borg Collective are the perfect monster for our time.
A philosophical essay about monstrification from antiquity to the present, in Aeon.
An essay on ancient monsters and their consequences for how Europeans thought about humanity in the age of exploration appeared in Pasts Imperfect.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (my main social media site, @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
Instagram/Threads (https://www.instagram.com/surekhadavies/),
Mastodon (https://hcommons.social/@surekhadavies)
and LinkedIn (@surekhadavies-53711753/)
I am likewise only an extremely occasional consumer of horror novels (slightly more regular for movies, but mostly for monsters e.g. the Alien, Godzilla, etc. franchises). However, one that I highly recommend if you want to continue exploring the genre is Hildur Knutsdottir's "The Night Guest." Partly I was hooked by the somewhat comedic open sequences with the narrator recounting attempts to get a diagnosis from her doctor for her mysterious fatigue symptoms, which is hilariously recognizable to anyone who's ever suffered from long COVID or other post-viral fatigue symptoms. But also it's taut, perfectly paced, and more of a bracing novella than something longer that you have to worry about whether you'll last to the end. Oh, and thanks for the rec re: "Whalefall," which I had not heard of but will check out. :-)
Thanks, Karl, for the recommendation! I'll be cautiously sampling more horror-adjacent stuff in future. Like you, it's the straightforward improbable(ish) monsters that I've watched to date, many of which are not horror-inducing but just excitingly scary.