Nonfiction, SFF

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia

OJ

I have a new book coming out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is due out on the 18th of August, and pre-orders are open now at Luna Press Publishing.

Like many fantasy fans, I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually the first book I remember reading. I got it as a Christmas present and was utterly enthralled. As the years went on I read the rest of the books in the series, and they were all fine… and then I got to The Last Battle, which remains to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across a room in disgust.

The problem was Susan: exiled from Narnia for her disbelief and her liking for nylons, lipstick, and invitations, she was the only one of her entire family to survive the horrendous train crash that sent them all to Aslan’s country. Heaven, supposedly, and they were all so happy to be there, to die in this horrendous way, and I looked at that book – I can’t have been much older than twelve, the age that Susan was went she first went to Narnia – and was deeply, irrevocably, revolted by it.

I have held a grudge about that stupid book for decades. Then I started reading fanfiction, and I came across Narnian fanfiction, and it didn’t take very long after filtering the characters for Susan to discover that there were a lot of other people as repulsed by that storyline as I was. I started bookmarking, and then I started writing about it: how fanfiction authors were re-imagining Susan to give her a better life away from Narnia… and away from Aslan.

Good for them. I like their stories better. And I hope, if you read this, that you do to.

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers

Sauna and the Cartography of Swamps

OJ

I have a new chapter out! “The Cartography of Swamps: Making and Breaking Boundaries in Sauna” can be found in Baltic Horror in Film, Gaming and Literature, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and published by the University of Wales Press.

I have to admit that, when I saw the call for papers for this, I didn’t send in an abstract because I knew a great deal about Baltic horror. I actually knew very little. What I did have was unbridled love for the 2008 Finnish film Sauna, directed by Antti-Jussi Annila. Now, a lot of my academic work is just me taking the chance to write about media that I really enjoy – this is my nerdy hobby, after all, and I’m not wasting time on work I don’t like! – so this was my opportunity to talk, at length, about Sauna. Why wouldn’t I take that up?

Sauna, if you haven’t seen it (and you really should) is a historical horror, set in the late sixteenth-century, which follows a map-making expedition along the border of Sweden and Russia. These two countries had just come out of a war, so setting up a mutually-agreed-upon border was a chance to try and limit future conflict. The expedition includes two brothers: one a cartographer, and one a former soldier deeply traumatised by the war. They discover an unmapped village in the centre of a swamp, and if you’ve any exposure at all to wetlands in narratives you’ll be familiar with how they shift and destabilise plot. How can anyone expect a reliable border in a place where land and water are constantly shifting? Answer: they can’t. Of course, given this is horror, geographical boundaries aren’t the only thing to be transgressed, and the brothers find themselves on opposite sides of moral boundaries which really should not be crossed. It’s cartography and ethical behaviour, essentially, and it’s fantastic.

Even if you don’t read my paper, the film is well worth watching. It’s slow, creeping horror and wetlands. What’s not to love?

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers, SFF

Lunar Gothic and Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series

OJ

I have a new chapter out!

To be honest, it’s not really new. It came out last year and I missed it. Oh well, better late than never. “Sterility Across Chasms: Dead Worlds and Technological Imaginations in Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series” is available to read in Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination from Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon.

When I saw the call for papers for this, which really was years ago at this point – academic publishing is notoriously slow – I knew at once that I wanted to submit something. Lunar Gothic? That was too exciting to pass up. There was really only one choice of text for me, too.

I was obsessed with the Darkangel series as a kid. I can’t tell you how many times I took it out of the school library. It was vampires! On the moon! And the central romance fell apart because it turns out it doesn’t matter if you (literally) offer up your heart to a prince, he doesn’t have to love you for it and it doesn’t make him a bad person, it just means you get to transfer your previously rather limited ambitions to (literal) worldbuilding instead. The drama! The imagery! The dead Earth, hanging in the sky while gargoyles roamed a creepy lunar castle and a whole series of brides got their blood drained and hung around afterwards, whining. (To be fair, in their place I’d whine too.) Death! Rebirth! Fantastical creatures and artificial life!

That trilogy was weird as hell and I loved every page of it. Because I mostly write academic papers on my own time – it’s the world’s nerdiest hobby – I end up writing a lot about my favourite things and pieces of media over the years. And why not, I say. Any excuse to reread this series is a good one. And Gothic really can go anywhere…

Horror, Short stories

How to Live with Polar Bears

OJ

I have a new story out! “How to Live with Polar Bears” is in the latest issue of Asimov’s. According to the magazine, the story “brutally terrorizes” the reader, which is a lovely description and exactly the effect I was going for.

It’s a bit of an odd story, to be honest. If it has a theme, technically it would be constructing a narrative in which we can live with polar bears, but there are a number of these narratives within the story and they don’t always fit together. They’re not even always the same genre, which is fun – for me at least, mashing together fairy tales and science fiction and animal horror. There are genetically engineered bears and bears transported to Antarctica to feed on the scientists who work at Scott Base, and there are polar bears coming for a very different sort of dinner in a little house made of seals. There’s also a woman who’s part bear herself, or who sometimes wants to be and is making it happen in different and unethical ways.

She’s not very nice, that woman. In my past stories there’s a number of decent protagonists, good people doing their best, but there are times when I just want to write a rather brutal perspective, because such a character is often the vehicle for a very black humour and I find that amusing to write as well as to read. I happen to think this story’s hilarious, but I may be the only one.

The main character, I admit, has few redeeming features. (She does feed people to polar bears, so what can you reasonably expect?) Then again, she’s trying to bond with, or at least develop a method of cohabitation with, one of the few species on Earth that will actually hunt humans. I’m interested in the ways we interact with other predators and the choices we make in doing so. This story came out of that.

Also, I wanted to Frankenstein a polar bear. That seemed like it might be fun… and it was.

Horror, Short stories

Inviting the Hollow Bones

OJ

I have a new story out! Well, to be perfectly honest, it came out a few months back but I’m playing catch-up here. “Inviting the Hollow Bones” can be read in the anthology The Map of Lost Places, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas & Lesley Conner and published by Apex Books.

I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute to this, and the hook was appealing: write a horror story about a haunting, set in a real place. Somewhere off the beaten track. Naturally I chose something in my own country – a place called Echo Valley, in Fiordland, where a complete mummified skeleton of a bush moa was found several decades back. A bush moa is one of the smaller moa species – nothing like the giant moa, but still interesting. And sadly, still very extinct.

I’ve written ghost stories about birds before – there were ghostly penguins in “Tidemarks” – but the haunting here is less traditionally spectral. A number of artists have been employed to set their own take on the moa in different parts of the national landscape… sculptures that represent this lost element of our ecology. Two of these artists, working together, are placing a sculpture of the moa in Echo Valley.

That sculpture is made of human bones, and it requires a sacrifice…

It’s a creepy little story, but fun to write. I was happy to get it accepted, and while I don’t quite believe in the tales that come out occasionally of moa still surviving in the far reaches of Fiordland, I wish they were true. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? It would be a less bloodthirsty resurrection than this one, that’s for sure.