Kyle Winkler lives in Ohio and teaches at Kent State University at Tuscarawas. A long-haired, bespectacled husband and father, Winkler happens to write some of the strangest, scariest, most inventive fiction out there. His stories are literary, emotional, character-driven, and delightfully unsettling.
Winkler’s work has been praised by the likes of Dan Chaon, Christian Kiefer, Amber Sparks, and Brian Evanson. Still, you may not have heard of him, as he doesn’t have a big publisher or a publicist. I was a fan before I ever spoke to Winkler, having discovered him on what was once called Twitter. I can’t remember who reached out to whom first, but now I’m both a fan and a friend.
His new novel, Tone-Bone (Castaigne Publishing, 2024), is named after the titular character, a middle-aged, queer, anarchist biker who, because of her gang’s involvement with a young trailer park priestess, contends with an unnamable cosmic horror she can’t escape. The character Tone-Bone briefly appeared in Winkler’s first published novella, The Nothing That Is, which he released himself. The Nothing That Is was an indie horror hit. An exciting addition to horror literature, Tone-Bone expands the mythology, deepens the terror, and stars a cast of female bikers and other dangerous outcasts. It is unabashedly queer, tough, complicated, and irresistible.
I spoke to Winkler over chat right before the release of Tone-Bone about genre, the craft of horror, and the difficulties of publishing hard-to-categorize fiction.
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The Rumpus: I want to get right to it and ask what made you want to give Tone-Bone her own book. She appears so briefly in The Nothing That Is.
Kyle Winkler: Right. She is on the page and speaking for one chapter. But she kept nagging at me. She started as a name, of course. A minor character in The Nothing That Is mentions her name to the main character. The name burbled up in a spontaneous moment. I wanted something that would give a sense of an older woman who gave zero fucks. The singsong nature of the name helped antagonize that, and she was simply fully formed when I wrote her there. One of those minor characters that belie a dark depth inside. I had originally considered doing a traditional sequel that followed the main character, Cade McCall. But the more I thought about it, that felt boring and expected. The person who needed their story told was the menopausal queer biker. I’d unknowingly laden her with a layered and complicated past. It made sense to unpack it. Rather, I was excited to unpack it. I knew I had something when I realized that her legal name was “Antonia Boniface.” Her nickname “Tone-Bone” was born from that. I suddenly knew who she was, where she came from, what she wanted. That was why I wanted to give her a solo book.
Rumpus: There is a wonderful layering of history, emotion, and “literary” attention to detail combined with a hard-boiled genre aesthetic in this novel. Can you talk a little about that combination of elements or how you approach genre? Do you think about it?
Winkler: I do think about genre. But I only think about it as a loose border that’s easy to slip through and back again. I’ve always loved Star Trek and fantasy fiction. Horror was a slower burn for me. Years ago, when I first started writing seriously, I didn’t think about genre at all. I wrote whatever pleased me. I read Michael Chabon or Joy Williams and realized that they didn’t care much about what they were “supposed” to do according to the dictates of mimetic fiction. They played. It wasn’t until I read how Vonnegut tried to distance himself from merely being placed on science fiction shelves and Chabon, conversely trying to bring in more fantastical work into the Best American Short Fiction, that I realized this vast genre war had been underway. I think we’re past a lot of that now, though.
With Tone-Bone, I needed cosmic horror, crime, roadhouse-style films, biker imagery, caper aesthetic. Finally: an absolute shitload of ’80s cinema. I also wanted something I’d noticed a lot from my youth in the 1980s: a neon blare of explicit anti-Nazi imagery and rhetoric. But I also care a lot about language and rhythm. I care about over-the-top metaphors and the pure musicality of words. I look to certain models like Clark Ashton Smith, [Ursula] Le Guin, [China] Miéville, [Roger] Zelazny, Jack Vance, etcetera. The thing I can’t stand about genre, however, is any kind of insistence on including the topoi of a genre. That was a weird barrier for me while writing The Nothing That Is, Tone-Bone, and other cosmic horror work. All roads lead back to Lovecraft. And I’m not a devotee of his work. So, I had to work tangentially with all that mythos and what came after without Xeroxing it. Trying to create my own way into cosmic horror without bending the genre knee at Lovecraft’s altar.
Rumpus: I think you succeeded. Both novels don’t feel like they’re part of the Lovecraftian version of cosmic horror. Though you feel we’re past much of the genre war, what has your experience been trying to publish works with mixed genre trappings in the traditional publishing space?
Winkler: In a word: failure. Why? From my perspective as an author who had a limited amount of exposure to traditional publishing for about three or so years, the Big Five machine likes what’s easily labeled. One may take umbrage with that. Fine. Go ahead. Big Five publishing seems more about what’s marketable, what’s likely to gain social media hype. However, as we saw from the Penguin Random House court case, these people seem rarely capable of knowing what will work and what won’t. It’s all a crapshoot to them. They have little faith in readers, I think. I say that because look at what I’ve published in the past four years. Each book has found an audience. Is it a massive one? No. But is it an audience that’s growing and interested in each subsequent book? Is it an audience I’m intimately in contact with?
The book I originally got agent interest in back in 2015—Boris Says the Words—went nowhere, never went on submission. I published that one on my own too. So, I wrote a “salable” book: one that would be straightforward but also weird. That was Grasshands. It was “literary horror,” as the pitch said. Well, we got the usual, casual polite rejection from just about everyone. “This is sooo good, of course. But we just can’t find a way to break it out.” Don’t get me started on publishers’ obsession with breaking out a book, or “it’s not right for my list” or, “it’s too weird for mainstream and too normal for the weirdos,” etcetera., etcetera.
Rumpus: A lot of writers put away those novels that don’t sell on submission and try again and again to write something that might break through into traditional publishing. You seem to have followed your own path. What has publishing with indies been like?
Winkler: Big Publishing, for the most part—there are exceptions everywhere—doesn’t do work that’s on the aesthetic fence of the genres. One will have a lone voice in the wilderness helping you out, but it’s rare. The traditional publishing space is lagging behind indie publishing. Small presses, run typically by one person, maybe two or three, are kicking ass in the adoption of strong, weird voices. Sure, there’s rarely an advance. But the creative freedom is amazing, and the contract terms can be more generous than other places. True, the marketing isn’t robust, but the dedication and love for the authors and their work is palpable. And in these spaces, I’ve had much more success. Why? Because the publishers don’t care what readers will think. And in that way, they respect them. They respect them too much to pander. They publish what they want. They let the readers come to them. It’s a good strategy because readers are quite adamant about seeking out their preferred word-tipple, especially in the horror and horror-adjacent genres.
Some writers still can break through this aesthetic no man’s land and get a cool, fucked up book published with the Big Five. But I do think that those are few and far between when you look at how many books are published versus the kinds of books I’m thinking of. An interesting experiment would be to look at those writers whose first few books were published by a small press and then followed by a big press book. There have been many in horror and other genres. Did the aesthetic change? If so, how? Did the “Fuck You” quotient shrink in later books? I don’t know these answers, but I will add that on the last two books I gave my agent before we parted ways, it was made clear to me that the way they were written wasn’t going to pass muster with the Big Five folks. My agent would not be able to sell them as is. Lots of heavy lifting and revision would be needed to make them palatable to the editors we wished to submit to. So, I took them somewhere else and got them published on my own with indie presses.
Rumpus: We could talk about publishing forever, I know, but I want to ask about your approach to teaching the horror genre. Are there writers you share with students that might surprise us?
Winkler: I’ve started teaching a horror craft class, and I teach what I think of as non-capital H horror stories and authors. Borges, Joy Williams, our friend Chris Dennis, and, well, you. (Ha!) Other authors I’m always drawing from for horror are Kelly Link, James Ellroy (mostly his memoir about his mother’s murder, My Dark Places—it’s an existential crisis in a thriller-slash-detective costume), Hardy, Dickens . . . Bolaño routinely scares the shit out of me. I’ve taught his “Last Evenings on Earth” as a cosmic horror story before. I’m sure many people would look sideways at that. Also, poetry: William Bronk, Robinson Jeffers, Carl Phillips, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence—people who can write poems that either are bleak or focus on the dying species. All of that can be used as foundation.
Rumpus: I want to push you a little to explain what you mean by non-capital H horror. I think I understand what capital H horror is, but I’m fascinated by what these other writers might offer to a horror reader or writer.
Winkler: I mean authors who don’t set out to write in the Horror sandbox the same way that, say, Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, Anne Rice, Tananarive Due, or Victor LaValle do. (Many of those authors roam around, too, as they should.) But many of their books will be shelved at a bookstore under “Horror.” Joy Williams never would, same with Lawrence or Bolaño or Dickens or Kelly Link. Those authors will likely be under a different label: “Literature” or “Fiction” or “Fantasy”, etcetera. But, of course, many authors play with lowercase-H horror ideas or images. I’m often drawn to those uses and deployments because they (sometimes) buck expectations in a fun way, like how Joy Williams uses ghosts in The Quick and the Dead. There’s something about her ghosts that I feel like I would never read in another novel.
This is different than an author unknowingly using a horror trope and retreading old, dead ground. That happens a lot. And there’s nothing compelling or creative about that.
Rumpus: There are surprising images in Tone-Bone, sort of wacky or absurd moments that become terrifying. You certainly buck expectations. I don’t want to spoil anything, but an example is the use of a certain fruit in this novel. From a craft perspective, how are you approaching these moments where you could easily rely on the lineage of capital H horror?
Winkler: So, from the beginning, I told myself that I wanted to take an image or object that was innocent and banal and elevate it into a terrifying or worry-making talisman by the end of the book. For example, that little ripple of light that appears a handful of times in the second half of Hereditary. Or the Furby from Lunar Park. Stuff like that. Growing up watching Poltergeist or slasher films, the scares were in the gore, the horrible gibbering faces of ghosts. But I remember reading The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, and in it one character has this flickering light in his ceiling, and it becomes this horrible beacon. And then the ceiling fan starts playing a strange part in his thoughts. The whole thing was great. I loved that. Take the everyday object and make it doom-laden. A harbinger of terror.
I love gore and gross-out stuff and whatever jump scares a book can offer. But horror readers are hard to freak out. Even harder to actually scare. So, I wanted to veer off the lineage and find different ways to bring horror to bear for the reader. People are more familiar with a wingback chair than they are with some multidimensional entity hellbent on soul-destruction. They are cozy with chairs and food and books. If you can warp that—if you can estrange the ordinary—you’re well on your way to brewing unease in the reader.
Tone-Bone was carrying on what I’d done in The Nothing That Is (where the wingback was made eerie). In the new book, yes, it’s a piece of fruit. It’s a great challenge to try and think of all the ways you can make fruit evil.
Rumpus: At this moment, it’s impossible not to ask you what scares you.
Winkler: Losing my job. Not being able to pay my mortgage. My children dying in a school shooting. Student loan or medical debt. My own death in a school shooting. An unwanted creeping desire to stop reading or writing in my old age. Losing my curiosity.
Rumpus: Do you feel like horror is being more seriously considered as an “important literary art form?” Do you feel a change in the air in that respect?
Winkler: “Considered important as opposed to what?” I want to ask. Entertaining? Shocking? Gruesome?
I think most people know that horror is already an important art form. When we’re in school, we often read Poe, Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, Ambrose Bierce. We read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We read 1984, we read War of the Worlds, and so on. These are not, in all instances, capital-H horror, but I don’t think they have to be to count as horror literature. Or to count as an important literary art form.
There was a real kerfuffle back in 2003 when Stephen King won a National Book Award. In his speech—which I encourage people to watch on YouTube—he gives a hearty defense of and encouragement for taking popular literature seriously. Horror as it is done by my peers, even the most eloquent ones, will not likely win over effete New York award judges. I don’t think horror missing those awards does much to disqualify horror as an important literary art form. It may confirm a certain status on it for a slim portion of readers and book industry folks, but horror readers are usually those who don’t need an award stamp or sticker on the cover to find themselves in thrall of excellent writing and fantastical ideas. Lord, I wish the best for everyone to potentially gain some of that wider exposure, if only for a bump in sales, but I can’t abide by this notion that because a genre deals with ghosts, ghouls, blood, and gore, among other unspeakables, that it can’t be done in a “literary” fashion. Shit, I’m just finishing a reread of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and if that isn’t chockful of horrific imagery, plotlines, and tropes, then I’m seriously out of my mind. And I’m sure we’ve installed McCarthy into the pantheon of Great American Writers.
I think it’s possible that the literary world isn’t fully invested in horror to the extent that people like you or I would prefer because they sense a distant pulp magazine ick or that horror was written for the shock factor or lacks character depth or tawdry stories. And some are like that, but the genre has mutated over the decades. Moreover, when a niche Star Wars show can draw a viewership, then I think we can dispense with the pearl-clutching and nose-turning-up affectations when horror is mentioned or suggested.
I would suggest making friends with a horror writer, if nothing else. We’re nice people. Some of the most generous and sweet humans I’ve ever encountered in this professional sphere have been horror writers. And I think—no, I know—it’s because we’ve already seen the worst we can do to one another in our fiction, so why would we waste our time being cruel when given a chance to do otherwise?
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Author photograph courtesy of Kyle Winkler
