A Haunted Reality: Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It
The narration isn’t dispassionate, but there’s a distance.
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Posts Tagged: horror
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado discusses Her Body and Other Parties, riffing off the work of others, and how writing is like solving a math problem.
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The Final Girl
I wanted to be scared because being terrified taught me how to survive.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #126: Christopher Zeischegg
“Being thrust into forced ritualistic closeness does break the ice, but doesn’t guarantee closeness.”
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Hearse and Home: How Stephen King Saved My Girlhood
Down the steps of the second-story apartment above the hearse garage and across the alley was the library.
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That Monster Is Right There: Talking with Colin Winnette
Colin Winnette discusses his new novel, The Job of the Wasp, the nature of horror and his approach to writing it, and the fear at the heart of the book.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado discusses her debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, her favorite horror writers and movies, and writing the book(s) she’s always wanted to read.
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Between Autonomy and Powerlessness: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Women’s bodies signify so much, both to ourselves and others, that inhabiting them and having ownership over them often feel like two different states of being.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna discusses New People, inhabiting her characters without judging them, playing with the reality and surreality of identity, and pushing against traditional story arcs.
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Can We Even Trust Ourselves?: A Conversation with Jac Jemc
Jac Jemc discusses The Grip of It, revision, and returning to the theme of trustworthiness again and again.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb
Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak. Her husband must become her caretaker, living with a woman […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Samantha Irby
Samantha Irby discusses her new essay collection, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, all that comes along with writing about your life, and reading great horror books.
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Storytelling Is a Search: An Interview with Sequoia Nagamatsu
Sequoia Nagamatsu discusses his debut collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, grief as a character, and the intersection of ancient myth and the modern world.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kea Wilson
Kea Wilson discusses her debut novel We Eat Our Own, the influence of film on her work, and what she’s learned from working as a bookseller.
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The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
The individuality of body horror is its signature attribute. Nothing is more intimate than one’s own body, and by extension, one’s own physical suffering.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
In a political climate in which undocumented immigrants are painted as criminals and rapists and half the country is crying for deportation, this week’s story reminds us that immigrants are fathers who love their daughters, who work hard and send money home to dying mothers, who will go to the ends of the Earth for […]
...moreLet’s Get Scary
Over at the Quietus, horror master Adam Nevill revealed his favorite short stories from contemporary writers working in the field of modern horror to Sean Kitching.
...moreLiterature Tricks or Political Threats?
So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life. At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief history of collisions between humor and horror in Western literature (and American politics).
...moreNew Scares
Happy day after Halloween! For the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty reviews a variety of chilling fiction, and delves deep into why these are exceptional: The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression of fear, without having to extend the action past the breaking point of the reader’s […]
...moreThe Perfect Eerie Piano Scale
In honor of Halloween, Consequence of Sound has collected what they deem the “10 Essential Horror Movie Scores.” Following Scorsese’s argument that music and film are intrinsically tied, “[b]ecause there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together,” the piece celebrates how horror perhaps above all genres uses […]
...moreJohn Carpenter’s “Utopian Façade”
“Utopian Façade” is a track from the director’s second studio album, Lost Themes II, and the video, directed by Gavin Hignight and Ben Verhulst, is a kind of Neon Genesis Evangelion meets zombie forest freakout set to the hum of Carpenter’s darkly suspenseful composing. Speaking of their goals in the project, the video’s directors said: [Carpenter’s] work stands the test […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tara Laskowski
I realized that I’m interested in how people change when something terrible happens to someone else.
...moreJohn Carpenter’s World Tour
The horror master has formed a band (including his son and godson), and is embarking on a world tour to perform his own reworked versions of the soundtracks to Halloween, Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Fog, Consequence of Sound reports. The themes for each make up a series of vinyl single releases, each to […]
...moreThe Limits of Horror
At SF Signal, Victor LaValle discusses his horror novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, and writers using the constraints/limitations of genre to their advantage. Want more? Check out our own recent interview with LaValle here.
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The Rumpus Interview with Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle discusses his latest book, The Ballad of Black Tom, patience, H.P. Lovecraft, and reinvention.
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The Rumpus Interview with Keith Lee Morris
Keith Lee Morris discusses his latest book Traveler’s Rest, Lewis and Clark, and how writing a novel about dreams requires much more than sleep.
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The Rumpus Review of The Witch
The most interesting part of The Witch is that the family is so convinced of humanity’s fallen, sinful nature that it never occurs to them to even look for an aggressor from without.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Bad news from the free-Internet fight is also good news in the war on Google. A bit of sexist schadenfreude. Are psychologists who study morality evil? Want to make things really scary? Here’s how to do it. How do we work together?
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The Rumpus Interview with Dean Koontz
Dean Koontz talks about his newest novel, Ashley Bell, overcoming self-doubt, and “what this incredibly beautiful language of ours allows you to do.”
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