“Borderlines of the Uncanny, Polysemy, and a Hunger for the Mysterious”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance and over on my YouTube channel.
Through in-depth conversation with authors this column explores the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror and dark fiction, and more.
My short story collection with Cemetery Dance is titled The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales in homage to Aickman and his kind of stories that operate this way. It can be found here.
I spoke with Bess Lovejoy in early November 2024 about her latest short story titled “Internal Theft” which appeared in the most recent issue of the acclaimed ‘zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the work of Robert Aickman, and much more. We began our conversation about her death-related non-fiction work and publications.
DANIEL BRAUM: In addition to your fiction, which has appeared in publications such as the Wales horror magazine The Ghastling: Tales of Ghosts, The Macabre, and the Oh So Strange and Gavin Grant and Kelly Link’s long running, acclaimed zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, you are a writer of non-fiction. Can you tell us about your books and body of non-fiction work.
BESS LOVEJOY: My first and “main” book is Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, which came out in 2013. Before that, I’d helped research and write the Schott’s Almanac series of books, with the British writer Ben Schott. As much as I enjoyed working on those books, I wanted to do something in my own voice after that. While working on Schott’s, I learned about the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who essentially turned his body into a statue after his death, for fascinating reasons that have to do in part with opposing the English church. From there, I got very interested in the question of what various famous folks wanted done with their bodies after their deaths (and what was done), and what that might tell us about their lives.
As it turned out, the posthumous adventures I collected in a series of 50 short essays had as much to tell us about fame as they did the history of bad ideas in science and medicine. The research there also taught me a lot about how much our attitudes to death and the corpse have changed over time. It was really interesting for me to see how much a lot of the “crazy”-seeming death stories (stealing a famous writer’s finger bone, for example) made a lot more sense in the context of their times, thanks to the influence of things like Catholic relics and phrenology, and just how our ideas of what constitutes “proper” mourning have changed over the years.
That work also led to my engagement with the Order of the Good Death and Death Salon, projects that are devoted to bringing death out of the shadows and encouraging healthier conversations. And it led to an interest in human remains displayed in museums, including the body of a Mexican woman named Julia Pastrana, which I wrote about for the Public Domain Review and for an anthology in her honor called The Eye of the Beholder. That was put together by Laura Anderson Barbata, the artist who finally got Pastrana’s body repatriated.
In addition, during the pandemic I also collected a bunch of Pacific Northwest ghost folklore and wrote Northwest Know-How: Haunts. Sasquatch Press puts out this great series of guides to the Northwest, and this was their contribution on the subject of haunted places. My approach to ghost lore is more anthropologist than “ghost hunter,” and I had really strict ethical guidelines about the kinds of stories I wanted to cover, but it ended up being a really fun project.
I’m also a journalist and I’ve written a lot about the darker corners of history and the history of medicine. For the past couple of years, I’ve also been really interested in cemeteries. I’m now getting into writing for podcasts, which is a fantastic way to tell longer-form stories from history.
Because of our mutual interest in the work of Robert Aickman I became aware of your short story “The Nondescript” published in a 2020 issue of The Ghastling. Before we discuss the story what is it about Robert Aickman’s fiction that first captured your interest?
I was lucky enough to pick up Aickman’s NYRB “Compulsory Games” from the free bin when I worked at a magazine in New York called Mental Floss. That was a life-changing discovery. What probably hooked me first is that his work explores a kind of subtle strangeness. It’s a bit like magical realism in that it’s partly rooted in the ordinary world, but by the end of the story you’ve gone somewhere very odd indeed. It’s the weird circus just on the edge of town, that unsettling event you had in an old house 20 years ago and have never spoken about with anyone, that mysterious, powerful stranger who is totally captivating and yet not quite real. I don’t tend to go in for overt fantasy or overt gore, but those borderlines of the uncanny are often very compelling for me.
And the effect is enhanced by the way Aickman often frames his stories. Often they’re narratives that seem to be related by an older person to a younger listener. An old salt at the bar telling a young fella about something, perhaps, although the framing is not usually that overt. The narrators seem very solid, very trustworthy, and perhaps that heightens the sense of strangeness we eventually get into with his work. I heard Kelly Link speak recently and she talked about some ghost stories as “club stories” (as in, stories told at a club, in the sense of the old English clubs I think). I think many Aickman stories fall into that camp.
They are also deeply rooted in time and place, usually 20th-century Britain circa mid-century yet with a 19th-century cast, somehow. Something about entering that world can be deeply relaxing to me. Perhaps because nobody has a smartphone.
Since then, how did Aickman’s work and “strange tales” inform your fiction (if at all)?
Aickman has definitely influenced my own work. “Internal Theft,” the story in Lady Churchill‘s, went through many versions. My initial prompt for myself there was just about the discovery of a hoard of undelivered mail. At one point, it even involved Russian spies! But eventually I got the elements that I liked in place, which was more of a collage style of documentation and interviews, and it still wasn’t working. So I thought, what if I rewrite this as an older journalist relating his slightly weird experiences to a younger listener? And that framing seemed to work better. I think of my work as “suburban surreal,” so it’s not quite Aickman’s elegant midcentury tearooms and whatever, but there’s a relationship in the framing.
In “The Nondescript,” the main character whose job it is to catalog and classify artifacts in a museum, comes across an unidentified and unlabeled artifact as part of their work.
I suddenly had a great affection for it though I had no idea what it was.
Tell us please about this artifact and the character’s drive to identify it.
I can’t tell you too much about the artifact, because no one knows exactly what it is. Even my images of it in my mind’s eye shifted as I was writing it. But basically, the idea is that a young museum worker one day finds a strange object in a back drawer. She’s working on cleaning out a storage area and figuring out what to get rid of, because the museum has too much stuff. So she brings the object to all these different specialists at the museum, and they all have a different idea of what they’re looking at. Then things get a little weird.
In a sense, the story is a critique of the disciplinary silos of academia and elsewhere. Although it’s also an issue that’s more fundamentally human: you can bring a basic problem to four people and get four different diagnoses or strategies for fixing it. Some of this may be influenced by my upbringing in Judaism — for every Jewish text, there are five or six layers of interpretation. (How many rabbis does it take to screw in a light bulb?)
I wasn’t conscious of this when I wrote the story, but it’s also informed by my experiences having a complex chronic illness that mainstream medicine has (still) never been able to diagnose. I have learned a lot about how medicine and other systems of knowledge operate, and how they tend to look at parts or emergent, acute symptoms instead of the whole, or instead of deeper and often more subtle processes and structures. Because that’s much, much harder to do within the systems we’ve created. All of this informs my work. And one day I was just sitting at a cafe and I thought, what if there was an object at a museum that just drove everyone crazy? And what if it’s inability to be easily categorized or explained was also a source of power in some way? I love natural history museums, so it just felt like an appropriate setting for this idea.
The “nondescript” aspect of the artifact and the intentional ambiguity about its nature and identity struck me as operating akin to the way ambiguity operates in Aickman’s strange tales. What opportunities does the unexplained bring to you an author of strange fiction?
We live in a world where technological and scientific rationality dominate, and where it seems like everything has already been figured out. It’s created a real hunger for the mysterious. People crave a sense of something that hasn’t yet been all figured out, something unmapped, something that involves awe. I love being able to tap into that with fiction. It also, of course, allows a lot of creative freedom — you can “explain” the unexplained from whatever angle you want, since it is by definition not well-defined.
In a recent film called Oddity, strange and possibly haunted objects featured prominently in the story. What is the appeal of object-based stories for you? Why to they fit so nicely with ghost stories, horror, and tales of the uncanny?
I didn’t even realize that I was writing object-based stories, but you’re right! I think partly it may be based on the friends I had in New York City who were involved in the world of museum, visual art, and antiques/oddities. But I also think there’s some really fertile ground to be explored around the object. The chain of ownership, or provenance, is interesting, and there can be a sense in which the touch of past owners or contexts still resonate. So in a sense objects come into our possession haunted by their pasts. There are also perhaps some tensions between what objects are for and the uses we put them to. And then of course all the emotion we imbue certain objects with, the extent to which we have trouble truly understanding they are not alive. I’m thinking of an incredible Attila Veres short story about a child’s teddy bear in his recent collection The Black Maybe, in which a mother convinces a child that his teddy is “sick.”
A wonderful multi-layered answer. And in the last few years I’ve started reading Veres’ short stories. They are so good!
Author Kelly Link and her husband Gavin J Grant are the publishers and editors of the long-running zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Some of my favorite authors have appeared in its pages, such as Karen Russell with her first published story “Help Wanted” in Issue #15 (2005) and Ben Francisco with “This is not Concrete” in Issue #25 (2010).
In addition to her work on the zine Kelly Link is an acclaimed author of the uncanny. Her short story “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” (one of my favorites) strikes me as being both Aickmanesqe and a story about an object. Do you have any favorite or stand out stories by Kelly Link?
I think one of the first stories I fell in love with was “The Hortlak.” That and “The Faery Handbag,” which immediately precedes it in “Magic for Beginners.” There’s just something about Link’s sense of humor, and her ability to blend the poignant with the absurd, that feels exactly right to me. It’s like a far more entertaining version of real life. Plus, the pajamas in “The Hortlak” crack me up every time.
Your short story “Internal Theft” appears in Issue #48 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (2024). Like “The Nondescript,” “Internal Theft” could be viewed as being an object-centric story, as the story of a hoard of undelivered mail dating back to the 1960s is the central focus.
The main character is Hank, a writer investigating the mystery of the “lost letters” one Christmas time. In addition to having Aickmanesqe elements of the unexplained and intentionally ambiguous present the story to me struck me as having a real noir quality to it.
How do noir and tales of the uncanny operate together? What similar elements to the two do you see as a writer?
A fascinating question. With respect to noir as compared to Aickman specifically, it seems like there’s often a solitary protagonist looking for some kind of truth in a morally ambiguous situation. There’s often some sense of grappling with evil, or at least with darker forces. That noir aspect of “Internal Theft” probably shows up in its detective focus. In a way, it’s a paranormal detective story.
Hank’s investigations of the small town and its inhabitants favorably evoked for me the private detectives that populate the most well-known noir tales. I think in most noir tales there is a revelation and a definitiveness and certainty to the caper or mystery even if and in most cases the truth turns out to be something unexpected to our hero and to we the readers.
I liked that there is an element of uncertainty in the revelation at the end part of the story. Can you tell us about the ending and the choice of having that open element in the storytelling?
I really struggled with the ending, and in part because a reader friend said she found that very uncertainty difficult. Because of the detective elements, she expected a more definitive ending. But I eventually had to just come to grips with the fact that I’m not the kind of writer (or reader) who’s very interested in definitive answers. If that’s what you’re looking for, there’s always math. I’m more interested in polysemy — the notion of multiple possible meanings — and ambiguity. Someone (I wish I could remember who) once said that stories should leave the reader in a “well-shaped void.” That’s stuck with me. And ultimately it’s the reader’s interpretation — or simply the experience of reading — that matters, not my authorial intent. As long as I can provide an experience for the reader that’s fulfilling in some way, I’m very happy.
I like that term “well-shaped void.” If you remember the author please let me know. Fascinating how uncertainty, polysemy, and ambiguity can subvert reader expectations of a detective story. I had not thought of that before but it makes perfect sense.
I found a note of optimism in the story, something that perhaps isn’t present in Aickman’s work. I sometimes find optimism in some of my favorite dark works of art. I’m thinking about some of the songs by the band The Cure.
Can you tell us about some of your favorite music and elements you see in it. Does any of it resonate with the fiction that interests you as a reader and writer?
What I listen to changes constantly, but it’s usually categorized as goth, darkwave, cold wave, post-punk, or something related. In a way, I’m simple in my musical tastes. I don’t need my music to tell a story, and I don’t necessarily need it to be innovative. Whether it’s “First and Last and Always” by The Sisters of Mercy (an old fave) or Boy Harsher remixing Chelsea Wolfe (a recent fave), I look for atmosphere, for mood. I want to be taken somewhere else. Aickman also does this for me — he’s very heavy on mood.
I’ve noticed that in a lot of the electronic music that I like, there’s a sense of foreboding, a sense of nocturnal chase. Someone is always about to get fucked, in one sense or another. I read something in a Smithsonian article about creepy dolls today that might relate. The author was looking for an explanation as to why people enjoy creepiness, and she wrote: “The same mechanism that makes us hyper-vigilant also keeps us interested.” She also interviewed the curator at the Strong Museum of Play, Patricia Hogan, who said: “We’re fascinated and enthralled and little on edge because we don’t know what comes next, but we’re not in any way paralyzed by it … We’re more drawn into it, which I think it’s that drawing in or almost being the under spell of wanting to find out what comes next is what good storytellers exploit.” I think it may be that dark, slightly dangerous things — music and stories and more — do engage that evolutionary sense of hyper-vigilance for me, but I look for things that are tantalizing, are right on the line between disturbing or not. Too far in the “nice” direction and I get bored, too far into “dangerous” and I’m too alarmed. But right on the line is where I want to be.
Do you have any plans or works in progress that will integrate some of your non-fiction research and or music expertise into stories?
I am working on so many different projects at once right now, most of which I can’t really talk about yet. I keep joking that I have so many half-open doors. But when it comes to research, I am teaching a whole online class on research with Morbid Anatomy starting in March. I’m very excited about that! It will be my first time teaching a class, but as the child of two teachers, I have teaching in my blood. I’m really excited to help writers and other creative types learn more about navigating the weird, wild world of research.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
BESS LOVEJOY is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, which the Times Literary Supplement said contained “something to dismay everyone.” She is also the author of another non-fiction book, Northwest Know-How: Haunts, which was a Northwest indie bestseller. Her fiction has appeared in The Ghastling, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and The Happy Reader. Find out more at https://besslovejoy.wordpress.com.
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DANIEL BRAUM writes “strange tales” in the tradition of Robert Aickman. His stories, set in locations around the globe, explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural.
His novella The Serpent’s Shadow and short story collection The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales are out now from Cemetery Dance.
More about his books and events can be found here.
