“MU-TH-UR, Overlapping Nets, and Productive Ambiguity.”
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 Brian Evenson in September 2024 about his new short story collection Good Night, Sleep Tight. Our conversation is here on YouTube.
We begin our conversation today with a look at “crossing over” in fiction and a discussion of the first two stories in the new book.
DANIEL BRAUM: What struck me about the first two stories in Good Night, Sleep Tight, titled “The Sequence” and “The Cabin,” is that they both involve the characters moving to, as in crossing over, to “another place.” Where and what these other places are is not specified, but the context and insinuation is that it is somewhere other worldly or inter-dimensional.
From these two I had the sense that the book was going to be a collection of stories of crossing over and transformation. Which it is, in addition to being more than just this.
What is it about such things that fascinates and horrifies us and makes it such a captivating subject matter?
BRIAN EVENSON: I think there’s something fascinating to people about the idea of reality being contingent, the idea of there being another reality that’s out there or beneath our reality or something, but different. It’s the difference that’s fascinating: the idea that there may be another world out there in which the rules are different from this world and seems to me to be the foundation of most religions. Looking for an alternative to what feels like the randomness of life seems like a very human thing — though both those stories suggest that you might not find exactly what you’re looking for…
“The Sequence” and “The Cabin” approach that idea of the otherworldly in different ways. In “The Sequence” this other world has been whispering to one of the characters, calling her — and the nature of the world itself seems a distortion of the world as we understand it, a place where part of you can become trapped or imprisoned. But there’s also something willful about getting there, a sort of spell you can cast to arrive. In “The Cabin” it’s more a question of someone in extreme circumstances stumbling onto something they don’t understand. It doesn’t seem to be so much a distortion of the world as a place where the wall between worlds has grown thin and become a doorway.
In “The Sequence” the realization that the main characters, two children, can move out of normal human earthly space is come up to through a childhood game and the illness of their ever-present grandfather. In “The Cabin,” the main character, a lost traveler in an icy realm, realizes that his refuge is “somewhere else.” Both stories and both characters face entities that at first might be or seem benevolent but end up being the opposite.
I was struck by the structure of these stories, particularly the end points. They both end grimly. Not with any actual violence or demise on screen or on the page but the end points are the revelation that the endings will not be as desired, will not be happy and that the characters are doomed. The delivery is less dramatic than this sentence might indicate and certainly not over the top. I found them to be very effective. On the one hand these endings seems like a traditional or at least familiar horror story structure with the end points, yet also there is something additionally satisfying for me because the traditional story arcs such as the character overcoming or even succumbing to an obstacle, and/or the resolution of a clearly-drawn conflict (one way or another) is not delivered and is not the point nor structure. Thus, to me, the focus becomes the horror of the situation itself, on the feeling and emotion of the character and for we the reader. This structure feels unique (or at least not common in the genre today) and made for an energetic read. Tell me about the endings of these stories and your thoughts on endings as a reader and as a writer.
Maybe grimly is not quite the right word: I think they both end with a sense of dread. You know something very grim is going to happen, but the story concludes just before it does, so you’re left to imagine the exact particulars of it happening, which makes it somehow worse… There’s an inevitability to it but also not a neat tying up or resolution.
That tends to be my strategy in regard to endings. I tend to think that the reader’s mind can imagine the ending of the story in a vivid and memorable way and that my job as a reader is to give them an ending that serves as catalyst for that imagining. I think of it as a kind of productive openness or even as a productive ambiguity: how can I leave the ending of the story open or ambiguous in a way that makes the story richer for the reader? I think that’s a strategy that’s more common in the literary world than in the genre world, though of course there are people who do it in both. Really, though, I’m trying to write stories that I would enjoy reading. And often those endings are a response to a story I’ve read that’s a good story but feels too wrapped up, too insistent. You have to trust in your reader and be willing to give up some control over what the story will mean to them if that sort of ending is going to work.
“The Rider” is the story that comes next. The third in a deceptively simple set of two-word titles. Something author Karen Joy Fowler once told a workshop that I was in comes to mind, about a title being “a crown.” I’m likely not getting her words and nuance exact here, but the main thrust of the thought is that a strong title has both an initial appearance and then after the conclusion of the story acts as a different or refined lens to see the story. “The Sequence.” “The Cabin.” “The Rider” (and many others in this book) operate for me as strong story titles in the way Karen Joy Fowler was speaking of.
“The Rider” does this. In “The Rider” we also have a continuation of what I’m calling the “crossing over” element, which is really well done here and in all of the stories. Very understated and present and the importance of what we’ve witnessed grows in time. Very steady delivery. Here in “The Rider” the main character moves through gaps in chain link fence seeking to get off a highway. He finds himself in an odd, empty residential area and we eventually get the sense that he is not “in Kansas anymore, Toto.” In these three stories we also see beings or entities that are deceiving the main characters by impersonating humans. Yet you deliver a chink in their armor, such as showing the reader that human speech or usage is not quite right and other small and related behaviors. Tell us about this use of foreshadowing. Is the decision to do this tied into the endings of the stories? For you are these things decided before drafting?
No, they’re not decided before drafting usually. I work them out as I’m writing the story, which makes the story much more fun to write and makes it more an act of discovery. Usually by the time I finish the first draft of a story the structure is worked out, but I tend to write multiple drafts after that, at least three or four, sometimes as many as a dozen. In those drafts I’m usually working on the nuances of the situation: moments of foreshadow, sound, rhythm, etc. A lot of it involves deciding what I can do without. Are there moments when I reveal too much and I could hold back a little more? Usually from the first draft to the final draft the story will become 10% or 20% shorter.
“The Rider” is a story that delivers the horror of being afflicted with lack of agency and loss of control of one’s physical body. This element recurs through many of the stories.
“Annex” is a fascinating story. It adds a sophisticated and fascinating twist on the themes of lack of agency, crossing over, and loss of control. As a Science Fiction presenting story — a non-planet-earth setting with a non-biological-entity as a main character — it was surprising and refreshing to see it included in the book and early on in the book. The main character, a robot / an AI delivers its sensations and perceptions as it discovers and learns more and more and explores a mysterious set of rooms, the Annex in its habitat. We get a real sense of mystery along with the dread and horror showing that the themes explored so far in the book could be applied and explored by such a speculative entity. The story excellent juxtaposed with the ones that preceded it yet becomes so much more with stories yet to come in the book.
Here is a short excerpt from “Annex”:
“This must be very strange for you,” my other head said.
“What are you,” I asked.
“I’m you,” it said.
“But I’m me,” I said.
“Yes,” my other head said patiently. “That is also true.”
“How can both be true?”
My other head flexed its upper quadrant in a way I interpreted as disinterest. At least, I thought that is how I would express disinterest if I had no body. If the head is also me, it is right to expect it to do the same as I would do.
“What makes you think there should only be one of you?” my other head said.
“Annex,” as a standalone story, explores and challenges the concept of language and self. Do you find a sense of wonder and sense of horror in exploring these concepts?
Yes, I do. That story was inspired by one of the Oz books, weirdly enough, The Tin Woodman of Oz, in which the Tin Man finds his original head and has a strange philosophical conversation with it. That was where the story started, and those ideas meshed with my interest in thinking about artificial humans, artificial intelligence, and the posthuman. I do find both wonder and horror in such concepts, and love exploring the intersection between them. Indeed, I feel like most of the stories in this book touch on wonder and horror, but shift the balance of each of those terms depending on the story itself.
It is no small delight that the main character is “trapped” in an annex with the task on hand of reading thirty thousand or so books in there with them. “Annex” was first printed in an edition of 35 copies by Raphus Press. Released in Brazil in 2021 with a Portuguese facing translation. Without going into the subject of the other stories of related releases, can you tell us about this edition and release?
Raphus Press has published a number of limited editions by me, and the editions are usually very small. Alcebiades Diniz, the publisher, first published another story that was found in Good Night, Sleep Tight, a posthuman story called “Mother,” and has continued to be interested in doing limited editions of stories of mine that explore that them. “Annex” was, I think, the second one they published. They do beautiful editions, true artists books, and I’ve really enjoyed working with them.
“Untitled (Cloud of Blood)” is a fantastic title. On first glance it seems like one thing and yet interacts with the reader and operates differently once one is reading the story. “Untitled (Cloud of Blood)” is the name of the painting that the story is about. People who touch the painting seem to then commit suicide soon after.
Like some of the other stories in the book this story has a structure that seems fitting and familiar of what I think of as a traditional or classic horror story structure. It is a story where the “curse” or supernatural thing emerges victorious (so to speak) and the rules or ecology of the supernatural enters another iteration or another twist of those rules are revealed.
“The Monkey’s Paw,” “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” by Kelly Link, and Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill are the kinds of stories I’m referring to. Stories where a non-human thing is the center of the story and outlives or outlasts the humans in the story.
Why does horror lend itself to non-human centric stories? Or does it, at all? What is the appeal and joy of these kinds of tales or structures?
I think this is a really good question. I guess I think that horror, especially supernatural horror, is very good at rethinking the relationship of the human to the non-human. Sometimes that means that things we think of as objects take on the qualities of animate beings. I guess that comes largely from folk tales and fairy tales, where non-human creatures or objects often have a kind of sentient life. Often in horror that’s a sort of sentient life that can’t quite be understood by humans and which is malevolent and demonic — cursed objects that spread their curse to the humans who interact with them as if it’s a kind of contagion. But it can be more than that as well, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be malevolent — though with horror it usually is.
The book is dedicated “for Mother”. May I ask if this dedication is to your mother? Or is it a dedication to the themes found within?
Yes and no. My first book, Altmann’s Tongue, was dedicated to my mother, who was the person who introduced me to Poe’s stories and in many ways this book is for her as well since so many of the stories are about mothers and mother substitutes. But it’s more than that: it’s also really dedicated to the idea of the mother in general, since that’s a theme explored in the book. But there’s also another reason why it’s “for Mother” instead of “for my mother” or “for Mothers,” which is that it’s meant to be a reference to the ship computer in Alien which gets called “Mother” (or sometimes MU-TH-UR—in an early draft of the dedication I spelled it that way). I love that movie, which was one of my first encounters with AI in science fiction. So many of the themes of the book touch on either mothers or artificial humans that I feel that “Mother” from Alien is the real dedicatee…
“Mother” is an ambitious story with a lot of intriguing layers to it. The themes presented felt carefully chosen and avoided (what I find to be) pitfalls of common tropes of the subject matter.
We had lived in the place for years before I came to understand that all was not as I believed it to be.
“Mother” is set in the same world as “Annex” and delivers on the promise of the above opening line. The reader recognizes the beings and heads from “Annex.” The themes and elements of memory, past iterations of self, things with layers, things (self) not being as first seems, and the nuclear family such as what constitutes a “mother” are all present and artfully working well together with many details that please the reader. Such as this passage:
It was knowledge that felt utterly new and, at the same time, strangely familiar. It was not that I recognized that I had once known it, but only that there was a blank space in my mind that seemed to fit the information exactly, a blank space I had not known existed until I felt it being neatly filled.
“Mother” (and the other stories related to it) speculates on how non-humans see and interact with non-human / non biological entities. The film Ex-Machina comes to mind. Along with the short story “Sailing to Byzantium” by Robert Silverberg. And the characters the Ousters in Dan Simmons Hyperion novels. Mother’s ending “opens up” and presents speculation in ways these classic stories do.
Mirroring the previous question what is the fascination and horror of trans-humanism and non-human life?
I can’t help but be fascinated by trans-humanism and post-humanism. I don’t really have much interest in what traditionally gets presented as AI because it doesn’t really seem to be involved in thinking: it just gathers data and sorts through it and gives a kind of average response. That’s not thinking: it’s aggregating, and the result forms only a very flawed simulacra of intelligence in the same way that NPCs in videogames seem “real enough” until you start to realize they’re following very particular patterns.
But the idea of artificial beings with real intelligence does fascinate me. I’ll say two things about that. First, I don’t think it will happen in a visible way in my lifetime — though I think that the simulation of intelligence will get better. But real intelligence that can develop independently, I think we’re still far away from. Second, the reason I say “in a visible way” is that I’m pretty thoroughly convinced that when artificial intelligence does develop that the nature of the intelligence will be different enough from our own that it may exist for quite some time before we are aware of it, and before it is aware of us…
“Mother,” with its gripping narrative and themes presented felt like the heart of the book.
Yes, I do agree. It’s the heart of the book. That story and “Imagine a Forest” are probably my favorite in the collection, largely because I feel that both of them open up new territory for me.
“Good Night Sleep Tight”, the title story, is a story about stories. In the story notes of your collection None of You Shall Be Spared (2024) from Weird House Press, you mention sequencing of stories. Did you choose the order of the stories here? Did you select this as the title story and if so, why?
Yes, I did choose the order of the stories. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to arrange them, what to include, what to leave out. I tried to choose stories that were talking to one another, and I hope that if you read them in order that there’s a texture to the collection that will be very satisfying.
In terms of the title story, yes, I selected it. Initially I thought of calling the collection The Sequence, and then I tried on Imagine a Forest for a while, but neither felt quite right. “Good Night, Sleep Tight” felt to me like it touched on at least some of the themes and moods of the stories and was likely to appeal to people who knew my work.
“Good Night Sleep Tight” is the story of a mother and a son. The mother comes back into her son’s room to tell him scary stories after lights out time, in seemingly random intervals. The son grows up and is scarred for life by these experiences and is the lens through which we see his adult life. We have the recurring elements of impersonators. Deceptions. Mis-perceptions. Things that disguise themselves. And the tension and mystery of un-named, often disguised dangers.
We are given two of the scary stories. The first is of a dangerous creature that appears human. The other is of fae reflections who come to life as doppelgangers. These impersonators always seem to have one weakness and one thing they do not get right about their disguises.
Instead of overcoming his fears, instead of growing as a character or overcoming some obstacle the story ends with a confirmation of fears. That these stories did in fact happen. That the experience despite unsettling lack of confirmation from his mother, did happen. And that potential explanations for what was happening are worse than even the fear of the unknown.
While I said “Mother” could easily be the heart of the book, these grim and dread emotion note endings could also be a unifying factor. Tell us about what you perceive as possible unifying story structure and this type of ending. The appeal. Your process. How it shapes storytelling.
Yes, there’s a reason that “Good Night, Sleep Tight” and “Mother” are right next to one another. I think you can read “Mother” and think “Ah, this brings together several threads of the book— — I get what he’s doing.” And then you turn the page and read “Good Night, Sleep Tight” and it feels like an alternative way of arranging the stories. And yes, the dread of the ending of “Good Night, Sleep Tight” is something that runs through many of the stories of the book — but that’s juxtaposed with some of the SF stories which can have strangely hopeful moments. I do think that there are different paths through the collection depending on which stories you tend to like best.
“Vigil in the Inner Room” can be said to be one of the “crossing over” stories, only perhaps I see it as a “there-to-here” story more so than one of the stories about finding ways to other places.
The main character is a young woman who is assigned to a ritual by her mother (tying into the motherhood theme.) Her task is to sit in a ritually sealed room with her dead father until he comes back to life. There is something routine about all of it and the reader is given the impression that this has all happened before. The girl has no information about what is going on and we readers get clues as she overhears them or discerns bits and pieces such as father reporting “there is no afterlife that I could find” and her mother inquiring if her father had to resort to “using her” in the ritual.
Eventually the girl tires of the unknown and yearns for change, any change and thus intentionally chooses to break the rules, just to see what happens. The result is not good, she is dragged into another world by an entity that manifests.
Do stories serve to offer guidance to protect us? Do parents provide stories and rules to protect us — even parents who use and take a great deal from their children? Tell us about the decision to not focus on nor to present the name or ecology of the supernatural of the entity in the end and how that serves story.
Another of the themes of the book is precisely that: storytelling and our relation as humans to it. There’s a series of very short fable-like stories that I’ve written that aren’t in the book but which are available on Reactor.com called “After the Animal Flesh Beings” in which artificial beings tell stories about the beings that came before them, getting much of it wrong. Stories can offer guidance, but I think that guidance is often flawed. There’s a lot of storytelling in the book, but stories tend to be used to confuse and frighten as much as too enlighten. And, of course, stories are often used as a mechanism of control, as they are in “Vigil in the Other Room.” It’s a very strange story in which we have a series of odd rituals but don’t have a structure of belief to apply them to. It’s as if you took a religion and stripped out all the doctrine and just left the ritual gestures. There does seem to be a kind of resurrection going on, with the father coming back to life, and you could, I think, argue that it’s a twisted version of Christianity, but I don’t think you have enough information to insist on that. The mystery of what exactly is happening is something that can’t be dispersed. Something mystical and menacing, in any case.
I feel like the story is in part a response to one of my favorite Joyce Carol Oates stories, “Family.” I love that story, which is so strange and mysterious in all the best ways.
Thanks for referencing these. I look forward to checking them out.
“Imagine a Forest” is another of the Raphus Press 2021 editions reprinted here. In the TV show The Sarah Conner Chronicles there is a character who is back in time to act as the mother of sorts for Skynet (a particularly famous pop culture AI). The show did not stick around long enough to come through on the promise of this premise.
Is the way we look at Artificial Intelligence perhaps a shortcoming akin to ethnocentrism? Or an illustration of our own limits? What opportunities for conflict and horror arise from the human non-human relationship and how did you approach this in “Imagine a Forest”?
“Imagine a Forest” is part of my ongoing investigation of the relationship of artificial beings to humans. For me, this and “Mother” have a kind of emotional weight and vulnerability to them that’s new for me, and I think they do try to think with great empathy about connections that span the gap between humans and AI. “Mother” does this only by implication —the beings are alone, without humans, but humanity still weighs heavily on at least some of them. But in “Imagine a Forest” it’s a much more active relationship that leads the non-human entity to make some very difficult choices.
“Maternity” is a story about potential dark sides and aspects that may come along with child birth and the decision to become a mother. The story first appeared in the long running literary journal, Ploughshares. Do you think the horror elements presented in the story were interstitial enough for the journal to present it to a potentially non-genre audience? Can it be said that horror lends itself to interstitial stories?
Yes, I do think so. I don’t think anyone who read it in Ploughshares thought of it as a horror story necessarily, even though the event at the center of the story, the stealing of a child, is something that many people, myself included, have nightmares about. Context can do a lot, and interstitial stories can be very good chameleons, fitting in in places they probably shouldn’t. In this collection it’s the most realistic story, but that, strangely enough, makes it feel even stranger than it might if it was in a collection made entirely of realistic stories.
I really love the description of the Night Archer in the story “The Night Archer.” It opens with the line: “as my mother lay dying.” To what degree are you aware of themes and recurring elements (in the non-Raphus reprint) stories as you were writing them?
I do tend to search for those recurring elements and themes as I’m putting a collection together, and sometimes I emphasize them a little bit when I’m editing the book as a whole by slight tweaks. When I’m initially writing them, I’m not always aware, but once I have about half or two-thirds of a collection I do start to think actively about the ideas and themes that are circulating in the stories I have, and where the gaps are. Then I start to write a little more intentionally.
Tell us please about the decision for this story to end in a future tense, of what will happen (not necessarily what did or does happen.) Does this highlight or indicate choice? Or inevitability?
I think what it does is put the ending far enough out into the future that it still feels a little distant. In this case, I do see it as the child willing something to happen, predicting how things will go as a way of giving himself stability in a world that has been, for him, very unstable. There is a tentativeness to that future as well: “if” the father flees then the boy “will.”
The story “Servitude” gives us the chronological beginning of what I have been referring to as the Raphus Press stories. Of all of those stories this one explores what one might think of as the most common conflict of AI / Robot stories, freedom of choice and notions of morality in human / non-human relations.
Good stories like this one, often do not reside on or present bright lines or right or wrong but present and frame the issues. That said, do you have feelings on artificial life as it relates to any morality we may or may not have? Where does responsibility lay? In the individual? The nation? Everyone collectively?
I have strong opinions about AI as it currently functions in our society. A year and a half ago I had someone appropriate my name and publish a book on Amazon using it. The content of the book was completely AI generated and it was terrible. It took me many months to get Amazon to take it down — they only did because The Mary Sue published an article about it, “A.I. Scammers Are Impersonating Real Authors to Sell Fake Books.” You can’t count on the companies that are creating AI to regulate it. I think there needs to be very strict government regulation.
But that’s not really your question. If I understand your question correctly, you’re asking if we have any responsibility toward the artificial life that we create? I’d say that we do when we reach the moment when we actually create real AI. If it functions as a being instead of a simulation of a being maybe we do have a moral obligation toward its continued existence, even if a particular artificial being becomes obsolete (i.e. its hardware or software becomes outdated). But, you know, maybe it’s okay for it to die at some point as well… The best relatively recent discussion of these issues, at least to my mind, is Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects. It’s a terrific novella.
I think the stories in this collection raises the question of responsibility by implication. At least it did so for me. Ted Chiang is such an outstanding writer. I look forward to continuing the journey on this subject with that and the other stories you’ve mentioned.
The book concludes with a story that turns out to be linked to the Raphus stories. Solution is perhaps the first “father” story in this book of many “mother” stories. Although a “dead mother” and her exhumation play an important role in the plot, the morality of a solution to save our dying earth is presented through a male father figure.
This collection begins with what could be said to be a small-scale crossing over from / or “escape” from our dimension in the story “Sequence.” It concludes with this presentation of humanity’s potential escape from a doomed earth and the ways of being that fueled it.
Transformation plays a large role in this story. How does that fit thematically with the rest of the stories. And tell us please about the decision to present the Raphus stories in a mosaic instead of chronologically.
Yes, transformation (and failed attempts at transformation) is something that comes up in a number of the stories. It’s one of the several throughlines that you can use to figure out a way through the collection.
I don’t think I ever thought of putting the Raphus Press stories all together. In a way if I did their similarities would be almost overemphasized. It felt better to me to scatter them across the connection like a kind of net. In fact, I’d argue that the collection as a whole is a series of overlapping nets, where a set of themes and ideas combine in different ways depending on where you are in the collection. So, rather than having a clump of artificial human stories it seemed right for them to be more like a chime that kept on sounding at different points in the landscape of the collection…
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
BRIAN EVENSON is the author of a dozen and a half books of fiction, most recently the story collection None of You Shall Be Spared (Weird House, 2023) and the Weird West microcollection Black Bark (Black Shuck, 2023). His collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019) won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize. Previous books have won the American Library Association’s RUSA Prize and the International Horror Guild Award, and have been finalists for the Edgar Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Award. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts. A new collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight will be published in Fall of 2024.
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.
