“The Twilight Zone. The Infection Party. And the Heart of Darkness.”
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 online 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 Douglas (along with author Jeffrey Ford) in April 2024 about their recent work. Our conversation is here on YouTube.
My conversation with Douglas today begins with question about author Charles Beaumont…
DANIEL BRAUM: Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and Shirley Jackson are three authors from the post-Weird Tales era that you cite as ones that are important to you. Tell us what you think of when you think of each author.
DOUGLAS FORD: Interestingly enough, Matheson is the only one of the three that was published in Weird Tales. That’s not entirely surprising, as that magazine probably suits his style and aesthetic better than the other two. After 1939, horror fiction saw the ascendency of Unknown magazine, which was edited by John W. Campbell. I’m quoting from David Hartwell’s introduction to Dark Descent here because it’s revealing: “Campbell demanded stories with contemporary, particularly urban settings, told in clear, unornamented prose style,” influencing Shirley Jackson in particular, though I don’t think she ever published anything in the pages of that magazine.
Hartwell does provide an interesting anecdote elsewhere in Dark Descent when he says that Jackson called Unknown “the best” and attested to having a “complete run” of its issues. Meanwhile, her work became celebrated in mainstream publications like The New Yorker, while Beaumont’s name appeared in Playboy.
Purely because of personal inclination and bias, and not to ignore writers like Gerald Kersh or Ray Bradbury, both of whom I adore, but I think of Jackson, Beaumont, and Matheson as a kind of holy trinity of horror fiction from that era, particularly for how they crafted short stories. Together, their respective styles helped fashion modern fiction — Matheson for his finely-crafted storytelling, Jackson because she knew how to cast a spell through her prose, and Beaumont because he somehow made horror personal — more so than any other writer I can think of.
You’ve mentioned Beaumont in particular as perhaps the most influential to you. In what way does he influence your work?
When I read a Beaumont story, I sense a writer who put a great deal of himself into the plot and characters. There’s an intimacy about Beaumont story that’s hard to miss. When I write, I need to feel a personal connection to the characters and the events of the narrative. By that, I don’t mean that they’re strictly autobiographical, but rather that there are personal echoes, resonances that make the story honest. If there’s no honesty, something doesn’t work. Horror, more than any other genre, needs to tell the truth, even when dealing with unreal things like monsters and phantoms.
Is there such a thing as a “Beaumontian” story? Are there any elements that you’ve identified that you’ve noticed recur in his stories?
I find myself going back to the intimate quality of his fiction. I can’t claim to be an authority on his biography, but those echoes I mentioned seem ever-present to me. There’s an aching loneliness that triggers my empathy there, a feeling of finding oneself estranged from the world in which he lived — at least that’s the sense I come away with. Even a story like “Place of Meeting,” a story that contains the kind of twist we find a lot in The Twilight Zone (though it wasn’t one that Serling used) is founded on the need for a connection. So often that kind of story gets reduced to a twist, almost a kind of punchline. Of course, Beaumont’s reader is supposed to feel a sense of surprise at the end, but that’s not the most powerful emotion. Instead, it’s a profound sense that we’re isolated from one another and adrift in a chaotic world.
You said you find a “sense of aching loneliness that triggers your empathy” in his work. And a “sense that we’re isolated from one another and adrift in a chaotic world.” Take them one at a time and tell us about these two things and how you see them operating in Beaumont’s stories.
“The Howling Man” comes to mind when I think of that sense of finding ourselves adrift in a chaotic world. I think that story contains one of his most memorable endings, one that somehow remains fresh to me every time I reread it. That story suggests that peaceful order is precarious, hinging upon a group of monks keeping the devil locked in a cell. Yet he’s such a pathetic figure, so of course the narrator of the story wants to release him. It’s an act of kindness on the part of young man wandering aimlessly, trying to find himself. But letting the devil loose unleashes forces so destructive they change history itself and result in the holocaust. When he adapted the story for The Twilight Zone, Serling soft-peddled the ending a little bit.
Beaumont himself, on the other hand, never hesitated to steer us into emotionally precarious waters, like in a story such as “The Hunger,” which ends with a woman whose loneliness ends with her murder. The last lines of that story are amongst the most haunting in horror fiction: “perhaps if I don’t scream he’ll let me live. That would be nice.” Through his subtlety and deft touch, Beaumont makes it clear it won’t be nice at all.
“Perchance to Dream” is a well-known Twilight Zone episode. Tell us about the episode and the story it is based on. Why is it so iconic and quintessentially “Beaumont”?
I can’t remember who pointed out the connection first, but Wes Craven seems to have lifted several elements from that story to use in A Nightmare on Elm Street, specifically the idea that if you die in a dream, you’ll die in real life. Serling’s adaptation of that story contains so much memorable imagery — the carnival, the roller coaster, all creating such wonderfully surreal dream sequences that would probably scare Freddy Krueger. The main character of that story is so doomed, almost in a classical Greek sense, the course of his life governed by forces he cannot control. For me, that stands out as a key component of what we might call quintessential to his work.
I’m not a fan of reading fiction as disguised autobiography, but in Beaumont’s case, it’s hard to not think of the tragedy of his own life. He suffered from a rare condition that caused him to deteriorate both mentally and physically. Eventually, writing became impossible, and he apparently aged so rapidly that when he finally died at the age of 38, he looked like he was in his 90s. Experiencing such premature aging must have made it seem like the universe truly conspired against him, and it’s hard not to make connections two of the Twilight Zone episodes he penned — “Queen of the Nile” and “Long Live Walter Jameson,” both of which involve characters who suddenly age rapidly in their climaxes.
Could it be said there is a surreal or magic realism aspect to Beaumont’s work?
“Fritzchen,” one of Beaumont’s most wonderfully strange stories, involves a strange creature boarded in a pet store, where it soon starts making a meal of the other pets. The story ends with the reveal that it’s actually the young offspring of something bigger and more dangerous. The story begins by describing the setting this way: “It had once been a place for dreaming.” This sentence encapsulates so much of Beaumont’s work for me. It’s also a line that speaks to your question.
To some degree, both surrealism and magical realism collapse the boundaries between dream and reality. I don’t think I’d go as far as to suggest that what Beaumont writes fits comfortably in magical realism, but he certainly made the borders of reality seem permeable. In that sense, surrealism never seems that far away.
To offer a counterpoint, I’d suggest that Beaumont wrote most powerfully when he wrote in a realistic mode. “Miss Gentibelle,” for instance, is jarring and disturbing in its depiction of a child abused by the title character — she tortures and murders his pets.
A moment ago I said I don’t generally like to read fiction as autobiography, but “Miss Gentibelle” is another one where we have to acknowledge that Beaumont injected a great deal of himself into his fiction. As a child, he apparently suffered some of the abuse he depicts in that story. Similar realism turns up in “The Life of the Party,” which has a wonderful reveal and succeeds beautifully without any fantastic or otherworldly elements. It’s another story where the horror arrives with a palpable sense of loneliness.
I often mention The Twilight Zone as a touchstone or quick way to reference to a newcomer when introducing the concept of “strange tales” or “Aickmanesqe” fiction. Upon talking with you about Beaumont’s work I’m wondering if my use of The Twilight Zone as a touchstone is not the most accurate. In many Twilight Zone episodes, there isn’t an intentional ambiguity that I associate with strange tales but instead many of the “strange aspects” you mention present in a Beaumont story :“an aching,” “loneliness,” and “a verisimilitude.” Even in episodes that have ambiguity there often is a big reveal or explanation.
Might it be more accurate to use The Twilight Zone as a touchstone for Beaumont’s work? Is a “Beaumontian” story and The Twilight Zone “formula” synonymous?
There might be some truth in that. I don’t think it’s by coincidence that Beaumont penned the first Twilight Zone episode not written by Serling. Arguably, Beaumont began hammering out the tropes that we would come to associate with The Twilight Zone years before the series premiered. I’m not sure that aesthetic is too far afield from Aickman’s notion of the “strange story.” While it might be hard to imagine a straight-forward Twilight Zone adaptation of a story like “The Hospice,” the ending of that story does offer up a brutal sense of irony that might have tickled both Beaumont and Serling. I’m thinking of that wonderful moment when the hapless traveler has to leave that bizarre hospice by riding in the back of a hearse. In the end, I don’t think it’s necessarily ambiguity that underscores what we’re calling “Beaumontian,” but the sense of irony that results from the clockwork of an inconceivable universe.
What are some of your favorites of Beaumont’s stories that have been adapted to The Twilight Zone?
I find myself going back over and over to “The Howling Man.” I love the gothic setting and the gorgeous chiaroscuro cinematography. Plus, I’m a sucker for the devil. We’ve already mentioned that one as well as “Perchance to a Dream,” which is a weird masterpiece. I’m also fond of “Long Distance Call,” one of the more chilling episodes.
How does Beaumont’s work influence your creative process? How do thinking about his stories and depictions lead you to finding your way to personal or intimate spaces for your characters?
I dedicated my second collection of stories, The Infection Party and Other Stories of Dis-ease, to both Shirley Jackson and Charles Beaumont. The title story is a deliberate riff on Jackson, but there is more than one story contained in that collection where I now realize I was, perhaps unconsciously, trying to channel the kind of story Beaumont was so good at delivering. I’m thinking of “The Halloween Mummy” in particular, which contains the closest thing I’ve written to a Twilight Zone ending. But I didn’t start the story with that goal in mind. I’m not a planner at all when it comes to writing fiction, so the denouement of that story came about organically. As a writer, I always assume that the reader is smarter than me, that they can see a trick ending coming before it arrives, so I don’t even try. As a reader myself, I love surprises, but I don’t like to be tricked.
Writing “The Halloween Mummy” proved to be a joy because I surprised myself, and hopefully it will surprise the reader, too. My sense of Beaumont is that he enjoyed that element of surprise too. But that’s not the sole reason for the “Beaumontian” qualities of that story. It also came from a personal place. As I wrote in the story notes in that collection, I drew from personal experience to craft that story and tried to channel some personal pain. I didn’t know where it would take me, and as I indicated, I wasn’t necessarily prepared. As Beaumont did with “Miss Gentibelle,” I took myself back to something that happened in childhood. One Halloween, my mother helped me dress as the mummy for a birthday party taking place a few houses away. She helped me cover myself in ace bandages, with everything held together by safety pins. Wearing nothing underneath those bandages but underwear, I went to the party, and of course I unraveled. I’ll never forget running home virtually naked with the last traces of the bandages flapping in the wind behind me.
Moving the focus to some of your stories. The first one of yours that I read was “Invitation to a Burial” which appears in your Madness Heart Press short story collection, Ape in the Ring. I have a series of questions for you about this one. And this is a heads up to readers that we are going to go in-depth and into spoiler territory for this one.
While stories about kids are a hard sell to me this one grabbed me. I found that it captures that “intimate” character space you mention about Beaumont’s work. Also, it felt very “Ray Bradbury” to me as well. What I mean by that is that the set up captures the innocence and magic of youth with a side order of danger that I associate with so much of Bradbury’s work.
You give us a group of kids and their game of trying to break a streetlight with their ball as the story begins, along with capturing the feeling of something many of us can relate to from childhood, the sense of that one house on the block that was different. A very “American” thing, perhaps.
How much of your personal experience do you put into your stories?
To paraphrase the famous Douglas Winter quotation, horror is an emotion, not a genre. It hinges upon a feeling. To extend that idea, I believe that in order to make the reader feel something with a horror story, I have to feel something when I write it. I’m so glad you mention “Invitation to a Burial” because it’s a meaningful story to me. It’s another story that came from a personal space, and it went through several drafts. I couldn’t make that story work until I channeled myself and my own coming-of-age experiences. I grew up in Miami, where the kids in my neighborhood played a lot of street football, and the game would always continue until long after the sun went down. The streetlight in front of my house had a sensor on top of it, and the game sometimes degenerated into a contest to see who could throw the football high enough and hard enough to knock that sensor off. Every once in a while, someone succeeded, and the resulting darkness seemed so total and haunting. That darkness followed me when I went back inside my house.
The second thing I like about the story is the ambiguity about whether anything supernatural is happening at all. Even if something supernatural is not happening, to this reader, it holds the same space as if it was.
As the story progresses the group of kids enter the house (by invitation) and thus are drawn into something “super”-natural to their every-day world, to their normal. They are now in the world of the kid named, Hugo who is the outsider of the group and who lives in that house.
At anytime that story could have turned into a “basic” horror story, at least structurally. What I mean by that is that at any time this could have turned into a story about an “ordinary” monster being in the house but you did not go there. What were you thinking when making these choices for the story?
As I said, I had to rewrite that story several times before it felt right. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the character of Hugo that it came together. In many ways, I felt like the outsider. As the nerdy kid who read books all the time, I never completely fit in with everyone else. At some point while writing that story, I read something about immigrant families from Romania paying money to exhume their buried ancestors and move them overseas for reburial. That detail gave me the element that was missing from the story. In the end, it’s the closest thing to a vampire story I’ve ever written.
I was surprised when you told me that this is your “vampire” story. On my first read while I observed the lore and customs of Hugo’s family, I did not overtly read anything on the page that indicates “yes this person they are burying is a vampire.”
Which brings me back to the way this story holds the space of where a supernatural element could reside in the story. I viewed Hugo’s family’s old-world traditions as the group of kids seeing the strangeness of the outsider through their own eyes. Without this being supernatural we can see how affecting and un-nerving such an experience can be. Especially when young and especially if it is one’s first time experiencing other cultures and customs. This is one of the powers of the story.
Were you daring the reader to think that what was happening is supernatural?
Aha, we’re back to ambiguity! My hope was to leave enough room and context for a reader who wants to find a supernatural element in the story. I also made the deliberate decision to avoid calling the coffin’s occupant a vampire. To make that the only conclusion available to the reader diminishes it. I also want room for myself to imagine that it’s something else.
Then we come to the ending. The story is careening to the conclusion that a baby will be killed as part of the burial ritual. The “gun is on the mantlepiece” so to speak.
Yet the story delivers an unexpected and very effective ending. The ball is buried. Giving us this delivers something so personal and something I found weird in the right ways. Often if things go down the way I expect something is lessened. So, I was delighted that this ending challenged me.
Is this ending representative of that “intimate space” you see in Beaumont’s stories?
The idea of burial ultimately signifies an attempt to suppress memory, to pretend the unpleasant things in life have gone away. Yet, the kids in the story will always suspect they know what the grave contains. They were invited to the burial, which entails a burden of responsibility, the duty to remember and memorialize. The trauma doesn’t go away, becoming something that they must learn to deal with. In this sense, my stories often function as explorations of trauma. Staying true to this theme, buried things often refuse to stay in the ground.
I want to mention your use of the supernatural and ambiguity in your short story “Everglades Rest Stop” which can be found in your collection The Infection Party.
This is a Florida-set story. A rest stop off of Snake Road, the rural stretch of highway which bisects the Everglades in Southern Florida.
This story delivers the apprehension and atmosphere of the setting. I feel it is more on the bullseye of what I think of as being a horror story. The joy of the story is it delivers the reader what they want. And what they expect.
The structure for me read as foreshadow… foreshadow… then delivery on the expectations.
As opposed to “Invitation to a Burial” which operated as foreshadow… foreshadow and then a subversion of expectations.
When do you make the decision to deliver or subvert on expectations when drafting?
Again, as a writer, I generally try to surprise myself without forcing anything and to treat storytelling as an organic process. That particular story came about after taking countless car trips between Naples and Miami along Alligator Alley, which cuts across the Florida Everglades. Even though I’ve visited the Everglades many times, it has never lost that powerful sense of the sublime and numinous for me. I knew I wanted to write a story in that setting and draw from Snake Road, a major road that crosses Alligator Alley. At some point, I came across a photo of Snake Road from the air, and it winds in such a way that it truly looks like snake. That kind of road provided not just a setting for the story, but also the trajectory. As a text, it winds and winds like a snake toward one inevitable destination, and of course, that involves a den of snakes in what are essentially the ruins of a roadside attraction transformed into a kind of temple.
There is again an ambiguity of sorts in the ending. Again, this ambiguity is not the kind I refer to when talking about an “Aickmanesqe” kind of story. The clearly is a giant snake and an ancient temple present at the end of the story. So, it is not ambiguous that the supernatural and fantastic or horrific is present.
What is not delivered is the why. The how. The back story. All the foreshadow comes into play.
Is this story operating more in a “magic realism” or “surrealistic” way?
I wanted to leave the backstory up to the reader, often suggestion without any definite conclusion. It’s tough to analyze my own fiction, but my guess is that one reader might find it more akin to magical realism while another might find it surrealistic. My preference is to think of it as more in line with the Weird tradition that Jeff and Ann VanderMeer outline in their monumental anthology, The Weird. I love how that anthology offered both a foundation and a reappraisal of what that mode means, beginning with late nineteenth century stories and working up to present-day incarnations of the “New Weird.” Stephen Graham Jones devised a fascinating guide for assessing the Weird in the form of a flow-chart he calls “The Flowchart of the Damned.” One position on the flowchart asks us to appraise weird fiction on the basis of how much it destabilizes our perception of the world. My hope is that “Everglades Rest Stop” succeeds in doing that.
One of your recent releases is the novelette called “Dead Cats of Civilization.”
Tell us about the link to the iconic Joseph Conrad story “Heart of Darkness.”
While re-reading “The Heart of Darkness,” a particular line captured my imagination. At one point, Marlowe states, “I’ve done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it if I choose for an everlasting rest in the dustbin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilization.” Somehow, that odd phrase — “the dead cats of civilization” — led to an association with hurricanes and how I live in a state where such storms are a constant hazard to civilization. Seeing the turmoil of Hurricane Andrew in the 1990s made an impression on me, and I have always been haunted by speculation that the death toll was much higher than reported as well as the rumor that the National Guard was storing dead bodies in a fast-food restaurant. Somehow, the confluence of those things led to the main arc of the novelette, where a young man rushes into the aftermath of a similar hurricane to help his family and finds that things are not as they seem. In the end, there are literal dead cats in the story, as well as something more uncanny that has washed ashore in the storm surge. However, I want to emphasize to anyone reading this interview that I love cats. I really do! As I tell prospective readers of the book, no actual cats were harmed in its writing. The cats who share my home with me would never forgive me. So blame Conrad!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
DOUGLAS FORD writes horror fiction, often covering a wide spectrum of styles, from the quiet corners of the uncanny, to occult wilds of folk horror and southern gothic. His credits include The Trick, The Beasts of Vissaria County, and Little Lugosi (A Love Story). His short fiction has appeared in two collections, most recently The Infection Party and Other Stories of Dis-ease, and a third (Let’s Cut Up Dad!) will appear in the second half of 2024. He lives on the west coast of Florida. Find him at douglasfordwrites.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.
