“Ghost Stories. Interstitial Spaces. Crossing Over.”
Opposite of the “Day Time” part of a story, which is the part that deals with rules, linear logic, and things we consciously process, Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed.
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.
While author Howard Waldrop coined the term, the phenomena is certainly on display in the work of British author Robert Aickman. Any of his books of stories are a fine starting place for those looking for recommendations to read what he called “strange tales.” 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. It can be found here.
In March 2024 I spoke with Gwendolyn Kiste about her new book, ghost stories, haunted houses, and much more. Our conversation is available on YouTube.
Kiste’s newest novel The Haunting of Velkwood is out now from Saga Press. We begin our conversation by talking about ghost stories…
DANIEL BRAUM: Congratulations on your new release The Haunting of Velkwood. Let’s talk a bit about some of the ways ghost stories operate to give context to the unique elements in play in your novel.
Some ghost stories operate with the ghost as the vehicle of human emotion. There are stories where the ghost is the stand-in for the emotion, or acts as harbinger or warning, and sometimes the ghost is a symbol. Stories dealing with closure, loss, and tragedy were common themes in the classics and traditional ghost stories.
Why do you think the ghost story worked so well in delivering these elements and emotions and what is a standout classic ghost story for you?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: For me, ghosts can symbolize anything and everything. They can represent the past or secrets or grief or fear. There’s practically nothing they can’t do within a horror story. Ghosts are our hopes and dreams as well as our nightmares, all wrapped into one. Whatever theme you’re looking to convey, there’s a ghost story you could tell about it. Part of me thinks that’s because we’re all haunted in one way or another, so that makes the ghost story something that’s so instantly recognizable.
An absolute favorite ghost story for me is “The Lake” by Ray Bradbury. I love both the simplicity and the emotional devastation of that story. It’s not very long, but seriously, wow, does it pack a punch. In my opinion, that’s everything a ghost story should be: haunting and beautiful and grief-stricken and creepy, all at the same time.
Ghost stories have evolved into tales that convey much, much more than just scares, atmosphere, or the traditional themes and tropes. Fritz Leiber’s short story “Smoke Ghost” (originally published in 1941) comes to mind as a transitional story. It is one of the first stories where the ghost is something different, and operates in a notably different way than the ghost stories that came before it. In “Smoke Ghost” we see reflections of the attitudes and issues facing the world at the time it was written.
Why are ghosts and ghost stories able to deliver “something more” than just the scares and thrills?
A follow up. What is an outstanding ghost story that operates this way for you?
I think the metaphor of the ghost is so malleable, which helps to make it incredibly powerful and enduring. Ghost stories are the kind of fiction I think we’ll be telling for the rest of humankind’s history. There won’t ever be a moment when ghosts won’t resonate with us and how we see ourselves and how we see the world.
I feel like most of the ghost stories I love absolutely operate as something more than just a scary story, but if I had to pick one, I want to mention “A Cure for Ghosts” by Eden Royce. It’s such a very short story, but the voice is so vivid, and the way it’s told is so unique. It’s a tale of consequences and hauntings and possessions, and it’s the kind of story that really gets under your skin in the best possible way.
I intentionally started with those two sets of questions because Velkwood is doing something unique. It is combining different “kinds” of ghost stories as well as bringing its own unique element into the mix.
Velkwood delivers a story about closure, loss, tragedy, and the past on a human and individual level for the main characters, Talitha and Brett. It is the story of their lives and their own past, present and future. It is also a wider story of our society; through their story we get a window into a place and time and the intolerance that they face.
Can you tell us about Tal and Brett? They experience love and the loss of love and the loss of the opportunity of a life together. What kind of intolerance are they faced with?
With The Haunting of Velkwood, I wanted to mine some of my own experiences and deal with homophobia and biphobia. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the ways that intolerance can derail a person’s life. Talitha’s mother makes it very clear that she doesn’t accept Talitha’s feelings for Brett, and she does everything she can to keep the two of them apart. That ultimately leads to Brett and Talitha growing apart, and it also leads, albeit tangentially, to the haunting itself. To me, intolerance — and the cruelty that goes with it — creates some of the most long-lasting wounds in a person, and I wanted to really explore that experience and how a character can deal with that.
Ghosts and haunted houses are in play in the book from the start. While the emotion and atmosphere of classic ghost stories are present, the ghosts and the places we encounter them are something unexpected.
The story opens with a truly unique element in play. Velkwood Street. 20 years ago in the time of the story an unknown and unspecified phenomenon happened on suburban Velkwood Street causing a small number of houses to disappear. Tal is 40 now. We meet her when Jack from Foxwell Enterprises comes to her with an offer to explore Velkwood and thus her past.
Tell us about the neighborhood of Velkwood?
The neighborhood in The Haunting of Velkwood is as much a character as Talitha, Brett, and all of the denizens of the street. It was important for me to make Velkwood Street feel like it was really coming alive, despite being a ghostly domain. There are eight houses on the street, though at the time that everyone became ghosts, only six of those houses were occupied. It was an allotment built back in the late 1980s and all the houses were these once colorful split-levels, which are now faded out with time.
Through the descriptions of the street and in particular the way that Talitha interacts with the street and the people on it once she returns after twenty years, I wanted there to be not only a sense of pervasive dread but also an odd feeling of familiarity. I did my best to imbue the neighborhood with reminders of the past, markers that might even take some of us back to our own childhoods. The distant melody of an ice cream truck. The worms and millipedes and frogs that you might see in a backyard. Basketball hoops and cans of Coca-Cola and hiding places where the kids go to hang out. To me, each of these things takes on an almost mythic meaning once Talitha goes back into the neighborhood after it’s become a ghost. Everything feels at once like a small detail and a huge memory to her, just as our own pasts often seem to be both very unique and personal but also so broad and all-encompassing.
Exploring Velkwood is not just exploring haunted houses, it is literally going back to the past. Both a symbolic and literal haunted house at the same time.
Also, Tal is the ghost (of sorts) to the occupants. She is back in her own past and she is a ghost of sorts haunting the ghosts. This is a really unique and really fun way that integrates some of the different things that ghost stories can do that we discussed.
While the Velkwood phenomenon is treated with the atmosphere and trappings of a ghost story it to me operates as a science fiction story too. There is the phenomenon. There are Investigators that are akin to men in black. Tell us about this interstitial aspect. What did you have in mind in creating it and how does it serve the story you set out to tell?
I love that you describe the researchers as being akin to men in black! That’s too perfect! I would definitely agree with that assessment. And you’re also very right — there are absolutely science fiction elements to the story as well. I didn’t plan that from the outset; to me, this was always first and foremost a horror story. But one of the comparisons that has come up several times is The X-Files, and though I wasn’t consciously thinking about the series, I was such a huge fan when I was growing up, so I feel like that combination of horror and science fiction certainly wormed its way into Velkwood. That kind of genre blending and exploration of interstitial aspects probably make sense, because when I look at my work overall, there’s a lot of liminal spaces. People and ideas don’t exist entirely in only one way or another. My characters are usually outsiders who don’t know quite where they belong, and with the way I write, the genres I explore don’t always end up belonging only in one area or another, so I think that’s where those interstitial aspects come into play. I’m fascinated by what happens in those unknown, lesser-explored spaces. I feel like the most unique and surprising stories are lurking there all the time, just waiting for us to discover them.
Velkwood favorably compares to the hit television show Yellowjackets. Structurally, Yellowjackets shifts back and forth in time showing happenings from two places in time. In Velkwood there is a similar structure — however both “places in time” (the past and the present)are happening in the “now” of the story.
How did this structure come about and how is this vital to Tal’s story?
The past and the present are fully interwoven in The Haunting of Velkwood. Because the three main characters can literally walk into the past when they visit the ghostly neighborhood, time moves very differently for them. One of the things about grief and trauma is that time can feel frozen or cyclical. You often don’t feel like you’re moving forward, or even if you feel like you’re moving forward sometimes, you can suddenly feel pulled into the past by a memory or a trigger. The Haunting of Velkwood is all about making that experience literal: these characters haven’t been able to move on from what happened to them growing up, and the ghosts of their past are still right there where they left them, embodied by this ethereal neighborhood. For me as a storyteller, it was such an interesting way to deal with grief and trauma, by giving these characters a chance to go back and almost “try again” to fix the past. But as we all know, fixing the past isn’t as easy as it sounds, so the characters end up with a lot of surprises along the way.
Both Yellowjackets and Velkwood have women in their 40s looking back at their 20s. Fame is central to Yellowjackets. Tell us about how, in contrast, Velkwood mostly steers away from the theme of media and media appetites and delves into personal stakes and familial relationships instead?
This was definitely a story that could have focused more on the media aspect of how people initially paid a lot of attention to the Velkwood Vicinity when the anomaly first happened. That could have been an interesting story to tell, and in fact, I’m working on a book right now that deals more with that kind of notoriety after a tragic event. However, for The Haunting of Velkwood, it made more sense to deal with the emotional aftermath of the event rather than the issues of fame and how that would impact the surviving girls. I wanted to travel much further into the future after all the initial attention would have died down, and the girls would just be these forgotten survivors of this terrible experience. I’m always fascinated by the different ways in which people are affected by extreme situations and grief and trauma. This story seemed like the perfect vehicle to explore that.
“Crossing over” or the moving of spirits and persons from one realm or dimension to the other is a trope we often see in ghost stories and horror stories. How did you present and play with this trope in Velkwood?
I love that you point out the idea of crossing over in this book, because it’s undeniably a more literal use of the idea in The Haunting of Velkwood: Talitha must cross a physical threshold to make it from our mortal reality into the realm of the ghosts. I liked the idea of subverting expectations by having a living person who does the crossing over into the ghost realm rather than vice versa. In particular, since ghosts are such a potent metaphor for the past, it felt right in this story about grief that the people who are still alive and dealing with the past would be able to physically get there. Like I mentioned above, trauma can so often put us into these time loops in which we mentally relive the past, so it seemed apt that the main characters could physically act out that experience on the page.
Literature and media in general is full of cringe-worthy stereotypes and depictions. Even a story as noteworthy as “Smoke Ghost” does not escape this.
While I was reading from the story at a recent event the dialog, the Narrator’s perceptions, and the relationship between the Narrator and his secretary stood out to me as being antiquated and no longer representative of today’s norms.
Early on in Velkwood there is a fantastic line: “Men are always charming when they’re about to get what they want.”
This is just one indicator and example of the strong female characters in the book that contrasts from depictions of stories like “Smoke Ghost.” What is the importance of such depictions and presentations?
I definitely feel like we need more female perspectives in general, both in literature and media in general. We need to hear these voices. We need to see the world from a female point of view. Women need to see ourselves represented in stories, and people who don’t identify as female need to hear those voices, so that we can foster a greater sense of understanding and empathy. In general, we need to hear from a wide variety of voices — queer writers, people of color, women — so that we can have the full range of human experiences represented in the stories we read. It makes for a more interesting world when you have so many different people getting a chance to share their experiences. That’s the world we should all want to live in.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
GWENDOLYN KISTE is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor Nightfire, The Lineup, and The Dark. She’s a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts
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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.
