“Messy and Mysterious”, the “Indiscernible, Unknowable, and Ambiguous,” and a “Destabilization of Perceptions”
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 Laird Barron in early December 2024 about his latest short story collection titled Not A Speck of Light. You can watch our conversation here.
Our conversation for the column contains topics and stories we did not cover for the YouTube show. We began our talk about the opening quote for the book.
DANIEL BRAUM: The new book, Not a Speck of Light, begins with the following quote from Samuel Taylor Colerdige’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape…
There is the connection of the word “speck” to the title of your book I also found many of this batch of collected stories have in common something ambiguous and indiscernible in them an element that often comes into focus (takes shape) as something horrific.
Why did you chose the quote to open the book?
LAIRD BARRON: The obvious choice, initially was the Rower’s Song by Roald Dahl, it has the line in it “not a speck of light.” it’s in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder and company, that’s the song he’s quoting as he takes them through the tunnel. I would have liked to have used it but I also like the Coleridge quote. I used pieces of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in several of my books and I wanted to keep that too. And also the description of the shape, which is death approaching. It is doom approaching and the book went along with that.
I’ve only recently started reading and watching Dahl’s adult fiction so that is really interesting to learn. His work is so dark.
He’s one of the greats. A great horror writer. He’s on my top shelf list.
In the afterward for the book you wrote “For me, every collection is battle fought in a war of attrition that we all lose in the end. Our best hope is to leave something of ourselves behind; a token of the joy, suffering, and turmoil that make up a life. Literature is my gesture against the dark.”
How much of you, the real you, are in the stories?
I think it is a fallacy or a misapprehension of the old adage to not conflate the artist with the art. I think that’s fair because there is a delineating line but there is going to be something of yourself in it, if nothing else your world view.
When I first started publishing I wasn’t worried about any kind of a message, and I’m still not trying to transmit any kind of a message. I was more interested in neutrality the first 10 or 15 years of my writing career.
What do you mean by neutrality? Is it not having any message other than that in the dramatic structure of the characters?
Yeah that and also on any level having a moral point of view in the stories. They’re just stories. Looking back, I probably wasn’t skilled enough to make them neutral but the point was as time went on I became less interested in that and more interested in imbuing my point of view. I think you can get where I am coming from if you read a lot of my work and that’s important. I think the best artists have a point of view.
On this topic I recall something from one of my early teachers. It went something like: “before a story can do anything else, it has to entertain. Then it can go on and deliver a message or anything else that comes next.” I think there are a lot of things we can take away from your work in addition to the entertaining face value. The first thing that comes to mind for me as a take away from this book is the sense of Alaska. I love stories with a strong sense of place. And I thought it was really effective and I enjoyed the descriptions of Alaska that appear in many of the stories. Such as this one from the story “Blood in My Mouth”:
Alaska is a damned big, empty place bordered by Nowhere. Between frigid temperatures and snowfalls ass-deep to a giraffe, it has the weapons to kill anything more complex than a rock. Civilization exists in tiny, disenfranchised pockets surrounded by a howling void. Basically it’s the universe in a microcosm.
and this one from the story “In A Cavern, In a Canyon”:
Eastern settlers had carved a hamlet from wilderness during the 1920s; plunked it down in a forgotten vale populated by eagles, bears, drunk Teamsters and drunker fishermen. Mountains and dense forest on three sides formed a deep-water harbor. The channel curved around the flank of Eagle Mountain and eventually let into Prince William Sound. Roads were gravel or dirt. We had the cruise ships and barges. We also had the railroad. You couldn’t make a move without stepping in seagull shit. Most of us townies lived in a fourteen-story apartment complex called the Frazier Estate. Terra incognita began where the sodium lamplight grew fuzzy. At night, wolves, howled in the nearby hills.
You were born and raised in Alaska and now you are on the East Coast of the US, in upstate New York, what differences come to mind about the two places in terms of your writing?
The three major places I’ve lived inspired me, I’d say almost equally. Alaska. Washington State, and now New York State, for 13 years. Half of this book you’ll notice is set in Alaska, the other half is New York State and a lot of my recent stories have been New York State stories. There is a dramatic difference between them. What is funny is that there is almost a direct comparison between Washington State and here, they are like a negative of each other. They are very similar. But Alaska is just sui generous, its just its own thing.
What is it that is so unique about it? Is it the sense of danger? Is it the isolation or even something more mundane than that?
I don’t think it is unique in this aspect, there are places you can go that are similar, but with Alaska for me, it is a sense of how old it is and how unwelcoming it is. Especially in the winter time, it’s just not a welcoming landscape. It almost actively rejects your presence like an antibody would a germ.
The book is divided into four sections, the first section is titled “Blood Red Samaritan.” I noticed the recurring element of shapes (or specks) in all four of these stories.
The first story is “In a Cavern, In a Canyon.” The narrator’s father has disappeared and the story brings us to different points in time in her life in relation to the investigation. There is a black figure that the characters see in different places and different points in time (most horrifically at the end of the story).
At one point the narrator tells us “Life is messy and mysterious.” and “I did not crack the case, didn’t get any sense of closure.”
I took this line to operate as key or cypher to the book and even as an introduction to your fiction or your kind of fiction.
Tell us your thoughts about the in-discernable, the unknowable, the ambiguous, and the messy as it pertains to your portrayals of the supernatural and the structure of your stories.
That’s a great observation. I consider this a horror collection because there is so much horror in it. But it is as much a weird fiction collection if you start weighing and sifting it. There are always going to be horror elements in most of my work but I’m really work to let the “freak flag” fly when it comes to weird fiction and part of it for me with weird fiction is that weird is the superseding, the over arcing genre. I look at it (like this): weird does not have to be horror but a lot of horror is weird.
For me, weird is basically a de-stabilization of hopefully the reader’s perceptions but definitely the viewpoint character’s perceptions. They either are not quite understanding what’s happening, there’s never necessarily going to be a good explanation that neatly ties it up, or what they are doing is inscrutable and it is opaque to the audience.
The rules are basically transgressed. So that you are in alien country. The laws of physics or time don’t necessarily work as you thought. There’s some kind of slippage of sanity. That may or may not come with some kind of threat like a horror story would, it could just be its just an experience. Its inscrutable.
A lot of the stories in this collection, they may have messy endings, they may not tie up neatly but there’s a lot of elements in them where there is almost like a meta element in some of the stories.
Horror and weird fiction are often so close together. In terms of a story not having a horror-like threat to it, I thought of “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. There is not necessarily a threat there but there is a destabilization of the kind you mention.
A lot of the stories in Not a Speck of Light, even if there is not a common or specific or tangible threat or horror present, there still is a threat and danger in the story.
“Joren Falls” is a story in the second section of the book, “Wandering Stars.” Larry and Vonda are an old retired couple living in Kingston New York. When investigating a sound they think is squirrels in the attic they come across a sign Larry brought back from Japan, from Joren Falls, that warns “do not remove anything from the falls.”
The story shifts focus to Roger, the 70-year-old veteran, who is Larry’s friend and the repairman they enlist for their attic problems.
This one struck me as perhaps the most “Aickmenesqe” of the collection. While I think what transpires leans towards being intended and interpreted as being a supernatural occurrence, it is the story that lends itself most to having an “intentional ambiguity” between psychological and supernatural explanations for the story and story elements. I found it certainly fit in with the Coleridge quote that starts the book off.
Tell us about the ambiguities in this story.
This is one of the more straightforward monster stories. Since it was published in a horror line of chapbooks I think you know what you are getting in to. There is a noise in the attic. I think the ambiguity in this story is that there are other things going on, especially between the couple. Things aren’t always as they are portrayed, like in break-ups. I wanted to portray the couple as poisoning each other but if you read it casually it could seem like they are okay. The real horror of the story is more than just the creature.
I got the idea to write it, I was sitting in my house, an old country house and all hell broke loose in the ceiling above me. And it was some kind of squirrel or something. The vent had been broken in a storm. A handyman, who may or may not be similar to Roger Miller in the story fixed it. As he was up there I was thinking… what if it wasn’t a squirrel.
It is fascinating to me to hear your focus. I was so focused on the handyman. My take on it was through an Aickeman-esqe lens. I was not convinced about whether there was something supernatural at play or not with the artifact or if it was just a psychological catalyst. Whatever it was, the story lent itself to multiple interpretations and I love when a story can operate like that.
In the story “The Blood in My Mouth” Is Isiah Coleridge, the character Erika’s younger brother, the same Isiah Coleridge of your three crime novels? The publication date on this story pre-dates Blood Standard by three years.
Yes and No. It not “ours.” If you recall in that story “they come from elsewhere.” That’s an alternate universe version. I was writing the stories at the same time. I wrote the story and I wrote the Coleridge book right after.
I like the weird elements and directions the story goes. Is this one of the stories that you describe as being one of your “meta” weird fiction stories?
Yeah, it’s a weird fiction story. A fantasy science fiction weird fiction tale, not really a horror story.
The third grouping of stories is called “Alan Smithee is Dead.” Alan Smithee is the pseudonym name that film makers once used when they wished to disavow a project and not have their name be associated with it. Screenwriter Joe Esterhaus notoriously spilled the secret on this in Burn, Hollywood, Burn. Other than the stories in this section having a film element in them, is there a reason for the Smithee name for the grouping?
Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons. One. It ties into the story “Fear Sun.” I feel the entity in that if he had written a script he would have eventually have said “by Alan Smithee.” There’s another element to it; I’m a big David Lynch fan and I feel like the collection owes a bit of a debt to Lynch. There’s a recurring line in the film Lost Highway someone will whisper on the intercom “Dick Lorrant is dead.” So I put in “Alan Smithee is dead.” Its basically a subliminal thing, its not intended for anyone to consciously “get” but anyone who’s watched Lost Highway and loved it and sees that title, in the back of their mind they’ll go “what is that?” It’s playful.
Are the stories in the Alan Smithee section the “meta” stories? I see common elements such as films and film crews in the plot. And conspiracies, government agencies, secret projects, and gnostic-like elements.
Right. That’s quite a bit of it. There is a certain amount of self-awareness there. In the “Mace” stories, Mace is quite aware or almost aware she’s in a weird fiction series.
In Robert Aickman’s work the supernatural elements are rarely explained. They could be supernatural, psychological or anything at all in some stories. In the story “Strident Caller” there is a possibility what transpires is psychologically induced. What is the appeal to readers with these kinds of “unexplained” and “intentionally ambiguous” elements in them? What is the appeal to you as a writer?
The events occurred as depicted, although that doesn’t necessarily render them explicable. Craven is an erratic, self-serving narrator. Neither he nor the audience has the full picture. Good weird fiction, which “Strident Caller” is as much as it is horror, possesses an element of mystery. I prefer to make art that leaves space, however minor, for the reader to interrogate the text. I don’t write for an imaginary reader — I pursue a spectrum of interests and hope that my preferences find a like-minded audience.
In the story “Strident Caller” the supernatural experience does not appear to be a catalyst for change in the character, Craven. With the focus off of the dynamic of character change readers are free to and perhaps directed to focus on / think about / be left with something else from the story. What do you see in the story? What might you want readers to see in it?
Character change is one narrative result among many. I tend to favor revelation — characters discover or reveal details about themselves over the course of the narrative. Things that were there from the beginning and shine, or squirm, in the light. A larger goal is that my writing might effect a change in the reader, however minute. The thesis of SC is that “survival at any cost” is untenable. The brave taste of death but once; the coward dies a thousand times before his death, to paraphrase. It was probably a subconscious spot-check of my own convictions.
Robert Aickman is known for not speaking about his creative process, the origins of his stories, and even anything about the meaning of his stories at all. What might be gained and or lost from this approach? How about you? Where on this continuum of talking about meaning to not talking about it at all do you fall in discussing your work and process? If you are open to it can you tell us about the origins of the creative spark for you for “Strident Caller”?
I admire Aickman’s weird fiction. He was also an editor who curated several anthologies and I imagine one could derive significant clues about Aickman’s own stories from his editorial choices and the introductions he penned for other writers. I haven’t endeavored that kind of survey, but anecdotally, I find that you can at least partially decode an author by observing what they read, what they watch or listen to, and how they speak of these experiences.
“Strident Caller” was born of my casual interest in occult horror films of the 1970s. And of course, a love of dogs and hard-bitten characters.
“Not A Speck of Light,” the title story for the book, is original to the collection. The story does something I like — it presents itself as one kind of story at first then lands somewhere else. I this case it presents as a ghost story or a haunted house story but as the main characters Lars and his partner Findley and their rescue dog Aardvark live in a house in the Catskills where something is not quite right and foreshadowed as “wrong.”
The story then leans into the movie and film and occult elements with the characters ultimately embarking on an other-worldy adventure I found reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith tales. Tell us about this “negative” space secondary dream-like world that Andy winds up in at the end of the story.
The secondary world is alluded to as possibly a Lagerstätten, which is German for “resting place” — not a burial ground but like a graveyard. It’s also used in fossil terminology, the idea that there is a repository. I used it in the spiritual sense that it’s like a purgatory-like place. There’s a place where everybody’s consciousness goes.
The stories “Soul of Me” and the final story in the book “(You Won’t Be) Saved By The Ghost of Your Old Dog,” while two very different styles of stories, felt like they belong together.
“Soul of Me” is the story of an artificial dog. A “robot”-like German Shepard that is the survivor of a post-apocalyptic post-alien invasion world after humans are gone. The story feels like science fiction and is set at different points in time.
“Ghost of Your Old Dog” is a short (flash fiction) piece. It’s very poetic. It presents as a dream a human has of being out in the snow, traveling in a winding and widening circle eventually finding the bloody prints of his dog.
Tell us about these two, please.
LB: I love eRx, the protagonist, the semi-immortal dog from “Soul of Me.” He’s the last canine and he carries genetic memory of every dog that every existed, in a quantum state. He frequently dies but that’s the thing. It doesn’t really matter. He comes back in other points in the time line. It was fun to write about him.
And the last story is simply very purgatorial. It is almost like a coda to the story “Not a Speck of Light.” Like a “hidden” story, almost. I almost asked to have it left off of being listed on the table of contents. One of my publishers did that in one of my other short story collections. I think in Imago Sequence. In some editions of it there is a story that is not listed in the table of contents.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
LAIRD BARRON spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All; The Wind Began to Howl; and Not a Speck of Light (Stories). His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.
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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.
His all new short story collection Phantom Constellations is coming in Autumn 2025 from Cemetery Dance Publications.
More about his books and events can be found here.
