“Strange Tales. Fairy Tales. Pluto in Furs and Romanian Folklore.”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed.
In this column I explore the phenomenon of Night Time Logic and other aspects of horror and dark fiction through in depth conversation with authors.
I delight in the strange and uncanny side of the genre particularly the kind of story one might call “Aickman-esqe.” My short story collection with Cemetery Dance is titled The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales in homage to Robert Aickman’s strange tales. It can be found here.
Romanian Writer Liliana Carstea was a guest author at the New York Ghost story festival back in December 2020. You can see our conversation here.
Since then she has gone on to publish in a range of anthologies and magazines. Carstea is an author of strange tales and we begin our conversation with a question about that term.
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DANIEL BRAUM: As a writer of strange tales what does the term mean to you? Do you have a definition you go by? Are there any hallmarks or elements to the strange tale that you’ve identified?
LILIANA CARSTEA: Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the strange tale means to me, so I’m glad you asked me this question. I haven’t been able to come up with a set definition, partly because I think what makes a story strange depends on who writes or reads it, and what their perception of strangeness is. The environment I grew up in was quite bizarre. I was raised in the Christian Orthodox faith, but a lot of the practices the adults around me followed were rooted in folklore, myth, and paganism. The Romanians who surrounded me were very superstitious, so I was exposed to a plethora of tales, recollections, and warnings. These people truly believed in life after death, in spirits who returned to haunt or punish their loved ones, in the importance of traditions, in heaven and hell. I think I was eleven or twelve when I started to question my faith, but I’ve remained connected with the spiritual and folklore beliefs from my home, which inform a lot of my work.
I think writing strange tales has allowed me to explore these predilections. This mode of writing focuses, in my opinion, on the liminal space between reality and the fantastical, between light and dark, between life and death. If there were a veil separating the world of reason from that of the extraordinary, I think the strange tale would be almost like an incantation meant to help you lift it.
You’ve mentioned that fairy tales both classic and contemporary and works of the dark fantastic are among your influences. One current author working in that area is Kelly Link. Is there a standout story by Link that has significance to you, and why?
I love Kelly Link’s work! I think she has a unique manner of blending dark themes with subtle humor, which is in my view a very difficult thing to do, but she does it brilliantly. My favorite work of hers is “The Wrong Grave.” It tells the story of a boy named Miles who decides to retrieve the only copy of his poems which he’s placed in his girlfriend’s coffin. When Miles opens her coffin and meets her again, things don’t go exactly as he’d expected. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I won’t say anything else about it, but I have reread it every year during the Samhain festivities for a while now, and each time I find something else that fascinates me. As a writer who appreciates the strange tale, I find this story inspiring — it’s not often that the theme of death is approached so gently and beautifully in fiction.
“The Wrong Grave” is one of my favorites by Kelly Link. I had the good fortune to hear her read from it one evening many years ago in a bookstore in Brisbane, Australia.
In the old fairy tales things often end terribly for women. What does it mean to you to be telling stories of women today, via the dark fiction genres?
I’m very pleased to see that the fairy tale is becoming more and more popular, and that it doesn’t shy away from challenging former tropes. The idea that what is female has to be soft, gentle, always caring and nurturing, is, I hope, a concept that writers have decided to move away from because a) it is reductive, and b) it is incredibly boring and overdone. I want to make it clear that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being any of these things — we need people to be kinder and more nurturing, no matter their gender — but I want to see women fleshed out as characters who are multidimensional rather than only a sketch of what is expected from them.
I’m particularly interested in women’s qualities that are seen as less desirable, such as their ability to be cruel or vengeful. I want my women to be unapologetically wild and unrestrained in their behaviour, which you wouldn’t find surprising if you knew the women in my family. I remember vividly an evening around twenty years ago, at the funeral of my maternal grandfather, who had been ill for months prior. In Romania back then, funerals were mostly held at the home of the deceased. My mum and aunts had gone to the kitchen to get some nibbles because their stepmother was too distressed and had forgotten to sort food for the guests. When they opened the fridge, they were disgusted by what they found — pots full of maggoty soups and stews, cheeses and hams covered in mold, rotting fruits and vegetables. After the shock faded, we went outside on the balcony for some fresh air. My mum and aunts started laughing and cheering. My grandfather had been a horrible father and a horrible husband. His years of physical abuse had eventually killed my grandmother who developed dementia and died of a stroke in her mid-forties. My mum and her sisters were talking about how having to eat maggoty and moldy food in his last months of life was the least their father deserved. The dark fiction genre allows me to tell stories inspired by these women and others, and to explore characters who have an inkling of something odd and sinister in them.
On your recommendation I’ve read short stories by Mariana Enriquez and Camilla Grudova. How do these authors use the dark and supernatural to tell their unique stories?
Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet and Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire collections changed the way I approached writing entirely and opened new possibilities for me. From a reader’s perspective, I felt mesmerized by their worlds.
Grudova has a great ability to create something bizarre from the most mundane things. Most of the stories in The Doll’s Alphabet have an Eastern European vibe, which made nostalgic about my home and reminded me of things I had thought forgotten.
Things We Lost in the Fire is, I believe, what ultimately magical realism is about: the oppressed trying to fight their oppressor in a world that blends realism with the supernatural. As the daughter of people who were out on the streets during the Romanian Revolution in 1989, Enriquez’s works made me think deeper about my country’s own violent history. It’s interesting that, although Grudova’s and Enriquez’s stories contain elements of the dark and the supernatural, they are often more realistic than not, and the strangeness feels astounding because of that.
Following up to the previous question, which tales are stand out stories to you by these authors?
“The Dirty Kid” by Mariana Enriquez and “Waxy” by Camilla Grudova make me wish I had the superpower to erase specific parts of my memory, so I could read them again for the first time.
Your short story “One of the Whores” from the anthology Pluto in Furs 2 (2022 Plutonian Press) has the feel of being set in Eastern Europe. What is the importance of setting in your fiction and in the stories you want to tell?
I wrote “One of the Whores” with an old home in mind, which my family had rented for about eleven years when I was younger. It was a really small apartment on the fourth floor of a communist bloc, in a rough area in Bucharest. It wasn’t easy to live there for a lot of reasons. One was that we didn’t have any hot water nor a bathtub and the sewage was broken, so the whole time we lived there we had to boil water on the hobs and pour it in a small plastic tub each time we wanted to wash. That apartment was the kind of space that would get really hot in the summer and really cold in winter. One of our neighbors was suffering from dementia and used to chase me and the other young girls in the bloc with a cane, so we had to make sure we were staying out of her way. But somehow we managed all these things. I have a good deal of wonderful and equally distressing memories from that place.
I suppose setting is very important to me, as a writer, because that’s where the strange lurks from. If I want to tell the stories I want to tell, in which my characters are shaped by these kinds of environments that can be both nurturing and hostile, I have to make sure the people who read my work can see what it would be like to inhabit certain spaces.
The narrator of the story is a young girl who is fending off inappropriate sexual advances of a family friend. It is in this context that the character the “iconoclast” Natalia enters her life. What are some of the institutions Natalia is rallying against?
Interestingly, I wrote a different version of “One of the Whores” a few years ago, during my undergraduate studies. In that story, Natalia was not an iconoclast, but the victim of an everlasting system of abuse and misogyny. However, last year I was possessed by a strong wish to “create” her again, to give her a second chance, because her first narrative did not seem right anymore. Natalia was also not solely a figment of my imagination, and neither was the man who brings her into my main character’s life. Many years ago, my parents held a house party in the apartment I mentioned previously, and a family friend brought a sex worker with him. She was underage and had been abducted by some brutes from her parents, to repay a financial debt. I had always disliked that family friend — he was rude, misogynistic, uncouth — but from that night onwards I started to find him repulsive. Natalia, as a character, is rallying against the system that allows men like him to believe it’s okay to get away with abuse as long as it is inflicted on people no one cares to fight for.
Natalia is the supernatural heart of the story. The narrative opens with the narrator’s dream and her belief that she is “cursed.” When the narrator demands to know who Natalia is, Natalia replies, “I am what and who you will become.” In what way is Natalia a catalyst for the narrator? (I will revisit this exchange through a different lens in the following questions.)
I don’t know how much of this came across, but the narrator in my story was in a state of uncertainty before Natalia came into her life. Natalia’s apparition not only invited the narrator to challenge her abuser, but also to reach for answers inwards, somewhere in her unconscious. Natalia only showed her the way. When I was younger, I used to find it difficult to maintain friendships with other girls because I, like many of them, was indoctrinated with misogynistic ideas by my school, by the church, and by the others around me, particularly by some of the adult men around me. So I used to fear that all friendships with the people of my gender were rooted in competition and mean behaviour. I grew out of that mentality long ago, and now my female friends are like sisters to me. We uplift and support one another, and our friendships are based on mutual love and respect. I know understand how much damage growing up in an extreme patriarchal society such as Romania has done to many of us, so I hope my work shows how strong women can be, especially when coming together to fight the injustice inflicted on them.
I’d like to revisit the exchange in the previous question through the lens of analyzing “One of the Whores” as a strange tale. I found myself turning over the question is Natalia (and the creature she becomes) a thing of flesh and blood or is she and her transformation a psychological response and or perception of the narrator? In my opinion, the answer, for purposes of looking at it as a strange tale, is not as “important” as is the presence of this duality of possibility. What opportunities and benefits does the strange tale and dark fiction format give to telling the stories you wish to tell?
In truthfulness, my characters are always a hybrid of this and that rather than clearly defined individuals. Natalia is someone that exists in reality to a certain extent — a thing of flesh and blood — but she isn’t entirely a thing of this world either. I really believe, as you say, that identifying these details about Natalia is not that important. Maybe it’s up to the reader to see where she fits best. I suppose the possibility of things is what draws me the most towards writing in this style. I like to think that whoever reads my stories enjoys the sense of uncertainty. I’m very sporadic with my story planning prior to writing it — in fact, I barely plan at all — which works very well for me as a writer of strange fiction who uses the unconscious as the main source of inspiration.
The story wraps up with the powerful notion from the closing line, “…people are more concerned with showing they care than with actual caring…” In what way does the ending of the story form a circle with the beginning?
Some of the godliest people I used to know during my childhood and teenage years were the most judgmental and unforgiving. I used to find it bizarre that they were so concerned with appearing righteous, yet, when they had the opportunity to act in support of those who needed guidance and to actually do good, they would choose to be critical and punitive. It didn’t sit right with me and it’s one of the reasons why I started distancing myself from that world. When I wrote that last line, I wasn’t consciously aware of it forming a circle with the beginning, but now I can see that too. In what way it does, I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to think about this a bit deeper. All I can tell right now is that it will certainly feed another story.
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LILIANA CARSTEA is a Romanian writer living in the UK, fascinated with the macabre, the ancient, and the magical. Her work has appeared in The Pinworm Factory: A Tribute to Eraserhead (Plutonial Press), Pluto in Furs 2 (Plutonian Press), Cunning Folk, Black Flowers, Civilian Global and Write or Die Tribe. Some of her flash fiction stories made it to the second round in the SmokeLong Flash Fellowship for Emerging Writers in 2019.
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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.
The all-new Cemetery Dance Publications edition of his first short story collection The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales can be found here.
Cemetery Dance Publications will be releasing his novella The Serpent’s Shadow in September 2023.
