“Horror and Noir,” “The Pain of Memory,” and “Eight Very Bad Nights”
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 New York Times Bestselling Author Tod Goldberg about his work, including the recently released anthology Eight Very Bad Nights from Soho Press.
We began our conversation about the relationship between horror and noir fiction.
DANIEL BRAUM: Noir is often found adjacent to and within genre fiction, particularly horror. With its literal definition being “black,” this becomes easy to see why. Do you have a preferred definition of noir? How do you see it interacting with horror and other genre fiction? What do you find to be some of the areas of synergy and what are some differences and distinctions?
TOD GOLDBERG: I always think of noir as being about bad people doing bad things to worse people. And of course there’s frequently a black-comic element to it, a kind of cynicism or ironic detachment that I think has a lot in common with post-Scream horror. I think the way noir and horror find common ground often has to do with the realization that monsters need not be giant spiders under the city — they can just be about the banality of evil people. The most horrifying people have nothing supernatural about them. It doesn’t make them any less scary.
Crime fiction and horror fiction have a long history of appearing side by side, from occult detectives going back to Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Pupin in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” What is the appeal of such combinations? What lends itself to the longevity of these kinds of stories?
Well, I think we prefer to believe that truly awful things are not the provenance of normal humans. I think Hannibal Lecter, as originally written in Thomas Harris’s books, fundamentally altered that paradigm, forcing us as readers to see an actual man-eating monster as an intellectual creature capable of fascinating insight and, even, a bit of empathy. Believable monsters are all the more compelling because they could be anyone. Not knowing your neighbors, your co-workers, lends itself to imagining that they just might be eating people on their off hours.
Your Gangsterland novels and your short fiction are modern-set crime and noir stories. In them readers will find dark humor, dark circumstances, and shady characters in morally and legally “sticky” situations. Do you see a unifying thread to your work? In what ways might it “fit the bill” of crime and noir fiction and in what ways does it push the boundaries?
In the Gangsterland series, of course there’s a unifying thread about how organized crime has wormed its way into every aspect of American life, but also about how even those not committing crimes have the desire to “get away with it,” whatever that means these days. There’s also, of course, the examination of violence and retribution and what both mean in common, polite society and why both are celebrated as entertainment (which I recognize is odd to do in a book that is ostensibly entertainment, but, well, I contain multitudes!). I think the boundaries being push in those books, at least, have primarily to do with religion. There aren’t a ton of noir novels where a hitman gets religious faith and it changes the way he does business.
What are some of your favorite crime and noir stories? What was the last story that truly excited you and why?
I love Vu Tran’s story “This Or Any Desert,” which was in Las Vegas Noir several years ago, “Night Stand” by Daniel Woodrell, and “Johnny Christmas” by Ivy Pochoda, which was in Eight Very Bad Nights, the book I edited. I think is a special story. A crime story I come back to a lot, though, and which I often give my students, is an obscure little story by Joe Meno called “Happiness Will Be Yours” about two boys who were kidnapped who return each year to a shitty amusement park where they have a lifetime pass given to them for being the two boys who survived. That one excites me every time I re-read it.
What are some that have influenced your writing?
Not many are straight up crime stories, but rather stories that often involve compromised people in bad situations, like “Rock Springs” by Richard Ford, “The Golden Gopher” by Susan Straight, “The Ceiling” by Kevin Brockmeier, “Passion” by Alice Munro, “First, Body” by Melanie Rae Thon, and “The Prophet from Jupiter” by Tony Earley, to name just a few.
Some of the crime classics like The Sopranos and The Godfather are also pop culture classics. Francis Ford Coppalla’s direction of Mario Puzo’s novel is a master class on filmmaking. One of my early teachers recommended I watch the television series The Sopranos for the purpose of learning from its naturalistic dialogue. As founder and director of the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at UC Riverside, do you have any advice specifically for those interested in writing noir and crime?
I don’t think watching other scripted things, or reading books for that matter, are the best way to learn dialogue. You want to learn dialogue, go listen to people talking. Eavesdropping is a master class — when I’m stuck with something, I’ll go to Target and just wander around, listening to people talk as invariably you’ll over hear something that strikes your fancy. But I think if you want to write noir, watching things like The First 48 — the documentary show about the first 48 hours of a murder investigation — can help you understand how cops talk — to each other, to suspects, to themselves, even — and get an interesting insight into the cadence of that life. But nothing trumps real life. Listen to people. Talk to people. If there’s a jail near you, go to the fast food restaurant closest to it and order a burger, sit there, listen — you’re going to encounter people who are going to visit someone who is in trouble and they’re going to talk about interesting things. Beyond that, if you want to write crime fiction, you really need to know how criminals think. I don’t always know if that’s learnable. You really benefit from being a little criminal minded in this job.
Do you see any trends in the genre? And how do you feel about them? Do any of the trends or tropes rub you the wrong way?
I really love the victim-forward crime narratives you’re seeing these days, writers like Ivy Pochoda, Steph Cha, and Danya Kukafka specifically are doing some really cool stuff. I don’t tend to read a lot of trend-based crime fiction, but I’ll say that as soon as one character says to another, “You and me, we’re not so different,” I stop reading the book.
In December 2024 Soho Press released the anthology you edited, Eight Very Bad Nights, a collection of Hannukah Noir.
In the prologue, you speak about the menorah and the Maccabees along with recollections of yours from the 1970s. For those who might not be familiar can you tell us about the holiday of Hannukah?
Hanukkah commemorates the Maccabees’ rebellion against the Greeks in 165 BCE. These Jewish warriors reclaimed Jerusalem’s Temple, only to find it desecrated — except for one untouched jar of oil for the menorah. Miraculously, that oil lasted eight days, symbolizing faith and freedom triumphing over tyranny. The festival celebrates the fierce spirit of the Jewish people, the minor miracle of the oil, and our freedom from oppression.
Our anthology Eight Very Bad Nights twists this narrative into dark tales of crime and redemption and just a touch of revenge.
How might noir and nostalgia go together? What were some of the approaches the authors used to pair Hannukah and noir in the book?
Nostalgia is literally the pain of memory. That’s a perfect recipe for criminal behavior, isn’t it? Beset by the pain of the past, you go and do some crime! But also the holidays in general provide a real impetus for people to do the wrong thing. People are lonely at the holidays. People covet at the holidays. People spend a lot of money during the season and if you don’t have a lot of money, you might feel compelled to go get some. It’s also a time of charity…which can lead to bad things, too! All of these are approaches found in the book. Bad people doing bad things to worse people, as I said above, that’s happening in all of the stories.
Your short story “Eight Very Bad Nights” closes the book. Please tell us about Palm Springs both as a place and as a fictional setting. Please tell us about some of the Jewish characters in the story.
Palm Springs is a vacation town, so many of the relationships with people there are very transactional, which I like to play with. Also, however, Palm Springs is an old Mob town — an open city where gangsters can essentially vacation in peace — and so that has historically led to some unsual bedfellows.
The story and the book concludes with two characters reciting a prayer “for the living and for the miracles beyond our understanding.” What is that prayer and what makes it a good note to end the book on? What is its significance for the characters?
Well, that’s a bit of a spoiler, isn’t it? Best to leave that to the reader. Except to say…the character doesn’t actually speak Hebrew.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
TOD GOLDBERG is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books, including the award-winning Gangsterland trilogy and Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has been published widely, including in Best American Mystery & Suspense, and his nonfiction appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Alta, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays. He lives near Palm Springs, CA, where he founded and directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at UC Riverside.
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.
