They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Gemma Files, whose Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up from Deep Places is available now from Trepidatio.
What does Gemma love when she’s not writing utterly creepy tales that take her readers beyond their safe zones? Spoiler alert: a playlist guaranteed to inspire, a romance between horrible people, a fantasy of manners, a stack of movies that are dark and full of terror, and podcasts to get you through insomnia. Interested? Read on to learn more!
At the moment, I’m still basically recuperating from Christmas/New Year’s, plus dealing with the personal and business fallout from both the very sudden collapse of my primary publisher (ChiZine Publications, look it up) and the current ecological horror in Australia, where half my family lives. So the theme for the beginning of this brave new decade is split fairly straight down the middle between self-care and inspiration, as so often happens. Yet as my list of resolutions for 2020 clearly states, I’m determined to keep going, keep going, keep going. Here, therefore, are some of the things I’m using to process what I need to while — hopefully — still keeping on track.
Music
This never changes, though the exact types I fixate on often do. (It was black and death metal from Rotting Christ and Nile not too long ago, then short catch-up courses of Loreena McKennit and Linda Ronstadt, then the original soundtrack for Full Moon’s 1991 Romanian vampire movie series Subspecies.) I’ve been writing to music ever since I was old enough to buy my own vinyl, and listening to music while walking around with a notebook in my backpack since SONY Walkmen first became available. These days, I make playlists on my phone of tracks mainly sampled from iTunes. The most recent one is named after “God’s Dark Heaven,” an organ-driven gothabilly song by Those Poor Bastards, and includes such upliftingly sorrowful pieces as “You Want It Darker” by Leonard Cohen, “The Spark” by William Prince, “The Black Bird” by Rachel Brooke, “High Hopes” by Pink Floyd, “Sedna” by the sadly late Kelly Fraser, “Ugly and Vengeful” by Anna von Hausswolff and “Spinning Song” by Nick Cave…but also the ass-kickingly awesome “Even If I Die (Hybrid Remix)” featuring Cypress Hill and Idris Elba, off the Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw soundtrack. It’s the evolutionary urge of humanity vs the planetary wreckage we leave behind us, I guess, set to a block-rockin’ beat!
Books
I have a crazy To Read stack that takes up three shelves and a couple of bins, so I’m always substantially behind on re-homing the stuff I don’t opt to keep. The book that gave me a lot of pleasure over my son’s school break, however, actually turned out to be a novella rather than a novel (which I first read as an ebook on my phone, thus explaining why I didn’t notice that fact until I bought it in hard copy): Jennifer Giesbrecht’s The Monster of Elendhaven, a weird borderline romance between two incredibly awful people set against a dour, magic-poisoned version of Fin de (19th-)Siécle Holland. Since villain-on-villain is one of my absolute favorite things, I knew I’d like it pretty much from the moment someone recommended it to me on Tumblr, but the real draw here is Giesbrecht’s juicy, creepy, ultra-decadent prose, which draws the reader briskly along through its protagonists’ cavalcade of crimes like a numbing, hallucinogenic flood of absinthe-tainted blood. I also re-read Ellen Kushner’s Riverside series, a blithely bisexual fantasy of manners and mayhem that reads somewhat like Dangerous Liaisons crossed with The Three Musketeers, except snarkier — Swordspoint, The Privilege of the Sword and The Fall of the Kings (co-written with her wife, Delia Sherman). Next up, therefore, is Serial Box’s Season One of Tremontaine, a prequel to Swordspoint, co-written by Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese and Patty Bryant.
Films
Movies have always been my creative lifeblood, since long before the roughly ten-year period during which I made my living as a film critic for Toronto’s now-defunct eye Weekly. I’m entirely capable of watching upwards of three movies a day, be it through various streaming services, on DVD/Blu-Ray, or even (very occasionally) in the theater. They can be used to distract, to set the tone, or even as a very shallow sort of research, especially when I’m working on my very first nonfiction book project, Dark Comforts: Horror as Comfort Food in a Time of Fear. (It was supposed to come out through CZP, but now who knows?) And yeah, I have a stack of movies to get through, too. Most recently, I spent some time compiling a list of the movies I discovered or revisited the most times during 2019, which included Turkish director Hasan Karacadag’s Dabbe movies, all of which are built around the idea that the Internet has made it infinitely easier both to discover arcane secrets and be tempted into using them on other people; my favorite, Dabbe 5: Zehr-i-Cin, involves “poisonous black magic” used by djinn against too-worldly lapsed Muslims, Baskin-style hell imagery and a general spread of extremely bodily fluid-centric awfulness. Other similarly creepy things you can find on Canadian Netflix: Chae-hyon Chang’s Svaha: The Sixth Finger (Catholic priest who makes his living busting cults runs up against a Buddhist sect trying to rebalance the world one supposedly born evil murdered girl at a time), Denis Rovira’s The Influence (based on the Ramsey Campbell book of the same name, in which a woman tries to save her daughter from being possessed by her witchy, necromantic grandmother) and two equally amazing French/Belgian miniseries, Black Spot (Zone Blanche) and Marianne. These last two are particularly full of creeping dread, folk horror imagery and complicated, “dislikable” female characters of the sort I try to specialize in, which is why I hope they’ll be useful in helping me plan out my next couple of fiction-writing projects.
Podcasts
Finally, I’d like to give shout-outs to a few of the many podcasts I follow, all of which have given me comfort during my long, dark nights of near-constant insomnia — Ologies with Alie Ward, a series of interviews with the best experts she can find in whatever field happens to interest her this week (Cnidariology [Coral], Cucurbitology [Pumpkins], Osteology [Skeletons/Body Farms], etc.); Season Two of Fool and Scholar Productions’ thrillingly strange continuing narrative The White Vault (a Lovecraftian tour of underground realms which began on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, before recently relocating to the Patagonian Andes); and when all else fails, My Favorite Murder, in which hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark bond over their mutual anxieties by telling each other the least well-researched version possible of various true crime cases, solved or unsolved, occasionally for a live audience. If you like monsters, there’s the Cryptonaut Podcast, in which three extremely well-read and similarly foul-mouthed nerds discuss everything from the Mothman to Spring-Heeled Jack, or Scared to Death, in which Dan Cummins takes great pride in freaking his wife Lynze out with might-be-true tales of poltergeists, demon possession and urban legends (take a shot every time she exclaims: “I don’t LIKE that!!” and you’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning before the halfway mark).
Soon enough, my son’s rehearsals as part of Viva! Youth Choir’s Everyone Can Sing wing will start again, after which my own — for Echo Women’s Choir — will also kick off, allowing me to channel my own terrors into mastering breath control, lyrical interpretation and tonal volume. Then I’ll start back in beading necklaces again, or finish watching Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s almost pornocentric new adaptation of Dracula. Always some way to distract yourself, as a human being, even while forests burn and Trump declares war on Iran.
Maybe that’s a good hefty part of our problem, right there.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
Want to purchase fiction directly from the author? Feel free to contact her at filesgemma @ gmail.com.
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I have absolutely been excited to watch BLACK SPOT, so I’m thrilled you mention it as a favorite! Thank you so much for sharing, and for providing us so many great things to check out!