My Favorite Things with E.L. Chen

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 E.L. Chen, whose latest (which is two books in one! With flip covers!) Summerwood/Winterwood came out in October!

What does E.L. love when she’s not out-writing C.S. Lewis and Lev Grossman’s portal fantasies? Spoiler alert: a certain Bent Neck Lady, animated films to pass along to a new generation, comedy as speculative fiction, a podcast that embraces Asian creators, and a historical YA fantasy that’s coming to a close. Curious? Read on to learn more!

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Mike Flanagan

I’ve been avoiding horror for most of my life. I blame it on ‘80s slasher fare like Nightmare on Elm Street, which inevitably got shown at middle grade birthday parties. (Did no one’s parents care or notice what their kids were watching?) Freddy Krueger seems tame now, but he was pretty scary as an impressionable 10-year old. Someone who can kill you in your dreams? Well, I’m never sleeping again.

Later as a tween, I read some Stephen King, because it felt very grownup and cool to be reading King. I don’t remember why I stopped; possibly because I discovered fantasy. I do remember, however, making the conscious decision to avoid horror after watching the first film in the Scream franchise in my early 20s. I realized I didn’t like watching teens getting killed in graphic ways.

So it was a surprise to discover twenty years later, I actually like horror. (Not the gory serial killer stuff. I’m still scarred from Wolf Creek.) Over the past year I’ve been testing my hypothesis that supernatural horror stories don’t scare me the way they used to. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I love the idea of ghosts and everything they can represent in a story. So I inevitably stumbled on The Haunting of Hill House miniseries on Netflix. I know it was polarizing, but I loved it. I loved the creepy, uncanny atmosphere, the gorgeous cinematography, the strong performances from both the adult and child actors, the way director Mike Flanagan wove together the past and present, and of course, the haunting, visceral image of the Bent-Neck Lady.

Because of that, I’ve been seeking out Flanagan’s other films and really enjoying them. (Well, except for Before I Wake, which oddly falls flat despite a good premise.) I’m loving the realistic settings and characters. The characters’ relationships and personal histories are often more tense and uncomfortable than the terrorizing events themselves. Having only watched lurid slashers in my youth, it’s also been refreshing to see women who are not victims. Even in Hush, which has a typical woman-terrorized-by-creepy-killer plot, the protagonist fights back and although she spends the whole movie in a low-cut sleeveless top the camera never lingers too long on her body. (Despite the actress being Flanagan’s wife!) My only complaint about Flanagan’s films is that he really loves his Chekhov’s gun. I’m looking at you, Hush and Oculus. Anyway I’m really looking forward to his adaptation of Doctor Sleep. By the time this article has been posted, hopefully I’ve been able to see it.

Hayao Miyazaki

Horror movies are what I watch at night; by day, it’s the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. It was actually my parents who showed my 8-year old son Ponyo and since then we’ve been watching a Miyazaki film every week for our movie night. I’d only seen a few of them before, so it’s been wonderful to be able to watch many of them with my son for the first time. What I love is that most of Miyazaki’s stories are like fairy tales, or even YA novels. Adolescent children, often girls, are thrust into adventures and have more agency to save themselves and their world than a young person would normally have in real life. And like fairy tales, the girls succeed by being kind as well as resilient.

I also love seeing my son react to the films. They seem to have tickled his imagination in a way no Disney film has before. During Spirited Away; he exclaimed, “What? WHAT??!!” at every delightfully surreal and strange moment, which was about every ten minutes. So far his favorite seems to be Castle in the Sky, although when asked he’ll tell you he likes them all. He’s been mentioning Shita and Pazu a lot lately, but I’m not sure if he’s drawn to their airship adventures or their friendship.

John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme

When I’m not watching films I’m listening to content. Sadly I can’t read as much as I used to; as a single mom there’s always something that has to get done around the house. Audiobooks, podcasts, and BBC Radio are my go-to after my son has gone to bed, and I’m washing dishes and tidying up. One of my favorite things to listen to is John Finnemore on BBC Radio, which you can access online even if you don’t live in the UK.

I’ve long maintained that comedy can be a form of speculative fiction. From Jerry Seinfeld theorizing that NASA only built a moon buggy in order to look for women to catcall, to Bob Newhart’s one-sided phone conversation between an Empire State Building security guard and his manager the night King Kong attacks, a lot of comedy is based on what-ifs. No one answers the question “What if…?”  like John Finnemore, an English comedy writer and performer. He’s the writer of the absolutely perfect radio sitcom Cabin Pressure (which starred a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch) and he currently has his own sketch series, John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme.

Caterpillar detectives! Time travel hijinx! Intergenerational family dynamics when everyone’s immortal! Each episode ends with Finnemore telling a tall tale in the Victorian tradition, often riffing on ghost story tropes. My favorite sketch is not the funniest or cleverest of the lot, but it never fails to make me laugh: a scientist finally achieves his life’s work of translating whalesong, only to discover they’re saying, “Heeyyyyyyy, I’m a whaaaaaale!” If you’re lucky you can catch John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme re-running on BBC Radio 4 online. Otherwise it and Cabin Pressure are available in the iTunes store.

They Call Us Bruce

My favorite podcast at the moment is They Call Us Bruce. Hosted by Phil Yu, creator of the Angry Asian Man blog, and journalist Jeff Yang, in every episode they discuss what’s happening in Asian America and often interview notable Asian-American writers, actors and filmmakers. It never fails to make me think about my own journey as a content creator, and my place and experience in the Asian diaspora. Even if you’re not Asian, there have been guests the spec fic fan might be interested in e.g. Alex Woo, showrunner of The Terror: Infamy, Tze Chun of TKO comics, and forthcoming Marvel superhero actor Simu Liu. The conversation is always lively, and Yu and Yang do a great job asking the right questions and keeping the momentum going. It’s now my new life goal to be a guest on this podcast.

The Diviners

I just realized all the favorites I’ve listed so far have been by men, so here’s one last fave: The Diviners YA fantasy/horror series by Libba Bray. Starting with The Diviners, these doorstop-sized (in a good way) novels follows a group of teens in Jazz Age New York as they combat supernatural evils and try to solve the origin of their special powers.

I love how Bray captures the zeitgeist of the era and shows that it’s not much different than it is now: the feeling of decadence and impending end times, tense race relations, the fear of immigrants, one character’s ambition to be an It Girl. And, of course, drinking too much at parties and making out in cars. There are genuinely chilling moments combined with terrific flapper slang and a wonderfully diverse and well-developed cast. Although each book is huge, it always makes me sad to close the cover after the last page and leave that world and characters. On top of this, the audiobook experience is just as good, if not better. Narrator January LaVoy gives an incredible one-woman performance, pulling off dozens of voices and accents, and won an Audie Award for Lair of Dreams and was nominated for Before the Devil Breaks You. The fourth and last book, The King of Crows, is coming out in February and I’m so giddy with excitement I’m grinning as I type this. In fact, just thinking about how much I love these books makes me want to re-read them again.

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E.L. Chen’s short fiction has been published in anthologies such as The Dragon and the Stars and Tesseracts Fifteen, and in magazines such as Strange Horizons and On Spec. Her first novel, The Good Brother, was published in 2015 and her next, Summerwood/Winterwood, is out now. She lives in Toronto, Canada with her son.

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