Crafting Shadows: The Dark Entries Interview with Simon Strantzas

Simon Strantzas emerged as a distinctive voice in weird horror fiction, gaining recognition for his masterful short story collections and editorial work. His fiction explores psychological horror and cosmic dread while drawing inspiration from literary giants like Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti. Through thoughtful and probing questions, we'll explore the depths of his creative process and artistic vision.

The Seeds of Strange Fiction

Your work occupies an interesting space between what you've called "the strange" and "the weird." Could you elaborate on how you see these two modes intersecting in your fiction? I'm particularly interested in how you balance the psychological aspects of strange fiction with the more cosmic elements of weird fiction.

I should first explain what I mean by “strange” and “weird”. As succinctly as I can reduce it, the weird is fiction concerned with the cosmic, with the outer, whereas the strange is concerned with the mysteries of existing, with the inner. The ontological versus the psychological. I do feel there’s an overlap of concerns between them, however: both are ultimately interested in trying to understand our world. The difference is the weird attempts to provide answers while the strange attempts to obscure them.

Much of my fiction, on reflection, is interested in this idea of understanding the underlying truth of things. Perhaps not the literal truth, but a subjective truth that lets us make sense of how it feels to navigate through a seemingly malevolent universe. I find this idea intellectually fascinating, and feel driven to explore the ramifications of what that might mean when I write.

On Process and Craft

You've mentioned that you rarely pre-plot your stories, instead working toward a particular image or metaphor. Could you walk us through how this approach developed and what advantages you find in this more organic method of composition? How do you maintain narrative coherence while allowing the story to find its own path?

When I first started writing, I outlined rather extensively. But I stopped fairly soon for two reasons: the first, rather selfishly, was because I just wanted to get to the fun part, to the writing, and spending days meditating on what I wanted to say and how to say it kept me from actually doing those things. But the second reason was I'd discovered that some of my best ideas were surfaced through accidents. Or small, innocuous details I’d thrown in randomly that rippled through the story and became the unifying theme. Those moments were euphoric, and I wanted more. So, I began to write without the net of an outline.

It has its drawbacks, though. The primary one being I end up rambling a lot as I circle different options, trying to find my way through. My first drafts are often long, disjointed, and not very readable. But by the time I reach the end, I have a pretty good idea of what the story was supposed to be. Then it's simply a matter of paring away everything that's not that story. It means I excise a lot of writing, which may represent days of work, but I perversely find the act one of the most rewarding parts of the craft. The more I get to cut, the better of a writer I feel I’ve become. This method also tends to resolve any issues I have with narrative coherence. As I pare away, I inevitably shed anything that doesn't fall in line. Stylistic coherence becomes more of a problem, though, as I have a tendency to shift narrative voice after a while. But, again, by the time I've reached the end, I've usually settled on how the story ought to read.

The Evolution of Weird Fiction

In recent years, we've seen what some call a revival of weird fiction. As someone who has both contributed to and observed this movement, what changes have you noticed in how contemporary authors approach the genre compared to its classical roots? Do you see this as a genuine renaissance or more of a natural evolution?

This "weird" revival has been going on since the late-nineties, and it's been populated by two sorts of writers: those who are trying to write in the style of the weird stories they previously enjoyed, and those who are trying to be as different from the weird writers who came before as those writers were from their predecessors. And I don't think either of those mindsets has changed over the years—only their reference points have.

If there's been any change at all, I suspect it's because the walls of genre have been torn down by the loss of gatekeepers and the ubiquity of the internet. And it's not only that we're seeing a melding of speculative genres, we’re also seeing an influx of literary authors who might have once looked down on genre. So, for example, in the early 2000s, we saw authors coming from crime fiction and ghost fiction and southern gothic and historical fiction (and more) all being lumped under the weird fiction umbrella despite not being very representative, on their own, of what weird fiction is. All this contributes to a genre that’s defined primarily by its perpetual state of flux.

But weird fiction, as an established movement, I think has faded somewhat. Its peak was perhaps a decade ago, back when no less than Tom Cruise was to star in a Lovecraft adaptation, and teenagers wore plush Cthulhu backpacks. You couldn’t go ten minutes without the announcement of some new anthology or other exploiting it. You don’t hear so much about those books now. Like the vampires and zombies that captured the publishing world earlier, weird fiction has been shunted out of the mainstream to make room for whatever might be the newest flavor of horror. But the weird perseveres.

Editorial Perspective

Your work editing anthologies like Aickman's Heirs, which won multiple Shirley Jackson Awards, must give you a unique perspective on the field. How has your experience as an editor influenced your own writing? What do you look for in stories that you feel exemplifies the best of contemporary weird fiction?

I wish I could give you a thought-provoking answer here, but in honesty, I haven’t done enough editing for it to have had a direct effect on my own work, and the little I did do consisted of finding writers I thought wrote great stories and asking them if they'd write a great story for me. Those stories I ultimately settled on were the stories I liked best, though I'm as in the dark as anyone as to what exactly that means. I suspect it has to do with surprise and juxtaposition. The art of telling a tale in a novel way. The good writers make it look easy. The great writers make it look inevitable.

The Art of Collection

In curating your own collections, you've spoken about the importance of focus and thematic unity. Could you discuss how you approach the architecture of a collection? What considerations guide your decisions about story order and thematic progression?

I view collections as either a showcase or an examination. As a showcase, the goal is to present the reader with an author’s range. This may mean the book is filled with a variety of styles or settings or themes, each in their way displaying a different facet of the author’s output. These sorts of books can be fun to read because, if the author’s work is varied enough, they avoid the potential trap of “sameness” that affects some collections. When we say an author works best in small doses, what we typically mean is their collected work highlights their limited range. A showcase collection can help avoid that.

That said, I don’t aim to write showcase collections. Instead, my collections tend toward examinations. While some authors choose to examine a theme in their collection like love, or murder, or family, my collections instead attempt to explore modes of horror. Each is focused on a different mode: urban and strange; weird, lit, and noir; anti-horror. Across these books, my themes don’t stray far from the core of my interests, but by examining those same themes through different lenses, I can explore how the different modes of horror work.

I like to think this means each of my collections appeals to a different audience of sympathetic readers. And this guides the way I arrange the stories. Each collection is an artifact, and potentially the first time a reader will be trying my work, so I front-load the book with what I think are the stories most likely to impress. I want the reader hooked. Then I place another strong story in the dead centre of the collection to act as a tent pole, and immediately follow it with anything more experimental or risky. By this time, I’ve hopefully earned enough trust from the reader to try something challenging. Finally, I end the book with more of my strongest stories, as it will be the last thing the reader takes away from my work. As for the specific order otherwise, it’s largely dictated by feel. Some stories feel like endings, some like beginnings. They all find their place eventually.

Technology and Terror

You've noted that technology has played a significant role in allowing weird fiction to find its audience. How do you see digital platforms and social media affecting not just the distribution but the actual creation of weird fiction? Has this increased connectivity influenced the themes you explore in your work?

If digital platforms and social media affect the sort of stories told, it’s happening in corners of the genre I’m not privy to. Or, at least, don’t frequent. The stories I’ve read (and certainly those I write) don’t seem to focus on any different matters from those before this digital age. Fiction is still mostly about how people live with one another and how people live with themselves. I think our technological age throws various different-sized wrenches into the mix, but ultimately the emotions we suffer and troubles we deal with are the same as ever.

But one could argue I’m out of touch. After all, I was already an adult when the internet took a firm grip on the world, which means I grew up in a disconnected time, and the models I have for what stories should be were written by people even older and more disconnected than that. This is all to say that I might be too myopic and set in my ways to fully grasp the changes occurring around me.

In my own fiction, technology newer than the telephone is barely present. My characters may own a smartphone or a computer, but they rarely interact with them other than as an occasional tool. No one is visiting social media or bothering to text one another. My smartphones replace flashlights more often than they ring.

As I said before, I think mystery is at the heart of what interests me about weird fiction, and technology and interconnectedness often rob us of a lot of that mystery. Or, perhaps more exactly, the sort of mystery that interests me. I’m certain there are clever ways around these hurdles, but I’m probably not the author to find them.

Literary Influences

While Aickman and Campbell are often cited as influences on your work, I'm curious about some of the less obvious influences on your writing. Are there writers outside the horror genre whose work has shaped your approach to fiction?

I struggle to see other writers’ direct influence on what or how I write. Which is not to say I arrived sui generis, but rather that I can’t pinpoint how exactly I’ve been shaped. It just sort of happened. I know my interest in this unreliable reality has been with me long before I began to read, so it was only natural I’d explore it in my fiction when the time came. I suspect a great deal of my approach stems from other media such as television, films, and music more than it does prose. And, of course, from comic books, whose authors probably played the biggest role in how I write and how I approach writing. I was fundamentally changed by the terse noir dialogue of Frank Miller, and the everyday fantastical of Neil Gaiman. Peter Milligan taught me about heartbreaking moments that might also blow one’s mind, and Ted McKeever showed me that even the grotesque could be beautiful because of, not in spite of, its ugliness.

Arguably, all of these examples fall if not into horror, then into horror-adjacent fields of speculative fiction. There are writers I enjoy outside of these realms, too. Writers like Paul Auster, Kenneth J. Harvey, Cornell Woolrich, Alice Munro… but the truth of the matter is that what appeals to me about these authors is that they can be read through a horror lens. When folks say “read outside the genre” I understand what they mean, but my interests are almost exclusively dark interests, and I prefer works that explore that darkness even if there is nothing supernatural involved.

The Future of Fear

Contemporary weird fiction seems to be moving in multiple directions simultaneously, with some writers embracing more experimental approaches while others maintain closer ties to traditional horror. Where do you see the genre heading, and what excites you about its future possibilities?

Earlier you asked about how digital platforms and social media affect the creation of weird fiction. More interesting, I think, is the way technology and our ability to connect with one another have evoked societal changes that might instead redirect horror fiction. The rise of fourth-wave feminism and our evolving understanding of sexuality and gender politics has quickly made obsolete a lot of what’s come before. We are in the throes of rethinking our world, and that has unsurprisingly led to a rise in horror exploring these changes. Perhaps not from the old guard, or even the old-ish guard, but certainly from an increasing number of newer and younger writers. The field is so much more diverse than when I started (which feels like only yesterday, but which I’ve been confidently assured was actually aeons ago), and I believe it’s only going to keep going in this direction, broadening and becoming more inclusive.

Or, at least, a good chunk of it will. A portion, larger than any of us are willing to admit, will reject those changes and instead retreat into the familiar. There will always be a strong draw toward nostalgia because people tend to most want what they already know. And in this case, it will be horror and weird fiction that reads like the horror and weird fiction they grew up reading. More of the same, over and over. It’s comfortable, and it is nothing new.

Personal Evolution

Your work has shown a remarkable evolution from collection to collection. How do you challenge yourself to push boundaries while maintaining the core elements that make your fiction distinctively yours? What aspects of your craft are you currently most interested in developing?

As I’ve mentioned, I don’t see my work evolving so much as I see it exploring different aspects of horror and the dark fantastic. In a very real way, my stories are about looking through horror at my own peccadilloes and grievances to see how they are warped and changed. Thus, even when I’m trying something new or different, it’s fairly easy to keep my fiction centred on those aspects that make it distinctively mine. It couldn’t be anything but. It might be too pat to say I write so I can better understand myself, but its draw for me is certainly the deeper exploration of all my fascinations. I suppose, though, that’s true for many authors. Maybe even most.

I can’t imagine not continuing along the same lines in the future, looking for undiscovered facets to view myself through. From what vantage will my next collection be? That’s still too far in the future to know for certain. What I can tell you is that of the different modes of horror I’ve written, there is only one I wish I was primarily known for. I’d like to think I’ll write more of that sort of work in the future. But I also know the siren call of those other aspects will inevitably draw me away as it has done time and time again.

Closing Thoughts

Many of your stories deal with the unknowable and the inexplicable. In your view, what role does ambiguity play in weird fiction, and how do you balance the need for narrative satisfaction with maintaining that crucial sense of the unknown?

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say ambiguity’s role is important to all weird fiction, as weird fiction isn’t any one thing, but I would state that in my own work, ambiguity is very important as it best exemplifies our state of existence in this unknowable world.

The thing about ambiguity is readers can tell when you’re faking it. Stories don’t always have to make literal sense. It helps, of course, if you, as the writer, know the answers to the questions your story raises, but sometimes those answers aren’t as simple as who a character really is or what they truly want. Sometimes the secrets are hidden even from you.

When you employ ambiguity, you are forming a covenant with the reader, and they take that agreement very seriously. Despite what they may tell you, despite what they may actually think, the reader doesn’t care what the answers are to the mysteries in your stories. What the reader cares about is that it feels like there are answers. What they want is to believe that the story you’re telling actually makes sense if only they tried a little harder or were a little smarter. But if you are using ambiguity dishonestly—if you are being elusive and opaque for the sake of elusiveness and opacity, the readers will know it immediately. They instinctively know something is wrong, even if they can’t verbalize it. And you will lose their trust in an instant.

I hope this explains why, to some degree, I find myself not caring about maintaining any narrative satisfaction when it comes to the sense of the unknown. I navigate these waters blindly by feel, and I use my judgement to determine when ideas or actions should be necessarily explicit and when they should be purposely obscured. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned after all these years, it’s that no matter how much you try, for some people, nothing will ever be explicit enough.

Simon Strantzas, 2019