Contemporary Authors

• Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge - 2009 New Generation Publishing , London, England
• Knock Knock - 2012 Omnium Gatherum,
• Delphine Dodd - 2012 Omnium Gatherum,
• Astoria - 2013 Omnium Gatherum,
• Little Visible Delight - 2013 Omnium Gatherum,
• In the Light (Skillute Cycle) (Volume 4) - 2014 Omnium Gatherum,
• Strange Is the Night - 2017 Journalstone, Carbondale, IL
• I Wish I Was Like You - 2017 Trepidatio Pub , Carbondale, IL

• Amazon -

  S.P. Miskowski is a three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee, a 2017 Bram Stoker Award nominee, and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, Black Static, Identity Theory, Strange Aeons, and Eyedolon Magazine as well as in the anthologies Haunted Nights, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, October Dreams 2, Autumn Cthulhu, Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, Tales from a Talking Board, and Looming Low. Her books are available from Omnium Gatherum Media and JournalStone/Trepidatio.

• The Gothic Imagination - http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/an-interview-with-s-p-miskowski-part-one/

  An Interview with S.P. Miskowski, Part One
  Posted by James Campbell on September 23, 2013 in Blog, Interviews tagged with american gothic, Astoria, Delphine Dodd, Flannery O'Connor, horror, Knock Knock, Omnium Gatherum Media, Pacific Northwest, S.P. Miskowski, Shirley Jackson, Southern Gothic, Stoker, The Conjuring, The Skillute Cycle, The Woman in Black
  ‘Raised on Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Allan Poe and public television in Decatur, Georgia,’ the author S.P. Miskowski describes herself with characteristic wit and good humour whilst acknowledging the influence of three of the best known purveyors of Southern Gothic. As an undergraduate earning her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Washington she wrote a number of prize-winning short stories and edited a small press magazine. Her short stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, Horror Bound Magazine, Identity Theory, Other Voices, The Absent Willow Review, New Times, Fine Madness and in the anthology Detritus (ed. Kate Jonez and S.S. Michaels, 2012). Several of her stories were collected in Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge (print, 2009; expanded ebook edition, 2011). Her first novel, Knock Knock (2011), introduced readers to the small Washington town of Skillute and a mystery that continues to unravel in a follow-up trilogy of novellas entitled The Skillute Cycle. The first of these, Delphine Dodd (2012), followed Knock Knock in being nominated for a prestigious Shirley Jackson Award. This year saw the publication of Astoria, while the third and final novella In the Light is scheduled for release in 2014. All of the books in the series are published by Kate Jonez’s Omnium Gatherum Media and are available in both print and ebook editions. Each volume also features impressive, atmospheric cover art by Russell Dickerson of Darkstorm Creative. In addition to writing fiction Miskowski also maintains a blog, Daughters of Catastrophe, and an excellent review site, Shock Room, featuring insightful analyses and commentary on the latest horror releases, from the small press to the big screen. Miskowski currently resides in California with her husband, the writer and game designer Cory J. Herndon.

  In the first of a two-part interview the author discusses writing, labelling and marketing her work; the role of ‘horror’ in North American culture; ‘women in horror’; and the current renaissance in small-press publishing.

  *********************************************************

  JC: Hi S.P. How would you describe and label your work? Are labels something you worry much about?

  SPM: While working on a book or a short story, I would describe what I’m writing as fiction. My approach is to place all of my life experience, any skills I’ve acquired, and any research I’ve done, at the service of the story. After the first draft has taken shape, when I have a sense of the story’s unique form and its themes, I consider whether it lends itself to a particular genre. Then as I revise I may add elements specific to that genre. But I try to avoid second-guessing my story until it begins to have a life of its own. My method is akin to having a baby and then waiting until the baby’s personality emerges, to give him a name.

  That said, I have written stories with an existing, identifiable audience in mind. But it was work for hire, and I don’t consider it to be my most interesting writing.
  Labels never worry me. They may serve a purpose in finding the right market for a story once it’s complete. Or they may help agents and publishers. My concern is to make the tale as compelling as possible. If I succeed at this, the work will eventually find an audience.

  I’ve seen writers who vehemently defend the validity of one genre or label. This always surprises me because I think one ought to be secure in one’s choices, and not defensive. I never question the legitimacy of any genre. Although I started getting published when I was in an academic setting, and my early stories were printed in small press literary magazines, I’ve never felt a prejudice against a genre. To me, the work I admire is just fiction, well written fiction. Genre labels are marketing tools, not writing tools.

  But maybe this is because I read widely when I was a child. Horror and sci-fi books were popular, so I read them along with everything else. My objective was to find the well-told tale, not a certain type of literature.

  The Skillute Cycle has been identified as horror because it has a dark edge and both psychological and supernatural elements. I’m happy with the label because I’ve been reading a lot of horror over the past few years. Informally, I’ve been studying horror and the purpose it serves in our lives and our culture. So I’m pleased to have been welcomed by the community of writers who embrace the genre. But I really came to it after I realized that my novel, Knock Knock, was emerging as a horror story while I worked on it.

  JC: I’ve been enjoying your horror blog Shock Room immensely and have a question connected to it that I’ll get to in a moment, but what purpose do you think horror fiction serves both generally, and in American society and culture in particular?

  SPM: H.P. Lovecraft’s often-quoted line is, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” One purpose horror novels and films serve is to give an identity to our dread, making it specific, concrete, and, in a limited sense, knowable or recognizable.

  Anticipation is nebulous, free-floating. Giving our fear a name and a face makes it possible to indulge momentarily in the fantasy that we can face whatever is lurking in the dark.

  In his introduction to The Philosophy of Horror, Thomas Fahy writes that the horror genre promises, “the anticipation of terror, the mixture of fear and exhilaration as events unfold, the opportunity to confront the unpredictable and dangerous, the promise of relative safety…and the feeling of relief and regained control when it’s over.” This statement implies that the relief is a necessary part of the cycle. Readers and viewers crave resolution. Many also desire a happy ending. They want to put the monster back in the closet and lock the door when the story is over. The degree to which a writer allows them to do so depends on how comfortable she wants them to be. It also depends on the particular nature of the tale she’s telling.

  I like a story that follows through to its natural conclusion. If a reassuring final scene is earned by the story, it can work. But I think some writers confuse resolution with a happy ending. I don’t share their interpretation.

  For example, I think the natural conclusion to The Woman in Black is the original one, which is death without redemption. The logic of the story calls for it. Arthur Kipps finds happiness, and it’s snatched away from him, as it has been for all who crossed paths with the vengeful spirit of the woman in black. The final scene in the Hammer adaptation didn’t work for me. Letting viewers off with an image of a reunited family after death is like giving everyone a cookie on the way out of the theatre. It’s childish. It’s American. I was disappointed to see this, especially since the stage version (with the original ending from the book) has run successfully for so long.

  You see this little scrap of optimism in a lot of American horror films and books. The audience is let off the hook in the cheapest manner. I don’t think this is what resolution is all about, especially in the horror genre. If a novel portrays horrific action, it’s a challenge to resolve that. It should be a challenge. It should be difficult.

  Americans fear ambiguity. A timid writer or filmmaker seeking only personal success will feed our childish need to believe that everything is going to be okay.

  Over the past decade audience/reader tolerance for cruelty and torture has increased exponentially. To anyone who dislikes the genre it might seem that we’re simply becoming more enamored of violence. The more we see, the more we desire to see. I don’t share this opinion. I think we are, collectively, attempting to come to terms with recent history.

  Any adult who is aware of events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay ought to question our collective morality. And I think many Americans, including many military men and women, are deeply troubled by what we know about actions taken in our name. Yet individual and group efforts to affect change in our nation’s policies seem to have little influence. It isn’t a coincidence that we see an eruption of real violence, and a profusion of senseless cruelty in films and fiction. We want to know what we are, that we can condone extraordinary brutality. We are examining ourselves in whatever manner is within our grasp. And–as ever–Hollywood and the publishing industry are eager to make a dollar from our obsessive curiosity.

  JC: Those are really interesting points. ‘Torture porn’ cinema springs to mind here, as does the torture/killing currently being carried out by the ‘good guys’ of American pop culture, whose actions are troublingly portrayed as a ‘necessary evil.’ James Wan, who directed the notorious Saw, also included a disturbing torture scene in The Conjuring, and it was strange to see such a topical subject in a film that was otherwise something of a throwback. Your Shock Room review of The Conjuring perfectly articulates the problems I, and I suspect many others will have had with this film: that the characters are just too good to be true, and that it’s strange for a horror film to be so lacking in narrative ambiguity. Its Brady Bunch ending seemed especially bizarre after Wan’s Insidious and the recent Evil Dead re-make.

  Above: The Power of Christ compels the Warrens to bind, gag and torture their ‘victim’ with a tedious bible reading in The Conjuring (dir. James Wan, 2013).

  Mainstream horror cinema seems saturated at the moment with variations upon this home-invasion theme, with films which typically show a white, middle to upper-class family under attack from some external agency. While Knock Knock also involves a series of ‘home invasions’ the horror is much more intimate, with the focus being on the series’ central characters, Beverly, Marietta and Ethel, as their respective personal ‘spaces’ are breached by male and baby invaders. While in The Conjuring maternal instincts are expected to override demonic possession – the film’s resident psychic even has her very own ‘mommy-sense’ that’s set a-tingling when storm clouds gather – your books avoid such saccharine sentimentality. We get to see the protagonists as kids grossed out by the prospect of childbirth; their different responses to impending motherhood; as well as a variety of healthy and unhealthy mother/daughter relationships, alongside memorable monsters like Miss Knocks and Connie-Sara, borne out of those same themes.

  Women are central to your work. They’re often deeply flawed, sometimes delusional, but they’re never simply ‘good’ or ‘evil’ and there’s no shortage of moral ambiguity on display. Of course, horror has a bit of a reputation when it comes to the representation of women, both on screen and behind the scenes. To what extent do you think that reputation’s deserved? Do you see your own work as a response to how other works in the field, and society at large, treat women in general and topics such as motherhood in particular? Barbara Creed wrote that ‘the presence of the monstrous-feminine’ in popular horror fiction ‘speaks to us more about male fears than about female desires and feminine subjectivity.’ Do you see your own work as a corrective to that? Some critics describe horror as being an essentially ‘feminist’ genre – that sounds a little optimistic, but do you think that it can be?

  SPM: Horror’s representation of women is a huge, complex topic. Allow me to offer a small, simple observation.

  Last year Park Chan-wook directed what I thought was a witty and beautiful film called Stoker. This coming of age story presented a young woman who learned to stand on her own and destroy those who tried to harm her. Upon its release, I was taken aback by the reaction of male horror fans. Many of them couldn’t say enough about how much they disliked Stoker, even if they loved the director’s better-known opus, Oldboy. The response reminded me how much I enjoyed a couple of other horror films about young women learning to lash out; the surreal comedy Teeth, and the poorly marketed Jennifer’s Body.

  All three of these movies featured young female survivors, loners who reject male guidance. None were runaway hits. I couldn’t help comparing the original film adaptation of Carrie, a hugely successful movie in which the dangerous girl lashes out and dies, and another girl is permanently damaged. I’m not sure that we, as a society, like girls who kick ass and walk away unscathed.

  Left to right: Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) and Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964).
  My writing is influenced most by two odd women who took a dim view of society at large, Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson. They wrote complex, layered stories that seemed straightforward and were accessible yet open to interpretation. Their clear-eyed, unsentimental depiction of horrible human behavior was a constant. They let the story speak for itself. In this way, I think they got away with a lot of social commentary without being pedantic.

  I try not to respond to society at large. I try to tell engaging stories about interesting women and men. The stories I write are true to what I know about people.

  Maybe a personal note is helpful. I have three sisters and six aunts, all very tough-minded and independent. Also, for years my mother took care of the children of women in our neighborhood who worked full-time. My sisters and I helped out. We met dozens of families and knew women in all sorts of circumstances who were trying to raise children while earning a living. My mother was a confidante. These women would pick up their kids and stay to talk about their day, their lives, how things were going.

  The stories of these women made an impression on me while I was growing up. I noticed the faces they wore on various occasions, what they said to one another, and how they behaved in front of authority figures, especially men.

  Not all women have maternal instinct, or at least it doesn’t always override other impulses like ambition or sexual desire. Lack of interest in raising children is condoned in men, and condemned in women. We hound women, even highly respected career women, to have children. No one seems to think it might be inappropriate, and in the case of women who dislike children, perhaps dangerous, to put this social pressure on them. Of course, we say, the woman who dislikes children will love her own. But what if she doesn’t? What if motherhood is a nightmare? What if she can’t stand her family?

  For me, writing unnerving scenes of motherhood is a natural outcome of knowing so many women who have loved, accepted, struggled with, or resented the role.

  Knock Knock could be analyzed in light of Julia Kristeva’s description of the abject and the idea of releasing the hold of maternal entity. One of the problems plaguing the characters is that they can’t establish a discrete identity. As soon as Ethel thinks she has finally separated herself from the damaging connection to her mother, she plunges into the experience of pregnancy and the feeling of being occupied by another. And in a sense, because this is a supernatural as well as psychological story, she’s right. She’s invaded by a stronger entity.

  In this cycle of books, I’m concerned with repetitions of physical and emotional experience between generations of women. A character severely damaged by her connection to her mother decides to claim independence by having a child of her own, but this turns out to be a trap. Some first-time parents think they’re creating a new world. They want to escape their parents and do things differently. Nature doesn’t necessarily work like that. Personality traits recur and skip generations. Ethel escapes from her mother, begins to find her way, and then gives birth to someone like her mother, only much worse. Instead of continuing to build her new identity as a parent she slips back into the defensive role of a child.

  These books are a culmination of experiences shaped by a natural desire to explore characters without framing and defining them through religion or family values. I’m not interested in looking at women in that way. We receive too many guidelines and opinions about what women are and how we ought to live. I didn’t set out to respond to that so much as I felt a strong impulse to toss it aside and present women as they are.

  One author or even one genre can’t serve as a corrective to traditional views. Boundaries and stereotypes are being broken every day but very little of the boundary-breaking work is popular. Even when it is popular, we tend to discuss it in the same, old ways. Consider Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s a troubling story about someone who gives birth because she’s already done everything else. This is a great subject for an unhappily affluent culture to explore. Yet most discussions about the book center on whether the protagonist is a good mother or a bad one. Few readers or critics ask whether the current baby boom is a good thing. Would the world be better if fewer people had children? It might be, but try raising that question at the next book club meeting. You might not get out alive.

  I don’t think there is a feminist genre. Women have to make great efforts to be heard in any genre, even romance, because we grapple with stultifying expectations about what women like and don’t like, and what we’re capable of doing. Breakthroughs often occur when women assist women. I think I’ve gotten away with a lot because my editor is a fearless woman. My books are in print because of my publisher, who is a woman. Knock Knock came very close to being accepted by a major publisher. Ultimately they turned it down because they couldn’t decide on an effective label, for marketing the book. Fortunately Kate Jonez came along and Omnium Gatherum published the novel and optioned the series of novellas. Small press is a haven for the truly divergent point of view.

  JC: Absolutely. Your experience with that first publisher reminds me of something Scott Nicholson wrote in his introduction to the e-book anthology American Horror (2011), regarding changes in ‘the public perception of the [horror] label.’ ‘The publishers’ sales teams believe horror doesn’t sell, so they convey this lack of enthusiasm to the bookstores. The bookstore owners don’t order it, and because readers don’t see it on the shelves, they believe horror must no longer be readable.’ Nicholson goes on to claim that there’s an ‘indie revolution’ taking place in the field, and I’ve seen others talk of a ‘renaissance’ in connection with the work being published by the small presses. Do you agree with their assessment? There does appear to be a strong, supportive network of small presses, specialist magazines and awards, like the Shirley Jackson Awards, all coming together to promote this end. Digital e-readers also seem to be opening up new opportunities for writers.

  Are you able to, and do you follow the sale of your work closely? And how do you feel about the reception of your work? Are you pleased with the general response, and has there been anything about it that surprised you?

  SPM: There is a renaissance in small press publishing, yes. The amount of material is impressive and the quality is remarkably good. It’s a period akin to the 1980s when low-cost Xerox machines hit the market and there was a boom in chapbooks, journals, and zines. Everybody started desktop publishing because it was suddenly an affordable proposition. Then, as now, some of the material was cranked out fast and without much editorial judgment, yet the majority of magazines and books were (and are) excellent.

  Never underestimate the importance of providing affordable editions. In the 1980s books crept up in price until the average person really couldn’t buy new hardbacks. You would have to do some research to confirm this but I think the rash of paperback imprints from big publishing houses around that time was a response to the small press boom. Today the majors whose books have gradually climbed in cost again, are trying to catch up with the new technology. They’re beginning to live in the 21st century but the amount of time it’s taken to recognize that simply wishing and griping won’t help indicates how far behind the zeitgeist they were trailing to begin with.

  You can’t blame them for settling into a paradigm that made them prosperous and kept writers beholden to them. It’s a natural occurrence. Now things are changing fast and you can see them catching onto small press ideas, with Goodreads chats and blog tours. Most of them overcharge for electronic editions, however, because it’s one way to command a clear profit.

  And they still don’t entirely get it. Recently I had an opportunity to receive a review copy of a horror collection from one of the best-known publishers in the world. I confirmed my interest and they sent me a digital copy via email. But before I could open it I was required to sign a contract stating that I wouldn’t share or sell the book, and I was supposed to download some fairly complicated software to my computer. Well, I asked if they would send a hard copy instead. They were very nice about it, really, but I couldn’t help comparing this to the small press process in which writers, editors, and publishers swap mobi, PDF, and ePub files on a regular basis. The unspoken agreement is that anyone unscrupulous and stupid enough to pirate a book is going to get a black eye online from everyone in small press, and his reputation will be ruined. If you want a career, that’s enough of a deterrent. And if you’re actually a book pirate, a signed contract and protective software isn’t going to stop you. That’s the implied logic behind review copy sharing, in the digital age.

  When Knock Knock was first published I tracked sales pretty closely to see which PR efforts worked and which ones had no effect. These days I have a good idea what I like to do for promotion, my publisher has good PR strategies, and I can usually count on a tiny rise in sales as a result. So I just apply myself to that and keep fingers crossed. I found it nerve-racking to follow the sales so closely. I’m happy to do the work and have faith that it will help.

  The reception for The Skillute Cycle has been a wonderful surprise to me. I know some writers think they will publish a book and then the sky will fall and they’ll start having lunch with Stephen King. I don’t think that way. I’ve been a writer long enough to be thrilled at every good mention and every reader who takes my story to heart. I’m delighted when a reader comes up to me at a book signing and says she loves Knock Knock and feels like the characters are people she’s known all of her life. That really does it for me.

  I didn’t have any idea what the audience would be for these books. The shocking thing is that they’ve been embraced and talked about and passed along to friends by a wide range of people. I hear from teenagers, middle-aged men and women, and people in their 20s and 30s. Somehow the books have struck a chord with more people than I imagined. Most surprising has been the number of men between 20 and 25 who have given the series positive attention, tracking the allusions and homages, the jigsaw quality of the big picture formed by the books when you read them together, and just really getting excited about the whole project. Since the key characters in the book are three middle-aged women, I never expected this. I’ve read a couple of reviews in which young men who also like more extreme horror have recommended the books, and said they realized their friends might overlook this series because it’s about women and it’s set in a small town and represents a slow-burn, quiet brand of horror, but to stick with it because it’s worth it. I’m quite pleased about that.

  An Interview with S.P. Miskowski, Part Two
  Posted by James Campbell on September 30, 2013 in Blog, Interviews tagged with american gothic, Asian horror, Astoria, Delphine Dodd, horror, j-horror, K-Horror, Knock Knock, Nang Nak, Pacific Northwest, S.P. Miskowski, Southern Gothic, Thai Horror, The Skillute Cycle, Wisit Sasanatieng
  Presenting part two of our in-depth interview with S.P. Miskowski, author of Knock Knock and The Skillute Cycle. If you missed part one, you can catch up here.

  *********************************************************

  JC: A lot’s been happening in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) – generally understood as Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, Canada – over the last 25 years or so. British Columbia has been given the moniker ‘Hollywood North’ because of the amount of American film and TV being produced there. TV shows like The X-Files and Supernatural, and more recently, the film The Cabin in the Woods featured the region as the ‘archetypal’ rural American backwoods setting. The Ring, the American remake of the J-Horror classic, and the Twilight franchise are both set in the PNW, as are several recent horror-themed console games, Alan Wake, Deadly Premonition and Silent Hill: Downpour, produced in Finland, Japan and the Czech Republic, respectively. It seems fair to say then that the region has an increasingly global commercial appeal. And of course, the last several years have seen a growing number of writers producing superlative supernatural fiction set in the region – writers like yourself, Laird Barron and Livia Llewellyn, to name a few.

  Much of the praise surrounding the current wave of small press horror writers tends to centre on connections to the north-eastern, transatlantic ‘Weird’ tradition; references to New England writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Shirley Jackson abound. But on first reading Knock Knock I was struck by its ‘Southern Gothic’ flavour – something to do with that combination of the grotesque, that trace of O’Connor, set against a backdrop of rural poverty and the relationships/tensions between the local ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Of course, academics love to label: considerable ink is still being spent on proving that Edgar Allan Poe was an ‘American,’ ‘Southern’ or even a ‘Philly’ writer. How do you think living in Georgia and Washington has influenced your work? Was there a particular reason why you chose to set the series in the PNW, as opposed to any other region? The PNW and the South are quite far apart geographically speaking, but are there certain continuities, certain things they have in common that stand out to you, as a writer? Do you think of yourself as being a regional or national writer?

  SPM: Growing up in Georgia, I was aware of history, aware of racism. Although I wasn’t old enough to put it into perspective I knew I was living through sweeping social change. My generation was the first to experience integration. My friends were African-American and my neighborhood in Decatur, just outside of Atlanta, was integrated. The contrast with older generations in my family was stark. I think it caused me to question authority and the so-called wisdom of my elders at an unusually early age. It’s difficult for me to accept anything at face value. I always wonder who’s in charge and what their agenda might be. I also tend to be critical of white assumptions, especially the assumption that racism exists primarily in the South. It exists everywhere in the United States, and it thrives in places where people refuse to acknowledge it. Places like the Pacific Northwest.

  Above: A gathering of the Ku Klux Klan – more traditionally associated with the Deep South – in Downtown Seattle, Washington, 1923. For more information see the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project.

  Maybe because my parents came from poor but ambitious families, as a child I noticed the fine distinctions between classes. Racism is fueled by the insecurity of people who can’t quite get what they want out of life.

  The South has an oral storytelling tradition and the people I knew there loved to talk. The front porch was a place where people gathered and shared stories while preparing food, while smoking, while drinking. Talking was an art; making people laugh was an art. I began to write short stories when I was about eight years old, and it seemed like a natural extension of this social activity. It never occurred to me to hide my stories. I read them aloud to my parents, who got a kick out of them, even the ones in which children did horrific things to their loved ones. Fiction wasn’t a threat; it was healthy entertainment.

  In the Pacific Northwest most people are more reticent. If someone asks a question, and you reply at length, the other person is apt to go silent instead of carrying on with the conversation the way a Southerner would. You can live in the Northwest for years and barely know your neighbors. People are curious about others but unwilling to talk about themselves. Of course these are huge generalizations.

  I set Knock Knock in the southwestern part of Washington State because I knew the area and had conflicted feelings about it. My husband’s family lives there. I was spending a long, sleepless night at his grandmother’s house when I had the idea for Knock Knock. The physical details of the place were all around me. They reminded me of visits to the country when I was a kid. The woods had that same lonely, eerie feeling. I wondered how women lived in these places. I considered myself to be an entrenched urban dweller, but I knew many rural families when I was a child. So the story was a combination of intimate knowledge and wild speculation.

  The continuities between the South and the area where the novel is set perhaps have to do with small town life. People in cities make bizarre assumptions about anyone who chooses to stay in a town like (the fictional) Skillute. There’s a snide condemnation in their tone when they refer to the residents of small towns. I wanted to both exploit and explore that. I wanted to sidestep the obvious and consider how women like Ethel, Marietta, and Beverly developed as women in such a place.

  One thing rural dwellers have in common across the country is irritation at being told who they are. Stubbornness emerges when someone who doesn’t know you makes an assumption about how you live and how you vote. I know people who are routinely dismissed as “rednecks,” who exaggerate their stated views purely to get even with liberals who write them off. I wanted to get past all of the animosity and assumptions.

  The South influenced me but I don’t think of myself as a regional writer. If I had to choose between identifying as a Southern writer or a Northwest writer, however, I’d say I’m Southern. I do think of myself as an American writer. My concerns, my themes, have to do with specifically American social and historical contradictions. But I’m not on a campaign. I’m not trying to prove anything. My aim is to look closely and relentlessly at who we are and how we live. I’m aware of being American, although my writing is about human nature, self-delusion, and deep-rooted desires that are universal.

  JC: While Knock Knock introduces readers to Skillute, Delphine Dodd extends its roots further back into the regional and national past. Of course, one of America’s most enduring national myths is that it has no history. In fact its history, or histories, are always in the process of being written and rewritten. Certain histories have, historically, been marginalized. In horror fiction the ‘ancient Indian burial ground’ is a typical cliché whose popular sobriquet serves to efface its subject. But in Delphine Dodd you offer a brilliant alternative to this via your detailed historical account of the real-life ‘rock of the dead’ Mont des Morts, better known as ‘Mount Coffin.’ With your fictionalized account of the notorious Washington sanatorium Wilderness Heights, nicknamed at the height of the scandal ‘Starvation Heights,’ you also offer insight into the lives of the women who lived in this region during the early twentieth-century.

  Traditionally these histories have been marginalized by the nation’s patriarchal histories/mythologies: the Puritans, the cowboys, the self-made businessmen. This development is reflected in Delphine Dodd with the coming of the ‘Bostons,’ and in how the area came to be reshaped by, as one of your characters puts it, ‘big men’ and their ‘big business.’ Can you elaborate further on the historical research you conducted when preparing the novella, and what you learned about the region’s development?

  SPM: Thanks for the kind words about Delphine Dodd. I hope I’ve avoided the cliché of the burial ground excuse for supernatural occurrences. It worked in Poltergeist and Pet Sematary, more subtly in The Shining. It’s been used a lot, since then. I actually felt I was going out of my way to avoid it in Knock Knock. The challenge was to invent a plausible local legend that didn’t rely explicitly on what I’m now beginning to enjoy calling ‘the burial ground excuse.’

  Delphine Dodd required more historical research. My husband knew southwestern Washington State well because he grew up there. We’ve spent time there with his family. But I did a lot of reading to lay the groundwork for the book. Everything I read brought me back to one location, Mount Coffin. Burial grounds.

  Above: ‘Mt. Coffin on the Columbia River near Longview, Washington,’ from Oregon State University Libraries’ Gerald W. Williams Collection. The photograph was taken in 1900, when the days of ‘the Rock of the Dead’ were shortly numbered.

  The twin desires of many American immigrants, and we are a nation of immigrants, has been to start fresh while retaining our original culture, from another part of the world. Neither desire, to begin again or to honor our original homeland, allows for the legitimacy of cultures that existed here for thousands of years before we arrived. The first Europeans to navigate what we call the Columbia River were uncertain of the intentions of the natives they met. So there was often a respectful distance based on fear. After the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition in the early 19th century, Europeans began to explore the area with the intention of settling there. Their illnesses decimated the native families that had no immunity. With their numbers greatly reduced, the remaining natives were in no position to bargain, or to protect their homes.

  Before this rupture, Chinook jargon-speaking people lived near the river for thousands of years. For perhaps hundreds of years, families in the region placed their dead loved ones inside sealed canoes and placed them on and around a basalt rock formation on the north shore of the lower Columbia River. Over the course of a century, the rock was destroyed by industry, blasted into smaller rocks by a sand and gravel company and used to construct roads and foundations in the area. I was struck by the idea of this geological oddity serving as a spiritual place, and then as the building material for new towns like Longview, Washington.

  Above: ‘Coffin Rock’ by Paul Kane, based on sketches the artist made in 1847. ‘We encamped for the night near Coffin Rock, much against the inclination of my men, whose superstition would have led them to avoid such a place. This rock gets its name from its being the place in which the Indians deposit their dead’ (Kane, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America, Courier Dover Publications, 1925, 137).

  I didn’t want the destruction of Mount Coffin and native people like the Cowlitz to serve some cheap fictional purpose. I wasn’t interested in the land as a place haunted by vengeful spirits. I was drawn to the significance of Mount Coffin, as it was perceived for hundreds of years before its disruption, as a spiritual place. Delphine comes from a tradition of faith in a spirit world which can be visited, and from which certain people can return. Her home is situated at spiritual crossroads between living and dead beings, honored by her grandmother’s rituals. It’s a peaceful connection to the real history of the land. The disruptive change that unsettles these spirits is not the destruction of the rock, but a collective loss of memory. Mount Coffin is itself a ghost, an absence.

  There are big landmarks in the area but the construction I found interesting was Longview. The town didn’t develop naturally. It was planned as carefully as a single structure might be, after its founders conquered a few engineering challenges. Longview was assembled to be a model city. The founders had financial investments in the area and a town made sense, so they created one. Modest in style but ostentatious in its intent.

  Left to right: Two vintage advertisements for Longview, Washington. The first, taken from a 1926 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, promises ‘An Entire City Developed by the same Principles which Govern the Planning and Building of a Modern Factory.’ The second, from 1924, proclaims it ‘THE CITY PRACTICAL THAT VISION BUILT,’ ‘[l]ocated in the heart of the Pacific Northwest with its abundant undeveloped resources, in one of the most rapidly growing sections of that great empire’.

  JC: I’d like to ask you a question about your latest book, Astoria – but here we have to tread carefully so as not to give away (too m)any spoilers! Astoria focuses on the character of Ethel, picking up after she leaves Skillute in Knock Knock following a life-changing event. Without giving too much away, can you talk a little about the character’s state of mind at the beginning, and during the course of Astoria, and the transformation she undergoes?

  SPM: Ethel Sanders is a major character from Knock Knock. In the novel she faces a personal catastrophe and decides to make a drastic change to her life. Afterward the novel continues, following another set of characters.

  Astoria picks up where we left off with Ethel. Actually, we back up just a bit, and for the first time you see what Ethel was doing in Skillute while her friends Beverly and Marietta were carrying out their nefarious plan.

  The first draft of Astoria began exactly where we last saw Ethel in Knock Knock. We just hit the road with Ethel at the wheel. My editor suggested backing up enough to give readers unfamiliar with the novel more insight into Ethel’s life in Skillute. (A reader can enjoy any one of these books without having to read the others, but anyone who follows the entire cycle will find overlapping action from different points of view and recurring images that fit together in an interesting way. To make sure Astoria worked as a stand-alone, I needed to offer a glimpse into the nightmare Ethel is trying to escape.)

  I’m not going to say how much of Astoria is psychological or supernatural. It’s more fun and interesting for the reader to figure it out. I will say that Ethel is at the breaking point when her new journey begins. She’s attempting what many of us consider at moments of crisis. She’s casting off her identity for a shot at freedom. This part of the story brought to mind some famous female characters ditching their old lives, from Marion Crane in Psycho to Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House. The escape is exhilarating, but we don’t know where our heroine will end up.

  Long Beach, Washington is featured in Knock Knock as one of Ethel’s favorite childhood places. This is her destination. Then, for reasons I won’t give away, she decides on Astoria, Oregon as a hiding place. I’ve wanted to create a scene like the one on the Astoria-Megler Bridge ever since I read Dostoevsky’s The Double. This book gave me the chance to delve into the idea of the double and what it might mean to a woman whose identity is far from stable.

  JC: In addition to works by Dostoevsky, O’Connor and Jackson, was there anything else in particular that inspired you when it came to writing the books in The Skillute Cycle? I ask this, partly because you have in the past mentioned the influence of a particular Thai film that inspired a portion of Knock Knock. Having an interest in Asian cinema I would love to know the title of that film! Is Asian horror cinema a field you find particularly interesting, disturbing and/or compelling? And are there any other particular horror writers, either in the mainstream and/or small presses, whose work you especially enjoy and would like to recommend to our readers?

  SPM: When I first began to write Knock Knock, I lived in Seattle. My friend Scott McGough, a fantasy writer and film buff, had recommended the work of Takashi Miike, Kim Jee-Woon, and Park Chan-wook. My husband and I rented from Scarecrow Video, which had a great collection of Asian horror. We bought an international DVD player because some of the titles weren’t yet available in North American format.

  After watching Audition, I was soon hooked on both psychological and supernatural foreign films. I wasn’t bothering with American horror by this time. Alien and Jaws had long ago lost their allure in endless franchises, and most American horror was just teen gore. I became a fan of the Korean films A Tale of Two Sisters, Acacia, Memories of Murder, and Tell Me Something. I watched quite a few Thai ghost stories; of these, I’d especially recommend The Unseeable, directed by Wisit Sasanatieng.

  Japanese horror really struck a chord, and led me to the fiction of Koji Suzuki. I’d go so far as to say that the films Ringu and Ju-on changed my life as a storyteller. They scared the hell out of me, something that hadn’t happened in years. It was refreshing.

  The kind of horror I became interested in required the viewer to share an intimacy and familiarity with the subject. Hitchcock liked to introduce something inexplicable or vaguely disturbing amid the mundane details of every day life. If you believe where you are, if you recognize it and feel in control of it, estrangement occurs naturally when a weird element is added. This is a truth Hollywood producers specializing in ‘high concept’ may have forgotten. If you start out crazy, there’s no suspense and you have nowhere to go. If you start with three little girls, who are restless during a grade-school hygiene film, and you imagine how they might respond to another girl’s description of her mother’s pregnancy, you have a real world in which a creepy legend might wreak havoc.

  Around this time, I was trying to talk with my friends about the films I liked, and they were letting me know horror wasn’t their thing. So I started a blog, Shock Room, where I could share the films with a mainstream audience and where I could explore the genre. The blog gradually expanded to include novels, anthologies, and story collections, but its mission is the same. I’m not a critic; I’m an enthusiast. I try to share the work I find most provocative and exciting, and the emphasis is on story structure.

  My first impulse with Knock Knock had been to introduce a city dweller, Lydia, among the unfriendly residents of a small town, an idea later reinforced by the Thai film Nang Nak (directed by Nonzee Nimibutr from a screenplay by Wisit Sasanatieng). But as my novel grew I realized I wanted to know the small town residents just as well as the city dweller. Nang Nak, one of many adaptations of a famous ghost tale, receded as an influence, although I used a few of its minor elements, e.g., looking through a window to see the true nature of another being.

  The section of Knock Knock about Lydia and her husband is still informed by the popular Thai legend of a pregnant bride left among hostile villagers when her husband goes to war. But my story took on a life of its own once I knew who Lydia was and why she came to Skillute. Her journey is subsequent to the story of the three little girls who share an oath in the woods, and it’s woven into a larger, more complex history.

  While sampling Pseudopod a few years ago, I heard a story by Simon Strantzas and it blew me away. Around the same time, I started collecting anthologies. I was amazed. Glen Hirshberg, Reggie Oliver, Lynda E. Rucker, Steve Duffy, and Nicholas Royle demonstrated without doubt that horror fiction had become much broader and deeper since the last time I’d spent money on it. I added to my to-read literary list a lot of classic and modern horror. So I was educating myself while attempting to revise a novel rooted in the genre.

  The writers I’ve mentioned are ones I recommend, along with John Langan and Laird Barron. I’m also interested in the writing of Anna Taborska, Rosalie Parker, and Barbara Roden. I advise readers to sample anthologies and follow the trail wherever it leads. There’s something for everyone in horror fiction today, and these writers are at the top of their game. I’d recommend them to anyone who likes fiction, not just genre fiction.

  JC: While your next Skillute novella looks set to conclude the current cycle, do you think you might return to the town and its inhabitants at some point? Or do you have other plans and projects on the horizon?

  SPM: The final book of the cycle is In the Light, which is about Henry and Alicia Colquitt and the girl, Ruthie, who appears in the epilogue to Knock Knock. This one takes place in 2013, so we’ll see what’s happened since the events of Knock Knock and Astoria. If another Skillute story occurs to me, at some point, I could return to the setting. It’s certainly alive in my imagination. At the moment I don’t have plans to carry on with Skillute after In the Light is published in early 2014.

  There are three book-size ideas in my head. One is about a murderous woman and her family. Another is about a strange girl raised by parents who can’t stand one another. And the one I’ll most likely begin writing as soon as The Skillute Cycle ends is a tale of ambition, greed, and murder set in a rapidly changing city. That’s about all I can reveal right now. This fall I’m co-editing an anthology and revising a few short stories. If any of them are any good, I’ll submit them to magazines in the coming months. Keeping my fingers crossed.

  JC: S.P. – thank you for your time!

• LIVE GIRLS! THEATER - http://lgtheater.org/2010/08/miskowski/

  S.P. Miskowski
  Published: August 16, 2010
  S.P. Miskowski
  The world premiere of Miskowski’s Emerald City runs March 9 – April 2! Tickets still available!

  S.P. Miskowski graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. The same year she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for playwriting. Since then UW, Youth Theatre Northwest, Seattle Theatre Project, New City Theater, New Image, Northwest Actors Studio and Mae West Festival have produced her plays. A Contemporary Theatre’s FirstACT program and New City Theater have commissioned her, and she has been invited to workshop plays at Asylum Theatre and at GEVA in Rochester. Watusi, a coming-of-age story about a girl living in Decatur, Georgia in the mid-1960s, was included in the Cherry Lane Alternative reading series in New York City. Her play about cyberbullying, my new friends (are so much better than you), was nominated for the 2009 American Theatre Critics Association/ Steinberg New Play Award. Published by The Absent Willow Review, Identity Theory, The Stranger, Horror Bound Online Magazine, Other Voices, Fine Madness, Black Ice and other journals, Miskowski has won two Swarthout prizes and received an NEA fellowship for short fiction.

  —————–

  Where did the idea for Emerald City come from?
  The idea was sparked by a conversation with Artistic Director Meghan Arnette about ongoing cultural changes in Seattle. We didn’t set out to create a play on the subject, but we found that our views of the city were similar and were shared by many other long-term residents. The more people I’ve talked with the more I confirmed that a strong love-hate attitude prevails. Where there is conflict, you find drama. Soon the characters began to tell me their feelings about the city, and the play started to take shape.

  What is your favorite moment in the play?
  Tina is a typical Seattleite. Transplanted from the southwest, Tina came to the city with a lot of emotional baggage. She has been trying to heal her broken heart while harboring hopes and dreams out of proportion with reality. She is in denial about her pain and disappointment. While the landscape is in constant flux around her, Tina is unable to make some much-needed changes to her personal and professional life. Her underlying frustration leaks out in the form of hateful online comments about a neighbor. Then, at a crucial point in the play, Tina loses all control. I find the ensuing rush of honest emotion to be quite liberating and funny.

  Who is your current playwright talent crush?
  Ki Gottberg and Kelleen Conway Blanchard. These playwrights have great wit and inimitable voices. Every time I see their work I make a resolution to write better plays!

  What advice would you give to aspiring playwrights?
  Write plays and stage them. Join a theater company, or start your own company. No one knows what will work on stage until you try it out. Don’t be discouraged by failure, it is a necessary part of every artist’s life. Keep working.

  What kind of theater do you love?
  My favorite kind of theater takes for granted the intelligence of the audience, and doesn’t pander. I have an intense dislike for plays that tell the audience what to think, or that display all of their ideas on the surface where they’re easy to see. Great writing has ideas built into the marrow. Great writing has elements that are mysterious and open to interpretation. Great writing offers us characters that lie to themselves and to the audience. It is up to the viewer to decide what is real and what the play is about.

  What are you currently working on?
  I am revising a horror novel about mother-daughter relationships. The story is set in Washington State, and begins when three girls take a strange oath in the woods. They inadvertently cross paths with an entity that has been waiting a long time to find the proper vehicle for escape.

  Outside of theater, what are you really into right now?
  My current passion is horror (fiction and films). I write reviews and interviews at my reader blog Shock Room Horror, which is published online at the Seattle P-I site.

  Horror is the only popular genre that takes us to the heights and depths of human longing. Horror expresses our core fear of mortality better than any other genre.

  Do you have a favorite and least favorite word?
  My favorite word is “work,” because it’s what I love. My least favorite word is “favorite,” because every time I hear it my mind goes blank.

  Is there a question you would like to see posed to playwrights featured in future spotlights?
  Yes. I would ask: If no one came to see your work would you keep writing, and why or why not?

• S.P. Miskowski Website - https://spmiskowski.wordpress.com

  S.P. Miskowski is a three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Swarthout Award. Her M.F.A. is from the University of Washington. Her stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, Black Static, Other Voices, Identity Theory, and Strange Aeons as well as in the anthologies Haunted Nights, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, October Dreams 2, Autumn Cthulhu, Cassilda’s Song, The Hyde Hotel, Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, Tales from a Talking Board, and Looming Low. Her books are available from the following publishers:

• The Shirley Jackson Awards Website - https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/2012/07/12/charles-tan-interviews-s-p-miskowski/

  Charles Tan interviews S. P. Miskowski
  July 12, 2012
  S.P. Miskowski is the author of the Shirley Jackson Awards nominated novel Knock Knock.

  First off, what was the most challenging aspect when it came to writing Knock Knock?

  The most challenging aspect was establishing the point of view that would work best. When I found the point of view the story opened up for me.

  The first draft of Knock Knock was about a young couple coming to live in a small town in Washington State and falling under a malignant, possibly supernatural influence. The husband had relatives in this rural town and was content to live there temporarily. The wife (Lydia) was pregnant, missed the city, and felt trapped by circumstance. The early draft alternated between third person omniscient and third person limited (Lydia).

  This approach was never quite satisfying. I wanted to look more closely and intimately at the town and its inhabitants. I wanted to do more than catch glimpses of them from the perspective of an outsider. Lydia was a bit of a snob. She had a tendency to reduce and caricature the country people she met. All along I thought there was a deeper story hidden in the lives of the town’s residents. Eventually I would also discover Lydia’s real connection to the town.

  I tried looking at the interior world of a resident. This was better. It provided a contrast, and I ended up with the story of Ethel, a woman who didn’t want to have a child. I wrote a whole draft of the novel following Ethel. That was too bleak for me! I started longing for another contrast. And I wondered what it was that made Ethel afraid to have a child.

  Considering Ethel’s friends Beverly and Marietta as they might have been in grade school gave me the idea of a childhood oath, a bit of foolish magic that prompted an uncontrollable entity. The more I wrote about these three girls the more I wanted to see them advance through several decades. How does the girl become the woman? How does the oath haunt each of the girls?

  In each chapter I took a different character and adopted third person limited point of view. We see the town from all of these vantage points. In this way I was able to cover many years and changes in a novel that is 300 pages long instead of 700 or 800. I hope the shifting perspective allows complexity and subtlety in a book where I am not doing extraordinary things with language. I think the novel is both straightforward and layered.

  How different was writing a novel from writing short stories and plays? Did the latter influence the former (and vice versa)?

  I began my writing life with short stories and had quite a few stories in literary magazines before I turned to drama. Theater was a lark. I took it up out of a desire for camaraderie in the creative process. I stayed because the theater artists I met were wonderful people with a lot of talent and wit, and because the form was such a challenge.

  In novels and short stories you can cheat a little if you want. You can show for a while and then tell. You can let the reader know the ideas and themes without sounding ridiculous. On stage this hardly ever works. Unless you’re deconstructing you have to strive to build your ongoing ideas into the structure of the play. You have to use repetition, juxtaposition, contrast. Having characters stand around discussing the play’s ideas will be deadly unless you’re Tom Stoppard and it’s a comedy about people who discuss ideas.

  The discipline required to write drama, therefore, was good practice. Sometimes I got it right and sometimes I failed, but the struggle was worthwhile. I think my short stories are better for it. In a short story I’m now less apt to pontificate than I was in my twenties. I trust the reader to figure out what the story is about, if that matters to her.

  Novel writing seemed so daunting that I never expected to tackle it. Then I encountered a place, an imaginary town where people construct their lives around local myths and personal fears. This place required a novel in order to expand and take on the nuances I wanted it to have. So without knowing exactly how to write a novel I pursued the story and made changes as I went along.

  Last week I finished a novella related to Knock Knock. It’s fairly complex for a novella. Yet it took a fraction of the time to write. I knew the characters well and I knew from the beginning it was crucial to establish the point of view that could sustain the book. So I gave it a lot of thought before I started, and the writing took less time than I expected.

  Ultimately, the writing process is largely solitary whether you’re writing a novel, a short story, or a play. A play or a novel is a long haul. If you’re writing a play that long haul is punctuated by moments when you gather with charming, delightful people and read the script out loud. That’s fun. Then you have to go away again and write the next draft. So the nuts and bolts are slightly different, but there is no way around the solitude. You are alone in a room inventing a world.

  What’s the appeal of horror for you?

  Horror is merely an extra layer on literary fiction. It is the acknowledgment, by the author, that mortality is horrifying. The idea that we must die and everyone we love must die. I think horror is a perfectly reasonable response to that.

  For years I read more general fiction and was vaguely dissatisfied. What I found appealing was fiction that people usually labeled dark or strange. Flannery O’Connor’s work is too easily dismissed as moralistic. Whatever her personal beliefs, her fiction is often marvelously ambiguous and edged with an awareness that we are all playing for time in an uncertain universe.

  I always liked strange writing, even if it was non-fiction and came from a place and time that was foreign to me (Thomas de Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” for example.) Editors and directors have always said that my stories and plays are dark and strange. So embracing horror is nothing more than recognizing that what I have to say, and how I say it, is often dark, even when it’s funny.

• Nightmare - https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-s-p-miskowski/

  Interview: S.P. Miskowski
  by LISA MORTON

  PUBLISHED IN JAN. 2018 (ISSUE 64) | 4029 WORDS

  Three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee S.P. Miskowski was raised in Decatur, Georgia, but later moved to the Pacific Northwest. After receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, she seemed poised for a career as a writer of mainstream fiction (she cites Flannery O’Connor as an early influence), but instead found her way into the horror genre. She debuted with Knock Knock, the first of a series of books set in the fictional town of Skillute.

  Since then, she has provided acclaimed short fiction for such anthologies as Haunted Nights, The Madness of Doctor Caligari, October Dreams 2, Autumn Cthulhu, Looming Low, and Cassilda’s Song. In the latter half of 2017, she published her first collection, Strange is the Night, and a new novel, I Wish I Was Like You, and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly for both. She and her husband, game writer and novelist Cory Herndon, recently moved to Canada.

  While still at college, you edited a small-press magazine. How did that evolve your own writing?

  This was a tiny magazine I edited and published quarterly with a friend for about four years. But the slush pile was astounding. At the height of the magazine’s popularity we received about a hundred stories each month. Reading fiction from writers all over the country—all over the world—gave me a new sense of what was out there. I was able to perceive the writing world beyond my own efforts and the efforts of my classmates. Reading the slush pile as an editor sharpened my preferences. After a while I developed an awareness of what I craved as a reader, and what I was tired of seeing. I applied this to my own stories—what was necessary, and what I could reasonably expect a reader to assume. I came to trust the reader to make certain leaps, fill in gaps in an imaginative way without being led and told everything all the time.

  Many horror readers first became aware of your work with Knock Knock, a ghost story that’s the first installment in your Skillute Cycle (Knock Knock, Delphine Dodd, Astoria, and In the Light). Even though the fictional town of Skillute is located in the Pacific Northwest, these books have a Southern Gothic edge. What defines Southern Gothic for you?

  Southern Gothic has a sinister undercurrent. The combination of places which are broken down or falling down, or informed by shameful history, and people who somehow still make their way despite the growing detritus and redundancy, there’s a sense of unease and inevitable collapse. I think of this as a thin line between the material world and whatever life force propels individuals. Southern Gothic focuses on this line, and you get a powerful understanding of what drives people, so there’s both a social and psychological awareness—and this might be stated or it might be presented ironically through juxtaposition and understatement. I think I’ve applied this way of seeing a community, and the forces shaping people in that community, to the Skillute Cycle. Each character is a unique person, but no one escapes the influence of the community’s history. And if the history is brutal and horrific, this comes out in some form in every individual.

  In an older interview you said, “The Skillute Cycle (Knock Knock, Delphine Dodd, Astoria, and In the Light) was a challenge to write. Throughout the project I felt slightly out of my element, creating a town with a complex history and mythology.” What about that made you feel out of your element? What special challenges did creating a fictitious town’s history bring?

  Well, when people who haven’t lived in the south try to imagine it, they think largely in terms of rural settings. In fact there are complex, thriving, urban areas of the south. My parents were not happy living on the farms where they grew up. They wanted out. They dreamed of cities and opportunities. We lived in an old, slightly rundown part of Decatur, Georgia. The houses there were fixer-uppers, with broken windows and ceilings lying in pieces on the floor. My dad made our house livable; he practically built it. There was a feeling of reaching upward, to more freedom of choice and more prosperity.

  We visited my grandparents and aunts and uncles on weekends and holidays. My real life was just outside of Atlanta, and this rural landscape we visited was exotic to me as a child. My country relatives considered me a city kid. This had as much to do with my being the first generation to go to racially integrated schools, as it had to do with where we lived. We were quite different in our views, and at a certain point—probably near the beginning of middle school—I rejected that rural southern world. It wasn’t feeding my soul. It seemed to me an ancient and self-degrading society, and I broke away.

  So, when I decided to write a book set in a fairly isolated location, I had to dig deep to recall what that isolation felt like. And to admit how deeply it could alter a person’s point of view, I had to recall some negative things about my family. Because the Skillute Cycle is, in part, about these limited perspectives and how people who feel they can’t escape them create a worldview to explicate those limitations. It’s about digging one’s heels in and self-justifying, which is something we all do. But in an isolated place like Skillute, defining self as part of the landscape fits right in with the ghosts arising from the history of the town. The challenge was to imagine such ghosts, to fill in the blanks in the kind of place I had rejected earlier in my life.

  There seems to be a growing amount of horror and weird fiction set in the Pacific Northwest, especially Seattle. Is a Pacific Northwest Gothic subgenre being birthed?

  The Pacific Northwest has an eeriness I associate with cloud formations. You don’t get the wide, open sky of the desert or the plains, or the vast horizon of an ocean. Clouds form a weirdly low “ceiling” here, close and dark. There is this gray canopy most of the fall and winter, and even into the spring. More than the rain, this dark, low sky defines the place. It isn’t a very treacherous or difficult landscape. It’s more somber and moody. The people are quiet and self-reliant—because you never know when the bridge or the power or the ferry might shut down, and you need to be ready. Even in the city, you need to be ready to hunker down with candles and friends and someone who can play a musical instrument.

  You’ve noted that many of your stories are about characters who rely on “the illusion of control.” Isn’t that almost a requirement for characters in a horror story? Are your characters just perhaps likelier to hang onto that illusion for longer?

  I would say many of my characters are, in fact, vaguely aware of their shortcomings, and they fear being put to the test. They don’t necessarily admit a fear of loss of control, but there are signs of it everywhere in their lives, stray distress signals. And yes, this is something we find in horror fiction—the barely concealed fear of what is out there, the false bravado of the person ill-equipped to face what’s coming.

  How do you see your work fitting into the “weird fiction” category?

  My writing, for the most part, fits a category I would describe as fiction of unease or growing suspense and distress. I just finished reading the Joan Didion memoir Blue Nights, which is about the death of her daughter but also, in a greater sense, about the gradually accumulating unease as Didion slips from middle age into the next phase of life, a phase of strange losses—people, places, strength, language—and a new knowledge of mortality as a certainty, a physical reality replacing the mere anxiety and anticipation of middle age. Suddenly she fears the moment when she must stand up after sitting for a long time in a folding chair. This simple act, and the possibility that she will fail at it, consumes her thoughts.

  As a college student I was enamored of Virginia Woolf’s writing. Not so much the stream-of-consciousness style but all that it implied—this space between the world in which we act and speak, and our innermost impulses and responses to things we never discuss. This is what Didion was trying to get at in her memoir. I’m still fascinated with the amount of ourselves we keep buried, and in most of my work I try to locate these buried layers of existence. This is probably what (at least partially) defines my work as “weird fiction.”

  In 2013 you did an “H-Word” editorial for Nightmare, “In Search of Horrible Women,” in which you said this: “We don’t accept women as complete and fallible. People who are infallible or unassailable can’t be real. How can they demand rights? How can they insist on taking charge of their own bodies and actions?” If women in fiction can be presented as fallible, then can fiction affect real social change?

  It can, but (I think) only by chance. While I believe what Ian McEwan says about fiction building empathy, I don’t think a writer has absolute control over how and where and when any of her ideas will be received. And certainly not over how those ideas will be interpreted. One of my favorite episodes of the old series The Day the Universe Changed demonstrated how the same social and scientific concepts of an era fed into vastly different political movements. You may design a really great story promoting social justice, but it may be read in a context you didn’t anticipate.

  More reliable is the writer’s personal worldview, if it plays out in the work at a subconscious level. For example, as a teenage fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, I took to heart his admonition not to create disposable characters. His opinion was that throwaway or minor characters in fiction underscored our tendency to think of some real people as minor characters. That idea is fundamental to everything I write. You won’t hear one of my characters making a plea for compassion and justice but you will get a sense that every character comes from somewhere and is on his or her own journey, however small a part they may play in the story as a whole. Everyone has significance, if not in this story then somewhere else.

  In an earlier interview, you talked about your affection for Asian horror cinema and said that the Japanese films “Ringu and Ju-on changed my life as a storyteller.” How, exactly?

  Since I don’t hold any specific beliefs regarding an afterlife, I could never quite understand the purpose of a ghost lingering in time and space. But I’d written quite a few stories about revenge—usually petty revenge on a small scale, awful little acts perpetrated by people who feel unrecognized or cast aside. This is one of my obsessions. I can only recall committing one such act, and it was painfully small and inconsequential, but I’ve always wondered how someone justifies doing real harm. I was raised to think seriously about the possible consequences of careless actions, and it’s always astonishing to me when someone lashes out without thinking. Even more shocking is a step-by-step plan for vengeance. The angry spirits portrayed in my favorite Japanese horror films opened up the possibility of a subliminal connection between the living and the dead, a craving for violent expression that can cross material boundaries. It opened my imagination to the idea of the ghost as an expression of the same energy that allows someone to harm another person.

  You’ve provided work for a number of themed anthologies. How do you transform an existing theme into an S.P. Miskowski story?

  Usually I do a lot of research and reading to prepare, especially if I’m unfamiliar or only slightly familiar with the theme. Joe Pulver has invited me to submit stories to a number of anthologies whose theme I found intriguing and understood fairly well, but not as well as I wished. So I did the research. For The Madness of Dr. Caligari, for example, I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari quite a few times, first paying very close attention and then letting the film play while I checked in and out, viewing casually. I read essays about it, and about the culture of the Weimar Republic. Then I set all of it aside and tried to forget about it. My original intention, to build a story in the time and place where the film was produced, gave way quickly to what interested me most about the film—the nested narratives and the deeply unreliable narrator whose sanity keeps wavering.

  My story, “Somnambule” developed organically from the crossbreeding of these elements with my childhood memory of a woman who was abused by her husband. There was such urgency in the tales she told my mother, and at the same time there was something else wrong with what she said. She wasn’t telling the whole story, and I always wondered what was going on around the edges of the violence that played such a big part in her life.

  To answer your question, I prepare and prepare, and then I let what I’ve read work on my imagination and my experiences without judging or forcing how the theme plays out—at least until I have a first draft and can start looking at the story more objectively and structurally.

  [Full disclosure: I recently co-edited with Ellen Datlow the anthology Haunted Nights, which includes S.P.’s story “We’re Never Inviting Amber Again”] I’ve read “We’re Never Inviting Amber Again” probably almost ten times (including a couple of very slightly different drafts), and one of the things that fascinates me about the story is that it’s nearly impossible to define what makes it so creepy—it’s like a magic trick that I can’t quite figure out. With something like that story, how do you build that beneath-the-surface dread in—do you start with a situation and then work on the emotional context, or the other way around?

  Thanks very much. That means a lot from a storyteller of your talent and accomplishments. I appreciate it. And I’m not absolutely sure, but I think this is an effect that comes from making lots of notes that are not used overtly in the story. When a story is finished, I probably have almost an equal amount of material “left over” in my notebooks. I know more about the characters and their lives and relationships than I spell out explicitly. And I suspect these “secrets” break through the surface of the narrative from time to time, giving it (I hope) depth and ballast.

  You’ve recently received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly for both the collection Strange is the Night and your novel I Wish I Was Like You. The review for the collection referred to you as a “rising star.” Did that feel strange, given how long you’ve been writing?

  It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s a long life when you begin telling stories as a toddler and go on writing stories through school, college, graduate school, and beyond. It seems like a long time, but there are several segments to it. I wrote stories and poems as a child and as a student. I was on a traditional path, with a collection and a novel and a respected agent in New York, when I threw it aside to study and work in theatre. For about fifteen years I only wrote plays—no stories at all. I had an MFA. I had day jobs as a teacher and then as an editor. Most of my plays were produced by brave artistic directors at little fringe companies in Seattle. I was fortunate enough to work with very talented people, but I grew more and more frustrated with the writing itself. I didn’t like what I was doing. And it was around 2010 that I came back to short stories, this time with those Japanese films informing my imagination, and with a powerful sense that I needed to work hard to catch up. I could never get back to where I was when I took that detour into theatre, but I wanted to see how far I could push myself, how deep I could go. Not commercially, per se, but in terms of my ability to tell a story that mattered to the reader.

  Near the beginning of I Wish I Was Like You, the protagonist (Greta) tells us that she “wasn’t even a huge Nirvana fan,” and yet the novel’s title seems to be a nod to a line from the Nirvana song “All Apologies.” Did that lyric just happen to fit the novel too perfectly, or is there a little intentional clue to Greta’s character there?

  It occurred to me early on that the swagger with which I wanted to endow the character’s voice could not be the swagger of, say, Philip Marlowe. His experiences were not hers; his voice was not hers. I’ve read detective and crime novel pastiches that employ the rhythms of the world-weary private eye, and some of them don’t work because they’re placed in a different universe. I knew my character came from a dreary suburban background and I wanted her to have a voice and outlook equivalent to that of Marlowe, but not an imitation. I aimed for this downbeat, slightly depressed teen attitude. And like most of us as teens, she denies a lot of things that are perfectly obvious. It creates an ironic tension because she’s aware but she isn’t always correct. This song is her song whether she admits it or not. “I wish I was like you—easily amused.” She’s a wise-ass. She rejects so much of the world and yet she longs to be part of it, and this longing continues to drive her even after death.

  One of my favorite lines in I Wish I Was Like You is, “No wonder suburban kids crave violence.” Has that always been true?

  Yes. I’m going to commit to this and say yes. I think the more boredom you make kids deal with, the more trouble you’re asking for, and the suburbs are nothing if not boring. They lack the cultural stimulation of the city and the possibility of physical adventure in the country. This isn’t a new view. Look at the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Read the stories of John Cheever. The main problem is, you move to the suburbs to get away from something, and that thing is life. You seek a calmer setting, a place where you can sit down and breathe and relax. Well, that’s why I moved to the suburbs, anyway. But I’m middle-aged. It isn’t a dreamy place for teenagers. No matter how busy they are, they can still find time to blow things up and set things on fire and generally act out—because they’re experiencing the frenzy of youth in the most boring place imaginable. Yes. I’ll stick with that.

  While reading I Wish I Was Like You, you describe Greta’s murder right up front (this is not a spoiler!), but she examines her own corpse as she drinks and smokes. In fact, that wasn’t the only time in the book that I wondered if she was actually dead. Did you intend to have your readers thinking that?

  My intention was to make the knife-edge between life and death as sharp as possible. I wanted her to behave quite naturally. It should all be nonchalant, with a sort of hardening into the situation as she goes along. She doesn’t know what she can do until she does it. Especially in those early moments of figuring out what the hell is going on. Believe me, if I’m wrong about an afterlife and I come back, the first thing I’m going to do is take up smoking again.

  I love Lee Todd Butcher, the failed crime novelist within the novel. Was he based on anyone in particular?

  He started out as a composite of three writers I’ve known. Then, one day, he got up off the sofa and went out for a drink. Lee Todd is his own guy.

  Lee Todd describes the motive for writing thusly: “The thing about fiction . . . and I don’t care what genre we’re talking, whether it’s mainstream, or sci-fi, or porn, to be convincing you’ve got to feel the urge to write it, right down in your gut.” Is this a macho washed-up mystery writer talking, or do you share that view?

  My view is more generous than his. If someone tells me he wants to write a book, I say, “Write it.” Try your hand at writing. You’ll work hard or you won’t and the work will turn out to be interesting or it won’t. You’ll stick with it or you won’t. None of these things are of any consequence in the grand scheme of things. This is where Lee Todd and I agree. Writing is not the end of the universe unless it’s your universe and you love it. You may find out that you have the engine that keeps going and creates fiction. Or you’ll get sick of the process and try some other field of endeavor. That’s fine. I don’t believe everyone can write fiction, but I don’t believe it’s my job to decide who writes it and who doesn’t. Lee Todd feels a desire to tell people bluntly whether or not they’ve got the right stuff. I tend to be wary of self-appointed gatekeepers while admitting that they may be partially right.

  You once suggested that the increased sadism and violence in the horror films of the early 2000s was due to more awareness of real-life horrors like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. What horror is coming out of the current state of the country?

  Yes, I think I said the growing fascination with torture expressed a collective need to understand what our leaders were doing in our name, and why. The madness and inexplicability of it demanded exploration through our most popular forms of “entertainment.” Today’s era is about paranoia. It’s about lies and whisper campaigns, racism, casual violence, and ignoring the suffering of other people. This will undoubtedly feed into the horror genre with more films like Green Room and Get Out. There’s a strong social undercurrent to even the most intimate horror originating in the U.S. I expect this will be the case for years to come. Having a real-life monster at the helm makes horror the predominant genre of our time.

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/spmiskowski/ -

  S.P. Miskowski
  S.P. Miskowski
  3rd degree connection3rd
  Fiction Writer
  Self Employed University of Washington
  Canada 219 219 connections
  InMail Send an InMail to S.P. Miskowski More actions
  S.P. Miskowski is a three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee. Her 2017 novel, I Wish I Was Like You, is a nominee for a Bram Stoker Award and This Is Horror Award. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, Black Static, Identity Theory, Strange Aeons, and Eyedolon Magazine as well as in the anthologies Haunted Nights, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, October Dreams 2, Autumn Cthulhu, Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, Tales from a Talking Board, and Looming Low. She's written two non-fiction 'H Word' columns for Nightmare Magazine. Her books are available from Omnium Gatherum and JournalStone/Trepidatio.

  In 2016 Dim Shores published Miskowski's story, "Stag in Flight," as one of their limited edition chapbooks, with cover art and illustrations by Nick Gucker. Dunhams Manor Press published her novelette, Muscadines, as part of their hardcover series, with cover art and illustrations by Dave Felton.

  Show more Show more of S.P.’s summary
  Experience
  Self Employed
  Writer
  Company NameSelf Employed
  Dates Employed2010 – Present Employment Duration8 yrs
  Fiction writer.

  ArenaNet
  Copy editor
  Company NameArenaNet
  Dates Employed2006 – 2006 Employment Durationless than a year
  Contract assignment: Copy edited the game manual and official Prima strategy guide for Guild Wars: Factions.

  Education
  University of Washington
  University of Washington
  Degree NameMaster of Fine Arts
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1990 – 1993

  Activities and Societies: Received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships

Strange Is the Night
Publishers Weekly. 264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p110.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Strange Is the Night

S.P. Miskowski. JournalStone, $16.95 trade paper (252p) ISBN 978-1-945373-74-9

These 13 eerie stories (of which 10 are reprints) by rising star Miskowski (I Wish I Was like You) will thrill fans of clever horror. In "Ms. X Regrets Everything," a middle-aged woman at her parole hearing remembers a life wasted, drowned in blood, despair, and depravity. "Strange Is the Night" imagines the well-deserved fate of a cynical, caddish theater critic who attends a very strange stage production. The melancholy "The Second Floor" is about a successful playwright who revisits the Seattle home she shared with three others 18 years before, recalling the heartbreak and hope that resided there. "Animal House" and "Fur" explore animalistic tendencies. The heartrending, Kafkaesque "Stag in Flight" mines the unhappy, insular world of a mentally ill man and his ultimate release from it. Every story showcases Miskowski's versatility and gift with prose and taps into a dark, writhing undercurrent of palpable unease beneath the mundanity of everyday life. Uncanny and quietly menacing, these stories will transport readers, inviting them with crooked finger to confront, and even embrace, the shadowed corners of their own psyches. (Oct.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Strange Is the Night." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 110. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502652630/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a08e870b. Accessed 17 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652630

• Tor.com
  https://www.tor.com/2017/05/10/one-star-reviews-have-consequences-s-p-miskowskis-strange-is-the-night/
  Word count: 2946

  One-Star Reviews Have Consequences: S.P. Miskowski’s “Strange is the Night”
  Anne M. Pillsworth and Ruthanna Emrys
  Wed May 10, 2017 4:00pm 13 comments 1 Favorite [+]

  Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.

  Today we’re looking at S.P. Miskowski’s “Strange is the Night,” first published in 2015 in Joseph S. Pulver’s Cassilda’s Song anthology. Spoilers ahead.

  “A growl of thunder overhead and Pierce imagined the ceiling cracking open, his oblong, cumbersome body drawn upward, sucked out of his ergonomic chair into the ebony sky.”

  Summary

  It’s a dark and stormy night in Seattle, and Pierce is hard at work tapping out the two thousand words of his weekly theater review. In the paper’s warehouse office, only editor Hurley has a door to close. Everyone else packs into cubicles, making interoffice pranks only too easy. Someone’s just played one on Pierce, filling his screen with the headshot of a young actress he’s recently savaged. She visited his cramped apartment with pictures of her theatrical troupe, dressed in a gossamer gown and, no really, fairy wings: another artistic aspirant with more self-delusion than talent. Molly Mundy smelled of honey and lemon zest, constantly munching lemon drops. Pierce is glad he didn’t accept the one she offered from her chubby, moist hand, especially after her response to his doctored wine and groping assault was to vomit yellow goo on his hardwood floor.

  Well, he got her back by going to her performance and pinning her with the perfect descriptor: porcine. Hey, it’s not as if he hasn’t persevered through plenty of knocks himself, from a father who taught him to respond to bullying by toughening up, to losing a Berkeley teaching assistantship because oversensitive fools didn’t like the language in his thesis. But he spent six years in Daddy’s (luxurious) basement, writing plays far better than the hackneyed attempts of his contemporaries, yet going unproduced. Daddy finally kicked him out, and now he gets to be the critic, defender of artistic standards and scourge of hungry poseurs!

  Pierce’s theater-hating editor likes his approach, and the snark sells ads. Or so Pierce tells Ali Franco, the paper’s addled spiritualist, when she castigates him for his harsh approach. Of course she’s the one who put Mundy’s picture on his desktop. Pierce should encourage young artists, not tear them down. If he can’t do that, he should resign and follow his heart, finish his own plays, he’s forty-six years old, yet he writes like a middle-schooler with a grudge, blah blah blah. Fortunately their editor has confided to Pierce that he’ll fire Ali soon. Pierce only wishes he could fire the old hag himself.

  Pierce usually tosses weird promotional material, but today he’s gotten an intriguing invitation sealed with saffron wax. The wax bears a weird hieroglyph, probably the Tattered Performance Group’s logo. He decides to attend their play, Strange is the Night. He recognizes the line from Chambers’ King in Yellow mythos, which everyone is adapting these days. It should be fun to teach Tattered a lesson…

  On the way he stops at a coffee shop, where Ali Franco sits crying. What, has editor Hurley fired her without letting Pierce watch? She rushes past, eyes averted. Irritated to have missed Ali’s dismissal, Pierce heads for the Tattered Group’s warehouse stage. The cashier gives Pierce a complimentary glass of wine, which is surprisingly good. The plush lobby carpet’s gross, though, a “dense mush” of gold that seems to suck down his feet. And there are only two others in the lobby, older women with matching “C” brooches. They’re arguing about whether one must identify with the protagonist to care about a play. Pierce edges into a nearly-empty auditorium with a bare stage. His program, marked with that funky hieroglyph from the invitation, lists no cast or director.

  The house lights go down. Amber illumination descends from the flies, along with a spill of orange-yellow petals. Pierce mutters “Marmalade,” his tongue oddly clumsy. His eyes roll. He finds himself face down in something resin-sticky, burned with the heat of a hundred lamps, pin-prickles in his legs. Someone’s pouring hot liquid on his backside. “That’s enough honey,” someone says. “Turn him over. Let him see.”

  Pierce sees pale yellow light arcing over him–his own vomit. A suspended mirror shows his honey-smeared nakedness, strewn with petals, trembling. In his mind he composes his review, but the words sink into the cheap paper and disappear.

  Fat fingers dig into his shoulders, deep enough for the nails to scrape bone. Somewhere in the wings, Molly Mundy waits in her gossamer gown: giggling, patient, hungry.

  What’s Cyclopean: Everyone in this story has one word that can destroy them, whether “porcine” or “fired.” Meanwhile Pierce’s boss thinks himself quite the wordsmith for editing “in short” to “in brief.”

  The Degenerate Dutch: Pierce has strong opinions about all sorts of people, but reserves his chief contempt for people who think they might get somewhere in life. “Porcine” women with any sort of ambition are particularly contemptible. “Illiterate bloggers” also come in for derision.

  Mythos Making: The titular play, Strange is the Night, includes a number of quotes from The King in Yellow—or at least its publicity materials do.

  Libronomicon: Alfred Jarry was the rage when Pierce was in school. (Best-known play: Ubu Roi or The King.) Now everyone is doing stage adaptations of some dude named Robert Chambers.

  Madness Takes Its Toll: Pierce would, in fact, benefit from some therapy.

  Anne’s Commentary

  Ah ha ha ha. Here is one of my guilty pleasure microgenres, the CRITIC who gets his COMEUPPANCE. I definitely have a love-hate relationship with critics and criticism—a good review of my own work, with insightful comments, will make my day, and week, and a good chunk of my aeon; a bad review can ruin all of the above. Well, maybe not the aeon-chunk. I enjoy a great review I agree with and can have an ecstatic rant over one that pans a favorite. But best of all may be a truly radioactive panning of something I hate, liberally sprinkled with snark.

  And wow, have the number and variety of commentators grown in this the Internet Era. Was there not an innocent time when only the elite few critics held forth to large audiences, first via newspapers and magazines, then via TV and radio? The rest of us had to squee or carp en famille, or around the water cooler, or at most in mimeographed zines of dubious legibility. Or, like Howard and Friends, in snail mail missives.

  Those were the days of my two favorite fictional critics, George Sanders’ cobra-sleek Addison DeWitt in All About Eve and the insignificant of physique but powerful of (poison) pen Ellsworth Toohey of The Fountainhead. They dwarf poor Pierce in range of influence and self-awareness, but Pierce has venom as potent as theirs, just not the fangs to administer it efficiently. He has to choose weak prey, all those tragically hopeful/hopeless amateurs and ingenues. Only their hides are tender enough for his weak jaws to clamp onto, his tiny teeth to gnaw the death-dose in. Or rather, Pierce likes to think he delivers death-doses, yes, and with a single razor-honed word. Like porcine. I figure most of his targets survive his reviews, their dreams succumbing not to his quill but to the more pressing imperatives to pay rent and buy food more sustaining than instant ramen noodles.

  I don’t know. Maybe he shoots Molly Mundy dead with that porcine he’s so proud of. Maybe not — she’s still giggling at the story’s end, or he imagines she is. Pierce wanted to shoot her dead, though. Her and every impractical dreamer who reminds him of his distant father and unappreciative professors, of fellow students who got the plaudits and positions he craved, of the theatrical world that rejects his plays, over and over, preferring what is clearly inferior, because not by Pierce. He even got his theater critic job because the reigning critic quit and couldn’t find anyone else hungry enough to take her place. Ego-wound after ego-wound, which make his ego grow not sturdier but sicklier, inflamed with envy, feverish with stymied ambition. Swollen, fit to pop.

  Nope, Pierce can’t do, and he’s too mean to teach, so he criticizes in the spirit of a self-avenging angel. I could kind of pity him if that was all he did, but he also exploits the young women who come to him for a boost. It’s strongly implied that he slips Molly a date-rape drug. It’s stated outright that he glories in dismissing any ingenue desperate enough to sleep with him. Get out. Go. Caesar dismissing a thick-ankled dancing girl after first rolling his eyes over her performance and then copping a feel.

  That he does worse than write nasty reviews is necessary to justify the end he comes to. Still, I semi-agree with “Cam’s” companion in the theater lobby who argues that fiction can’t have emotional impact if no one identifies with the protagonist. I was semi-identifying with Pierce’s frustration until he spiked Molly’s drink. After that, I was done with him and more concerned for Ali Franco, a rather Trelawney-like sibyl, warning Pierce to mend his sophomorically vindictive fuming before it’s too late.

  The “Cam” mentioned above is short, no doubt, for Camilla. I’ll bet her friend, also wearing the diamante initial “C,” is Cassilda herself. Other references to the Chambers mythos are blatant, such as the saffron hieroglyph—Yellow Sign!—that Pierce receives, and the bits of Cassilda’s Song he vaguely remembers: “twin suns sink beneath the lake,” “strange is the night,” “Song of my soul, my voice is dead.” Others are subtler, like the peppering of yellow throughout: Molly’s lemon drops, crumbled saffron wax stuck in a keyboard, the bile-yellow of vomit, a glass of Pinot Grigio, jonquil-scented powder, whiffed urine, a gold carpet.

  That carpet! Curious how our last tale of a wronged woman’s revenge also featured floor covering like carnivorous foot-sucking vegetation. Does this figure forth some sort of male terror of pubic hair or the placenta? Or just of gross rugs?

  Sometimes my mind goes where no blogger’s has gone before, for good reason.

  Chambers-esque is the closing, whisking us from the dingy reality of Pierce’s world for a true theater of the weird, perhaps a door into Carcosa. That Pinot Grigio may come straight from the Yellow King’s vineyards. It’s a more potent mindbender than veterinary sedative in cheap Chardonnay—it opens Pierce’s eyes to amber illumination, a skewing ceiling of delicate gold chains and pulleys, a shower of orange-yellow petals. And honey, sticky as resin, poured hot over his naked body, because he is suddenly naked, splayed beneath a mirror, vomiting arcs of pale yellow light. Molly’s scent, both acquired and natural, has been described as honey-sweet. In the theater of the weird, Molly waits off-stage, giggling.

  I don’t think it’s really Molly, though. Whether Pierce is drugged to madness or transported to another plane, he’s obsessed her into the poster-child for all his objects of derision, all the victims of his weekly two thousand words. Had she/they deserved his critical flogging? Had he earned any right to administer it? Do desserts or rights even matter, or is selection to meet the King in tatters (gossamer) random?

  All I’m sure about is you shouldn’t open any invitation bearing the Yellow Sign. Yellow envelopes might be dangerous, too.

  When in doubt, recycle unread. Also, avoid one-star reviews. You never know Who the author may worship….

  Ruthanna’s Commentary

  Woe, woe to the blogger caught in a web of self-referential recursion as she attempts to review a story about the sudden but inevitable downfall of an un-virtuous reviewer. I shall make a noble attempt to do so without being drowned in honey or dismembered. At some point, because the advantage of a “reading” series over a “review” series is that I don’t have to stay on topic, I shall shift from trying to figure out what I think of this story to nattering on about theater.

  Or maybe I’ll start there. The King in Yellow, though usually encountered in script form, is a play—meant to be performed. Meant to enthrall a director who’ll cling to their sanity long enough to run auditions, who’ll stage Cassilda’s big scene with the perfect set and lighting, who’ll keep actors from self-destruction and techies from murder all through the run. So, much like any other play. Like Shakespeare and Ibsen, it must hang on the sacrifice and passion of people throwing themselves into an imagined world, and on the audience swept up in the search for catharsis. If King takes those emotional journeys to a deadly pinacle, it’s one that follows as logically from everyday theater as the Necronomicon does from realizing, after hours immersed in a good book, that you’ve forgotten to eat.

  The tragedy driving “Strange is the Night” is that you can become jaded to these wonders. And it is a tragedy, in the theatrical sense. Pierce may be a lousy human being. He may be a lousy artist, shielded by privilege and isolation from the lessons that would make his scripts sing. His sole dismal satisfaction may come from destroying (piercing) the dreams of others as his own have been destroyed. But his tragic flaw is his inability to seek anything in a play beyond its flaws—to allow himself to be pierced. At which point, making that piercing literal is the only reasonable revenge the universe can take. Actress Molly Mundy just happens to win the role of avenging fury. (Mundy = mundi = world? Or Mundy = Monday = Moon-day? Interesting name games here.)

  All of which would work better for me if Pierce didn’t also showcase the same misogynist flaws as so many other doomed horror narrators. If his central failing is meant to be one of art appreciation (and if we’re playing with Chambers, that’s more than sufficient to be lethal), why does he also need to be a fat-shaming twit? Why does he need to be the sort of guy who drugs ingenues to get laid, and then throws them out when they puke? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against smothering that kind of guy in honey and/or feeding him to elder gods. But so much of horror comes down to a dance-off between punishing women for sexual agency versus punishing men for being misogynist predators… and there must be more original ways to get yourself a starring role in a deadly performance. Right?

  But then there are the two ladies discussing kabuki and unsympathetic protagonists: “One identifies with a mask, a stereotype, if tradition prepares us for it.” There’s certainly plenty of tradition preparing us for Pierce’s stereotype.

  At first, I wanted a deeper connection between Pierce’s final curtain call and Chambers’s masterpiece. The references seem omnipresent but tenuous—a quote here, a mask there—unless there’s a honey-drowning scene beside the Lake of Haldi that I missed. But the more I think about it, the more Carcosa makes the story hang together. It’s no coincidence that the curtain’s rise is the first time that Pierce is impressed by anything. Perhaps The King in Yellow is the play that comes to you—with whatever force necessary—when all other theater has lost its ability to make an impression. Molly Mundy may be getting her hungry revenge, but she’s also making art. Whether it’s good art… well, we’d have to ask a reviewer.

  Next week, in Brian Hodge’s “The Same Deep Waters as You,” some bright minds decide that an animal whisperer is just the person to get in touch with the Deep Ones. You can find it in many anthologies including Lovecraft’s Monsters.

  Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” is now available from Macmillan’s Tor.com imprint. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Dreamwidth, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

  Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

• Unnerving
  https://www.unnervingmagazine.com/single-post/2017/08/08/Thorns-Thoughts-I-Wish-I-was-Like-You
  Word count: 583

  Review
  Unnecessary reading
  Thorn's Thoughts: I Wish I was Like You
  August 9, 2017

  |

  Mike Thorn

  S.P. Miskowski’s I Wish I Was Like You Explores the Writer’s Inner World

  Like many really good novels, S.P. Miskowski’s I Wish I Was Like You can’t easily be summarized in one sentence. If someone were to ask me “what is it about?”, I imagine I could competently outline the plot: After Greta’s washed-up crime-writing instructor Lee Todd viciously criticizes her fiction submission, she moves to Seattle and pursues a short-lived journalism career, before she’s murdered in a manner that’s assumed to be a Cobain-copycat suicide. Obviously, there’s more to it than that, but there’s the gist. But in terms of plot, this novel reads more as a deconstruction or a fun exegesis than as a simple transcription of Event A, followed by Event B, etc. The novel mixes up chronology and even point of view, peppering Lee Todd’s dogmatic writing rules throughout, before almost always coyly breaking said rules within the next handful of pages.

  So what kind of book is I Wish I Was Like You? Well, it’s a book with many thoughtfully considered attributes. It’s a bittersweet ode to a time and place (Seattle in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—the title itself is a line from Nirvana’s “All Apologies”); a tonally complicated study of the young and existentially anguished artist (Miskowski understands both the genuine pain and humor of this narrative); an intermittent ghost story; and above all (at least to this reviewer), it’s a book about writing.

  It could be in large part because I’m a writer myself, but this book had me frequently asking, “how the hell did she just do that?” More than once, I flipped back a few pages to re-read a passage or a section, trying to get a grasp of Miskowski’s amazing (not to mention complicated) tonal and narrative balance. Not only does this novel reflect frequently and insightfully on the writing process, but it also devotes serious space and energy to writers’ inner worlds. Executing a downright masterful demonstration of character voice, the author transcribes narrator Greta’s desperate, self-contradicting, funny, acerbic, and cynical reflections.

  I Wish I Was Like You is also deeply and evidently aware of genre and the ways in which it’s working. As I mentioned, it’s partially concerned with the conventions of ghost stories, but it’s also constantly toying with (and breaking down) the mechanics of crime and mystery narratives. And it doesn’t read anything like a customary work of “genre fiction” (whatever that might mean). If anything, Miskowski’s style falls somewhere in the space between, say, Zadie Smith and Kathe Koja.

  This is the second book from Journalstone that I’ve read this year (the first being Gwendolyn Kiste’s mind-blowing debut collection, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe). Based on these two titles alone, I feel confident saying this is a formidable and major press. After my first run-ins with Kiste and Miskowski’s work, I’m reminded of my initial encounters with the early line of books from Abyss, another publisher whose releases frequently stretched and challenged the limits of genre fiction. I look forward to following this press’s output for years to come.

• The Arkham Digest
  http://www.arkhamdigest.com/2015/01/review-skillute-cycle-by-sp-miskowski.html
  Word count: 990

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2015
  Review: Skillute Cycle by S.P Miskowski

  Enter Skillute, WA: a small, blue collar town that is pretty much ignored by outsiders. A rural black hole, a town that grabs ahold of you and doesn't let go. Men grow old and pass the time by drinking beer, and the women grow up and pass the time playing bingo and gossiping among one another. The town has some dark moments in its history, and the books themselves give a look at Skillute over 50+ years.

  The main narrative doesn't focus as much on the town itself, as it does a select few people populating the town, and how they're affected by living in such a place. At the heart of the narrative are three women: Ethel, Beverly and Marietta. Knock Knock, the first novel, follows these women over a 50+ year period, starting when they are young girls.

  Knock Knock is a powerful debut, opening strong and ending with a punch. The three girls at the heart of the story are revolted by a health class video and from a fellow student's story about how her mother's pregnancy is enacting gross changes on the woman. The three set out into the woods, where they conduct a small ritual and make a pact. Unbeknownst to them at the time, there is something of a cruel and dark nature that they awake, setting in motion events that take several decades to come to an end.

  Miskowski's novel follows the girls as they grow old, all while something dark is stirring under the surface. Beverly has an edge to her, a sarcasm that seems a self defense mechanism. She's strong, and learns some of life's hard lessons early on when she has a teen pregnancy, which her parents hide until the baby is born and can be given away for adoption. Over the years she marries, and becomes a widow, yet she remains strong and independent.

  Ethel grows up in a broken household. Her parents are drunks, and her mother has a cruel streak, bringing other men home and spending much of her time out at bars. Tragedy strikes early, leaving Ethel to be raised by an aunt. Ethel is the meek one of the bunch. She's quiet, polite. She goes along with things. It isn't until middle age that Ethel finds love and marries, and even gets pregnant. It's clear from the start that something is wrong with her daughter.

  Marietta is the mysterious one. The girl raised by her aunt, a midwife that many refer to as being a witch. Strange things happen around Marietta, and she sees things no one else sees.

  The narrative's strength lies in restraint. Much of it is ambiguous. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Ethel is home alone with her baby, Connie Sara. The baby reminds her of her mother, and just silently stares at her, following her from room to room. Ethel becomes frightened, and is then torn. Is something wrong with her or is something wrong with the baby? Is it only in her head? Maybe she's not fit to be a mother? Maybe everyone is right and she was too old to have a baby? Why does her husband not seem to have a difficult time like she does? The paranoia and fear is so well handled that the reader doesn't know what to believe.

  Miskowski does a fine job of giving the reader a glimpse into the horrors of womanhood: Beverly's teen pregnancy and forced adoption, Marietta's abusive brute of a husband and sacrifices she has to make, Ethel and the horrors of parenting. These are trials that many women have had to face, and are all too real.

  Knock Knock can be read alone, and is one of the better weird horror novels of the past few years, but the full story unfolds over three more novellas, all of which are published by Omnium Gatherum.

  The first novella in the cycle, Delphine Dodd, is a prequel and is a first person account as told by Marietta's aunt Delphine. One of the more interesting characters in Knock Knock, Delphine Dodd only appeared briefly as a wise old woman. This novella gives readers her backstory. The majority of the novella follows Delphine as a child, when she, along with her sister, are dropped off at their grandmothers house. Her grandmother is a healer, midwife, "witch of the woods" type, and it is from her that Delphine learns her trade. The other part of the novel follows Delphine a few decades later, when she moves to Skillute, and shows the history of the malevolent force in Knock Knock.

  The second novella, Astoria, takes place during the time frame of Knock Knock, and follows Ethel after we last saw her. This gives more closure to her character, and although it mostly takes place outside of Skillute's borders, it may be my favorite of the bunch. The narrative is surreal, with small oddities bringing a strong sense of doom throughout, leading to a wonderful conclusion. Miskowski is at her best here.

  The cycle ends with In the Light, which takes place several years after the events of Knock Knock. The first half of the novella focuses on Ruth, a young new girl who recently moved to Skillute, and the second half follows Henry Colquitt, a former pastor and son of Marietta. Everything comes full circle in this volume, providing readers with a solid conclusion.

  S.P. Miskowski has become one of my favorite writers with these books. Fans of weird fiction, and dark small town stories should pick these up without hesitation. While I'm sad my time in Skillute has come to an end, I look forward to seeing what Miskowski does next.

• Turn to Ash
  https://turntoash.com/strange-is-life-the-everyday-horrors-of-s-p-miskowski-in-strange-is-the-night/
  Word count: 846

  Strange is Life: The Everyday Horrors of S. P. Miskowski in Strange is the Night
  By S. L. Edwards
  SitN

  Mundane. Everyday. Normal.

  It’s easy to scoff at these words, to write off any fiction that shows what could happen to any unexceptional person. What could happen to a neighbor, a friend, you or me. But there is a deceptiveness in “normal,” a wicked smile peering out from the face of a shadow that you only catch for just a moment before you blink and explain it away with “exhaustion.” It’s normal to see things. Normal to be mistaken, after all.

  It’s happened to all of us.

  And so, you keep walking, sure that you are only seeing things and that you will stop after a good night’s sleep. After you make it home. Only…you’re not so sure. Uncertainty, a perfectly reasonable sensation, overtakes you and just to relieve your own (understandable) curiosity, you turn back around.

  And then it gets you.

  This is Miskowski’s line, the boundary of horror and slice of life which she has seized for her own. Readers familiar with the Skillute cycle and her recent novel I Wish I Was Like You know that the author is not afraid to fully flesh out her characters, to let them take the stage as long as necessary for the reader to crawl inside them. Familiar enough with someone so relatable, someone who we could be or who at the very least we have known before, Miskowski endows her readers with a sense of security. When this security is taken away, the horror is all the more lasting.

  Seattle figures into the majority of the stories in Strange is the Night. The characters are actors, journalists, and mothers who move through wet winters and thick fogs. They are college students trying to get by in a haunted house, they are mothers and sisters who find themselves between competing loyalties and desires. And they each come into contact with something, even if that something is merely a glimpse into a darker world. There are stories within stories, “A.G.A,” “Somnambule,” and “Death and Disbursement” being prime examples this format. Just as the revolving door of characters becomes distracting in these stories, Miskowski manages to draw the reader back in, the impact all the stronger because of character-driven meanderings and musings. The effect is that the reader is forced to bolt up in their chair, to bring their finger back over the page to make sure that they really read the words correctly.

  There are also tales which are deceptively commonplace, things which could happen to any one of us if we only allowed ourselves to be sufficiently strange, nostalgic or sad. “Fur,” “The Second Floor,” and “Lost and Found” all detail a sort of middle-aged blues, the protagonists each sad and strange. The world seems to move around these characters, rather than them moving through it and the effect of this is a prosaic malaise that even the best ghost stories often struggle to invoke. One should not be so disquieted about a blind date in which the date is only weird, or an unsuccessful vacation or the desire of someone to recapture the heyday of their youth. And yet, Miskowski manages to take each of these seemingly common, everyday stories and twist them ever so slightly to leave the reader just as unsettled as they would have been reading M. R. James or Algernon Blackwood.

  Two stories in the middle of the volume complement each other quite well, and their place in the overall sequence of the collection leaves quite the impact because of it. “Stag in Flight,” and “Ms. X Regrets Everything” deal with realistic horror, the sort which can be found in the crime section of every news website. Both stories demonstrate how we, normal people who often worry about being loved and desperate to belong, could become monsters. Again, the impulse to escape solitude and to be recognized by someone else is a sympathetic one and again Miskowski demonstrates the innate terror of such a “mundane” desire.

  The final sort of tales, however, deals more directly with what could be called “supernatural horror.” “This Many,” “Animal House,” “Strange is the Night,” and “Water Main” will not disappoint readers looking stories which are bleeding, rotting and shambling. But through ghosts, monsters and haunted houses, Miskowski maintains her wry, creeping just-behind-the-scenes approach to horror that allows a fluid transition between subtle and overwhelming atmosphere. The experience of these stories is akin to stepping through murky water, the reader one moment up their knees and in the next step entirely submerged.

  The ultimate accomplishment of this collection is to show that the mundane can be strange. Life, in all its competing sensations, creeping shadows and everyday regrets, is strange. Nothing can be familiar enough for it to not become horrifying.

• This is Horror
  http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/book-review-i-wish-i-was-like-you-by-s-p-miskowski/
  Word count: 651

  Book Review: I Wish I Was Like You by S.P. Miskowski
  June 6, 2017
  “At times delicate and poetic, yet can turn as sharp and deadly as the stroke of a knife through flesh.”
  Never open your story with a corpse? S.P. Miskowski smashes that rule with a tale of a young woman who is forced to solve a murder. She has no choice because the corpse is her own and she doesn’t want to be remembered as some Cobain imitator. Set in Seattle in the early nineties, I Wish I was Like You follows the story of Greta, who journeys to the Emerald City in the wake of having an affair with a has-been writer turned professor who tears apart her crime manuscript and tells her to give up on writing.

  Greta’s ghost roams the city, turning over the events that lead her to death in the living room of her apartment. Her monologue is both pessimistic and darkly humorous; endearing the reader to the spirit of a girl who was no saint in her previous existence but, like so many of us this side of death’s veil, was just trying to get ahead in life by any means necessary. She also encounters those on their way out of the living world, sometimes giving them a bit of a push to help them along. Greta’s voice is cynical but rightfully so as she sheds light on the real world she was once a part of and reveals the story of her death through the memories of the oftentimes lonesome existence of living in a big city, trying to make it on your own surrounded by those looking to take advantage of others. Greta is headstrong and has nothing to fear anymore since she’s dead. Nothing will stop her from solving her own murder and painting the town black with vengeance in her wake.

  There are many thoughts on writers and the rules of writing, this book has a few burned into the mind of Greta and she turns those ideas on their heads with a sardonic grin. The character, Lee Todd Butcher, states in his crime fiction writing class the first rule is never open your story with a corpse because it’s a cliché. Miskowski clearly displays how incredibly wrong his advice is, poking fun at those pretentious enough to think they have all the answers when it comes to writing a great book. I wish I Was Like You is a page turner from the beginning, its characters, both living and dead, are the type the audience will find intriguing. It’s a unique look into an afterlife where vengeful spirits are more than chain-rattling and unseen hands; instead they are much like us living creatures who are flawed, have vices, curiously seek out old “haunts” and go about our time making the decision to hold onto the wrongs committed against us or just let go of them.

  S.P. Miskowski is no stranger to dark writing, with multiple Shirley Jackson Award nominations. Her writing has been in Black Static and Strange Aeons as well as being in a handful of stellar anthologies such as The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Autumn Cthulhu and Cassilda’s Song. Her prose is at times delicate and poetic, yet can turn as sharp and deadly as the stroke of a knife through flesh. She owns a natural ability to convey nightmares into the minds of the reader, like a spirit invading their thoughts, planting the seeds of startling images. I Wish I Was Like You is a thoroughly enjoyable read for people who already know the dark magic of Miskowski’s prose and a great introduction for any new readers.

  MICHELLE GARZA

  Publisher: Journal Stone
  eBook: (253pp)
  Publication date: 7 July 2017

• This is Horror
  http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/book-review-muscadines-by-s-p-miskowski/
  Word count: 703

  Book Review: Muscadines by S.P. Miskowski
  October 24, 2016
  “Its Southern Gothic aesthetic is filled with allusion, and with suggestion, allowing for a measure of interpretation. And yet where it defines its darker aspects, it does so with both restraint and power.”
  Muscadines - SP MiskowskiMuscadines are a type of grape, native to the south-eastern and south-central regions of America, and are also often used in the fermenting of wine. Ruth Parker has been making her own, special wine from them, on the farm she inherited when both of her parents died in close proximity. Now Ruth herself is dead, and the farm falls to her second oldest daughter, Martha, to look after; also taking care of younger sister Louise. One day, Alma, eldest daughter of Ruth, returns home for her own reasons, and slowly the family history is drawn out into the light, as loyalties shift and tensions mount. Yet this is no simple tale of familial discordance, and these are no ordinary women.

  S.P. Miskowski is a writer who has been garnering critical acclaim for a number of years, steadily showcasing a deft hand at creating dark, literary stories with a powerful and distinctive voice. In Muscadines, she shows an astonishing ability to convey a wealth of detail and information in just a few, well chosen and naturalistic paragraphs. Within moments of reading, it is clear that this story is set at some point in America’s past, the writing imbued with a distinctive nostalgic element. Further, it is also evident that we are in the region of the ‘south’, the prose flavoured with talk of dirt roads, farming families, cotton fields. The tone is at once beguiling and punchy, these details imparted in short sentences, yet works very well, this contrast between the languid and the dynamic. Similarly, we are given only snippets about Martha and Louise’s life at the farm-house, yet the discerning reader will be able to infer a great deal of the familial relationship between these two even as further questions are raised as suspicions, as intuitions, as portents. Yes, there is love between the two—a broken, uneven, strained love—but there is also abuse, both physical and mental, and it is clear that Martha dominates Louise, who is obviously physically impaired, and perhaps mentally too. And when Alma arrives, upsetting the status quo, further dark secrets are revealed, stretching back beyond the current generation, gradually teased from the dialogue and hints given by Martha’s first person account.

  A short novella—perhaps even novelette size—this work nevertheless manages to satisfy the reader’s need for a complete story (at the same time engendering a desire for a longer, more immersive work), whilst also catering to the ambiguous, to the atmospheric. Its Southern Gothic aesthetic is filled with allusion, and with suggestion, allowing for a measure of interpretation. And yet where it defines its darker aspects, it does so with both restraint and power; providing a greater impact with its subtly disturbing nature than reams of graphically depicted violence could ever hope to achieve.

  Be aware, though; the characters are all rather unpleasant individuals, selfish and self-centered. Certainly not ‘likable’, but this is not the point, and nor should it be in fiction; especially not dark fiction. They are, however, fully realised, wonderfully drawn, and believable, displaying the dark sides of their humanity in three dimensions. Their dialogue is distinctive and individual, and they still manage to elicit a measure of empathy from the reader as it becomes clear just why they are this way. If anything, the story is an examination of how we become locked into certain, learned behaviours, of how the past influences the present, of how cycles of abuse and violence repeat and repeat.

  A true dark literary masterpiece, one which is a showcase for a writer at the absolute height of her talents and having a complete mastery of her craft. Muscadines is an essential read for anyone who considers themselves a connoisseur of atmospheric, insightful, powerful literary writing.

  PAUL MICHAELS

  Publisher: Dunhams Manor Press
  Hardcover (60 pp)
  Release Date: 15 September 2016

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-945373-78-7
  Word count: 223

  I Wish I Was Like You
  S.P. Miskowski. JournalStone, $16.95 trade paper (252p) ISBN 978-1-945373-78-7
  Tweet
  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  Through the eyes of a dead woman, Shirley Jackson Award–finalist Miskowski (Muscadines) reveals a fraught and unhappy world; black humor underneath the grit keeps the reader enthralled. When 20-something Greta Garver landed in Seattle, she befriended a theater maven and bluffed her way into a job as a theater reviewer for an alternative newspaper. She is living in a small apartment in 1994 when she finds her own dead body and realizes she’s become a ghost. Greta’s restless spirit haunts the good (and not-so-good) folks on the seamy side of Seattle, coaxing them to end their misery in various ways. Greta’s too smart for her own good and often too lazy to care, and the literally cutthroat world of alternative news just might be her undoing. Greta is an acerbic delight, and revenge is sweet, but the real question is whether she’ll ever be able to let go of the living world and find a measure of peace. This biting, sly gem of a novel shouldn’t be missed. (July)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 06/26/2017
  Release date: 07/07/2017
  Open Ebook - 252 pages - 978-1-945373-79-4

• Bloody Good Horror
  http://www.bloodygoodhorror.com/bgh/book-review-delphine-dodd-by-sp-miskowski
  Word count: 318

  BOOK REVIEW: DELPHINE DODD BY S.P. MISKOWSKI
  BY CC ON NOVEMBER 12TH, 2012
  Left on the roadside by their wayward and absconding mother, Delphine Dodd realizes this time is not like the others. She and her little sister, Olive, have been discarded on the side of the road like trash, only to find themselves floating aimlessly into the care of their unfamiliar grandmother. Set in the early settlement years before the First World War, S.P Miskowski weaves Delphine’s vivid recollections of her adolescence into a haunting dreamscape.

  Once comfortably settled with their grandmother, Eve Alice, in her small and secluded cabin, Delphine and Olive graciously begin to submerge themselves in the Pacific Northwest landscape. In the shadow of Coffin Rock, where Delphine’s native ancestors were born, raised and buried, the girls begin learning the art of homemade remedies from their grandmother and the cycle of good and evil. Divided into two sections, the novella follows the girls’ life with their loving and knowledgeable grandmother whose small haven of a home has travesties lurking beyond the forest that will haunt Delphine into her adult life, into the second half of the book, where Delphine’s life is haunted by the ghosts of the living.

  S.P. Miskowski’s Delphine Dodd reads like an old family tale told by that old, wispy grandmother that had a strange wives-tale of a solution for whatever ailed you. Mysterious remedies, superstitions, talismans, ghosts, and evil in the flesh waft throughout the pages of Miskowski’s writing like a chill that tingles your spine. A gripping story with such a depth, you’re often left scrambling for the line that divides the dimensions between reality and the paranormal. Genuine and provoking, Delphine Dodd allows the reader to determine which is more haunting, the ghost of your past or the one in your present.

• Geeks Out
  http://geeksout.org/blogs/ranerdin/book-review-astoria-sp-miskowski
  Word count: 944

  BOOK REVIEW: ASTORIA (S.P. MISKOWSKI)
  The worst thing I can say about Astoria, the second novella in S.P. Miskowski's wonderful "Skillute Cycle", is that I wish I could remove those last two letters from the word and call it a novel. Miskowski is one of the best horror authors that I've discovered in recent years, and she is using some interesting techniques to bring us into this frightening world she has created. Beginning in 2011 with Knock Knock (in my opinion, the best horror novel of the year), Miskowski introduced us to Skillute, Washington, and created a fictional town worthy of a space on the twisted atlas of the imagination alongside places like Arkham and Salem's Lot. Rather than go for a sequel, she has chosen to expand on this story with a series of novellas. Last year's Delphine Dodd was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson award and received well deserved praise and recognition, but I think Astoria is even better.

  Astoria primarily deals with Ethel Sanders and her escape from Skillute in the midst of the tragic events of Knock Knock. Ethel begins the story in a fractured state -- her delicate and uneasy family life is destroyed, and she finds herself lost and broken after a tense decade-long domestic stalemate. Herself a child of a broken home with a tragic end, Astoria suggests -- but never tells -- much about cycles of abuse and human weakness. And, while some of Ethel's situation can be excused because of supernatural occurrences, it is interesting and insightful for the reader to view the tragic events around the birth and demise of that evil little turd (sorry) Connie Sara as symbolic of the ways that family tragedies, broken homes, and parental abuse haunt and pursue us in real life.

  We do rejoin Ethel's story while she is in flight, running from demons both real and imagined, and Miskowski never pulls the lens far enough out of Ethel's mind to intrude with expository explanations. This is one of the strengths of novellas -- as much as I loved Knock Knock, a wider lens had to be used on that larger story, and I was always very curious about getting deeper into Ethel's mind. I felt like, throughout that novel, we had been kept at a distance, and spending this brief time with her in Astoria really does help to enrich my understanding of her as a person and brings her to life in a very real and most importantly believable way. I particularly enjoyed being in Ethel's mind on her manic car ride during her escape from Skillute -- her frenzied desperation to put distance between herself and her home were perfectly conveyed in these scenes. What Hitchcock managed to convey with Janet Leigh's grim and determined face juxtaposed against the frenetic score on her drive early in Psycho, Miskowski manages to do here in prose.

  Another aspect I found fascinating is a re-imagining of the "demon child" trope (most effectively used and often tied to feminist backlash in the late 60's/early 70's by Levin in Rosemary's Baby and Blatty in The Exorcist). With all due respect to both of these classic novels, it is fascinating to experience the psychological and emotional damage tied to either the failure or success of the act of giving birth and how it can impact a woman's sense of self.

  Miskowski's prose is sharp and to the point -- she writes more in the Shirley Jackson camp than someone more florid like, say, Stoker. Ethel is a great protagonist of the Jacksonian type for a story of this kind -- because she has recently experienced such an intense amount of trauma and stress, her perceptions are already flawed and her emotional state is fragile enough so that we have a sense of nervousness and psychological unraveling before anything even happens. Given more context for Ethel's behavior and insight into her mind makes her extremely damaged and nearly broken existence even more heartbreaking, and we find ourselves all too easily empathizing with her desire to violently beat a child and pathologically lie about her identity.

  Although the reference to Frankenstein and Shelly's misunderstood and ill treated monster is applicable, I found the mention of Jane Eyre to be particularly fascinating. Indeed, it almost seems as if the final third of the novella is setting up a wonderful bit of tension between Ethel and the mysterious owner of the house she is watching, and one could almost imagine Ethel coming down the steps wearing Rebecca's dress at Manderly. Miskowski sets these final scenes with great care and detail, and it is almost disappointing to have the ending come suddenly (and tragically) just when I was getting ready to sink into what felt like the beginnings of a great gothic novel.

  Astoria is a great companion piece to a great novel, and another huge victory for Miskowski. A nearly perfect and wickedly fun (if you find the heartbreaking tale of a broken woman's demise and her unsettling descent into insanity to be fun, that is...and I guess I do) read, it is a win on all accounts. There is a lot packed into this slim volume, and there is plenty to delight and disturb as you curl up with it one (hopefully stormy) evening with a glass of wine. With its only flaw being the fact that it leaves greedy readers like myself wanting more, Astoria is highly recommended on all levels, and is the clear forerunner for novella of the year for me. Rating: A-

• James Everington - Scattershot Writing
  http://jameseverington.blogspot.com/2012/11/review-knock-knock-s-p-miskowski.html
  Word count: 500

  MONDAY, 5 NOVEMBER 2012
  Review: Knock Knock - S. P. Miskowski
  I first came across the author S.P. Miskowski when I read her really rather excellent short story A.G.A. in an issue of Supernatural Tales. So I thought I'd try her novel Knock Knock, particularly as it seems to be doing rather well for itself, getting nominated for the Shirley Jackson award and everything.

  Knock Knock uses a familiar horror novel device - that of setting a novel firmly in one small, American town and telling of an evil that affects multiple generations in that town. In this case the setting is Skillute, a backwater American logging town, and the novel begins in the Sixties and progresses to the modern day. Miskowski uses this setting to great advantage, both as a realistic backdrop and as a place where it seems quite natural tall tales and superstitions would spring up. The story tells of three female friends from Skillute, and how a childhood pandering to one of these local superstitions brings an old evil back... I mention they are all female purely because this seems to me a novel very much written from a female, feminist perspective - ideas about women, pregnancy, and children drive the plot, although that's not to say there aren't some sharply drawn male characters too. In this sense it's quite original, and it gives the book an structural and thematic coherence that underpins the disturbing and grotesque events brought about by the girls unintentionally awakening an evil spirit.

  This is a slow-burn novel, with the significance of certain events at the start of the book not being entirely clear. In this way the tense, oppressive atmosphere builds - Miskowski is great at generating eerie imagery, particularly when describing the woods and forest around Skillute. When the scares come, she can do more with a single, stark line than most authors can in pages and pages of poorly written gore.

  If I had one issue with this book, it was the nagging feeling that all of the character's actions didn't matter that much in the end - that the disturbing events of the book were preordained no matter what they did, and that they were just caught up in it all with no agency or control. (I think this is a perfectly legitimate way to approach a short story, but maybe for a novel some sense that the characters actions might affect the outcome is needed.) A minor gripe, but there we are. Knock Knock is certainly worth reading and certainly worth the acclaim it seems to be getting. Even better, I see that S.P. Miskowski is also to release a series of novellas set in the same town, with the first, Delphine Dodd, available now. As I mentioned, one of the great things about Knock Knock is it's setting, so I'll certainly be keen to see what other dark tales are being told there...

• The Short Review
  http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/SPMiskowskiRedPoppies.htm
  Word count: 773

  Red Poppies:
  Tales of Envy and Revenge
  by S.P. Miskowski

  YouWriteOn, 2009, Paperback
  First collection

  Facebook Page

  S. P Miskowski has won two Swarthout prizes for short fiction and received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for short fiction and drama. Her play about cyberbullying, "my new friends (are so much better than you)" was nominated for the prestigious American Theatre Critics Association/ Steinberg New Play Award in 2009. She is currently writing a horror novel about mother-daughter relationships.

  Read an interview with S. P. Miskowski

  " Then she said: She didn't care what the pottery guy did, now. In fact, she hated him. In fact, she was thinking about suing him. I still don't remember what she wanted to sue him for, but it was something like harassment in reverse because he "entrapped her emotions" and she "responded in good faith" and her passionate nature was "taken advantage of" and "the distress was compounded by his fake interest in art."

  Reviewed by Carol Reid

  Envy is a tawdry tyke of an emotion-- dishonorable and despicable, without the high drama of the other mortal sins. Manifested as revenge, it rarely satisfies. The opening story, Red Poppies, is a rambling narrative in which the narrator, Hazel, seems to find a new niche in her haphazard life. She becomes a housecleaner-companion- muse to multi-medicated Paula, the narcissistic wife of "middlebrow corporate liar" Thomas Livingston the Third.

  Miskowski has a knack for manipulating the reader's sympathy toward the characters she creates. It's difficult not to feel an uncomfortable mélange of contempt and empathy for Paula, and frustration and empathy for the malleable and foolish Hazel, whose shallowness, in the end, is equal to that of her employer. There are funny and pathetic moments in this story but the sometimes flat voice dulls the effect. This piece in particular could have been greatly improved by a ruthless edit of dead-end paragraphs and extra complications, such as the arrival of the Thirds' adolescent son.

  In A Personal Recommendation, Sadie takes up mugging when family financial troubles threaten to waylay her college and career plans. Neither the motivation nor the protagonist are convincing in this story. The back-and forth-structure, as a device to tie together plot threads and create suspense, doesn't succeed here and the concluding acts of violence don't have the feeling of inevitability that would have made this story work. But, as in Red Poppies, secondary characters shine and the scenes in which a larger-than-life college professor misunderstands Sadie's plea for help add a nice dramatic effect.

  You Never Know is a deft, darkly funny blend of rural depravity and skewed family values. A film crew takes up residence in the Bowers' home, planning to film a documentary about homeowners victimized by tax laws, little realizing the resourcefulness of the little clan. Here the narrative voice is wry and cunning and succeeds in winning over the reader, despite the horrors to come.

  In Next to Nothing the well-to-do are again the target of the narrator's barbs. This is a scathing portrait of an inept caterer and her fey clientele. There are some great lines here, such as, "Nancy likes to tell people she knows 'a thing or two' about food. I've been here a couple of years now and I would say that figure is accurate." But the general tone of the story is so petulant that the reader is hard-pressed to care about the little food allergy incident which brings the house down.

  Idiot Boy is the shortest and perhaps the strongest piece in this collection. It's easy to connect with this story of sibling rivalry and escalating resentment toward the enterprising and brainless Leon, whose latest great idea is to steal neighbors's electricity. All the world ignores and forgives Leon his many sins-- everyone but the exasperated narrator.
  "Mother stand next to me at the patio window, watching her stupid son. 'Now, this is where all that electronics training will come in handy, ' she says, because she doesn't even know that Leon flunked out of the Dixon Academy after two weeks."
  Taken individually, these stories display a flair for quirky characterization and a sharp sense of humor. As a themed collection, too much similarity in narrative voice, repetitive phrasing and the emotional limits of envy and revenge weaken the whole.

  Read a story from this collection in Identity Theory

  Carol Reid is an associate editor for the Emprise Review.