Feeling frightened after our last episode, TOYS? Grab a plush companion for comfort and gather ‘round for an interview with Spencer Koelle, the talented author behind the bone-chilling “Hand Raised in Anger.”
What inspired "Hand Raised in Anger?"
This is the easiest. One thing that inspired this was the situation where a child is uncomfortable, increasingly frightened by something banal, but the parent just doesn't want to deal with it. I think most people can think of some allegedly family-friendly entertainment that left a child crying and a parent just trying to shush them. The other half of the inspiration is the morbid reflections on Punch and Judy brought about by M. R. James's ghost story "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance".
How do you connect with the idea of TOYS, childhood, and innocence? What is their place in horror, both as a whole and in "Hand Raised in Anger" specifically?
I've always found cleaning out old toys and giving away or throwing out the stuff I don't want to be an emotionally draining experience, and I certainly find premises like Toy Story to be disturbing in their implications. Children are especially vulnerable and dependent, which makes it easy to put them in peril, and is also why so many horror anthologies have submission guidelines ruling out things done to children, it can get a bit cheap. For this piece I tried to strike a balance by focusing on the emotional turmoil and the problem of not having one's feelings taken seriously, while leaving any genuine physical danger for the heroine pretty vague and abstract.
Your piece features a child narrator, which is notably difficult to nail as a narrative voice. Did you find it challenging to write from that perspective? How did you get into the headspace?
Broad strokes and distance is what worked for me. It's easier to find the flow when it's all framed as something that happened when people who are dead now where very young, and the hazy film of childhood memories. I also just remember how much bigger and louder things were in the part of your life when an hour was a long time.
How did you get into horror? What do you enjoy in the genre? What scares you?
I actively avoided the Horror genre as a child, but I reluctantly got into scifi-horror and creature features because I was drawn to interesting monster designs and it was the most abundant form of speculative fiction. I can't pinpoint when I went from actively avoiding scary things to seeking out the shiver of pleasing terror. I love atmosphere, the sublime, the sense of mystery and wonder in good supernatural fiction and cosmic horror, as well as the undefinable cozy horror of a good old ghost story. As for personally being scared, a lot of things scare me, but one of the worst is when a video won't stay paused or turn off. That happens a lot in my nightmares. If we're talking about scares I actually like, I love heavy, mounting atmosphere and a sense of the unnatural/inexplicable.
What’s your writing process like?
I'm more of an architect than a gardener. I come up with a short story idea, mull over it for a long while, talk with people about it, write up an outline with key characters and chapter summaries, and then get started with the actual writing. I try to front-load a lot of the work that would otherwise come in the editing stage and I'm shocked and disturbed when I hear other writers talk about "discovering" the story in the editing process.
How does identity play a role in your writing?
I ask myself if there's any reason to make the character cisgender, white, male or straight before doing so, because there are so many stories already about cishet white men. I also try to provide in my writing the representation I find lacking in most of what I consume, or especially when I think "Huh, this premise would work out differently/be more interesting if Character was X".
What role do you think horror plays in the LGBTQ community?
At the risk of stating the obvious, a complex one. People more qualified than me can talk about how entire parts of our community have been codified as horror tropes, about the alienation and/or vindication. I just want to see more horror that isn't cishet, or at the very least not so aggressively cishet as the upper-middle-class white nuclear family with a "this haunted house will be a new start for our family!" dad.
What’s next for you, creatively?
I'm trying to focus more on my fantasy novel, about a bunch of traveling entertainers moonlighting as anti-colonial rebels, but I've still got another Christmas ghost story in need of heavy editing. At some point I'll take a break from the novel to crank out another horror short story, like the one about why camgirls are more vulnerable to sympathetic magic or a Smoking Room Ghost Story pastiche/homage.
Any great horror recommendations?
The original "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" utterly wowed me this Halloween. In terms of short fiction, anything put out by Crone Girls Press does not disappoint (I'd say this even if I wasn't published in one of their anthologies). The Silence of Ghosts and A Shadow On the Wall by Jonathan Aycliffe utterly knock my socks off and deliver the perfect novel-length experience for fans of M. R. James. I have great hopes for The Twisted Ones, which I'm partway through, but mostly I'm looking for recs from other people.