DISSECTING THE BOOK OF QUEER SAINTS

1/4/2022

HORROR FEATURE DISSECTING THE QUEER SAINTS .png

On Monday we interviewed Mae Murray about the release of the killer new anthology The Book of Queer Saints, today we welcome some of the authors of the anthology in a feature where they discuss their stories within this must buy anthology.

The Book of Queer Saints features 13 short stories and a lineup that includes renowned authors Eric LaRocca, Hailey Piper, and Joe Koch. Joining them are the innovative visions of Briar Ripley Page, Nikki R. Leigh, Joshua R. Pangborn, Eric Raglin, Belle Tolls, Perry Ruhland, James Bennett, LC von Hessen, K.S. Walker, and George Daniel Lea. A fresh blend of transformative body horror, crimson-coated romance, and monstrous eroticism, this anthology is sure to satisfy your every depraved itch. Foreword by Sam Richard of Weirdpunk Books.

Further Reading

An Interview with The Book of Queer Saints Editor Mae Murray

Rebecca Rowlands review of The Book of Queer Saints

LC von Hessen

"The City Behind The City" is among my most pessimistic and, in many ways, most personal stories, in that one of its major themes concerns tying one's hopes and dreams to a specific geographic location in one's youth and gradually, as one ages, seeing those dreams eroded. In both my own story and my protagonist Theodore's, that location is NYC. It's a sort of unofficial companion piece to my story "Hivemind," from Planet Scumm #11 (guest-edited by my Queer Saints tablemate Hailey Piper), which was inspired by the infamous Manhattan tourist-trap-turned-suicide-destination "The Vessel"--and which, as it happens, also has a decidedly imperfect queer protagonist.

The deranged interview Theodore undergoes in "The City" was inspired by an online interview scam I was once subjected to as a struggling underemployed freelancer: my desperation was causing me to mute the alarm bells around a lot of things that seemed rather unorthodox or just plain off. What really clinched it, and saved me from potential disaster, was the typo I noticed in the company's supposed address. Incidentally, I work as a proofreader now.

LC von Hessen is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and various unpleasantness, as well as a noise musician, occasional actor, and former Morbid Anatomy Museum docent. Their work has previously appeared in such publications as Hymns of Abomination, Beyond the Book of Eibon, volumes of Nightscript and Vastarien, and the ebook collection Spiritus Ex Machina. An ex-Midwesterner, von Hessen lives in Brooklyn with a talkative orange cat.

Eric Raglin

Some stories start as jokes, and "Macramé Flames" was one of them. I thought it would be funny to write about a queer motorcycle gang that summons Satan by burning down 666 Hobby Lobbies (a craft store chain with religious right-wing politics, for anyone unfamiliar). However, some jokes contain a kernel of something more serious. It wasn't until after I wrote this story that I realized what that kernel was. One of the characters, Thorpe, distances himself from the motorcycle gang and loses touch with his values. By the time he tries to reconnect with his Satanic comrades, he's a thoroughly changed man.

I connect with Thorpe in this way. Prior to the pandemic, I was actively involved in leftist organizing. But with organizing often comes burnout, and I found myself distanced from activist work almost completely. This story was my way of exploring the feeling that I'd lost touch with my values. My hope is that I can still reconnect with them and take action. Like Thorpe, I want to do something that matters again after too much time on the sidelines.

Eric Raglin (he/him) is a Nebraskan speculative fiction writer, horror literature teacher, and podcaster for Cursed Morsels. He frequently writes about queer issues, the terrors of capitalism, and body horror. His debut short story collection is NIGHTMARE YEARNINGS. He is the editor of ANTIFA SPLATTERPUNK. Find him at http://ericraglin.com or on Twitter @ericraglin1992
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JOE KOCH

How many angels can fuck on the head of a pin?

My story "The Love That Whirls" owes its origins to experimental queer occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger. In 1949, he made a film of the same name in Mexico that was never seen. Apparently it depicted nudity and a ritual human sacrifice story derived from the book "The Golden Bough." The only person who saw it was whoever developed the film and deemed it pornographic. The film lab's policy at the time was to destroy any footage with nudity, no matter how innocuous. Anger claims the film was not pornographic and simply featured an exquisitely beautiful young man.

So, like the legendary lost and damaged footage from Event Horizon, we can only imagine what might have been. The unknowable fascinates and delights me, and in my story I wanted to recreate an idea of Anger's arcane lost footage while paying respect to his concept that the things we create as artists are magical workings. At the same time, my own head was whirling from a terrible break-up. So I thought and wrote about why we continue to engage in romance, sex, and relationships at all when they can go so very wrong and cause us so much pain.

Working with "The Book of Queer Saints" in mind, I felt I had permission to explore a dysfunctional queer relationship with big age and power imbalances. I have mixed feelings about labeling a particular age difference as problematic. I think we need to question the specifics of a situation before making a knee-jerk judgment. I wouldn't have gone to college without the "bad" influence of an older man. He wasn't abusive and I'm grateful someone directed me away from the path I was on. Instead of moralizing about right and wrong, "The Love That Whirls" explores an older person, a creature really, not exactly human, not exactly a man, who takes in a vulnerable young guy. Both are changed over time. There's no simple formula of dominance and submission.

I had a blast writing the film footage and sex scenes in the most surreal way possible in order to suggest the unseen, the numinous. I guess my current goal as a writer is to capture angels fucking. A lot of the imagery comes through suggestion and unexpected sensory detail. In "The Love That Whirls," the older creature reconstructs the film in an effort to undo grief and change the past, and this fits into the idea of love as a whirlwind we can't always control, a force that makes and remakes us, the power both parties play with while they make and remake each other. I hope I've done Kenneth Anger's art justice in both the story and its execution.

Joe Koch (he/they) writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Joe is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive. They’ve had over fifty short stories published in books and journals like Year's Best Hardcore Horror, The Big Book of Blasphemy, Not All Monsters, and Liminal Spaces. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.

HAILEY PIPER

"I went through a number of maybe stories for The Book of Queer Saints, ideas written or half-written, but I wanted the right one. This is a special project. Exhausted one night, as I was getting into bed I had a sudden thought, 'What if fish people lived in a sea monster's mouth?' I got to work on 'We Frolic Within the Leviathan's Heart' the next morning.

It was the right story, I knew from how the fish people take to returning to the land as outsiders hiding among everyone else, with interests, passion, pain, and wrongdoings too. And I won't pretend there's no incidental jab and nod at Lovecraft too. Their queerness is part of them. User @flameswallower on Twitter asked after reading 'is it gay and trans to become a fish person?' and I think that sums it up perfectly."and trans to become a fish person?' and I think that sums it up perfectly."

Hailey Piper is the 2x Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The Worm and His Kings, Queen of Teeth, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with over seventy short stories appearing in Pseudopod, Vastarien, Cast of Wonders, Daily Science Fiction, Dark Matter Magazine, Planet Scumm, Flash Fiction Online, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and other publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their paranormal research is classified.

Find Hailey on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays and on Instagram via @haileypiperfights.

JAMES BENNETT

‘From the moment I saw the submission call for ‘The Book of Queer Saints’, I wanted to be in the antho so badly. In many ways, it chimed with my sentiments about current queer rep and the book is in line with the stories I'm working on now, essentially a drive to present some authentic and (hopefully) entertaining stories free of the demands of the mass market or the ‘queer norms’ that have a tendency to render everything so saccharine, anodyne and trite. It strikes me as a situation that has little to do with the history of queer literature, or queer lived experience, which is necessarily quite punky, rebellious and viewed as ‘grotesque’ anyway. We have to be free to relate our experience, warts and all.

You know, you can’t oppress a minority group since forever, with all the trauma, insight and subversion it stirs up in an artistic sense, and then ask queer folks to write nice, ingratiating stories for the masses so they don’t get too uncomfortable. In a nutshell, fuck that noise. It was definitely with that in mind that I came to write ‘Morta’ (Morta is the name of a Roman deity, the Fate who cuts the thread of life). It took a couple of attempts to land on the right story, but I knew I wanted to play on a 'coming out' theme and the general stickiness of adolescence. Looking back to my troublesome teens, I recalled my love for films like 'The Fly' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', my real introduction to the genre.

There's quite an 80s spin to 'Morta', I think, and a healthy dollop of Cronenberg. It was a lot of fun to turn all those breathless coming-of-age tales on their head, because I don’t remember coming out as anything other than a car crash. I can laugh about it now, but… With ‘Morta’, I guess I’m saying it’s OK to get your freak on. We should be out there unsettling people. That’s what Horror is for.’

James Bennett is a British writer raised in Sussex and South Africa. His travels have furnished him with an abiding love of different cultures, history and mythology. His short fiction has appeared internationally and his debut novel CHASING EMBERS was shortlisted for Best Newcomer at the British Fantasy Awards 2017.

Feel free to follow him on Twitter: @Benjurigan
Or join him on Facebook: fb.me/Benjurigan

Briar Ripley

When I was young— a child, a teenager, in my early twenties— I often felt monstrous. My feelings and thoughts and experiences weren’t like the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of other people. Worse, when I tried to talk about them with others, they’d push me away in horror or tell me there was something wrong with me.

I think this is exceedingly common for young queer and trans people, particularly those who are also disabled, neurodivergent, survivors of traumatic experiences, and so on. Most of us eventually learn that we’re fine, that there’s nothing wrong with being who we are, that we are not in fact causing terrible harm to others if who we are and what we’ve experienced makes them feel upset or uncomfortable. Yet that feeling of monstrousness remains in the back of our minds, occasionally flaring up in full force.

It makes perfect sense that there’s a long tradition in queer fiction of reclaiming monstrousness, celebrating it, turning monsters into the heroes of a story. I love doing this, and I love stories that do this, but for “Therianthrope” I wanted to delve into more ambivalent territory. What if you were a monster, and that was both empowering and destructive? What if you really were fated to maim and kill and rampage? What if it would be objectively bad to fulfill your desires, but fulfilling your desires was also the only thing that would let you feel truly alive?

Briar Ripley Page is the author of Corrupted Vessels, a Florida gothic novella; Body After Body, an erotic dystopian novel, and a forthcoming short story collection from swallow::tale press. Their fiction has appeared in places like smoke + mold, The Fantastic Other, and hyphenpunk, but The Book of Queer Saints is their big break, probably. Briar recently moved from central Pennsylvania to London, where they live with their partner and cats.

Belle Tolls

The name of my story comes from the dress code for a Halloween party I threw. I went as the death of King Midas. It was super cute. Heliogabalus Fabulous rewrites the story of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, who has been demonized by historians for their purported extravagance, promiscuity, and gender fluidity. But who wouldn’t want a financially and sexually generous genderfluid icon for emperx? What the historians regard as their crimes, I regard as their gifts, so when I saw that Mae was compiling stories about queer villains, I knew it was time to recuperate Elagabalus as a saint. The emperor in my story is still a little villainous - they conspire to murder an innocent teenage boy, but it’s for a very good cause.

I like how this collection really troubles the idea that queers have to be represented as pristine to gain some elusive acceptance from a hostile cishetero world; that we can’t be the bad guys, when it’s highly questionable that there are any totally good or bad guys, or total guys for that matter. The book queers queer representation, and I love that. I also appreciate that Mae chose my story to end the collection, because although it’s historical it’s also kind of a trans eschatology. Because the future is trans, and in that sense Heliogabalus Fabulous, which isn’t really horror, also isn’t really a story. More a prayer, or a threat.

Un bacio!

Belle

Belle Tolls (was / were), New York City death hag and writer of queer speculative fiction. This is her first publication. She is currently working on a volume called "Headless but Haloed", collecting stories about the cephalophores.

Follow Belle on Twitter

George Daniel Lea

I can barely describe my excitement and incredulity when I received the email informing me that my short story, The Last Disgrace, had been short-listed for The Book of Queer Saints. When it comes to submissions, I try to keep anticipation to a minimum, if only to diminish disappointment, but this project...

Even now, I can't quite describe or explain my reaction: I felt an immediate and intense connection to this project; one that threads beyond the contentious frisson of its core premise. The idea of Queer Saints was immeduately and naturally exciting to me: an anthology of stories by LGBTQ creators, involving sincere, complex and genuine LGBTQ characters and situations? Given my raison d'etre, I couldn't help but be inspired.

But, even that doesn't entirely explain the powerful emotion of being short-listed. There has been something especial about this project from the very beginning, something essential; a magic that's difficult to quantify.

The Last Disgrace itself was a strange story for me: most of my work is glacially produced, picked and prodded and polished until something essential emerges (a process that can often take months or years). This was the exception that proves the rule:

Originally inspired by a piece of homo-erotic by my good friend, Alexandru Teodor, the first draft was recorded within a day, the story fully edited and shaped within the next two. Written in a feverish state of fluctuating emotion, it drew on my

own experience of LGBTQ venues and culture from when I was at university; the "gay districts" of British Midlands inner-cities, which are often oddly archaeological in nature, freighted with history and haunted by the ghosts of queer experience past.

The inhuman protagonist derived from a particular species of older gay man who so often prowled these arenas; those old enough to appreciate the raw history of those sites but also subsumed into the -often predatory and consumptive- cultures of raw sexuality and appetite that pervade them.

This creature is, in part, an exaggeration and distortion of a particular species of gay man I observed often in the gay bars and night clubs, the dusk and nighttime

streets; those I myself often sought out and seduced when I was in the place of the -ostensibly more naive- boy who happily feeds himself to the beast.

As for the boy himself, he is very much a dead aspect of myself; a reflection of the distance and divorced condition I and so many of my gay, twenty-sonething siblings operated at the time. In retrospect, we were a romantically disturbed little tribe of impending suicides; creatures fully aware of their lack of place or purpose in the world and wanting nothing from it.

That is where the anonymous, drugged and dreaming boy derives from, his suicidal ideation not only an expression of my own at the time, but one that was -and remains- sadly pervasive amongst LGBTQ youth, most notably our trans brothers and

sisters in the present day.

When I learned that The Last Disgrace had been accepted, and the company it would keep in the anthology, ecstatic would be too small a word to describe my reaction. Even now, with the project's publication imminent, I can't quite believe that my work is part of it, that readers will be exposed to such powerful and sincere expressions of LGBTQ experience.

All I can do is express my sincere thanks to Mae Murray for conceiving and seeing the project through, and to my LGBTQ siblings for their own contributions and the original inspiration.

Joshua R. Pangborn

Crumbs has all my favorite traits in a story: it's a little bit sexy, a lot scary, and so very weird. Exploring the kinky world of feederism and bondage through dark humor, the reader is taken on a journey through the life and choices of our main character, Raymond. Yet, for all of the macabre zaniness, what I love most about this story is how relatable it is. Raymond, for all of his flaws, wants love and acceptance from the one person who will never give it to him--and I think that's pretty familiar for all of us (but especially for queer readers).

Having Crumbs included in The Book of Queer Saints is an incredible honor (not the least of which is because this is the first time I've had a piece of fiction published!). This anthology resonated with me, and I knew I had to pursue it. I think the mission of Queer Saints is vital for queer art. Mainstream queer art is only allowed to be queer through a heteronormative lens, and this places limits on how queer characters can be represented. But every story I tell is a queer story, and as such I believe strongly in presenting all facets of queer characters: the good, the bad, the messy, and the mundane. I'm so grateful to Mae for putting together this book and making it possible to present authentic queer characters (albeit, horrific ones!).

I find perfection to be a false narrative we've been sold by society, And not just perfection of character; this Grecian statue appearance queer people are told we have to have is a lie. Crumbs--like all of the work I create--features characters who do not look like the queer characters found in mainstream queer art. They are fat, they are hairy--and they are human. I love to see queer characters who look like the people I know, the people in my circles, and when I create, I create those characters. For those looking for more fat-representation in horror (and not at the expense of a joke)--I'd say to check out Crumbs!

Joshua R. Pangborn is an award-winning actor, writer, and creator, and founder of SideKick Productions, a company focused on telling queer, fat and sex-positive stories on film and television. Joshua created the award-winning queer soap opera Skeleton Crew, now in its fifth season, and the horror comedy Demon Doctor, now entering its second season. Watch these series, along with the award-winning horror shorts Wasted on the Young and Scratched, at youtube.com/sidekickproductions. He can also be found on Instagram @SideKickProductions, on Twitter @SideKickProd, and at Patreon at patreon.com/sidekickproductions. Joshua holds a doctorate in English Literature from St. John's University.

Joshua R. Pangborn (he/him)
SideKick Productions
Patreon: SideKick Productions
Creator of the independent TV series Skeleton Crew and Demon Doctor
Creator of films Wasted on the Young and Scratched
Producer of The Art of Blowing It
Instagram: @SideKickProductions and Demon Doctor
Twitter: @SideKickProd
Facebook: Joshua R. Pangborn SideKick Productions Skeleton Crew Demon Doctor

The Book of Queer Saints
edited by Mae Murray

In this debut horror anthology by editor Mae Murray, queer villains reign supreme. The Book of Queer Saints features 13 short stories and a lineup that includes renowned authors Eric LaRocca, Hailey Piper, and Joe Koch. Joining them are the innovative visions of Briar Ripley Page, Nikki R. Leigh, Joshua R. Pangborn, Eric Raglin, Belle Tolls, Perry Ruhland, James Bennett, LC von Hessen, K.S. Walker, and George Daniel Lea. A fresh blend of transformative body horror, crimson-coated romance, and monstrous eroticism, this anthology is sure to satisfy your every depraved itch. Foreword by Sam Richard of Weirdpunk Books.

Further Reading

An Interview with The Book of Queer Saints Editor Mae Murray

Rebecca Rowlands review of The Book of Queer Saints