 J.S. Breukelaar is the author of The Bridge and Collision: Stories, a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and winner of the 2019 Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Previous novels include Aletheia and American Monster. Her short fiction has appeared at The Dark Magazine, Black Static, Lightspeed, Gamut, Unnerving and elsewhere, including Paula Guran’s Years Best Horror and Fantasy, 2019. She currently lives in Sydney, Australia where she writes and teaches. You can find her at thelivingsuitcase.com and on everywhere else at @jsbreukelaar. WEBSITE LINKS www.thelivingsuitcase.com Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I am an Australian-American author of dark fiction living in Sydney with my family. I teach writing and literature at the University of Sydney and at the University of Western Sydney and online at LitReactor.com. Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life? If you’re talking about The Bridge, I have to say that I’ve met them all already. I probably wouldn’t be able to write about them otherwise. I know that sounds precious but it’s true. Even the Father in The Bridge— I know him. We all do. He’s the mad scientist, the bad daddy, a controlling uber-dude with fatal misogynistic instincts. That rapey guy in the bar who you were honest-to-god hoping you wouldn’t have to hit with a tire iron but you know, pleased to meet you and all that jazz. For me writing about monsters is like putting live footage through an animation filter. It looks like art, but it’s really life. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? So much—if you’re talking about genres, then off the top of my head that’d be noir fiction in the style of everything from Hammett to Lehane (in books); science fiction, Gothic, magic realism, classical drama, and weird fiction. I think more than genres, certain authors have marked me. Miguel Cervantes, Mary Shelley, Bolano, Carlos Fuentes, Cormac McCarthy, Ken Lui, William Gibson, the Brontes, Toni Morrison, Aeschylus. Jeff Ford, Peter Straub, Angela Carter, Arthur Machen, Kathe Koja. Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Vince Gilligan and Michaela Coel. Poetry is my bit on the side. Auden, Dickinson, Bishop, Heaney. The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations. What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions? I don’t mind the term, because horror, like paranoia or pessimism, can be another word for insight. There are all kinds of horrors in The Bridge. I leaned right in—body horror, cosmic horror—witches, myth—and social horrors too. The last were the worst, of course, so the supernatural horror functioned as both curtain raiser and valid for itself. The function of supernatural horror as a point of entry, a portal, into ordinary terrors is often underestimated by the critics—but all you have to do is read Paul Tremblay, Laird Barron, Angela Carter or Karon Warren to see how effective that ambiguity can be on the page. That horror is anything but ambiguous is one of the many false assumptions about horror, broken past by too many authors to mention. There is also the assumption that the genre attracts narrow mindedness, racism and sexism in both readers and writers. But is there a style of literature or any artform that doesn’t? Why should the art world be any different than the real world in that way? What about Roth and Updike? Dickens? Tolstoy? I think people like to beat up on horror for other reasons. Maybe for the same reason that they beat up on romance literature. There’s a kind of snobbishness associated with it. What they’re really saying is that it’s forgivable for Roth to be racist because he’s an artist, but it’s not for Lovecraft because he was a hack. That it’s okay to elicit fear or disgust for the purpose, as Lovecraft put it of ‘uplifting the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism,’ but that it’s not okay to do it for entertainment. Or, even worse, to wipe the smirk right off our faces. I honestly think that part of the criticism levelled toward horror—and I’m not trying to be defensive here—is that many readers lack the imagination or confidence to detach themselves from the everyday. The reader who doesn’t think they’re sensitive enough to jack into the supernatural, or who doesn’t want to, who thinks it’s beneath them, or who is simply not able to free themselves enough from the ordinary to respond to the extraordinary. And I get that. But when they get the chance—a couple of my most valued readers are mainstream writers and are new to horror, and read my work initially out of a sense of obligation and reciprocity, only to amazed that this, as they said, was horror? I’m only just slightly more of a Lovecraft fan than I am a Roth fan. My experience is that it’s just not possible to break certain peoples’ associations of horror with stereotyping or cheap tricks, or splatter porn or exploitation. I’m pretty okay with leaving them to their safety nets, to be honest. While the rest of us get on with our work in the genre pushing its penumbral boundaries toward lost and found possibilities of being—and humanity is just one of those. A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years? I think it’s safe to say that the tea leaves predict a host of pandemic/plague stories in the future. Folklore will hopefully continue to emerge as diverse and multi-lingual story tellers weave traditional stories into tales of universal terror. I think that mainstream writers, especially those not affiliated with the Smirking Optimism Party, will draw on horror more and more in order to navigate this weird reality even as we work together towards a better world. Weird horror, quiet horror, slipstream—cosmic horror might get a good dust off. It’s definitely time for the so-called monstrous feminine to lure more non-binary characters and plot lines out of the closet. I drag three such characters into the light in The Bridge—the Furies, sisters born of spilled Titan blood, a castration in fact. I’ve redrawn them as a witch, a rock chick and a non-binary cartographer. All winged of course, and wielding scourges which they frequently use on themselves, or on each other. And I think that older women are already featuring in new roles in horror. I mean as complex protagonists and not witches or crones or props. Or dying or dead or eccentric or irascible or spry or grumpy – I think that there is already a reckoning in horror that is leaving these stereotypes behind. And it’s about time. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? I don’t know. At its best it’s one of the most challenging forms that I can think of, and many more readers enjoy being challenged in their reading than publishers give them credit for. Its potential to tap into raw emotion is something we’ve been familiar with since Grendel’s howl. And the thrill of the shadows. I think that’s in us all—the attraction to the monstrous even as it repels us. The awe of the unknown, the lure of the lonely wood. The promise and perils of discovery and of being discovered. At its worse, and this is what I condemn in The Bridge, which is as much about story telling as anything, the attraction to suffering represented in some of the more exploitive horror fiction is a next-level Schadenfreude that like one of my characters says, is obscenely enjoyed at the lip of the abyss, ‘like from a cute bar right near the edge, drinking sneaky spritzes and wearing brand new shoes.’ What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? Honestly, I would say nothing. I am loving this time in horror—everything old seems new again. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off? I am behind in my reading, so for now the ones I’m immediately aware of are Joanne Anderton from Australia, who is about to burst onto the stage with a new collection and a novella that I read in beta and blew me away. I’ve read stories by Carina Bissett, Roni Stinger, Maria Haskins, Gordon B. White, J. Ashley Smith—whose new novel, Ariadne, I Love You, harnesses Greek myth in ways I adore—all upcoming horror writers of huge talent. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? They all stay with me and I’m grateful to have had a mostly positive reception to my work. There was one reviewer who didn’t like my short story collection, Collision, particularly “Union Falls,” which they read as insensitive to amputees. That stood with me because there are no amputees in that story or in any of my stories. The review was a positive reminder of the power of fiction to fly or fall where it may. That’s not to say that I agree with the manifesto of the exploitive reading series in The Bridge, which states with requisite smirking optimism that we are all responsible for our own happy endings. If the last eighteen months have called BS on anything it’s that. What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? Not having the time to do as much of it as I should. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? No. There are topics that others can tackle much better than me, and I’m happy to let them. If I have a no-go zone it is scenes where children and animals get hurt, partly because these are problematic in terms of I guess, consent, for want of a better word, and partly because my writing isn’t up to doing it effectively, at least for now. It’s not that I don’t refer to these evils in my fiction at times, but obliquely and never head-on. Writing is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years? I’ve gotten better at writing on no sleep. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? Angela Slatter read an early draft of The Bridge. To say Angela has been instrumental in my career, and in that of many others, is an understatement. You won’t find a more generous literary citizen anywhere. After reading the novel she suggested it lacked “an overarching bitch statement that comes at the beginning and hints at past and future,” a ‘Sing, goddess,’ call to arms like in the Iliad, that moment where the singer says, “Listen up, fucksticks, I am telling you a story and you will listen.” I stared at her comments, and thought, what the what? I walked and ran and danced and listened to music and cooked and drank wine and finally it hit me. I got what she was saying with every fibre of my being. And when I sat down to write again, I came up with the opening line of the novel: “I was raised by three sisters—one a witch, one an assassin and the third just batshit crazy.” Short stories are all about the end. The end, in a sense becomes the beginning. If you don’t have that right—the ending—you’ve got it all wrong. Novels are much more forgiving in one sense, because it’s a longer ride and the journey is the destination—but you have to know the secret password—literally. You have to find that ‘Listen up, fucksticks,’ line. Best advice ever. Which of your characters is your favorite? In The Bridge I’d have to say that’s middle sister Tiff, the raging rock chick mistress of kink and doom. Which of your books best represents you? Whichever book I’ve just finished, which in this case is The Bridge. I think it represents where I am as a writer in terms of being more accessible but still challenging. I draw from my own experiences as an insecure teenager, as a bereaved best friend, as a sister, as a daughter and above all as a story-teller straddling worlds. Connected with that it also represents my best efforts so far to imagine being other than I am in terms of history, gender, physicality or even ontology. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? “Narn is on the porch in an instant, rolling up the sleeves of her tunic. Spittle and invocations fly from her lips. Beneath the hysterical screech of the ravens, I am also aware of Mag stealthy and watchful around the corner of the hut in their filthy oversized hoody and mud-caked sneakers. And perhaps that is what propels me into my sister’s arms, like a baby, wrapping my legs around her waist. A maggot drops from her lips, and a watery ichor pools behind her toenails. But her hair smells like bloodwood blossoms. It has grown back coarse as a horse’s mane. It is so long that I wind it around both of our necks so she can never leave me again.” - The Bridge. Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? The Bridge takes place in a parallel multiverse, where Meera and her twin sister Kai are among thousands of Mades, part human, part AI, in a cult called the Blood Temple. Its founder is the Father, who has implanted his Forever Code in all the ‘daughters’, a kind of Asimovian compliance protocol, unaware that multiple births corrupt the code. By the time Meera and Kai realize this, it’s too late, and while Meera manages to escape with the help of a mysterious witch called Narn, Kai doesn’t make it. Eventually Meera is off to college where in order to be accepted by the Regulars, she allows herself to be talked into participating in a horror reading series called Fearsome Gatherum, and in order to do this she needs to persuade Narn to keep on sharing her conjuring tales, in return for a promise that she will try and find Narn’s missing sister. And a way to forgive herself for losing her own. Next, I’m wrapping a collaborative novella with Angela Slatter, the acclaimed Australian author, and after that I have a haunted house novel in the works. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? I love horror tropes, personally. I love a good basement. A haunted house, tall trees, a dead cell phone, whispering corners, unforgiven sins, sex-crazed teenagers. Just leave out trauma or splatter porn, and if you’re writing the other, make sure you’re writing yourself. One thing I still see in new horror writers, is the fetishization/romanticization of rape/abduction/trauma, and again, in both genders, a kind of blindness actually to the implications of killing mothers/daughters/others as the set-up. I generally find that these writers are pretty receptive to alternatives once they seriously consider them. I mean come on—it’s all too easy to give mom cancer just so you don’t have to deal with her in your story, but is it really necessary? Generally my advice to new horror writers is that if it’s easy you probably shouldn’t do it. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? The last great book I read was Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, and the last book that disappointed me was Castle of Otranto, which I finally got around to reading and which I found kind of like a Hammer Horror movie without the humor. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it during lockdown. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? What is your favorite episode of Schitt’s Creek? And what would be the answer? All of them! But just for now, because we need a happy ending: Season 6, Episode 10. “Sunrise, Sunset,” when Moira and Alexis rescue each other. After a successful meeting with the producers of the comeback season of Sunrise Bay, Moira sits down next to Alexis who is binge-watching old episodes and feeling lost. ‘Wait,” Moira says, pointing to the TV. ‘She’s about to look up.’ The Bridge |
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