AUTHOR INTERVIEW: SEAN M. THOMPSON AT FARMINGTON CORRECTIONAL

Sean M. Thompson is the author of the collection Too Late from McManbeast Books, and Hate From The Sky, a novella in the bizarro genre, from Eraserhead Press. He’s also the cohost of a comedic horror/weird fiction podcast, Miskatonic Musings.


Thompson’s latest book, Farmington Correctional, is available now from Planet X Publications. The synopsis states: “Chuck is new to Farmington Correctional, in for assaulting a man trying to steal his car. He talks with his social worker Sarah once a week, and he's started to get used to life inside. Except, he's starting to hear a voice in his head, and starting to see things. And he can't shake the sense that God wants him to kill. There's a reason the woods surrounding the prison are called Whispering Pines. Chuck, Sarah, and the rest of the prison are about to find out why.”


Thompson sat down with The Ginger Nuts of Horror to talk about Farmington Correctional, religious symbolism, violence in entertainment, and fellow author Matthew M. Bartlett’s toothbrush.


Before anything, Sean, I wanted to take a minute to say thank you for taking the time to talk with The Ginger Nuts of Horror.


Well, it is a pleasure, sir. Always glad to work with fellow gingers.


Your new novella, Farmington Correctional, just came out from Planet X Publications. In your own words, could you tell us what it’s about and maybe a little about what inspired it, what made you want to tell this particular story?


Back around 2010 I was working in a garden center. It was one of a long line of menial customer service jobs I was to work until a few years back. Anyway, in this garden center there was a candle, and the scent was “Whispering Pine.” I’d been writing short stories since 2006, and the moment I picked up that candle I knew I had to use the name in a story.


I grew up with conservation land right behind my house, in central Massachusetts. I wrote about the version of these woods I had inside my head. The early stories, like anyone's, weren't great. But the seed was there. Eventually I moved on and picked other locales, but Whispering Pines has lived inside me since.


I had the idea for a full Whispering Pines collection for many years, but after a few false starts I put the project aside. I came back to a story from the early draft recently, and decided to expand it.
Around 2012 I first heard about the Bridgewater Triangle, and started incorporating a little of that into the universe. So, this early draft of Farmington was tweaked a bit based on the mutation of the fictional landscape and history.


The town of Farmington is my version of Framingham, one of the towns I grew up in. Of course, the really funny thing is turns out there’s a bunch of Farmington’s, so it’s almost like my Springfield. Whispering Pines is located in a few towns; other stand-ins for real places from my childhood, such as Lincoln, Hudson, Marlborough, Maynard, and Sudbury. I kind of mash them all together in my head and use whatever aspects of each place accordingly.


So flash forward to December of 2017, and my seasonal depression is in high gear. I’d been struggling a bit with social media addiction, and I needed a bit of a break. Having a project to get lost in helps. For some reason expanding the Farmington story seemed to fit, in that moment in my life. I was thinking about the collection again, which was why I choose to use a story from that.


As to why I wanted to tell this story in particular? Honestly, I have self image issues. I’ve felt like an outsider for a lot of my life; like a deviant, a freak, a weirdo, like maybe people look at me like I might be some sort of deranged serial kidnapper or the like. I don’t always get great sleep, and I have RBF, I get it, I can look kinda creepy. So I wanted to take that sort of character and ramp them up so they actually were a deranged, very violent individual.


I also wanted to approach a ghost story, a supernatural story, in a unique way. Prison narrative seemed to be the way to go.


Right off the bat, one of the most attention-grabbing things about Farmington Correctional is its prison setting. How important to you is setting in general and what does this one in particular offer as a storyteller? How was the process of researching the setting?


I chose to write about a prison because I have a fascination with the darker aspects of life polite society doesn't want to talk about. I don’t say this to seem edgy, I legitimately find myself drawn to researching these terrible, violent, disturbing things; I think it’s because I have a morbid streak.


When I began to research I found the stats for the mentally ill in prison are staggering. Also, at some point in researching the Bridgewater Triangle I read about the abuse in The Bridgewater State Hospital, which housed the criminally insane. I think there was another case also, but I’m blanking on the name of the facility. New England has a wonderfully sordid history of absolutely terrifying cases of patient abuse in those old asylums and prisons.


Setting is very important to me. It informs whatever story I decide to tell. Often I have an image in my mind, and I go from there. In this case the image was this massive old prison in the middle of the woods.


Staying on the subject of setting for a moment, Farmington Correctional itself sits in the shadow of your fictional Whispering Pines region. It has an ominous presence of its own, lurking in the background. What can you tell us about Whispering Pines and can readers expect another visit there sometime in the near future?


If I get off my ass, there's a whole lot more you'll be seeing. As to when, I'm not sure yet.


Whispering Pines is a hot spot of paranormal activity, or at the very least reports of such activity. I drew inspiration from, funny enough, an old Are You Afraid of the Dark episode called “Watcher’s Woods.” That’s being a tad reductive in terms of the influences, but the seed of the place definitely started early with that episode. I love the concept of a haunted forest, ala The Blair Witch Project (original) or more recently the work of Matthew M. Bartlett, in particular his Leeds stuff. Getting off on a tangent, I remember when I first read Gateways to Abomination I hopped on the Facebook messenger and told Matthew about my Whispering Pines stuff; he was very kind and didn’t outright ignore me. For the record I’d written many Whispering Pines stories before Gateways came out, but I still thought it was cool someone basically wrote haunted forest in Massachusetts stories. We’ve since become close, Bartlett and I, so close I often use his car, use his toothbrush, and sleep in his bed (all lies).


There’s some very striking imagery in Farmington Correctional, stuff that seems to evoke both Old Testament “wrath of god” Christian mythology and good ol’ diabolical backwoods folk-horror occultism. What is your view of the supernatural in your fiction? For this project, what was the appeal of this particular kind of iconography?


I am obsessed with the intersection of the psychological and the supernatural. Both deal with perception; if you can really trust what you're seeing, hearing, feeling. Religion, faith, is all perception. I don't know what I believe. But I know if I were to have a supernatural experience I would wonder about the spiritual.


As for the appeal of the fire and brimstone, the cross, the wings, and the halos… This imagery surrounds me all the time as an American. What I like to do is use this some would say played out iconography and infuse it into a story in which the paradigm is shifted. So, the cross in this case is not a sign of salvation, but rather an image of profound mental illness, or doom. You’re starting to see this trend in a lot of horror, The Witch for example. Also, in prison many inmates turn to God, so it seemed an obvious choice of imagery.


There’s also some very striking violence in Farmington Correctional. Not in the sense of being graphic or gory, because it isn’t. Rather, in the sense of having a kind of raw, real-world ugliness to it. There’s a palpable air of menace when it pops up. How much of that is intentional? How do you feel about the push and pull between explicit violence versus more suggestive violence?


It’s all very intentional.


My early work was very splatterpunk; limbs torn off, guts used to strangle, hell, I had a story where some guy broke his wrist while fisting someone. So my early work was much more, almost cartoonish violence. In these early years, I discovered something very important: If you go too over the top with the violence, and if there’s a lot of it, it becomes funny. It becomes this fun ride. And don’t get me wrong, I think this sort of over the top playful pulp violence does have its place. However, if your intent is to scare and disturb, over the top doesn’t work. Or rather, if it does, it works sparingly.


More often than not nowadays I like to hint at a terrible mutilation rather than show it. I have some truly awful stuff hinted at in my first novel TH3 D3M0N which I left up to the reader’s imagination, but pretty much spelled out. For instance: the scene in the shower with the cheese grater. Yeah. Let that one soak in. Awful, right? Okay, well right now, whatever you pictured, that’s way more effective than any explicit description I could give. The violence becomes more intimate, more personal, because in the hinting of it each person goes on to fill in the gaps in their own unique way.


Real violence is ugly. Real violence is quick. Real violence is chaotic. Yet, what I’m writing isn’t entirely real violence; it’s in a story, so it is still fictional. Basically, what I try to do is mix real, devastating violence with more outlandish over the top stuff. But as stated, when using over the top violence, a little sprinkle is all you need. Too much and the scene loses its impact.


I want the violence in my stories, above all, to disturb. Because I think all too often in our media we see violence that is so far from being real that it downplays actual violence. People get shot in a movie and it’s just a little groan and they fall down. You have to think about how it would really happen. The person would probably wail in awful pain, and they might not die all that quickly. How would the blood pump out of the wound? It most likely wouldn’t gush, it would slowly pump out. Your hearing would most likely be bad if a shot went off in an enclosed space, or if the bullet was fired close to you without ear protection. So I try to take all this into account, as often the base of my work is realism.


I am greatly inspired by Jack Ketchum. That man knew how to have the violence in his work hit hard. And I think anyone who wants to write about violence, no matter what genre, needs to read his essay “Splat Goes the Hero: Visceral Horror.”


I like to have my work breathe. In and you take the reader in, in real close, close enough to smell the breath of the person or thing panting before you. Out, pulling it back so you see the wider scope, the whole tableau. I also like to control the cuts, switching from, for lack of a better term quick cuts (no pun intended) to slow cuts. So in one scene we only see bits and pieces of the violence. In the next, we hold, hold for an uncomfortable amount of time on some aspect of brutality.


TL;DR in all things, balance.


Planet X Publications is a relatively new press. How did Farmington Correctional end up coming out through them? What has been it like working with them?


I had been talking to Michael Adams over at Planet X a lot online. I’d had a story in the anthology they put out Test Patterns. My last project I self published, so this time around I wanted to work with a small press, because self publishing correctly can run you back, and as a writer my retirement plan is a box, and I’m a broke son of a bitch. I looked at it practically: Michael was someone I had a good working relationship with, and he seemed hot to trot, so I asked him, and he said he’d look at what I gave him.


It’s been nice working for Planet X. I got a lot of creative input, and had a bit of experience from self publishing so I knew a bit about artists, interior layout, etc. I knew the right people for the job, and requested them. George Cotronis made us an incredible cover, and I want to thank him again because I know I was a huge pain in the ass. Ultimately, the cover came out incredible. It’s one of my favorites out of all of my books.


I’d recommend them. Buy their books. Write them books. Long live Planet X.


Having read some of your other work, you seem to have a pretty diverse bibliography. You’ve written things that run the gamut from what some might call straightforward Stephen King-style horror to bleak Thomas Ligotti-esque weird fiction to completely surreal bizarro, all while retaining a unique voice of your own. What to you is the common through-line that unites them all? Do you see distinctions between the different kinds of stories you write? What are your thoughts on the concept of “genre” in general (and horror as a genre specifically)?


Genre, as a concept, is a tool for organization. Terms are created to differentiate this work from that work. Otherwise the fucking book store you’d go in and be like “what do you recommend that’s scary?” and they’d just point at a big ass pile of books in no fucking order.


I go back and forth with whether I love the concept of genre, or fucking hate it. I love horror, and usually if people ask me what I write I say horror, because that’s usually the mode I go into a story with. My intent is often to scare, or unsettle. But the more I write, and the older I get, the more I just want to tell a good story, to write engaging characters, and to impart personal philosophy.


There are of course distinctions between my work at times, yes. I see them. My more traditional horror I tend to be a bit drier, buttoned up, operating in a more or less realist mode, though I do sprinkle in transgressive and surrealistic elements at times. My bizarro work I try to operate entirely in dream logic, so it tends to move a lot faster, and can be a bit more manic and genre hoppy. For instance, my bizarro novella Hate From The Sky moves very quickly (even for me) and one page might be a crime scene, while the next could be urban fantasy, the next page comedy. In a dream, you don’t always have these rigid lines separating story and tone. So I back off a bit with my bizarro, let the story hop across borders a lot; I think of it as absurdist slipstream, but bizarro is how I market it. I feel like I’ve never written weird fiction, but maybe I have? Again, we get into how genre is, at the end of the day, a way to market and organize. Less of a tool for the writer than for the audience.


Ultimately, a Sean M. Thompson story has a distinct sensibility, and view of the world. I like to write characters who feel like their lives are falling apart, or whose lives are actually falling apart, because I think in these moments you can see someone for who they really are; when everything is falling apart, a person can be at their most beautiful. Tragedy can have this way of pushing the extraneous out, letting the real, the true, shine through. Yet, I’m not afraid of the darkness, and to show the ways the world can be a truly awful and brutal place. I do think in my long form fiction this optimism peeks its head out, because at the end of the day I am an optimist, I just refuse to hide from the uglier aspects of the world. Though at the moment I’m struggling to remember if Farmington has said optimism. Perhaps.


I love the horror genre because to my mind it deals with the most important things, namely life and death, the struggle for survival. Survival is at the heart of every story, but a horror story won’t obfuscate this fact by dressing it in the clothes of a forty something New Yorker who’s unlucky in love. The horror I love strips away the bullshit, and leaves you with the simple truth: you survive or you die.


Now that Farmington Correctional is out, can you tell us what else you’re working on, where readers should look for your work in the coming months, and how they can best follow you going forward?


I’m on twitter @spookyseant, and my new website is seanmthompsonfiction.com. I am a cohost of the comedic horror and weird fic podcast Miskatonic Musings, and I’m on Facebook because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.


I’m currently in the process of shopping my first full length short story collection, which I would say is mostly supernatural horror informed by my recent love of absurdism and surrealism. And soon I would like to start my second novel, a western which is a continuation of the story “Dust” from my chapbook Too Late. However, best laid plans and all of that, so who knows, in a year I might have a literary novel about ducks.


Thanks again for taking the time to speak with The Ginger Nuts of Horror.


Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Be sure to tune in on Friday for William Tea's review of Farmington Correctional 

Chuck is new to Farmington Correctional, in for assaulting a man trying to steal his car. He talks with his social worker Sarah once a week, and he's started to get used to life inside. Except, he's starting to hear a voice in his head, and starting to see things. And he can't shake the sense that God wants him to kill.

There's a reason the woods surrounding the prison are called Whispering Pines. Chuck, Sarah, and the rest of the prison are about to find out why.