G. Wayne Miller:
Congratulations, Christa, on your latest book, “Beneath the Poet’s House”. Before you discuss that, how about a brief intro to folks who may not have read your outstanding work yet?
Christa Carmen:
Thank you so much! I am a writer of horror and psychological suspense, and my novels include “The Daughters of Block Island”, “Beneath the Poet’s House”, and the forthcoming “How to Fake a Haunting”. My short story collection, “Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked” was published in 2018 by Unnerving, and additional short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in places like Nightmare, Vastarien, Wicked Run Press, Fireside Magazine, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and the Bram Stoker-nominated books “Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror” and “The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaption”, to name a few.
I live in Westerly, Rhode Island with my husband (we were married on Halloween at the historic-and-purportedly-haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado), our four-year-old daughter, and a bloodhound/golden retriever mix. I have a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in English and psychology, a master’s degree from Boston College in counseling psychology, and a Master of Fine Arts from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine.
GWM:
When did you first begin writing?
Carmen:
In May of 2014, I was on a train back from Baltimore to my hometown in Rhode Island after a family gathering, and I ended up downloading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft to read on my Kindle. I had read the book before, but I’d recently overcome a fair amount of upheaval in my life and was reconnecting with things that brought me joy. As I read, I remembered, almost like a woman awakening from a bad dream, that not only did I love reading, but I loved writing, and there was nothing stopping me from doing just that. I’d written a lot in the past—mostly journaling and some weak attempts at novels and a memoir—but never with the express intent of trying to get published. By the time the train arrived in Westerly, I was outfitted with a plan and no small amount of inspiration, maybe even preoccupation bordering on obsession. By the next day, I was trying my hand at short stories, and by the end of that summer, I’d finished a draft of my first novel.
Was horror you preferred genre from the start?
Carmen:
I’ve enjoyed horror for as long as I can remember. Counted among my favorite books as a child were Alvin Schwartz’s “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”, the “Goosebumps” and “Fear Street Series”, the vampire novels of Christopher Pike, the harrowing mysteries and narrow escapes of Caroline Keene’s “Nancy Drew”, and James Howe’s “Bunnicula”, “The Celery Stalks at Midnight”, and “Howliday Inn”. The love of the unknown, of things that go bump in the night, only increased as I got older.
I remember lying in bed following my first ever horror film, John Carpenter’s “Halloween”, certain that Michael Myers was in my backyard, making his way up the trellis to my bedroom window. That there was no trellis alongside my house didn’t matter; beguiling, paralyzing fear wound through me all the same. I can also recall darting across my room to retrieve a crucifix from my jewelry box after reading the scene in “Salem’s Lot” in which Danny Glick floats outside of Mark Petrie’s window, tap-tap-tapping, hoping to be invited in, and I refused to venture into my bathroom at night for weeks after reading the “Inside 217" chapter of “The Shining”, certain that Jack Torrance’s vision of the hideous dead woman would become my own.
Today, the horror that interests me most is a different kind than the vampires or ghosts that inducted me into the genre. That’s not to say I don’t still enjoy these types of stories; I love a great creature-feature or supernatural-horror novel, short story, or film as much as the next fan. But horror, in my opinion, is the best genre for reflecting the hideous and appalling parts of life—addiction, mental illness, the death of a loved one, difficult marriage, dangerous childbirth, the future, dead-end jobs, not being good enough, being forgotten—back at us through a carnivalesque filter that makes the suffering more bearable.
GWM:
And what is the appeal of horror? For me, it has always been what my favorite writer, Stephen King, described when he wrote: “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
Carmen:
I absolutely agree with that King quote; he’s always—not surprisingly—so eloquent when it comes to describing the appeal of horror. Personally, I subscribe to the Jungian idea that we each have a shadow side to our personality, and I find writing horror the most satisfying way to explore mine, and the most organic way to work through what truly terrifies me. I’m actually a little suspect of people who don’t enjoy horror, or, at the very least, don’t acknowledge the essential nature of the horror genre within film and literature. That there’s darkness everywhere seems much easier to swallow when you’re used to facing that reality in your entertainment.
GWM:
OK, let’s dig into your work. Your first book was a collection: Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked. An overview, please.
Carmen:
The most literal way to read Something Borrowed is as a series of straightforward horror stories. There are ghosts, apocalypse-inciting rains, witches, serial killers, more ghosts, nefarious shadow creatures, zombies, haunted houses, long-preserved corpses, newly-opened mausoleums, sinister trains, and out-of-place staircases.
But these tropes are stand-ins for deeper themes I was interested in exploring. The babysitter in “Souls, Dark and Deep” uses her unorthodox powers not for evil but to level the playing field against evil and injustice. The serial killers in “Red Room” function less to scare à la Michael Myers, and more to warn of the perils men can face when they disbelieve the women in their lives for whom they’re meant to be allies, like their partners and other loved ones. The ghost in the eponymous flash fiction piece is a hardcore, Gloria Steinem-quoting, take-no-nonsense-and-even-less-prisoners feminist. And the shadow wolf in “Flowers from Amaryllis” represents many things: the fear of eventually losing a companion animal, the fear of losing a parent, the fear of being alone, the fear of going mad, the fear of not being able to be true to who you are.
In putting together this collection, I really strove to include stories that showcased my range, not just as a writer, but as a horror lover, and all the different types of horror stories I had penned to date. Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked includes post-apocalyptic, extreme, slasher, paranormal, supernatural, psychological, zombie, Gothic, magical realism, weird, and creature horror, so I truly hope the phrase, ‘there’s something for everyone,’ will apply.
Read the rest of this interview here.
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