Shining Moon Episode 30: A Walk in the Dark II

Tara Campbell :  www.taracampbell.com.

Kat Day writes regular flash for her blog, thefictionphial.wordpress.com.    

 Lindz McLeod: https://lindzmcleod.co.uk/

 Suzan Palumbo:  suzanpalumbo.wordpress.com. 

 Sam W. Pisciotta:  www.silo34.com or @Silo34 on X and Instagram.

Stories on this episode


Tara Campbell

“Spencer,” Speculative City #7. https://speculativecity.com/fiction/spencer/

“Sasabonsam,” Strange Horizons, December 11, 2017  http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/sasabonsam/

 Kat Day

“When I Was Young, I Did Not Need Magic,”  PseudoPod 832 October 14, 2022 

https://pseudopod.org/2022/10/14/pseudopod-832-flash-on-the-borderlands-lxiii-respect-your-elders/

Lindz McLeod

'Sunbathers', Cosmic Horror Monthly.

 Suzan Palumbo

“Douen” -- https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/douen/  and https://pseudopod.org/2023/12/09/pseudopod-896-douen/ 

Sam W. Pisciotta

“Words for the Dead,” Spirits and Ghouls Flametree Anthology. 

 “Blue Line on a Winter’s Night,” Factor Four, https://factorfourmag.com/blue-line-on-a-winters-night-by-sam-w-pisciotta/

J.S. Breukelaar 

 “Auscultation” in The Dark. https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/auscultation/ 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:01.442)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 30, A Walk in the Dark 2, Dark Fantasy versus Horror. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. This week we'll be having a conversation with Tara Campbell, Kat Day, Linz McLeod, Suzan Palumbo and Sam W. Pisciotta. Let's start with some introductions. Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimball Fellow,

Deborah L. Davitt (00:30.43)
Fiction co-editor at Barrow House and graduate of American University's MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Master's Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, Craft Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, Artemis Rising. She is the author of the eco-sci-fi novel Treevolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press.

We are publishing Brethren. I have been published by Aqueduct Press too. It's amazing. All right. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project, SFWP, in fall 2024. She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, the Writers Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.terracamble.com. Welcome to the podcast, Tara. How are you today?

Tara Campbell (01:25.923)
I'm doing wonderfully. Thank you for having me. Hopefully the airplanes flying over ahead won't be disruptive. They started right when the podcast started.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:35.105)
Oh no, I don't hear them at all. You're good.

Tara Campbell (01:36.972)
Okay, great.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:39.246)
All right, we'll move now to Kat Day, who is an editor and writer who lives in Oxfordshire. By day, she works as a medical editor and looks after her two children and wrangles the pseudopod towers, tentacles, into producing horror stories every week. By night, she does all the things she hasn't managed to do during the day. Her work has been published at venues, including Flash Fiction Online, Cast of Wonders, and Daily Science Fiction, and she writes regular flash for her blog, thef

Welcome back to the podcast, Kat. It's wonderful to have you back.

Kat Day (02:10.29)
Hi, it's wonderful to be back. Yeah, thank you very much. And also happy Lunar New Year, it's the year of the dragon.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:19.806)
It is, yes. I just, I discovered that because I was trying to get, I was trying to wrangle somebody for the podcast for later in March. And I had just reached out to them through their contact form and they said, yes, I'm interested, but I'm very involved with Lunar New Year right now. And I'm like, Oh crap. I didn't realize. I'm so sorry. No, don't worry. It'll take about a month for us to get together. It's fine. We'll make a connection along the way. We just lost someone. Who did we lose? We just lost Suzan.

Kat Day (02:21.065)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:49.43)
Well, we'll get back to her in a second. Linz McLeod is a queer working class Scottish writer. Her short prose has been published by Apex Catapult Pseudopod. TURDUCKEN (Spaceboy, 2023), as well as her novels BEAST (Hear Us Scream, 2023), SUNBATHERS (Hedone Books, 2024), and A FLORAL ARRANGEMENT (Harlequin, 2024). 

Suzan Palumbo (02:56.281)
And my internet is gonna go in and out.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:15.926)
That's a lot of stuff coming out in a very short time. I don't know how you have the energy, but that's amazing. She is a full member of the SFWA, the club president of the Edinburgh's Writers Club, and is currently studying for a PhD in creative writing. Welcome to the podcast, Lins.

Lindz McLeod (03:31.435)
Thank you very much and my PhD is the most relaxing thing I'm currently doing.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:36.421)
Hahaha!

Alright, so when Susan comes back, she is a Trinidadian Canadian, dark speculative fiction writer and editor. Her short stories have been nominated for the Nebula, Aurora, and World Fantasy Awards. She also co-fond the Ignite Awards with LD Lewis. Her debut dark fantasy slash horror science fiction short story collection Skin Thief Stories is now out from Neon Hemlock.

Her novella Countess will be published by ECW Press in fall 2024. Her writing has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, The Deadlands, Nightmare Magazine, The Dark Magazine, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Anathema, SpecFix from the Margins and other venues. She's officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maas Literary Agency. Her full bibliography can be found at susa And when she logs back in, we will greet her again.

Sam W. Pichota is an intrepid storyteller hurtling through space time on the power of morning coffee and late night tea. He writes stories for people who want to visit other planets, learn magic from birds, or camp in haunted forests. Connect with him at www.silo34.com or at Silo34 on X and Instagram. Oh, you have converted over to saying X as opposed to saying Twitter. I don't know whether I should be sad or not.


Sam W. Pisciotta (04:58.359)
Right.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:00.365)
Welcome to the podcast.

Sam W. Pisciotta (05:02.599)
Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm excited to talk about horror and dark fiction.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:10.186)
All right, we're gonna dive right into our general questions, which is let's talk a little bit about the history of horror. Somebody recently spoke to me about the Epic of Gilgamesh and maggots writhing on the head of Enkidu as the first moment of horror and literature. And I was just like, wow, I didn't realize it actually went back that far because most people talk about The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole being the first horror novel.

Where do you draw your inspirations from? Where do you... What authors are seminal for you in terms of how you have interfaced with horror and dark fantasy through your lifetime? And I'll start with Linz.

Lindz McLeod (05:57.031)
So it's an interesting question and one I find kind of hard to answer with respect to like what I find the differences between kind of horror and anything else. And kind of what I came up with was I think if we're considering kind of dark fiction versus what is like true horror, I think it differs so much from person to person. I think there's so many shades of horror that it kind of there are fictions that

genuinely horrified me and filled me with revulsion and fiction that made me want to put the book in my chest freezer so that it could not hurt me. And books that I, even though I had maybe read them before and I knew what was coming, I still felt like the thrill of dread. So for me, I'm always going to go back to Poe because there's something about Poe that is just so kind of inexorable.


Lindz McLeod (06:52.831)
like those characters are never getting away from what is happening to them. And it was really nice to see that kind of brought to life in the Fall of Usher. And also like I looked, I didn't actually know the Walpole story so I had looked it up and there's actually been like a stop motion made of it which is really like a little short film from like the late 70s. But I was also thinking about like the way that ancient civilizations described...

Deborah L. Davitt (06:53.376)
Mm-hmm.


Lindz McLeod (07:19.343)
their versions of kind of Heaven and Hell. I think there was a great courses series that I was listening to about ancient Mesopotamia and they basically went, hey you know what hell is for us? It's exactly like this so everything is mud and wind but it's underground and you're dark. And I thought, well that doesn't say a great amount about your current state.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:22.55)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (07:40.715)
and that you're not having a wonderful time, but that you weren't. It's the same. It's just darker down there. And I thought, oh, that's pretty terrifying. There's something about that was about four years ago and it stays with me is it's the same. It's just windier and darker. So I think we can go really, really far back and find that things have always been, you know, we've always been scaring each other. I think in some ways it's how we feel alive, I think, in certain ways.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:06.35)
Mm-hmm. Welcome back, Suzan. We introduced you while you were gone, but I just wanted to say hello now. I'm going to repeat the question, and I'm going to peg you for the person who answers it next. We're talking about the history of horror, and we talked a little bit about the Epic of Gilgamesh and Horace Walpole's seminal and controversial novel, The Castle of Otranto. And I was asking people, what


Deborah L. Davitt (08:36.29)
works of horror have left marks for them. What has been seminal for you as a text that you can't get away from and that you use as a touchstone for horror for yourself.

Suzan Palumbo (08:51.888)
Okay, so first of all, I'm going to apologize because my internet started acting up as soon as we got on here. It was fine all afternoon. So if I come in and out as a... I know, I'm like almost crying. I'm like, why? Why? So if I fade in and out, it's just a meta performance of me being horrific. I am being a ghost. Do not... Just go on without me. It's like a zombie movie. Save.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:03.511)
Man.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:20.776)
I will work with it. I will work with you. Don't worry. We will have an Ouija board set up and we will figure it out. Mm-hmm.


Suzan Palumbo (09:22.992)
Yeah, yeah, just save yourself, continue on and let Susan fall back. But, so this question is very grounded in written literature, and I love written literature, so I don't have a problem with that. But I sort of approached horror. I went to school and I have a literature degree and all that stuff. And, but.

Things for me that are seminal. Ah!

Deborah L. Davitt (09:54.379)
And we're gone.

Kat Day (09:55.283)
Uh...

Deborah L. Davitt (09:57.022)
I was wondering if we were going to be able to hold her because her voice was so glitchy, so... Oh, man.


Lindz McLeod (10:03.843)
See, this is a kind of horror, in a way.

Tara Campbell (10:06.12)
Right.

Kat Day (10:06.27)
She was just, I feel like she was just about to start talking about, you know, storytelling, verbal storytelling. Yeah, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:06.684)
It is, yes.

Sam W. Pisciotta (10:07.999)
is.

Tara Campbell (10:15.411)
Right.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:17.098)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the oral tradition and things like that. So yeah, I was really wanting to hear that. And now we're, and we've got a comment in chat. Yeah. Okay, yeah.

Kat Day (10:24.379)
Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, it's just me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, this is something that I talk about often, actually, is I, I don't come from a literature, literature degree background, my degrees are in chemistry. So my, I tend to look at things, I maybe look at things a little bit differently.

Kat Day (10:57.522)
But something that I am constantly saying is horror is the oldest form of fiction. I will die on this film, probably. Just because it is the, I am absolutely convinced it is the first story humans started telling each other was essentially horror in that it was intended to be warnings. It was.

Suzan Palumbo (11:12.348)
Save yourself.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:25.347)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Day (11:26.666)
That is where the bad things happen. That is where the big, big monsters are. Don't go into that dark place. This is what will happen if you do this. This is what will happen if you do that. And in that sense, I think of horror as being that I literally said this the other day, I think horror is the first story and the last story. It was the first story humans ever told and it will be the last story humans ever tell.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:33.026)
Mm-hmm.


Deborah L. Davitt (11:38.396)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:55.82)
Yeah.

Kat Day (11:56.222)
When the world ends, we will be telling stories about the ending of the world. And we told stories right from the beginning. If you go back into even like the oldest, I mean, just for the sake of obviously having a Christian background, I'm more familiar with the Bible than anything else, but it's the same in other religious texts, I'm sure. The Old Testament is brutal. It's full of horror. It's, you know.

kill all your firstborn sons, rivers of blood, plagues of locusts. It's horrific, it's all horror, you know, this is it. And again, it's all warnings, it's all... And so, that's how I see horror, it's always been with us and it will always be with us.


Deborah L. Davitt (12:34.318)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:43.638)
That is something you've said something there that I want to come back to and touch on later, which is the idea of culpability and responsibility and horror. But we're going to save that question for a moment and we're going to talk to Tara, and we're going to say, what are some touchstone narratives for you, whether they're oral tradition or text tradition, what has touched you that has shaped your writing.


Sam W. Pisciotta (12:53.879)
Hmm.

Tara Campbell (13:10.935)
Thank you for personalizing the question because I'm kind of the odd person out here in that I actually sidled into horror. I did not dive in. I can't watch scary movies late at night and yet I write horror and I'm surprised when I see a story published under the horror category. But I think probably what shaped that approach from my approach to horror is the exorcist.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:19.423)
Hahaha

Tara Campbell (13:35.619)
I was born in 1970, the book and the movie were sort of born in the early 70s. And I came into horror not through seeking it out myself, but my brother was very unkindly reading excerpts to me as he was reading the book. And of course, I mean, I would go away, but then I would come back and want to hear more, you know, but so it's not something I sought out, but it was something that fascinated me in kind of that gruesome way where, you know, it's like through the.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:49.992)
Ow!

Tara Campbell (14:04.359)
watching movies through your fingers, you know, and so I think the, and then I saw the edited version on TV, probably around the same time. And I think for me, the idea of something that, you know, getting back to culpability, something that you didn't bring on yourself, and you can't defend yourself against, you can't like lock the door against it. And how do you figure out those rules when you didn't bring it upon yourself?

Deborah L. Davitt (14:06.174)
Through the fingers, yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:24.039)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:32.973)
Yeah.

Tara Campbell (14:34.019)
And so that idea of being in that kind of vulnerable position stayed with me. And I think that's kind of what fuels my fiction, that position of vulnerability and having to figure something out. And that's what fascinates me about anything sort of on the horror spectrum.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:45.582)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:55.343)
Sam, how about you? What narratives were seminal for you that shaped how you view and interact with horror?

Sam W. Pisciotta (14:56.566)
No.

Sam W. Pisciotta (15:06.591)
Well, I also think that it goes way back, and I taught Gilgamesh and had not thought about that, but it is interesting. But I have always seen, you know, horror, sort of the roots of horror in religion and folklore. But, you know, for me that, because I do have a literary background, so, you know, the modern sense of, oh, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:23.997)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (15:35.815)
horror as literature comes from that 19th century. And I sort of grew up with movies based off of those things, Dracula and Wolfman and things like that. So I saw that quite a bit and then was introduced to some of the things like through German expressionism, like Nosferatu or Cabinet of Dr. Kilgary. And like movies for some reason, like have influenced me in terms of.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:40.119)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (16:03.511)
how I see horror and how I write it. I tend to use imagery a lot. And so those images in films that stuck with me from an early age, you know, and trying to recreate, you know, that light and dark juxtaposition and things like that. So, but, you know.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:05.556)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:26.522)
All right. I find it interesting that everybody has a different entry point, whether it's the cinematic imagination or the literary or the oral, but horror is such a absolutely huge field, as somebody on my YA podcast was pointing out, because they were talking about YA horror and they were talking about just how absolutely sodding enormous horror is as a field. So, yeah, it really is.

Let's switch gears a little bit since we've already touched on culpability. There's basically a schism going right down the middle of modern horror where there are the people who write it in such a way that the person who is the victim is or the recipient of the horror is completely innocent and they're just on the receiving end of this malignity.

that is imposed on them and they don't know why, they don't know the rules, they don't understand what's going on, it's just imposed on them, there's complete innocence. And then there's on the other hand of the spine, we have a lot of horror that plays the game that the victim on some level deserves the horror leveled at them. They have broken the taboo. They have. And so

Do you see a stronger tendency one way or the other these days? Do you see one gathering more traction in the field these days? What do you what do you personally write? Do you write towards culpability or do you write towards the innocence? And I'm going to start with Linz.

Lindz McLeod (18:02.303)
So the second that I read this question, when you sent it around, it made me think of one of my favorite stories of like pretty much all time. I'm willing to throw down on this hill. And it's a story that was published in Nightmare magazine and it's called We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It. And it is one of the angriest things I have ever read. If you've read it, you know it is the ghosts of the girls who were murdered in a basement.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:15.572)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (18:22.262)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (18:31.099)
and part of the reason that they went into the basement in the first place is that the two young men who took them there were accompanied by a young woman called Sandy. Sandy believes that she's part of this group. Sandy thinks she's safe. Sandy's wrong. And Sandy ends up joining them. And there is a moment in it where you think, well good, you deserve that Sandy because look what you did. But-

Deborah L. Davitt (18:47.317)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (18:57.475)
Did she though? Really? And the other ghosts kind of ignore her because of that, but she's still in the same predicament as them. What do we think that, did she really do this out of any desire to... because she does not take part in a lot of the horrible things that happen. She's just sort of there to corral these girls in. She doesn't seem to take joy in the other things that happen. But she was willingly participating.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:59.108)
Mm-mm.

Lindz McLeod (19:27.075)
Why is that? Was there ever a sense in the back of Sandy's head that actually maybe this could happen to her if she doesn't? And so I have written some things like that. I wrote a piece which I fully believe will never be published anywhere because it takes the lyrics of a Mamma Mia song and it makes them so horrific that I think I probably scarred everyone who's ever read it. But I wrote it at a time when, particularly in the UK and also in Ireland as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:27.41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:47.136)
Ha!

Lindz McLeod (19:56.847)
there were a spate of attacks on young women who were walking or running alone. It was something that, I think it was like as we were just coming out of lockdown as well, I've written quite a lot about it, you may have heard of the case of Sarah Everard, there have been others as well. And when I started to write about the way that I felt about seeing these things repeatedly, in fact one of the young women

Deborah L. Davitt (20:11.406)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (20:26.159)
had gone jogging in a public place to avoid this happening and had been killed in a public place anyway. And there is no escaping it. And so I started asking my fiance, you know, what did you do when you were on a US university campus? Is it different? And she said, well, we had rape whistles, what did you have? And I said, they taught us to carry our keys in our fists. I personally would have gone with mine as a better like method of protection, but the fact that you

It wasn't even, oh they didn't teach me anything because I didn't need it. She had an answer straight away. So I think I do write those things and I do write horrible people and horrible things happening to good people as well. A lot of the horror that I write tends to be in the mundane, which Kat can attest to because the story that I have in Pseudopod is very much gentle elderly retirees deciding to go on a serial killing spree together and talking about Countdown a lot.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:59.773)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:08.673)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (21:24.271)
and it's very chill. It's so cosy, but it's also the piece that people come to me and they tell me they like it, but they keep a distance, they noticeably keep a distance while they tell me that. You don't come within our reach. But even as I write those things, there's a place for my anger and my bitterness, but I prefer to write subverted versions of that story. I want the things that I am powerless to change in life.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:24.964)
It's cozy horror.


Deborah L. Davitt (21:36.474)
haha

Kat Day (21:37.852)
HAHA

Lindz McLeod (21:53.451)
I think sometimes I'm trying to fix in my fiction, so I'm giving people powers that they wouldn't normally have. I'm giving them, like, the foresight to avoid something. You know, I am sometimes, not all the time, but I am sometimes making the bad things happen to the bad people.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:58.845)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (22:10.084)
sometimes all it feels I can do.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:12.142)
All of the above. Ha ha ha.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:16.374)
Tara, how about you? Same question. Culpability versus innocence. How do you play with that? How do you subvert it? How do you work with these two themes?

Tara Campbell (22:28.511)
Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a reason these two areas are always kind of duking it out in the genre because there is a lot of gratification in the idea that, you know, evil people are getting their just desserts and that's why horrible things are happening to them. And it's a really attractive thing to write just to get out some frustrations, right, and to read as well can be very gratifying. But I think also, I mean, people definitely are.

I mean, the other side of that coin where bad things are happening to good people is just an acknowledgement of the world, right? And so we can't ignore that either. And some of the most intriguing stories blend those elements. Perhaps your main character seems innocent, but then as we work through the story, we find out maybe they're not as innocent as they seem. And so I really enjoy those stories that play with culpability.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:05.277)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (23:26.495)
and make you ask the question, well, okay, what's the metric for how evil a person has to be to have something evil happen to them? So I love it when stories play with that and acknowledge that there are evil people that still deserve to be saved sometimes and sort of make you face that reality in your own work. My work tends to...

Deborah L. Davitt (23:27.22)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:35.95)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (23:55.103)
be some of the wish fulfillment. But not in terms of having evil things happening to evil people, but maybe letting people find a way out of the evil so that if you're smart or you're good or you're virtuous, then maybe you can find a way out of those dark spaces.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:57.442)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:18.83)
Oh man, we've got an email from Suzan saying that she's just glitching and she can't get in. So we'll just keep going and hope that she'll be able to join us. Because I am so bummed because I really wanted to talk with her about her story because it was slated to be on a different episode. The first Walk in the Dark episode, we were supposed to talk about it. And the person who had volunteered to talk about it turned out to be unavailable to talk about it. And so everybody else said, well, we're not qualified to discuss the story. I'm like, but I can get the person who wrote it and then who else is more qualified to talk about the story than the person who wrote it. And now the internet's being a bear. So Sam, we'll talk about culpability and yeah, culpability versus innocence in your writing.

Kat Day (24:53.546)
Ha ha ha!

Sam W. Pisciotta (24:58.689)
Yeah.

Kat Day (25:00.254)
Hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:11.03)
And then we'll go on to Kat on the same question. And then we'll probably move on to each individual work because we do have a lot of people to talk to today. So I'm not gonna talk about quite all of the questions. But when I talk about culpability, I'm talking about stories like Ian Muneshwar's Dick Pig, which came out last year. That was a phenomenal story. He breaks taboos and then he's

slowly incrementally punished for breaking the taboos. And P.A. Cornell's, I can't remember the title, but she talked about it on her episode. But it was a horror from the 80s. And the two girls are out after dark. They've lied to their parents. They're breaking curfew and they're going into this house where they know they're not supposed to be. And then they're

horribly punished for having broken all these rules. So do you play with that at all in your writing, Sam? Or do you go more towards the innocent?

Sam W. Pisciotta (26:17.499)
I think for me, it's probably more towards the innocence. But one thing that I wanted to say about culpability that I think is interesting is like, that idea has been around since the roots. Like when we're talking about religion and folklore, like if you go against the norms of the community, you're punished. So if you sin, you go to hell. If you stray off the path in the woods, the wolf gets you. I mean, all of these,

Deborah L. Davitt (26:34.87)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Day (26:46.279)
Warnings.

Sam W. Pisciotta (26:47.371)
pretty common, I think. I think where the tension and the problem comes in is when the norms of the community change, but the stories don't change. So you have as you have a woman who's acting strong and maybe asserting herself in the way that a man does, and yet she's punished for that because she's not acting against this outdated norm, right? So I think that's where the problem with that.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:19.402)
Yeah, exactly. Yes. Cat, same question about culpability versus innocence. Where do you fall along this spectrum and in your writing and in what you like to read?

Kat Day (27:32.99)
Um, you know, when I, when I saw this question, it made me think, cause I, I was listening to Neil Gaiman in an interview and he said that in fantasy people get what they need, whereas in horror they get what they deserve.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:45.637)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Day (27:47.258)
And I thought that was quite interesting. And I think what Sam has just said is quite interesting. Horror is about warnings. And the thing is, if you find yourself in a horror story, in order for you to be in that horrific, I mean, we all read stories or watch movies and say,

Deborah L. Davitt (28:04.021)
Haha

Kat Day (28:14.654)
Don't go there, don't do that, stay at home, right? In order for you to find yourself in a horrific situation, you have to have stepped into the path of that situation in some way. Whether that is something that you ought to be able to do safely or is something that you know is risky is the question. Going back to what Lyn said.

Kat Day (28:45.666)
women should be allowed to, women should be able to, I mean, to walk around safely. And you know, we talked about this last time, I wrote a story exactly at the same time and pub never enough pockets, exactly about exactly, exactly the same things that Lindsay is talking about, right? It is exactly the same. We both like anyone that lived, anyone living in England, any women probably living in England at that time was like, ah, sorry, Lindsay or Scotland, the United Kingdom.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:48.91)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:57.859)
Yeah, I love that story.

Lindz McLeod (29:13.263)
Thank you for acknowledging my country exists, yes. I see.

Kat Day (29:15.002)
Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please forgive me. But yeah, I mean, I think it hit all of us very, very hard. I think. The thing is. Nobody is completely innocent, except possibly a baby. Right, if you're doing horrible things to babies.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:38.627)
Mmm.

Kat Day (29:44.306)
I mean, I guess, but I think anyone who's managed to get past early childhood is not completely innocent. Everyone's told a lie. Everyone's done something they shouldn't have done. Everyone's broken a rule they shouldn't have broken. There's always something. And the thing is, most of the time, people probably get away with it, I guess. And in a horror story, what you do is you...

you take that and you push it, what might have happened if you didn't get away with it. And yeah, horror has always been about warnings. Like Sam says, step off the path and bad things will happen to you. And that's what it tells you. Maybe you step off anyway.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:15.246)
Mm-hmm.


Deborah L. Davitt (30:41.834)
All right, we're gonna move into each of your individual works at this point. And the first story we're gonna talk about is Tara Campbell's Spencer, which appeared in Speculative City number seven. I'll include the link, as always, in the description below. In this surreal short story, a one-time novelty ring has slowly taken body parts from its one-time owner to create a new body for itself. At first, interspersing her bits and pieces with parts taken from dolls and mannequins,

and then taking all of her except her head, which even now is filling out a police report against the ring. And while a police officer questions the person that the ring has become, the ring warns the officer at the end that if it isn't released, perhaps it will just take all of them at once instead. This is so wild. It's a wild ride of a story. And it never quite went where I thought it was going to go, and then it wound up going to places that were beyond where I was expecting it to go, so.

Bravo, I was not expecting any of this story. It's body horror mixed with pure surrealism. So let's talk about your story. Where does the title come in with Spencer? Is like Spencer gifts, hot topic, that sort of thing? I couldn't really tell.

Tara Campbell (31:59.107)
Yeah, so Spencer is actually the name that I gave a novelty ring, the very ring that inspired this story. And actually, you know, just this conversation we were just having about culpability. In this case, there was no culpability from the victim. Her only sins, quote unquote, was taking Spencer off and not fixing Spencer. And so, you know, everyone is the hero of their own story. And

Deborah L. Davitt (32:23.429)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (32:28.607)
feels vindicated for taking these body parts from the former wearer, right, to make a body of his own. And she hasn't really done anything wrong objectively, right? So the story came about because I had a novelty ring that I had purchased and it was fun and I wore it all the time. It was a skeleton head with diamonds for eyes or, you know, the rhinestones for eyes.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:35.862)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (32:54.327)
but it was cheap. It was like, you know, on the stretchy band. And eventually I wore him so much the band broke. I put him on the top of my dresser and said, I'll fix you. I'll get some string and fix you. And I kept not fixing the ring for months and then for a year. And so the ring, I would see it every day, but I would continually not fix it. And so this ring just kind of took up residence in my head. And its real name was Spencer. I named some of my jewelry.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:09.475)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (33:23.711)
And so I just wrote this from the perspective of this ring and about his frustrations and his motivations and what he would do to solve the problem. So in my mind, I wasn't writing horror. I can't read, like I said at the outset, I can't read horror, I can't watch a lot of things. So I really got into this from the perspective of he feels wronged, how would I feel if I were this ring that had been abandoned?

and just left to rot and what might I do to solve the problem. And so, yeah, I mean, I write these things from the perspective of the person and not necessarily according to a category that I think I'm writing it.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:06.168)
Mm-hmm.

If I remember correctly, when you were talking to me about this story, you were surprised that it wound up in the horror category at all.

Tara Campbell (34:15.959)
Exactly, because I was just writing about Spencer and him trying to, you know, find a body for himself. And, you know, I tend to write things with a little bit of humor, and of course in this case is dark humor, but I was thinking of it more as just, you know, kind of a romp, not as body horror, because I was thinking of it from Spencer's perspective.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:23.292)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (34:39.998)
Yeah, yeah, understood. All right, we've talked about the title, we've talked about your inspiration for it, we've talked about how it wound up being horror. It's time to move to Kat Day to her story, When I Was Young, I Did Not Need Magic, which appeared in Pseudopod 832, October 14th, 2022. Again, link will be put in the comments below.

An elderly woman has caught a young intruder in her home and advises them not to struggle, not that they can. She explains over a cup of tea that she's been slowly turning up the volume on her life since she lost her sense of taste, then her sense of hearing, and then the strength to move around, drawing on other senses and capabilities for her own use for decades. She reveals slowly that her partner moved out, that she tracked him down and used him up the way she's going to use up the young burglar. The story is slow, it's quiet, it's methodical, and it's completely horrifying.

We've talked a bit about culpability and horror, the sense that someone somewhere is responsible for the evil or to blame for what happens to them. Here we have both. We have the victim being culpable. They broke into her house. They broke the taboo. They've broken the law of hospitality and of men. And, but the outside vengeance wreaked on them is where the horror lies. The narrator, to flip the trope, completely is the source of the horror. Did the voice come to you first?

Or did the idea of the vampiric drain of people's senses come first? And in short, where did you get the idea from? And how did this work its way through your fingertips into the keyboard?

Kat Day (36:11.686)
You know, I was desperately trying to remember. I know that I had the title first, but I am not quite sure where I got the title from. It might've been a Codex title, but anyway. I started from the title. I don't normally do that. Normally I write a story and then I pull the title out from somewhere. But this time I started with the title and I was trying to think, because it sounds...

Deborah L. Davitt (36:28.374)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kat Day (36:39.266)
a little like it could just be somebody reminiscing about their life, right? And I had this kind of, how can I make this dark? And so it kind of grew up into this quite twisted story. I, as you might guess from what I was saying before, I look for the gray areas in things.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:44.939)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:50.894)
Hehehehehehe

Kat Day (37:10.754)
disinclined to kind of set the world up as these are the bad guys and these are the good guys. In fiction, in real life there are some definite bad guys, but I just think it's more complicated and it's more interesting when it's complicated. I wrote this story deliberately using second person

Deborah L. Davitt (37:15.822)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:22.262)
Well, yeah.

Kat Day (37:40.03)
because I wanted that very strong sense of a narrator. And I felt that it kind of allowed you to build up that horrific sense of, oh my God, she's gone so far too far with this. I...

Deborah L. Davitt (37:57.622)
Yeah, the pacing on this story is magnificent. Because it starts off so slow and then it just it becomes a grinding wheel. And it's inevitable by the time you get to the end. And then the shocks get faster and faster and faster towards the end. And it's really, really good. I recommend that people read this.

Kat Day (38:02.366)
Thank you.

Kat Day (38:20.502)
or listen to it you can go in because actually I narrated this so you can hear me read it. Yeah, yeah, I very specifically didn't identify her victim in any way. And it's one of those funny things where people say, oh, well, clearly it was a person of it was, you know, it was a young, it was a young man clearly and I'm not I don't say that. There's no. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:22.014)
Or listen to it, yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:44.658)
No, you don't. That's why I was very careful to say them when I was saying that, because I went back through the story and was like, nope, there are no markers. This was done deliberately.

Kat Day (38:51.666)
No. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Partly because I was hoping it would be spoken and I wanted the person listening to it to feel that it might be them. I don't even make it clear how they got into a house and for all the listener straight reader knows, they could be pretty much innocent, right? They could have just walked into a house to check.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:06.535)
Mm-hmm.


Kat Day (39:21.394)
that she was okay. I mean, there could have been an innocent explanation, but she has trapped them in this chair and they don't have a chance to explain or say anything. So it's yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:23.783)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:31.488)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:34.942)
Yeah. It's very Poe-esque in that regard. Getting back to the inevitability of the evil in Poe that Linz was talking about at the outset of the broadcast. Yeah, it's very casque of Amontillado.

Kat Day (39:47.218)
Yeah.

Kat Day (39:51.25)
We've got that coming up on Pseudopod just to tell if we're running that later in a few days. For Fat Tuesday, Stroke Shove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, tune in on Tuesday.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:04.941)
Well, by the time this episode goes live, they'll have to go back to it.

Kat Day (40:08.354)
Okay, all right, it'll be on Pseudopod. Bye then, yeah. Yeah, I think I believe Alastair is reading it for us. So it's going to be fantastic. Yeah. He's got an amazing voice.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:12.242)
It'll be on Pseudopod and you can find it. It'll be great.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:18.058)
Ooh, I love listening to him.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:24.486)
All right, we're going to move to Linz now with Sunbathers, forthcoming in Cosmic Horror Monthly, which will all and Sunbathers is also the title of your forthcoming book. So I'm assuming that there's going to be a connection. And so can you explain that a little bit before I get into the summary? Oh, that's out already? Okay.

Lindz McLeod (40:40.695)
Yeah, it's actually out already with Cosmic Horror. It came out in their January edition, I just didn't realize. And yes, the book is forthcoming with Hedony, which is an imprint of dark lit press, and they specialize in erotic horror. I will be, it will be erotic. It will be extremely heavy on the horror as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:02.014)
Excellent. I love that. That's gonna be fun. Sophia lives in the dark and burrows beneath the ground, venturing topside only at night to steal food from the sunbathers, those who live above ground in the full light of the sun. Why? When the sun began to set out flare after flare, most humans retreated into their homes to protect themselves from its wrath. But some ventured out into the light and were changed. Purified, they said, of their sins. Made more powerful the apex of humanity.

Now they hunt those who haven't turned to the holy sun's light, and Sophia would give anything to be able to walk in the sun again. Even the life of her girlfriend sacrificed to her needs. The premise is dark fantasy blended with science fiction in a slipstream fashion. The ending is pure horror. It's masterfully done. I really enjoyed the story because I was kept guessing what the premise was, how things meshed together, and then the slow inevitable

slide of my needs are more important than the needs of the group or the needs of anybody else and the selfishness of it Very unlikable character, but she's the protagonist so we are she's by definition the person with whom our sympathies lie So we're sort of implicated at the same time with her selfishness looking into ourselves It's it's a really wonderful story. What gave you the inspiration for it? And how is this going to?

Is this going to mesh into the novel? Is this first chapter of the novel? How is this going to work?

Lindz McLeod (42:34.915)
Well firstly, thank you very much, I really appreciate that. This is one of the...Soph is one of the worst characters I have ever written. She is completely morally bankrupt and completely selfish. She's a tosser in our parlance. And every time I got to a decision point I thought about what I would do and then I made her do...

Deborah L. Davitt (42:43.585)
Mm.

Lindz McLeod (43:00.131)
not that. I made her do the opposite. So she does a lot of terrible things. It is always selfish. She never considers the group or the betterment of other people, even in very, very small ways. So basically, I was born in 85. I grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, you know, it's such a huge kind of cultural touchstone, and it subverts a trope that we've had going on

Kat Day (43:01.123)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (43:01.249)
Ha ha!


Lindz McLeod (43:30.443)
I had this in mind and vampires are so often linked to darkness and the night time and they're also linked to certain kinds of appetite. So they have this lust for blood but they also have a sexual hunger going on. This is kind of touched on in Buffy and Lost Boys and other things like that but it's often the vampire is more sexually free.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:45.986)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (43:58.423)
and is more likely to perform what we would have in the past called deviant behaviour. And I started to wonder, what if I subverted both of those things? So what if the vampires in the story are made more powerful by the sun, which forces the humans to live in the burrows and become nocturnal? And also, what would happen if I made the vampires basically wasps? So we don't really use the term

Deborah L. Davitt (44:04.066)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:10.669)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (44:27.319)
wasp here but like white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they are pretty much strictly heterosexual, they actually enforce those rules socially with various different means, shame and strength and burning punishments. And Sophie doesn't know that exactly to begin with, she just is so sick of being in the dark and scrabbling around and eating whatever and having people that she knows eaten.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:30.345)
Mm-hmm.


Lindz McLeod (44:52.099)
There is actually, one of the first indications that she's a terrible person who really doesn't care about anyone but herself is that she mentions that she had been cheating on her girlfriend with someone from another tunnel. And she doesn't even remember what exactly what the woman's name is, but she knows that this woman had freckles and she once found, after like a cave-in had happened, she found a freckled foot spitted over a campfire. So she's like, oh well, I guess she's dead.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:52.723)
Mm-hmm.


Lindz McLeod (45:20.887)
And she still does not remember what her name is. And I'm like, you're just the worst. Why are you like this? You're so bad. But yeah, so I actually had sent it to... It's kind of a funny behind the scenes story that I haven't talked about yet, but I had sent this story to Caitlin Marceau, who if you read any kind of horror, and especially indie horror, you'll know as someone who's been really up and coming for quite a few years.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:25.189)
Hahaha

Lindz McLeod (45:46.263)
and is doing very, very well for herself. And we had kind of become friends. I had sent her this story, as well as one which was, I can only describe as an intensely psychosexual drama where Estella actually seduces Miss Havisham and then causes her to kill herself. And my aim was, please write a book with me. And Caitlin got back to me and said, hey, I'm obsessed with Sunbeathers. And I was like, great, maybe we could write it. And she said, actually, I want you to write it.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:02.594)
Haha.

Lindz McLeod (46:15.091)
and you know, don't tell anyone yet, but I'm starting a press. And I want you to be the debut of this. And so I was like, you know, that's a pretty, that's a consolation prize. It's not getting to work with you, but I will take it. So I've been really excited about it. It's the story that has come out in Cosmic Horror. It's about just under 5000 words. It probably encompasses part of the first part of the book.

So right up until Soph sacrifices her girlfriend in order to become a sunbather, some of that will be padded out and then from that point on it is Soph living amongst the sunbathers, realizing that oh no this is nothing like what I had wanted and in fact I hate myself even more. I thought I would hate myself less and I in fact hate myself so much more. And her kind of figuring out what can I do

Deborah L. Davitt (46:44.35)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (47:12.963)
the entire Sunbeather society down with that redeem me in some way. And there is a way that she finds that might be possible to do that. So I'm excited. We're having a lot of conversations about what to put in, like, book boxes and things and I keep going, please don't put that in. Please just make me, like, the vampires, they call the humans worms. So I think we're going to have little


Lindz McLeod (47:40.099)
pain worm bookmarks that are going to be very cute little cartoon worms wearing dog collars and maybe some other horrendous sexual things in the box as well, I'm not quite sure. There have been suggestions, oh there have been some suggestions that I have flushed out. But I'm very, very excited. I don't normally write someone this terrible. And I tested

Deborah L. Davitt (47:42.094)
Hehehehe

Kat Day (47:50.707)
That sounds... how do we sign up? This sounds amazing!

Deborah L. Davitt (47:53.849)
Hehehehe

Lindz McLeod (48:09.415)
I knew that I had hit a jackpot when the people who were the most out there in that group were leaving messages going, what the hell man? What the hell? And I was like, if I have broken you, I have done my job correctly. Excellent.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:24.515)
Haha!

Well, since Susan is not able to log back in, I wanna at least talk about her story, even though she can't be here. So I'm gonna read my summary of doing, which appeared in The Dark magazine. And it means I've been wanting to talk about the story since the first walk in the dark podcast on Shining Moon. And nobody felt qualified to talk about it. And I wanted so badly to talk with her about it. So I'm gonna talk about the story and point people to it because it is a phenomenal story. First and foremost, this, yes.

Kat Day (48:54.466)
Just to say, sorry, sorry Debbie, just to interrupt you. If you wanna hear this story read by a Trinidadian narrator, it's on Pseuopod, it's on Pseudopod narrated by Mercedes Modest. So go in, yeah, because it really comes alive. Yeah, you need to hear it. So it's...


Deborah L. Davitt (49:14.11)
Oh beautiful. I will have to listen to this.

It adds so much to the story.

Kat Day (49:23.93)
You need to hear it. It's so much more alive when it's spoken to you. So go and listen to it. It's recent. I can't remember the episode number, but it's not very long ago.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:26.253)
Yeah.


Deborah L. Davitt (49:34.998)
I will have to look for that. Thank you very much. I will definitely look for that and see if I can put that into the show notes because it is written in a beautiful and authentic Trinidad and Tobago creole. Rather than being distancing, this choice invites the reader in. It's written in an intimate and close proximity third person from the limited point of view of Samantha, a child who has died and come back as a doin. An undead creature with no eyes, a small whistling mouth and skin like that of a mango. Samantha's love for her mother

who can no longer see or sense her, makes her stay close. Her dog can still sense her, and for a time she loves on her dog as a child would, but the other children can still see her, and they throw rocks at her. And her jealousy of her cousin who's gotten all of her things, including her clothes and her bed, and her childish inability to look forward at ramifications causes her to kill her dog, which she deeply regrets doing, but she can't undo her actions any more than anyone else can.

Finally, as her mother gives birth to a son, Samantha starts to lure her cousin away into the wilderness the same way she lured her dog away to be killed. And her mother finally sees her and embraces her and gives her the love and the acceptance that she's craved. And so it has a beautiful, gentle ending, but it is so dark in so many ways and it is so intensely personal. And there's culpability, but she's just a kid.

She, you can't blame her for being a kid and not having the adult faculties. So, but she's still doing horrific things because she's a kid. And I really, really recommend that people would take a listen to this one on Pseudopod or take a read to it on The Dark. It is beautiful. And I just wish that Susan had been able to talk with us about it, perhaps another time.

Sam, we're getting to you now. Sorry for the long wait. Words for the dead, which appeared in the flame tree anthology, Spirits and Ghouls, involves Connell, a recent Irish immigrant to the New World, who is trying to get his wounded son home to his mother for nursing, when a dark fairy out of Irish folklore costs the father and the bleeding son. The dark fairy is there in search of the son's soul, and Connell tries the old magic of storytelling to keep the dark creature at bay.

Sam W. Pisciotta (51:33.591)
Alright.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:58.658)
but his words don't work. They don't unlock the magic of pain and emotion in his heart because he's learned to keep his emotions at bay as a man of that era did. Only by accessing the pain of his youngest son's death at home in Ireland is he able to defend the life of his living son. This one definitely comes to me as more of a dark fantasy story than as a true horror story, but that part of this episode is about the distinctions between the two. What do you want readers to take away from reading it?

Sam W. Pisciotta (52:28.891)
Oh, well, you know, when I started this story, it was I agree, it's dark fantasy, because it is about a journey, rather than, you know, just feeling creating emotion and mood and things like that. But the journey is of Connor, who's learning to be a father to open up, learning to express his emotions, actually, probably just learning human being. Right. So

Deborah L. Davitt (52:39.298)
Mm-hmm.

Hehehehehehe

Sam W. Pisciotta (52:59.855)
And I think that's probably where I was coming from. It was just sort of in terms of like there's this tendency for, you know, traditionally for men to put up a wall and hide their emotions and hide their feelings. And that tends to pass down from father to son. And that's sort of what the story, you know, centered around. And if it's Connor.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:13.598)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:21.463)
Yeah.

Sam W. Pisciotta (53:27.735)
realizing his failings with his older son, which cost him his son's soul in the terms of the slaugh that came for him. But in, yeah, slough is how I say it. So we have people from England and Scotland here. But they, you know, I started it off with, it was a banshee and

Deborah L. Davitt (53:34.718)
Mm-hmm.

Thank you for saying the word, I was really not sure how to say it. Could you repeat that, please?

Sam W. Pisciotta (53:57.515)
I realized that, well, what I needed that character to do, the banshee or banshee didn't, wasn't that type of a character. So I shifted over to a slua, which is the fairy king of the dead sort of thing, and who does steal souls. So, but at any rate, that character, it's Connor's inability to.

to connect and to express himself that it's his failing with his oldest son that he corrects with the youngest son and he's able to save his youngest son eventually.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:38.826)
Alright, we're gonna bop back up to Tara with the story Sasa Bonsam, which appeared in Strange Horizons December 11th, 2017. Link will be in the comments. In this story, the man-eater Sasa Bonsam first takes a man to eat, a man who snuck out of his village culpability on unspecified business. The spirit remains alive in the creature's belly because he feels anguished. Sasa Bonsam then eats the man's wife.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:07.63)
taunting the man's spirit because she smelled of sex with another man. Culpability! Then Sasa Bonsam begins to know regret because the man's spirit accuses him of wrongdoing. She had been pregnant and the creature is supposed to have a code. Culpability! Even though she made him a cuckold, even though he died before her, he still loves her and that poisoned Sasa Bonsam until the realization that the man's true indigestible regret is that he didn't succeed in killing his wife's lover. Oooh. We got some tension going now.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:35.862)
The ending is spectacularly dark. Sassiponsum no longer answers the voice of the man he killed. The man has become the creature who killed him, and now he finally finds his revenge against his wife's lover as that man walks out under the trees that you're not supposed to be walking under, long after he's forgotten who the man even was. So this has got some layers going in it.

And so does this story come out of established legends or did you, and did you give it a personal tweak or twist? And how did you, what was the inception point?

Tara Campbell (56:09.691)
Yes and yes. So I was doing a lot of research into the Ashanti for another book project that became my master's thesis. And it's all about sort of the Ashanti region being sort of modern day Ghana, roughly those boundaries. And there in West African folklore, there is a creature called Sasa Bonsab.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:28.587)
Okay.

Tara Campbell (56:37.239)
It's a bloodsucker creature that has a brother, a Sanbosan, who actually eats the bodies. But I was fascinated by the stories of this creature and the idea that, you know, they sort of sit up in the trees. And in the stories, they don't necessarily have a code. They just take, they snatch up anybody who happens to be out at night.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:44.759)
Mm-hmm.


Tara Campbell (57:02.635)
And so sort of in the vein of warnings that we've been talking about earlier, don't go out after dark, don't sneak around because Sasa Bonsam might get you. So I started thinking again in terms of from the perspective of the creature and what the creature wants and sort of creating what kind of code it might have. And so there you get culpability because again, the creature.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:06.028)
Mm-hmm

Tara Campbell (57:30.311)
has its reasons for what it does. So the story really came out of the research and my curiosity about this creature. And so it kind of follows the more classic horror lines because it started in the more classic horror lines of this monster that we're supposed to be on the lookout for. And so my...

Deborah L. Davitt (57:40.139)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (57:53.978)
adding to it was sort of more the psychology of what's the monster's perspective and why it might be doing what it's doing.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:01.526)
It's a very interesting story and it's got some really lovely layers. Again, I highly recommend people check this one out. A link will be in the comments. Bopping back down to Sam for our last of our, our stories before we go on to other people's stories. Blue line on a winter's night appeared in factor four and in this flash piece. So we're talking something that's under 1000 words. So there's a, you have to bend your world building.

tightly down. In this flash piece the narrator's on a night train and he can't quite believe it when he first meets a banshee then La Llorona then a voodoo woman but none of them are there to reap his soul rather in spite of his fears he's becoming one of them a reaper a taker of souls. So this one has elements of urban fantasy, dark fantasy

which would you classify it as because I don't again I don't really categorize this one as being horror is again about a journey and so where did you get the idea from it for it and take it away talk to me about it.

Sam W. Pisciotta (59:07.803)
Well, I, this was a, through Codex, this was a weekend warrior story. So it's part of a competition that I wrote, that I expanded on. And I just, yeah, that image, like I said earlier, like images play a big part of, in my process in terms of even how I begin, like conceptually, like I see something, I see an image of a character in a situation and then

Deborah L. Davitt (59:15.278)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sam W. Pisciotta (59:34.683)
right from there. And so there was this young man on a train sitting across from a Banshee. And so I, boy, it's really hard to, I also see elements of urban fantasy and straight fantasy. I tend to probably think of it more in terms of horror, although it's not really graphic and, you know, bloody, but I think I do that because it doesn't

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:00:04.719)
Um, it's trying to create a mood. Like that's what I'm doing with it. Like the language and the images are there to be dark. And in the end, this, this kid's never getting off the train, you know? So, um, what's going to happen to him is going to happen to him.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:19.648)
Yeah.

there, then that would be an existential level to the to the horror, which is interesting. And I didn't really get that because it didn't come across as a horrific end to me, it came to me as sort of a hopeful one. But that is just how I read things. So we're gonna

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:00:36.915)
Well, maybe you would like to be a reaper, but he... I think it wouldn't be a bad thing. What I mean by that is he's not gonna get off the train the same way that he got on the train. Like he will...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:43.846)
It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:52.85)
Yeah, that's true. There is a sea change coming in him. That's true, too. So on Shining Moon, we like to lift up other people's work. So every episode we try to read someone else's work. And the story that we have come up with for this week is by J.S. Breukelaar, who is an Australian writer. It appeared in the dark. And I'm going to absolutely make an abomination of the name.


Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:22.054)
Auscultitation. I think I got it right this time. And I am told by Kat that this actually means the process of listening to someone's breathing and heartbeat. So that is relevant to the story. This is an unusual story in the modern world because it's epistolary. It's written entirely in the form of rambling discursive emails sent from Maxine Bailey to her lover Rebecca Lytton.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:01:25.975)
a skill test.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:46.686)
Maxine has lost her job and has been hitting the prescription drugs pretty hard, so Rebecca has, it seems, bet her that she wouldn't last two weeks at a cottage in the country on the estate of a ruined manor house. Maxine takes that bet and tries to update her CV and practice yoga and do all the things one needs to do to put one's life back together. But the manor house is getting closer day by day until it swallows the cottage, preventing her from returning to London, and then she discovers her lover's long-dead body inside the manor house.

How much of this is reality and how much of this is delusion is up for debate, but she joins her dead lover in the bed at the end. Is this horror? What type and what did we like or dislike about this one? And we're going to start with Linz.

Lindz McLeod (01:02:28.119)
So this was a really disconcerting story for me to read because I had a similar one, but it came at it from a- and I didn't know anyone had done this, so it was really like uncanny valley to go, oh god, someone else had this idea. But it kind of- so I work with a production company who shop my short stories to Hollywood for like adaptation and stuff, and one of the things that I had written last year-

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:50.659)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (01:02:55.091)
was a story which kind of harkens back to what we were saying at the start of the podcast is like you know when you put yourself in this character's shoes you're thinking oh I wouldn't go in there I would I would close that door I would leave this place and so I thought I'm so sick of these haunted house things because I would be out of there you would not see me for dust I'd be like no thank you just

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:16.919)
You would not see me for dust.

Kat Day (01:03:18.794)
I think I'll just stay in the lounge. Thanks.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:21.902)
Hehehe

Lindz McLeod (01:03:22.047)
I would be like the road runner. You literally would not see me waddling away. And so I thought to myself like what would happen if I wrote that story? If I wrote a story about someone going to view a house, which at first she thinks is okay, and the more that the estate agent is pushing this at her, she's like this house is kind of creepy. I think this house is haunted. I'm not going to buy this house. So she doesn't buy the house and she leaves like a sensible person would, like I would, only to find that the house has decided that

Kat Day (01:03:26.692)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:46.626)
Hehehe

Lindz McLeod (01:03:51.311)
no actually I would like you to be my tenant and the house starts to stalk her around town. And it is really it hits on something that's like a new kind of version but I also felt that way while I was reading the story because the idea of a building moving is something so disconcerting to me and like one of the things that I kind of wrote in my notes when I was putting my thoughts

Kat Day (01:03:53.63)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:53.934)
Hehehehe

Lindz McLeod (01:04:20.131)
when I, and I actually just taught a workshop on horror last week, so I was very much in like here are the foundational things. One of the things that I think creeps people out the most and the simplest way that I can explain that is there is something where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:23.849)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (01:04:40.691)
And that is a really, really easy way to explain to people, like, if you turn a corner and you did not think that there should be anything or a shadow there and suddenly there's a shadow there, that's not a good thing. We panic. On the other hand, if you think there's something under your feet or there should be something and there isn't, that's also horrible and in a bunch of different ways. The spider you can see is one thing. The spider you now can't see is quite another thing. So I really like this story. I'm a sucker for anything epistolary and especially an unreliable narrator.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:40.842)
Yeah.


Lindz McLeod (01:05:10.743)
And I love the way that she went back and forth. It wasn't just that it was escalating, although it was beautifully, but she was going back and forth. Because a character in this situation wouldn't have just this linear progression from I feel fine to I don't feel fine and everything's terrible. They would have this kind of, oh no, I'm coming off these meds and you were right. And well, actually, I don't know if you were right because I've had some time to think about that. And

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:11.138)
Very unreliable, yes.


Lindz McLeod (01:05:38.807)
you know, this kind of, maybe I'm going crazy, no, I'm perfectly fine, I'm just having an episode. And I really, really like that kind of push and pull, like, against thing. I also thought, like, the image of the houses pressed together as if they were French kissing was such a wonderful metaphor for this, like, not great sounding relationship. Kinda toxic, not loving it, the house, like, kind of...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:48.142)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:00.334)
Yeah.

Lindz McLeod (01:06:05.391)
hurting her as she tries to escape the manor house, it kind of hits her on the head a little bit. And I'm thinking, yeah, there's so many little things that represent this missing partner that we never see. And of course we're only seeing it from her point of view. And a story told from one person's point of view, of course, has to be shaded in some way. But I just really loved the way that it went back and forth and she was like, oh, you're too good for me.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:06.672)
Mm-hmm.


Sam W. Pisciotta (01:06:21.792)
Yeah.

Lindz McLeod (01:06:32.227)
Although you did actually do some things and I didn't think about it, but no, you're really too good for me. And also the thing about the cat was heartbreaking. I was pretty mad about it by the end. Yeah. I didn't love it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:38.762)
Oh yeah, that hit hard, that hit really hard.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:06:44.515)
I think that she doesn't get an answer is also part of the horror. Like, initiated by one side, but I keep thinking, man, this woman's not answering. She's all alone. It makes her feel even more isolated, I think.


Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:50.816)
Yes.

Lindz McLeod (01:06:50.851)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:00.672)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (01:07:00.823)
So that's again, that's a nothing where we expect there to be something. Cause we expect there to be answers coming in there aren't. And I think that's pretty fun.

Kat Day (01:07:05.384)
and

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:08.13)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (01:07:09.883)
Yeah, this story has kind of all the hallmarks of, you know, when you talk about what makes a horror story. It's got, you know, the isolation with the spotty cell coverage. It's got silence. It's got, you know, crumbling buildings and the vulnerability of close relationships changing like family becoming dangerous or something like this.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:16.846)
Mm-hmm.


Tara Campbell (01:07:32.803)
Even, you know, the long dead body moldering on the bed. It's very sort of, you know, it's very Poe, but it's doing something new with it, right? It's using this epistolary format. And the unreliable narrator is, you know, yes, yes. You don't know what you think you know the whole way through and you're questioning everything as you go. So, yeah, very classic, classic story.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:39.426)
Mm-hmm.

Lindz McLeod (01:07:39.535)
Very cool.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:42.327)
Mm-hmm.


Kat Day (01:07:55.967)
for me, I am a sucker for a circular story. And the thing, and it doesn't happen that often that I will be caught unaware by something in the story because I've read so many. But this one did because I guess spoilers are fine, right?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:26.422)
Yes, yes, absolutely.

Kat Day (01:08:27.899)
Yeah, there is right at the very start, she says, Oh, you couldn't come because you're getting over pneumonia. And I had completely let that just dribble straight through my head. And it was not right until the end where she says the where the that she finds the dead body and there's strychnine next to the dead body. And that's used to be a treatment for pneumonia.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:36.098)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Day (01:08:56.846)
And suddenly you're like, Oh my God. And I just love it when a story does that. Cause it's very hard to pull that off. I mean, talking about, um, epistola, you know, I can't say that word either. Stories. Um, I, uh, I, uh, I do like them when they're done well. Unfortunately, they are often done extremely badly.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:03.326)
Yeah, very surprised, yeah.

Kat Day (01:09:24.142)
The ones that make it into print are usually done well, obviously. This one really nails it, but I have read many, many bad history stories. You have to have a reason. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:36.254)
I will say that in terms of epistolary, and in terms of epistolary, I was inflicted with Pamela in undergrad, which was the first novel basically in English. And I remember very little of it because it was so absolutely dreadful. But as a reward for making it through Pamela, we were allowed to read Shamela, which was the parody written in the 18th century.

write as a direct response to Pamela, which does all the things that Pamela does, but pillories it. And it does all the things like, he's coming into my room right now as I'm writing this. Oh my God, he's about to, oh no! It does all the things that epistolary does so poorly. So I have a thing, I don't like epistolary usually, but when it has the unreliable


Kat Day (01:10:22.726)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:33.182)
and all the things that this one did. I was like, I was looking at it and going, do I like this one? I think I do. It caught me off guard because it got under my bias against epistolary and got me. So yeah.

Kat Day (01:10:33.598)
Yeah.

Kat Day (01:10:40.609)
Yeah!


Kat Day (01:10:45.298)
Yeah, you know, it's really good because, it absolutely stands up. So many epistolary stories, you're like, like you just said, you're like, when did they stop and write that down? And also, how did the other person, how have we got hold of this letter that they've written, because they've now just been trapped under a rock? So how, like, where is it?


Tara Campbell (01:11:03.68)
Hahaha.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:13.902)
Yes.

Kat Day (01:11:14.706)
Whereas this, obviously she's sending these emails. So of course, that is perfectly reasonable that these emails could get out. So it makes sense. So it's like the whole thing. I do I do feel like this is was it who said it was it Linda Tara, someone whoever it was, it just said this does all the things of a horror story. It was Tara, wasn't it? Yeah, you're completely right. This this just hits so many horror beats. So perfectly. You know, it's a really good piece of writing.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:32.31)
Yeah, that was Tara.

Kat Day (01:11:43.715)
Good find, Deborah! I hadn't read it! Go on! Yeah, who suggested it?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:46.056)
Whoever suggested this one, thank you.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:11:51.231)
Well, I suggested it, but I would point out too, like I think a buccalair or something, as how it's pronounced, I'm not sure, but she has a collection of stories called Collision, and it's worth looking at. I mean, she's got many good stories. And a lot of those are, and with this one, it's just the language is beautiful too. There's a lot of beautiful images and a lot of beautiful language. I picked up one just because I wanted to say it was like,

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:02.866)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:12:18.975)
She's talking about the dark in this place. And she says, like, I'm not talking about the velvety dark of spring evening in London, but the kind of roadkill black, the color of rock. And that's just so nice. Yeah.

Lindz McLeod (01:12:30.763)
Yeah, I really like that. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:30.89)
Yes, that was a really good one, yeah. One of the images that stood out to me was as the house is getting larger, the trees are parentheses around it and the trees are getting smaller. And I was just like, ooh, that's really good. So yeah, we have wrung out that one. So we're going to talk about.

Kat Day (01:12:45.906)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:51.482)
your stuff again. What do you have coming out soon or out recently that you'd like people to read? And, Linz, this is your chance to talk some more about your various novels that are coming out.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:13:02.016)
Hmm

Lindz McLeod (01:13:02.299)
Oh dear, there are so many. There are so many. It's a lovely problem, but it does mean that whenever my friends were so close to staging an intervention in the last month, they were, I could feel it. I was, they kept being like, let's go for coffee. And I was like, no, because you're going to, you're going to, you're going to kind of corner me. And also I have now started calling my agent, my poor agent, and she deserves that because of the things that I do to her.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:06.235)
It's a good problem to have.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:15.011)
Hehehe

Lindz McLeod (01:13:30.627)
But I have at least four books that I know of coming out between now and the end of 25. There will probably be more to add to that. So it is fun. My per agent. Just take a moment and feel bad for her. I have Sunbathers coming out at the end of this year.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:42.496)
Oh my god.

Lindz McLeod (01:13:55.631)
I am, it may surprise you to know that the books that I am writing right now, and I'm almost finished it, is actually a lovely, fluffy, sweet, historical romance. And the only person who dies in it is, dies in the first line. And there are no more murders after that. And no one will believe me when I say this. Everyone's like, no, but really, and I'm like, no, I promise, genuinely for this one. But I might have to start colour coding my books into this is safe.

and comfortable and this is not safe. So that is called, well we've actually changed the title but they haven't announced it yet, so that is called a floral arrangement. They will be changing it. Yeah, it's so gentle, it's so full of flowers and it is set four years after the events of Pride and Prejudice take place. And it is recently widowed, as in widowed in the first sentence, Charlotte Lucas.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:24.366)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:34.698)
Yeah, that sounds safe.

Kat Day (01:14:38.253)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:46.337)
Okay.

Lindz McLeod (01:14:51.963)
falling in love with grown-up botanist Mary Bennett. It's very cute and again, I do promise that no one dies. Maybe I should stop promising that no one dies because I feel like that's giving people concerns. Is this podcast going to come out next week?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:54.944)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:11.19)
It's gonna come out on the, let's see, this coming week is the 14th, it'll come out on the 21st.

Lindz McLeod (01:15:18.619)
Mm-hmm. Oh perfect, so then I can spoil something for everyone here that I could not otherwise do. So I am actually going to be announcing a collaborative project this week. I am so excited about this one. This is a strange little love child that I put together myself and a publisher has already signed on. Haha, more Phil than. And that will be coming out at the end of 25. I have chosen... I'm going to be working with a different writer every month.

gonna write a fiction piece together, then a non-fiction piece about how we did it. I have chosen eight people already. They range from people who were on the Locus Ballot five times last year, you might know who that is, to someone that I am also working with on another project who wrote for The Handmaid's Tale. Someone who's a Sunday Times bestseller, some writing teachers, other people who have been in a lot of different things and-

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:07.703)
Ooh.

Lindz McLeod (01:16:15.147)
are wonderful, talented people, all of them. And I am opening up application spots for the last four spots, because I believe in crowdsourcing fun things. So I'll be announcing that this week, and it's called An Honor and a Privilege. And I will also be writing a book with my darling fiancee, who is a very talented writer in her own right. And we are not allowed to talk about what that is. But it is, it's going to be snowy, and it's going to be horrible.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:37.632)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:42.909)
Nice! Tara, how about you? Coming out soon or out recently?

Tara Campbell (01:16:48.263)
Yes, well, I am equally writer and teacher. So I have some classes coming up one in particular through Clary on West that is going to be a reading class based on the book exploring new sons, new speculative fiction by writers of color. And that's coming up in February and going into March.

In terms of publications, I have a book coming out in September, so it'll be a while before that is going to be available for preorder, but I am in the midst of thinking about it. It's called City of Dancing Gargoyles, coming out with Santa Fe Writers Project, and it's basically set in the 22nd century in the U.S. climate change.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:31.565)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Campbell (01:17:40.552)
Eridification and two of the main characters are sentient gargoyles who are on the search for water.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:48.014)
Okay, that sounds great. Sam out recently or coming out soon?

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:17:55.595)
Yeah, well, I just had a song of Nick's come out in analog, the last issue of analog. And I have a story coming out in Pinnumbric called Breakfast in TikTok, which is about the family of mathematical concepts who break into this world and they're searching for a part to play. Yeah, so that would be fun.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:17.518)
How surreal that is!

Oh my God.

Lindz McLeod (01:18:22.851)
That's so Harlan Ellison, I love it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:27.508)
Kat! Coming out soon or out recently?

Kat Day (01:18:32.102)
I, you know what, I have got a bit of flash coming out this year. I'm not very good at getting things actually written and out into the world, but I have got some, but I'm not quite sure when that's coming out. In terms of pseudopod, we mentioned at the start of the Poggle or Dubivision in the middle that I've lost track. But anyway, for Mardi Gras, we've got the casque of Amontillado. We're doing a run of that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:59.275)
Nice.

Kat Day (01:19:00.322)
Yeah, then we've got some other we've got some other like amazing stories coming up. We've got I'm just I'm just kind of reminding myself there's some really great pieces coming up this year. I'm so looking forward to so many of these. So yeah, go and go in there point your podcast wherever you get your podcast go and point it at a pseudopod please. And subscribe.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:23.083)
Yes.

Kat Day (01:19:26.074)
And then take all of your friends' phones and subscribe them to Steadapod as well. And it'll be fine. Nobody will be traumatized too badly. And only a tiny little bit. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, because it's gonna be such a good year. Yeah. And we will be opening just to kind of advertise. We will be opening for anthologies and collections.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:29.41)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:36.228)
Only a little bit, only a little bit, around the edges.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:50.823)
Ooh!

Lindz McLeod (01:19:52.116)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Day (01:19:55.55)
submissions soon. So, March, I think. So, if you have got anything, any horror stories in anthologies and collections that are either already out this year, it's only February, of course, or will be published this year, we want to hear about it because we like to promote anthologies and stories in anthologies and collections because they otherwise, I feel like they tend to get a...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:56.307)
Okay, okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:01.492)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:22.498)
They languish. They languish.

Kat Day (01:20:24.894)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you mentioned it, I think, on one of your questions that we didn't quite get to, but something Ellen Dutlow had said about taking stories from anthologies and collections. Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, they don't quite get the love that some of the others do, so we, that's something that we believe in, so we try and, so please, if you've got an anthology collection or a collection, please send us your work, we want to read it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:36.26)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:52.43)
Awesome. All right. Thank you all for having been here to speak with me this week. I've really enjoyed our conversation. It was a really good one, and I'm thinking that a lot of people are going to enjoy listening to your insights, and maybe we'll go check out your stories, which I, again, highly, highly endorse. We had some really good ones to talk about this week. Next week on Shining Moon, our topic will be non-Western fantasy, and I'll be talking with Tina Zhu and Osahon Izeiyamu on that topic. And we just got someone else on...

there and I can't remember the name. We just got them and it was brand new to me and I'm looking forward to speaking with them, but I can't find it right now. So anyways, as always, please hit the like and subscribe buttons as you help me feed the algorithm and we are out.