Demon Muse

This is the second in the Demon Muse series of conversations with notable writers and artists about their experiences of the creative process. The first was with T.M. Wright. In this latest installment, I talk with horror writer and SUNY writing instructor John Langan.

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John Langan

I’m almost inclined to preface the following conversation with a blatantly hyperbolic claim, to wit: If you haven’t heard of John Langan, then you soon will. That’s how strongly I feel about the quality and importance of the man’s writing. And although it’s true that he may, like many horror writers, end up being known not to a general audience but only to those who actively seek out such stories, this doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have a mainstream breakthrough. Because he’s writing some really stunning stuff.

I first heard of John maybe five or six years ago when a friend, the fantasy and horror artist Jason Van Hollander, directed me to John’s story “On Skua Island,” which had been published in 2001 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I found out somewhere, maybe from Jason, that John is a creative writing teacher at SUNY New Paltz. He also teaches classes in gothic fiction and film. This interested me greatly.

In keeping with my usual mercurial reading habits (dictated by weird inner pressures and impulses that I’ll never manage to map out), I examined the story, found it hugely exciting, and then put off reading it for several years. When I finally did read it, I was positively enraptured by its thoroughly delicious deployment of classic supernatural-horrific literary tropes — all of them used quite consciously — in the service of a really fine and wholly original tale.

This was in 2009, only a few months after John’s first book, the fiction collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, had been published (in December 2008) to an enthusiastic reception that included a starred review in Publishers Weekly. The book consists of five stories that demonstrate more of what the author had demonstrated in “On Skua Island,” which is included in its contents. I read it  and was again enraptured.

Then John’s first novel, House of Windows — a thoroughly literary exploration of the haunted house theme, as played against the family curse theme, as played out in a parable about the power of language, as played out in the lives of two career academics — came out in late 2009. I reviewed it for Dead Reckonings. Here’s a snippet of what I said: “House of Windows is a scarifyingly assured debut. It’s one of those wonderful books where you realize only a few pages in that you can relax into it and trust yourself fully to the author, since he obviously knows what he’s doing.” A host of other critics and reviewers agreed.

The story continues: His work has now been featured in editor Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 2, and editor Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. He has been a judge for the Shirley Jackson Awards for the past three years. Most interesting of all — to a person like me, at least — he’s currently working on a Ph.D. through the CUNY Graduate Center, with his dissertation to be titled Lovecraft’s Progeny. It offers “a consideration of Lovecraft’s influence on Fritz Leiber, Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, and Caitlin Kiernan.”

Somewhere along the way, I became Internet acquaintances with John, and that led to my inviting him to sit down in virtual space for an interview. Well, that, and the fact that his stories were pinging right and left on some of the major themes that I’ve pursued here at Demon Muse: the question of creative inspiration’s true nature, the experience of being dominated by autonomous psychic forces, and so on. I wanted to ask John about the origin of these strands in his work, and about his interesting fusion of academic themes with supernatural ones, and about the implications of these things not only for his own literary creative life but for the creative lives of anybody else who might benefit from hearing what he’s learned.

So that’s what I did. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: creative process, creative writing, d.h. lawrence, daimon, flannery o'connor, genius, h.p. lovecraft, horror, john langan, muse, shirley jackson awards, stephen king, suny, supernatural, the magazine of fantasy & science fiction