An Interview With Cody Goodfellow

By: Carrie Lee South

If you’re a fan of horror anthologies, you should already be reading Crystal Lake’s Dark Tide series. Each edition collects three novellas on a particular theme written by some of the genre’s most original voices. Their June release PsychoActive features Ryan C. Thomas, Ed Kurtz, Cody Goodfellow, and Anthony Trevino on the theme of “transformation.” The stories in this 16th volume explore the twisted corners of the human mind. 

 

I found myself particularly drawn to the cosmic terror in Cody Goodfellow’s tale “The Secret Eater” which follows a family reaping the destructive benefits of their farm’s unique product: a strong and hallucinogenic moonshine. 

 

Cody Goodfellow has been a fixture in the “weird” community for decades. Whether you know him from his vast catalog of novels and short fiction or his film and TV appearances, there’s no question that he knows what gets under your skin. I sat down with Cody to talk about his Lovecraftian influences, psychedelic experiences, and pulp existentialism.

Carrie Lee South: What was the inspiration behind The Secret Eater?

 

Cody Goodfellow: It was one of those stories that came out of a travel experience. I went up to Alaska with my girlfriend at the time to stay with her family at a hay farm about an hour outside of Anchorage in the Matsu Valley, and it was a striking and incredible environment. So I went up to help haul hay and hike and check out what little remains of their glaciers, and I was just struck almost immediately and started writing this story. My girlfriend at the time had moved away from Alaska as soon as she was old enough. The main character, Rebecca, is an alternate version of her, a person who wouldn’t leave. 

 

I was also trying to look at the psychology of small towns. Not just the mass psychology of small towns, but the individual psychology. They’re usually seen as oppressive, small-minded places that are toxically positive because we’re trying to maintain the fiction that Mayberry is the center of the earth. But what if it is for you? 

 

With our advances in neuropsychology, we’re coming to understand that some people don’t actually have a visual imagination at all. So when they read something, they might as well be reading hieroglyphics. It doesn’t trigger a picture in their brains. It’s an adaptation to living in isolation. If you can’t picture another life, then you’re going to live the hell out of that life that you have right in front of you. Looking at that the other way, it would be a nightmare to be the one person in this small town who can picture something else. I was looking at those kinds of things and looking at the introduction of psychedelics, which is another long-term obsession of mine.

 

CLS: Do you often write characters based on people you’ve known?

 

CG: I often base stories on people I pass in the street. Just wondering, how the hell does that person live? Where are they going now? But I’ve always been very cautious about using other people’s stories. The kinds of stories that I like to tell are the stories that happen to people who can’t tell their stories. Something might happen to them, and they might limp out of this extraordinary impossible experience, but they’re not going to call the news. They’re just going to try to live their lives with all of the rules having been ripped out from under them. 

 

I am still mining events that happened in my young life that just didn’t make any sense to me. I’m trying to figure out, “what are the missing pieces in this puzzle?” Because telling me something about this encounter I had with a person would help me understand myself, in a very real way. So many of my characters are assholes because I’ve experienced assholes and found, “Oh my god, this person’s walking into quicksand. How can I, if nothing else, forearm other people so that they can see it coming and not sink into the quicksand themselves?”

 

CLS: I love your point about using fiction to get into the real truth of these situations, which brings me back to that idea of psychedelics. Many people, when they have a psychedelic experience, talk about ego death and how it strips away the self. There’s a lot of that in “The Secret Eater.” For one thing, this homegrown moonshine peels back the characters’ layers and reveals how awful they are. I’m wondering how that fits into your overall thoughts on psychedelics and maybe even the theme of this anthology about transformation?

 

CG: Well, you hear about afterlife experiences where somebody on the operating table sees the light and they see all their ancestors and Abe Lincoln, and he’s like, “No, you’re not dead yet. Go back.” For every person that has that experience, there are people that go to hell on an operating table. They’re not as quick to try and go on Dr. Phil and share their experience, but what if you break open your head and you have a psychedelic experience and you find out, yes, you are an asshole, and you’ll always be an asshole, and your job is to be the best asshole you can be. Some people come out of it with that experience: they get validated in their failings. 

 

Other people come to recognize their failings and see them from outside. I’ve experienced honest, ethical growth because of breakthrough moments where I recognized how selfish a lot of my motivations were, or how when thinking I’m doing something great, I’m mostly doing something so that I appear great. This is what can be really hard and what scares people away from psychedelics. In some people, it just jacks up their cortical response so that everything is frightening, and they just can’t deal. If you can lean into that fear and push past it, there are great revelations to be had, but that’s not everybody’s idea of a fun Saturday night. 

 

I’m not saying psychedelics are a quick chairlift to enlightenment; they can easily lead to anxiety and depression and other problems, but usually because you don’t want to see what they’re going to show you. I worry about trying to write a story where psychedelics become the villain, because it’s really easy to do. I think psychedelics offer much more fascinating possibilities. 

 

CLS: I don’t think the psychedelic is the villain in The Secret Eater, but what or whom would you say is?

 

CG: Selfishness. I don’t want to give too much away, but the main character is one of five siblings and they have a family farm. There’s always been deep-seated conflict between them, and a very strange relationship with their parents. The farm is their real life, and all of these kids to varying degrees have left it. There’s that conflict at work, and so once the parents are out of the picture (the father dies and the mother is hospitalized in intensive care) they are talking about what to do with the farm. A couple of them just never wanted to go back. They’d just as soon sell it and get on with their lives. The others want to exploit it. 

 

Again, without giving too much away, there’s an entity or a presence within the farm. This presence wants a relationship with people. What if the land was alive and wanted to give us everything that we needed to survive? What would it want in return?

 

CLS: You work with Lovecraftian elements like this in many of your stories. How do you think weird or cosmic fiction gives us a way into the human psyche that maybe another genre is not able to?

 

CG: I feel like cosmic horror is an open space made up of everything that’s not us, right? Conventional horror tropes like vampires and werewolves are always metaphors for us, for our relationship to the larger indifferent universe. Supernatural horror kind of becomes a comfort. If you look at things like Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, the Satanists have all kinds of powers, but if you pray hard enough, they can’t really do anything. There are rules that they just can’t break, and so you just have to make it night and not step outside the salt circle and they’ll be vanquished. It’s very reassuring. It’s kind of like that false sense that there’s somebody out there guarding the light at the end of the tunnel, as Hunter S. Thompson said, and cosmic horror denies you that comfort. 

 

Lovecraft is like pulp existentialism. It confronts the same things that Sartre and Camus and Kierkegaard were looking at, but finding pulpy, fun metaphors for those things. To me, that abolition of established universal meaning sets us free. It means that all laws and rules are arbitrary, but all laws and rules should be there for our benefit and not for the placation of some higher entity that may or may not actually give a shit about our well-being.

 

So I look at cosmic horror as a fresh new playground wherein all of the old rules whereby we justified our morality or our dominance over the earth are undone and we have to come up with new ones. We have to create our own meaning, and that’s a beautiful liberating thing and to me. The story in Secret Eater is not so much a story about the destruction of a family or a society or an individual because of these drugs: it’s about a transformative experience and the dying away of the old selfish self to clear the way for a new, genuinely communal experience. 

 

CLS: What do you hope that readers take from this story? 

 

CG: I hope that they take a recognition about the deep ambiguity of giving into and exploring the inner world. The dangers of it, but really the imperative of it. Because the thing is, as weird as it gets toward the end of The Secret Eater, I was trying to establish that shit was really dysfunctional before, nobody’s happy and everybody’s yearning for something else, for some other transformation. Whatever format that transformation takes, I’m hoping that I can get people to be a little bit more self-aware and recognize that binge watching a whole season of TV on Netflix is not a superpower. It’s a recognition that reality is failing us, and what magic can we bring back to reality? 

 

That was ultimately what Secret Eater was about. As people in this town consume this substance and they realize, “Oh my God, everybody can see into my mind, they can see into my heart. They know what I did that I’ve been trying to hide.” Everybody else has been trying to hide something else too. It’s the birth pangs of actually coming together, because that’s the thing that we are not getting from everything that we abuse. 

 

CLS: So what’s next for you?

 

CG: My next novel is called New Tomorrow, and it’s due out later this year from ODDNESS Books. It’s an epic riff on characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage–I’m trying to deliver those pulp thrills, but for a modern audience. In New Tomorrow, these heroes are fighting against anarchists and late labor agitators and mobsters and bank robbers and realizing we’re just taking out the pawns. The actual enemies are the captains of state. 

 

Who’s the bad guy? The hero is always the agent of the status quo, of keeping things the way they are and never asking, do the things the way they are suck? Why don’t they ever have a Superman who just goes, “you know what, none of you motherfuckers is smart enough to run things” and disarms all the superpowers and installs renewable energy. But an agent of change instead of an agent of status quo? We would hate him. He’d be more terrifying to the powers that be. 

 

I’ve always thought of my role as a way to trick people into absorbing harsh truths about the universe, at least as I see them. I like to think that I’m doing more pulpy stuff in order to make it more fun, to take people to the place that they want to go.