An Interview with Kyle Toucher on ‘The Medusa Psalms’ and More!
An Interview with Kyle Toucher on ‘The Medusa Psalms’ and More!
You may have already read the work of Kyle Toucher, either in his excellent novel Live Wire or a myriad of short stories, and are thus familiar with his Walpurgis County: a place where American folk horror meshes with Lovecraftian terrors. Now he has gathered many of those stories into his first collection, The Medusa Psalms. Or as his publisher describes it:
“Enter Kyle Toucher’s Walpurgis County and discover the history and lore of America’s most benighted landscape, a melting pot of monsters and occultists, the heroes and the maimed, the suffering and the insufferable.”
Which is basically my catnip, and I was all in to deep dive on some of my questions about the Purg, its denizens, and what lies beneath Walpurgis Peak.
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Kyle Toucher (rhymes with voucher) is the author of the novel Live Wire, from Crystal Lake Publishing, the novella Life Returns, and the Black Hare Press Short Read, Southpaw.
He recently appeared in the anthologies Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror and To Hell and Back, from Crystal Lake and Hellbound Books respectively.
Through his twenties, he fronted the influential Nardcore crossover band Dr. Know, made records and hit the road. Later, he moved into the Visual Effects field, where he bagged eight Emmy nominations and two awards for Firefly and Battlestar: Galactica.
He lives with a lovely woman, five cats, two dogs, and several guitars in a house built when Nosferatu first ran in theatres.
L.S.: In the foreword to The Medusa Psalms, you say you conjured (love the choice of words) the world of Walpurgis County on the fly when writing “Strange Acres.” Were there any real-world inspirations for Walpurgis County and Walpurgis Peak?
Kyle: It’s likely a mish-mash of images stored in mind over the years, the majority of them from the time I spent on the road in my twenties. I’m from a California beach town, so the first time I saw barns with hex symbols in Pennsylvania, the charm of rural Connecticut, the imposing mass of Mount Rainier, Hood, and Shasta, I never forgot it. The overwhelming scale of the United States left one hell of an impression. Fireflies in Ohio. Run down gas stations on Route 66. A slanted, decaying motel on a dry Texas highway. The red mesas of New Mexico. Dropping from the Rockies and onto the flatlands of Utah. Real winter.
I remember the skanky punk rock clubs with shitty sound and the run-down shitholes we slept in with the same fascination as the staggering beauty of the terrain. So, to answer your question, I suppose those images sit there in my cerebral hard drive, randomly accessed. Whether they are faithful representations of what I actually saw, well, that’s where imagination steps in. Walpurgis County is certainly nothing like 1970s Oxnard, California.
Mountains. The colossal scale of them gives me the heebie-jeebies. Not dysfunctionally so―I don’t blubber and hyperventilate―but when I am in the presence of a truly massive mountain, I experience an odd blend of awe and terror. I am dwarfed by it, minuscule. It is a titan, not to be messed with.
Walpurgis Peak is like Hill House.
Not sane.
L.S.: “Awe and terror” is a good transition to my next question, actually. It’s hard to write about cosmic horrors, or otherworldly things lurking in mountains, without also conjuring Lovecraft—indeed, you give him a bit of a hat tip in your afterword when talking about “Note to Sanderson.” What has been the influence of Lovecraft on your work overall?
Kyle: I haven’t read Lovecraft in quite awhile, but very many years ago I went on a serious Lovecraft jag and consumed as much as I was able.
Funny that you mention this because I found my old Dell paperback collection a few months back. Those editions had great artwork, and I know if I read it again, all that fascination I held for his wordsmithing will boil right to the surface. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, eh?
So way back then as I thought about taking writing seriously (which culminated in the very first draft of what became Live Wire), it was piles of this undiscovered Lovecraft writing consumed amid the days when King could do no wrong and Clive Barker was releasing books that made everyone else look like amateurs. I was in my early-mid 20s then. Soaked it up.
I found in Lovecraft’s later material (let’s say from “The Festival” onward, so about 1922 or 1924) he seemed to have settled nicely into the pocket. “The Dreams in the Witch House.” “The Whisperer in Darkness.” At The Mountains of Madness. “The Call of Cthulhu.” As King says that guy couldn’t write a scene for shit, but for my money Hoss Lovecraft could paint atmosphere like he’d bought it wholesale at Costco. If you read the opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror, you’ll see what I mean.
He knew what was up. Evil is real, and it doesn’t like you.
At all:
Happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy is the town at night whose wizards are all ashes.
Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.
All the warning you’ll ever need.
L.S.: Well, I definitely see Lovecraft’s influence on your work, and you’ve woven in some other elements as well that made me curious … there are a lot of references to both Christianity and witchcraft in these stories, yet while we generally associate witchcraft with women, most of the antagonists in these tales are men. It made me wonder, what does it mean to be a witch in the world of Walpurgis County?
Kyle: Witch is a great word. It’s a great looking word. You know immediately what image—or behavior—to conjure.
Warlock, although I have used it, doesn’t have the same wallop. It makes me think of Paul Lynde as Uncle Arthur in Bewitched, and it loses a lot of its thunder.
Everything is The Old Conflict. Good versus Evil. Light against darkness.
As for the antagonists in these stories being male, I never thought about it until you brought it up. Vendurr and Armand Jenckes/Jenks are probably the biggest offenders, sure. Medusa Cult to the bone.
Aunt Mary strived to obtain supernatural/occult skill—she bought all the crystals, books of enchantments, and Zamfir records she could find, but it was Uncle John that knew the score and paid as all evil must. So, yeah, he definitely eclipses her efforts.
The Town Crier is exposed by Judgement’s Cruel Deliverer, and it doesn’t end well for him. I thought that the better twist, the bloviator at the Halloween re-creation of witch-hanging himself exposed as an agent of Satan.
Lange. He’s a tool, and eventually discarded, same for Captain Brisbane. Julie Reese, is she ultimately drafted into service?
I suppose Frederick Vanderbaum II is a problem, and we’ll learn more about him as time goes on I reckon … but his nursemaid isn’t going to win the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval anytime soon, either.
Izuriel and Virazel are both second-tier fallen angels, a couple of androgynous dolts dumped onto Walpurgis Peak with the rest of the riff-raff, so they don’t even place in the equation. One possess a dead woman, the other a broken man. Vile creatures. But The Proprietor is a Monster, not a Witch, and he makes sure that Beauchamp understands the meaning of his self-inflicted wound. As you see in the story it is the three sets of twins that possess the real power, one that resides only within the maimed.
So what does it mean to be a Witch in Walpurgis County?
If you take up the dark arts in the Purg, you’d better be willing to go the full distance.
Coffee is for closers, the saying goes.
L.S.: Your answer is great because it also shows something I wanted to touch on: how the stories in The Medusa Psalms create a kind of history of Walpurgis County, with recurring characters and events. One of the things I love about this book is how it takes us from a recognizable past into a technological present.
Which brings me to my last question. In “Notes to Sanderson,” you describe how the Shadowless Ones—ancient, cosmic entities—are being maintained by a vast bio-mechanical apparatus; similarly, humans use increasingly technological methods to interact with these dark beings, a concept you explore more fully in your novel Live Wire, which is set in the same world. It made me wonder how you developed this element in your work, and where you see it going in future stories?
Kyle: There’s no clear answer to that, really. I didn’t sit and plot the juxtaposition between old and new tech, and quite frankly, I never thought about it.
Early James Cameron movies offer very plausible tech, along with Crichton’s novels. It’s fun to make it up, no matter how wonky, but only if you can sell it. Those two cats outgun my IQ by far, so don’t expect a terse techno-thriller from me anytime soon. But the flavor of it I like a lot, and if an idea boils out of my mind, I’ll explore it to best of my ability. Plausibility is everything.
The VLA stuff in Live Wire (my 2023 novel) is fanciful at best, but I try to present it plausibly, and when it goes so shithouse, you roll with it. By the time the AC130s show up, you know it’s showtime. As for the global construction project described in “Note To Sanderson”, the sheer scale of it scarred Earth permanently. It should leave doubts about the authenticity of the history we’ve been taught.
So where does it go.
It’s buried in Strange Acres.
The end times.
2077.
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The Medusa Psalms is up for preorder now on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCG7R9C9). Check out the book trailer on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kemlxPUQ7z4. And if you can’t wait to dive into his unnerving vision of America, be sure to check out Live Wire.
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