Category: Guest Post

Noir has not always been confined to rain-swept streets or roadside diners or gangsters on the lam.  The carnival, with its seedy operators who prey on a public desperately wanting to believe the big top clairvoyants can communicate with the dead, has also featured in noir novels.  The most famous of these was Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).  But in actuality, Bradbury’s novel is more horror than noir and violates one of the cardinal rules of noir, in that the novel has a happy ending.  Good triumphs over evil.

The best example of noir under the big top is, in fact, William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946).  The novel is uber-noir in that, for sheer bleakness and greed, very few noir novels can touch it.  Good doesn’t triumph over evil, and the lasting impression from the book is that the desperate will continue to be fleeced by the amoral grifters.
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Knocking on Heaven’s Door

by Greg Herren

(reprinted from Queer and Loathing in America, December 12, 2021)

I woke up this morning to the news that Anne Rice died last night.

She was an enormous influence on me and my life, for any number of reasons. It was her book The Witching Hour that made me realize that I needed to come to New Orleans, that awakened my connection to the city that was maybe always there in my head yet was dormant; I cannot precisely place what it was about that book that opened the connection necessary in my head to know that New Orleans was where I belonged. There was just something about that book, the way she wrote about the city and its magic, that drew me here. The weekend of my thirty-third birthday I came to New Orleans, and it was the first time I ever felt connected to a place, that I had finally found the place where I belonged, where–if and when I were to move there–all of my dreams would come true. Her love of the city where she was born and grew up comes through so powerfully in The Witching Hour, and the book remains one of my favorites to this day. The friend I stayed with that weekend–knowing how much I loved the book–took me on a drive around the city and through the Garden District, and pulled up the house at the corner of First and Chestnut. “This,” he said with a big smile, “is where she lives. Do you recognize the house?”
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CO-AUTHORING IS WHERE MAGIC HAPPENS

By Lindy Ryan

(in advance of Throw Me to the Wolves, Black Spot Books, May 24, 2022)

Relationships are tricky, and anyone who might tell you that co-authoring isn’t a relationship would be dead wrong. Like any other partnership, finding the right co-author can be akin to finding a writing soulmate—two people who share the same passions and ideas, and have the skills, drive, and desire to put in the work to reach a shared vision together. 
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Novellas, the Bogeyman of Publishing

by Cassondra Windwalker

     Literature and publishing are forever squabbling like impassioned parents, leaving readers to look on morosely from their hiding place behind the couch. In this case, the argument is especially silly, as its conclusion has been decidedly proven on the best-seller lists already. Still, agents and publishers will claim that books must be a minimum of 70,000-80,000 words long to even be considered for publication, while authors point miserably to the insistences of successful writers from Beatrix Potter to Truman Capote to Ernest Hemingway to Charles Bukowski, each of whom loudly proclaimed the superiority of paucity.

     Brevity is especially well-suited to horror. Horror, like seduction, relies more on the imagination of the reader than the dictation of the writer. Should the writer give in to her self-indulgent desire to painstakingly explain and describe every detail of every scene, to plumb the depths of every motivation, she would remove the reader entirely and leave them outside the pages, a mere observer. Worldbuilding serves the author well, but it should never be used to bludgeon the reader into docile submission. The reader needs to feel the cobblestones under their feet and choke softly on the cold smog filling their lungs, not visit the bricklayers’ yard and measure out the particulants in the air.

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