Horror Tree Q&A: Gemma Files, Canadian horror icon
Horror Tree Q&A: Gemma Files, Canadian horror icon
Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Her novel Experimental Film (2015) won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (Novel) in 2016. Her most recent publications include her Bram Stoker Award-winning collections In That Endlessness, Our End (2021) and Blood from the Air (2023).
PSM: Horror and short fiction are two significant descriptors of your body of work. What do you feel about the convergence between the two? (Poe’s dictum of the single effect, etc.)
GEMMA: Would it make you think worse of me if I tell you I had to Google this? The “single effect” here being, I suppose, a sense of unsettling wrongness leading (hopefully) to a greater sort of disturbance/discomfort–suspense, fear, dread, disgust. I know that when I was teaching, I often said that the great thing about writing a horror short story is that you can kill everybody in the narrative–including your protagonist–and not feel bad about it; I still believe that. I.e., the great thing about writing a short story is that you can make very ambitious decisions without having to justify and sustain them for 300 pages or so. OTOH, I also often used to say that in order to write a short story you need to sacrifice either plot for character or character for plot…a longer, more complicated plot calls for slightly sketchier characters, people reduced to a goal or a quality that works to keep them moving forward, while a more complex, deeper-sketched character usually exists best inside a story that’s more about slowly building weird detail…the ultimate “no plot, just vibes,” as the kids say. And I’m not sure I totally believe THAT anymore, but I do think that half the fun of writing horror short stories is discovering where to meet your characters–the point in their lives where they’re most likely to make the decisions/mistakes you need them to make, in order for what you want to happen to come about. Which is, in the end, for the reader to be led to a very dark place and left there, staring around, going “oh shit, what now?!?” And…scene. The literal end.
PSM: Do you have anything you’d like to say or share regarding Blood From The Air and Dark is Better, both published in 2023? Does the release of two short story collections so close together show something about your work or approach?
GEMMA: My first two collections were basically fifty percent stuff that had already been published before vs fifty percent stuff that hadn’t been published anywhere, but since then, I’ve mainly written stories either TO sell them (with a venue in mind) or because someone asked me to write them for a specific market, which means that the reason I keep putting collections together is because I want at least some of my readers to have the option to be able to find a particular sampling of my stories in one particular place, under my name, instead of having to buy ten different books to get the same content. That said, I do find that when I’m putting collections together, they usually fall into one of two thematic categories–they’re either mostly urban, contemporary, overtly horror (Kissing Carrion, Dark is Better, Spectral Evidence, In That Endlessness…) or more experimental, poetic dark fantasy, often set in different historical eras or worlds (The Worm in Every Heart, Drawn Up From Deep Places, Blood From the Air). I don’t think that’s likely to change in future, because those are my two main playgrounds; certainly, my next collection (Little Horn: Stories, from Shortwave, due to drop in 2025) falls pretty clearly in the first category, and whatever comes after that will probably fall more into the latter. That’s why it was so amazing when Blood From the Air won the Bram Stoker Award even though In That Endlessness… had won the same award two years before; I think that’s the first time one of my second category collections has ever connected with the same audience, and it moved me deeply. (Usually they sort of hit or miss, which I get–if you’re expecting more Kissing Carrion, The Worm… might seem like a bit of a slap in the face, stylistically. But I always hope there’ll be at least a few stories for any reader to connect with, in every collection.)
PSM: Do you have any significant longer works in progress, or other items on the workbench that you’d like to highlight?
GEMMA: Still working on some novels! The other lure of short fiction is that it IS short–you get the idea, you hammer it out, you place it: Done, on to the next one. Novels are different, and the relative success of Experimental Film (a narrative intimately based on my own life) has left me sort of shy of other long-form projects, afraid that whatever I end up doing can’t possibly be something as good as that. Which is a silly way to look at things, obviously. At the moment, the two novels I’m working on are Nightcrawling (contemporary horror, semi-epistolary, also based on my life, but…a little less? An alternate version?) and In Red Company, a Tanith Lee-esque sword and sorcery tale I started during the pandemic, to distract me from the anxiety of real life (which is, naturally, why it’s about religious strife, the aftermath of plague, patriarchal politics and climate catastrophe). And then there’s Dark Comforts, a nonfiction book I’ve been intermittently screwing around with, which crossbreeds essays on horror culture and personal memoir…why I like what I like, what it does for me as a neurodiverse author of a certain age. Etc.
PSM: Several of your stories were adapted for the TV series The Hunger. As a distinguished commentator on cinema, what did you think of the process and the results?
GEMMA: The results could have been better, but the process taught me a lot about A) film and TV production and B) the Canadian runaway film system, which was very useful when I started teaching Canadian film history and trying to explain to people who wanted to work inside it that “Hollywood North” is mostly a series of supports for other cultures’ narrative content. Otherwise, I’d love to eventually see something of mine produced in a longer form with better production values, and who knows? It might still happen.
PSM: According to your public info, your first short story was published in 1993. What, if anything, could you say about the process of creative development and maturation between then and now?
GEMMA: When I first started writing, I tended to get the beginning of a story and the end of a story, then snag on not so much how to get from A to Z but why my characters would eventually travel that route–the decisions they’d make, the arc of their emotional journeys, all that. So I’d start writing something, get to a certain point and then just stop. In the case of the title story in Kissing Carrion, for example, I took literally ten years between starting to write it and finishing. I think it had something to do with a combination of performance anxiety and maybe scaring myself, to some extent, with the stuff I’d come up with. The minute I began to place and sell stories, though, I realized that writing fiction was (or could be) just as much of a job as being a journalist or a film critic, and I was already used to turning articles, interviews or reviews around quickly. So I applied those skills to writing fiction, and things got a lot faster from then on.;)
How have I changed otherwise? I miss not thinking about how readers might react to something, because I knew no one was watching so I’d just let all the perversity and poetry inside me spill out in a gush of barely-curated, gilt-edged bile. When I began, I was only writing for myself, and I knew it. Laird Barron once called my first two collections “punk,” and I worry sometimes that I’m not so punk anymore, because I’m the preliminary sketch of a crone, the mother of a 20-year-old with special needs, a known quantity–because I understand my own methods now, because I get that I’m on the spectrum, because I’m on anti-anxiety meds so I don’t have the extreme highs and lows the powered my through my own twenties. Then again, I don’t doubt my own ability to write once a month anymore, so that’s nice.
PSM: As a Canadian writer, do you feel there are any strong demarcations in sensibility, perspectives, etc., in your work that differentiate it from authors south of the 49th Parallel?
GEMMA: For a long time, being Canadian was sort of a negative identity both at home and abroad, more defined in terms of the things we weren’t than the things we were (which none of us ever felt comfortable agreeing on in the first place, at least in public). The nice thing is that we’ve since begun to separate ourselves from being “Canadian” at all, which was always a weird government project of a cultural imprint imposed on us from the federal level on down to try and make sure a bunch of very disparate regions scattered across a huge whack of landscape remembered they were supposedly all one thing–that we should all believe in the same stuff, all want the same stuff, all be loyal to the same stuff. Peace, order and good government, as opposed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These days, however, I think we understand that an identity the Prime Minister hired a Scottish propaganda filmmaker to come in and curate back in 1955 or so cannot possibly apply to all of us. We’re a country the size of the former USSR with a population roughly the same size as California’s; none of our provinces have very much in common, really. So I guess I define myself more as an Ontarian these days, a Torontonian, because those are the places I know best.
I do, however, think that there are certain things I enjoy about only being mistaken for American (and then only on occasion, these days). I think there’s a kind of distance Torontonians have from their own quote-quote culture, a sort of skepticism towards whatever received wisdom our current era has on offer, which serves us well when things get tricky. I remember when Nalo Hopkinson took a weird amount of BS vis a vis what American readers saw as “over-representation” of POC in her stories and novels set in downtown Toronto; that’s the same Toronto I grew up in, the same Toronto I walk through every day. White as a sack of maple leaves may be the way I present, but I have full-blood Cree and Latvian Ashkenazi pretending to be Austrian/Dutch on my Canadian side (plus transported criminals all over my Australian side). We have the same genocidal history as every other colonizer state, but I try to think of it as a reason to understand that never again either means never again for everybody or it means nothing, and it HAS to mean something. I don’t feel guilty about the various tragedies that went into making me who I am anymore, experientially or genetically. With every new thing I learn about myself and where I came from, I only feel more grateful. It gives me an incredible amount to draw from.
PSM: What elements, if any, do you think ally you – if at all – with the current cohort of new weird/numinous/cosmic horror writers?
GEMMA: One of the things I love most about this generation is its commitment to identity–to write out of who you are, not who you’re told to perceive yourself to be, and use that to find empathy not just for all the types of people who overlap with you positively but also the people who overlap with you negatively. It’s this sort of…joyous acceptance of vulnerability and rage, power and lack of power, the inherent capacity to revel in monstrosity we all share. As a neurodiverse person, I spent an incredible long section of my life knowing there was something “wrong” with me that even my best intentions couldn’t change; this makes every person who’s ever similarly felt they fell outside the default of acceptability my peer, part of my community, if they’ll have me. Which seems like an odd thing to collate with writing this sort of horror, but another thing I think that all of us who accept our outcast lot instead of bewailing it understand is that what we love is precious because it’s mortal. That we only have so much time before pain comes, before our bodies run down, before bad things happen for no reason. The older I become, the more I see that people do the worst thing in pursuit of an illusion–that they want to follow any creed which will convince them the hatred they feel is justified, and the things they do in expressing that hatred are therefore good because THEY are good. None of us are good, but we can try to be better, and it’s a whole lot easier to do that if we accept that we’re all going to die and no one knows what happens after that. It’s like that exchange in The Departed: “How’s ya mother?” “Aw, she’s on her way out.” “We all are, act accordingly.”
The other thing I think we all share is an almost Romantic devotion to whatever odd things we’re drawn to, the stuff that fascinates and inspires us. Sex, death, body horror, transformation, the tiny details, pushing the edges of reality, the physical envelope. I’ve waited a long time for stuff to cycle back around to Clive Barker and Anne Rice territory, let alone territory which borders on that of the Dell Abyss Imprint roster of writers who first made me aware I could do what I want without censoring myself: Melanie Tem, Kathe Koja, Nancy Holder and Billy Martin (as Poppy Z. Brite). I see their fingerprints everywhere, even amongst writers who may not understand their influence on the people they love, the same way when I first started writing Lovecraftian fiction I found myself far more influenced by writers like TED Klein and Caitlin R. Kiernan. As the world gets worse, horror starts to bloom, right? We’re living in interesting times.
PSM: How do you think prose style and subject matter/structure cohere in your work?
GEMMA: My parents are both actors, so I grew up surrounded by theatre, radio plays and poetry readings, which may explain why voice is such an incredibly important part of my work–nothing really comes alive for me unless I find the right language, the right jargon, the right rhythm to jump-start an idea and turn it into a tale. I always think about reading things out loud, performing them; everything’s a monologue, if you do it right. I also feel that my visual art (I started doodling creepy stuff and pretty monsters again during the pandemic, after a maybe twenty-year hiatus) feeds into it, the same way that allowing myself to start writing poetry again around 2005 or so after giving it up back in high school and really lean into the speculative parts of it led not only to me publishing a couple of collections but to me embracing the poetic purple elements of my prose instead of trying to edit them out. It stopped me being embarrassed by my own inclinations to act like a seer or oracle in public, to be driven by my visions. To dream aloud.
PSM: As you’ve just visited Spain, do you think this is a good time for literary interaction and cross-fertilization between countries, languages, traditions and cultures?
GEMMA: Absolutely! Not only did I feel like a rock star in Spain–I’ve never met fans like those–I was incredibly inspired by how huge and new the world can be outside our various tiny little corner(s) of it. Different, and yet so much the same…humanity, in its best and worst forms. Global mythology made flesh. Yeah, I’ll go anywhere I’m translated, gladly.:)