EXTREMELY WEIRD SPLATTER Written in Its Authors’ Guts: Group Interviews, Part One

by L. Andrew Cooper

As I put together the table of contents for the forthcoming anthology Extremely Weird Splatter, I asked authors to answer three basic questions about why they and their stories fit with a project aiming to fuse extreme horror and splatterpunk with weird fiction. Not entirely randomly, I’ve sorted responses into three groups.

Extremely Weird Splatter: Contents

Nick Badot, “The Copper Merchant”
JB Corso, “Scenarios”
Suvajeet Duttagupta, “The Weight of the Dark”
JG Faherty, “The Fishhook Prophecy” 
Angelique Fawns, “Highway to Hell Fan”
Tom Johnstone. “Debbie Does Delos...?”
Leonardo J. Lamanna, “How to Build a Meat Radio”
Thomas C Mavroudis, “Adoration of Evil”
Christine Morgan, “What They Deserve”
Jason Nickey, “Portal”
J. Rohr, “A Parent Sacrifices”
Steve Rasnic Tem, “Dermis” 
C.M. Saunders, “On the Fringes”
Dan Scamell, “MySkin EverFlesh”
Vox Villalobos, “Soup”
Maxim Volk, “My Love, Like Moss, Envelops You” 
Etta Wynn, “The Architect of the Soft Circuit”

Interview Group One

GROUP MEMBERS: JG Faherty, Thomas C. Mavroudis, J. Rohr, Steve Rasnic Tem, Etta Wynn

By the way, I totally stole this “roundtable” format from author Sean Taylor, who does neat stuff all the time on his site Bad Girls, Good Guys, and Two-Fisted Action.

What aspect of your biography is most relevant to Extremely Weird Splatter?

JG Faherty: The biography that accompanies the story in the anthology? Probably nothing, except maybe that I’m a distant relative of Mary Shelley. She had some squirmy stuff in Frankenstein. But in real life, I’ve had more than the average person’s share of experiences that might go well with an antho like this. As a kid, I once saw a man get run over by a car while crossing the street (I was already watching The Twilight Zone and reading Poe by that point, so you can’t blame my fascination with horror on that!). In my late 20s, I had a part-time gig for a few months as a crime scene photographer. Mostly boring stuff, but once it was a guy who’d been run over by a train. I still have a pic of his eyeball on the tracks somewhere. I’ve helped a friend sew corpses in a morgue, assisted a doctor with re-attaching my grandfather’s thumb, and filmed a c-section on a St. Bernard for a veterinarian. I also taught a vertebrate anatomy lab in grad school, which involved dissecting cats and other animals.

Thomas C. Mavroudis: The story “My Love Burns with a Green Flame,” which appears in my collection Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters, was originally published in the anthology Year’s Best Body Horror 2017. This story was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker, who were my horror foundation. Respectively, they are the emblems of “weird” and “splatter”.

J. Rohr: The aspect of my bio that’s most relevant to Extremely Weird Splatter is telling nonfiction stories. It exposes me to a lot of folks who have lived lives I might never have experienced. There is a definite truth to reality being stranger than fiction, but it can also be far grimmer than anything conceived by a twisted imagination. There’s a chaos to existence that often occurs without warning, and only those who have experienced it can share what it was. Plus, it helps me see how to inject that real life tangibility into something.

Steve Rasnic Tem: I’m best known for my quiet horror. But my initial interest in horror was because I was impressed by the range of the genre, from quiet ghost stories driven by vague apprehensions and paranoia (probably the closest most of us come to horror in our real lives), to disorienting encounters with the surreal, to graphic, gory extravaganzas which, when well done, can be a transformative reading experience. For my work in the latter realm, see “Boxer” in Splatterpunks II and “Elena” in Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium.

Etta Wynn: My work is rooted in speculative fiction that explores memory, identity, technology, and transformation. I am drawn to stories where emotional intensity intersects with the strange, unsettling, and bodily.

Which of your previous (or forthcoming, or planned) works makes you most qualified to participate in a project that fuses splatter with the weird?

JG Faherty: Oddly, I rarely do splatter (Hellrider, “Jennifer’s Body“), and while I often do weird (The Malthusian Correction), I rarely mix the two. Probably the best example would be in my Nightmare World trilogy, which involves some graphic scenes with a boogeyman creature butchering children and adults. The weird part is when the characters have to move back and forth between our world and the alternate reality of the boogeyman.

Thomas C. Mavroudis: The aforementioned story is my greatest qualification, but “The Happy Worm,” which appeared on Creepy- A Horror Podcast’s 31 Days of Horror in 2023, is particularly gross. And it was inspired by a picture of a character in one of Clive Barker’s plays. While the majority of my work centers heavily in the weird tradition, I have a few pieces in progress that are more splatter-forward than my usual fare. I don’t always bring the goo, but I can, and I like to do it when the story moves in that direction.

J. Rohr: My latest music project was wrapping up an alternative metal album inspired by Romantic era paintings like Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich and the video game Dredge. Finding the sublime in the hideousness of relatable occurrences is an offshoot of that, which is something one can find in a lot of my work, especially other anthologies like Tractor Beam, Kozy Krampus, and Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror. I think of horror as an exploration, especially that which we don’t want to talk about directly.

Steve Rasnic Tem: My personal definition of the weird is that it is dark fiction that eschews traditional tropes such as vampires, werewolves, etc. in favor of personal & idiosyncratic perceptions of the strange. Many of these tales seem to come from a broken place and are imbued with threads of sadness. This is also a literature that more clearly reflects the influence of surrealism, absurdism, & decadent literature. When your experience is pushed to the extreme, when especially the horror of the body and what can happen to it is invoked, I think you naturally enter the realm of the weird. I explore this theme in my most extreme novel, Ubo.

Etta Wynn: My writing often blends psychological depth with surreal and speculative horror elements. I focus on how horror can carry emotional and philosophical weight beyond shock value.

Without giving away ANYTHING—what about your story for Extremely Weird Splatter is most transgressive?

JG Faherty: I guess it would have to be the idea of self-mutilation as a pathway to both sexual and spiritual pleasure and enlightenment. It’s definitely not an idea most people would find enticing—and I certainly don’t!— but at the same time, it’s been practiced since the dawn of civilization.

Thomas C. Mavroudis: I feel the first scene is pretty damn transgressive. I wanted to open as explosive as I could, and I think I was successful. Overall, my wife’s summation of the story was “yuck” and “I wish I didn’t have to read that.”

J. Rohr: This question reminded me of a friend around when he had his first child. Everyone was congratulating him, and I asked if he was scared. He sighed heavily, relieved that someone had finally asked him that question because it meant it was okay for him to say yes. There are aspects of parenthood people are not supposed to discuss because they may dissuade folks from having children. My story is about some of those things, that having children may not be a blessed event, while also celebrating those parents who give up everything so their kids can have a happy life.

Steve Rasnic Tem: The most transgressive aspect of my story is probably its hyperfocus on the body as we age. It’s something we try to ignore, but it is, finally, inescapable.

Etta Wynn: It challenges the boundaries between body, memory, and identity, especially in moments of transformation that are both intimate and unsettling.