Sefira
Lisa looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her eyes had turned black.
The process had started a week ago, her second day on the road. She’d been washing her hands in the ladies room of a rest stop on I-80, somewhere in the sprawling middle of Pennsylvania, and when she glanced at the mirror for a spot-check, saw the black rings around her pupils. Heart whacking against her chest, she leaned forward. Her pupils were rimmed by black dark as squid ink. She drew closer. The black appeared to be moving, flowing sluggishly out of her pupil onto the green expanse of her iris. She pressed her nose against the mirror, trying to distinguish more detail, but her eyes teared, her vision blurred. Reflection fractured, she pushed away and hurried out of the rest room. She forgot to dry her hands, which she didn’t notice until she was gripping the wheel of her Accord.
For the next five hours, as evening faded into night and she continued on 80, until the fatigue drawing her lids down forced her to pull off at a truck stop outside Pittsburgh, Lisa checked her vision every ten minutes, closing first the left eye, then the right, in an attempt to determine the full extent of whatever was happening to her. As far as she was able to tell, the change to her eyes was chiefly cosmetic. Her vision didn’t seem any worse, her eyes more sensitive to light, nor was there any pain.
Which didn’t make what happened to them over the following days any less unsettling. Days two and three brought the steady darkening of her irises, until even she could no longer say where her pupil ended and her iris began. The effect was both unnerving and noticeable enough for her to retrieve the Ray Bans in the glove compartment and slide them on. On day four, another mirror, this one in a Day’s Inn in Paducah, Kentucky, showed what appeared to be tiny black clouds churning over her eyes. When, up unexpectedly early, she entered the bathroom, she was considering an extra hour in bed, the prospect of which evaporated as she studied this latest development. The blackness that had spread across her irises was venting up into the humor beneath her corneas, like smoke rising from some internal conflagration. As before, she couldn’t detect any impairment to her vision, so after her shower, she slid on the sunglasses she’d already grown so used to her reflection wearing that it looked more than naked, it looked incomplete without their chunky tortoise frames, and headed out under the sky that was just beginning to fill with light.
At several instants, as she sped up and down Illinois, she saw the white “H” indicating a hospital off the next exit and debated turning from whatever road the Honda’s wheels were humming across and steering straight for the emergency room. It wasn’t a question of whether whatever was changing in her was something to be concerned about: how could it be anything but? It was a matter of being twenty-four, at most thirty-six hours behind Sefira, and a detour to the E.R. would consume days, because they would have to admit her, and run tests, and treat her—try, at least. What would happen when their efforts failed, as she guessed they would? Specialists would be called in, experts consulted, she would be transferred to a regional medical center, a university hospital. They wouldn’t be able to let her go, would they? Not that she blamed them. They wouldn’t want to risk her infecting others with her disease, whose long-term effects might be more severe than she’d yet experienced.
And all the while, Sefira would keep moving farther and farther away, first—assuming Gary was correct—to the motel in Montana, and after that, who could say? There was the chance—slim, but not so much it could be discounted entirely—she would overtake Sefira, catch her unawares at some all-night truck stop, surprise her on her way back to that ridiculous van. Even if, as appeared likely, Sefira maintained her lead, Lisa would arrive in time to confront her at the motel. According to Madame Sosostris, she would rest there for at minimum three days, possibly a week. All of that, however, was contingent on Lisa keeping her foot pressed on the gas pedal, the car in 5th. Lose a few days, lose Sefira.
By this point, Lisa had cycled through the assortment of CDs scattered on the passenger’s seat three times and was beginning a fourth. At first, driving north through the Adirondacks, she hadn’t felt much like music, to put it mildly, and had passed the hours imagining arguments with Gary, switching on the radio to NPR when she grew tired of the sound of her voice. The following day, she roamed among the radio stations of upstate New York and the width of Pennsylvania, her finger pressing the radio’s scan button almost compulsively, abandoning a song she didn’t like only to return to it after a circuit of the local offerings turned up nothing better. She did the same thing the next morning, until sudden annoyance at the static caused by West Virginia’s mountains prompted her to reach for the CDs on her right. With irony sharp as a scalpel’s blade, her hand came up with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. She had obsessed over the album in middle school, enjoying its defiant lyrics without understanding the raw emotions informing them. Suffice it to say, that had changed. She sang along to the tracks full-throated, and once it was done, cycled through it again. Alanis was followed by Rihanna, then Luscious Jackson (another blast from the past), then Pink, Lady Gaga, and her guilty pleasures, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. She’d come by her appreciation for the last two via her job. One of her physical therapy clients was a late-middle-aged woman suffering from Parkinson’s who had spent thirty years as a public-school music teacher before the disease forced her to take early retirement. At the beginning of each of their sessions, Mrs. Mueller insisted on an album to serve as the accompaniment to her efforts. Her tastes were eclectic, ranging from Beethoven’s later symphonies to Frank Sinatra’s middle period. The day she put on Jolene, Lisa had wrinkled her nose at the album cover of Dolly Parton in her beaded green dress, her thick hair swept up and hair-sprayed in a blond elaboration. Mrs. Mueller had tsked as if Lisa were one of her students. “Don’t you dare frown at Dolly,” she said, her eyes fierce, “the woman’s a genius.” To her surprise, Lisa agreed with her client, and on subsequent visits, had asked the music teacher if they could listen to another of the singer’s albums. “I told you,” Mrs. Mueller said. With each new session, she had taken Lisa through Dolly’s catalogue, branching out to include Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. Gary had been annoyed by her newfound enthusiasm for, as he put it, his parents’ music. He preferred electronica, long trains of sound that merged into one another. “It’s for my job,” she said, more defensive than she should have been. At Rhino Records in Huguenot, she discovered a massive, four-disc compilation of Dolly’s greatest hits, along with a two-disc set of Loretta Lynn’s best songs. She purchased both and kept them in her car, where they joined the music that accompanied her as she drove from client to client. Hearing Dolly’s high, rich voice now was oddly comforting, although the opening lines of “Jolene,” with their plea to the titular woman to leave the singer’s beloved, made Lisa wince.
Day five of her journey, she awoke with her eyes burning. She stumbled past the frowns of the counter staff at the McDonald’s in whose parking lot she’d been sleeping, into the bathroom. Her sunglasses clattered in the sink. The woman in the mirror might have had the mother of all hangovers, or a virulent case of pinkeye, except that the blood vessels crisscrossing the whites of her eyes were black, as if someone had drawn on her sclerae with a fine-tipped pen.
Throat tight, she splashed cold water in her eyes, which helped the burning for a moment, but had no effect whatsoever beyond that—as if it would have, as if she could have cleaned her eyes of whatever was staining them. She bought a bottle of sterile saline and a bottle of Visine at the CVS next to the McDonald’s, then returned to the restaurant’s bathroom to rinse her eyes with the saline and douse them with the Visine. The treatment brought some measure of relief. She ordered a large coffee to go and went, back on the road. On the car stereo, Dolly sang about drowning in an endless sea of tears. For the rest of the day, as she crossed first Missouri and then Kansas, her eyes were too dry, gritty, her eyelids scraping across them every time she blinked. She had to pull over what felt like every ten minutes to use the Visine. She was annoyed. The time it took her to roll to a stop, remove her Ray Bans, tilt her head, pull down her lower lid, and squeeze the eye drop in was time slipping through her fingers.
Immediately under the irritation, like dark water under a scrim of ice, was fear, anxiety that the process underway in her eyes had entered a new phase, that this was the start of something worse, something she’d missed whatever window she’d had to address. The fear seeped into her annoyance, until finally, on the other side of Topeka, Lisa went so far as to take the next exit that advertised a hospital. She navigated within sight of it, only to have an emotion she couldn’t name make her foot press the gas, her hands steer for the signs that led back to the interstate.
When her eyes felt better the next morning, she told herself that she’d made the right decision. The black capillaries crosshatching the whites of her eyes had multiplied to the point the whiteness seemed the oddity, the results of a child’s careless coloring. Within another twenty-four hours, only a couple of pale spots would remain across her eyes, like spattered paint. By then, she would have crossed into Montana, and whatever concern had swelled at the penultimate phase of her eyes’ transformation was swallowed by the sensation that jolted her when she saw the sign welcoming her to Big Sky Country. It was as if the yellow line delineating the state’s margin in her frayed and dog-eared Rand McNally were an actual border, as if in crossing it, she had passed into something else, analogue to the shift in the map’s colors from the blue edge of Wyoming to the white expanse of Montana. It was like having had a bad cold, nose blocked, head fuzzy, and then taking a drug that cleared the symptoms instantly. The landscape streaming by her window wasn’t especially different from what had flown past the last few hours in Wyoming—land like rumpled sheets on a bed, thick with yellow grass, the occasional house or gas station or farm like a set for a movie—yet it seemed brighter, as if lit from within by millions of tiny, brilliant lights. Thinking the phenomenon might be due to something on the lenses of her sunglasses, she removed the Ray Bans, but the impression remained.
Nor had it abated when a glance in the rearview mirror showed her eyes completely black. Despite everything, the catastrophe that was the last week-plus, what Gary had done and what had been done to him, what she intended for Sefira with the butcher knife wrapped in a towel and stuffed under the spare tire, Lisa was startled, jerked the car to the left, earning an angry honk from the eighteen-wheeler rumbling past her. She steered away from the truck, back into her lane. Loretta Lynn was singing about the Devil getting his due. The difference in her eyes was of the slightest degree, but she could not stop staring at them. After a second truck, this one a pickup behind her, beeped because she had failed to notice herself slowing from seventy to forty-five, she decided it was time to pull off. She hoped there was a McDonald’s at the next exit. The drive-thru window meant she didn’t have to worry about the teenager working the register staring at her because she was wearing her sunglasses inside.
Not to mention her mouth—there was no disguising that, either.
© John Langan 2019
This story is an excerpt of the book Sefira and Other Betrayals by John Langan, Hippocampus Press 2019
Lisa looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her eyes had turned black.
The process had started a week ago, her second day on the road. She’d been washing her hands in the ladies room of a rest stop on I-80, somewhere in the sprawling middle of Pennsylvania, and when she glanced at the mirror for a spot-check, saw the black rings around her pupils. Heart whacking against her chest, she leaned forward. Her pupils were rimmed by black dark as squid ink. She drew closer. The black appeared to be moving, flowing sluggishly out of her pupil onto the green expanse of her iris. She pressed her nose against the mirror, trying to distinguish more detail, but her eyes teared, her vision blurred. Reflection fractured, she pushed away and hurried out of the rest room. She forgot to dry her hands, which she didn’t notice until she was gripping the wheel of her Accord.
For the next five hours, as evening faded into night and she continued on 80, until the fatigue drawing her lids down forced her to pull off at a truck stop outside Pittsburgh, Lisa checked her vision every ten minutes, closing first the left eye, then the right, in an attempt to determine the full extent of whatever was happening to her. As far as she was able to tell, the change to her eyes was chiefly cosmetic. Her vision didn’t seem any worse, her eyes more sensitive to light, nor was there any pain.
Which didn’t make what happened to them over the following days any less unsettling. Days two and three brought the steady darkening of her irises, until even she could no longer say where her pupil ended and her iris began. The effect was both unnerving and noticeable enough for her to retrieve the Ray Bans in the glove compartment and slide them on. On day four, another mirror, this one in a Day’s Inn in Paducah, Kentucky, showed what appeared to be tiny black clouds churning over her eyes. When, up unexpectedly early, she entered the bathroom, she was considering an extra hour in bed, the prospect of which evaporated as she studied this latest development. The blackness that had spread across her irises was venting up into the humor beneath her corneas, like smoke rising from some internal conflagration. As before, she couldn’t detect any impairment to her vision, so after her shower, she slid on the sunglasses she’d already grown so used to her reflection wearing that it looked more than naked, it looked incomplete without their chunky tortoise frames, and headed out under the sky that was just beginning to fill with light.
At several instants, as she sped up and down Illinois, she saw the white “H” indicating a hospital off the next exit and debated turning from whatever road the Honda’s wheels were humming across and steering straight for the emergency room. It wasn’t a question of whether whatever was changing in her was something to be concerned about: how could it be anything but? It was a matter of being twenty-four, at most thirty-six hours behind Sefira, and a detour to the E.R. would consume days, because they would have to admit her, and run tests, and treat her—try, at least. What would happen when their efforts failed, as she guessed they would? Specialists would be called in, experts consulted, she would be transferred to a regional medical center, a university hospital. They wouldn’t be able to let her go, would they? Not that she blamed them. They wouldn’t want to risk her infecting others with her disease, whose long-term effects might be more severe than she’d yet experienced.
And all the while, Sefira would keep moving farther and farther away, first—assuming Gary was correct—to the motel in Montana, and after that, who could say? There was the chance—slim, but not so much it could be discounted entirely—she would overtake Sefira, catch her unawares at some all-night truck stop, surprise her on her way back to that ridiculous van. Even if, as appeared likely, Sefira maintained her lead, Lisa would arrive in time to confront her at the motel. According to Madame Sosostris, she would rest there for at minimum three days, possibly a week. All of that, however, was contingent on Lisa keeping her foot pressed on the gas pedal, the car in 5th. Lose a few days, lose Sefira.
By this point, Lisa had cycled through the assortment of CDs scattered on the passenger’s seat three times and was beginning a fourth. At first, driving north through the Adirondacks, she hadn’t felt much like music, to put it mildly, and had passed the hours imagining arguments with Gary, switching on the radio to NPR when she grew tired of the sound of her voice. The following day, she roamed among the radio stations of upstate New York and the width of Pennsylvania, her finger pressing the radio’s scan button almost compulsively, abandoning a song she didn’t like only to return to it after a circuit of the local offerings turned up nothing better. She did the same thing the next morning, until sudden annoyance at the static caused by West Virginia’s mountains prompted her to reach for the CDs on her right. With irony sharp as a scalpel’s blade, her hand came up with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. She had obsessed over the album in middle school, enjoying its defiant lyrics without understanding the raw emotions informing them. Suffice it to say, that had changed. She sang along to the tracks full-throated, and once it was done, cycled through it again. Alanis was followed by Rihanna, then Luscious Jackson (another blast from the past), then Pink, Lady Gaga, and her guilty pleasures, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. She’d come by her appreciation for the last two via her job. One of her physical therapy clients was a late-middle-aged woman suffering from Parkinson’s who had spent thirty years as a public-school music teacher before the disease forced her to take early retirement. At the beginning of each of their sessions, Mrs. Mueller insisted on an album to serve as the accompaniment to her efforts. Her tastes were eclectic, ranging from Beethoven’s later symphonies to Frank Sinatra’s middle period. The day she put on Jolene, Lisa had wrinkled her nose at the album cover of Dolly Parton in her beaded green dress, her thick hair swept up and hair-sprayed in a blond elaboration. Mrs. Mueller had tsked as if Lisa were one of her students. “Don’t you dare frown at Dolly,” she said, her eyes fierce, “the woman’s a genius.” To her surprise, Lisa agreed with her client, and on subsequent visits, had asked the music teacher if they could listen to another of the singer’s albums. “I told you,” Mrs. Mueller said. With each new session, she had taken Lisa through Dolly’s catalogue, branching out to include Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. Gary had been annoyed by her newfound enthusiasm for, as he put it, his parents’ music. He preferred electronica, long trains of sound that merged into one another. “It’s for my job,” she said, more defensive than she should have been. At Rhino Records in Huguenot, she discovered a massive, four-disc compilation of Dolly’s greatest hits, along with a two-disc set of Loretta Lynn’s best songs. She purchased both and kept them in her car, where they joined the music that accompanied her as she drove from client to client. Hearing Dolly’s high, rich voice now was oddly comforting, although the opening lines of “Jolene,” with their plea to the titular woman to leave the singer’s beloved, made Lisa wince.
Day five of her journey, she awoke with her eyes burning. She stumbled past the frowns of the counter staff at the McDonald’s in whose parking lot she’d been sleeping, into the bathroom. Her sunglasses clattered in the sink. The woman in the mirror might have had the mother of all hangovers, or a virulent case of pinkeye, except that the blood vessels crisscrossing the whites of her eyes were black, as if someone had drawn on her sclerae with a fine-tipped pen.
Throat tight, she splashed cold water in her eyes, which helped the burning for a moment, but had no effect whatsoever beyond that—as if it would have, as if she could have cleaned her eyes of whatever was staining them. She bought a bottle of sterile saline and a bottle of Visine at the CVS next to the McDonald’s, then returned to the restaurant’s bathroom to rinse her eyes with the saline and douse them with the Visine. The treatment brought some measure of relief. She ordered a large coffee to go and went, back on the road. On the car stereo, Dolly sang about drowning in an endless sea of tears. For the rest of the day, as she crossed first Missouri and then Kansas, her eyes were too dry, gritty, her eyelids scraping across them every time she blinked. She had to pull over what felt like every ten minutes to use the Visine. She was annoyed. The time it took her to roll to a stop, remove her Ray Bans, tilt her head, pull down her lower lid, and squeeze the eye drop in was time slipping through her fingers.
Immediately under the irritation, like dark water under a scrim of ice, was fear, anxiety that the process underway in her eyes had entered a new phase, that this was the start of something worse, something she’d missed whatever window she’d had to address. The fear seeped into her annoyance, until finally, on the other side of Topeka, Lisa went so far as to take the next exit that advertised a hospital. She navigated within sight of it, only to have an emotion she couldn’t name make her foot press the gas, her hands steer for the signs that led back to the interstate.
When her eyes felt better the next morning, she told herself that she’d made the right decision. The black capillaries crosshatching the whites of her eyes had multiplied to the point the whiteness seemed the oddity, the results of a child’s careless coloring. Within another twenty-four hours, only a couple of pale spots would remain across her eyes, like spattered paint. By then, she would have crossed into Montana, and whatever concern had swelled at the penultimate phase of her eyes’ transformation was swallowed by the sensation that jolted her when she saw the sign welcoming her to Big Sky Country. It was as if the yellow line delineating the state’s margin in her frayed and dog-eared Rand McNally were an actual border, as if in crossing it, she had passed into something else, analogue to the shift in the map’s colors from the blue edge of Wyoming to the white expanse of Montana. It was like having had a bad cold, nose blocked, head fuzzy, and then taking a drug that cleared the symptoms instantly. The landscape streaming by her window wasn’t especially different from what had flown past the last few hours in Wyoming—land like rumpled sheets on a bed, thick with yellow grass, the occasional house or gas station or farm like a set for a movie—yet it seemed brighter, as if lit from within by millions of tiny, brilliant lights. Thinking the phenomenon might be due to something on the lenses of her sunglasses, she removed the Ray Bans, but the impression remained.
Nor had it abated when a glance in the rearview mirror showed her eyes completely black. Despite everything, the catastrophe that was the last week-plus, what Gary had done and what had been done to him, what she intended for Sefira with the butcher knife wrapped in a towel and stuffed under the spare tire, Lisa was startled, jerked the car to the left, earning an angry honk from the eighteen-wheeler rumbling past her. She steered away from the truck, back into her lane. Loretta Lynn was singing about the Devil getting his due. The difference in her eyes was of the slightest degree, but she could not stop staring at them. After a second truck, this one a pickup behind her, beeped because she had failed to notice herself slowing from seventy to forty-five, she decided it was time to pull off. She hoped there was a McDonald’s at the next exit. The drive-thru window meant she didn’t have to worry about the teenager working the register staring at her because she was wearing her sunglasses inside.
Not to mention her mouth—there was no disguising that, either.
© John Langan 2019
This story is an excerpt of the book Sefira and Other Betrayals by John Langan, Hippocampus Press 2019
Narrated by John Langan
Narrated by John Langan
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hello John, and welcome to the podcast.
TN: Glad you made it here safely. It’s a nightmare out there.
JL: Good morning and thank you for having me. And yes, it is a nightmare.
BR: October: a good time to have scary stuff on our podcast!
TN: Either that or beautiful, autumnal leaves.
JL: Why should I have to choose; I’d like to have both!
BR: We just heard the very beginning of your most recent book, Sefira and Other Betrayals, which I understand is a collection including a novella and stories. Tell us a little about it.
JL: Sure, it’s a collection of stories that I wrote over just a couple of year period of time, and when I was trying to put together the stories for my third collection, which this is, I realized there was a small group, six stories, that were very intensely focused on betrayal, the themes of betrayal. I tried to fit some other stories that I’d written after them, and they just didn’t work, they didn’t work with that grouping of stories. So I decided, okay, I’m gonna go ahead and I’ll put these together. And I had two stories that were still in process that I thought would fit in with this grouping, and so ultimately they did, and one of those is the title story, “Sefira.”
TN: I see it’s been called “a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction.” What exactly does that mean? Is it like Edgar Alan Poe? Does it have an element of romanticism to it?
JL: I would be happy, delighted, to be compared to Edgar Allen Poe. You know, it’s a term, literary horror fiction, that’s stirred up some controversy within the horror community, as it seems to imply that there are some things that are literary, therefore elevated, more worth reading than others, and that’s unfortunate. I think, as a marketing category, I’m happy to embrace it if it will sell my book, to be blunt and crass. However, I think there are plenty of examples, going back to Poe and beyond, of work that would fall under the category of literary. Which is to say, work that rewards multiple readings, something that you can go back to. I think it’s Nabokov who says that the literary or literature is that which we are always re-reading. So the thought that something I wrote might be something that people can go back to and re-read over and over again is a pleasant one.
BR: I like that differentiation between literary and other genres, or the way literary works with another genre, with that distinction. Horror stories—I gather there’s quite a large and avid readership out there for horror stories, but I’ve never really been drawn to the horror genre. I mean, I enjoy the occasional scary movie, rather infrequently, but I never go there in my reading. So maybe you can help me understand: what is it that attracts people to horror, over and over again?
JL: Well, I think that there’s a distinction probably to be drawn between the movies and the books, the stories. I think a lot of people who say “I don’t like horror” are tending to think about the lowest common denominator films, the ones where there’s lots of blood and lots of jump scares, and where people are basically suffering meat, they’re there to be murdered in horrifying and inventive ways. Obviously there are films for which this is not the case: the original film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House—Robert Wise’s The Haunting, which is a brilliant film. Or the adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw—The Innocents. These are both films that stand up very well as films, and don’t derive their primary power from the jump scare or the buckets of blood. Not that I have anything against buckets of blood! I think that there are, that both of those short works—Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and James’ The Turn of the Screw would fall under that category of works of literary horror that you can return to again and again. But I also do think we’re free to have or taste. There are some things that just don’t work for people and if horror doesn’t appeal to you or to anybody, there’s no reason it should have to.
TN: I agree with you about The Turn of the Screw, that’s really a very chilling story, and without any blood. Some people might wonder why we haven’t featured more horror on The Strange Recital, seeing that we say we’re into fiction that questions the nature of reality. And a woman’s eyes turning entirely black as she drives… well, that definitely challenges conventional ideas of what’s real. Without giving a spoiler, can you explain what’s happening to her eyes?
JL: Yes, she’s been infected by what she herself calls “the worst STD ever,” after her husband has had a physical relationship with a succubus, a sex demon. And so she’s turning into something new, she’s transforming into something that even the succubus has never seen before.
TN: Is she going to become a succubus herself? No, no, don’t give it away.
JL: (laughs)
BR: Yeah, not only her eyes, but then something starts happening to her mouth. I think I’m afraid to know about that!
JL: Yes, that’s the, um, maybe what I should say is that she undergoes what she herself refers to as her “monstrous transformation,” somewhat tongue in cheek. When I was writing the, what became a short novel, I thought that it would be interesting from a narrative standpoint to break down this physical transformation that she’s undergoing into alternating chapters. So the first chapter would focus on her eyes, and then the next, the third chapter would focus on her teeth and so on and such and such, with the idea being that if you were to see them all at once, it might be overwhelming, it might become almost comic. And I wanted to try to avoid that by focusing on one part of the transformation at a time.
TN: The connecting theme of your book, as you’ve said, is betrayal. So it seems that betrayal has a special place in your heart.
JL: Well, you could say that I was surprised myself when I sat down to look at my stories. I was really genuinely surprised to find that I had done this, that over this relatively short period, obviously there was something that I was working out, or some kind of obsession bubbled to the surface. And over and over and over again, these stories of betrayal, in a variety of circumstances, showed up. I’m a great believer as an artist in trusting your, whatever you want to call it, your unconscious, your subconscious, your creative consciousness, and just allowing what is going to come out, to come out. And then afterwards saying, oh, that’s very interesting.
BR: My new novel explores betrayal as well, with the Benedict Arnold story as a key element, plus a man’s fears of his own traitorhood, plus there’s political betrayal and sexual betrayal. So you and I have approached that topic from quite different directions, which is one more illustration I guess of the infinite reservoir of human creativity, because every person is twisted in their own unique way. So, if I may ask, how did you get so twisted?
JL: Oh my goodness, how much time do we have on this? (laughter) I will say just in passing that Benedict Arnold fascinates me. He’s maybe the character from the Colonial or the Revolutionary period in American history that I just find utterly fascinating and utterly compelling, because of that change from the hero of Saratoga to the great betrayer of the United States, so I’m quite fascinated to read your book and see how you tackle him, because he prowls in my mind. I think in terms of how I was twisted… I was raised in a very devout Catholic household, and in particular the supernatural always felt as if it was all around us and omnipresent. At the same time, when I was very very tiny, about two and a half, I had to have eye surgery done. A little fragment of metal got into my right cornea, and it’s a procedure that in an adult can be performed in an office, under, you know, there’s no real sedation needed. But for a child you need to be sedated, out entirely, and then when you wake up, your arms are in these wooden splints to keep you from tearing off the eye patch. And so it’s about the only memory I have from that period in my childhood. So those were at least two contributing factors.
TN: Well you know, speaking of twisted, Brent and I are quite twisted, like Möbius strips. So John, do you untwist yourself by writing horror stories? Are you working on any new ones right now?
JL: Yes, I am working on new ones right now. I have one I’m trying to finish typing, because I hand write everything and then I type it up, so one I’m trying to finish typing this weekend. I’m not sure, in terms of untwisting, it’s actually an interesting kind of question. If you’re, as it were, to sort of work the metaphor, if you’re fundamentally twisted, can you untwist, or can you just become more aware of your twistedness? And by becoming aware of it, maybe live with it in a better way, or maybe access it for your creativity in a better way.
TN: Yeah, it’s almost a kind of alchemy where you need gold to get gold.
JL: Yeah, I think so. It’s recognizing that the gold has been twisted and then what you’re trying to do is to draw on it and maybe untwist it enough for somebody else to look at it and have an interaction with it.
TN: Either that, or untwist the double helix of DNA. (laughter) Anyway, I think we’ve taken this metaphor as far as...
BR: I think we’ve come to the end. I mean, not the literal end, but you know, the end of the interview. Thank you, John, it was very good to meet you.
JL: Thank you very much for having me, I really appreciate your time.
TN: Yes, and be careful getting home. Something’s going on. The owls and the coyotes are out—and it’s daytime!
JL: I noticed that.
TN: It’s not the Ides of March is it?
BR: Hello John, and welcome to the podcast.
TN: Glad you made it here safely. It’s a nightmare out there.
JL: Good morning and thank you for having me. And yes, it is a nightmare.
BR: October: a good time to have scary stuff on our podcast!
TN: Either that or beautiful, autumnal leaves.
JL: Why should I have to choose; I’d like to have both!
BR: We just heard the very beginning of your most recent book, Sefira and Other Betrayals, which I understand is a collection including a novella and stories. Tell us a little about it.
JL: Sure, it’s a collection of stories that I wrote over just a couple of year period of time, and when I was trying to put together the stories for my third collection, which this is, I realized there was a small group, six stories, that were very intensely focused on betrayal, the themes of betrayal. I tried to fit some other stories that I’d written after them, and they just didn’t work, they didn’t work with that grouping of stories. So I decided, okay, I’m gonna go ahead and I’ll put these together. And I had two stories that were still in process that I thought would fit in with this grouping, and so ultimately they did, and one of those is the title story, “Sefira.”
TN: I see it’s been called “a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction.” What exactly does that mean? Is it like Edgar Alan Poe? Does it have an element of romanticism to it?
JL: I would be happy, delighted, to be compared to Edgar Allen Poe. You know, it’s a term, literary horror fiction, that’s stirred up some controversy within the horror community, as it seems to imply that there are some things that are literary, therefore elevated, more worth reading than others, and that’s unfortunate. I think, as a marketing category, I’m happy to embrace it if it will sell my book, to be blunt and crass. However, I think there are plenty of examples, going back to Poe and beyond, of work that would fall under the category of literary. Which is to say, work that rewards multiple readings, something that you can go back to. I think it’s Nabokov who says that the literary or literature is that which we are always re-reading. So the thought that something I wrote might be something that people can go back to and re-read over and over again is a pleasant one.
BR: I like that differentiation between literary and other genres, or the way literary works with another genre, with that distinction. Horror stories—I gather there’s quite a large and avid readership out there for horror stories, but I’ve never really been drawn to the horror genre. I mean, I enjoy the occasional scary movie, rather infrequently, but I never go there in my reading. So maybe you can help me understand: what is it that attracts people to horror, over and over again?
JL: Well, I think that there’s a distinction probably to be drawn between the movies and the books, the stories. I think a lot of people who say “I don’t like horror” are tending to think about the lowest common denominator films, the ones where there’s lots of blood and lots of jump scares, and where people are basically suffering meat, they’re there to be murdered in horrifying and inventive ways. Obviously there are films for which this is not the case: the original film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House—Robert Wise’s The Haunting, which is a brilliant film. Or the adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw—The Innocents. These are both films that stand up very well as films, and don’t derive their primary power from the jump scare or the buckets of blood. Not that I have anything against buckets of blood! I think that there are, that both of those short works—Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and James’ The Turn of the Screw would fall under that category of works of literary horror that you can return to again and again. But I also do think we’re free to have or taste. There are some things that just don’t work for people and if horror doesn’t appeal to you or to anybody, there’s no reason it should have to.
TN: I agree with you about The Turn of the Screw, that’s really a very chilling story, and without any blood. Some people might wonder why we haven’t featured more horror on The Strange Recital, seeing that we say we’re into fiction that questions the nature of reality. And a woman’s eyes turning entirely black as she drives… well, that definitely challenges conventional ideas of what’s real. Without giving a spoiler, can you explain what’s happening to her eyes?
JL: Yes, she’s been infected by what she herself calls “the worst STD ever,” after her husband has had a physical relationship with a succubus, a sex demon. And so she’s turning into something new, she’s transforming into something that even the succubus has never seen before.
TN: Is she going to become a succubus herself? No, no, don’t give it away.
JL: (laughs)
BR: Yeah, not only her eyes, but then something starts happening to her mouth. I think I’m afraid to know about that!
JL: Yes, that’s the, um, maybe what I should say is that she undergoes what she herself refers to as her “monstrous transformation,” somewhat tongue in cheek. When I was writing the, what became a short novel, I thought that it would be interesting from a narrative standpoint to break down this physical transformation that she’s undergoing into alternating chapters. So the first chapter would focus on her eyes, and then the next, the third chapter would focus on her teeth and so on and such and such, with the idea being that if you were to see them all at once, it might be overwhelming, it might become almost comic. And I wanted to try to avoid that by focusing on one part of the transformation at a time.
TN: The connecting theme of your book, as you’ve said, is betrayal. So it seems that betrayal has a special place in your heart.
JL: Well, you could say that I was surprised myself when I sat down to look at my stories. I was really genuinely surprised to find that I had done this, that over this relatively short period, obviously there was something that I was working out, or some kind of obsession bubbled to the surface. And over and over and over again, these stories of betrayal, in a variety of circumstances, showed up. I’m a great believer as an artist in trusting your, whatever you want to call it, your unconscious, your subconscious, your creative consciousness, and just allowing what is going to come out, to come out. And then afterwards saying, oh, that’s very interesting.
BR: My new novel explores betrayal as well, with the Benedict Arnold story as a key element, plus a man’s fears of his own traitorhood, plus there’s political betrayal and sexual betrayal. So you and I have approached that topic from quite different directions, which is one more illustration I guess of the infinite reservoir of human creativity, because every person is twisted in their own unique way. So, if I may ask, how did you get so twisted?
JL: Oh my goodness, how much time do we have on this? (laughter) I will say just in passing that Benedict Arnold fascinates me. He’s maybe the character from the Colonial or the Revolutionary period in American history that I just find utterly fascinating and utterly compelling, because of that change from the hero of Saratoga to the great betrayer of the United States, so I’m quite fascinated to read your book and see how you tackle him, because he prowls in my mind. I think in terms of how I was twisted… I was raised in a very devout Catholic household, and in particular the supernatural always felt as if it was all around us and omnipresent. At the same time, when I was very very tiny, about two and a half, I had to have eye surgery done. A little fragment of metal got into my right cornea, and it’s a procedure that in an adult can be performed in an office, under, you know, there’s no real sedation needed. But for a child you need to be sedated, out entirely, and then when you wake up, your arms are in these wooden splints to keep you from tearing off the eye patch. And so it’s about the only memory I have from that period in my childhood. So those were at least two contributing factors.
TN: Well you know, speaking of twisted, Brent and I are quite twisted, like Möbius strips. So John, do you untwist yourself by writing horror stories? Are you working on any new ones right now?
JL: Yes, I am working on new ones right now. I have one I’m trying to finish typing, because I hand write everything and then I type it up, so one I’m trying to finish typing this weekend. I’m not sure, in terms of untwisting, it’s actually an interesting kind of question. If you’re, as it were, to sort of work the metaphor, if you’re fundamentally twisted, can you untwist, or can you just become more aware of your twistedness? And by becoming aware of it, maybe live with it in a better way, or maybe access it for your creativity in a better way.
TN: Yeah, it’s almost a kind of alchemy where you need gold to get gold.
JL: Yeah, I think so. It’s recognizing that the gold has been twisted and then what you’re trying to do is to draw on it and maybe untwist it enough for somebody else to look at it and have an interaction with it.
TN: Either that, or untwist the double helix of DNA. (laughter) Anyway, I think we’ve taken this metaphor as far as...
BR: I think we’ve come to the end. I mean, not the literal end, but you know, the end of the interview. Thank you, John, it was very good to meet you.
JL: Thank you very much for having me, I really appreciate your time.
TN: Yes, and be careful getting home. Something’s going on. The owls and the coyotes are out—and it’s daytime!
JL: I noticed that.
TN: It’s not the Ides of March is it?
Music on this episode:
Madness is Everywhere by Lobo Loco
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Crying in my Beer by Audionautix
License CC BY 3.0
101 Tirs Genius Erosin Mixtape
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Sound Effects:
AM Radio in car.WAV by Kev_dur
License CC BY 3.0
