Gwendolyn Kiste: Confronting Ghosts

Not pictured: awesome book. Pictured: awesome hat.

Gwendolyn Kiste is a rapidly rising star in the realm of literary horror. Her 2017 short fiction collection And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe was nominated for a 2017 Bram Stoker Award. I was lucky enough to meet Gwendolyn at this year’s StokerCon, where her book The Rust Maidens won the 2018 Stoker Award, in the First Novel category, which is the one category where you only ever get the one shot. Gwendolyn is a really great person, and she was a source of a great deal of energy and light at StokerCon. When her name got called at the awards dinner, I cheered harder for her than I did for anyone.

Gwendolyn is rapidly moving towards the category of "prolific" and already has a new, limited edition chapbook out, The Invention of Ghosts, but I really wanted to talk with Gwendolyn about The Rust Maidens.

The Rust Maidens is an exceptional work of fiction, and it ties into pretty much every one of my favourite horror subgenres and themes. In the book, we follow the story of Phoebe, a teenager in the 1980s and a middle-aged woman in the present day, as she tries to unravel and come to terms with the mystery of the Rust Maidens, a group of teenage girls living in depressed city of Cleveland, Ohio whose bodies begin to turn into industrial decay from the inside out.

If you haven’t read The Rust Maidens and want to, here’s the inevitable spoiler warning. Anyway, this is Gwendolyn and me, talking about the beauty of body horror, the monstering of teenage girls, healing in exile, and the spiritual consequences of Bad Reputations.

Artsploitation! Richard Blackburn on Vampires and Apes

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural, which is honestly one of the most downright fun films I've found since starting my project, was directed by Richard (Dick) Blackburn, and I had the immense privilege to talk with Dick over the phone a couple of times over the last week, and to ask him about Lemora, and also, more briefly, about his voice work on Return to the Planet of the Apes, which makes Dick the nexus of an unlikely crossover of my interests.