Horror author Christine Morgan talks about surviving cancer and her love for all things Viking and Bizarro
The cover art from Christine Morgon’s White Death, published by Bloodshot Books
CHRISTINE MORGAN CONTAINS MULTITUDES, ALL OF THEM DECIDEDLY MORE EVIL THAN HER CHERUBIC FACADE. AND AT HER MOST DIABOLICAL CENTER... DOLLS.
YOU'RE STILL RECOVERING FROM (KNOCK WOOD) A HARROWING BATTLE WITH CANCER. MANY WHO'VE GONE THROUGH REAL LIFE TRIBULATIONS FIND HORROR AS ENTERTAINMENT TRITE AND UNSATISFYING. HAVE YOUR EXPERIENCES CHANGED OR REFINED YOUR WORK? HOW ( OR HOW NOT)?
This is my second go-round with cancer, too… had surgery for thyroid cancer in 1990 when I was still in college. And that one was a bungled shitshow, resulting in a week in intensive care, double pneumonia and a collapsed lung, three days radioactive iodine isolation, six months of not even having a voice at all thanks to stretched/scraped vocal cords… by comparison, or so I keep telling myself, this hasn’t been THAT bad. Except for the eight weeks of radiation treatments, which got pretty awful in the middle. And the blood pressure issues. What am I saying? It’s been hell. Anyhoo, though! I’ve done my best to keep upbeat and approach it all with a sense of humor. It certainly hasn’t taken away from my love of horror, though there were several moments when it seemed like the universe was out to get me… I’d be sent review copies or proofreading manuscript assignments or such, and the books would be chock-full of body horror directly related to what I was going through: people getting growths or parasites in their face, eyeballs, sinuses, etc. Gee, thanks, just what I needed! As for my own work, I generally consider real life just research for fiction, so I try to dissociate enough to take in the experiences with a certain observational detachment in mind, to be aware of what was going on, how it felt, how it affected me. I also, during an incident involving extra anesthesia for being kept zonked out two whole days, came away with some powerful… visions? hallucinations? …images and experiences that seemed incredibly vivid and real at the time. Part involved the probable-ghost of an old man called Roger. Part involved two figures flanking my bed, the White Nun and the Crinkly Lady. They creeped me out so much and stayed in my mind so clearly that I had to write them into a story to get them out of my system. Which story, I then had accepted into an upcoming anthology, so, they were good for something after all!
WHAT'S WITH ALL THE VIKINGS?
Although I’ve always been a horror fan as a reader, my formative years in high school and college were spent playing Dungeons and Dragons and other such fantasy games I’m a lifelong fan of mythology, folklore, history, and ancient/medieval cultures I also really dig ship porn (pirates, tall ships, etc). One day at the library, I picked up Bernard Cornwell’s “The Pale Horseman” on audiobook and it all slammed together in my head what I’d been missing all along. Vikings proved to be the perfect storm of all those subjects. Plus, I have a shameless love for over the top purple prose, gory descriptions, wordcraft like alliteration and assonance and kennings. It really was just this moment of “hey, wake up, this is what you’ve been meant to be doing!” I can go totally nuts with language, and it works! Theirs was also such an awesome age, the explorations, the laws and sagas, the strong women. Not just goddesses and valkyries but actual historical figures some Viking women kicked absolute ass. I’ve been to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway, and to stand there by those ships, those thin hulls the only thing between them and a cold death, sailing into the unknown … that took some serious Iron Age balls no matter who you were.
TELL US ABOUT HOW YOUR PHILOSOPHY OF BIZARRO DISTINGUISHES YOUR OUTPUT IN THAT FIELD WITH YOUR MORE "CONVENTIONAL" HORROR OUTPUT. WHAT DOES BIZARRO MEAN TO YOU?
Bizarro brings that same sense of wordcraft and going nuts with language I so love it’s experimental and playtime, there aren’t real rules. In that genre, and extreme horror, I get the most sense of writers just being able to cut loose and have fun, no matter how crazy or sicko or gross. I don’t dare consider myself a full Bizarro writer yet, but came to it first as a reader and reviewer (labeling myself “bizarro-friendly” was a great move, brought a ton of cool authors to my attention). Yet, at the same time, many of my favorite childhood reads, and that lifelong interest in folklore and fairy tales and fables … well, at their core, those are pretty damn bizarro themselves… in some ways, I think of it like that old saying about porn, you know it when you see it… whenever I sit myself down to try and think up something bizarro, I trip all over my own mental feet, convinced nothing’s weird enough, or it seems so normal to me after growing up on Dr. Seuss and “The Ice Cream Cone Coot And Other Rare Birds” (the aforementioned childhood favorites) that my perspective’s warped. What I like best about a lot of it is the cleverness, the well-thought-out extrapolation. Carlton Mellick III is a definite master of that. He’ll take a single premise–what if it rained candy instead of water, for instance–and follow it through the ramifications and repercussions in such plausible ways. That’s the sort of world-building that really rings my bells, and what makes a lot of traditional fantasy/sci-fi fiction just not work for me.
YOU ALSO MAKE DOLLS OF CHARACTERS IN COLLEAGUES' BOOKS, AND ARE A WELL-KNOWN COUNTERFEITER OF STOKER AWARDS. PLEASE TELL US YOU ALSO MAKE VOODOO DOLLS OF VARIOUS NATIONAL POLITICAL FIGURES.
The only political dolls I’ve done were in response to an artist’s challenge by Jim Agpalza (THE bizarro master of lampooning those folks)… I made Clinton and Lewinsky dolls with the motto “politics suck anyway, make America fellate again!”
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON? WHAT'S OUT NOW OR COMING OUT SOON, THAT WE SHOULD SEARCH OUT?
I’m currently about 2/3 of the way through the first draft of a book called Lakehouse Infernal, a sequel of sorts to Edward Lee’s Lucifer’s Lottery. With his knowledge and permission, of course! He’s been utterly awesome about letting me play with his toys all he asked was that he got to have a cameo. Lakehouse Infernal will also be loosely connected to Spermjackers From Hell, which itself owed a lot to Lee in the first place. After that, I’m committed to two more extreme horror novels I’ll be submitting to Deadite Press, based on some “here’s what I’d like to see more of” suggestions from Jeff Burk. One’s about freaky undersea monsters (another of my favorite jams!) the other will be about mummies, spanning three different eras. I have several weird fiction tales, Lovecraftian and Chambersian, appearing in various upcoming anthologies, and a list of calls I really hope to submit to. My most recent novel-length work is titled White Death, set during a real historical blizzard in 1888 out in the frontier territory… only, for my poor intrepid homesteaders of Far Enough, Montana, the storm brings something even deadlier than ice and wind. I find the era interesting because, although they’re centuries apart, the pioneer life and early Anglo-Saxon life weren’t all that different. But, wow, did I ever learn way more about frostbite and hypothermia than I ever wanted to know! Brr!
