Furnace

"I usually think what I’m writing is going to be very short, under 5000 words. Then, in the process of writing the story, it starts to grow. Some of it is that as I write, I’m editing, I’m adding stuff. By the time I’m done, my average length is somewhere around 10,000 words, 40-ish pages. At a shorter length, I’m much more of a hit-and-miss writer. The great difficulty in writing short short stories is that you don’t want them to turn into simple trap stories, where the narrator walks into the equivalent of a Venus flytrap and is just eaten. You want them to be effective and weird and strange, and I find that a great challenge at the very, very short length. At greater lengths, the characters can develop and breathe: so even if they walk into the Venus flytrap at the end, it matters to you as the reader, because you’ve gotten to know who they are. Livia Llewellyn is a secret treasure of the horror writing community. She’s written two short story collections, Engines of Desire and Furnace. Livia’s stories are beautifully written: she writes, more often than not, in a kind of Baroque prose. They are horrific. They are deeply, explicitly sexual. In some cases, they will go back over very familiar territory – for example, she writes a story in Furnace in which each of Dracula’s three wives gets a monologue to talk about herself and her relationship with Dracula (not in a simple ‘He was my boyfriend’ way, in a more complicated way). There is a long, brilliant story in Furnace called “The Last Clean, Bright Summer,” which is written like a period piece about an American family going to a beach. The prose is much more mundane, much more pared down, and yet the family encounters something that is so bizarre and so sublime and so bonkers… It uses all its prosaic qualities to its advantage, so that when you see this incredible thing at the end of the story, you’re completely bowled over by it. You’re caught off guard. I realise that I’m speaking in frustratingly vague generalizations, but it’s such an amazing story. Livia is one of those writers, like Nadia Bulkin, who has written more stories than she has collected and published as books. I wish more people were familiar with both their works, because they’re just astonishing talents. I was so caught up in the story that I did not laugh. If I had laughed, it would be in a kind of ‘Oh, my god …’ way – the laugh of gobsmacked admiration. The expected ending for horror, I guess, is, ‘Oh, it was so terrible, I went insane. Now I’m writing in my insane asylum’ – or whatever. The writer Kate Wilhelm said that when you write a story, there is the expected ending – and she said you should probably try to avoid that – but then there’s the opposite of the expected ending, and that can be expected too. She said that what you want to try to do is find the third way: not what is expected, and not its antithesis, but some other path forward."