Horror Q&A: Alistair Rey (Something Wicked This Way Rides)
“I wanted to capture the existential horror of war and place it within the context of the supernatural.”
The short story collection Something Wicked This Way Rides from Dark Owl Publishing is an anthology featuring some two-dozen authors exploring the Old West with a twisted view, showcasing the 1800s through stories featuring the wicked, supernatural, demonic and just plain weird.
Alistair Rey contributed the story "What Hath God Wrought?" In this interview, the author talks about legend vs. history, mixing horror with the Old West, and the challenges of historical fiction.
More interviews in this series:
Q1 What’s your favorite thing about mashing up horror with the Old West?
The Old West is often imagined as a brutal place filled with violence and lawlessness. While these impressions have been romanticized in both literary fiction and dime novels, in reading some history books on the period I became aware of how accurate many of these perceptions were.
The Old West doesn’t need horror elements to make it horrific. It is filled with stories of murder, survival, and genocide. This historical backdrop provides a great deal of raw material for stories in the horror genre.
Q2 Did you approach your story as a western story with elements of horror—or vice versa?
In many ways, the two were intertwined. In focusing on the Mexican War of the 1840s, I wanted to capture the existential horror of war and place it within the context of the supernatural.
I did use the structure of the epistolary novel popular during the nineteenth century to tell the story, hoping to give it a more accurate feel. This structure also allowed me to capture the voice of a narrator who is torn between an idealized vision of the West and the carnage and slaughter experienced during the American conquest of the West.
Q3 What inspired this particular story of yours?
At the time, I was reading a number of history books on French colonization in Algeria and nineteenth-century American expansion. The two phenomena occurred at approximately the same time, and despite their different locations it stuck me how similar they were in practice and ideology.
France perpetrated violence on North African Arabs and sought to install European colonists on the shores of Africa. The US had comparable plans that would pave the way for ideas of empire and manifest destiny in the West.
It seemed to me that addressing these two historical events in fiction could allow me to treat subjects of conquest and imperialism, all while adding a supernatural reckoning that stabbed at the heart of the atrocities and bloodshed upon which modern empires were built. The title—“What Hath God Wrought”—was taken from the first telegraph sent by Samuel Morse to inaugurate the telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore in 1844.
The phrase had a very cryptic and prescient quality, seeming to foreshadow the advent of an American empire across the western and southern Spanish territories.
Q4 How does your story in this anthology compare/contrast with your usual fiction?
I have typically shied away from explicit historical fiction. I like to incorporate elements of history, but rarely do I place stories in an actual historical setting. There are too many things that can go wrong.
You need to ensure you have a good understanding of what life was like at the time, the argot and colloquialisms used, and even try to access the consciousness of people in a given time period. This is no easy task. It requires authors to commit to a great deal of research and abandon their modern sensibilities.
Q5 What do you want to tell Monster Complex readers about your latest or upcoming work?
I tend to write and publish short stories. They accommodate my peripatetic lifestyle.
That said, a novel-length work is not out of the question in the near future.
FIND THE AUTHOR ONLINE
ABOUT THE BOOK
Something Wicked This Way Rides
(Dark Owl Publishing)
An anthology of weird westerns and genre fiction in the Wild West
Click here for the Goodreads page!
This book is appropriate for teenagers.
The anthology Something Wicked This Way Rides explores the Old West with a skewed view, showcasing the weird western genre through stories that explore the peculiar and fantastic, the wicked that was and could have been. Experience spiritual nightmares, mythical monsters, cosmic outlaws, discerning gods, and science run amok. Even the North Pole Security Division isn't immune to the supernatural strangeness that stalks the late 1800s. In the tradition of pulp and western stories of a bygone era, these are thirty tales to intrigue, amaze, and perhaps downright spook readers out of their boots.
Includes stories from:
Marilyn "Mattie" Brahen
Kenneth Bykerk
Dwain Campbell
Gregg Chamberlain
Vonnie Winslow Crist
Stuart Croskell
Lawrence Dagstine
J.B. Dane
John A. Frochio
Steve Gladwin
L.L. Hill
Adrian Ludens
Stefan Markos
Gregory L. Norris
Q Parker
Peter Prellwitz
Alistair Rey
Darrell Schweitzer
Bradley H. Sinor
Charles Wilkinson
Martin Zeigler
MORE HORROR AUTHORS
Horror Author Q&A: John S. McFarland (The Dark Walk Forward)
Horror Author Q&A: Laura J Campbell (No Lesser Angels, No Greater Devils)
