Conduced by John Kenny, September 2024
Carly Holmes is a writer and editor who lives on the west coast of Wales. She is the author of the novels The Scrapbook (Pathian 2014), which was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award, and Crow Face, Doll Face (Honno Welsh Women’s Press 2023). Her short story collection Figurehead (2018) was published by Tartarus Press. She has had numerous stories published in journals and anthologies, and has been selected for The Best Horror of the Year three times.
John Kenny: Before we dive into Uncertainties VII, tell us a little about yourself. Where did your love of the uncanny and supernatural come from?
Carly Holmes: I was an anxious, timid child who organised my days around obsessive rituals and magical thinking to ensure that my family would stay safe. I carried so much guilt constantly and was always worried that I’d get into trouble for something, that I’d be found out and then rejected. I think being attracted to dark fiction and the uncanny—both writing it and reading it—are quite natural steps for an anxious child to take as they progress towards adulthood. The uncanny tends to focus on the domestic world and that shift from security to insecurity when what was once safe suddenly becomes unsafe in a way that’s almost too subtle to be able to appreciate. The same goes for the supernatural. We have an understanding of the way things should be based on logic and rationality, and what we’re taught in school. A supernatural occurrence or experience turns everything on its head and pitches us into a world that is made alien. All of our familiar markers for negotiating our way through life are suddenly called into question. I spent so much of my childhood in a state of uncertainty and fear, and everything about the uncanny as a genre speaks to me.
JK: I suppose you could say that dark fiction and the uncanny helped you to negotiate those childhood fears and make some sense of them. Certainly, there’s a struggle to make sense of things in “A Suit of Darkest Blue” by Steven J. Dines, for me one of the standout stories in Uncertainties VII.
CH: When I invited Steve to contribute a story I was very excited to read what he’d come up with. And, of course, he didn’t disappoint. I think, of all the people I know who write in the horror genre, his stories are most similar in spirit and tone to my own; or certainly to the stories I want to write, those that exist in my head before I’ve committed them to paper, when they’re still perfect, pure things. That longing, that aching melancholy, the horror of grief—that’s what I’m drawn to as a reader, and what I aim to convey as a writer.
JK: I’m quite the fan of Dines’ work myself, particularly the stories I’ve read in Black Static. It’s interesting what you say about the stories as you conceive them compared to what appears on paper. Which of your own stories do you think have come closest to that perfect purity in your head?
CH: I don’t know if any of them have, really! The gulf between what I thought my stories might be before I started writing them and what they then became is vast, every time. I’m not saying I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve written, particularly the novels, but I’m not sure I’ve ever written anything that matched what I initially thought it could have been. Of my short stories, maybe “Three for a Girl”, the novelette in Figurehead, came closest. I never plan anything I write, be it short-form or long-form prose. I tend to respond to a fragment of something overheard or half seen and run with it, which means I’m not following a written guide at all and only have the vaguest idea how the narrative will progress. Recently a friend commented on social media that she kept hearing women singing in the walls of her house and after investigating she discovered a hive of wild bees. That beautiful, other-worldly image sparked the idea for a story, and it was going to be the most perfect story I’d ever written. I’m about 1,000 words in and it’s already moving into less perfect territory! I don’t know if it will ever be published but if I finish it then I hope that I will at least be proud of it.
JK: I think most artists feel the same way about the finished piece, be it fiction, art, music, whatever. Although it does feel to me that Craig Rosenberg’s Uncertainties VII story “The Good Old Days” is as near perfection as can be. I wonder how the sense of nostalgia in that story worked for you. It’s tied to a very specific place and period.
CH: “The Good Old Days” is fantastic, isn’t it! Though it’s set in suburban Australia and partially in the mid-1970s, so a place I’ve never been to and a period before I was born (just), the sense of nostalgia for childhood is pretty universal. The childhood sections of King’s IT, set in the 1950s, conjure that same atmosphere most of us who are Generation X or older will remember: bombing around on your bike with your friends, making dens, disappearing for hours without adult supervision . . . Craig handled that superbly, with a wistful nostalgia and a scattering of references to popular culture. You might not have tasted those particular sweets that Robbie and Jon had when they were kids, but you remember the joy of going to the sweet shop and getting your paper bag of pick n mix with your pocket money.
JK: That’s very true. In my case, I recognised and remember with fondness almost all the films, TV programmes, toys, etc. mentioned in the story. One thing I noticed in Uncertainties VII is the equal balance of male and female writers represented in the anthology, with one non-binary author. Was this by design when you were inviting contributions or a happy accident?
CH: Yes, it was by design. I wanted both sexes to be equally represented. I already had a list of male and female writers whose work I admire and who I knew I’d approach, and that was pretty balanced. I would have liked there to be a greater diversity of ethnic voices as well but some of the authors I emailed with the initial invitation to submit didn’t respond, which is a shame.
JK: Tell us a little more about your own work. Your latest novel was published last year by Honno Welsh Women’s Press. And you’ve had a number of short stories chosen for Year’s Best anthologies.
CH: Sadly, there’s a lot less to tell than I’d like! My first novel The Scrapbook was published ten years ago and I got frozen in the aftermath and became a Miss Havisham character who just couldn’t let it go. I hadn’t been prepared at all for the way a book you’d loved and worked so hard over would drop into the collective pool of all the books written and churned out every month, and sink like a stone after a brief fanfare, causing barely a ripple. That’s just the way of it for small indie publishers, I know that now. But I didn’t really know it then, and I couldn’t move on for a long time to try to write something novel-length again. I’d always written short stories and loved the genre so I returned to them and was lucky enough to have a collection, Figurehead, picked up by Tartarus Press. Then Crow Face, Doll Face, my second novel, was published by Honno Press last October, and I’d had years to forget how smartly the publishing world moves on after the initial post-pub promo buzz, so I’ve had to deal with that all over again! Hopefully I won’t leave it another decade before I write another novel though.
As to the short stories, I just don’t have the time or energy to write much of anything these days as my job is stressful and the workload is overwhelming, so for the last two or three years I’ve only written stories for commission—maybe two or three a year. “Dodger”, a story I wrote last year for Darkness Beckons, Flame Tree Press’s ABC of Horror series of anthologies, was selected for reprint in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthology, out at the end of this year, which is wonderful.
JK: I look forward to reading that. Datlow’s Year’s Bests are superb. Looking at all of the stories in Uncertainties VII, I think the strangest one has to be “Mama Fungus” by Sarah Read. The surreal quality of the viewpoint character’s interactions with the “men” manages to convey a real sense of uncertainty. Are you familiar with any of Read’s other work?
CH: I first came across Sarah’s work when we appeared together in Black Shuck Books’s Pareidolia anthology, back in 2019. Her excellent story “Into the Wood” really stayed with me. I picked up her collection Out of Water and absolutely loved it. There’s a strangeness to her writing—a surreal quality, as you say—that really appeals to me. And her prose is exquisite, both poetic and visceral. I have her latest collection, Root Rot, on my TBR pile!
JK: There’s an interesting experiment with time in Georgina Bruce’s “An Innocent Beast” that leaves you guessing at the end. And another favourite of mine is “Subject Matter” by Philippa Holloway, about the lengths to which an artist’s model has to go to fulfil her contract.
CH: I think both “An Innocent Beast” and “Subject Matter” are perfect distillations of the anthology’s theme: uncertainty. The reader, through that intense and intimate second-person narrative, is as out of their depth and insecure as the narrator in “Subject Matter”, trying to work out what’s going on and how things will end. Though a totally different story in theme and gear, “An Innocent Beast” deals in uncertainty just as deftly, giving the reader pieces of the story from different viewpoints and then ultimately ending where it started . . . Or does it?
JK: I wonder if working with such a wide range of writers for this anthology has in any way influenced or inspired you with your own short fiction? Are there any more stories in the pipeline?
CH: It’s always inspiring to read fantastic stories, especially ones that take you by surprise. I love how we all interpret a theme or topic differently and filter our response to it through our own experiences or perspective. Looking across the range of stories in this edition of Uncertainties they’re all so different, and all of them inspiring to me.
I don’t have any stories in the pipeline right now, but do have a deadline for a commissioned piece for an anthology next year. In the meantime, it would be lovely to start (and hopefully finish!) another novel over the next year or so. I have a vague idea for it but nothing more developed than that.
JK: If I were to notice a theme emerging in many of the stories in Uncertainties VII, it would be that of characters trying to escape their past and inevitably coming face-to-face with it. Is this something you noticed yourself or is it a common theme in tales of the uncanny and supernatural?
CH: The shadow theme I noticed when the stories started rolling in was that of nature turning on humans. The natural world not behaving as humans expect it to, and becoming unnatural . . . The wonderful “Ends Abruptly” by Tim Major is a perfect example of this, narrated by a man walking with his family through a sculpture park (which surely has to be the most human-centric outdoor pursuit ever! Manicuring nature and adding unnatural man-made structures to the beauty that is naturally present in order to “improve” it for the human experience), and it’s also there in “An Innocent Beast” by Georgina Bruce, “Mama Fungus” by Sarah Read, “The Winding of the Willows” by Steve Toase, and “The Son” by Bethany W. Pope, to name a few.
JK: The quality of the stories you’ve chosen for Uncertainties VII demonstrates a genre that is in excellent health. But do you think there are enough outlets for stories of this nature? I’m hearing of several small presses shutting down.
CH: I’m not a writer who is firmly rooted in the horror/uncanny genre; I’m more on the fringes of it, as I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally set out to write a horror story. So I don’t have as much awareness as other writers of the general state of small presses in the genre, particularly in the US. I do read things on social media which bear out what you’re saying, and I also know that the situation in Wales is pretty dire generally for short story writers as we’ve lost a number of journals due to lack of funding over the last couple of years. In the horror genre, as in every genre of writing, the number of writers who want to be published far outweighs the number of outlets available. Without supporting these outlets by taking out subscriptions to journals or buying books, the situation will only get worse.
JK: Is Uncertainties VII your first edited anthology? Is this something you’d like to do again in the future?
CH: I work for a publisher and before that I was a freelance editor, so I’ve edited a lot of books: single-authored story collections, novels, memoir, and anthologies, but Uncertainties VII is the first anthology I’ve edited in the horror/uncanny genre. It’s been a lot of fun but also very stressful, mainly because I work essentially full-time hours in my job and have very little free time to spare. I’m a neurotic perfectionist and was determined to give this book and these writers quality attention. I’m very proud of the end result and very excited to see it in print but I need a nap and a large gin now!
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