[INTERVIEW] EDWIN CALLIHAN'S 'STRANGE SPELLS' TRAFFICS IN RURAL OCCULTISM • DIS/MEMBER

Read Time:11 Minute, 42 Second

Appalachia is a weird place. I see and hear things and just roll with it.

A man returns home to find things aren’t as he left them: it’s a familiar set-up, from classics like Rambo to recent reads like Jackal and Cottonmouths. Yet what’s beneath this trope is the unease we feel when we begin to realize that actually, home was never safe to begin with. It’s possible that things haven’t changed, but become more obviously what they always were. In Edwin Callihan‘s gonzo-cosmic Strange Spells, all notions of home are smashed and rebuilt by both real-world forces and preternatural ones.

Catastrophic natural disasters are the birthright of the Hurricane Katrina generation (my generation, if you consider that teens in the 2000s were first radicalized by Bush-era malice and incompetence)–or you could call us the D.A.R.E. generation, witness to one of the worst drug crises in living memory. These very real forces are further catalyzed and complicated by Callihan‘s Mgo mythos, introducing cosmic and folk-horror twists into what could’ve been a straight-up contemporary rural noir.

Make no mistake, Strange Spells is a horrifying book, in perhaps the truest sense. We don’t call it terror, after all. Protagonist Goldie Lungfish is no con with a heart of gold, and the home he returns to is no Hollywoodized Harlan County. As meth and floods have rocked his Appalachian landscape, so a void-born menace is poised to rock the populace body and soul. Callihan‘s grimy verbiage veers between hyper-realistic detailing–dive bars and adult diapers–and spiraling accounts of cosmic patterns, occult rituals, and unearthly creatures. Arcane knowledge goes down best on the back of some drain cleaner.

Think Heavy Metal directed by Harmony Korine. Strange Spells is a page-turner on account of its powerful sense of repulsion, the true push-and-pull at the back of unheimlich. It provokes the sense of being a kid happening upon the adult bookshelf, flipping to get to the good parts (scary or sexy), knowing you should look away, that your nighttime self will regret this. “Being afraid and being horny are primal instincts, animal instincts,” writes Elizabeth Burch-Hudson in a recent edition of Black Lipstick. This twinning pursues Goldie along his descent, as he encounters lives wasted in dangerous pleasure and cults built on universal suffering.

For the majority of the United States, Appalachia is a cipher: a slate on which to write our own neuroses and assumptions:: a shibboleth bandied between aisles for political points. In horror terms, then, it’s a site for folk horror. Strange Spells encompasses all that we culturally fear about Appalachia, from prescription drug epidemics to treacherous hollers and “Cornbread Mafia” druglords to apocalyptic evangelicals… and dials it up to a thousand.

The book thumbs its nose at credulous citiots (as we say around here), while deploying a cast of heavies who are difficult to pin down and a villain (?) whose guises are as endless and impassive as the stars. Unexpected beams of light punctuating the malaise–a Beach Boys lyric, a table set with fresh orange juice and bacon–lend a Lynchian allure. Beneath it all, the prose is terse and yet burgeoning, a prison shank pricking a swollen garbage bag, the whole book a palm-sized exercise in brutality.

We talked with author Edwin Callihan about Strange Spells, his inspirations, indie publishing, and more.

Dee Holloway: Hello Edwin, and welcome to DIS/MEMBER! To start, could you give us an introduction to you and your work so far?

Edwin Callihan: So, as brief as I can make it, I’m Edwin Callihan and I live in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. I write somewhere in the realm of weird fiction in the broadest sense. Strange Spells has been brewing for a long time and it took a few years to write, actually, since I’m a bit obsessive with the particulars of my stories. I’m an avid reader of sword & sorcery, specifically the stranger tales like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Testament of Athammaus” and Lovecraft’s “Celephais,” as well as crime writers like Walter Mosley, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Harris, Joe Lansdale, etc. The old pulp tradition of bad guys being in the protagonist’s seat has always intrigued me.

Strange Spells spawned some time after reading Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion, and I was driving one of the backroads outside of town, populated with a lot of dilapidated houses and trailers and barns on the hillsides, and I thought: What if an evil sorcerer—rather than a heroic warrior—was transported to a place like my town? What would the sorcerer do? The sorcerer would probably get involved in some heinous-type shit here, right? There’s already a ton of evil shit going on around here anyways. Who would stop the sorcerer when there’s no good guys around?

DH: Do you perceive a clear line between contemporary realism and weird tales? Is there a toolkit you pull from for writing cosmic horror, and one for rural noir?

EC: No. Absolutely not. At least for me. Vagueness is what draws me to fiction in general. Questions keep readers interested and explanations are boring as fuck. I think about novels like Brian Evenson’s Last Days or John Langan’s The Fisherman; sure, some wild shit happens, but the situation is very real and perplexing. I read a book earlier this year by David Simmons called Ghosts of East Baltimore that does that same thing. Very real characters in a setting that has such identity, while throwing absolutely insane horrors in the mix and you 100% believe it while you’re reading. I appreciate shit like that. So when it comes to tools in writing, I write what I see around me and exaggerate it.

I think about Bukowski a lot and how he approached fiction. There isn’t a specific toolkit for rural noir or cosmic horror. It all kind of just converges together like a car crash and the wreckage is what you get. Most of Strange Spells’s foundation is real situations. Eastern Kentucky is hit with catastrophic floods and tornadoes every year, and those towns are never the same and nobody cares either after the news cycle does its spin. The bars, the drugs, the sickness–all that shit is almost like a microcosmic apocalypse. I’ve never seen any real occult shit happen, but I’ve heard some incoherent ramblings of meth users that others may interpret as prophetic and prolific. I’ve heard stories from dealers claiming to walk up walls on really good batches. Appalachia is a weird place. I see and hear things and just roll with it.

DH: There are a few heavy-metal Easter eggs scattered throughout Strange Spells. What have you been listening to lately? What influence has extreme music had on your writing?

EC: Haha, this is a tough question. Lately, Steely Dan and Warren Zevon. A lot of Tangerine Dream and Berlin School-era shit. I’m all over the place with music. I’m somewhat of an audiophile. I still have my first CD I ever bought, which was the Batman Forever soundtrack. But music in general has played a role in most of my life. I come from a family of musicians. My Papaw played the bluegrass radio station every Sunday, all day. My dad showed me the rock’n’roll basics. I was into Pink Floyd and The Alan Parson Project at an early age. I’d bring friends over to show them how to use the record player and spin a random vinyl from the bin.

So, from that I was always looking for new music. But I’m a rocker, dude! My cousin and I got into punk and metal and hip-hop, mostly through skateboarding and watching skate videos. It opened up a whole new world to us. We were constantly finding old DVDs and CDs to trade in at FYE in the mall and get new CDs every week. I also played in several bands in my youth, long before I ever considered writing fiction. Anyways, films about music or music playing a large role in the plot were influential. Soundtracks were always important to me. Music being integrated into the narrative like Detroit Rock City, Wayne’s World ,and of course, Heavy Metal always resonated with me. Fuck, even Joe Dirt! So, when I’m writing, I’m always thinking of a song or an album that sets the mood for a scene or chapter. Strange Spells was very inspired by Heavy Metal and how metal, especially from the 80s, can create atmosphere, character, setting, etc. Every single thing that I write has a song that it could be connected to, whether it’s obvious or not.

DH: What place do you perceive horror media occupying in an era of steadily-intensifying horrific reality?

EC: Same as it ever was. However, I don’t think books and film are going to be the dominating medium in the future. They will always be around, but more of a niche than it already is. Something more underground. The future of horror media will be this constant stream of consumption that subjects us to a shared experience, blurring real and unreal, and keeping us perpetually anxious. Ai will probably take the wheel of most mainstream media, I suppose, greatly reducing a person’s role aside from supplying a prompt, but maybe that will be obsolete eventually, too. Whatever happens, the dynamics of media will drastically change with the future generations. Sometimes I think people are going to lose interest in the concept of a traditional narrative one day. A protagonist/antagonist relationship will be a dated literary device and horror will be a purely voyeuristic appreciation of cruelty, tragedy, and death. Just some Clockwork Orange shit, really. Horror will fit right in wherever our doomed future will take it.

DH: Name a favorite horror movie or book–or an anti-favorite, a piece of media you feel you’re writing toward in an attempt to address, rebut, or correct.

EC: Shittttt. That’s another tough question. I have a million favorites and million “anti-favorites” as you put it. It’s a great question though, especially how you worded it as “an attempt to address, rebut, or correct.” Everything I write is an amalgamation of all my favorite books and movies. When it comes to books Laird Barron’s The Croning is hands down the greatest horror novel ever written. Robert Bloch’s Psycho, W.H. Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” Poe’s “Hop-Frog,” Ligotti’s “The Lost Art of Twilight,” Kafka’s “ln The Penal Colony”… I could go on and on, but that would be boring as hell. Basically, I’m always trying to make my own version of what inspires me.

Strange Spells has a lot of Fulci’s Conquest and Gates of Hell trilogy in there. Fuck, it even has Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers’ villain, Ivan Ooze, in there somewhere. I can watch films like In A Lonely Place and watch Dumb and Dumber right after that. So I’m not some snobby prick. I love a good flick and a good read; if it makes me laugh, cry, or gets me pumped, I say that’s a win. I read a good amount of my contemporarys’ work and I’m like damn, I gotta amp up my shit. There’s a fun kind of competitiveness in that. I read Matthew Mitchell, or Sam Richard, or Justin Lutz, I’m like fuck, I gotta do better than what I’m doing. It keeps me sharp.

DH: In addition to writing, you’re also behind Castaigne Publishing, which publishes a variety of extreme horror and weird fiction. What sets Castaigne apart from other horror-centric presses? How do you feel that Castaigne is in conversation with other small presses or purveyors of the fringe?

EC: Castaigne has no restraints, really. We have a shared vision of raw, unfiltered fiction. You can call it transgressive, weird, horror—or whatever you want. But it kind of embodies this lawlessness as its ethos. We don’t really like rules, so we just put out what we want. We put our friends’ work, our own work, or sometimes just some random person that submitted shit. We employ nepotism and are equally against it. We are diverse, but that is not any part of our mission. We are anti-authoritarian, and it’s not something we have to shout about. If the work is good, it’s good. That’s our philosophy. Simple as that. Castaigne is among many other presses that have a unique vision, too. Filthy Loot, Weirdpunk Books, From Beyond Press, etc. The cool thing about this indie press shit is that every one has their own identit. For the most part, nobody is biting anybody’s shit.

DH: What’s on deck in your writing and publishing life?

EC: I’m taking a personal break from publishing at the moment to focus on some projects in the works. I’m finishing up a non-fiction book about cosmic horror and realism in cinema and fiction. I’m also in the final phases of completing a novel with the great Michael Tichy (The Winnowing Draw) set in the Mgo mythos with lots of dope fiends, hitmen, and occultations. Finally, Evan Dean Shelton and I are formulating a pilot script for a tv series in hopes to sell out and cash a fat check. We will see.

Many thanks to Edwin for speaking with DIS/MEMBER! Find his books direct from Castaigne and Filthy Loot (or try recommending a title purchase to your local library, a very cool-kid thing to do). Happy reading, ghouls!