We have an ongoing series at Black Gate on the topic of “Beauty in Weird Fiction.” Usually we corner an author and query them about their muses and ways to make ‘repulsive’ things ‘attractive to readers.’ Previous subjects have included Darrell Schweitzer, Anna Smith Spark, Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney, and John C Hocking. (See the full list at the end of this post).

I’m excited to corner Joe Bonadonna this round. When his Dorgo character grilled/interviewed me in 2017, the questioning began with:

Who the Hell are You?

JB: Who in the Nine Circles of Hell do you think I am? Quasimodo? Doctor Frankenstein? You mean you don’t know who I am? Have you never heard of me? Why, I’m famous the world over! Joe Bonadonna, I am. (I could never settle on a pen name, so I stuck with the name I was given at birth.)

[Aside by SE: To clarify, he often writes about Quasimodo and Dr. Frankenstein for Janet E. Morris’s Heroes in Hell series (Perseid Press). Here’s Joe Bonadona’s official Bio.]

Joe Bonadonna is the author of the heroic fantasies Mad Shadows — Book One: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser (winner of the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy); Mad Shadows — Book Two: The Order of the Serpent; the space opera Three Against The Stars and its sequel, the sword and planet space adventure, The MechMen of Canis-9; and the sword & sorcery pirate novel, Waters of Darkness, in collaboration with David C. Smith. With co-writer Erika M Szabo, he penned Three Ghosts in a Black Pumpkin (winner of the 2017 Golden Books Judge’s Choice Award for Children’s Fantasy), and its sequel, The Power of the Sapphire Wand. He also has stories appearing in: Azieran: Artifacts and Relics; Savage Realms Monthly (March 2022); Griots 2: Sisters of the Spear; Heroika I: Dragon Eaters; Poets in Hell; Doctors in Hell; Pirates in Hell; Lovers in Hell; Mystics in Hell; and the forthcoming Liars in Hell; Sinbad: The New Voyages, Volume 4; Unbreakable Ink; the shared-world anthology Sha’Daa: Toys, in collaboration with author Shebat Legion; and with David C. Smith for the shared-universe anthology, The Lost Empire of Sol.

In addition to his fiction, Joe has written numerous articles, book reviews and author interviews for us, Black Gate online magazine. Visit his Amazon Author’s page or his Facebook author’s page, called Bonadonna’s Bookshelf.

Dorgo… it is Time to Grill You! Or Am I Grilling Joe? Tough to Tell, Since Dorgo Feels like a Natural Extension of You.  Supernatural, Dark Fantasy Rarely Feels so Fun as it Does in the MAD SHADOW Series. Tell us Your Approach to Making Dark-Worlds Fun to Explore.

Dorgo is on holiday, so you’re grilling me. I hope I turn out well-done. Dorgo is indeed an extension of myself; my better half, you can say. His voice is my voice, his sarcasm and sense of humor are my own. I’ve read very little fantasy written in first-person, so I took a page from Raymond Chandler’s notebook and wrote all but one Dorgo tale in first-person. First-person allows me to make his stories more personal and, hopefully, more universal. Speaking to your question about how the “Supernatural, dark fantasy rarely feels so fun as it does in the Mad Shadow Series,” I must first thank you for that. I approach my writing the same way I approached writing music, which is much the same as Bruce Springsteen often composes: I toss everything I’ve ever heard, seen, read and experienced into a blender, crank it up and create what I hope is my own unique concoction.

I try to make it fun because my favorite books, those that inspired me or just simply entertained me, were and still are fun to read. From The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings, from de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series, I had fun reading those. And it was so much fun to discover Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle” and all his other Conan stories, not to mention King Kull and Solomon Kane. Stories and storytelling should be fun to read and write. If not, they’re like dry textbooks or novels where the authors spend more time preaching their own personal gospel than they do trying to entertain. As the Boss sang, “We learned more in a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school.” And that’s the truth. Fiction can be educational, in its own way. You learn by reading.

I just let my imagination run free and try to rein it in when something I really like strikes me as usable. My work, no matter what the genre, is a merging of everything I know and like. It’s no secret that Dorgo was inspired by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, as well as by Fritz Leiber’s work; comedy often played a huge role in Leiber’s stories, especially in his wonderful Lean Times in Lankhmar. In fact, if not for that story and a few others, I might not have written my two most light-hearted tales of Dorgo the Dowser, from the first volume: The Secret of Andaro’s Daughter and The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum, which can be read for free, right here. Although there is plenty of darkness, murder, magic, and weirdness to go around, the comedic situations and what laughs come from the characters, their dialogue and their antics, make these two of my favorite stories. I also give credit to David C. Smith and Ted (T.C.) Rypel for being the first of my “mentors” and for helping me whip that first volume into shape.

[SE aside; I’ve reviewed all the Dorgo Books (Book 3 most recently on Black Gate).  I described the first two as Mystery for the Horror Fan; Cozy Gothic Noir... they’re a great mashup of Horror/Fantasy/Film Noir. In Television terms, this would appeal to fans of the X-files, Supernatural, or Grim. Being a collection of tales, each serves as an episode. Expect: necromancy, mythological creatures — especially the hybrid horned creatures (satyrs, minotaur, etc.), pitted against our protagonist who is motivated to set things right (and make enough money to eat… and perhaps a sustained glance at a beautiful woman).]

You Have a Knack for Making Weird/Dark Fantasy Accessible to Adults and YA via Collaborating with Authors (i.e., David C. Smith and Erika M. Szabo). Fill us In on How You Write for Such a Broad Audience with Other Authors.

There really isn’t much to “fill in.” Most writers know that adult and YA audiences can be drawn into any sort of genre, if the characters are engaging and the storyline exciting. JK Rowling succeeded in that with her Harry Potter series, and certainly Tolkien, as well as Frank L. Baum and Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, to name a handful of authors. They wrote for everyone. Take Waters of Darkness, for instance. David Smith and I knew what we wanted to write, knew what to do and how to write it, and without consciously thinking about it, we just wrote what we wanted to write. Personally, I aim for a wide audience. I don’t write sex scenes for my own work, although I have done some “ghost writing” in that area for a few friends. I don’t go for excessive “foul language,” either. Too often that can destroy the suspension of disbelief.

As for the two children’s books, I had an idea for the first one, but no idea how to go about it. Erika M. Szabo, who has written a boatload of children’s books, took me by the hand and guided me along the way. We chose universal themes and characters we felt our readers could relate to. We used humor and a sense of adventure, too. We added subtle lessons for kids, as well. She reined me in on the action scenes, keeping me from going my usual, bloody and body-strewn way. She told me what we could say and what we could not say in a children’s book. We had a lot of fun writing the first book, and I learned a lot: keep it G-rated or PG-13, at most. We had so much fun, in fact, that Erika came up with the idea for the second book, and we ran with it. The key, for me was creating a world of magic and wonder, and letting our imaginations run free. As with David, Erika and I concentrated on telling good, solid and fun stories, doing our best to write something that was as unique as we could make it.

There really isn’t much more I can tell you. We just wrote the stories we wanted to tell, wrote them the way we wanted to tell them, and kept our audiences in mind at all times. We just wrote or overwrote, in many cases, and then started whittling away during the editing process. I usually write much more than I use: better to write something that is not needed, than it is to need something that hasn’t been written. I don’t believe in padding a story with unnecessary world-building and description. Describe what’s important to the plot: what can be done in three pages can often be done better in three paragraphs. In this, learning how to write screenplays is a most valuable tool.

That’s all I got. All I can tell you.

Going with the Theme that You Make Dark Fantasy Accessible, Let’s Talk About Having Fun in Hell!

You’ve been writing for the Heroes in Hell series for a long time (that’s the satirical, dark fantasy that explores the juxtaposition of deceased people across time)!  Your Doctors in Hell short story “Hell on a Technicality” is hilarious. A death panel (including Aristotle and da Vinci) convenes to discuss the nature of the soul and body in the preposterous case of Doctor Victor Frankenstein, who has had his brain switched with his creature Adam’s. So now Victor’s mind finds itself in his creation’s body… and vice versa. How else better to discuss the nature of a soul in hell then to work out this mess. The death panel erupts into an outrageous furor.  You have recurring characters of Victor Frankenstein and his creature-creation, as well as Quasimodo. Tell us why you teamed up with these hellions and your approach.

Thank you. I tried to make that story both hilarious and meaningful. The death panel evolved out of the dark-comedy “Undertaker’s Holiday” (originally titled “The Undertaker Takes a Holiday,” a play on the play and film, Death Takes a Holiday) Shebat Legion and I co-wrote for Poets in Hell, which also featured my first story for the series, “We the Furious,” or WTF, as Janet Morris’ husband Christopher called it. Shebat and I came up with the idea for a fandom convention in Hell — InfernoCon. Of course, as in all cons, there’s a panel discussion. Now, knowing that Doctors in Hell was the next volume in the series, Shebat and I created a panel of doctors, as a sort of prelude. But Janet wanted us to use poets, so I changed the characters. I later recreated the panel of doctors for “Hell on a Technicality” and thought it would be a riot to have their egos get in the way of what they were trying to decide: if Adam Frankenstein and Galatea, two damned souls who were not sired by men and born of women did, indeed, have souls.

It was Janet who, knowing my love of movies, suggested I write about Victor and Adam. She also suggested I reboot the Hellywood film industry first created by Bill Kerby back in the original series, in the 1980s. (Kerby wrote the screenplay for Bette Midler’s The Rose.) So hence, my storyline for “The Pirates of Penance,” featured in Pirates in Hell. Anyway, while doing research, I discovered that there was a Doctor Johann Konrad Dippel, an alchemist and a vivisectionist obsessed with reanimating the dead. He was born in Castle Frankenstein and was practicing medicine in Geneva, Switzerland when Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Doctor John Polidori were travelling through there. Aha! No doubt Dippel inspired the creation of Victor Frankenstein. So, my using a fictional character, which is allowed, was justified by there being a real-life counterpart.

While I pretty much stick with Mary Shelley’s novel, I use Colin Clive and Boris Karloff as “role models” for Victor and his Creature. Deciding that Doctor Frankenstein needed a hunchback assistant in keeping with the films, I looked no further than Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Doing research on Hugo’s novel, I discovered that around 2002 or so, workmen doing some remodeling at Notre Dame Cathedral knocked down a wall and discovered a small room which contained the bones of a hunchback. I also read that there was, indeed, a similar bell ringer of Notre Dame during Hugo’s lifetime, and he possibly knew the hunchback. While I use Quasimodo and his King of Fools persona for comic relief, I also endeavor to infuse him with pathos and humanity. I use Charles Laughton as my role model. Thus, I get to write about two beloved films, Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My approach is to have them interact more as a father and son, with Victor playing the eccentric, often hysterical and somewhat mad father-figure, and Quasimodo as the hapless, lovesick, innocent and childlike son. I think the two characters make a wonderful team, and I have fun with both of them.

How do You Define Beauty in Art/Fiction that Appears to be Repulsive (Weird/ Horror)?

Jeez, that’s a tough question to answer, Seth. I’m not even sure I can put my thoughts on this into words. I guess the best way is for me to go back to my childhood. Horror films never frightened me. I was always fascinated by and sympathetic to the “monsters.” I understood them. I wanted to be one of them. I always found a beauty and poetry in the best of the old Universal Classic Monsters, in the “grotesqueries” of characters and creatures like Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc.

In spite of having grown up and hung out with hundreds of kids, I always felt somewhat of an outsider, never quite fitting in. I never even once considered myself cute or handsome; I saw myself as being part of the gallery of the grotesque. In fact, back in 1970, when I was a young hippy and got my first apartment, my landlady’s kids called me Halloween Mask Man, a sobriquet I embraced. I even wrote a poem and later put it to music: Halloween Man. I was proud of that title. The “creatures” in, let’s say, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, have a beauty all their own: yes, they are weird and repulsive, but that does not turn me off. I find it all intriguing and, in its own way, quite attractive. Take the metamorph from Alien. So ugly, it’s beautiful in its shape and design. An intriguing lifeform.

Like many kids, I loved and still love dinosaurs, dragons, aliens and mythological creatures. I like centaurs and minotaurs, mutants and monsters of all sorts, for example, and I see the beauty in even the evil ones. Even Medusa I find beautiful in her ugliness; knowing her backstory, her history, generates sympathy in me. She was cursed by Athena, and her transformation into a gorgon is what made her evil. I feature Medusa in a new story I’m working on for Janet Morris’ Heroes in Hell™ series, and I portray her as aristocratic, heroic, noble and honorable, and of great inner, soulful beauty. She is not the monster history has made her out to be: that’s all a lie.

Understanding the repulsive is to see their beauty, to see beyond their physical appearance and even come to like them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I consider repulsive, with no redeeming qualities such as beauty, is what we have in the real world: racists and rapists, haters and murderers, people who lack compassion and tolerance and understanding, people who lack kindness, courtesy and manners. People who have no sense of honor and loyalty. People filled with hate for what they don’t understand and thus fear — fear of “the other” I guess all this is the best answer I can give you.

Do You Find Beauty in Your Weird Fiction? Dissect an Example.

Well, I really don’t consider myself a writer of “weird fiction.” Certainly, there are plenty of elements of the weird, of horror, in my stories. It’s difficult to cite and dissect any one example. My human characters are often the weird ones, the ugly ones. Let’s go with my Dorgo the Dowser tale from Mad Shadows-Book 2: The Order of the Serpent — “The Girl Who Loved Ghouls.” This features a witch, what I call one of the Wikku, who lost a son when he was a little boy, and now she’s become the surrogate mother and protector of a small tribe of ghouls, who are an endangered species.

The ghouls are friendly and noble; they pose no threat to the living. Now, there’s a nobleman with an Oedipus complex who, for his own political agenda, is framing the ghouls for a series of murders he is responsible for. He and his men are racist, violent men who find torture and murder to be their daily bread. He’s allied himself with a lost clan of semi-human cannibals who escaped to Dorgo’s world when their own world was in its final death throes. They are an ugly and repulsive race that is having breeding problems, and are thus dying out. This nobleman has promised them “fresh blood” in order for them to propagate and keep their race alive: namely, by giving Dorgo to their queen, with whom she will mate and produce a new breed of her species.

But these creatures are in no way as ugly or repulsive as the nobleman and his four murderous, racist henchmen. As I often write about, human beings are the monsters — i.e. Doctor Frankenstein is the real monster, not the innocent Creature he created, then ignored and abandoned, thus destroying its childlike innocence, which turned it into a thing bent on revenge.

The beauty in my story comes from the ghouls, from their kind hearts and pure souls: they are an intelligent species who just happen to feed on the dead, and not a pack of mindless, savage beasts. They are, to put a slight religious spin on it, God’s innocent creatures. They are the real heroes of this tale.

What Scares You? Is it Beautiful?

No, it’s not beautiful. What scares me is people. Books and films have never scared me; they are fiction and therefore not real. Reality scares me. War and violence. Look at what’s going on in our country today and across the globe. Ugliness, blind hatred, intolerance, misogyny, racism, violence. People can be seen as beautiful in their physical appearance. But far too often, it’s all superficial: beauty may be skin-deep, but ugliness goes to the bone. Their hearts and souls are ugly and repulsive. Kindness and compassion are fading from our world. Maybe it’s just my inborn cynicism talking, but that’s how I feel and what I fear. I’ll say no more on this lest I climb upon my soapbox and bore you and your readers to death.

Does any Formal Training or Experience Motivate your Writing?

No formal training, really, other than writing classes and such. I mean, I was “trained” to be a printer and a musician by trade and avocation. But my imagination and my experiences are what motivate me. Experiences of all kinds: my family and our history, the people I meet, the relationships forged or broken, friendships and love affairs, the movies I watch, the books I read, the music I listen to. All these provide motivation as well as inspiration. I often take movie titles or song titles and write my own stories to fit. I will even do a wordplay on a title. Take the Heroes in Hell™ series, for instance. In Pirates in Hell, I have a story called “The Pirates of Penance.” For Lovers in Hell, I wrote a macabre love story filled with gallows humor that I called “Withering Blights.”

For Liars in Hell, I titled my story “Hell’s Bells.” I also played with a variation on “dragon’s hoard” for Janet Morris’ Heroika: Dragon Eaters — and titled my story “The Dragon’s Horde.” For the final story in my Mad Shadows – Book 1: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, I “gakked” (stole) the title from an old Robert Mitchum western called Blood on the Moon, because I thought it fitting for my werewolf tale and did not want to destroy the mystery by having “werewolf” or “wolfman” in the title. (Well, I guess I just destroyed the mystery!) Life experiences are always part of my stories, whether obvious to the people who know me, or subtly portrayed; there’s a lot in the subtext. One can find inspiration and motivation in every facet of life, which I know is just preaching to the choir of writers and other artists.

Discuss Cinematic Writing! What are Some of Your All-Time Favorite Films and TV Shows?

Ah, another tough one to answer, simply by virtue of the question having many answers and opening up many windows. I always try to avoid picking favorites, the way parents avoid naming a favorite son or daughter. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip the “favorites” part of this interview; God only knows, I’m going to be long-winded. There a handful of films from the 1930s which have inspired me: Frankenstein (1931), King Kong (1933), Beau Geste, and Gunga Din. Later films, such as The Vikings and The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad (both from 1950), Spartacus and Jason and The Argonauts (both from 1960 or so) influenced me, of course. And there is something of Ray Harryhausen in just about all my stories.

I would like to mention Alfred Hitchcock, however. Having read a biography on the master, I was struck by his discussion and explanation of the “McGuffin.” This is the device around which most of his films revolve. It doesn’t matter whether the McGuffin is microfilm, wine bottles filled with uranium or some other artifact, relic or whatever. What matters are the characters, what each of them will do, to what lengths they will go to in order to get their hands on the McGuffin: sell it, keep it, destroy it, use it in some fashion. It’s the study of these characters and their actions. This is also how Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon works: the falcon isn’t really important, in and of itself, the story is all about the characters who are itching to get their hands on it. Stories are about characters, about people. You can have the most ingenious plot ever devised by mortal man or woman, but if you don’t have solid, realistic and engaging characters, all you have is a plot in search of a story.

You have written articles for Black Gate wherein you describes how cinema informs your style.  Prior/in-addition-to writing, you were a rock guitarist, songwriter, and even a board member of the Chicago Screenwriter’s Network. You compose as if you write for the camera, and your mind has been influenced by the masters.

Yes, and I’ve also written another article for Black Gate on my cinematic inspirations — Celluloid Heroes, which will pretty much give your readers the whole picture, no pun intended.

Terrible Inspirations: Can You Discuss How Writing Fiction can be Used to Explore? Heal? How Does One Approach Revisiting Tragedy in Art?

The haunting dedication to Mad Shadows I sets the stage for the themes of many of these stories: the dedication was extended to your parents and to “Mary Ellen Pettenon and the other 91 children and 3 nuns who became angles too soon in the Our Lady of Angels School Fire, December 1, 1958.” I learned soon after that you are a long time Chicagoan, who was in the same school system and if your birthday was a few months different, you would have been in the building that caught fire. In the book, we learn early on that Dorgo is an orphan, and many of the plots/character-motivations are based on family ties.

Yes, my date of birth “saved me.” I was down the street in one of the two houses that were used for kindergarten and three first-grade classes. However, if the dice had landed a different way, I might have been in the fourth first-grade class that was on the main floor of the building that burned down. I was lucky, and I was blessed. As far as Dorgo being an orphan is concerned . . . I did not know any orphans when I was a kid. Sure, I knew kids who had no mother or father, but I did not encounter any orphans until I was out of high school. Charles Dickens was the inspiration for my making Dorgo an orphan. It just felt right. I think being in an orphanage and then running away at the age of fifteen to become a mercenary is what widened his worldview, what made him an enlightened soul without one racist or prejudiced, bigoted bone in his body. He is the embodiment of what I strive to be, the angel of my better nature, so to speak.

[Aside by SE: Joe’s first story to appear in Heroes in Hell (“We The Furious,” in Poets in Hell), he placed the kid who started the OLA school fire in Hell, although he did not refer to him by name, just his actions].

As for how writing fiction can be used to explore and heal, and revisiting tragedy in art goes . . . I offer no advice, can’t tell anyone how to approach it. You just do it: you write what you know, what you feel, what you’ve experienced and how it affected you. There is a scene where one of Dorgo’s companions holds the hand of a dying man. After the man passes, the companion, a young, good-natured youth, looks at Dorgo and says that he was holding his mother’s hand when she died, and that’s how I witnessed my own mother’s death. Writing that helped me move pass that dark moment in 2001. In my The Man Who Loved Puppets, Dorgo has to save a group of children whose souls had been stolen. They were still alive, but just barely, and had this witch’s plot to resurrect her dead sister come to fruition, those children would have died.

To make it more personal, one of the kids, a little girl, was the daughter of one of Dorgo’s friends and former lovers. The little girl is based on Dave Smith’s daughter Lily, who was about four or five at the time: I used her mannerisms and the way she talked, her personality, to infuse my character with life. All that evolved out of that tragedy of my childhood, when I was six years old and learned that not just old people die, kids can die, too. The loss of an ailing father in my Blood on the Moon echoes the loss of my own father, who died of cancer in 1999. Just writing those scenes was a catharsis, a way for me to come to terms, after so many years, with the deaths of my parents, both of whom always believed in my writing gift and also supported and encouraged me in anything and everything I wanted to try, to do. I was extremely blessed with the parents given to me. I could not have picked two better parents, two decent and loving parents, had I been given the choice.

I explored my beliefs, my Catholic upbringing, my thoughts and ideas about God, faith and religion in Mad Shadows – Book 3: The Heroes of Echo Gate. Faith in God, and the absence or loss of that faith are at the heart of the novel. We learn all about Dorgo’s faith and how he views Life and a Higher Being. While he remains steadfast in his beliefs, he does have questions and doubts. In one scene, set the night before the first battle begins, he has a long discussion with a chaplain who had once been a mercenary. I feel this scene is one of the more insightful and heartfelt scenes in the story, as it conveys my own personal belief system, my own doubts, my own questions and theories. As I always tell people: I do not write for the head; I have no great knowledge or wisdom to impart, and nothing I can say has not already been said by others more skilled and wiser than I. I am not that ego-driven or presumptuous to think I can change anyone’s minds. I write not to make you think, I write to make you feel. I write for the heart.

Any Current or Future Endeavors We Can Pitch?

Well, in a story I’m working on for a future Heroes in Hell™ volume, I borrowed the title from an old war movie, “From Hell to Eternity.” But having signed an NDA (a Non-Disclosure Agreement), that’s all I can say about it. I also have a new Dorgo story in the works that I call “Rainbow Demon,” which was inspired by a song by Uriah Heep. I would very much like to do a fourth and final volume of Dorgo the Dowser tales: Mad Shadows – Book 4: The Return of Dorgo the Dowser, which follows closely on the heels of book three, The Heroes of Echo Gate, and Dorgo’s return home after the battle which is a huge part of that book.

I think a “quartet” of novels is enough: I don’t want to lose the magic of Dorgo’s stories; I don’t want him or his adventures to grow stale and repetitious, which happens with so many series. As you know, the first volume consisted of six separate adventures linked together by Dorgo and some recurring characters. Volume two is more of a novel — three novellas tied together by theme and certain plot elements that all come together in the last story. Book three is a three-part novel. If I do a fourth volume, I would return to the format of the first: six or seven separate adventures, ending where I started.

I’d also like to do a sequel to David C. Smith’s and my Waters of Darkness, and we have discussed it. Another dark, old-school, action-packed but character-driven Sword and Sorcery tale. However, we haven’t been able to come up with a good storyline, and Dave is busy with other projects, and I won’t do it alone. I have a prologue of sorts written for a second sequel to the two children’s Heroic Fantasies I co-authored with Erika M. Szabo, but again — no storyline that pleases us both has emerged.

Now, I’ve always wanted to do a Sword and Sorcery version of John Wayne’s Red River, which is about a cattle drive. I’ve got a title, “The Goblin Herd,” and it will feature a new character, Thibron the Skulker, who was first introduced in my story, “The Vampire Tree,” which was published in Savage Realms Monthly, in March 2022. I have a few characters lined up and I’m taking notes. The hard part is coming up with the incidents involved because, while inspired by Red River, I do not want to use the same plot. I have another Thibron tale in mind, set around a pair of strange jewels called “The Eyes of Bipty,” but that’s all I have, thus far. Other than that, and writing the occasional article for Black Gate, that’s about it. Real life situations, the things one must attend to, take up a lot of my time.

I hope to keep writing for Heroes in Hell™ for as long as I can. Writing for that series is very hard work, but it’s also so much fun and so rewarding. Janet Morris forces me to “up my game,” to stretch my boundaries, to break out of my box, and I think my stories for her are among the best I’ve written, not only in plot and characterization, but in prose style, as well. And the best part is, as long as we (the other writers and I) stick to the arc she gives us and follow the rules of Hell, almost anything goes. Our imaginations are free to run wild. Janet has become a major influence, and a wonderful teacher and mentor to me, and my writing has improved under her guidance.

So, that’s it, Seth. I’ve run out of words. But I do want to thank you for this wonderful opportunity to express myself. It’s been fun, a real pleasure and an honor. You rock!

You Rock, Joe! Long live Dorgo!

 

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#Weird Beauty Interviews at Black Gate

1. Darrel Schweitzer THE BEAUTY IN HORROR AND SADNESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DARRELL SCHWEITZER 2018
2. Sebastian Jones THE BEAUTY IN LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEBASTIAN JONES 2018
3. Charles Gramlich THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE REPELLENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES A. GRAMLICH  2019
4. Anna Smith Spark DISGUST AND DESIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNA SMITH SPARK  2019
5. Carol Berg ACCESSIBLE DARK FANTASY: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL BERG 2019
6. Byron Leavitt GOD, DARKNESS, & WONDER: AN INTERVIEW WITH BYRON LEAVITT 2021
7. Philip Emery THE AESTHETICS OF SWORD & SORCERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP EMERY  2021
8. C. Dean Andersson DEAN ANDERSSON TRIBUTE INTERVIEW AND TOUR GUIDE OF HEL: BLOODSONG AND FREEDOM! (2021 repost of 2014)
9. Jason Ray Carney SUBLIME, CRUEL BEAUTY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAY CARNEY (2021)
10. Stephen Leigh IMMORTAL MUSE BY STEPHEN LEIGH: REVIEW, INTERVIEW, AND PRELUDE TO A SECRET CHAPTER (2021)
11. John C. Hocking BEAUTIFUL PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING  (2022)
12. Matt Stern BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN (2022)
13. interviews prior 2018 (i.e., with John R. Fultz, Janet E. Morris, Richard Lee Byers, Aliya Whitely …and many more) are on S.E. Lindberg’s website

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S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He is also the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group and an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed six entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies  He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone, Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogue In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades, DMR’s Terra Incognita, and (soon) the 9th issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull.