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Author: markrigney

Mark Rigney is the author of numerous plays, including Ten Red Kings and Acts of God (both from Playscripts, Inc.), as well as Bears, winner of the 2012 Panowski Playwriting Competition (during its off Broadway run, Theatre Mania called Bears “the best play of the year”). His short fiction appears in Witness, Ascent, Unlikely Story, Betwixt, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Realms Of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Black Static, among many others. “The Skates,” a comic (and ghostly) novella, is now available as an ebook from Samhain Publishing, with two sequels forthcoming, “Sleeping Bear” (Feb. 2014) and the novel Check-Out Time (autumn, 2014). In non-fiction, Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical (Gallaudet University Press) remains happily in print one decade on. Two collections of his stories are available through Amazon, Flights of Fantasy, and Reality Checks. His website is www.markrigney.net.
The Uses of Ghosts

The Uses of Ghosts

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living-with-ghostsWhile Black Gate readers may (fairly) view me as a sword-and-sorcery writer, thanks to the Tales Of Gemen the Antiques Dealer, a good many of those who have stumbled across my fiction might (fairly) think of me as a horror writer. Since I never expected to fall into that particular category, I’ve been doing a good deal of soul-searching as to the value of what I’m up to – the value, as it were, of basing so much of my tale-spinning on the supernatural instead of, for example, “real life.”

Dare I take this moment to point out that an entirely different set of readers might quite reasonably think of me as a writer of literary fiction?  Yeah, I wear that hat, too.

This odd combination of multiple caps has led me to the following conclusion: ghosts are a tool in the writer’s toolbox, as specific as more established weaponry like setting, length, voice, and theme.

Without further ado, I offer my list of why Things That Go Bump In the Night have worth. I don’t expect this to be an exhaustive list, but I trust that I have made a good start. Perhaps you, gentle reader, will be inspired to add to the till?

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Unlikely Story: BG Interviews the Editors

Unlikely Story: BG Interviews the Editors

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Closed dooers slider2It’s been nearly three years since The Journal of Unlikely Entomology made its first appearance, and while this multi-legged publication focused initially on that fertile but narrow intersection of spec fic and bugs, the magazine has since branched out, changed its name, and adopted a rolling series of varied themes (the latest being the upcoming Journal of Unlikely Cryptography, now accepting submissions).

Unlikely Story pays pro rates for fiction, a rarity these days, and manages to make the stories they present look sharper than switchblades by moonlight.  Here’s my interview with editors A.C. Wise and Bernie Mojzes.

Unlikely Story has not only shortened its name, you’ve upped the pay rate. Nobody does both those things in one short span.  Have you gone quietly mad?

A.C.: That implies we weren’t mad to begin with… I mean, we started off publishing a magazine exclusively about bugs, how sane can we be?

Bernie: Indeed.

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Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

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original.0I missed nearly all the seminal pop culture of my youth. When in eighth grade Andy H. asked me which I liked better, AC/DC or Pink Floyd, I honestly couldn’t answer the question. I was also much too tongue-tied to ask Andy if he’d ever heard of Doctor Who, which I’m quite sure he had not.

Anyway. One of the major events that I missed was Planet Of the Apes. True, Planet is from 1968, and I was only born in ’67, but even so, kids at my school through at least my sixth grade year sported Planet Of the Apes lunch boxes, thermoses, backpacks, and t-shirts. Planet Of the Apes (whatever it was) was cool.

My hipper-than-I friends informed me that Planet regularly played in re-runs on TV, and of course there was the short-lived spin-off series made specifically for the telly (1974). How was it that I had missed all this? Simple: I was building dams in the tributary streams of the Olentangy River, using whatever was handy: stone knives and bearskins, that sort of thing. I knew better than to explain.

Now that I’m older than Methuselah, or at least rapidly catching him up, I figured it’s time to see precisely what I’d missed.

And you know what?

If it weren’t for the execrable presence of Charlton Heston, it’s not half bad.

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New To View: An Interview With Betwixt‘s Joy Crelin

New To View: An Interview With Betwixt‘s Joy Crelin

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Betwixt Magazine Issue 1Fantasy and sci-fi markets come and go (as, in fact, do periodicals in general). Most don’t survive six months. Some, however, have an aura of staying power, even right out of the gate; it shows in their guidelines, in the way they present themselves to the watching, skeptical world. One such magazine is Betwixt. I recently posed a few questions to Joy Crelin, editor and publisher of Betwixt, to quiz her about her hopes for her new venture and to take her pulse on all things spec fic. Whether you’re a writer, a reader, or a magazine publisher, you’ll want to hear what she has to say.

There are a fair number of fantasy mags and ‘zines on the market. Where does Betwixt fit in the pantheon?

As Betwixt is still so new, its editorial point of view is still evolving — and honestly, I expect it will continue to evolve indefinitely. The gist of the magazine’s ethos is deliberate eclecticism. When it comes down to it, I want to publish the kinds of stories I want to read. That means fantasy, science fiction, horror, magic realism, slipstream, whateverpunk, and all the configurations and mash-ups and niches thereof. I like having the freedom to publish stories that speak to me without having to decide whether they conform well enough to someone else’s expectations of what a fantasy or science fiction story should be — or my expectations, for that matter!

At the same time, I recognize that eclectic can often read as wishy-washy, so it’s important to me that there be at least a degree of internal consistency in each issue of the magazine. Overarching themes tend to develop in most collection works I edit, whether I expect them to or not, and so far Betwixt has been no exception.

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Adventures On Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

Adventures On Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

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Heart of Summer Having panned Merlin some weeks back, it’s time to dive headlong into one of the best fantasy films of this century, and possibly one of the best, period.

Yes, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is that good. Director Guillermo del Toro, he of Hellboy fame, was clearly out to prove that given solid material, sufficient devotion, and a lack of Hollywood oversight, he could deliver a contender.

True, Pan does invite several divisive questions, such as why must contemporary filmed violence be so jarringly graphic? Del Toro loves jets of blood almost as much as that eternal child-man, Quentin Tarantino, and he indulges himself more than once along his tale’s labyrinthine path. But is it necessary?  Does the vivid bloodletting aid the narrative? Pan is a hybrid, true, a film about war and revolution, and such chronicles cannot easily avoid bloodshed. But as anyone who has ever seen Pan’s sewing and stitching scene can attest, this movie achieves prime “I can’t look!” status. It’s visceral; it hurts.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) also begs a second question, perhaps even more sinister: is it allowable to put a child (or child character) into such peril? Pan doesn’t pull its punches. Our heroine, young Ofelia (played with no affectation whatsoever by Ivana Baquero), is in mortal danger throughout this film, and unlike, say, Harry Potter or Buffy (Slayer of the Dentally Challenged Undead), there is no guarantee she will survive.

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Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

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fanlgTwo weeks back, my Black Gate post took a stab at identifying a handful of the most hair-raising, spine-tingling short fiction ever written (in Vintage Scares). The more I looked at the stories that I (and others) came up with, the more excited I became about them. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm only served to underscore a curious fact that I have not always been ready to claim: I have become both a consumer and a writer of horror fiction.

That’s not something I would ever have expected. My version of horror, my “elevator speech definition,” would for years have centered on the gross-out work of Clive Barker (Hellraiser) and the voyeuristic nastiness of the movies I saw growing up: A Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead 2, and Friday the 13th. Horror to me meant attractive but stupid teenagers getting slaughtered and it was strictly low-brow. Not worthy of serious consideration.

Never mind that I’d already read Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle and a fair amount of Poe. By the time I’d been thoroughly eddicated by college, I’d relegated horror to a very distant cultural bayou. It was, at best, the literary equivalent of junk food.

But then a funny thing happened. I bought a copy of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 14th Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. As with all of those (sadly now defunct) collections, fantasy and horror were presented back-to-back and face-to-face, bumped up against one another as inescapably close kissing cousins. Confronted by the likes of Susanna Clarke, Esther M. Friesner, Ian Rodwell & Steve Duffy, Tanith Lee, and Kelly Link, it was time to re-evaluate.

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Vintage Scares: The Most Terrifying Short Stories Ever?

Vintage Scares: The Most Terrifying Short Stories Ever?

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In my fourth grade year, my teacher, for reasons still unknown to me, decided to read F. Marion 3852814493_5637bb50a9_o Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” aloud to our class.

The story is not so well known these days, but back in the late seventies, it had gained a certain notoriety by virtue of its inclusion in Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery, an omnibus to which I have (with trepidation) returned to many times since. If Hitch was the source from which my teacher made her choice, perhaps she was gulled by the book’s subtitle, which read, “Eleven spooky stories for young people.”

Let me reiterate the salient feature of that rash, dangerous subtitle: FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

Ha!

To be sure, “Miss Emmeline Takes Off” (Walter Brooks) and “The Haunted Trailer” (Robert Arthur) are easy on the soul, but how to explain the inclusion of “The Waxwork” (A.M. Burrage) or “In a Dim Room” (Lord Dunsany)?

As for “The Upper Berth,” suffice it to say that just as my teacher reached the climactic moment, our rapt, wide-eyed class erupted into chaos. One child whimpered; another screamed. Poor Alicia literally leaped to her feet and fled the room, running for dear life for the imagined safety of any spot on earth where she could no longer hear the teacher’s voice.

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The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

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free-standing-dry-stone-archAs of Sunday, August fourth, the last installment of my Gemen trilogy is up and published right here on the Black Gate site.

It’s a curious feeling to have these three closely linked tales “on display” at last. I wrote the first entirely on a whim back in 2004, but the storyline itself had actually evolved decades before, in 1986. How Gemen got to where he is today — that is to say, fictionalized, and available for public scrutiny — is a tale that will perhaps be instructive to rising writers, and hopefully of some interest also to those readers who’ve kept pace with my hero’s travails.

Yes, Gemen is the love child of Dungeons & Dragons (possibly too much Dungeons & Dragons, although that, I hope, will be left to the eye of the beholder), but consider this: in all the literally thousands of hours of role-playing in which I immersed myself from approximately 1980 until 1989, only one idea, one small glimmer of a scenario, presented itself later as worthy of being translated to fiction. Lucky Gemen: alone among my endless sword & sorcery imaginings, he has stumbled into a literary afterlife.

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Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

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1002747_514919775228258_344973762_nA few weeks back, I had the good fortune to take in productions of The Tempest and Peter and the Starcatcher at the Utah Shakespeare Festival (Cedar City, Utah). As I drove away afterward, I could not but help thinking that plays, too, are literature, and that more than a passing handful of theater’s best, these two titles included, are outright, unabashed fantasies. Adventures, even.

It is admittedly difficult to keep current with theater, since stagecraft is not, as books, comics, and film/television most surely are, a truly mass media. Access is tricky; productions are both local and fleeting. Also, the habit of theater can be expensive.

Nevertheless, I’m going to make a case, here and now, that Black Gate’s readership should take stock and keep track of contemporary theater. Scripted plays, after all, predate the novel as a form by many centuries, and we would be as blind as Tiresias were we to forget that were it not for Oedipus Rex, we would know nothing of that fantasy staple, the talking, riddling sphinx.

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King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

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41EQ75FAXGLThe legend of King Arthur has become one of literature’s greatest footballs, and it gets punted hither and yon with often quite careless abandon. Legions of celluloid spinoffs litter the vaults of Netflix, and on the printed page, one can select from heavyweights like Mallory, White, or Steinbeck to enjoy your Age of Chivalry fix.

Flying well under the radar is one of the twentieth century’s best known metafictional writers, Donald Barthelme. His story collections, including City Lights and Sixty Stories, are classics of the form, endlessly inventive, cartwheeling-freewheeling-Catherine wheeling lunacies that manage nonetheless to pack a surprising emotional punch.

Most of Barthelme’s output centered on short fiction, but every so often he ventured into the realm of the novel, as with his knowing, nudge-nudge/wink-wink Snow White and his unjustly forgotten Arthurian outing, The King.

Released by Harper & Row in 1990 and featuring the evocative, jutting illustrations of Barry Moser, The King is an anachronistic treat from start to finish, and hilarious besides.

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