the outer dark

“Skeletal” Echoes In the OUTER DARK

/ Clint Smith / Leave a comment

The Skeleton Melodies receives a generous shoutout by Gordon B. White on a recent episode of The Outer Dark on This Is Horror.  This installment features readings by both Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey, but Episode 091 launches with a sapient take on why the mode of weird fiction supplies such amenable medium for marginalized voices and outsider characteristics of “the other.”

Near the episode’s opening, in his brief critique of the collection (beginning at about the minute 8:15:00 marker), White (whose debut collection, As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions, was released in 2020) notes a pair of pieces, “Details That Would Otherwise Be Lost to Shadow,” as well as my novella, Haunt Me Still.  Host Anya Martin mentions a potential future appearance on the program, a collaboration which is currently in the works.

“A Care For Dark Cookery” Interview with The Outer Dark (Episode 21)

/ Clint Smith / Leave a comment

I was recently afforded the opportunity to appear on Scott Nicolay’s podcast, The Outer Dark (Project iRadio).

The Outer Dark

L’esprit de l’escalier has been particularly pronounced in the wake of the interview and subsequent social-media (ephemeral as it may be) conversations.  Still, we managed to discuss the eerier writings of Henry James and Hawthorne, as well as the relationship with my writing and the structure (houses included) of societal rituals.

For over a decade, Thanksgiving Day (owning to the typical, day-off-work traditions) has been, for me, a day to absorb more of what I’m reading (sneak in an extra story or two), and reflect on the writing exercise I’ve accumulated during autumn.  (Standing out in my mind with Kodachrome clarity is Thanksgiving, 2000, when I completed Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night.  Ignorant of the craft (as I still, in great part, am), that novel was a revelation to me, and I had that quiet period during the holiday, and extended winter holiday, to wonder what it would be like to write something — anything.

Scott Nicolay has been enormously supportive of the Ghouljaw endeavor.  So, on this Thanksgiving Day, 2015, I’d like to record my gratitude for his writerly camaraderie, and for his high-octane celebration of little-known scribblers dog-paddling in weird waters.