Spencer Koelle haunts a Philadelphia row house with his partner and two orange cats. He mixes cocktails, worships Pagan idols, and watches horror movies on DVD. His website is www.spencerkoelle.com, his twitter is @KoelleSpencer, and his blood is hot.
GI: Your story has an element that most of the selections in GREEN INFERNO don’t:
it’s a legitimate Whodunnit? with a Weird twist. Without giving too much away:
you lay a lot of clues for the reader early on, establishing an intriguing murder
mystery. Mystery is not an easy genre to write. How difficult was it for you to
stay in the lane of those tropes? Are you a Mystery fan in general?
SK: Would you believe, I didn't even think of it as a murder mystery while I was
writing it? That said, I am a pretty big Mystery fan--the classics like Poirot and
Holmes, along with a few new ones--so I certainly had those influences to
guide me. I prefer detectives that think and listen to ones that fight and
trash-talk. I trust the primary influence for this story is obvious, but the Twilight
Zone episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" is another key inspiration.
GI: The Spare Child can be read as a study of identity on a supernatural level, but it
also touches on issues of gender, religion and social status. We’re living through a pretty
unprecedented, and divisive, time, as far as identity politics being foregrounded in the world
consciousness. How does this subject play into your art in a macro sense, or is this story an
outlier in your body of work?
SK: It's not that complicated to me. There's a huge volume of horror fiction about
white, straight, able-bodied, cishet people. There are more stories you can tell if you step out
of the model of: upper-middle-class dad says, "This house will be a new start for our family!"
Diversity of characters makes for more engaging stories and opens up more narrative opportunities.
Also: I’ll give you the “unprecedented”, but the only thing I find “divisive” about the current times is that
one side of the political aisle is trying to oppress or kill everybody on the other side.
GI: This is the part where I ask you for some general anecdotes about your life and
hobbies, influences on your art, etc. Later on I’ll come up with something far
more clever to plug in here***.
***Later on, I most definitely did not.
SK: Well, I live in Philadelphia with a partner, a roommate and two cats, Kitkat and
Butterscotch. I'm a vegetarian who doesn't smoke or do drugs, though I'm fond
of wine and cocktails. I can take a series of punches to the face while resisting
the urge to hit back for personal reasons. I worship Pagan idols, one of Whom I
thanked for this publication success. My day job is fundraising for nonprofits, but
that's an unsteady ship and recently I've been eking out an existence in the chilly
wastelands of Freelance.
I've never met a ghost or seen a UFO, but I did have an unsettling experience
driving alone up a dark, lonely mountain road, nearing the hotel at the end of my journey.
My GPS led me away from the lights of the hotel and toward a side road; I thought maybe
the official address was around back, or there was a trick to getting off the highway. This
continued as I passed two big iron gates set in stone and thumped along something that
was barely a road, past a series of stone monuments.
I was in a graveyard, in a cul de sac surrounded by three illuminated crypts.
Right on cue, my GPS announced, "You have arrived at your destination."
As for influences, there're the obvious ones like Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Garth Nix,
Stephen King, and M. R. James. K.A. Applegate first showed me that there was no such thing
as an "evil" species, and did wonders for my sense of creature design, alien ecology, and world-building.
It also helped that I read a lot of [DK] Eyewitness Books and watched a lot of
nature documentaries growing up.
GI: What influenced “The Spare Child” specifically?
SK: I was working at a zoo and dating somebody with a daycare job, and I realized
how much responsibility is placed on childcare workers, and how scary it would be to be
suddenly saddled with life-or-death responsibilities in a position of marginal authority.
I don't think you can perfectly imitate a human while being totally alien, but I did consider
how a lot of interactions aren't really built on words or syntax, but phrases an outsider could easily memorize.
GI: How have you been coping with the shitstorm of 2020?
SK: As best I can, and probably better than some, since I actually managed to
produce new stories, including one based on a pandemic-inspired nightmare. I haven't
finished my novel this year, but anyone who has cranked out a whole novel under this
kind of pressure should probably be given a blood test.
I'm very lucky that I decided to take up mixology just before the dome went
down, so I wasn't part of the rush of people attacking closed state liquor stores, and I
had a new interest to engage me!
GI: GREEN INFERNO is sub-titled, The World Celebrates Your Demise. How do you
feel your piece relates to this sentiment?
SK: There are many environments not really designed for human habitation, and we
live in most of them. (Phoenix, AZ springs to mind.) Humans are so good at killing off things
that hunt us that we've put a lot of apex predators on the Endangered Species list. [As a result, we’ve]
gotten used to the idea that we exist outside the food web.
Many animals that we consider scary don't want to tangle with humans. They’re just pushed
into a position where conflict is inevitable.