Eirik Gumeny is the editor of Atomic Carnival Books and the author of Infernal Organs and the Exponential Apocalypse series. His short fiction has appeared in, among others, Kaleidotrope, Andromeda Spaceways, and Escalators to Hell (From Beyond Press). His nonfiction has been published by Cracked, Wired, and The New York Times. In 2014 he received a double lung transplant and technically died a little. He got better.
His story, “A Balanced Breakfast”, was originally published in Soul Jar by Forest Avenue Press, and will appear in BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror Volume Two, available to preorder now.
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Give us the elevator pitch of your BNW-nommed story, please.
A young woman summons an interdimensional cereal mascot, dooming the world to a slow and mildly complicated oblivion, but, also, she makes a new friend.
What does your writing routine look like? Do you have an office? A preferred coffee shop? The back of the bus? Standing under your neighbor’s eaves, avoiding the rain? Are you one of those true modern Weirdos who write your entire novel on your phone?
I’ve got an office and a desk, and every morning, like clockwork, I sit down with a cup of coffee and fire up the laptop. Everything after that’s a crapshoot, though. Sometimes I get eight hours of good writing in and sometimes I stare at the screen for a few minutes, give up, and go play Baldur’s Gate 3 for the rest of the day.
The way I write is pretty mercurial, too. I used to start at the start and work my way to the end, editing as I went, so that when I typed the last words I was done. Then I implemented a three draft system: rough, rewrite, polish. Lately, though, I’ve been jotting down sentences and paragraphs on scrap paper and in texts to myself and then building out a completed story from there, starting in the middle or at the end or from a snippet of dialogue three-quarters of the way through.
The only real constant to my writing habits is that I seem to be most prolific when I’m supposed to be doing something else. I wrote my first two novels while on-shift at a pair of office jobs. Even now, if I have a week with no obligations, the proverbial time enough to write at last, I will struggle and get very little done. (I will kill a bunch of shadow-cursed miscreants, however.) But give me three deadlines and a bunch of errands and an electrician coming over after lunch and I’ll knock out most of a story in a day.
What does “Weird” mean to you, in the context of storytelling? And what creators/experiences/influences helped sculpt this definition for you in your creative journey?
Honestly, I’m not the most well-read person out there, and I don’t have a great head for different philosophies, but I’ve been reading a lot of Robert Aickman lately, and I really like the way his stories don’t explain anything. There’s no big horror. He has a tendency to subvert the notion of what should be scary and upsetting.
I think about “Meeting Mr. Millar” a lot: there’s this guy, and he’s a little off, and being around him is incredibly upsetting for reasons no one can explain, and maybe there’s a ghost, but don’t worry about that, it’s this lonely guy and his army of accountants not actually doing anything wrong that’s the real problem. I love how much suspense Aickman wrings out of that scenario, out of nothing really happening.
That’s maybe the only thing he and I have in common, the only direct influence on my own writing: sometimes shit’s just strange, and you have to roll with it.
In the Tenebrous Discord, we ask everyone to introduce themselves as a Film-meets-Music Artist (Citizen Kane x Metallica, f’rinstance). It doesn’t have to be your favorite, and don’t spend too much time overthinking it; now GO.
Attack of the Crab Monsters x Donovan.
What’s the Weirdest thing—capital W—that’s ever happened to you (that you’re comfortable sharing)?
I feel like this isn’t going to be a surprise to a lot of people, but my lung transplant is easily the Weirdest thing that’s happened to me. Not the surgery necessarily—I mean, it was a lot and I technically died a little, but it was all Very Medical in terms of strangeness—but everything after.
The farther I get away from the procedure, the more having a dead guy’s lungs breathing inside of me is the status quo, the more I accept everything and get past the trauma and the body horror, the more surreal the whole thing feels. Obviously, there’s a ton of science and reason at play, and I’ve got scars and memories, however fuzzy, but I’ve internalized all that. Forgot, almost.
But then I’m at the grocery store and it all hits out of nowhere and I kind of lose myself a little, I’m back in the past and don’t recognize my own body, and suddenly I’m Frankenstein buying bananas. It’s fucking weird.
I wanted to ask about this after reading your bio, but there wasn’t really a good “in” with it. Thank you for filling us in unprompted.
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BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror, Volume Two, is out June 26th.
