LC von Hessen (they/them) is a writer, noise musician, multidisciplinary artist/performer, and former Morbid Anatomy Museum docent. Their work has appeared in Bury Your Gays, Seize the Press, The Book of Queer Saints, Stories of the Eye, YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR BODY, Vastarien, and many others. Their debut short story collection will be released in late 2024 through Grimscribe Press. An ex-Midwesterner, von Hessen lives in Brooklyn with a talkative orange cat.
LC’s “Transmasc of the Red Death” originally appeared in The Book of Queer Saints II (Medusa Haus Publishing), 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.
Poe-inspired parties full of hubristic rich pissheads getting their comeuppance, but with more extreme kink (e.g. consensual lust-murder) and queer T4T content. There's also a giant demon dick. If you're into that.
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 don't really have a single set routine. Much of my writing gets done in the form of notes and passages jotted down in Google Docs open among the million tabs on my work laptop when I have downtime during my day job. Pre-pandemic I'd go to a coffee shop in my neighborhood on weekends and try to nab the lone seat in the corner to write.
I have trouble finishing work if I don't have a set deadline to aim for, and thus frequently in the past I've ended up downing constant caffeine while staying up late the night of a submission deadline to squeak by at the last minute. This method is not recommended if you value your health or sleep schedule
What's vital for doing a lot of writing in one sitting is a comfortable seat, privacy, adequate caffeination, a decent soundtrack and lighting, and regular breaks and/or rewards for finishing a certain word count or whatnot. As a practicing heathen I also have a specific bindrune I draw for creative productivity.
My cat sometimes helps, or more often "helps." He's sprawled out in my lap as I type this.
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?
"Define 'weird fiction'" is one of those terribly fraught queries that often leads to headache-inducing "discourse," but I will say it includes:
-A sort of mélange of SFF and horror, though it doesn't necessarily need to have confirmed supernatural elements
-Related to the above: the tools and trappings of horror, but using anything from quiet everyday ambiguity to apocalyptic-scale cosmicism; more interest in exploring the abject and uncanny than "mainstream" horror
-A goal of mood-setting that is less interested in outright fear than pervasive dread, anxiety, absurdity, existential despair, or even beauty and revelry in the grotesque and profane
My BRAVE NEW WEIRD story is an example of the loose microgenre I frequently write in which I call "pulp gothic," with style and content inspired as much by old-school 18th-19th century gothic literature as the '70s-mid-'90s pop culture horror I absorbed growing up. Also for my work in particular, "non-genre" influences like William Burroughs, Franz Kafka, JK Huysmans, Arthur Rimbaud, Kathy Acker, etc. carry as much weight as Weird-leaning horror writers like Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, and Clive Barker, all of whom I read before leaving high school.
On 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.
Ken Russell's Gothic x Swans.
What’s the Weirdest thing—capital W—that’s ever happened to you (that you’re comfortable sharing)?
That isn't sex or substance-related? Precognitive dreams that came to pass, or spells and rituals that saw results, all of which becomes normal over time to a practicing witch or occultist? The overwhelmingly uncanny experience of seeing a dead friend in their coffin, knowing a bullet wound has been concealed by the embalmers? I'd say probably the time I might have encountered a ghost, or some other entity, while visiting my late grandmother as a child.
This happened in the living room of her little apartment in her retirement center. She had recently moved there from her old house on the North Carolina mountainside, and some extended family were helping her unpack. Among her things was a section of newspaper from 1929, dated some months before the stock market crash: we were passing it around and having a chuckle at some of the text and images, like an ad from some duchess or other praising the smooth taste of Camel cigarettes. I was sitting there reading the whole thing--I was 11 years old, and a big history nerd even then--when I felt three gentle but unmistakable taps on the back of my right hand as if from an index finger.
I immediately lowered the newspaper and looked around a bit in confusion. I was sitting on the rightmost end of a couch, and on my right side was a little end table holding a lamp, then the corner of the wall, and then, a bit further, a picture window. Nobody else had noticed, nor was anyone sitting anywhere close enough to me to have done it, and there was no ceiling leak or anything of the kind. I figured that something supernatural had happened, but was more intrigued than anything else, certainly not scared at all, and my response was to keep reading the newspaper.
When I told my mother that evening, she assumed it was my uncle playing a prank, but he was seated too far away; I absolutely would have seen him. And besides, I felt intuitively that it was a feminine hand, not one of my uncle's big callused man hands.
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BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror, Volume Two, is out June 26th.
