If you’re on Twitter and have at least a passing interest in Horror Fiction, you’ve undoubtedly crossed paths with Midnight Pals, Bitter Karella’s wildly popular, hilarious, sacred cow-skewering reimagining of the Greats—and not-so-Greats—of Horror Fiction gathered ‘round the campfire swapping stories and antagonizing one another.
But Bitter is much more than an outlet for Poe, King and Edward Lee to regularly pile on JK Rowling. We first worked with her in our anthology YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR BODY, where his delightfully blasphemous story, “The Divine Carcass,” was a show-stealer. Below, we talk with Bitter about some of their other projects; the setting for her Brave New Weird-chosen story, “Low Tide Jenny”; and that one time he fucked a demon.
These responses have been edited for clarity.
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Goddamn, the setting of Santa Carcossa in your BRAVE NEW WEIRD story “Low Tide Jenny” is evocative! Of what, precisely, I can’t say. It feels like a mash of both West coast post-apocalyptic wasteland and decaying East Coast Coney Island. Is there a particular setting that inspired it?
A big inspiration was George R.R. Martin's Asshai by the Shadow; [he described] this massive city that only had the population of a good-sized market town, so that "By night only one building in ten shows a light."
That image reminded me of so many small California beach towns I'd lived in when I was a kid; towns that emptied out in the off-season, so that you could stand on the beach at night and turn toward the city and it would appear just as dark and empty as the ocean. The specifics of Santa Carcossa are mostly drawn from the Santa Cruz boardwalk, although I hear it's been renovated in recent years and doesn't have that same grody run-down charm anymore.
What does your writing routine/setup 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?
I mostly write at work; I just hide my laptop under the cash register so I can write when no one's watching. That way, even if I never sell a single story, I'm still technically getting paid to write!
What does “Weird” mean to you, in the context of storytelling? And what creators/experiences helped sculpt this definition?
"Weird" for me is very much about capturing the numinous experience, that terrifying but also thrilling (and sometimes deeply spiritual) feeling of confronting the universe in all its vastness and strangeness.
As humans, we're drawn to seek out these experiences because they can be very profound and very telling about our place in the cosmos, but we also want to go back to our ordinary, profane lives afterwards. And you just can't do that. Weird storytelling tells us that you can't look into the face of the Great God Pan and expect to remain unchanged afterwards.
In “Low Tide Jenny”, I really wanted to capture that hazy feeling of being on the precipice of a huge spiritual change but unable to drop over, a dream right before it tips over into nightmare.
The writers that I most think of when writing are probably Fitz James O'Brien, E.T.A. Hoffman, and Thomas Ligotti.
Those are some seriously old school influences, barring Ligotti; and far deeper cuts than the standard Lovecraft/Robert E. Howard. Considering how contemporary your work reads, what lessons do you still glean from writers published two hundred years ago?
I love when older authors try to describe something that doesn't exist yet. It's like the Allegory of the Cave, where Plato is struggling through a really convoluted analogy to describe something that today we could much more succinctly explain in a single sentence: "Oh, it's like watching a movie."
In some ways, I think not having an easy analogy frees up an author to really explore the fantastic. Like old sci fi authors who didn't yet know enough about the atmosphere of Mars or the vacuum of space to realize how implausible their stories really were—to them and to their readers, these wild speculations could have been real.
In one story, Fitz James O'Brien describes an attack by a strangely corporeal ghost in terms that any modern reader would immediately recognize as a sleep paralysis episode. But O'Brien obviously didn't know what that was. The fact that he's forced to try to explain this to us—normal phenomenon using only the terminology of the time—creates a bizarre distancing effect that makes the whole encounter all the stranger.
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.
Ravenous x Wall of Voodoo
What’s the Weirdest thing—capital W—that’s ever happened to you?
Once, after eating a half sheet of pot brownies, I had sex with an incubus (These two things might be related). I was lying in bed that night and...of course it was just sleep paralysis, but also, [there was] an invisible demon riding on top of me. The whole affair was so noisy that it eventually woke up my wife, who rolled me over onto my side in hopes that would solve the situation. It didn't really do much, since then the incubus just started spooning me instead.
I won’t flog you with Midnight Society questions, as I’m sure that already consumes a lot of your time. But I do want to know: are there any authors that are off limits, either to lionize or pillory?
One "author" that people keep requesting but I will never include is Garth Marenghi. First of all, he's not a real person! And secondly, he's already a satire of horror writers so I don't know what I could even say about him that would be funnier than his actual dialogue!
I wasn’t even familiar with the whole Garth Marenghi thing; thanks for giving me a new fandom tree to bark up!
So Bitter, you clearly have your fingers in lots of creative outlets: Midnight Society, cartooning, gaming, fiction. What have you not yet explored in the Weird realms that you have an itch for?
I'm currently working on adapting Midnight Society into an audio drama. I co-host the podcast A Special Presentation, or Alf will Not be Seen Tonight, all about comic strips adapted into animated specials, but [Midnight Society] will be the first time actually doing a narrative in audio form. It should be a fun new way to experience it, especially if Twitter finally goes belly up as we keep expecting!
Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror, Vol. One, is out February 6, 2023; preorder information coming soon!
