Rachel Unger thinks that now is an excellent time for us all to be kind to each other. Yes, really. She spends her days excavating stories from the dirt, staring down a microscope, and daydreaming about her next bike ride.
Rachel paints a portrait of a dark family legacy in her story “We Named You After Her” for IN SOMNIO: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror. Editor Alex Woodroe spoke to her about that and more.
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AW: Does “We Named You After Her” touch on anything personal to you?
RU: During 2020, I noticed a significant shift in what I was reading and writing. I spent 6 months writing lo-fi, happy spec fic because I just wanted comfort, and watched a lot of Bob Ross and Great British Bake Off for the same reason. At the same time, the only thing I wanted to read was Gothics. Ominous novels about people trapped in their houses seemed particularly relevant. (Thanks to Hicklebee’s [https://www.hicklebees.com] for supplying my reading habit!)
Fast forward to this year when I took an online course on Southern Gothics. I’d intended to write a series of stories set in coastal South Carolina, because I’ve had wonderful trips there with family. After Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the damaged houses really stayed with me as both the cause and potential expression of grief. So I had the setting and I had a stockpile of nebulous anxiety and dread my brain had been saving while mainlining Gothic fiction; “We Named You After Her” took off from there.
AW: What do you look for when you're 'staring down a microscope' and does it ever influence your writing?
RU: I’ve been lucky enough to have done microscope work on fossils in sedimentary rock, on algae and zooplankton in water samples, and on bacterial cultures. The living are seething with microbes of all sorts. Taken together, all the microorganisms on your skin and inside your body weigh 2-3 lbs—that’s as much as your brain weighs! There’s a lot happening at the microscopic level. The dead return their nutrients to the soil through the actions of critters and microbes called saprotrophs, which is fascinating and was definitely pertinent when I started writing “We Named You After Her”.
I also have a story coming out this fall in an Eerie River Publishing [https://www.eerieriverpublishing.com] anthology (It Calls From Doors) that pulled in some of my geology experience. The story is set in the Olympic Peninsula and the mineralogy there made the setting that much creepier, which was great.
AW: Do you have any specific formative memories that roped you into Gothic fiction?
RU: Growing up, my aunt Ellen introduced me to a lot of things—she gave me my first coffee and let me have free run of the closet downstairs where she kept all her horror and romance novels. She also showed me my first black and white movies—The Haunting (from 1963) and Rebecca (the 1940 version with Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers). I remember sitting in her living room in my pajamas, absolutely fascinated by these creepy houses and the way the past wouldn’t stay under the floorboards.
I also read a lot of Barbara Michaels novels—at the time, I couldn’t articulate why I loved The Master of Blacktower and Greygallows, but I tore through everything I could find from her.
AW: Did you ever embrace the Goth culture? Carry a parasol? Do you still? If not, what was your teen ‘scene’?
RU: All my teenage friends were the freaks and Goths, and I liked the elaborate outfits they’d come up with. By the grace of Value Village, I took their aesthetic and added as much color as possible. I’d use eyeliner to get two different lip colors from left to right, and wear jewelry to match. We listened to a lot of heavy metal and industrial, and it always made me smile that White Zombie’s “Super Charger Heaven” starts with an audio clip from The Haunting.
AW: Where can people see more of your past/upcoming work?
RU: I have links to some of my stories online at https://www.fictionbuffet.com, as well as a list of upcoming publications.
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IN HER OWN WORDS:
Below, Rachel reads a selection from “We Named You After Her”. Be sure to support the IN SOMNIO campaign, live on Kickstarter now!