I’ve lauded Joe Koch’s nightmarish, lush prose to anyone who would listen on a number of occasions. I won’t subject y’all to that again; instead I’ll keep it simple: Joe Koch will fuck you up.
Joe’s story in BRAVE NEW WEIRD, “Blood Calumny,” originally appeared in their collection Convulsive, available from Apocalypse Party here; it’s as good a reason as any to catch up.
These responses have been edited for clarity.
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As much as I enjoy your short fiction, I’m prone to sermonizing about your 2020 novella The Wingspan of Severed Hands until I’m blue in the face. My lazy one-sentence description is “like if William S. Burroughs directed an episode of The X-Files”.
So: have you ever had an extraterrestrial experience and/or tried to shoot an apple off someone’s head?
God, thank you, Matt! It took some time for people to find that book, and word of mouth is probably the only thing that saved it from vanishing into total obscurity. WSB is my absolute writing hero so I love your summary, too!
I regret that despite growing up near Gulf Shores, Alabama and participating in all sorts of [redacted], I've never met (fucked) an alien, nor have I ever shot a gun or an arrow at all, much less shot my wife in the head. I have never played Chicken or William Tell. What a sad and empty life.
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?
I thrive writing in a space where I have privacy. My tiny apartment is also my office on the top floor of an old house eye-level with the tree canopy. It's my own treehouse of horror, a little blanket fort where I can safely play with my demons.
So much of writing is thinking, though. When I'm not actively typing or laboriously editing (I do a LOT of editing!) I can be "writing" and working on a story while I walk, bike, shovel snow, avoid shoveling snow, or whatever.
What does “Weird” mean to you, in the context of storytelling?
Maybe Weird means the rules of science and logic and reality in general can be broken. I'm really interested in pushing an experience on the reader that holds truth without adhering to mundane fact. It's the difference between myth and religion, so to speak. Weird can transgress beyond religion to touch something more profound.
The situation of existing as a mind and being conscious is incredibly Weird despite being an everyday experience we take for granted. Right now we are telling a story about who we are: you, the publisher and me, the writer. My mind is thinking about itself and forming or filtering this perception into a story for you. But how does a mirror gaze into itself? How is any of this possible? Weird takes nothing for granted and looks deeply beyond the surface of things.
Honestly, though, Matt, I don't have a philosophy. I just made all that up on the spot since you asked. I prefer to leave genre definitions to others with more expertise.
On the Tenebrous Discord, we ask everyone to introduce themselves as a Film-meets-Music Artist. It doesn’t have to be your favorite, and don’t spend too much time overthinking it; now GO.
Fight Club meets (early) The Hafler Trio.
Hopefully I don’t misquote you too terribly, but you said something along the lines that “Blood Calumny” comes as close to embodying your Trans experience as anything you’ve written. What made this piece so revelatory to you?
I think you're referring to a tweet where I said it's a story very close to my heart. I took a few different experiences from reality and bundled them up with a bit of twisted murderous fantasy to express some of the rage I'm still processing as an older person who recently came out. I spent five decades navigating life being seen as a woman. That's half a century. That's a lot of rage.
It's not the story that best embodies my trans experience overall, however. Unfortunately, that story exists but keeps getting rejected by publishers! Oh, this writing life. Perhaps it's too wholesome to be entertaining. Too much about self-acceptance, personal honor, and resolving your conflicts with the past.
You don’t hold your readers’ hands; at first blush, your prose can be impenetrable. But once you dig through the layers, there’s a solid core of propulsive Pulp plotting in there; narratives wrapped in Weird cocoons. This might be reductive, but do you find that you generally start with the plot/theme or the imagery first when writing?
Plot and imagery go together for me, like in a movie. One of the first criticisms I received when I started writing was that the weather and setting seemed to be part of the characters or action rather than a proper backdrop. So I had to realize that I'm writing about perception, that my perception may be more synesthesia-like than some people—more animal-like—and I had to learn to communicate that with intention.
Like I said before, my goal is pushing the reader into an experience—sometimes very hard—rather than presenting a cozy outline of objective events they can make choices about engaging with. Because that's how we experience life, isn't it? Everything happens all at once and we're along for the ride having our feelings and doubts and epiphanies. So when I start a story, it's only when such a heightened complex of plot and imagery has formed into a tight little ball that it's ready to explode onto the page.
BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror, Vol. One, is out February 6, 2023 and available for preorder now.