A. P. Howell has worked as an archivist, innkeeper, webmaster and data wrangler. She lives with her spouse, their two kids, and a dog who hates groundhogs. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Little Blue Marble, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Eighteen: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem, and The NoSleep Podcast.
IN SOMNIO editor Alex Woodroe spoke with A.P. about the ethical treatment of the dead, the cultural histories we’ve lost along the way, and more.
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AW: Does your story touch on anything personal to you?
APH: A number of years ago I watched some TV show that dealt with the inner workings of a body farm. One thing that struck me was the attitude of the academic who served as the primary interview focus. She always referred to “individuals,” never “cadavers” or “subjects” or “bodies.” Even when she walked through a wooded area that temporarily served as a graveyard or opened a barrel to monitor decomposition, the place seemed more peaceful than macabre. What if a ghost found herself haunting such a place?
It’s important to note that there is a very dark side to medical science and physical anthropology; not every cadaver used for scientific discovery was obtained ethically. Henrietta Lacks’s family did not learn about the use of her cells until a quarter century after her death. Human remains from the MOVE bombing were shuttled between the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office and Ivy League institutions for decades. (Treating any artifact in such a cavalier manner makes my archivist’s heart wince; it’s so much worse when you layer on the nature of the artifacts and the circumstances of Tree and Delisha Africa’s deaths.) My story doesn’t grapple with those issues—and because I don’t deal with them fictionally, I feel it’s especially important to note them in this nonfictional space.
AW: What was your favourite thing about your work as an archivist?
APH: I liked the personal stories and oddities you come across. Candid photos, one-off documents, or just the cumulative effect of seeing how a particular person performed their daily work. I don’t think I’d make a good academic historian, because rather than digging into theory or primary sources in multiple relevant languages, I’d get excited by a coffee stain on an instruction manual or try to figure out the identity of a woman who was left at the altar more than a century ago.
There’s something comforting about working with the materials of the dead. You know how the story ends—part of it, anyway—and in some ways that makes it easier to piece together the contextual details. You get to tell stories about the people who created their collections—or the people who didn’t create collections, the women and the people of color and the poor people and the queer people and the otherwise non-elites, the people who exist around the margins of the primary sources we have. Picking out their stories (and, as an archivist, highlighting that sort of information for researchers) is fascinating.
It’s work that I miss. I think it’s valuable, but it’s not well-funded in general and the past few years have been particularly unkind to cultural heritage institutions in the United States.
AW: Do you have any specific formative memories that roped you into Gothic fiction?
APH: There’s not one particular moment—I sort of backed into it from other genres. An early short favorite, Clarke’s “The Star,” is science fiction, but there’s an undercurrent of cosmic horror (albeit without the expected tentacles). The same goes for a story like Tanith Lee’s “Venus Rising on Water” and movies like Alien—the unknowable, threatening thing has an explanation that is ostensibly scientific rather than supernatural, but the emotions are the same. Those feelings of being trapped by something beyond your ken, inhabiting a place where you fundamentally do not belong, are very effective and very Gothic. I approach genres as adjectives rather than boxes, so whatever the work’s primary marketing genre, the word “Gothic” means it’s probably going to deliver those tantalizing shivers.
AW: Did you ever embrace the Goth culture? Carry a parasol? Do you still? If not, what was your teen ‘scene’?
APH: I was very much a jeans-and-tee-shirt nerd in high school, though that didn’t feel much like a scene. (Quite a few of those tee-shirts were from colleges I toured. I was neither traumatized nor friendless, but I was still much less interested in experiencing high school than in getting out of high school.) In college, I was surprised to learn that cyberpunk was a subculture, not just a subgenre I enjoyed reading. I had similar revelations about Goths and Steampunks later on, though at that point it wasn’t a surprise. This sort of social obliviousness comes from living in your own head, I guess. Not growing up with the web probably had something to do with it, too, particularly in a rural area.
AW: Why Horror? Are you and Horror exclusive, and if not, what else do you flirt with?
APH: The world can be a horrifying place, so my mind often goes to dark places. I like making my characters react to unexpected pressures, and I tend to spend a lot of time in their heads. Horror is a great genre for doing that.
I don’t write Horror exclusively, but I’m pretty firmly in the speculative camp: science fiction, fantasy, and Horror. I like realism where I can remove—or at least bend—the shackles of reality.
AW: Where can people see more of your past/upcoming work?
APH: Perhaps of most interest to IN SOMNIO readers, I have work published and upcoming in Underland Arcana. Mark Teppo (the editor and publisher at Underland Press) has played around with other tarot-themed publications. I have a story in his anthology from last year, XVIII: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem, based on the Moon card.
I have some eco-themed work in Martian Magazine and Little Blue Marble, a story of an audiovisual archivist and a haunted VHS tape in Translunar Travelers Lounge, and a few other stories in webzines, anthologies, and on podcasts.
I’ll add an obligatory plug for my website, where I have links to my published work.
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IN HER OWN WORDS:
A.P. Howell reads a selection from her story, “Always an After”; watch below, then please support the IN SOMNIO campaign on Kickstarter!
