Interviewing Helen Marshall
Helloooo!
Last week I loved reading the incredible The Gold Leaf Executions by Helen Marshall a fantastic collection of strange, eerie, unsettling and hopeful tales that can often elicit all those feelings at the same time. It is a perfect time to say that it summarises the brillint Publisher Unsung Stories which this week announced it’s closure (more details below) but for me it has taight me that SF&F and Horror can really always stretch itself and surprise you. I was though very lucky to be able to ask Helen some questions about the collection and the stories within it. Its a collection well worth your time.
How do you like to tempt people to read The Gold Leaf Executions?
Ooooh, I’d say if you like ghosts and bears (and bear ghosts) and murder and devils and love and intrigue and fairy tales and mummies and children living inside the remains of monstrous Old Ones and archaeologists getting their comeuppance and hunger and sadness and want and desire then this is the book of you.
Many of these tales rather than a simple twist tend to veer between the uncanny and the world of horror – often at the same time and we’ve never too sure what the end result will be. What attracts you to subverting expectations?
I love the feeling you only seem to be able to get in short stories of a sudden jolt in your stomach, like an elevator descending. Short stories have this capacity to amaze and surprise because you can create miniature rules with whatever rules you like to them.
A lot of the tales have an Eastern European setting; what has drawn you to that part of the world in your work?
My family on my mother’s side comes from Poland and the Ukraine, several generations back. At around the same time as I began work on this collection and I also started writing a novel called The Mirabilists set in an Eastern European country, which has fantastical and mythical elements. I worked my way through a huge amount of research material and many of the ideas that I couldn’t incorporate into the novel found their way into my stories: the bear dancers of Romania, for example. One of the stories, “Katalog”, follows a character from the world of my novel.
Which of these stories was the hardest to write?
I don’t think any of these stories were incredibly hard to write which is part of what makes short stories so much fun as compared to novels, which often have a section (or ten) you just need to slog through. The easiest story to write was “Survival Strategies” which I churned out in a single session. It was based on a research trip I had done to New York and Maine to read the about the publishing history of Stephen King’s first novel Carrie. The experience had its own surreal quality to it that I found difficult to write about as an academic. I kept turning it around in my head, trying to make sense of it, until it came rushing out in the form of a story. Just for the record though, the story is massively fictionalised with wild departures from the truth. I published my academic article on the beginnings of the eighties horror boom and King’s association with it in The Journal of Popular Culture here: https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/doi/full/10.1111/jpcu.12897. So if you’d like to know what is true, read that.
Which short story writers do you currently love to read?
I’m devouring Kelly Link’s new collection White Cat, Black Dog. She is one of my favourite living writers. Her stories are sly and silly and strange and cutting. I can’t get enough of them. I also love everything published by Unsung Stories (https://www.unsungstories.co.uk ), which makes it a great sadness that they are closing shop. I recommend taking advantage of their closing sale to pick up some amazing work by Malcolm Devlin, Aliya Whiteley, Tiffani Angus, Sam Thompson, Emma Swift and others.
What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve finished writing a novel called The Mirabilists, which is very much in keeping with the tone and themes of many of the stories in this collection. It follows the daughter of a circus master, an apprentice magician and Amba, the great tiger god who will devour creation if he is released from the chain that bind him. Expect that some time in the future.
If there was one book, not your own that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?
It would be Tashan Mehta’s forthcoming novel Mad Sisters of Esi from Penguin India. I suspect this book may be difficult to get hold of but it is entirely worth it. I found it enormously exciting, both in terms of the worldbuilding she's done and the relationship between the characters. It was a world I wanted to linger in. Really. I haven’t had that experience of entering a new, completely immersive fictional world that was so captivating that I wanted to stay in it as long as I could. It was delicious. It was utterly pleasurable. The novel had echoes of Piranesi, touches of Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago novels, then even a bit of The Time Traveler’s Wife. But while there were elements I recognised, the novel seemed wholly her own. And I could imagine it really changing fantasy, introducing a new way of how fantasy could be done. I know all that sounds like very high praise but I did just love this novel.
