Helloo!

I recently had two excellent and very different reading experiences thanks to one author. There was the stunning horror novella Grackle which explores one of America’s most haunted towns and what happens to the two women investigating it, and then a science fiction/murder mystery with added strange angels in the form of Out of the Drowning Deep. It was therefore a pleasure to welcome back AC Wise to the blog to talk about these two very different novellas and what they explored!

 

How do you like to booktempt people into reading Grackle and Out of the Drowning Deep?

To be honest, I’m terrible at elevator pitches. That said, with Grackle, I describe it as kind of a folk horror/ghost story road trip and hope that’s peoples’ jam. With Out of the Drowning Deep, I try to sell folks on it being a mash-up of as many genres as I could get away with - science fiction, fantasy, horror, noir, murder mystery, all of it! If I happen to be face-to-face with people, with the books in hand, I can also point to the gorgeous end papers. I mean, end papers! How can you turn down something that pretty?

 

In Out of the Drowning deep we get a very new and yet also classical look at angels? What drew you to writing a story about these?

I love the idea of biblically accurate angels and just how strange and terrifying they are in contrast with the popular depiction of largely human-looking figures with wings and harps and halos. Angels should be scary and weird, and that’s what I wanted to capture with Angel and Murmuration in Out of the Drowning Deep. The way angels have evolved through literature and media over the years is also such ripe fodder for storytelling, and I wanted to tap into that as well. So, along with the biblically-accurate original aspect, I wanted to have some of the more human-like aspects that are often depicted, minus the harps and halos, because there’s a lot of cool dichotomies there to explore. They look human, but they’re completely other; there’s innocence, but also the potential for great power. I just couldn’t resist the temptation (pun intended).

 

What fascinated you about the power of memory which is a theme that runs across the tale?

Memory is such a fascinating and unreliable thing, and it changes over time. Memory is constructed through retelling – whether to ourselves or to others – and that telling cements our idea of how certain events occurred. Most of the time, it’s colored by bias, perspective, mood, experience, and a host of other factors, rather than being an objective and accurate snapshot. Memory can be vague, haunting, and ill-defined. Sometimes random things stick in your head that you would rather forget, and sometimes the bad stuff is easier to hold onto than the good.

One thing that appealed to me in particular about making memory central to Out of the Drowning Deep is that way we create our memories parallels nicely with the idea of creating gods through stories, faith, and repetition, cementing them as truths. I also liked the idea of playing with the amnesiac detective/detective haunted by their past trope. Both Quin and Scribe IV have things they would rather forget, and they’ve both found a way to literally rid themselves of those memories, at least temporarily. But of course, those memories and the choices to forget them come back to haunt both characters. They then have to decide if they’re going to do the hard work of learning to live with their pasts, or continue the cycle of forgetting.

 

Is writing a science fiction murder mystery easy or hard?

It was fun! I’ve never attempted a murder mystery before, and my novella may not meet the standards of an actual murder mystery written by someone who knows what they’re doing, but I did enjoy dipping a toe into the genre. The way I decided to approach it was that the mystery wasn’t necessarily the main point – the characters reactions and choices around the mystery were. That way I figured I could get away without having to be super clever in the way seasoned mystery-writing pros are.

 

With Grackle we meet two very different leads in Andi and Emmanuelle who are the person who wants to be haunted and the person who actually is? They feel almost to represent different types of horror story -was that a deliberate choice?

It wasn’t necessarily a deliberate choice when I first started writing the story, but I do like the way their journeys ended up mirroring each other as their characters developed. I love the idea of a character wanting to be haunted, who finds the idea of the supernatural comforting, and then either fails to experience a haunting at all, or stumbles into the wrong haunting. There’s something poignant and lonely about that to me.

I enjoyed delving into uncertainty with Emanuelle’s character. Is she being haunted? Is she the one doing the haunting? Is she a reliable narrator? Similar to what I said about Out of the Drowning Deep and the role memory plays, I also liked the idea of memory as a story in Grackle and the possibility that when it comes to Emanuelle, her stories may or may not be objectively true, but they are true for her.

 

Grackle plays with urban legends. Why do these fascinate us so much?

I think there’s something compelling about the formulaic language of “it happened right here”, or “it happened to someone I know” that appears so often in urban legends. It gives it an extra degree of plausibility. You can be almost completely certain that the story is made up, but also maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance it’s real? Even more so than with ghost stories, urban legends are framed as “true” and that makes them fascinating and enduring.

 

Emmanuelle is initially quite a disturbing character, but we get to understand her a lot better over the course of a story. What do you enjoy about writing such a character?

I enjoyed the idea of someone who is prickly partly as a means of protecting herself, but who is also fairly comfortable with being unlikable. She’s been through a lot in her life, and her default is pushing people away. She’s given herself permission not to prioritize others’ feelings. I enjoyed exploring a character with that kind of freedom, while also knowing that freedom might be isolating and/or make her a jerk in others’ eyes.

I’m interested in the conversation around whether characters should be likable or not. I don’t think they have to be, but they should be understandable at least. Their actions and the choices they make should feel like they’re rooted in what the reader knows about them, so they can at least follow the logic of those choices or that behaviour, even when they don’t agree. Hopefully I achieved that with Emanuelle.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and in this weird world of social media where can we find out more?

This is a perfectly timed question since the official announcement has been made and I can finally share that I will have a new novel, Ballad of the Bone Road, coming out in January 2026! It’s set in an alt-history New York City, where ghosts and fae abound, and where a demon hunter and ghost hunter duo get wrapped up in a much larger case than they anticipated while investigating what at first seems like a simple haunting at a hotel.

In the meantime, I’ll also have various short stories popping up in anthologies and online magazines, including a novelette that I’m very excited about, appearing at Reactor in January 2025. “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” is prom-slasher meets animal bride story, and hopefully it’s dark and weird and bloody in all the right ways.

As for where you can find out more, I have a sporadically updated website (www.acwise.net), I’m on BlueSky as acwise.bsky.social, and Instagram as @a.c.wise. For the moment, I’m also reluctantly hanging on to my X account as @ac_wise.

 

What great books have you read recently?

Oooh. I’ll try to limit myself and not go on and on, but…

I just started The City in Glass by Nghi Vo, and I’m very much enjoying it. I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones and Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay are both really satisfying horror novels that do some fun things with genre tropes. Beautiful Creatures by KT Bryski and The Dragonfly Gambit by A.D. Sui are two excellent novellas that came out this year, the former featuring a dustbowl traveling circus with a Carnivale/Ray Bradbury vibe, and the latter a space opera about war, desire, and revenge. On the short fiction front, The Crawling Moon edited by Dave ring, Northern Nights edited by Michael Kelly, and Death in the Mouth Volume 2 edited by Cassie Hart and Sloane Leong are all fantastic anthologies, and Josh Rountree just put out a new short story collection, Death Aesthetic, which I also really enjoyed.

I could go on, but I promised I would try to control myself.