Four Questions with Elana Gomel
Tamika Thompson: What is horror?
Elana Gomel: Horror is life illuminated by the imagination. When people ask me how I can watch horror movies to relax, I ask: “How can you watch TV news and go to sleep?” We live in the world of wars, violence, inequality, and discrimination. We can either avert our eyes from the darkness that surrounds us, or we can look straight into it and try to understand where it comes from and how to make it just a little bit lighter. My favorite line in Shakespeare is from his play Tempest in which Prospero says: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Horror for me is acknowledging the darkness both inside and outside ourselves.
I prefer speculative horror: that is horror, with a fantastic element, be it supernatural, weird, or sci-fi. I am not into slashers or true-life atrocities. Fantasy spices fear with wonder. The English language has many words to describe shades of fear: horror, terror, dread, fright, and awe. Fictional horror has to have an element of awe to be effective. Most familiar figures of horror—vampires, ghosts, monsters—originate in myths and fairy tales. And fairy tales are always about discovering and facing the unknown. In my own writing, I try to recreate the experience of enchantment mixed with terror that all good fairy tales (not the expurgated Disney versions) have offered their audience, both young and old, throughout the ages.
Thompson: What is the spookiest experience you’ve ever had?
Gomel: As a child, I was afraid of monsters lurking outside in the night. I grew up in a big city, and always felt safe and protected surrounded by people, streetlights, and the noise of traffic. It was nature that gave me the creeps. My family had a summer house and an orchard. When we stayed there, I would wake up in the middle of the night and hear soft footsteps that circled our house over and over again. Now I am pretty sure it was a stray cat, but who knows? Anyway, I would lie in bed and imagine what kind of creature that was. A dinosaur? An alien? A vampire?
And the more I tried to give it a face and a name, the less afraid I was. Once a monster became a character in my story, I had power over it. I have never forgotten this childhood experience—in fact, my forthcoming novella Embedding is based on it. Telling a story about our fears, nightmares and insecurities is the only way to recover.
Thompson: What is the scariest book you’ve read and what about it frightened you?
Gomel: My husband makes fun of me because I read horror novels and watch horror movies to help me unwind. I am very aware of the distinction between reality and fiction. As much as I enjoy the company of monsters, I know they only exist in my imagination, and in the imagination of the author. But there is one horror novel that really scared me, though not for the reason the author probably intended. It is called No One Gets Out Alive by the British writer Adam Nevill (it was also made into a movie, but I haven’t seen it). The novel has a supernatural creature, and I breathed a sigh of relief when it finally appeared. Until then, the novel was a realistic depiction of the struggles of an impoverished young woman in the streets of London. She loses her job and has to rent a room from a violent landlord because she has nowhere to go. It was so dismal, so hopeless, and so true to life that the fantasy element became a real comfort to the reader. All monsters are metaphors for the things that are too depressing to see as they are.
Thompson: I love the tagline for Nightwood: “All fairy tales were history once.” What do you hope the reader will learn about fairy tales from your novel?
Hansel and Gretel were abandoned by their actual parents because the family was starving. Sleeping Beauty was raped, not kissed, and only woke up when she gave birth. Beauty and the Beast goes back to a bawdy Roman tale about Eros and his bride. Fairy tales are very old. They were the sole entertainment of the poor in the ages when hard labor and early death were the only things they could look forward to. Fairy tales reflect the indomitable spirit of the common people who managed to survive various disasters that history threw at them and to transmute pain into poetry. This is why I believe fairy tales are the origin of all horror. In Nightwood, as in the novel I am writing now provisionally called Nine Levels, I want to recreate the spirit of traditional fairy tales but without the obligatory “happy ending” of Disney. The real happy ending is to survive and to go on, fighting monsters, encountering marvels, and knowing that at the end darkness will get you—but not before you stare it down.
Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic with a long list of books and articles, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She has taught and researched in Israel, Italy, and the US, and is known in the academy for her (purely theoretical) interest in serial killers, alien invasions, and rebellious AIs. She is the editor of the upcoming Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. She is also the author of more than a hundred stories, several novellas, and six novels of dark fantasy and dark science fiction. Several of her stories appeared in Best of the Year anthologies. Her most recent fiction publications are Nightwood, a novel of monsters, marriage, and exile, and the collection My Lady of Plagues and Other Gothic Fairy Tales. She is a member of HWA and other professional societies.