Blog Migration: Substack

Figured I’d leave this here for anyone still poking around this blog.

As you may have seen from the signup window on my main page, I’ve moved over to Substack. You’ll find my blog posts, newsletters, snippets, and more published over there, so if you’d like to keep up with me, that’s the best place to do so.

See you there!

Link: apthayer.substack.com

Giant Robots and the People Inside Them

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t, just that I wasn’t allowed to.

When I got home from school and my mother wasn’t home, I would stand in just the right spot in front of their bedroom TV so I could see out the window so I could see my mother pulling up from her errands. Then I would turn on Cartoon Network and catch Toonami. Dragonball Z was on a lot, but sometimes I’d be able to watch enough TV, at the right time, to catch other shows. Shows like Evangelion, Robotech, Voltron, and Gundam Wing.

Shows about giant robots.

Dazzling animated fights, energy beams, colossal blades… I was enthralled. The early exposure to these was likely an integral part of my writing foundation, just as much as my father reading Lord of the Rings to me was. I can’t help but think about those fights when I’m writing action in my own work even to this day.

Then I moved away to boarding school.

On a coed campus environment, Toonami afternoons were replaced by hooking up and movies like Fight Club, Mallrats, and Se7en. I navigated my way through adolescence and entered adulthood, and my interests shifted, of course. Action and explosions no longer held the same appeal. Instead, I gravitated toward the exploration of the human. It became about personal struggles and complex emotions. Character-driven narratives replaced power beams and energy blades.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

Often the pendulum swings too far. Now I’m older, I can have my cake and eat it, too, because looking back, those shows weren’t about giant robots, not really. They were about the characters inside those robots. Within the confines of their mechanical exoskeletons, those characters grappled with inner demons and faced the consequences of their choices. It was those internal battles that made the shows compelling (though I still think the energy swords helped).

In early 2022, Neon Hemlock had an open submissions call for queer mech stories, and the memories of all those shows came flooding back. I hadn’t even considered writing mech stories until that moment but jumped at the opportunity. And right away, I knew I wanted to write about the people inside the mechs. The story I wrote, “If Black Was Green and Fluorescent,” is about two old war veterans—retired lovers—who are called back into war. There are no laser weapons. There are no space rockets. The adversary is the strain in their relationship.

But there is an energy sword.

The anthology is coming out in July 2023 (available for preorder here).

I hope you’ll check it out.

Welcome to the Nightmare

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about my writing. I think it’s essential to explore my influences and define my style as a writer. After all, I want my readers to know what they’re getting when they pick up one of my books or start one of my stories. That’s why I’ve been getting into my upbringing and delving into why I am the way I am in previous blog posts. But I’m taking it even further and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I’ve been writing cross-genre speculative fiction for years—always with an element of horror. As I’ve grown as a writer, though, I’ve found that I’m drawn more and more to the void. I’ve been exploring the bleaker corners of the human experience, and I’ve found that though the horror genre allows me to delve into those spaces, there are other genres I can blend into it that really make that exploration personal to me.

Despite the fact that I’ve been writing for some time now, I’ve always struggled with how to define my style. Am I a grimdark writer? Horror? Weird fiction? Cross-genre speculative fiction? I’ve written stories that could be described as any of those, as well as those that could be described as literary fiction, magical realism, or even science fiction. But as I’ve looked back over my body of work, I’ve realized that there is a common thread that runs through all of my writing: a sense of unease, of something lurking just out of sight.

So I’ve decided to coin a new term for my writing:

Nightmarism.

Nightmarism is a genre that combines the best elements of horror, literary fiction, magical realism, and weird fiction. At its core, Nightmarism is all about exploring the dark areas of the human experience and the very real things that terrify us. But it’s also about delving into the unknown, the surreal, and the unexplainable.

What can you expect to find in Nightmarist fiction?

First and foremost, you’ll find bleak realities with complicated, adult relationships. I like to explore broken homes, faded relationships, regret, self-loathing, and distrust. These are all-too-human horrors that are known and experienced the world over and are at the forefront of the stories I tell.

But it isn’t all negative. Other common human experiences of hope and love are often themes I explore in my stories. The human experience is more than just the bleak, and those highlights of the good are what ultimately make the horror so awful.

Beneath the surface of these mundane experiences, though, you’ll find layers of reality being stripped away. The loss of sanity is muddled with intrusive magic. Insomnia leads to nightmares of alien vistas and the waking world becomes home to liminal spaces, cosmic dimensions, and dreamscapes. The unsettling, the strange, and the unknowable hammer the background of everyday horror reinforcing just how small humans are on the grand scale of the universe.

And through it all, there’s always a wriggling thread of terror. An unsettling feeling, a sense of impending doom, or the presence of death itself. Nightmarism is all about creating a surreal sense of dread in a very realistic experience.

I hope that this gives you a better sense of what my writing is all about. Nightmarism is a genre that I’m excited to continue exploring. If you’re a fan of horror, literary fiction, magical realism, or weird fiction, I’d like to invite you into my world of waking nightmares.

Welcome.

Blessed by Nightmares

I keep promising I’m going to delve into nightmarism, but before I can do that, you must understand my influences.

I’ve already covered the marks left on my psyche by Catholicism and the internet. Let me shine a light on a much bigger influence:

Hypnagogia.

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in blood. The sheets were soaked in it. Butters lay next to me, eviscerated, his insides spread out all over the blankets. A few panicked seconds later, the hallucination faded, the splatters of red melted back into the pattern on the linens, and I stroked the sleeping dog. I stayed up for a while that night, all hints of sleep chased away.

Several nights ago, I woke up at around midnight and my entire room was glowing a venomous green, like an alien ship was hovering outside my window, bathing the entirety of my bedroom in its light. I sat up, staring at my green walls, not daring to look out the window behind me, blinking and rubbing my eyes, trying to figure out where the light was coming from. Had someone changed the light bulbs in the alley? Was someone shining an emergency light into my room? What did green emergency lights mean? As I pondered these questions and looked around my room, the color faded. Green became shadowy off-white. My bedroom returned to normal and I was finally fully awake.

Last night, I woke up and there was a woman standing in the corner of my bedroom. Actually, to be specific, she was hovering a foot off the ground. She had her back to me and her head down, her long, dark hair covering her face. She didn’t move or make a sound, and a few seconds later, as my waking mind battled my sleeping one, her body disappeared and the curtain of disheveled hair reverted back to the lampshade it always was.

This weird phenomenon—these hallucinations—is thanks to hypnagogia. I have no idea what causes them, as I have no idea why they have become more frequent in the last few months. These hallucinations affect me as a person, of course, but also as a writer.

I am constantly trying to play catch up when it comes to sleep. When the norm is interrupted, nightmare-plagued sleep with panicked waking hallucinations interspersed throughout, you better believe it affects my outlook on life. Never mind how rested I feel during the day.

And as a writer?

They say to write what you know, and I know nightmares. I know hypnagogia. I know nighttime disturbances and hauntings and midnight horrors. I’ve lived with them since I was a child. I have become intimate with the anxiety that comes when the sun is down and our brains are in nocturnal mode. Terror isn’t the other, for me. It’s always—commonplace. I soak in those waters every night and when the sun rises, I have to choose whether I’m left with a feeling of fatigue and a damaged emotional state, or I can plumb the depths of those treacherous waters and wring out some use from them.

Some days, I can only do the former. Wallowing, yawning, grumping. On other days, the good days, I do the latter. I wrestle the incubus and put it in a chokehold. I beat it into submission and tell it to whisper its secrets to me. And I add every new secret to an ever-growing list of ideas and inspiration for my writing.

I went out to lunch with an old friend recently and he asked me, do you ever worry you’re going to run out of ideas?

It was an easy answer.

No.

I am inundated with them every night. I could write ideas down from now until my dying day and never have time to use them all.

I am a writer, and I am blessed by nightmares.

The Garden of Earthly Horrors

I’ve been shocking myself lately.

As I’ve been working on this horror novella, especially during the drafting process, I found myself pushing my boundaries of comfort. I may be an atheist and a horror writer now, but I was raised Roman Catholic and those hooks of so-called decency still ensnare me.

I made myself squirm, with the goal of making my readers squirm, but even I had to take pause and consider what I was writing.

Where did this come from? From where am I drawing these details?

The internet is a likely culprit. I’m a millennial, after all. My formative years were when the Internet was the wild west. When it was horrific, new, and dangerous. Not like it is now, a slow rot of cancer that whips us from apathy to rage at gigabit speeds. No, the new internet was scarring. Shocking. Nascent.

And it was on those just-born pages where maybe I started to cultivate the horrible within myself. I’ve seen some horrific things on the internet, and I don’t just mean two girls, one cup, goatse, or beheadings. I’m not talking about haunted e-mail chains, copypasta, and cursed websites. No, I stumbled upon some truly awful things. I was ten years old when I saw something so vile it changed my perception of humanity forever. And that darkness has likely stuck with me ever since.

So yes, the internet is part of the reason I write horror. It raised me. Literally and figuratively. In the time when I was learning teenage independence, in the years when I left home to go to boarding school, a place with the barest amount of adult supervision, the internet was shepherding me into adulthood.

But that’s not the whole story. I was raised Roman Catholic and if the internet is all of humanity’s sins at your fingertips, Catholicism is the comfortable chair you sit in to enjoy your vices.

For who created sin?

As damaging as the internet was to my psyche, and continues to be to my health, how damaging was all the talk of fire and brimstone to a child? How impressed upon me were fear and damnation? I grew up in Europe, so I toured the bone ossuaries and skeleton chapels. I saw the torture devices of the Inquisition. I stood beneath the statue of Archangel Michael slaying the dragon. And I fell under the spell of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, at seven years old.

All products of Catholicism.

No, all of the blame cannot be placed at the feet of the internet. The horrific things were already there inside of me before I ever loaded the first website. How dare the vestigial religion be shocked by what I’m writing now when it is its architect? How dare the creator of sin and hell judge my words?

You’re going to hear a lot about nightmarism in my upcoming blog and social media posts. It’s the name I’ve given my kind of horror writing. I’m looking forward to exploring what that is with you, but in the meantime, I leave you with this:

I’m going to keep writing my nightmarist fiction until I kill the last vestiges of Catholicism within me. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Stay frosty, my friends.