INTERVIEW: with author Alex Woodroe
Alex Woodroe is a Romanian writer of dark speculative fiction and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated editor-in-chief of Tenebrous Press. She’s the author of Whisperwood, The Night Ship, and Tatratea, and has several short stories and articles published in venues such as Nightmare Magazine and the Nosleep Podcast. Alex lives in the heart of the Transylvanian region of Romania. Recently, we got the chance to catch up with her to discuss The Night Ship, her writing influences, her role at Tenebrous Press, and what is up next in her writing life.
[GdM] Hi Alex, thanks for chatting. Your latest and second novel, The Night Ship, is out now from Flame Tree Press, and in our review we called it “a police-state-gone-apocalyptic tale that offers a ride as dark as its name: tense, chilling survival horror with a gloriously bizarre cosmic threat… and a beating heart of resistance and humanity at its core.” Can you give our readers a plot summary on the truck-centred creepy apocalypse journey that awaits them and who the book will appeal to?
[AW] Of Course! The Night Ship places us right at the moment of a world-ending apocalyptic event of unknown origin, as witnessed by a logging truck driver, his reluctant fiancée, and the hitchhiker they picked up just before the radio alerted them to impending doom.
The core of the plot follows this logging truck turned “sea”-faring vessel—although the sea is just a vast dark nothing—and its three crew members as they pick up radio transmissions from other survivors and try to make sense of where the world has gone.
It quickly becomes apparent that most people are in even worse shape than our crew is, and some of the messages coming through aren’t coming from people at all.
I really hope that it will appeal to readers who like moody survival horror, weird restricted settings, and big “how would you react if…” concepts. I wanted it to be engrossing and escapist to the extreme; to give the feeling that while you’re reading it, the world around you really is gone.
[GdM] The book is set in Communist Romania in the late 80s, and this feels like it has a real impact on the story, as the survivors have already endured a lot of suffering even before the apocalypse. Why did you choose this time and place?
[AW] It probably comes from my belief that the strongest people come out of the harshest circumstances. It would take a special kind of living conditions pre-apocalypse for people to sanely and relatively safely accept that the world as they know it has simply disappeared. People who already live with anxieties and fears beyond reason; people who have already made sacrifices unfathomable. If you want to find whomever in your friend group is best to go to in an extreme crisis, you go to the friend who struggles the most with anxiety, CPTSD; the friend who has the most gruesome childhood stories that give everyone around them pause. You live enough crisis, and a new crisis is just the thing you’re good at and programmed to handle well. You hear “I need help” and you’re locked in; if anything, you’re relieved to be of use. Those are the people I wanted to celebrate in this story—in most stories!
Besides, I feel like it’s such a good and subtle way to learn about what life was really like in another time and another place: by how people are reacting to it after it’s gone. You don’t get to see them try to survive dictatorship, you get to see the effects it has left on them after it’s no longer there, and that’s so much more telling. And the end of the world in The Night Ship might be fiction, but what these people left behind is terribly real, and based on my real family stories.
[GdM] I felt a lot of genre influences reading this— cosmic horror, zombie survival feels, and there’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia in parts. What were your direct influences for the story?
[AW] I will never tire of saying: the horror film Pontypool! For showing me how much you can do with a limited setting and not showing nearly as much as you think you need to. William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” for the oppressive mood and the stunning setting. Survival horror videogames like The Long Dark or yes, even zombie survival stuff. I’m an avid Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead player. People must have noticed there’s a lot of inventory management in this book.
[GdM] Radio transmissions, both helpful and unhelpful, form a key part of the story, as well as in your epigraphs, which range from funny to strange to downright terrifying excerpts of transmissions. Apart from the technological necessity of the time, why did radio form such a key component of the tone as well as plot of the story?
[AW] Do you ever think about the massive cliff of difference there is between our lives right now, and what they would be if we weren’t able to communicate with each other over long distances? If I walk right up to that cliff and look down, there’s another life down there: a place without internet, or without my ability to cross this language barrier between us. For one thing, I’m not a writer down there. I’m not an editor. None of the Tenebrous books have ever been published. The people I love most in my life, the ones who are constantly near me, they’re not there. I’ve never seen my favourite films. I’ve never heard my favourite music.
I don’t like to sit on the edge of that cliff for long, because that’s real horror. That’s what really scares me, losing all this.
So if I take every single other thing away from the characters and readers, the least I can leave them is this, right? Yes, it’s not perfect—not for them and not for us. Yes, half the communications we receive are more harmful than helpful, yes we have to be very judicious of what we embrace and let in.
But how could we keep going at all without it?
[GdM] Now for a very important question: I don’t think your characters give the truck (a la the Night Ship an official name (correct me if I’m wrong!) but what would you have called your trusty apocalypse logging truck?
[AW] Not a proper name, no, not aside from the joke of calling it “The Night Ship” and the response that it’s not a real ship and what they’re navigating ain’t a real night. But at the same time, I think that’s enough of a name, too, because it feels like a promise; a ship implies that somewhere, there’s a dock.
Aside from that, if I had my own logging truck, in Romanian tradition, I’d decorate the top of the windshield with white macramé lace and a name tag with a woman’s name. Probably Mirela.
[GdM] You’re also editor-in-chief of Tenebrous Press, one of the most highly regarded independent horror presses that specialises in critically-acclaimed Weird Horror. The Night Ship definitely has many of the tenets of Weird Horror I would say—first off, what do you define as Weird Horror, or New Weird Horror as you call it at Tenebrous—and has your tenure at Tenebrous influenced your own writing at all in this regard?
[AW] Maybe more the other way around; my identity as a writer and reader is what made Tenebrous what it is today. Our first year we were simply looking for Horror, even if the tendency to look for something fresh and interesting was always there. When it became apparent we were in for the long haul and it was time to pick a clearer direction, I led us to New Weird Horror (and frankly, made up that term entirely) because that’s who I am.
I grew up on eclectic chaotic combinations of books stolen from library shelves before I was old enough to be allowed them, often thirds in series with no access to the first two and no explanations. So I was raised with both the Weirds, like Mieville and Hodgson and Lumley, and the fantastical Zelazny, and the literary Jackson, and the fringe Barker, and the thrilling Yarbro, and the oldest gothic ghost stories of authors lost to time, and whatever I could get my hands on.
From that chaos what could possibly have ever emerged other than something even weirder?
But what I didn’t want is to accept static genre definitions that come with time stamps. I’m the same with music; I refuse to acknowledge anyone saying prog “was a genre in the seventies” and I refuse to acknowledge Weird “was” and New Weird “was” whatever people say they were. Lovecraft is dead, China is gone, and it can’t be New if it isn’t truly new, so New Weird Horror is what’s happening right now.
As for what it is; it’s fluid, like most identities. It’s a version of dark fiction that likes to reject the constraints of genre, to explore big concepts, to focus on the experience of taking us somewhere we’ve never been. Giving us thoughts we’ve never had before. Show us how small we are in the grand scheme of things. For better or worse, it’s a challenging genre, and it enjoys that fully.
[GdM] Tenebrous feels at the forefront of many of the changes in the last decade in horror – new voices, representation, pushing the boundaries of horror through sub-genres like New Weird. What do you make of the horror landscape now, and where do you think we’re headed?
[AW] We get to decide where we’re heading.
You’ll hear a lot of “horror is having a moment” and notice that everyone’s suddenly interested in Weird now, when four years ago we were struggling to get people to acknowledge it’s not just tentacle monsters anymore. And, to a perceptive reader, that might feel ominous, because what happens with trends is they get picked up by the big guns (and that is happening), milked for whatever money the market has to give, and then discarded when everyone’s tired of it. And then you hear that the genre or trope is “done” and “tired”.
Now, we could fall for that and participate in it, accept the box and its limitations…
But that wouldn’t be very New Weird Horror of us, would it?
See, I think we’re increasingly heading for a time of independence and diversity of choice. The age of the star is long over, the influencer is dying, and algorithms are getting worse by the minute. People are renouncing major social media platforms, which seemed inconceivable a handful of years ago, and turning back to the core of what made fandom exciting and amazing: word of mouth, forums, magazines. Catalogues! Newsletters. Article writers, although it’ll be tough for a while as we learn to accurately distinguish the human from the mechanical. It is getting orders of magnitude harder to have a viral hit, yes, but Horror has never truly been about that. All its most wonderful niche subgenres have always thrived on shelves, in the internet’s quiet corners, with a small core loyal audience of absolute raving lunatics, bless their hearts, and that’s where it’s going to return to.
So, in a while, when the big fish say horror and Weird and all of our best fringe genres are “done”? To use a Romanian expression: the dogs bark, the bear passes. Meaning, we’ve got work to do and places to go and the barks don’t need to concern us. And we get to decide where we’re heading.
[GdM] Does being an editor at a press change the way you think and work as a writer, having seen it from the other side?
[AW] I often joke that it might as well be two different brains in the same skull. I can clearly, easily see what another writer needs—the encouragement, the ass-kicking, the way their plot fits together, what they promised and didn’t deliver, what they didn’t dare but should have. But apply any of that to myself? No, don’t be silly, that would be breaking the laws of editor-brain physics.
The one thing it does help with is taking out some of the fear and pressure of submitting work. You can hear “rejection doesn’t mean your story is bad” a dozen times, but you will still never believe it as viscerally as when you see the thousands of things you are forced to pass on even though you have no reason to. That gives you a much more relaxed, come-what-may attitude about the process.
[GdM] What’s up next in the dark-tinted writing adventures of Alex Woodroe?
[AW] TATRATEA!!! And I’m so excited about it!
Tatratea is a novella coming out this October from Clash Books and it’s by far the tightest, Weirdest, and most fun piece yet. It’s a combination cosmic-gothic-botanical-post-apocalyptic-investigative novella which takes place in a gorgeous abandoned manor and its gardens. I think it’s terribly fun, funny, and uplifting, even though people who have read it unfailingly call it the bleakest, most nihilistic thing they’ve ever read. I’ve made interior illustrations for it. There’s a bonus short story set in space. In short, I love it to pieces, which means there’s a good chance I’m going to get panned for this one.
I can’t wait!
Read The Night Ship by Alex Woodroe
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