Reality Is How Horror Stories Are Born: an interview with Carson Winter, author of The Psychographist

It’s been a hell of a few years for Carson Winter, with short stories published in various magazines and Best Of’s, and a growing number of weird horror novellas under his belt. Jonny Pickering chats with Carson about Thomas Ligotti, what it means to be an American, and the deep seated unease lurking beneath the surface of the weird.

You often mention Thomas Ligotti as one of your favourite writers, and I can see his influence on The Psychographist. What is Ligottian fiction to you and how has Ligotti influenced your work?

Thomas Ligotti was really the beginning of me expanding my perspective of what horror can be. I got into him when a lot of other people did—right when that Penguin edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe came out—and it was a sort of awakening for me. This is horror? Holy shit, yes. This is horror! 

It was the first step to sending me on a personal journey, to divorce the idea of what was supposed to be scary (being murdered, for example), to more personal realms of fear. In Ligotti’s case, his fear is perhaps the most foundational of all: existence itself. And the way he expresses it—through setting, absurdity, urban decay, puppets, clowns, Kafakesque systems—all in his very precise, stylish, and sinister first-person. There’s a sense of individuality in his work that is both admirable and intimidating. 

But if you’re a writer, it instantly becomes a high water mark to imitate. Ligotti is a huge influence on me not only because of his specific imagery and unique worldview, but the fact that he paved a way for me to create my own language of symbols to represent my own personal fears and anxieties. No one writes like Ligotti and his fiction is wholly him. It’s an individual, subjective thing that doesn’t give a fuck about being anything else. To me, that’s the height of artistry and something I’d be lucky to emulate. 

One definition of Weird fiction that I particularly like references a deep underlying uneasiness about the mundane. Both of your books largely take place in mundane settings, Soft Targets in the workplace and The Psychographist in the family home. What draws you to the horror of the everyday and do you think there is a horror in the way we go about our daily lives?

Write what you know, right? 

I think that fiction needs to be personal. It’s gotta bleed honesty from every pore. And to make that happen, I needed to look at my own life. 

For Soft Targets, I was writing about the very real fear of mass shootings, but also feeling like I was a fish in a barrel, waiting for the inevitable day that it Finally Happened. It came straight from my life, the jokes we were telling in the break room, the laminated Emergency Response pamphlet given to us, the feeling that we were trapped and waiting for an impending doom. 

The workplace is mundane, sure. But its also kind of fucking horrifying. 

The same with The Psychographist. I was inspired a lot by what I was feeling around that time, but also what I was witnessing. This was about the time that the big GameStop thing was happening and crypto was taking off like wildfire. At work—a retail environment of mostly working class people—you could see the desperation in their eyes to escape. 

They wanted to get rich, because who doesn’t want to get rich in America? Who wants to clock in every day, eat shit from customers with a smile on your face? We all live these lives. And most of the time we can put on a happy face and deal with it. But it only took one promise, one hope, to get everyone to go all-in on black. 

Fucking scary, right?

But that’s reality. And for me, that’s how horror stories are born. 

How much of that experience do you think is universal and timeless, and how much is specific to your existence as an American in 2024?

God, this is a great question. Because I think about this a lot. Throughout my life, I feel like I’ve always tried to escape the idea that I was an American. I never stood for the pledge of allegiance and to this day displays of patriotism make me uncomfortable. Back in the day, my dream was to move to Canada or Europe or something. As a teen I was a Francophile who rented Jean-Luc Godard flicks (and pretended to like them). 

Now though, I guess I have a more realistic view of my identity. I’m an American, and I don’t think I could escape it if I tried. I was raised with American values, whether I recognize them as American or not. I feel the pull towards individuality, deranged hope, and everything that comes with it, while simultaneously being unsettled by it. 

Which is all to say: I don’t know what is American and what is universal, because the ideas we take for the human condition are oftentimes just extensions of capitalism. 

I’m a product of where I was raised, and even when I (the product), recognize my own flaws, I’m still doing the same things. Maybe that means I’m buying eco-friendly cleaning products instead of the cheap shit, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still buying. 

I think I’ll be untying the knot between the human experience and my experience as an American for the rest of my life. But that’s why we have stories—to express complex, conflicting ideas with symbols, where the narrative’s gestalt is larger than its whole. 

Sticking on this theme for a moment longer, I recently read Paul Jessup’s essay in Nightmare Magazine about ontological horror and the haunting of the everyday, and much of what he writes there made me think of your work. About things appearing superficially normal (as they apparently do to the Hoyers family in The Psychographist), but ‘deep down in the bones of it all it [has] gone rotten’; the warping of reality (as Ollie experiences in Soft Targets); the mask that transforms on a symbolic level (as in your short story “In Haskins”). Do you recognise Jessup’s elements of ontological horror in your work? What do you think of the concept more generally?

What a wonderful essay, and yes, I really see a lot of similarities in my approach to horror. I think it all comes down to the interrogation of the normal—and it’s not just something we’re doing in horror. It’s a society-wide interest right now as we attempt to extricate sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry from our language and thought patterns. We’re taking a hard look at the things we take for granted and trying to untangle them from our personal history (“I never meant it that way.”) and subjective opinions (“I would never do that, so it’s disgusting.”) and see them for what they really are, in the stark light of objective reality. 

Of course, that’s easier said than done. I’m not sure objective reality exists, honestly, so long as we’re observing it with our own, human lenses. But I do think that we’re all trying to do some good, and we’re doing it by challenging the status quo of language, and therefore: reality. 

In fiction, the concept of ontological horror is particularly ripe as it allows us to pull the rug out from under the audience, and ourselves. What if this good thing was bad? What if this thing we have accepted is not true?

Reality is not real. Consequences don’t matter. Identity can be changed. What if the core tenets of the nuclear family were but a mask pulled over greed, lust, and cruelty? 

What ifs are a great starting point for speculative fiction, particularly weird fiction, because they lend themselves to absurdity. Suddenly these fanciful what ifs can be drawn out, expanded, made hyperbolic—and it’s through that magnification process where the story happens. In The Psychographist, scaling up my own feelings toward cryptocurrency, marketing, and my own consumer urges allowed me the room to explore them, dismantle them, and see what made them tick. 

Your job is in marketing, and The Psychographist is a book written specifically as a critique of the marketing industry. What makes marketing so pernicious? How do you view your place in the industry and in the wider system it feeds, with all the discomfort and contradictions that entails?

This is a complex answer, because I think there’s a number of layers of reality here to deal with, unfortunately. 

I got into marketing because it seemed like a natural fit for me and my skill set. I was a creative dude who hated my job. I hadn’t gone to college and needed to figure something out, and fast, or else I was going to drive myself nuts. Marketing was a white-collar office job that promised to pay decently, where I could use my mind and most likely apply some of the skills I’d developed as a writer to my day job. 

It also promised that I could apply some of the skills I learned in my day job to my life as a writer! Win-win, right? A chance to have a job you don’t hate that lets you do fun things you like, while giving you the tools to better promote the version of you that you actually want people to see! Fan-fucking-tastic!

But, there’s another layer of reality. 

I got my degree at Western Governors University, an online college with relatively inexpensive tuition. It’s also self-paced, meaning, if you’re a good reader and have the time, you could potentially knock out a degree fast. Like, really fast. And cheap. Really cheap. 

And I was poor. Maybe not really poor. But poor enough to know that I didn’t have a lot of options and that massive debt could destroy the rest of my life. 

So, where I could go was based on what I could spend. And therefore, my degree options were limited to what were offered at the school I could afford. Marketing was the only one I could kinda-sorta see myself in. 

So no, I’m not a born marketer. But it does almost feel like it was all predetermined, right? Like it was an inevitability. 

But is marketing evil?

Well, yes and no. If capitalism is evil, then marketing might as well be too. But, if we can blind ourselves to that for a second (or else we’ll just have to say everything is evil and close the book), I really think it’s just a set of tools. It can be as invasive as a telemarketer, as manipulative as a magazine cover, or as innocuous as being able to find the thing you’re looking for when you’re looking for it. 

Ultimately, marketing is about connecting the right product with the right audience. It’s the machine that dictates when you’re looking for a plumber, you can open your phone book and find someone to fix your overflowing toilet. And likewise, as much as I bristle about our capitalistic society, marketing is a tool to find others like ourselves, share our art, and promote ideas and causes we care about. 

In marketing, the product really determines how good or bad you feel about your work. And I’m lucky to say that in my day job, I work in social services so that people who need help, can find help. It’s a compromise. But a world like ours is full of them. 

On top of writing and marketing, you’re also an editor at Cosmic Horror Monthly. I’m curious to know what you think contemporary cosmic horror can or should look like? Are there any stories or authors (in CHM or elsewhere) that you think are particularly pushing boundaries and breaking new ground in the genre?

Like any genre, cosmic horror should be personal to the author and interesting enough to get to page two. I think though, the former feeds into the latter there. 

I’m more of a weird fiction guy than a strict cosmic horror aficionado, but I’d love to see the genre break free of Lovecraft and his ilk. Pastiche has turned cosmic horror into a joke, and at CHM, we really love to see authors push beyond the old tropes and find new ways for us to experience weird and existential terrors. 

One of the best stories ever in this regard is “Black Bark” by Brian Evenson, which I think does more with a simple linguistic inversion than anyone’s ever done with a high-strung, academically-inclined narrator babbling at the sight of an octopus. 

To name two favorites though in CHM itself: “We Must Be Rabbits” by Erik McHatton, which I think is a delightfully strange weird fiction tale and “The Swallowed” by Ivy Grimes, who has a voice and sense of the absurd that is entirely her own. 

I always like to ask authors what good stuff they’ve been reading recently, or just for some recommendations for books that deserve more recognition; what have you enjoyed recently or not so recently that you think people should pick up?

There’s been a handful of books I’ve read recently that I’ve really dug. I was lucky enough to blurb Emma E. Murray’s Crushing Snails, which is about as far as you can get from weird fiction, but was a deliciously grotesque serial killer novel. It’s coming from Apocalypse Party, who also released The Psychographist, and even though it wasn’t the typical subgenre I dive into, I couldn’t stop reading. It was a blast and a half and I think people are going to love it. 

The Plastic Priest by Nicole Cushing is another shoe-in to be talked about—everything she writes is a classic in my eyes, and the latest is no exception. I could spend the rest of my life just begging people to please read Nicole Cushing. Funny, horrific, absurd, and always with a lot to say. 

Star Shapes by Ivy Grimes is another one I really enjoyed recently. Ivy’s writing is so uniquely voiced and the stories she writes are almost more fantastical than horrific, but the result is still some of the best weird fiction I’ve read. Star Shapes is such a strange novella and it deserves to be picked up by more people. 

Finally, in the true spirit of marketing, where can folks find your stuff, what are you working on now, and do you have anything new coming out soon we should keep an eye out for?

Am I naturally ambitious or am I just an American raised in a capitalist system that prizes productivity and achievement over anything else? I don’t know, but I have a lot of stuff in the works. 

Next up on the release schedule is an anthology called Howls from the Scene of the Crime. I have a story in there called “The Speakeasy” which is sort of a re-examination of one of my favorite horror tropes from my youth: the classic monster brawl. 

Beyond that, I have a novel coming out with Tenebrous Press called A Spectre is Haunting Greentree. I didn’t really realize I was going to be the capitalist horror guy until I put it together in my head that this would be three in a row! But, yes, this does deal with some of those themes, but it’s also a very different book from either The Psychographist or Soft Targets. 

Spectre is a much more fun, traditional horror novel inspired by the likes of 80s paperbacks. I mean, it’s about scarecrows! But it’s also about me and my anxiety, so it’s a very personal book as well. I really hope people dig it, because I had a lot of fun writing it and the cover is fucking amazing. Seriously, just wait till you see it. 

As for what I’m writing, I’ve just edited my Ligottian sword and sorcery novella titled The Corpse Priest and am now submitting that. I have another novel that I’m working on editing, and another that I’m about to start, but we don’t need to go that far down the pipeline.

You can find me on the sinking ship that is Twitter at @CarsonWinter3, as well as my website carsonwinter.com, but also on the horror writing podcast I co-host with PL McMillan, Dead Languages. 

Thanks Carson, it was a pleasure to have you here.

Thanks so much for having me! I love Seize The Press and the great work you do.