Interview with horror author and editor Joe Koch

Tell us a little bit about yourself! What is your role in the horror community?

I’m a horror author and editor. I’ve been writing since 2015 after being a visual artist for the first few decades of my life. The little bit of success I’ve had writing has come pretty fast. I’m lucky. I’m delighted with what I can do with words creatively and with the responses I hear from readers. It’s everything I sought to do through painting and drawing but never quite attained.

My most recent publication is “The Wingspan of Severed Hands,” a cosmic body horror novella based in equal parts on the Grimms fairy tale “The Maiden Without Hands” and Robert Chambers’ “The King In Yellow.” Before that came out, my short novella “The Couvade” was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2019, and I’ve had over 50 short stories published in places like “Year’s Best Hardcore Horror,” “Not All Monsters,” and “Liminal Spaces.”

I’ll have a new collection out April 19th called “Convulsive” with fifteen horror stories about religion, gender, abuse, and desire. It’s been called transformative, fearsome, heart-rending, lots of great things, and some of my friends have talked about feeling inspired to push their work further after reading it. I’m so glad to do that for other people. If my role in the horror community is the lunatic that gives you permission to push creative boundaries, I’m satisfied with that.

What was the first thing you encountered that made you fall in love with horror?

Old black and white horror movies on Saturday afternoon really thrilled me as a kid. I always liked monsters instead of the dolls I was expected to play with. I was actually scared of a ton of things as a kid, but I liked movies that promised to scare me or presented a mystery. My favorite monster was the vampire, and back then that would have been Bela Lugosi and possibly Christopher Lee. Although, I feel like I didn’t see a horror movie in color until much later, but we were poor and most likely just didn’t have a color TV, now that I think of it.

So maybe because we had bats in the eaves or roof or whatever, I recall feeling it was entirely plausible I was a vampire. It seemed to explain why I felt so different from the examples of humans I had encountered up until then. I was less than six years old, so anything seemed viable. You don’t have a solid grasp of reality versus fiction at that age, and I was not very interested in reality as a child anyway. The idea of physical transformation, which the vampire undergoes at will, voluntarily and with pleasure (unlike the werewolf, who is fraught with guilt); well, that really appealed to me. I think it remains present in my writing today.

What does the horror community mean to you? 

It’s like my reading and writing family. Movies and gaming, too. With pandemic isolation and coming out roughly coinciding for me, it’s been an invaluable support system. I’ve made good friends in addition to making “career” connections. I’m putting “career” in quotes because as much as I’d love to make a good living on writing, I’m not willing to treat my creative endeavors as a sport or competition or numbers game where I fleece readers. I have no interest in winning against others or achieving prosperity through exploitation. I feel like people have been harping on me to monetize my creative efforts since I first learned to speak, and I’m not interested in approaching art that way.

The horror community connects me with other writers, readers, artists, and thinkers who share aesthetic goals. It feeds the brain machine. It’s also the emotional satisfaction of finding all my fellow vampires finally, especially in the queer horror community. I love that we can rally together and be outspoken in our fiction. I love the humor and kindness of horror people. Really, there’s no denying it; we are the best people.

What have been your favourite stories that you have written and why?

Choosing favourites is the absolute worst. How dare you! Like sorting out children for human sacrifice. (Sorry; too dark?)

Each story I’ve written has a certain amount of love or passion in it, no matter how sick or twisted. I don’t write anything I don’t care about deeply or don’t feel urgently at the time. However, if forced to choose, I’ll say “The Wingspan of Severed Hands.” It’s my first long piece, and kind of an impossible task when I think about it retroactively.

Its premise and structure and language are all way too ambitious and complicated for a newby writer; but I wanted to make something I hadn’t seen before exactly, and the vision of it was very clear to me, even though that may sound corny. It took quite a few passes of editing and refining, but I think it stands a singular achievement. Most importantly, it’s reached readers and really touched a few of them. It didn’t hit the ground running as a new release, and I hope it gets more attention as the years go by.

Who are some of your favourite horror authors and why?

Didn’t I just say I hate choosing favorites? Okay, okay; let’s see…

Because I’ve just spent several months getting very intimate with their work as an editor, I need to give a huge shout out to our “Stories of the Eye” authors. Digging into each story revealed the layers of careful crafting and brilliant imaginative thought that went into each one. I’m just in awe of the artistry, and I can’t emphasize enough how educational it is to kind of take a story apart and put it back together as an editor. I’m almost scared to try writing again. Will I stand up?

They are: Donyae Coles, Hailey Piper, Ira Rat, M. Lopes da Silva, Gwendolyn Kiste, Roland Blackburn, Brendan Vidito, Gary J. Shipley, LC von Hessen, Andrew Wilmot, Matt Neil Hill, and co-editor Sam Richard. Right now, they are my absolute favorites and it is a huge privilege to work with each one of them.

Your upcoming collection ‘Convulsive’ is due for release in April. What does your process for writing and selecting short stories for a collection look like?

“Convulsive” is my first collection. The stories have all been vetted by being published before in a wide array of places, some obscure and hard to find. And although I’ve been sitting on a sufficient quantity of shorts to make a collection for a long time, I wanted to wait until I had a real book.

By that I mean the strength of each story must hold up in the long term outside of any themed anthology or journal, and they must all interlink thematically. And each story had to go really deep. There is an aspect of play in my writing, and moments of joy and light, but I would not call my approach light reading. The stories cover aforementioned topics of religion, gender, abuse, and desire; they present a complicated view of the intersection of these themes and cover a wide array of voices and genders for a difficult but fluid (and I hope rewarding) experience. The title of “Convulsive” is from a quote by Andre Breton: “Beauty must be convulsive, or not at all.”

We’re so use to seeing queer characters being villanous through representation that is more often than not, harmful. How did it feel to embrace the villain and write about them from that perspective in your story for The Book of Queer Saints?

It was enormously intimidating. First of all, I didn’t think of myself as “queer enough” when Mae first contacted me to write something because I did not come out until later in life. It’s a form of imposter syndrome compounded by good old regular author imposter syndrome that’s very destructive. It’s a wonder I wrote anything at all!

Secondly, once I decided I would contribute despite my personal self-doubts, the story that called to me involved an older person or creature seducing a younger man and taking him in. So it’s about grooming, which is a loaded and dangerous topic and a word employed by people who are trying to strip away the human rights of queer people. To make it worse, there’s some shape-shifting involved in the story, which raises questions about who is grooming who. If the so-called “puriteens” want to come after me, I’m afraid I’ve given them lots to work with.

Ultimately, despite the fears I had, I wrote the story because I’ve been in a multitude of complex relationships at various ages with various differences in age between partners, and the question of how we make and unmake each other in relationships was what I needed to explore after a bad break up. This was the story I needed to write. It’s honest, if not moralizing, and it asks an honest question: Is it worth it? All the strife we go through for love? Would you do it again?

What do you have coming in 2022 that you can talk to us about?

We mentioned my collection “Convulsive” already, and the anthology I’m co-editing with Sam Richard for Weirdpunk Books called “Stories of the Eye;” that anthology is themed on the subject of artists and models and will be released later this year. I have new short stories coming out in anthologies from Cemetery Gates, Castaigne Publishing, Tenebrous Press, and in anthologies themed around the early films of David Cronenberg, the music of Kate Bush, and the actor Nicholas Cage, to name a few oddities. I post when new releases come out and keep a full bibliography running on my blog at horrorsong.blog. I also share updates and some personal nonsense on Twitter @horrosong for anyone who wants to keep up to date.