Leaping at Thorns: Fifteen
Impalements Penned by Andrew Cooper arranges 15 of L. Andrew Cooper's
experimental short horror stories into a "triptych" of
themes--complicity, entrapment, and conspiracy--elements that run throughout
the collection.
The stories span from the
emotionally-centered and violence-mild "Last Move," about a mother
and son whose cross-country move might be complicated by a haunted U-Move
truck, to the almost unthinkably horrific "Charlie Mirren and His Mother,"
also about a mother and son, but their lives take a turn that might be
traumatic for readers as well. While "Worm Would" offers a
psychosexual fantasia on the sheer grossness that is a flatworm,
"Tapestry" uses absurd, sometimes comic violence to take Jessica, the
young professional protagonist, into a political nightmare. The absurd reaches
dark extremes in "Lachrymosa," a story of almost pure hallucination,
and stretches back toward the comic in the brain-and-tongue-twister "Heart
on a Stick." The 'conspiracy' panel of the triptych, from "The Fate
of Doctor Fincher" to "The Special One," is a series of
standalone stories that each adds important details to the fictional world and
grand scheme of Dr. Allen Fincher, who also lurks in the background of Cooper's
novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines.
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Leaping at Thorns
(BlackWyrm, 2014), collects 15 unpublished horror short stories that originated
in moments throughout my adult life so far—the first draft of the oldest story
in the book I wrote when I was 19. Until published, and sometimes even after, I
continued to revise, edit, tinker… so the stories, as well as the book as a
whole, have almost twenty years of development. To discuss what I learned over
that time period (which includes my entire post-secondary education and career
as a professor first of English literature, then of writing and communication,
now of film and digital media) would tax the patience of a tax attorney. So,
below, I've focused on a few things I've picked up during the final phase,
getting the book out to the world.
1. It’s okay to be a sick
son of a bitch.
My publisher presented me
with a certificate granting me the honorific status of “Sick Son of a Bitch”
for having written and published Leaping at Thorns, which is indeed a brutal
and sick collection of tales. I am genuinely proud of this certificate, prouder
of it than most of the honors I’ve been lucky enough to receive in my life.
First, I’m proud because it means I’ve found a niche and a community where the
stuff I’ve been producing my whole life—with no idea, until a few years ago, if
I’d ever really publish my fiction—is not only tolerable but actually exciting
because it’s sick. And while I don’t think my publisher had this dimension of
sickness in mind when he created the certificate (he’s far too kind and
sensitive), the truth is, the nasty edge of many of these stories comes
straight from my own history of clinical depression and possibly much deeper
(untreated but resolved) mental illness issues that arose in my early twenties.
My writing really comes from two places—dealing with sickness in my head,
something we all have to one degree or another, and dealing with sickness in
the world. I abhor violence anywhere but in fiction, but in my fiction, the
violence really ought to put people in messed up states of mind. The book isn’t
for kids, but for adults, this experience can be profound and productive, or so
I’ve heard—and so it’s okay that this particular sick son of a bitch named L.
Andrew Cooper is providing it.
2. For writers who refuse
to follow trends, short story collections are awesome.
While I’m hoping for more
reviews (the book has only been out for a month), most reviews and interviews
related to Leaping at Thorns so far have pointed out that many of the stories,
which I label as “experimental,” carry a significant “WTF” factor. I don’t
really believe in realism, and I think editors who insist on rational character
motivation and conventional narrative resolution tend to take a lot of the
horror out of horror—few things are more horrific than phenomena that frighten
us but defy logical explanation. Some of my stories, therefore, don’t fit into
mainstream magazines and such that demand for authors to provide readers with
more conventional experiences of stories with easy-to-follow characters and
beginnings, middles, and ends. For my genre, horror, I’m also risky in avoiding
pre-sold character types. Don’t get me wrong—I love me some good zombie,
vampire, werewolf, and ghost stories, and some of the creatures that show up in
my stories are arguably variants on these monstrous archetypes—but nothing in
Leaping at Thorns speaks directly to these pre-existing horror markets. So
again, one of these stories by itself is a homeless oddball. But with 14
friends, each story in the collection has a context where the absence of the
more familiar trappings of contemporary horror is a unifying factor. The
stories work better in a collection because the collection creates trends
within itself.
3. Present-day me and
years-ago me are different people.
I revised and edited all
the stories in Leaping at Thorns in the months prior to publication, so they’ve
all been filtered by my present-day brain, which belongs to a publishing author
who thinks about things like audience accessibility—i.e., I think about the
fact that readers might benefit from some WTF but at least need to have
something to hold on to while they read. However, the me that first drafted
many of these stories, particularly the oldest stories in the collection, didn’t
give much thought to audience because he wasn’t thinking about publication. My
19-year-old self, for instance, was still obsessed with William Faulkner,
stream of consciousness, sentences that go on for pages without full-stop
punctuation and with embedded phrases locked inside other embedded phrases… a
lot of that sort of stuff had to go because it would do a disservice to my
audience. However, certain moves I see myself making in stories like “Hands”
and “Light,” both older, I know I would never make in writing a story now, but
they’re moves I would have no problem with another author making. So in
preparing this book, I had to learn to draw a line between audience-unfriendly
prose that had to go and narrative moves that another me made that deserved to
stay.
4. Same stories +
different me = easier publication.
One could say that my
marvelous present day skills at revision and editing make all the difference. I
don’t believe that, though. While some of the stories in Leaping at Thorns had
never seen the light of day, I did send a few off to rejections. I eventually
stopped submitting stories almost completely, as there’s little money and a lot
of time involved in the revolving submissions processes. However, once I had a
couple of novels, some good reviews, and a bit of a following, I started
sending out some stories again… some of the same stories broadly rejected
before… and got picked up immediately. I’m not famous or anything, but I’ve
climbed a few rungs. This is just to say to other aspiring writers: if you’ve
ever suspected that the quality of your writing is not at issue, rather your
market position, you might very well be right.
5. Maybe, just maybe, I
don’t have to consider “L. Andrew Cooper” to be a fictional character.
I’ve been very fortunate
to work with BlackWyrm Publishing, a small press that lets me publish my grim
stories—my novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines—my way. Each
of those novels is politically charged, a bit more intellectual than standard
horror fare, but chock full of brutal violence and page-turning suspense. With
each, though, I felt worried that I had to keep my inner nerd at bay. The
novels are, plainly put, less experimental than Leaping at Thorns. The recent
short story collection is the biggest risk I’ve taken so far in terms of
actually letting my deep nerd side come out and play with the sick son of a
bitch side, and in that sense, it’s more who I am, both the past me and the
present me, than anything I’ve published. The result is that Leaping at Thorns
is simultaneously the sickest and most intellectual work of fiction I’ve
published. And so far the reaction seems to be not only that this revelation of
me-ness is not only okay but perhaps the best work I’ve ever turned over to the
public. So maybe when I’m wearing my horror writer hat, I don’t have to pretend
that I’m not also a complete geek for the history of philosophy and virtually
every form of art our species has invented. Maybe the sum of the me-s is a
viable author figure for the body of work I’m building. So maybe being “L.
Andrew Cooper” can be the same thing as being myself—whatever that means.
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Author Bio
L. Andrew Cooper thinks
the smartest people like horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. Early in life, he
couldn't handle the scary stuff--he'd sneak and watch horror films and then
keep his parents up all night with his nightmares. In the third grade, he
finally convinced his parents to let him read grownup horror novels: he started
with Stephen King's Firestarter, and by grade five, he was doing book reports
on The Stand.
When his parents weren't
being kept up late by his nightmares, they worried that his fascination with
horror fiction would keep him from experiencing more respectable culture. That
all changed when he transitioned from his public high school in the suburbs of
Atlanta, Georgia to uber-respectable Harvard University, where he studied
English Literature. From there, he went on to get a Ph.D. in English from
Princeton, turning his longstanding engagement with horror into a dissertation.
The dissertation became the basis for his first book, Gothic Realities (2010).
More recently, his obsession with horror movies turned into a book about one of
his favorite directors, Dario Argento (2012). He also co-edited the textbook
Monsters (2012), an attempt to infect others with the idea that scary things
are worth people's serious attention.
After living in Florida,
South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California, Andrew now
lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he teaches at the University of
Louisville. Burning the Middle Ground is his debut novel.
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Links
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Praise for LEAPING AT
THORNS
"Reading Leaping at
Thorns takes me back to my childhood, and those sleepless nights of reading
Stephen King’s Night Shift and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Cooper can scare,
shock, and more than that, get you to think about things you never considered
before, and perhaps, were frightened to even contemplate. A real triumph!"
— Michael West, bestselling author of Cinema of Shadows, Spook House, and The
Wide Game
"Leaping at Thorns, a
new collection of short stories from L. Andrew Cooper, will leave you paranoid!
The stories make even the bravest souls cringe in shock and horror. For fans of
the genre, this is a rare and fantastic treat, sure to give you gooseflesh and
nightmares!" — John F. Allen, author of The God Killers
"Once you start an L.
Andrew Cooper story, you can’t stop, even if you have to squint between the
fingers of your hand as it covers your face. Here’s a collection of 15 such
stories. Modern horror at its best, Enjoy." — R.J. Sullivan, author of
Haunting Obsession
"Cooper both frequently
and brilliantly focuses on the human element in his tales with the
protagonists’ flaws and pains exposed for the reader to vicariously revel in
while the darkly delightful antagonists/archfiends of all shapes and sizes
often take a back seat in the storylines, which many would argue is the
hallmark of great writing. Highly recommended!" — G.L. Giles, author of
Water Vamps
"Each story reads
like a frightening nightmare from which you don’t want to wake." —
Christopher Kokoski, author of Dark Halo
"Cooper’s imagination
delves into the bizarre, creating horrific images through windows in our minds
to view." — Brick Marlin, author of Land of the Dead
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Note: I had the pleasure
of getting to know Andrew Cooper two ways, one, he reviewed my TRANSPORT (Book
One) short novel for Seventh Star Press, and interviewed me a bit after the
fact. Two, I met him at the Imaginarium writers convention in Louisville KY
2014. I had the opportunity to talk to him and sit in on his LEAPING AT THORNS
book launch. His publisher, BlackWyrm, gave out all sorts of free goodies at
the launch. I even acquired a "tapeworm" as Andrew has a story in the
book that involves a tapeworm.
Andrew is a very nice
gent, and very talented. I recommend his book. (Plus a book of short stories is
always fun because if you don't necessarily enjoy the piece you are reading,
there is another one a few pages down.)
PJW Nov 2014
