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Short-Story Review by Lee Murray
"Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (a short story by Christa Carmen, published in In Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror, edited by Mark Matthews.
What inspired you to start reading? I started reading at a young age thanks to Sesame Street and wanted to work with books and reading. I became a librarian after first getting a master's degree in religious studies. After changing my mind about seeking a Ph.D., I got a library science master's and started working in a library branch. Before graduate school, I worked as a manager in a bookstore and managed a comic book store so I have worked with books for a while. Currently, selecting adult fiction is among my responsibilities for my library system.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? My mother was a huge fan of horror. The first adult horror novel I read was Cujo. I was in middle school and ran out of my own books to read on a family vacation so I borrowed one of my mother's books.
What inspired you to start writing? I started writing twice, once in college and then again almost ten years ago. When I started writing in college, I remember wanting to learn to express aspects of my life that I had never been able to talk about. I'd had a strange childhood and wanted to write about it because whenever I'd tried to speak about it, things had never come through properly. When I started writing again later, it was because I felt a strong need to concentrate on some kind of creative work.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? The wonderful variety of stories being told. I remember feeling very inspired to write again reading Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney as well as the anthology set American Fantastic Tales edited by Peter Straub...
What inspired you to start writing? The magic of getting lost in a story. For a moment in time, whether two hours in a movie or days in a book, you are immersed in another life, experiencing their triumphs and losses, joy and sadness, courage and fear. As a kid, I wanted to live in stories forever, but I didn’t want them to end so I began to create stories of my own.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? Fun fact about me, horror wasn’t my first chosen genre, it was escapist fantasy...
What inspired you to start writing? Once I started tabletop gaming, I started writing character stories. Then I started writing plotlines for games. Then I discovered I had other stories I wanted to tell. I’m not one of those people who “always” wanted to be a writer. I was more of a reader. It was a good way to decompress from my tech job. However, once I got the writing bug, I didn’t stop. I started being professionally published when I turned 31.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? I vastly prefer supernatural horror over realistic horror.
What inspired you to start writing? Believe it or not—I didn’t know I was going to become a writer! I planned to be a film director, and that’s what I studied in college at Harvard. Growing up in a small town in Virginia in the 90s, we didn’t have access to the internet or information like we do now. Also, the “YA” explosion hadn’t hit yet. The books we read in school (largely by “white” men) didn’t resonate with me. I couldn’t see myself in them, or how I would write them. But I gravitated heavily to Anne Rice and Stephen King, who are massive influences.
What inspired you to start writing? I loved words from the moment I could read them. Any group of words formed stories in my head and on paper. A set of spelling words turned into a crime story or a ghost story. Reading the dictionary had me scribbling notes of ideas, some of which I still have. So I write because stories present themselves to me, and I’m ever grateful. This is the case to this day: My latest novel, The Underhistory was inspired by a box of old postcards!
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? I didn’t know it was a genre for a long time! I just knew I loved the stories that scared me and surprised me, the ones full of ghosts and monsters, and evil acts punished and unpunished. I loved stories that didn’t end happily, and some of my early fiction re-imagined endings to make them less predictable...
What inspired you to start writing? I suspect it had something to do with following Alice down the rabbit hole. And through the Looking-Glass. Maybe all of the times I checked out Where The Wild Things Are from the Public Library (starting before I could read). Maybe listening to the grimmest Fairytales, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, “The Raven” and “The Highwayman”. Maybe learning to read and finding my life transformed by books — each cover I opened, a doorway to someplace new and thrilling! Possibly my Frankenstein Book Report, which I read aloud in class, and the Principal led me down the hall so I could watch him post the paper in a glass case outside the School Office. Maybe winning Third Place in a scholastic competition with a Werewolf Play in Seventh Grade. But I was already writing stories, poems, and plays at home — all illustrated. You see, it was not any one thing, nor any single defining moment. Writing has long consumed me. I started a Horror Novel in High School and never finished. The pages are lost, yet I still remember the first line: “It was the total dark of the universe.” Teachers, Librarians too, told me since I was small that I should be an artist or a writer. And I believed them. So here I am.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? Childhood being a rather dark and murky place, a black-and-white world of intense shadows and the blinding glare of people who could not be trusted . . . the Horror Genre nonetheless appealed and consoled, whispered to me at night and told me that this was where I belonged....
What inspired you to start writing? I learned to read really young when I was just 3 or 4, and I had this huge imagination. I just wanted to create. The very first book I ever wrote and published, I did when I was just 5 years old. It was a book of poetry, which is funny because I don’t think I had even read any poetry at that time. I just loved words and using them to make pretty things. I guess I still do.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? When I was young, I remember that we lived in a crappy trailer. At night, the wind would howl against my window screen and make this terrible howling noise.
What inspired you to start writing? I started writing the same way a lot of authors do: I couldn’t find stories that I wanted to read, so I had to write them myself. I grew up in a Chinese Filipino Evangelical Christian household and went to a Catholic all-girls school, which means I grew up more repressed than your average lady. I was made fun of for liking to read (a cousin actually laughed at me for spending my summers reading, for example) for wanting to write, and especially for wanting to write horror. It wasn't an easy journey, but it was also fun. I actually didn't know I was writing horror. I had an interest in the paranormal so I wrote what I wanted to write. A friend had to physically take me aside and explain that what I was writing was horror. When my first story was published in a national newspaper, my mom, a devout Christian, told everyone about it without knowing what I had written. Some church people actually read it and complained to my mom that it gave them nightmares. She was horrified that her eldest daughter would shame her in that way, to the point that on the day of the launch of my first book, she said, “Why can’t you write Christian books?” Those were the only words she spoke to me that day. She's proud of me now, sure, but only because everyone else is proud of me and not because she thinks I did anything noteworthy...
What inspired you to start writing? I wanted to be a writer and began writing stories as early as age eight. Mainly for myself since there were no options for getting published as a child. Years later, when I took a writing class for science fiction, fantasy, and horror in my junior year at El Cajon Valley High School, the teacher encouraged me to submit a story of mine for a writing contest he knew of. I began checking the writers’ guide in the local library to find places to submit some of my poetry. Three poems of mine, “The Horse”, “Sands of Time”, and “The Leopard” were accepted, and after signing a contract to publish them in the poetry magazine Hyacinths and Biscuits, I received my first check. I was only 17 and a couple of months from graduating high school. I began writing more poetry and short stories, publishing more poetry, and even an article that ended up in True Story Magazine in the 70s. But I did not publish my first story, which happened to be a horror story, until 2000.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? I read horror stories; how can one not when Edgar Allan Poe and other writers of his era, Bram Stoker, Sir Author Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, Washinton Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu who wrote dark stories, were taught in the English classes I took from junior high to college.