INDIGENOUS HERITAGE IN HORROR MONTH: INTERVIEW WITH THEO VAN ALST

What inspired you to start writing?

I wrote here and there my whole life, gave it a half-hearted shot in my 20s, but I don’t think I had all that much to say then, mostly opinions and essays, and I had a GED, so not much training in writing or anything at all, really. When I went to college in my 30s, I wrote a bit more, but life was too busy then for me to really give it the attention it needed, deserved. I published an edited volume of Stephen Graham Jones’s work when I was 50 — that was my first major work. But I had always been a good storyteller, like my grandpa, and a few people, including my wonderful wife, were like, “Maybe you should start writing some of this stuff down.” So, I did. I’ve always been a night person, and I started writing at night after everyone had gone to bed. Pretty soon I had enough for a book. And then another. The stories kept coming. I’ve been able to read as far back as I can remember, so that’s a lot of prep, I guess. And now, it’s my thing. I get to say, “I’m a writer.”

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

A couple of things are happening there. With writing, there’s a foundation of instability. You’re the writer; you get to call the shots and create the world. Is this thing possible? It is if I say so. Do these moments, these characters really appear in the world, in these ways? In mine they do. As long as you can work to create that space where those things are possible, they are.

The other is the idea of monsters. For me, as a little kid, Frankenstein and Quasimodo were these man-made monsters. But they weren’t actual monsters — just folks doing their thing, trying to make their way in the world. They didn’t ask to be created the way they were, didn’t ask to be vessels into which everybody projected their hate and insecurities. They had to deal with those things in life-threatening ways, but their humanity was far deeper than that of the “humans” who attacked them, tormented them. So, for me, exploring the monstrous in humanity is fascinating. The stories are endless.

Do you make a conscious effort to include Indigenous characters and themes in your

writing and if so, what do you want to portray?

Sometimes I do, but mostly those are just the characters, the ones telling you their stories. I think maybe underlying those moments when you’re aware and not, of what you’re doing in your writing, you want to say, “Hey. What’s up? Still here. Maybe in unexpected places, doing unexpected things, but yeah. Howdy.” That matters.

What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?

Horror is a matter of view. It should engender perspective, make you think about what’s happening when all this terrible shit is going down, how it’s affecting everyone involved, why it’s happening, what are the backstories? ‘Cause that’s where the weird and interesting is. Horror’s first cousin Crime is the same way. Why is this happening? For me, in either of those genres, I’m interested in the why and knowing how the players got there. You gotta have empathy to understand the draw, the story.

How have you seen the horror genre change over the years? And how do you think it will

continue to evolve? 

I think a lot of genres, whether it’s something like Spaghetti Westerns or, say, Martial Arts (and here I’m mostly referencing film/TV), it goes through stages where it’s serious, then artistic or literary, political, social, pastiche, and finally comic, eventually comes to the end of a cycle, and waits for some kind of rebirth (like American Westerns, which are continuously pronounced dead, but reappear every decade). But horror? Horror is a seriously plastic genre, able to accommodate all of the above and never die. Why? Because humans create horror every day. The human capacity for hideousness and redemption is boundless. We’ll always have horror. 

How do you feel the Indigenous community has been represented thus far in the genre and

what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?

I think the Indigenous community has been woefully underrepresented in horror. An entire community that’s living in a postapocalyptic world with less than 1% representation in the publishing world? That’s a f*$kn scandal right there. I remember when I first started thinking about putting together something that would eventually become NEVER WHISTLE AT NIGHT (NWAN), I had two things in mind. One was the stories we’d tell each other around firepits and hotel lobby tables late at night after everyone else had gone to bed, and the other was a Facebook group I won’t name because I don’t want folks raiding those pages, but it had hundreds and hundreds of stories that folks posted plain as day that were scary as shit. Holy moly! So, yeah. There are a lot of stories to be told. When we put the anthology together, it was vital that we got new voices out there, and NEVER WHISTLE AT NIGHT is almost half open-call stories. I’m hopeful we get to do more volumes. And that folks will read Indigenous horror authors beyond American Indian Heritage Month.

Who are some Indigenous horror authors you recommend our audience check out?

Well, everyone knows Stephen Graham Jones, of course. You could fill lots of shelves with his work. But the NWAN Table of Contents will send you down great roads, and that includes my co-editor Shane Hawk along with folks like Richard Van Camp, Waubgeshig Rice, Tiffany Morris, and Mathilda Zeller. And Jessica Johns and Ramona Emerson. And don’t sleep on our Indigenous cousins, folks like Gabino Iglesias, Cina Pelayo, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

What is one piece of advice you would give horror authors today?

I think it’s the same as with any genre, write the stuff that scares you most. Just put it out there. Write for you first. Don’t worry about the audience.

And to the Indigenous writers out there who are just getting started, what advice would you give them?

I don’t have to tell you that the stories are everything, but because they are, make sure you give them everything you have. Every time. Or don’t bother. The ancestors will know what you did.

Bio:

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (enrolled Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians) is a bestselling author and editor, and the Tilikum Professor and Chair of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of Chicago-set award-winning mosaic novels Sacred Smokes and Sacred City as well as the editor of The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. His co-edited (with Shane Hawk) Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology was published in September 2023 by Vintage / Penguin Random House. A bestseller in both the US and Canada, it received its tenth printing less than a month after release. An Active HWA member, his Southern Gothic novella Pour One for the Devil will be released by Lanternfish Press in March 2024 and his third collection of linked stories, Sacred Folks, will be published in Fall 2024 by the University of New Mexico Press. His work has appeared in Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Apex Magazine, Red Earth Review, Indian Country Today, and elsewhere.