TIH 195: Nick Mamatas on Japanese Fiction, Self-Defining Politics, and Creative Writing MFAs

In this podcast Nick Mamatas talks about Japanese Fiction, Self-Defining Politics, Creative Writing MFAs, and much more.

About Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is the author of a number of novels: Move Under Ground, Under My Roof, Sensation, The Damned Highway (with Brian Keene), Bullettime, Love Is the Law, The Last Weekend, and I Am Providence, three collections; 3000MPH In Every Direction At Once and You Might Sleep…, The Nickronomicon; and the novella Northern Gothic. He is also the editor of the anthologies The Urban Bizarre, Phantom #0, Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake), and Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow). As part of his day job, he co-edited the Locus Award nominee The Future Is Japanese (with Masumi Washington), Phantasm Japan (with Masumi Washington), Hanzai Japan (with Masumi Washington), and Mixed Up (with Molly Tanzer).

Show notes

[02:20] Working for Haikasoru (Viz Media) and interest in Japanese fiction
[06:10] Japanese vs Western fiction
[13:45] I Am Providence
[19:35] Rich Bunting, via Patreon, asks about defining horror
[34:35] Adapting a Brian Asman question re Mount Rushmore of horror fiction
[36:50] Newer writers that have impressed Nick within horror
[39:15] What is a horror that isn’t classically considered horror that you’d put in the genre
[44:30] Rick Siem, via Patreon, asks about authors who have sunk into obscurity that deserve to be back on bookshelves
[49:55] Rick Siem asks about the idea fo ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’
[53:15] Alan Scott, via Patreon, asks about self-defining politics, and the relationship between politics and cultural production
[01:02:40] Andrew M. Reichart, via Patreon, asks about nazis coming to town fad
[01:05:40] Experience studying the MFA
[01:13:00] Who should and shouldn’t taken an MFA
[01:14:50] Connect with Nick Mamatas

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Vastarien

Vastarien. The forbidden tome. The impossible otherworld. A textual entryway into

“…a place where everything was transfixed in the order of the unreal. . . . Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else. Rampant oddity seemed to be the rule of the realm; imperfection became the source of the miraculous — wonders of deformity and marvels of miscreation. There was horror, undoubtedly. But it was a horror uncompromised by any feeling of lost joy or thwarted redemption; rather, it was a deliverance by damnation. And if Vastarien was a nightmare, it was a nightmare transformed in spirit by the utter absence of refuge: nightmare made normal.”

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