INTERVIEW: Gregory Frost
By Jon McGoran
JON McGORAN: What was the inspiration for your story “Ellende”?
GREGORY FROST: It’s . . . complicated. Let me see if I can enumerate these things in sequential order. My grandparents owned two large cabins on Big Sandy Lake in northern Minnesota. They always stayed in one, and my family, when we came up in the summer, stayed in the other one. We fished, skied, swam, and drove further north, right to the Canadian border one year. So, there was that. Then, back in my late teens I became a huge reader of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and other Arkham House authors, thanks to a college art professor of mine, Gaylord Torrence, who got me to read Lovecraft. The summer after my second year of college, I packed up my typewriter, paper, and a girlfriend and drove to my grandparents’ cabin with the intention of writing a novel—about which, I should add, I knew sweet FA (this novel proved to be 74 pages long and it lives in a box, which is where it belongs). I also tried writing something Lovecraftian set on the lake, with ancient structures on one of the tiny island; it mixed Cthulhian elements with Ojibwe lore, and it was pretty terrible, but the idea of relocating Lovecraft’s haunted New England resonance to the woods of Minnesota never really went away. Jonathan Maberry’s invitation to write a story for the new incarnation of the magazine gave that desire a voice.
JON McGORAN: When does “Ellende” take place? Why did you choose that period, and how important is that to the story?
GREGORY FROST: It’s set around 1950. To an extent I landed there because the car, the Packard Club Coupe, is virtually identical to my grandfather’s Packard, right down to the cigar smell of the interior. It was a time when you had these odd cabin properties sprinkled around all the lakes up there, but semi-isolated. Everything wasn’t built up. Although it’s earlier than my childhood experience of it, the setting really is the northern Minnesota of my childhood. What cemented it was giving the two main characters the first names of my grandparents. My grandfather was a doctor who, family legend has it, had delivered half the babies in Des Moines, Iowa. He and my grandmother are definitely not the Floyd and Jessie of the story, but their names felt exactly right. One of my early readers, who didn’t know any of this, said that she thought the names perfectly evoked the period for her. So I think that worked both for me writing it and for the reader encountering the story.
JON McGORAN: Is this a style and genre you often write, or is this more of a departure for you?
GREGORY FROST: I think I write strange fiction, however you care to define that. I try to flex all over the place, though, in terms of voice. The last story I wrote before this, which just came out in Asimov’s Magazine, is a first-person sf narrative told by a character living in a trailer park in a small town in Iowa. So it does seem I have suddenly started writing “Iowa” stories. I don’t know yet if this is a departure or a direction.
JON McGORAN: What do you think of as your native genre?
GREGORY FROST: Do I have to pick? I have always loved horror fiction, by which I generally mean darker, troubling, discomfiting fiction—everything from Shirley Jackson to Nathan Ballingrud to Livia Llewellyn. My first published story was about the last five days in the life of Edgar Allan Poe. But the story after that was a science fiction story set in a spaceship trapped above the event horizon of a black hole. And the one after that was about a magazine cover artist living in an apartment complex where something has moved into the communal trash dumpster. So, again, I think my native genre is strange or weird. Fortunately, that comes in lots of flavors.
JON McGORAN: Did you write the story specifically for Weird Tales, and if so, how did knowing that’s where it would be published affect your writing of it?
GREGORY FROST: I did write this specifically for Weird Tales. So I knew I was dipping my pen into the Lovecraft inkwell (I write longhand, beware!). I’d recently read The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle and really admired how he shredded the racism of “The Horror at Red Hook.” And I thought, okay, I can’t do that, but I can sort of confront Lovecraft’s misogyny and see where it takes me. So, knowing this was set in this time, and who these two people were by name, and that vague beginning place, I just started writing. This became one of those stories where all the way along I probably came to each scene maybe a heartbeat ahead of the reader.
JON McGORAN: Does having a story in the new Weird Tales carry any special meaning for you?
GREGORY FROST: Oh, absolutely. This is the second story I’ve sold to WT. (The first one—maybe two magazine incarnations ago—called “So Coldly Sweet, So Deadly Fair,” was about Abraham Van Helsing’s very first encounter with a vampire, and the death of his son and loss of his wife, both of which are mentioned in passing in Dracula.) But also, as I said back at the start, my teen years were fairly steeped in authors who had published in Weird Tales in the 1930s and ’40s, and writers such as Ray Russell, and Charles Beaumont (who ultimately adapted Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for film). So being in Weird Tales definitely feels right.
JON McGORAN: What is your earliest or most vivid memory of Weird Tales magazine?
GREGORY FROST: I think my first actual memory of encountering Weird Tales directly was via the anthologies with that title that Lin Carter edited in the early 1980s, which mixed the Robert E. Howards and August Derleths with younger writers like Tanith Lee and Steve Rasnic Tem. Somewhere I think I still have those paperbacks hiding away in a box.
JON McGORAN: Can you tell us about a particular Weird Tales story that stands out in your mind, or that was particularly influential for you?
GREGORY FROST: It might well be Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” When I read it now, the resolution seems obvious, but I remember being astonished by the story at the time. But there are also Manly Wade Wellman stories, some of which appeared first in WT, and which take on special meaning for me, as I got to know him in the early 1980s when I lived in North Carolina. (Author David Drake used to throw pig-picking parties, a kind of large nighttime barbecue, drawing up a group of more-or-less local writers. We all sat around David’s property, drinking beer; Manly, who was still going strong when I first met him, displayed that storyteller’s brilliance in talking around the fire late into the night.)
JON McGORAN: What makes Weird Tales special to you?
GREGORY FROST: I think it’s the magazine equivalent of Christopher Lee as Dracula. Every time we are certain he’s been killed and cannot possibly come back, there he is again in yet another sequel. Weird Tales is like that—there is always a new generation hungry for the weird, dark, and unsettling. And there seems to be enough to go around.
JON McGORAN: Where can fans find you online?
GREGORY FROST:
Website: https://gregoryfrost.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gregory.frost1
Twitter: @gregory_frost
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jon McGoran is the author of ten novels for adults and young adults, including the award-winning YA science fiction thrillers Spliced, Splintered and Spiked, and the acclaimed science thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up. He has also written numerous short stories. He is a freelance writer, developmental editor, writing coach, and cohost of The Liars Club Oddcast, a podcast about writing and creativity.