Worcester Speaks #4: Gretchen Felker-Martin
Worcester Speaks #4: Gretchen Felker-Martin
"Horror inflects most great art."
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This month’s interviewee is Gretchen Felker-Martin, Worcester-based author of brutal, inventive, deeply moving novels.
Manhunt (2022) presents a post-apocalyptic New England teeming with feral men, whose testosterone has turned them into rapacious beasts. The central characters, trans women Beth and Fran, must hunt the man-monsters, seek community, and fight a TERF take-over to survive. Reading the book had me curled up on the couch like a terrified shrimp (and laughing aloud at a JK Rowling cameo).
Cuckoo (2024) combines the stomach-turning monstrosity of conversion camps for queer and trans youth with actual stomach-turning monstrosity. It’s one of the most viscerally upsetting books I’ve read, and one of the most beautiful.
(As always, I’ve lightly edited this interview for ease of reading and to hide how inarticulate I am when nervous.)
Liz: Worcester gets a cameo in Manhunt. How else the city has influenced your writing?
Gretchen: Well, I've lived here since 2007, so it's been the backdrop to my life for about half of it at this point. I love Worcester. I think about it all the time when I sit down to write fiction. I would say that this landscape is one of the closest to my thoughts in my heart. I actually have a book that's set in Worcester coming out in a couple years.
Have you been public at all about what that book is about?
So it won't be out until the earliest 2026, but it's called “Mommy” and it's about a relationship between a young sex worker and her much older girlfriend.
And this is also going to scare the hell out of me?
I hope so.
In a piece in TIME, you wrote about why we watch and read stuff about violence and death. You write, “Our body needs these vicarious violent delights in order to process real ones the same way some birds swallow stones to help them digest tough grains and fruits.” That's really beautiful. Has spending time with violence and death in imagination changed your relationship with real mortality?
Yeah, absolutely. I became a really hardcore horror person after my grandfather passed away. We were very close. It was really rough on me, and I found that the only thing that really helped was experiencing extremity through film and books and television. And that was a really transformative couple of years for me. And since then, it's affected my sense of morality, my values, my aesthetic sensibilities, and taste. I would say it's had a very comprehensive impact on me.
Does that extremity extend to other genres? Or is this horror specific?
Well, I think once you get into horror, you discover that the genre is very porous and that it inflects a lot of other great art. The example that I usually go to is the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink movie where Nazi-sympathizing serial killer burns down a hotel while gruesomely murdering a bunch of people and dumping a woman's bloody carcass in bed with his friend. And you would seldom see this classified as horror, probably never. But to me that seems unarguable. Where else would those things happen? So I think horror inflects most great art.
I'm curious to get your thoughts on representation and the demands that an interest in representation puts on authors. Seeing ourselves reflected in art is a basic human thing, I would argue, but I observe a trend where people are wanting the trans character or the queer character, whatever category, to have an unblemished soul and a frictionless existence. Do you feel that? Are you aware of this demand and do you give it any thought whatsoever?
I'm definitely intimately aware of this trend among fiction readers and to some extent professionals in the publishing industry. And fortunately enough, my editor cares about it about as little as I do. I'm not interested in reading or writing pamphlets about “it's normal to have two mommies” or whatever. I'm gay, I know all that. The people that I'm writing for know all that. They don't need to be told, they don't need their hands held, and I'm uninterested in doing it for anyone who doesn't because they're not going to like my stuff anyway.
I also find characters without interior conflict or serious flaws to be really uninteresting. You know, my favorite books are like The Name of the Rose, where the sweet ingenue monk novice character gets a woman killed by waffling back and forth about what he should say about their night together. Or Perfume, which is famously about a remorseless serial killer.
I think that all of the great characters of literature are seriously flawed, difficult people, because when it comes right down to it, every human being has serious difficult flaws. That's what I'm interested in writing about. And I do think that it's moving and powerful to see yourself on the page and on the screen, but I also think that as adults, we place too much weight there. And then too much weight again on this being an empowering experience or an uplifting experience. And we create this trap for artists and audiences where everyone is continually kind of in a big circle of gentle hugs.
Your novels do not offer us a gentle hug. [But] both of your books offer really beautiful depictions of community, and Cuckoo really nails the creepiness of the nuclear family as an organizing, mandatory structure for society. And I'm curious, would you ever write a book about a single protagonist, or is that just not the project for you?
My third story, my novella Black Flame, is actually about a single protagonist.
Did that feel like a very different process for you?
Absolutely. It was a big change. And it was a challenge, but I'm very glad I took it on and I think I will do it again in the future. The chance to be so comprehensive about one person and to have this whole event pass through the filter of their fictional personality was really cool. I very much enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.
I'm curious if you ever gross yourself out while writing. Like, do you ever need to go take a deep breath and drink some ginger ale?
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the things that I find repulsive come my own experiences, especially my experience with body dysmorphic disorder, which is an OCD family disorder that causes you to become fixated on real or imagined imperfections in your body to the extent that you can start hallucinating about them. So you'll imagine that your body is rotting and you'll actually start to smell it or you'll see a blemish and you'll start to interpret it as like an open sore or some sort of necrotic thing. So a lot of the time when I'm writing, I'm putting those experiences on the page, and that can be satisfying, but it can also be aggravating and activating too. And sometimes I do need to step away for a minute and, you know, go dunk my head in some ice water.
Yeah, I've admired your book's depiction of all of the creepy, nasty stuff that can happen in nature. I'm curious if you are into nature documentaries, science journalism… Where are you getting these images and this knowledge of what's possible?
I'm very much into nature and science. I think that in order to be any kind of author worth reading, you have to be passionate about a lot of things. And nature is one of mine along with film and comics and history. So I do watch a lot of documentaries. I do read a lot of science journalists. I'm friends with Asher Elbein who writes for the Washington Post and all sorts of publications. He has a wonderful newsletter called “Heat Death” where he talks about climate and ecology and the animal kingdom and paleontology in a way that I find incredibly engaging. And I've always been fascinated by animals and plants and biomes. Some of my favorite childhood memories are hunting for snakes and frogs in the woods, or just walking around, turning rocks over and seeing what I'd find. I've always loved ponds and pools. I love to sit next to them, look into them, and watch these little worlds unfolding in front of you. I think that nature is really bottomless in terms of what it can give you both an aesthetic experience and as an education about the nature of the world.
I want to know if you would diagnose what's wrong with my brain that I am absolutely unable to watch even the mildest horror movie.
You know, I think for some people it's as simple and as difficult to dissect as why some people like rollercoasters and some don't. I can't stand them. You couldn't cattle prod me onto one. I find them very upsetting and unpleasant. I don't know why, probably something to do with the fact that I'm not great about heights, but I love horror movies. I love to be terrified out of my mind. If I can find something that actually scares me, that's a great day. So I don't know why it works for some people only in the written word or only visually. Probably quirks of neurochemistry that we will never unravel.
You just said something about it being difficult to find something that actually scares you. Have you found anything recently that has actually scared you?
Let me see. I recently watched The Devil's Bath. I don't know if I would say that it scared me, but it did appall me and make me feel just absolutely nauseous, terrible. It's about the historical practice of a sort of a form of suicide by proxy among medieval women where they would kill a child and then immediately confess to local authorities so that they could be absolved before being hanged. And they would only do this if they were uncontrollably suicidal. Because of course, if you commit suicide under Catholic law, you go immediately to hell. So you're creating this emotional landscape where the only way out for these women is to do something really unimaginably awful. And it's about a woman who lives this way and how desperately she tries to do anything else before finally getting shunted into this miserable final option. And it's like watching an ultra slow motion car crash. It's so sad. It's so ugly, it's so repellent. It was a really incredible film.
That sounds like a hard watch.
It was, but I think we live in a world where hatred and antipathy towards children and denial of difficulty with mental health. Those are both very prevalent forces. I think it's a really timely film in spite of being about and really calibrated to the beliefs and morals of the 16th century.
I'm wondering about your Patreon, Deadlights Theater, and I know that you're bringing people together around film on Discord. Is that a complement to in-person independent theater like Worcester Cinema? Is it doing some whole other different thing?
Yeah. It's solely online on Discord. I stream movies on there which has been a really wonderful experience. I wish that we had some kind of in-person element, but it's just not practical.
Is that open for folks to join?
Yes, it is.
And is it horror-focused or all different films?
I would say that it's probably 60-40 horror to non-horror. We watch a lot of classic film as well. We're in the middle of a Hitchcock month right now. And next month is found footage horror for Halloween. And then we have a Halloween Day marathon of cursed places.
Do you have anything else going on that you want to talk about?
I think the next thing I've got coming up is my next book, my novela Black Flame, which is about a really severely repressed Jewish lesbian who works at a film archive. And she's given the job of restoring a recently discovered print of a Jewish exploitation film that was thought to have been destroyed during the Holocaust. And as she spends more and more time with it, she becomes less and less able to distinguish between the world that it presents of black magic and orgiastic sex and intentional depravity and the world around her.
Black Flame comes out in spring 2025 from Tor Nightfire. You can pre-order it here.
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