When I first encountered Corey Farrenkopf online, it was due in part to his literary profile — he’s a writer, an interviewer, and a librarian with a wide-ranging sense of the uncanny. This year brought with it the release of his deubt novel Living in Cemeteries, set in a world similar to our own with one key difference: restless spirits sometimes take revenge on the living for the sins of their ancestors. It’s a wonderfully disquieting book, and we discussed its origins, its evolution, and what’s next for him.

Before reading your novel, I’d been aware of the work you do as a librarian and a very public enthusiast for horror and Weird fiction. Is there any way that that role has had a direct influence or impact on your fiction?

Definitely! I’m not sure in which direction the influence flows more though. As a librarian, I see what books circulate heavily…and it’s usually not what I’m into…which is completely cool – let people read what they want (I’m just pumped they’re reading), but I try really hard to get people to read outside of their comfort zone in the different communities I inhabit, both IRL and online. How are people going to find certain types of literature if they’re never exposed to it? That’s what I try to think about when I’m planning book clubs, writing workshops, and my acquisitions orders in general. Our library offers a rich science fiction, fantasy, and horror collection that includes indie genre fiction and weird short story collections. I’ve always been proud of that. It’s what I love, and hopefully through my enthusiasm, other people will get to love it too.

As far as my writing goes, seeing library reading trends definitely pushes me to think about what I want to bring more of into the world…and then I try to do that. When I write, I keep a younger version of myself in mind, thinking what kind of book would have spoken to teenage Corey, what would have made him feel like he belonged…and that somehow has always fallen into very strange cross-genre spaces. Quiet horror and dark fantasy seem to be where I feel most at home, and I look on my library shelves, and there isn’t as much of those genres hanging around as I’d like. Especially eco-horror, which is the other sub-genre I feel at home in. In my mind, I thought there’d be troves and troves of eco-horror hitting shelves these days based on the state of our world, but there really isn’t a ton of it, hence why my next book is going to be a collection of eco-horror stories titled Haunted Ecologies. So, working at the library has really emphasized the gaps in the literary landscape that I enjoy, and I’m doing my best to fill those however I can.

Living in Cemeteries is set in a world that isn’t quite our own. I’m curious whether this was always the plan, or if the uncanny elements became part of the larger world over the course of revising it?

That’s an interesting question. The spirits and the retribution and the ghosts were always part of the novel, and the world was always as it is on the page, but through so many rounds of editing and workshopping with my agent (Marie Lamba) and my critique partner/beta reader (Gabrielle Griffis), I learned that I wasn’t really utilizing those genre elements to their fullest. For example, the character of Lenny originally wasn’t a painter obsessed with replicating the potential last moments of his portrait clients. That was such a fun part of the book to explore and would have never been there if my early readers hadn’t nudged me to make things weirder and flesh out the fantastical world more. They also pushed me to think about cultural habits and traditions that would be askew from our own…and to dream up new folklore. There’s a strain of the book that focuses on Dave, our main character, and his attempts to breed the poison out of nightshade plants in hopes of being able to bring back the dead. That was also a late add based on several comments Gabrielle made on an early draft…and it’s one of the core pieces of the narrative. I think that as a writer, I generate a lot of cool fantastical premises, then let my mind run wild and draft these to the best of my abilities, but it’s only when a great reader points out missed opportunities, that my fantastical worlds really reach their full potential. I’ve always highly valued the input of others on my writing and really believe the process is wicked cooperative. I definitely wouldn’t be as proud of my final novels/stories if I’d ignored the criticism along the way.  

There’s a lot here about reckoning with sins of the past — whether the action of a parent or a distant ancestor. There’s been a lot of reckoning with the past in this country in recent years — though maybe not enough of it — and I was wondering about the extent to which national issues informed the novel.

I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of morality. What makes a good person a good person. So many of the stories I write inevitably circle back to this idea, because I’ve always had a really hard time understanding how people can be so willfully and knowingly terrible to one another. I have historically been a pretty anxious/in-their-own-head kind of person, and seeing how terribly some people treat others, I’d just be losing my mind and having panic attacks the whole time (if I were them), but they just do it and go on with their lives as if that harmful action or belief or vote isn’t going to haunt them all of their lives (it would for me). I’ve always believed that it’s way easier to be kind to others than to be a jerk, so our world doesn’t really make much sense to me. I tried to make sense of all of this in Living in Cemeteries, but I think my outlook is just super bleak on the matter. In the world of Living in Cemeteries, people know that their relatives are going to suffer horribly based on the terrible things they’ve done during life…and they still choose to be terrible people. It would have been nice if the narrative swung in a different direction and my characters were able to live in a world of peace and kindness…but that wasn’t the case. It’s a bummer that my fantastical world mirrors our actual world so closely.

Were there any other novels or stories set in a slightly-askew version of the present day that you took as touchstones for this? I found myself thinking about Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire a few times while reading it….

I’m not sure if there’s any direct link to specific works that I was thinking about when I was writing this (also, fun fact, I originally drafted this book about eleven years ago…so my memory is not always great on these kinds of specifics). At the time I was reading Kelly Link, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Nathan Ballingrud, M. Rickert, and all the Ellen Datlow Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies I could find. So those were all swimming around in my head while I drafted. I’m a big believer of the Good art in – Good art out idea that authors like Matt Bell and Jeff VanderMeer mention. So much of what I do just swims up from my unconscious mind and guides me through my stories. Oftentimes I don’t feel like I have a choice on what I’m writing…which would explain the pile of terrible trunked novels I couldn’t get myself to stop writing.

This novel has a few fairly shocking moments, without giving too much away. Was there anything that surprised you as you were writing it, or did you have a pretty good sense of what was coming for your characters?

From the get go, I knew what characters were going to live and which were going to die, but I didn’t know how most of them would die. The only character death that I had completely visualized when I started was Clint’s…and that’s because it happened on page two. I’d say that through all the dozens and dozens of drafts I did for this book, the only scene that remains mostly unchanged is Clint’s death and his family’s cookout. It’s kind of an explosive note to start on, but I didn’t know how to do it any other way. I’ve heard a lot of feedback from readers who either love the quick immersion into this world or absolutely hate how fast it happens without fully understanding the rules/laws/reality that governs this place. I’m much more of a discover along the way kind of guy than an info dump kind of guy, so hopefully that works for more readers moving forward.

You have a second book due out early next year, I believe — can you talk about that a bit?

Yeah! My debut short story collection, Haunted Ecologies, is coming out from JournalStone on February 14th. Eco-Horror is the perfect Valentine’s Day gift… at least that’s what my publisher tells me. The book collects fourteen stories and one novelette…most of them previously published in places like The Southwest Review, Catapult, Tiny Nightmares, Flash Fiction Online, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Haven Spec. Here’s a little snippet from the back cover to give you a taste of what’s hiding inside this one:

“In these stories, three published here for the first time, we encounter ethical werewolf rearing, murderous tree cults, Weird insectile evolutions, seaside folk horror, corrupt environmental tourism, gothic forest wanderings, eternal plastic pollution, sea-bound cosmic horror, hostile swamp creatures, and the ever creeping threat of climate change.“

Short story collections are possibly my favorite thing to read, so it means a lot to me that I get to have one out in the world soon. 

What was the relationship of writing these two books like?

Short stories are my favorite things to write. Novels are great and all, but nothing beats taking a few weeks to write a handful of weird and wondrous stories. For most novels, the reader expects at least the semblance of a familiar arc/plot/structure (Living in Cemeteries gives you a bit of that…but also it does not)…and if you’re publishing outside of the indie sphere, there’s commercial expectations to consider. Short stories are free from many of those constraints. Most of these stories I could never sustain for the length of Living in Cemeteries, but at 4000 words, they totally feel natural. The shorter length lets you experiment more, lets you play to a greater extent, lets you write something that may not be commercially viable, but is definitely a little sliver of your heart.  All of the stories in Haunted Ecologies were written over the past five years, so mostly after I’d finished the majority of the edits on Living in Cemeteries. They feel very different, but at their core, they’re the same. Each of these, in some way, is looking at how we have messed up the planet for future generations and the repercussions of that. Maybe it’s overconsumption. Maybe it’s plastic pollution. Maybe it’s deforestation. Maybe it’s worshiping an eldritch tree god instead of helping your neighbor. Sounds like a bit of a downer, but I promise there’s a lot of humor in here also.

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