Douglas Winter’s oft-quoted line about horror being “…an emotion” has been brandished too many times as a shield by lazy writers and lazier, impatient readers who want their dark fiction to deal only with that single emotion: horror can encompass fear and revulsion, yes, of course, that’s fine and dandy, but if your work wants to explore any emotions beyond that, you’re labeled pretentious.Ī writer I know once paid me a backhanded compliment by saying that I “… do maudlin well.” Maudlin? Seriously? Nicholas-fucking-Sparks and Robert James Waller do maudlin Danielle Steele is sentimental a distressing amount of Spielberg’s work succumbs to both (witness the badly thought-out final reel of Saving Private Ryan). How did that become one of your major themes?īefore answering that, I have to tell you I have a problem with the word “sentimental,” and here’s why: for me, it trivializes what I try to achieve with my work, which - though it will never be seen as important literature - I work very hard to imbue with emotional authenticity, and in the eyes of a lot of speculative fiction readers (and more than a few writers) this means I’m pretentious and depressing.

Unusually for horror writers, your work often engages in sentiment/senitmentality. This story was inspired, in part, by conversations he had with various “detainees” at the camp, particularly a tailor. After an 18-month recovery period (which he spent in a full body cast) he served out the rest of his time (about four months, as I recall) at a desk job, filing paperwork in Minidoka, Idaho at the Japanese internment camp located there. It was near the Germany/Austria border where he was severely injured when most of his unit was wiped out by a crash in the mountains of Eberstadt. My father fought in both Africa and Germany during the war.

If I recall correctly, your father fought in the Second World War? Was he in the Pacific at all? What inspired this story? Nick Mamatas talks to Gary about it, and a few other things:

The ghosts here are the ghosts of the past, as Braunbeck tells the story of an old woman telling the story of a most peculiar set of events inside one of the US internment camps for Japanese and Japanese-Americans set up during the Second World War. As fantasist Robert Aickman once noted, a ghost story doesn't need a ghost. Braunbeck, is a classic ghost story in a way. Phantasm Japan's 'Shikata Ga Nai: The Bag Lady's Tale', by Gary A.

Phantasm Japan by Nick Mamatas