Glass Stories Bibliography + Paperback and Ebook Preorder

Yello!

I recently wrote out a list of books/stories that helped inspire my little novella Star Shapes. Now I’m back to do the same for Glass Stories

Preorder Link:

If you want to preorder a paperback copy or ebook for Glass Stories (which is set to be released August 21), here is the link:

https://grimscribepress.com/glass-stories/

Paperback is $20, including worldwide shipping, and the ebook is pay-what-you-will.

Some Books/Stories that inspired Glass Stories:

1. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

   A classic! This is probably the most obvious inspiration, because many of the stories in my collection play with bits fairy tales and folklore. There’s something inherently compelling to me about stories like Cinderella and Hansel & Gretel, and Angela Carter took these stories in her own disturbing and funny directions. As she puts it in a quote that can be found on, uh, the Wikipedia page for The Bloody Chamber (I’m phoning in my homework here):

   My intention was not to do “versions” or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, “adult” fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.

   Not all the stories I wrote for Glass Stories have a connection to a fairy tale, but many do, and I wholeheartedly agree with her take. We can collectively spit after saying “adult fairy tales.” Often the original tales had to be censored for the sake of children’s collections (or actually, for the adults buying them for children, as children are often underestimated).

   I was inspired by the way Angela Carter picked up small details from the stories and explored their psychological implications. I could go on and on about this, and maybe I will in a separate post, but I’ll spare you for now.

2. The Secret of Ventrioloquism by Jon Padgett

   Jon Padgett runs Grimscribe Press, which is publishing Glass Stories, and I was very happy to work with someone whose work has inspired me. I love that the stories in TSOV vary so much in terms of subject and style, and I’m fascinated by the connective tissue among them. Of course, there is the theme of ventrioloquism, of humanity as the manipulator and the manipulated, but I was also very intrigued by the repeated appearances of the daddy-longlegs. Some of the stories reminded me of Flannery O’Connor, and I was very intrigued to see realistic stories mixed up with atmospheric Weird Horror stories. I discovered the literary niche of The Weird through Vastarien, the journal that Jon Padgett edited through Grimscribe Press.

3. “Summer People” by Kelly Link

   This is one of my favorite Kelly Link stories, which for some reason is available to read (as linked above) on the WSJ website, bless its heart. It’s in conversation with another story I love, Shirley Jackson’s “Summer People,” an alarming tale of a summer vacation extended a bit too long. One thing I love about this Link story is how funny and down-to-earth it is in the beginning, and how absolutely insane it is by the end. I won’t spoil it for you!

4. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales and other books by Marie-Louise von Franz

   Most of her books involve analyzing fairy tales and folktales from a Jungian perspective. I don’t agree with everything she says by any means, but I love reading her books. I’m definitely more interested in her than Carl Jung. She brings her own experience and sense of humor to her analysis. I’m especially interested when she discusses her take on symbolism in old stories, for example:

   In man, the wolf represents that strange indiscriminate desire to eat up everybody and everything, to have everything, which is visible in many neuroses where the main problem is that the person remains infantile because of an unhappy childhood. Such persons develop a hungry wolf within themselves. Whatever they see, they say “Me too!” If one is kind to them, they demand more and more.

   Reading these books helped conjure the feeling of fun and mystery I need to write. They also helped me see old stories in new ways.

5. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

   This is one of his shorter novels, and it’s one of my favorites. Like all his novels, there is an element of questing, but here the scope is more clearly defined. He must seek out all four of his old friends to discover why they cut off contact with him. I was inspired by how Murakami played around with color here, and how he explored personal culpability. Are we guilty for our dreams? Do we all have a Mr. Hyde self wandering the cosmos, and are we responsible for him? Although Murakami stories are modern in construction, they explore ancient questions of spirituality and meaning in ways I find fascinating.

6. One Eye Opened in That Other Place by Christi Nogle

   I hadn’t read this full collection when I wrote Glass Stories, but I read a number of these individual stories published elsewhere, and I’ve been following Christi for several years. We work from a few common influences, especially the likes of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link, and yet Christi has a wholly unique approach. I admire how she channels a variety of voices, how she explores the wisdom of nonsense, how she’s never afraid to walk straight into a nightmare.

7. In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan

   I read this around the time I was writing Glass Stories, and I found it so delightful. I loved the voice most of all, the hippie lilt and whine, the carefree sense of humor, and I fell in love with the bizarre communal otherworld he created. Some of my favorite stories (like Kafka’s The Castle) take place in a kind of purgatory, and I took inspiration from this in writing some of my glass stories.

8. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

   This was another book that left me completely enchanted. I love it when Jackson writes about young women in a way that shows the menace and hardness hiding beneath the prettiness and sweetness, behind the daisy chains and cute kittens. Her protagonists are funny and deadly serious at the same time. Her stories are most frightening to me when they display the reasoning power of a character who would normally be considered insane and force us to question our own reality.

9. You guessed it, Barbara Comyns

   I’ll be talking about her for the rest of my life, I guess. She delights me every time I read her, often detailing a lovely yet mundane world and then surprising the reader with a very sudden foray into the supernatural. She uses fairy tale elements in the most interesting ways (please see The Juniper Tree). She finds humor in the horrible things, some of which were based on lived experience. By sharing her sense of beauty and humor, she makes an argument for survival.

As always, there’s definitely more, and there are influences embedded within these influences, from Kafka to Flannery O’Connor to James Joyce. Reading Dubliners in high school made me fall in love with the short story. Although my hometown in 90s Alabama was quite different from turn-of-the-century Dublin in many ways, I also felt the similarities…intense religious and political concerns, conflicts over tradition, the local sense of humor, the confusing kaleidiscope of childhood.

I’ll end there for now, though. Thanks so much for reading! I hope you share your influences with me in return.