Interview with Patrick Barb

Neutral Milk Hotel and more!

It’s Pub Day for And One Day We Will Die: Strange Stories Inspired by the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel!!

This haunting anthology is edited by Patrick Barb, and it features stories by many luminaries of weird/horror fiction (as you will see from the link above). Patrick Barb is a luminary himself, and a very busy fellow with multiple books already published and many more to come. He even has a book coming out in this very season, a horror novella called JK-LOL. I’m grateful he made time to answer my questions!

When did you first encounter the music of the Neutral Milk Hotel, and how did it evolve from there? What song or songs of theirs do you find most meaningful?

I first heard of Neutral Milk Hotel in either my junior or senior year of high school. I got into the music at first for that most noble of high school reasons…because someone I had a crush on was really into them at the time. Of course, my love of NMH has long outlasted that crush at this point. I think what keeps me coming back to the music that Jeff Mangum and co. make is way they combine a sense of confusion and mystery with something heartbreaking and harrowing all at once. There are moments of lyrically sublime beauty matched with a cacophony of sound. It’s folksy, it’s psychedelic, it’s mournful, it’s hopeful.

I feel like great art is often something that holds these contradictions in place within itself and conveys them through the audience’s experiencing of the work. Certainly an album like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (and On Avery Island to maybe a somewhat lesser extent) accomplishes this feat. You can take any NMH song and pick out the different approaches to instrumentality, the different themes, motifs, etc., and each time you can come away with something different. I think that’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to use the music as the springboard for other authors to inspiration for their stories from in the anthology. With each story, you can read it and maybe you’ll connect with what led that story to be birthed from that particular song. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll come back to it later and go “Ohhhh. Now I see.”

With all that said, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” may be the cliché choice but it’s still my favorite. There’s this balance of whimsy and melancholy, of fatalism and optimism to Mangum’s lyrics that just hits you in the heart and the gut all at once. I mention this in the book’s Acknowledgments but it was actually played at my wedding. So to say I have a special connection to the song might be underselling it a bit.

Do you see a connection between Weird fiction and NMH? Do you think they helped inspire the stories you'd eventually write?

I’d say look at the authors and the stories in the anthology and the answer is pretty clear. When you have folks like John Langan, Brian Evenson, Joe Koch, Christi Nogle, Erin Brown, Briar Ripley Page, etc., etc. crafting these pieces that are weird, strange, unsettling, and dream-like (sometimes all these things all in one sentence), I think it’s easy to see the connective tissue. I think some of the most effective pieces of weird fiction have a level of musicality to them. There’s a sense of notes unplayed a la the old cliche about jazz in weird fiction. You’re giving readers a glimpse of a larger world in the same way that Mangum and co. produce these layered sonic experiences where not every line is given context, not every turn of phrase is meant to be understood.

Music in general has certainly played a part in my own writing, and I’d like to think that NMH is included there. Listening to music like that is often a great way to brainstorm or just kind of churn the waters of your creativity and see what floats to the surface. I’m not necessarily one to listen to music while I write, but there is still the presence of music—its rhythms and antirhythms, its peaks and valleys, its tensions and releases—in the writing chair with me.

Plus, if nothing else, Jeff Mangum’s lyrics show that you can draw from many sources of inspiration, many traditions, many histories, and still produce something that is whole and fulfilling, with none of its parts diminished. I think that’s a takeaway for any author.

How hard or easy was it to put together an anthology? Were there any unexpected challenges? Do you sympathize more with editors in general now?

First, I have to note the contributions past and present of the project’s original publisher Brandon Applegate at Hungry Shadow Press. Brandon came onboard the project when I finally got tired of talking about wanting to do an NMH-inspired anthology and started working toward actually making one. He was the one who helped set up the open call, who contracted and paid authors, who found Chris Bilheimer to do the cover and Adam Clair for the foreword. He was the one who reached out to the record label to get the OK for the book as well. You know, the publisher stuff.

Unfortunately, Brandon had to step away from publishing and so the project reverted to me. We were so close to the finish line by then that it seemed easiest to just take the reins entirely. Brandon graciously passed along the remaining budget for marketing, cover design, and some donated copies for a fundraiser/book event in the works in Athens, GA (home of NMH)—an event I can’t really say much about now but will hopefully have more to share with folks soon. He’s helped with formatting for Ingram, answered all my silly first-time publisher questions, etc.

So while there have been setbacks, I think I’ve been able to weather the storm fairly well.

I’ll also note that I have worked in book publishing on the editorial side of things for 16+ years. I’ve done everything from textbooks and academic publishing to cookbooks, graphic novels, and technica/professional organization publications. So from one side I really had a lot of editorial experience going into the book. But this was really the first time when I was doing the editing thing on weird fiction, horror, etc. I made a very conscious decision to shy away from that sort of thing starting out/getting serious in my writing career. I wanted to draw a pretty clear line between Editor Patrick and Author Patrick.

Once I reached the point where that line was fairly well established (at least as far as I was concerned), it felt good to take on a project like this one. I think it’s at once maybe somewhat of a departure from my writing sensibilities, while also being very much in keeping with my editing and reading preferences. My hope is that someone can read the anthology and in working with the authors I’ll have given them a cohesive reading experience.

Tell us about a couple stories/books from the past that you're most proud of, and what are some projects you have lined up in the future?

I’ll talk about 2 projects from last year that I think really worked well for me. First, my second short-story collection The Children’s Horror: Cursed Episodes for Doomed Adults came out from Northern Republic Press in the summer. It’s a themed collection and—similar to the NMH anthology—a weird idea I had that I just couldn’t shake. In this case, it was to do a short-story collection where each story was based on a kids’ TV show that my children either are or had been into. It’s kind of like Saturday Morning Cartoon by way of weird fiction. My hope is that other parents will read ‘em and think “OK, so I’m not the only weirdo here.”

And I also had a short story published in Shortwave Magazine (free to read here) that I think could almost be a companion piece to the work in The Children’s Horror. “And Contributions from Viewers Like You” is a found-footage-style story about a college kid’s experience transcribing an episode of a PBS telethon where a Mr. Rogers-type TV star encounters this kind of apocalyptic cosmic horror. I had a great time writing that one and I’m so happy it found a home with Shortwave.

As far as what’s on the horizon, there’s a lot. Releasing on the same day as the Neutral Milk Hotel-inspired anthology is my latest sci-fi/horror novella JK-LOL which is kind of a social media age Jekyll & Hyde tale. Then, in March, I’ve got a supernatural slasher horror from Shortwave’s Killer VHS line called Night of the Witch-Hunter. Then, there’s my talking animal/crime/cosmic horror novella The Nut House which will be collected by Undertaker Books (after previously being serialized in Cosmic Horror Monthly), along with illustrations and a prequel novelette The Acorn Run. After that, there’s my debut novel Abducted from Dark Matter Ink in August and an action/cosmic horror novella The Big One from Anuci Press in October.

Phew! So, ya know, a little busy… 😀

What themes/obsessions do you find yourself returning to in your art?

Parents and children, the act of creation and its counterpart in destruction, potential and wasted potential.

What landscapes have inspired you most?

I grew up in southeastern Virginia, out in the sticks. While I’ve been living in cities for the last, like, 20 years, it’s that woodland, pine tree-covered world of youth that continues to provide inspiration.

At the same time, I spent 7 years (post-college) in New York City and that’s as far from the country as one can get. Yet that’s also high on the inspiration list for me as well. I think we pull from places that inspire—awe, fear, questions, what-have-you. Tall trees, tall buildings, if I’m not sure what’s inside ‘em or on the other side of ‘em, then you can bet they’ll be fuel for a story some day.

What is a question you would like to be asked?

“Hey, I’ve got this extra batch of chocolate chip cookies, would you like them?”

Sorry, both batches are for me. Thanks, Patrick!!