Author Adam McOmber with Todd Summar
The title of Adam McOmber’s latest novel, The Ghost Finders, is deceptively simple. Occult detectives Henry Coxton, Violet Asquith, and their not-quite-human associate Christopher X search for spirits, or what they call abnaturals, as Coxton & Co. in Edwardian-era London. But what they find when they make a routine house call early in the novel leads them down a dangerous path that accelerates into the darkest depths of cosmic horror and weird fiction. As the action unfolds through the eyes of each of the three characters, it becomes clear that this isn’t merely a story about gaslit ghost hunting. It is at once an atmospheric character study and a fast-paced thrill ride that dares you to keep turning the page.
As I learned in my conversation with McOmber, the queer horror aspect of The Ghost Finders is intentionally front and center. In their own way, each character must confront their outsider status in a society that never makes life easy for them: Henry as a closeted gay man, Violet as woman with hidden supernatural powers, and Christopher as a “monster” who must hide his face. Along with their housekeeper Mrs. Hastur (who is also hiding monumental secrets), they form a chosen family. Each character quite literally has their world torn apart and their identity tested, and it is this bond that gives them their only chance of survival.
The Ghost Finders ticked all the boxes for me as a fan and writer of dark speculative fiction: immersive, well-crafted prose; three-dimensional characters with troubled pasts; queer protagonists; grotesque monsters; and sky-high stakes. I’m not alone in that assessment. Publisher’s Weekly said, “With larger-than-life characters and expertly conjured gritty, gas-lamp ambience, this is a treat for fans of dark historical fantasy and weird fiction alike.”
McOmber read his story “There’s Someone at the Door” for Artists Book House’s Stories After Dark reading event last October. He is the author of Jesus and John: A Novel, My House Gathers Desires: Stories, The White Forest: A Novel, and This New & Poisonous Air. His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Diagram. You can find him online at adammcomber.net and on Twitter at @adam_mcomber.
I interviewed Adam via email in July, 2021. Our conversation is below.
The Ghost Finders evokes the works of Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and of course, Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. I also couldn’t help thinking of the TV series Penny Dreadful as I was drawn into the richly crafted, colorful backstories of each of the three main characters and how they converge. Yet, your story is all its own, and you’ve created a world that fully exists before and after the events of the novel. What inspired this book, its cosmology, and its characters?
The occult detective genre has always been a favorite of mine. It goes back to a couple of different things. Something like “The Hound of the Baskervilles” is not exactly occult detective, but I was always drawn to the idea that, here we have Sherlock Holmes and he’s dealing with something that could be, possibly, paranormal. So, this very scientific, Apollonian mind is dealing with something that’s incredibly Dionysian, and how can that kind of mind deal with a thing like that? I think “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” as well, isn’t necessarily supernatural, but it has that feeling of the supernatural, and it’s written by Edgar Allan Poe.
I also think Twin Peaks was really formative for me. It came on when I was a kid, and it’s something I’ve just thought about in my life. Again, we have that very Apollonian figure of Agent Cooper trying to uncover or bring order to this Dionysian event. I do think The Ghost Finders replicates that as well. These characters are trying to bring order to something that is just inherently disordered and is essentially going to mess with them significantly. I put all of these things in my blender, so everything that you mentioned—the Algernon Blackwood, the Hodgson, Penny Dreadful—is definitely on my radar. I love that. Also, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Very interested in that, too. So, I think all of these things came together in my blender to produce The Ghost Finders.
In terms of the cosmology behind the book, I think that really grew organically out of what I was trying to say with the book. There is a mirror that is very central to this story. I think you get that from the cover of the book, so it’s not a spoiler. But all the characters have a kind of doubleness to them. There’s the outside version of the character and then there’s the inside version of the character. The mirror itself also has a kind of outside version and an inside version. The cosmology comes from that. The mythic order comes from the idea of mirroring, that idea of outside vs. inside, which I think, too, has a lot to do with mystery. We see one thing on the outside and we see another thing on the inside.
Throughout the book, you juggle the narratives of the three main characters through first person point of view. What made you decide to tell the story through their eyes, and how were you able to give such a distinct voice to each of them?
I gave all three of the primary characters their own point of view and their own voice because, essentially, they are all holding secrets from each other, and I wanted to let the reader know more of those secrets before the other characters fully understood what was going on. I thought that that would create a nice tension. I wanted to be able to be inside the head of all three characters. They kind of form this interlocking puzzle. We move from one to the next and we learn little pieces and we start to assemble the overall larger picture. In terms of the three distinct voices, I worked really, really hard on that. Henry, I think, has a very lush voice. I have different registers that I write in, and Henry’s voice is one of my registers. Very lush, very detailed. Christopher has that very straightforward, almost simple voice, but it’s very emotional at the same time. He is another kind of register that I write in. And Violet’s story is really an action story. She starts essentially running at the beginning of the novel. She doesn’t really stop running. She moves very quickly. So, hers was always kind of set at this breakneck speed, and I wanted her sentences to reflect that. She is a character that I think knows even more deeply what’s really going on than the other characters. She has this will to protect the other characters from what’s going on, from what she knows.
In terms of distinct voices, I read out loud as I compose. So, if you see me writing, I’m just sitting in a room talking to myself, and I try to get the sound of the voices, and I try to get that sound down on the page. That’s how I give them their separate voices.
There is a strong sense that these three characters (and their housekeeper Mrs. Hastur) have formed a chosen family, and that their love for each other amplifies the stakes as the danger unfolds. Was this a theme that you intentionally chose to explore, or did it come as a surprise to you as you wrote the book?
The notion of chosen family is definitely something I was consciously thinking about. I love that idea. I think it was Armistead Maupin who popularized it in Tales of the City. I just love that idea of a group coming together. These are our queer outsiders. These are very much queer outsiders who come together, and they form a bond and it’s a strong bond, but the bond itself has problems because of the things that society has done to these three characters. They do, to some extent, have a bit of trouble forming a cohesive bond. So, I think part of the process of this novel is for them to reveal themselves to each other, and in doing that, it makes their bond even stronger.
Self-realization also seems to be an important component of each character’s arc. In some way, each must confront a past they’ve been trying to ignore or trying to outrun and must ultimately face the person they’ve become. Can you talk about this, and whether you consciously tied this concept to issues of sexuality or gender? I’m thinking especially of Henry and Violet, who grapple with their own conflicts as a gay man and a woman in Edwardian era London, a time period that was kind to neither.
All of the things that I’ve written are queer in some way. That is part of my project as a writer. I’m writing the things that I wanted to read as a younger person that did not exist. I’ve always been interested in the speculative, so in fantasy, in science fiction, and particularly horror. And I wanted to see more queer representation in those genres. So that is something that I’m doing. The lens that I’m using is a queer lens. If we’re talking about outsiders, I grew up gay in a small farm town in Northwestern Ohio, so I certainly understand that outsider feeling. I think that also comes into all of my work and it informs all of my work. I was very interested in that in this novel. I was interested in the Edwardian time period and thinking about that as a kind of way to highlight these differences even more strongly, though certainly there are many places today where we would have the same feeling of outsiderness for these characters.
Despite the rich atmosphere, character-driven story, and immersive attention to detail, the book moves at an exhilarating pace and doesn’t skimp on the horror and gore when it’s needed. How did you balance these elements to deliver such a well-rounded story?
I’m a reader who gets bored really easily. So, for me to want to read a book, the book really has to be reaching toward me as a reader and making things interesting and exciting. The way that I constructed The Ghost Finders is that each chapter begins with some kind of want. The point of view character of that chapter has a particular want and then that want becomes the engine for that chapter, it really drives that chapter. We’re trying see whether they get that thing, or do they not get that thing? That’s how I held the pace. There are wants and then are high stakes. We kind of know that bad things are always about to happen here, and the characters are either trying to dodge the bad things or trying to hold up the sky from falling. Those kinds of things.
The book does have a gory nature to it. My sister likes my fiction a lot, but she said there were certain parts of this book which she could not read. She had to stop reading, which I feel quite proud of. But again, I think the goriness there connects to that idea of action, that there are high stakes here, that there’s a lot of trouble in this book. So that kind of helps with that engine that I was talking about.
Throughout much of your work, you explore queerness and the notion of desire and its dangers, often in historical settings, and The Ghost Finders is no exception. What draws you to tackle these themes within different time periods?
Part of the reason that I’m drawn to different periods in history is that I like decadent writing a lot. I like writing that feels decadent, and it feels easier to me to achieve that level of decadence, the richness of the language and the strangeness of the language, if I write in different time periods. Throughout all of my writing, I’ve explored a wide variety of time periods—the Victorian, the Edwardian. Jesus and John, my novel that came before The Ghost Finders, is set in Biblical times. It allows me to, again, use this kind of lens that makes the world even more interesting to me. That kind of lushness and decadence. I don’t feel it in the world around me. I don’t think I would like to live in any of these other time periods, but I like to imagine them. I like to dream about them. So that’s part of the reason that I use these different time periods.
The Ghost Finders is published by Journalstone, which has made a name for itself as a leading independent publisher of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. What led you to working with them?
Honestly, we shopped the book around to all sorts of publishers, and Journalstone is where it fit. I agree that Journalstone is publishing really excellent horror and innovative horror, and I would say that really good horror in general now is happening more at independent presses than at the big houses. I really don’t see a lot going on with the big houses that I find interesting at all and definitely not interesting in terms of horror, so I encourage people to look to places like Journalstone and Lethe Press, as well, which published Jesus and John. They are doing really innovative, diverse types of representation of horror.
While queer narratives have slowly entered the mainstream of literary fiction within the last few years, there also seems to be growing interest in queer horror, which is really encouraging to see. What advice would you give to queer writers who want to publish work that falls within the world of horror or weird fiction, or any of their subgenres?
I agree that queer horror is getting really big, which I’m excited about. The advice I would give to queer writers who want to work in horror and the weird: I would say do it. Because I want to read more of that. I want it to continue to flourish. One thing I would say is try not to rely too heavily on the tropes. Try to make the thing your own. So, whatever it is that’s inside of you, that queerness inside of you, try to manifest that through the piece. George Saunders, in his new book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, talks about manifesting your iconic self in your fiction and that is something that I would think about. So how do you manifest your queer iconic self in your fiction? Another thing I talk to my students about is turning the dial. If you’re coming into a genre and the dial is set at 8, how do you turn the dial one click so it’s at a 9? It’s usually that you bring some element of yourself, something that doesn’t exist already in the genre, in the tropes, you add this element of yourself to that thing and it twists it in an interesting way and gives it that electricity and makes it something new.
At the risk of giving too much away, there seems to be room at the end of The Ghost Finders for the story to continue. Are you considering a sequel?
I do love these characters and there is a possibility of a sequel. We will have to see about that. But as we mentioned before, the characters are in a very different place at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning, so the next novel would have to be a very different kind of thing. But there are certainly intriguing elements, some threads that are left untied at the very end of the novel that I think I could see making an interesting sequel.
Fantasy Kit, a collection of queer speculative flash fiction pieces, will be published by Black Lawrence Press next June. Can you provide any details about it?
I believe it’s 36 pieces, all of them are either flash or experimental forms in different ways. I really think about it, as the title says, as a kind of kit, that these are all objects that the reader is being asked to put together. They are queer fantasies, they are strange fantasies, and there is this element that the reader will be asked to assemble these fantasies themselves, maybe in a way that they make the fantasies their own. It’s that notion that the writer produces half of the text, and the reader produces the other half. But I’m very excited aboutFantasy Kit. I think it is probably my favorite thing that I’ve written so far and it’s an honor that Black Lawrence Press is going to put it out in June.
About Adam McOmber
Adam McOmber is the author of Jesus and John : A Novel (Lethe Press 2020), My House Gathers Desires: Stories (BOA Editions 2016), The White Forest: A Novel (Touchstone 2012), and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA Editions 2011). His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Diagram. He lives in Los Angeles.
If you would like to know more about Adam’s work, please visit: www.adammcomber.net
About Todd Summar
Todd Summar writes novels, short stories, and essays. His work can be seen in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, PANK, Literary Hub, Joyland, and Monkeybicycle. He is the founding editor of Goreyesque, an online literary journal featuring work inspired by the spirit and aesthetic of Edward Gorey. Goreyesque has readers and contributors from around the world. Mr. Summar is a freelance editor for publishers and individuals and is a former instructor in the English Department at Columbia College Chicago.
He draws inspiration from dreams, experiences, absurd humor, and anything that mixes these elements in a literary context. He has written fiction, in one form or another, since age six.
If you would like to know more about Todd’s work, please visit: www.toddlsummar.com