Against the Lovers of the World: an interview with Graham Thomas Wilcox
Adam's Notes for October 24, 2024
Reminder: My short story “The Debtor’s Crypt” is out now in Hellarkey III. I’ve also got a review of Rick Claypool’s wild and weird new novel Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War out over at Sage Cigarettes.
This week I’m interviewing Graham Thomas Wilcox, author of Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy. It’s a wild ride of a story about a pair of knights, crusaders in the Baltics, who get swept overboard in the novella’s opening pages, and then embark upon a strange sojourn in an unknown realm. It reminded me a lot of Matt Holder’s Hurled Headlong Flaming, as both writers are invested heavily in using language to create the feeling of a distant past. Graham is also an editor with Old Moon Publishing, which is how I know him: he published my story “Diary of the Wolf” in OMQ #6.
Before we get into it, can you tell us a little about Old Moon Publishing?
GTW: Certainly! Old Moon Publishing is the imprint we use for Old Moon Quarterly and—with Contra Amatores Mundi—other publishing ventures. We’re three friends from western New York who really like sword and sorcery, weird fiction, and so forth. The magazine we publish—the aforementioned Old Moon Quarterly—is a magazine of dark fantasy and sword and sorcery short fiction. We are just about to ship our seventh and eighth issues, which were crowdfunded last year.
Do you find your work with Old Moon has helped your writing?
GTW: It does, yes. In part, it’s inspiring to read some of the amazing stories we’re sent—which can be humbling as well, mind you (never a bad thing). Some of the stories we’ve sent I read and think “damn, I wish I’d written that.” Many of those end up being the ones we publish, of course! All the practice editing helps me revise my own work as well.
Editing slush for a magazine lets you see the whole spectrum of the writing world, from seasoned pros to the greenest amateurs. But I will say, oftentimes the names newest to me (meaning I have not seen them before in other publications; this does not mean they are new to writing, of course) produce some of the best work. There can be a willingness to experiment or take chances which is not exactly absent in veteran writers, but which is (perhaps) less inhibited.
This may sound silly, but editing slush has also helped me perfect my own submissions approach. We get a few different sorts of cover letters, and they never really affect our final decision. But I have developed a preference for minimalism in the submission email itself. I’ve also some stronger opinions about “scouting” a publication before I submit to it, shall we say. I confess, I used to submit my stories to pretty much any publication that seemed even vaguely in the thematic ballpark. Having now read a couple hundred submissions from authors—including those aforementioned veterans—that were, I suspect, simply sent out to any publication that paid above a certain rate, I can see how my past strategy may have been a waste of time. Preaching to the choir here perhaps, but thematic fit is very important. At Old Moon, I’ve read many stories that were quite good—and some very fine indeed—but which we rejected purely on lack of thematic congruence with our magazine. In fact, it’s probably the most common reason we reject a story. We receive lots of dark faerie romance stories and lots of “DnD party on an adventure” stories. Both fine genres, but we don’t really publish either of them.
Okay, so the novella. Contra Amatores Mundi. “Against the lovers of the world,” right? Where does that come from?
GTW: Indeed! It comes from a 14th century sermon properly titled De amore Dei contra amatores mundi: “On the love of god, against the lovers of the world.” It was written by Richard Rolle, an English hermit and religious ecstatic. It focuses very much on the asceticism popular in the Middle Ages, as refracted through a discussion on what is, and what is not, proper love.
I’d like to say I picked the title because Rolle’s discussion of divine loves and earthly loves mirrors the tension in Hieronymus’s own soul regarding his love of his deity and his love of Walpurga, or something like that. But that would be, as the kids say, cope. I picked the title mostly because I thought the phrase “Against the Lovers of the World” sounded very cool, like it would be a Jarmusch flick or something. The notion of love, and what it means, is very important to the characters in the story (as it was to medieval Europeans—and I suppose it remains important to us all, doesn’t it?), but that’s more incidental than intentional.
So what’s going on with this novel? Prospero of Lucetti and Hieronymus of Tsorn are off on a nice little Baltic crusade when they get swept into a beast-infested land beneath the sea?
Walpurga, meanwhile, is stuck on the land, but Hieronymus is able to keep an eye on her, literally…?
GTW: That’s roughly the shape of things, yes! Hieronymus and Prospero are knights of a religious order—it’s called the Order of the Dragon in these stories, and while there was a real Order of the Dragon, it wasn’t a religious order of crusading knights, it was a chivalric order founded by Sigismund of Luxembourg and his wife Barbara of Cilli. The real Order of the Dragon was fairly interesting in its own right, and of course, it lent its cognomen to Vlad II Dracul of Wallachia and his son, Vlad III Dracula. Other than the name, however, and the vague connection to myths of vampirism (thank you, Bram Stoker and Francis Ford Coppola), the real Order of the Dragon has just about nothing to do with the one I invented for these stories. My Order of the Dragon is something like the Order of Santiago mixed with the Sword Brothers (a crusading order in Livonia—modern day Latvia and Estonia), alongside a hefty dose of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and other such nonsense. Neoplatonism was quite popular in the medieval church, and the Order of the Dragon is something like that late Neoplatonism as filtered through the chivalric ethos of the time (as interpreted by me, by way of Richard Kaepur).
Well, all that twaddle aside: Hieronymus and Prospero are crusading knights, yes. Sort of my take on DnD paladins, if you will: rather intense, frightful dudes immersed in the sort of esoteric religious extremism you might expect from people who think themselves (literally) warriors of god. They command something we might think of as supernatural, albeit at terrible cost. Walpurga belongs to the same order—she is a nun, and due to the unique nature of that aforementioned cost the knights pay, these nuns possess an unusual degree of authority over the Order of the Dragon. An authority they (understandably) wish to maintain.
Right, rambling again. Anyways, the story is essentially a quest narrative: Prospero and Hieronymus find themselves whisked away to an “otherworld” of sorts. Hieronymus, who is Walpurga’s lover, wishes to escape and return to her side. Prospero has other plans. Walpurga (whom Hieronymus views only through a, ah, not-palantir) has her own parallel adventure. The not-palantir Hieronymus uses shows him some contradictory visions of her quest, and her fate(s).
Along the way, they fight snake-men, skellies, and a mace-wielding giant (among other things). I won’t spoil too much. The setting, and their traversal of it, is very much inspired by what I’ve read of chivalric romance. It’s also inspired by the many, many hours I’ve spent playing Dark Souls, and Dark Souls-adjacent, video games.
The book’s materials mention you’re inspired by Gene Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy, and Chretien de Troyes. Can you talk a little bit about how they've influenced Contra Amatores Mundi?
GTW: Certainly! Gene Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy are probably my favorite authors. Both men wrote some beautiful prose, and that’s what first attracted me to them. I am a huge fan of stylized prose, and just about no other 20th century authors can beat Wolfe or McCarthy in that department. Wolfe loved to play with perspective, unreliable narrators, and very odd worldviews as well. He was a fan of puzzles, I think, and while I’m not anywhere near as versed in constructing them as he was, his comfort with leaving interpretational space in his writing really inspired me. Before I read him (and here perhaps I reveal my essential philistinism), I never spent much time appreciating the pleasurable gaps an author can leave in a book—those places where the audience not only must provide meaning, but wants to provide meaning. At the same time, I don’t think Wolfe was unfair in his ambiguities. He wrote works that can be “solved” in a sense—but the solutions may be multiple.
McCarthy’s work appeals to me for many of the same reasons. It’s pretty cliche now to gush about how much one loves Blood Meridian I suppose, but I’m already uncool, so what the hell: I love Blood Meridian. Brave of me, I know. He nails every part of it: the prose, the characters, the atmosphere of mounting dread, the unpleasant and ambiguous ending. Above everything however, it is his prose that speaks to me. Like Wolfe, McCarthy wrote more ornately in his earlier works and scaled it back in his later works—but while some of Wolfe’s later novels can be positively spartan in their approach, McCarthy never quite lost his taste for the baroque. I think there’s a lot of pressure on writers to write to the “window pane” standard: i.e., uncomplicated, plain prose. I love that sort of writing too, and it’s hard to do correctly (were it easy, everyone would do it flawlessly). But I’ve a fondness for the baroque and the ornate, both in art and in literature.
As for Chretien: he wrote some of the very first chivalric romances, and his impact on medieval knightly culture cannot be denied. Art imitates life, and then life imitates art, I suppose. We know that by the later middle ages, it was quite common for knights and ladies to essentially LARP as Arthurian characters, both in tournaments and in other contexts, like the pas d’armes. Edward III of English fame particularly loved the character Lionel, even naming one of his sons after him. Tropes of courtly love, knightly honor, and so on were not exactly created whole cloth by Chretien, but he (like Tolkien) created a blueprint that others followed. His stories of Erec and Enid, and Lancelot, show some complex interactions between men and women as well—ones in which both sexes have their agencies, after a peculiarly medieval fashion.
When I was writing this novella (and indeed all my other stories in this same setting), I thought it important to read some of the works my characters themselves might have read. It helps me inhabit their headspace better. Medieval authors loved allusion and remix—just as we do now. They consciously compared themselves, and interpreted their world, through the lens of the stories they read. I don’t claim my stories are historical in any sense other than inspiration—but I think it is more interesting to explore a character from a vantage point nearer their own, in cultural terms, than it is to write someone wholly modern and dress them up in medievalish costume. My characters are still more modern than not, of course, and so perhaps they’re still just 21st century weirdos in medieval drag. But perhaps they can give the illusion, at times, of being elsewise.
It feels like in the past, sword and sorcery got such a bad name because even the better stuff drew on a very limited range of influences—people were looking to Robert E Howard, Tolkien, Fritz Lieber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and not much else. And so maybe what sets apart this new crop—Contra Amatores Mundi, and what you’re publishing in Old Moon, plus Matt Holder, Bryn Hammond, Jon Olfert, and so on—it feels like there’s a wider range of influences. Do you think there’s something to that?
GTW: That’s part of it, yes. You still have some diehard fans of old sword and sorcery, who want nothing more than painstaking recreations of “Tower of the Elephant” over and over. I understand that point of view—I’d read pastiches of The Book of the New Sun or The Worm Ouroboros forever probably—but it does pigeonhole an author into a very niche audience, if that makes sense. In the current sword and sorcery revival, I do think we have plenty of authors (like the ones you named) who are doing something a bit different. Looking further afield, as it were. I think that’s for the best. Robert E. Howard wasn’t just copying a small range of authors, after all: he drew from history, from contemporary adventures, from westerns, and so forth. Those disparate influences, when distilled, lent his work its characteristic charm and vitality. Sometimes when we read an author we really love, we want to write just like them. And in my opinion, that’s the right attitude!
We learn best by imitating others. But oftentimes, our favorite authors were not just imitating a small stable of favorites within a niche sub-genre. They read widely, and weirdly, mashed things up, and created something new. Modern sword and sorcery authors like James Enge or Sky Hernstrom certainly love the classics—you can see it all over their work. But you can see their other influences as well—Enge’s love of big-c Classics shines through in his Morlock stories, and enriches them. I was very tickled by his first novel when Morlock deprives something of phlegethon (the river of blood that burns the unrighteous dead in Dante’s Inferno, and the substance certain pre-modern alchemists thought caused heat) in order to achieve some sort of plot-necessary alchemical effect. A minor detail, but one I rather enjoyed.
I really liked the medieval-feeling language you use, can you talk a little bit about how you achieve that? It feels to me like it’s all about word choice, not just using archaic words, but twisting more familiar words out of their usual usages—but I could be wrong about that.
GTW: Well, as I noted above, I love the stylized prose of Wolfe, McCarthy, Eddison, etc. When done well, nothing transports me out of Poughkeepsie (or Rochester, rather) into Elfland faster than well-done, and appropriately stylized, prose. I was inspired in particular by Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, where he famously employs antiquated and archaic (but real!) language to situate the reader in the decadent, neo-medieval dying earth in which his stories take place. We do not just see “soldiers,” we see hypaspists and dimarchi, cataphracts and schiavoni. They do not ride horses, but rather destriers. They wield cutroes rather than swords, and speak of exultants and armigers rather than nobles and gentry. The effect is particular. We get a sense of this ancient, byzantine culture (because the diction employed comprises our own ancient words) without Severian (the narrator) ever needing to stop, look at the reader and infodump us with “yes the earth is millions and billions of years old now and the Autarchy is an ancient decrepit dictatorship beset on all sides by horrors domestic and cosmic, etc etc, so on and so forth.”
Yet, Wolfe never “thees and thous” us. Severian’s diction is mannered, educated, and formal—perhaps for very plot-relevant reasons which I will not spoil—and that tells us much about him as a person as well. He was a boy (is a boy, I should say: he is eighteen, or thereabouts, throughout the entirety of the series) raised among torturers: ritualized violence is, quite literally, all he knows. Anyone who has ever interacted with the legal system knows how archaic and formal the language of ritualized state violence can be. Severian doesn’t speak in the elaborate parallel sentences of Melville, perhaps, nor does he recreate the Jacobean English of Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros—yet his word choice, and the unfamiliar and self-conscious formality of his syntax, makes him no less otherworldly to the modern ear.
I’m not Wolfe, and I don’t think I hit quite the same pitch-perfect note he hit in New Sun. But my use of certain words—heaume, alaunt, et c.—is meant to evoke that same feeling of a world older than our own, one with its own vocabulary, a vocabulary which makes perfect sense to its speakers (and indeed to any reader who cares to google the unfamiliar terms), but which pulls from our own archaic language and so (hopefully) transports the reader a bit better than would simply reading “helmet” and “dog” and so on.
It’s a hard line to walk—too little and it feels very anachronistic, the equivalent of those TV shows where ostensible Vikings or Elves prance around in biker leather and undercuts. Too much and you risk turning your prose into a sort of parodic tushery. It’s not historical accuracy (medieval literature runs the gauntlet, from Eschenbach’s very unique and stylized Parzival to the almost minimalist prose of certain Icelandic sagas, and off into even stranger pastures, like the purple prosed phantasmagoria of medieval Irish myth cycles), but it’s an attempt at weaving an illusion of “otherness,” I think. One that feels plausibly antique, yet remains engaging to the modern reader. Syntax, as you noted, is a big part of it.
McCarthy does this very well in Blood Meridian, among other works: the characters speak in our modern English (i.e. not the English of Shakespeare and co.), but the way they construct sentences, the verbs they choose and the idioms they wield all differ from modern usage. A character might ask another where he can find someone, for example. Rather than answer “he’s over there,” McCarthy has Glanton’s scalpers say something like “Yonder he lies.” All recognizable words (yonder is still current usage in certain English accents, even), but organized in a fashion which renders them (and their speakers) alien, in some sense, to the modern ear.
I love older fiction as well—Moby-Dick, Ivanhoe, The Worm Ouroboros, and the poetry of Milton, Tennyson, Shakespeare and so forth—and reading their works I think gave me an ear for how I wanted my characters to sound and think. Since the novella is written in the first-person, that means the whole story ends up written in this stylized fashion. You’ll note the authors I list above are, for the most part, nineteenth century or later in terms of vintage. Writing recognizably medieval prose is beyond me: I don’t read Middle English very easily at all, and I don’t read medieval German or French in the slightest (the closest I get is the very weak pun in one of the character names). I don’t think medieval prose (however one defines it) would read as “archaic” to many readers anyways, so much as it would read as very weird. We are still just familiar enough with nineteenth century and early twentieth century prose, on the other hand, to recognize it as certifiably “old.” Much of it lies in the choice of verb and the syntax, as I say above. I suppose I’m not describing my process very well. Hm. I suppose I should say I had a certain tone in mind, sought out books with that tone (many of them quite old), and read them and read them and read them again until the creative mulch of my brain, as it were, sprouted up some similar sounding stuff. That’s probably a useless metaphor, but it’s all I’ve got for now.
Oddly enough, the story was originally much more modern in tone, with only occasional flashes of archaism. Something like Zelazny’s Amber books. A sort of wry tone as well, much like you read in a lot of modern fantasy, with the archaisms played for purposeful irony or strangeness. But I found that while I enjoy reading that dissonant tone in the work of others (Laird Barron does it very well in his Antiquity stories, for example; very consciously in the vein of Zelazny, I think), I could not credibly pull it off in my own writing. It felt too artificial. What I’ve written is still rather modern, I suppose, but the tone I sought here reflected more sincerely my own interests and ideas as a writer.
I would love to write something like Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros or Pynchon's Mason & Dixon in the future: something fully committed to the bit, as it were. I’d need to read and practice a lot more before I achieve something readable though, I fear.
Contra Amatores Mundi releases on October 31 (awwooouu—wolf howl), and you can preorder it here.
Graham Thomas Wilcox is an author and editor from upstate New York, where he lives with his wife and their two dogs. He's written for Black Library, Whetstone, and Old Moon Quarterly, including the stories "Grimnirsson," "Lord of Slaughter," and "The Feast of Saint Ottmer." He has some more stories upcoming from Black Library as well. In his spare time, he is a fencer.
Adam McPhee is a Canadian writer who lives in Alberta. His fiction has appeared in venues such as Wyngraf, Old Moon Quarterly, Great Ape Journal, Ahoy Comics, and has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. He is a submissions reader for Fusion Fragment and writes this Substack newsletter, Adam's Notes. His latest short story, “The Debtor’s Crypt,” is out now in Hellarkey III.
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