Milton, Metalocalypse, and Medievalism
Milton, Metalocalypse, and Medievalism
Matt Holder talks about his debut novella, Hurled Headlong Flaming
I met Matt Holder a while back through a critique exchange on a discord server we’re both members of. I found his notes on my project insightful, and I had a blast reading his manuscript. Earlier this month he published his debut novella (not the project I critiqued but of a very similar vein), as part of the Keen Blades project from Whetstone. The novella, titled Hurled Headlong Flaming after a line from Paradise Lost, is about an unnamed medieval bishop’s ‘descension’ into an underworld (it’s left a little ambiguous as to whether or not this is truly Hell) in search of a rare manuscript that might stave off the apocalypse. I spoke with Matt about Whetstone, his novella, and his love of John Milton.
Before we get into your book, can you tell us about Whetstone and their Keen Blades project?
Matt: Sure! Whetstone is an online magazine dedicated to up-and-coming writers, and it’s published by Spiral Tower Press (STP), an indie press with publisher/editor Jason Ray Carney at the helm. STP also publishes Witch House and Waystation, online magazines dedicated to horror/weird fiction and space opera, respectively. And just last year, STP started its own Amateur Press Association with TriAPA, a collection of independent zines all dedicated to various aspects of pulp genres. All of these publications are absolutely free and available on their website, located here.
The breadth and dedication of STP’s output is impressive, particularly since so much of it (probably all?) is powered by volunteer hours, and its mission to find and cultivate new writers is one that I find admirable and much-needed. What’s more, their dedication to these pulp genres over several years seems to have paid off, as glimmerings of sword and sorcery publications and venues seem to be flourishing right now. But perhaps what drew me to them first was their art direction. Jason has a love for high contrast black-and-white art that recalls the glory days of TSR, the kind of art you might find scribbled in black ink on notebook paper. Every cover they commission and produce is beautiful, and it’s carried over into his choice of Jake Kelly as the cover artist for Hurled Headlong Flaming, the first Keen Blades entry.
The Keen Blades series represents STP’s first foray into physical publication with a stated intent to publish novella-length stories “that test the boundaries of what sword and sorcery can be.” Jason and I met online through Discord and then in-person at NecronomiCON a few years ago (2022, maybe?). He told me about this novella-line idea he’d had for awhile and one thing led to another. I can’t speak to the future of the line, but I’m confident Jason and the people he works with will continue to publish exciting and fresh work.
I’ve said elsewhere that you have, “a real talent for evoking the medieval mind, and then having it come up against things that are totally alien to its experience.” Is this something you set out to achieve? And if so, how do you go about it?
Matt: Thank you! I appreciate the kind words. I wouldn’t say I intentionally try to evoke a medieval mindset, but I am interested in juxtaposition. And I think part of what feels medieval is that I’m very invested in a kind of pre-Enlightenment worldview, one where corporeality and spirituality were much more entwined than separate—before Descartes kind of ruined everything for everybody. So when I’m writing a character set in this period, particularly a literate and learned character, I’m thinking about how they exist in a world that has entirely different boundaries than we do, one where definitions that we take for granted are shifted or unsettled, while at the same time having their own sets of rigid worldviews. Also, one of the things I wanted to do was take these people seriously when it came to their faith, which I think can also contribute to the kind of dissonance that is felt between the various encounters. If a person of earnest faith, in the medieval period, saw an alien descend on a spaceship, they’re going to experience that phenomena through their specific perspective, so it becomes an angel or a demon or some other miraculous wonder filled with portent, but it would decidedly not be what we would call an alien in a spaceship.
I should clarify I’m not a medievalist by any means, so I’m no expert on the time period, but I’m fascinated by its literature, which often drips with sacrality and weirdness (I’m thinking about John Mandeville here and passion plays, but also Dante and Chaucer and Beowulf). And I can’t stress the pre-Enlightenment piece enough. The Enlightenment solidified a lot of contemporary ideologies (about the human, about government, about economics) and rationalism became the name of the game. The way we understand logic and rationality is not necessarily the same way that a medieval mind understands “logic,” so they might process an experience very differently. Again, I’m no expert so I can’t pinpoint how they might process something specifically, but I’m always trying to think: what would piss off Descartes the most?
Jason Ray Carney’s intro mentions you’re inspired by Dante, Milton, and heavy metal. Can you talk a little about how they influenced Hurled Headlong Flaming?
Matt: When it comes to Milton and Dante, I’m inspired by their gift of language, their vividness, their imagination, their willingness to engage in fanciful play with something that they find sacred, their sheer technical brilliance, and their scope. I touch on this later in the Milton question, but their ability to transform the symbolic into something almost tangible and real holds a lot of sway over me, just the audacity to even try to describe what Hell might be like or to actually stage the war in Heaven.
As far as the heavy metal influence, it's more of the visual aesthetic I’m drawn to than the music itself. I’m not actually a huge metal person. I love Black Sabbath (is that still metal?) and Iron Maiden, but I’m particularly drawn, similar to Milton and Dante, to the breadth and ambition of both the lyrics and the often maximalist design of accompanying art. I just love how big and loud and angry everything is, which I think is the appeal for a lot of people. When I was in high school, Metalocalypse exerted an enormous influence, and I think part of its appeal for me was not only its maximalism but also its parodic aspect, of just stretching the limits of this genre of music to the obscene degree, yet still maintaining a level of craft and storytelling I found compelling.
The other big influence here is Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, particularly the series Hellboy in Hell. Also wearing the influences of Dante and Milton on his sleeve (Milton is quoted a lot), Mignola’s version of Hell is gothic, dilapidated, hollowed out, yet still wonderfully vibrant and evocative. As a writer and artist, Mignola is able to communicate a profound sense of pathos and emotional heft with sparse lines and even sparser dialogue, and it’s a body of work that I think about a lot when I’m writing.
And if there’s one thing that ties all of these influences together, it's their intertextuality. In other words, Dante and Milton, Mignola and heavy metal: these are texts, genres, and authors that are explicitly connected to other texts; they speak not only to and within themselves but also reach backwards in time (sometimes centuries) and stage a kind of dialogue with the corpus/canon/whatever that came before. To an extent this intertextuality is ultimately what renders a work worthy of the lofty moniker of “literature,” and it’s a huge reason for why I wanted Hurled Headlong Flaming to not only engage in different forms but also to directly reference past texts. This is seen in the epigraphs, but also in the Bishop’s own internal monologue, which is frequently just passages from the Bible. So the hope is that, though the page count is small, the thing can feel a bit heavier, packed with more depth, because I wanted it to be a part of this larger conversation.
One of the demonic entities that guides the bishop is named Lycidas, and I know there’s a connection to Milton there but why Lycidas?
Matt: I would like to say that there’s some deeper connection, that the name itself is an allusion to the long tradition of the name Lycidas appearing in classical literature, that there’s some connection to the beautiful elegiac poem of the same name that Milton composed for his friend that drowned, but the truth is I just like the name. And to be honest I’m not even sure if I pronounce it correctly when I say it out loud. I’ve used Lycidas in other stories as the name of a demon, but there’s not much more to it. I have a feeling the name will continue to occur in my stuff, and perhaps I’ll think more about the name’s history and consider some of the historical/literary implications that might be fun to play with.
I feel like Milton is having a bit of a moment now, Geoffrey Morrison’s recent novel Falling Hour is also titled after a line from Paradise Lost. I can’t think of a third example so maybe not that big of a moment, but I feel like I’m seeing people discussing his work more on twitter, maybe? What is it about Milton that works for you?
Matt: To get a little fanboy-ish and hyperbolic, I think Milton’s Paradise Lost is the crowning achievement of the English language. Milton set out to write (ambitiously, arrogantly) the English-language version of The Aeneid – an English epic, in other words. He chose the largest canvas he could think of (the creation, fall, and redemption of humanity), and he wedded that cosmic scope to an exacting and wonderfully evocative blank verse, every line stuffed with intertextuality, allusion, metaphor, etc. So on the one hand it works for me because, purely from a technical perspective, it sort of blows me away. I can’t read it and not come away recharged and excited about language. And on the other hand, the imagination on display is also unparalleled. Milton solidified and codified a preexisting iconography, but he infused it with so much of his own personal stamp that it’s easy to identify a pre-Miltonion cosmology and a post-Miltonion cosmology. Lucifer talking to his angels/demons on the shores of Hell, his ascension through the spheres, the war between Heaven and Hell with literal mountains flying amidst the invention of gunpowder and cannonfire (Milton’s idea that the devil himself invented guns and gunpowder has only gained symbolic weight), the strange ecology of Eden, the glimpse into the future afforded to Adam and Eve: it’s all just brilliant and fun and, genuinely, epic.
As far as a possible resurgence, I certainly hope so. Milton is not taught in high schools or colleges the same way that Shakespeare is (the other Big Important Early Modern White Guy), likely owing to the difficulty, perhaps, in trying to teach such a long poem. But he wrote tons of sonnets and shorter poems, not to mention Samson Agonistes, another masterwork, and his nonfiction writings are influential in their own way, his Areopagitica an insightful and prescient defense of speech and expression (to say nothing of his religious writings). If I had my way and could control all English curriculum, I would certainly prioritize his work more in the schools, as I think not enough of a general readership has encountered him directly (though it’s very likely they’ve encountered his ideas indirectly – for example, I’m not sure you can get to Warhammer 40k without Milton, let alone Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). I suppose one could argue that he’s not as well read because of the explicitly religious nature of, for example, Paradise Lost, but I’m not sure I really believe that. In a lot of ways Paradise Lost is similar to something like Moby Dick: a masterwork, but so dense and intimidating that only the most intrepid readers/students will pick it up and give it a go. But again, I hope he is having a moment and more people actually pick up his work. Whether you're a reader or a writer or anything in between, I think you’ll find something worthwhile.
Hurled Headlong Flaming is the story of a medieval bishop who descends into an underworld (I won’t call it ‘Hell’). Stories about journeys to an afterlife or underworld don’t often work for me, I find they either become too allegorical and I lose interest or else I find it hard to get invested in a character who’s probably just dreaming or whatever. I’m not really sure what it is. But with Hurled Headlong Flaming that wasn’t the case at all. There’s a real corporeality to the bishop, if that’s the term. I felt like he was there and I was there with him, and his every step is tormented and comes at a cost. How were you able to achieve this effect?
Matt: Thank you again! And you’re spot-on, corporeality is exactly the right word. I’m very interested in the ways that bodies produce their own types of knowledge, often without us being “conscious” of it (whatever that means). There’s an argument to be made (and it has been, but I can’t remember the name of the person that originally planted this in my brain) that rather than the conventional, rationalist explanation for how we operate (choice starts with cognition, which is then translated into an action/thought) we are actually closer to a bundle of interconnected instinctual responses (it’s a little Freudian/Jungian). In other words, there is a lot less conscious, agential thinking that goes into our actions than we might like to believe. Instead, both the body and mind produce their own knowledge independent of our “thinking” it through. I’m not here to make an empirical argument about how the brain works, but when it comes to thinking about characters as embodied, particularly in the case of this novel, I did go out of my way to draw a strong connection between the body and the knowledge it produces.
To actually answer the question, though, one of the strategies I used to emphasize this corporeality was to consistently remind the reader of the Bishop’s body. He’s naked through most of the story, and along the way his skin is repeatedly covered in layers of various substances: water, dirt, blood, oil, more blood, more water. He notes these changes and the characters themselves will comment on it. As well, he’s very cognizant of his wounds and when he’s hurt. During the battle sequence his body is healing rapidly, but he still acknowledges how torn his flesh becomes; when he walks in the city, his feet become cut and start to bleed. The Bishop’s body is neither clean nor divorced from materiality; when he descends into the netherworld arena, he’s not entering another plane of reality where different rules apply but instead his body becomes even more interactive with his environment, more responsive to it, more impressed into it.
I’m also obsessed with hands. Milton ends Paradise Lost with Adam and Eve exiting the garden while holding hands, and it’s a resonant image that stuck with me: “They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” As well, I’m thinking about the symbolic connection of “blood on your hands,” so again I try to emphasize hands that are doing things, which hopefully helps the reader connect the image/symbol/idea with the body/person that is actually lending that abstract notion a sense of materiality.
What was it that made you choose Yaqut al-Hamawi––a real historical person in a novella that otherwise mostly avoids these sort of details that anchor the narrative in time and place––to be the one who converses with and helps the bishop?
Matt: Again, I wish I had a more insightful answer, but the truth is just that I had encountered this figure years and years ago as someone who generated maps and chronicles of the world at the time. Historically, he is dead at the time of the novella, but I sort of cheated and had him still existing, partly to suit my own purposes but also to lend his presence a bit more dimensionality as it relates to his own quest to save his wife. Time is slippery.
Just when the novella is threatening to become unrelentingly grim, the bishop is forced to enter into a socratic dialogue on the nature of authority with a pair of demonic entities if he’s to continue his journey, and it’s a really delightful encounter, at least at first, but what’s going on there?
Matt: Part of it is my own restlessness (read lack of discipline) as a writer. I wanted to change the voice and style of the thing, so Part 1 sticks with a fairly standard limited third, Part 2 is this dialogue, and Part 3 is the first-person journal entry. So at least one answer to “what’s going on there” is just wanting to change things in terms of form.
But also, because the dialogue is such a venerated, literally millenia-old tradition, it felt appropriate to actually try to and use its structure as a tool in a novella that is invested in questions of truth and power and violence, subjects that have been debated in the dialogue form.
To answer your actual question, though, about the change in tone, part of it was a conscious decision to begin Part 2 with something more whimsical after all the bloody bits at the end of Part 1. As well, these demons/entities are seemingly detached from not only the Bishop’s own quest but also the world that he inhabits, so their attitude is similarly detached, which can read as humor (or madness, maybe). I’m a big fan of Terry Pratchett, and I’m struck by his ability to balance madcap humor and innuendo-filled dialogue with gut-punching pathos; his novels have a sense of pure play about them, and that is something I wanted to try for here.
Finally, one of my favorite films is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and there’s a truly demented scene around a dinner table where the murderous cannibal family is seemingly engaged in a mundane act, but from the protagonist’s POV it is profane. The humor in that sequence (or at least the maniacal laughter, I’m not sure it’s actually funny as a viewer) feels so unhinged and unsafe, the point where the film seems to fully delve into a genuine madness. That unease is triggered by a cognitive dissonance between the trivial function of the family dinner and the taboo of cannibalism. So now that I’m thinking about it more, in terms of my own influences, I think I wanted to balance that perversity with the whimsy of Pratchett, purely because those are things that I respond to as a reader/viewer.
You also write book reviews for Strange Horizons. How does that help when it comes time to write your own fiction?
Matt: Reviewing helps me stay engaged with the contemporary genre space and actively read within those subgenres that I actually want to work within. Reviewing also forces me to think about intentionality. When I review a book, I’m trying to read generously and ask: why might the author have made this choice, and how is that decision connected to the (assumed) desired response of the reader? Asking that question of others helps me to foreground those concerns in my own writing, a reminder that writing is ultimately a series of decisions to be made, and it’s easier to make those decisions when I’m thinking about intent.
Reviewing reminds me that writing and reading fiction are communal/social activities. If you’re trying to publish fiction, or if you do publish fiction, you want your work to be read and responded to. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re always writing with a reader in mind, but it does mean you want your work to exist within a larger social context. Reviewing allows me the the opportunity to participate in that community of reading and writing and reviewing, which, again, humbles me into the realization that, eventually, no matter the wherefores, an audience will read my work (hopefully), and that comes with a sense of obligation—not to entertain, necessarily, or to challenge or to provoke (though I do like provocation), but an obligation to take it seriously. So a long-winded way of saying that reviewing teaches me a greater respect for the community I belong to.
Do you have any plans to continue this story? A sequel, perhaps?
Matt: I do! This novella is actually a prequel to a novel I wrote several years ago titled Wyrm. Wyrm tells the story of a monastery and the monks tasked (slight spoilers) with transcription of the text that the Bishop retrieves. Unlike HHF, the novel is much more anchored in a certain kind of contemporary realism (though set in the early 1300s), and the characterization is more intimate, whereas the novella’s is a bit more operatic, perhaps. And my current writing project is a sequel to Wrym that I’ve tentatively titled Something Like Scales. With Scales, I want to try for a kind of mosaic approach with a wide cast of characters, voices, and forms that culminates ultimately with…revelation? I’m not really sure at this point. Neither of these has any current publication plans or anything, but it’s a world and time period that I enjoy working through, and I continue to use these projects as opportunities for practice of new styles.
I want to say a final thank you, Adam, for conducting this interview and hosting it in your newsletter – I really appreciate it.
And a huge thank you to all of the readers that pick up the book!
Thanks for reading! This has been Adam’s Notes for May 13, 2024.
You can find Hurled Headlong Flaming on Bookshop and Amazon (and Amazon Canada). Probably other places too.
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