Ice Voices: Interview with Felix Blackwell

To use the self-introduction I was given: Felix Blackwell emerged from the bowels of reddit during a botched summoning ritual. He writes in the horror and thriller genres, and is best known for the 2017 novel Stolen Tongues.

K.L.: Welcome to my modest Ice Voices Interviews with my favorite authors! As a horror writer, you deal in the gaps and thin places of the world as we know it and the world of ambiguities and nightmares. Is there at least a tiny part of you that believes in the supernatural or the unexplainable? 

 

F.B.: Just like the character Angela in Stolen Tongues, I refer to myself sometimes as a “daytime atheist.” As a child, I was particularly concerned about paranormal threats to my safety - especially ghosts and extraterrestrial kidnappers. As I grew up and the world shrunk around me, those fears retreated to the dark and distant places we adults rarely go anymore. More banal fears have replaced my anxieties about the supernatural (worries about money and family and health, etc). But when I’m deep in the mountains on a trail I’ve never been, or sleeping in a place purported to be haunted, or when I’m touring a site overwhelmingly populated by the dead (like the Hohenzollern Crypt), I sometimes feel those old fears arise. I suppose I can say I believe “enough” in the supernatural that I wouldn’t tempt an encounter with it by spending the night alone in an abandoned insane asylum!

 

K.L.: That makes sense and that’s probably why so many horror novels are written from a child’s perspective. I think in your scenario, if I were to spend the night in an abandoned insane asylum, the one thing I would be truly afraid of for sure is my own mind. Would you mind telling me about the genesis of Stolen Tongues? What underlying fears were you tapping into in your reader’s psyche or subconscious?

 

F.B.: One of my favorite horror films is Grave Encounters. If you haven’t seen it, you might like it. It’s about a group of paranormal investigators who become trapped in an abandoned asylum, and they begin losing their minds. There are some very clever scenes, and it’s quite a fun film.

 

Stolen Tongues wasn’t planned at all, but at the time I did think of it as an exercise in trying to frighten a modern audience that had been overexposed to gore and shock for decades. So I dialed the violence way back and started with the idea of “aural horror.” The characters are isolated in a remote cabin, and they keep hearing terrifying and unexplainable things outside: the screams of animals, the babble of people, and the cries of their deceased loved ones. They can’t see anything, so the reader has to just imagine what’s really going on out there. The monster itself was inspired by my partner’s tendency to talk in her sleep. I suddenly imagined she was talking to someone - or something - standing just outside the window in the dark.

 

K.L.: I’ll check it out! One of my favorites movies in that setting is Session 9. I live in the weak and the wounded... Doc. To start, I want to say that your book opens with an electrifying scene—reminiscent of the prequel, which I’d like to discuss later. McCammon’s Swan Song also has a striking beginning, though few others come to mind. According to Freud, stillness, darkness, and uncertainty form the triad that evokes the uncanny, and your book masterfully ventures into that liminal space, especially in depicting the disquiet of sleep-talking. I recall once falling ill, and my husband told me that during the night, I delivered a monologue in Russian, seemingly fully awake. I remember nothing of it, and the idea felt unsettling, almost violating, as if I had been someone else entirely.

You also tap into another profound fear—the eerie senselessness that comes from repeating a single word until it dissolves into meaningless noise, a sort of gibberish barely held together by social constructs. It’s a deeply disorienting feeling, a vertigo that shakes to the core.

On a different note, I love your term “aural horror.” I’ve often thought about what I'd call “sprawling” or “lavishly written” horror. Take Kill Creek, for instance. In that story, the human killer strikes me as far more terrifying than any screeching, writhing monster. It’s fascinating how such visceral horror contrasts with the more minimalist, “aural” horror—closer to what I write myself.

What’s your take on splatterpunk? Do you have any personal favorites? And, more broadly, do you think the extremity and brutality in that genre holds merit? Or does it risk losing something essential in pushing boundaries?

 

F.B.: Oh yes, I love Session 9 as well. That was such a hidden gem. 

 

I think opening chapters are my strength, opposite of ending the book, which is a weakness in Stolen Tongues. In a world where people are so oversaturated with horrific and gory media, I think less is more, and thus darkness and uncertainty can be a lot more frightening than a big monster. I try to lean into that a lot in my works, knowing it’s more and more difficult to frighten audiences these days.

 

It might surprise some readers to know that I have a pretty weak stomach and am unable to read splatterpunk or any extreme horror. I’m particularly sensitive to torture, or violence toward animals, so I have to avoid the more brutal authors and their works altogether. I don’t have much of a philosophical position on it; I think there is absolutely a (small but dedicated) market for extreme horror and I see no reason why authors shouldn’t be able to do it if they please. I guess maybe my personal limit would be if they glorify child or animal abuse or something like that. I’d bet Nick Roberts has a much more developed opinion on these matters of artistic creativity and indecency.

 

K.L.: Yes, I have to say, I am militantly against animal cruelty in horror literature and cinema. It feels to me like an unfortunate gimmick in the sense that it is usually used as a harbinger/catalyst for worse things to come. I also really like this atmospheric dread that you are working with. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, if I remember correctly, distinguished between fear and anxiety, such that the former has a specific object, whereas the latter does not have an object that you can point to. Would you like to tell me more about the prequel? What was your driving force in writing it? I saw that quite  a few readers online didn't find it as scary as Stolen Tongues. I am actually of the opposite opinion. I don't know if this was a conscious influence on your part, but there seemed to be something very Lovecraftian to the horror in this book. But what I found the most effective and original is that the horror here was almost tactile, meaning that it was palpable, like it had a variety of textures and scents to it, sort of like moist clay and decaying autumn leaves, dancing in the wind like mountains. Darkness and the earthen space itself, of incomprehensible geometry, appeared to be the site of horror, which is so remarkable. I also absolutely loved that the most loveable and badass character in the book was an old lady. As someone disabled, this is something I think about a lot and it is incredibly rare, if not unheard of, that strength would come from a disabled or otherwise incapacitated character. What are your thoughts on this?

 

F.B.: Stolen Tongues was a really scary book with flat, undeveloped characters. This time around, I tried to write the prequel for the critics (which is something most authors shouldn’t do), so I ended up focusing on deeply textured characters with interesting arcs. In order to do this, I had to elbow out some of the pure horror to make room for a better story. The Church Beneath the Roots is longer and a lot more complex, but it’s got some of my favorite characters I’ve ever written, and the answers to a lot of questions left in Stolen Tongues’ wake. It was deeply influenced by Lovecraftian horror, and I read nothing but books in that genre during the development process of TCBTR.

Moya is the old lady character you’re referring to, and I love her too. She embodies the rage of her people, the bitterness of an unfair life on a harsh mountain, and the despair of having lost her child. But she’s also a very tender and warm person, in her own way. In Stolen Tongues I conflated the “strength” of a strong female protagonist with “masculinity,” as at the time I hadn’t had much experience writing women (or any) characters. In TCBTR, Moya was my effort to write a strong female protagonist whose strength is derived from her tenacity, her loyalty to her people, and her wisdom. I felt like those qualities would be emphasized by placing them into a character whose body was brittle and ragged with age.

 

K.L.: Speaking of brittle bodies, years ago a friend of mine and I attempted to come with a female superhero character (I am a major geek when it comes to Buffy Summers) who’d be disabled. We had an idea we sort of liked, but nothing came of it. Of course, in horror, survival is the name of the game, but do you think creating a viable character with disabilities (viable in the sense that they wouldn’t be killed off in the first few pages) has potential? What would you envision, even in the most preliminary sense? (I reread Stephen King’s Misery this summer, which is just so brilliant, and in a way, it’s as close as we get to having a protagonist who is temporarily disabled and confined to one room.)

 

F.B.: You know, the horror genre has changed in its presentation of danger, and therefore it has also changed in its presentation of protagonists’ ability/disability. It was in the late 2000s that we saw a shift into deeper, more psychological horror and away from the ruthless physical-pursuer antagonists like Michael Meyers. In many horror novels and films today, the protagonist can’t just run away from the monster, and therefore we can sometimes showcase characters who cannot run at all. Many of my works are inspired by dreams, and whose plots are about dreams, so I’m imagining a character with physical disabilities who has to navigate danger using her subconscious mind and her mental acuity. You could also go in the opposite direction and write an antagonist who preys on a person with disabilities in the physical world, but then encounters a victim who is able to overcome him through cunning, persuasion, guilt, etc. I think I would avoid writing a character whose disabilities are alleviated through magic or something, because in my opinion, the point of writing a disabled character would be to show how they discover how to resist horrific oppression in their own unique way – as opposed to resisting it by becoming able-bodied.

 

I will say from personal experience (with respect to another underrepresented community), any author who is not disabled who tries to write characters with disabilities is going to experience some degree of blowback from the reading community, because inclusivity and representation mean different things to different readers. 

 

K.L.: I definitely agree on all counts. I’ve had this passing fantasy that if I were captured by a serial killer, as a disabled individual, I might actually stand a chance precisely because of my “hyper ability” to read the moods of my caregivers, to use cunning and to bide my time.

 

But I take it you’re referring to the Indigenous community? Would you like to elaborate?

 

F.B.: I would say “Indigenous communities” since there are more than one - just like how there is more than one community of disabled people - and they have disparate and sometimes opposing views on topics from politics to writing. Some of them have praised my efforts to include them in my horror novels, while others have been critical of it. The Church Beneath the Roots was largely written as an attempt to include them in ways suggested to me by those critical of Stolen Tongues. 

 

K.L.: So there are horror books that make us (well, some of us) keep the lights on at night or feel uneasy in an empty apartment. However, there are books that cut deep and maybe even break something a little inside us. These are the books that haunt us. Are there books that do that for you?

 

F.B.: Definitely. Gone to See the River Man (Kristopher Triana) and Left To You (Daniel Volpe) are modern works that moved something inside of me that had never moved before. They’re brutal in a lot of ways, and not just in the graphic sense. I’m particularly moved by writings on the Holocaust due to my academic interest in it during my undergraduate years. But the horror novel that has affected me the most throughout my life has got to be Shelley’s Frankenstein. I remember being blown away by it as a Senior in high school, and having a greater capacity for empathy ever since.

 

K.L.: Do you already know what your next project is going to be? If so, could you share a little bit?

 

F.B.: I have sort of “retired” from writing for the public due to health and family issues. But I have still been writing for my own personal enjoyment. Maybe someday I will release it to the world, but for now it’s just for me. If I ever return to writing for a wider audience, I’ll be wrapping up a novel I drafted years ago on a father whose twelve-year-old son dies mysteriously, and another novel on some of the most frightening dreams I’ve ever had. I have a lot of those, unfortunately!

 

K.L.: I truly hope you do continue to write, but I understand the weight of bare survival only too well.

 

On this note, thank you so much for doing the interview. It's been a real privilege! One last question since horror cinema has already come up: what are your three favorite horror movies? 

 

F.B.: There’s no way I can choose only three! But I will say Event Horizon, Alien, and The Thing (1982) came to mind first. But then there’s The Others, The Witch, The Ring, The Orphanage, The Autopsy of Jane Doe… More recently, The Night House struck me as an amazingly well-written and clever psychological horror/thriller. And Nosferatu was great. I can’t pick three. No way.

Please check out Felix Blackwell's books here, peeps!