From the title story, to “The Lake,” to “How Far to Englishman’s Bay,” these stories have a very close relationship with doom, annihilation, the unreachable prospect of solace. They ended up covering a wide range of topics including but not limited to: emotional catharsis through sublime terror, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Witch, inhabiting aesthetic utopias, resisting emotion by way of creating it, loudly eating nachos while watching Michael Haneke, the so-called “genre divide,” and who they’ve been reading, among so much more.Īdrian Van Young: One thing I’m struck by and appreciate about your collection Blood is its overall bleakness.
Van Young and Cheney, as it would happen, are also admirers of each other’s work and agreed to have a conversation by email in between bouts of winding down their teaching careers for the summer, and reading each other’s most recent books. Matthew Cheney is the author of the collection Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Eric Schaller) of the occasional online magazine The Revelator.
Adrian Van Young is the author of the collection The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and the novel Shadows in Summerland (ChiZine Publications, 2016) as well as The Murder Chronicles: A New Orleans Murder Mystery, an interactive, serialized mystery novella for.