Yes It's Fucking Political... with Elford Alley

A Quick Introduction…

Hi everyone, and welcome to the first ever Yes It’s Fucking Political - a space for darkfic writers to explore and expand on some of the intersections of politics and horror in their work. Today’s guest is Elford Alley, author of (among many other titles) the wonderful horror-comedy Apartment 239 and the short story collection Ash & Bone.

Before we get started, though, I thought it might make sense to offer a quick explanation of how we came to be here…

I set up this space, you’ll be stunned to learn, because I’m angry. Angry about all the usual structural issues that make everyday life in the UK and elsewhere that bit more unbearable for all but the most insulated. Among them: the fiscal and ideological strip-mining of the country I grew up in, and an institutional racism and homophobia that’s reached such fever pitch there are now public figures arguing, in all seriousness, that we should refrain from teaching kids about documented historical events, lest they realise just how genocidally racist and homophobic the English have been in the past. Also among them: a global climate catastrophe nobody in a position of real authority seems to have much appetite to avert, but that’s killing us all anyway, quickly and slowly; a broken housing market and equally broken healthcare system, both of them dismantled entirely deliberately by successive conservative governments intent on privatisation; and a media and policy demonisation of trans people that now manifests in things as genuinely unhinged as (and I promise, I’m not making this up) former TV Gladiators threatening to turn up on the doorsteps of politicians to ask them what they think about genitals.

There’s a lot to be angry about.

In less general terms, I’m angry about the self-proclaimed “apolitical”: those people who happily turn a blind eye to the suffering of others because it’s just too much damn effort to treat their BIPOC colleagues and queer neighbours with respect, or too damn uncomfortable to keep hearing about those people who died in that other place too far away to worry about. People who just want to settle down and enjoy a nice, nonconfrontational book or movie or TV show without having to look at too many brown faces, or read about those trans folk, or be reminded that they’re fiddling while Rome - quite literally - burns.

I do not care for these people. 

But many of them - so very many of them - have come out in the horror community lately, their ire stoked by the release of books like Stephen King’s Holly: a novel that dares to reference Covid, Trump and the culture wars he profited from, as well as a lot of other things that really happened in the US, and recently. These people, in particular, have pissed me off. Because they’re kidding themselves if they think the “apolitical” novel they’re thirsting for could ever actually exist.

I’m pretty verbose, and I’m an ex-academic. So my inclination here is to launch into a lengthy Foucauldian soliloquy - of the kind my partner routinely suffers through of an evening - about the impossibility of divorcing a text from the context of its production and reception; about the death of the author (uppercase or lowercase, however you prefer); about political and historical climates as determinants of textual elements. About the staggering lack of self-awareness that drives people to believe that what they write or read is ahistorical, acultural, un-tainted by the times and places they’re living in.

But really, Barthes and Foucault said it better. And my partner has suffered enough.

So instead, I want to cede the floor to others in the horror community with a point of view on how politics - the politics of everyday life, as well as literal social and governmental policy - influences their writing.

Which brings us… here.

I really hope you enjoy these essays - all of them from very talented people whose voices deserve to be not just heard but amplified. I’m excited as hell to hear what they have to say.

All the best,

Nat 

P.S. if you fancy a little light listening… behold, the song - from the evergreen and really rather wonderful Skunk Anansie - that inspired the name…

Yes, it’s fucking political. Everything’s political.

Now - on with the show…

Of Course It’s Fucking Political: Horrors In A Small Town, by Elford Alley

As a horror writer, I tend to tackle small towns and rural settings. I know these areas well, growing up in the middle of nowhere, no neighbors beyond my grandparents and a smattering of relatives. My graduating class was 35. My first experience in a “big city” was community college in a town of 36,000.

While there were hard times of course, I was damn lucky. But man, people struggled. They had a lot of people to blame for their falling wages, their lay-offs and lost pensions.

That’s how it works. People live on the edge there, and they’re pushed further every day. Instead of turning their rage to the rich fucks gaming the system and hoarding their cash like a goddamn dragon, the ones draining their towns of everything, they blame immigrants. They blame other races. They blame welfare.

Because that’s how the system is designed.

Because poverty underwrites horror. Why didn’t you leave the haunted house? Why did you take a job at the cursed campsite? Why did you stay late after work, or take the mysterious job posting? Why did you keep going to classes with a killer on the loose?

Why? Because you gotta eat. Because a system that funnels every single gain an economy makes to the very top and hoards it, hasn’t left you with any alternative. Because when they can’t impress their shareholders with bigger sales, they gotta take that cash from somewhere, and your pay and benefits will do just fine. You want to do something about it? Even the smallest towns have a police force with a bloated budget to keep you in line.

Kids have lunch debt at their schools. That’s okay, the system is gonna put them to work soon enough.

In my stories, characters live with the knowledge that they could lose everything any minute. They, like us, are a paycheck or maybe two away from losing their homes. They don’t make desperate decisions because the plot demands it, they do it because they know what’s waiting, and sometimes it’s worse than a madman with a butcher knife. In the fall where I live, when the leaves die you can see the tarps and tents nestled in the tree lines. They’re waiting for me, they’re waiting for you.

Art imitates life, and in both there’s no safety net and you’re standing at the edge.

The killer is closing in.

About Elford Alley

Elford Alley is a horror writer and disgraced paranormal investigator from Texas. His most recent work is the novel Apartment 239 and the collection We Will Find a Place for You. You can find his work at elfordalley.com.