A.P. Thayer's Blog

Figured I’d leave this here for anyone still poking around this blog.

As you may have seen from the signup window on my main page, I’ve moved over to Substack. You’ll find my blog posts, newsletters, snippets, and more published over there, so if you’d like to keep up with me, that’s the best place to do so.

See you there!

Link: apthayer.substack.com

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t, just that I wasn’t allowed to.

When I got home from school and my mother wasn’t home, I would stand in just the right spot in front of their bedroom TV so I could see out the window. Then I would turn the TV on and remember which channel it was left on, as well as the channel that would come up when you hit “last channel” on the remote (remember that?). If my mom drove up, I would hit the numbers for the last two channels and run to my room, leaving no evidence of my watching. Then I would change the channel to Cartoon Network so I could catch Toonami. Dragonball Z was on a lot, but sometimes I’d be able to watch enough, at the right time, to catch other shows. Shows like Evangelion, Robotech, Voltron, and Gundam Wing.

Shows about giant robots.

Dazzling animated fights, energy beams, colossal blades… I was enthralled. The early exposure to these was likely an integral part of my writing foundation, just as much as my father reading Lord of the Rings to me was. I can’t help but think about those fights when I’m writing action in my own work.

Then I moved away to boarding school. On a coed campus environment, Toonami afternoons were replaced by hooking up and movies like Fight Club, Mallrats, and Se7en. I navigated my way through adolescence and entered adulthood, and my interests shifted, of course. Action and explosions no longer held the same appeal. Instead, I gravitated toward the exploration of the human. It became about personal struggles, complex emotions. Character-driven narratives replaced power beams and energy blades.

But it didn’t have to be that way. Often the pendulum swings too far. Now I’m older, I can have my cake and eat it, too, because looking back, those shows weren’t about giant robots, not really. They were about the characters inside those robots. Within the confines of their mechanical exoskeletons, those characters grappled with inner demons and faced the consequences of their choices. It was those internal battles that made the shows compelling (though I still think the energy swords helped).

In 2022, Neon Hemlock had an open submissions call for queer mech stories, and the memories of all those shows came flooding back. I hadn’t even considered writing mech stories until that moment but jumped at the opportunity. And right away, I knew I wanted to write about the people inside the mechs. The story I wrote, “If Black Was Green and Fluorescent,” is about two old war veterans—retired lovers, who are called back into war. There’s no giant battle. The adversary is the strain in their relationship.

But there is an energy sword.

The anthology is coming out in July 2023 (available for preorder here). I hope you’ll check it out.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about my writing. I think it’s essential to explore my influences and define my style as a writer. After all, I want my readers to know what they’re getting when they pick up one of my books or start one of my stories. That’s why I’ve been getting into my upbringing and delving into why I am the way I am in previous blog posts. But I’m taking it even further and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I’ve been writing cross-genre speculative fiction for years—always with an element of horror. As I’ve grown as a writer, though, I’ve found that I’m drawn more and more to the void. I’ve been exploring the bleaker corners of the human experience, and I’ve found that though the horror genre allows me to delve into those spaces, there are other genres I can blend into it that really make that exploration personal to me.

Despite the fact that I’ve been writing for some time now, I’ve always struggled with how to define my style. Am I a grimdark writer? Horror? Weird fiction? Cross-genre speculative fiction? I’ve written stories that could be described as any of those, as well as those that could be described as literary fiction, magical realism, or even science fiction. But as I’ve looked back over my body of work, I’ve realized that there is a common thread that runs through all of my writing: a sense of unease, of something lurking just out of sight.

So I’ve decided to coin a new term for my writing:

Nightmarism.

Nightmarism is a genre that combines the best elements of horror, literary fiction, magical realism, and weird fiction. At its core, Nightmarism is all about exploring the dark areas of the human experience and the very real things that terrify us. But it’s also about delving into the unknown, the surreal, and the unexplainable.

What can you expect to find in Nightmarist fiction?

First and foremost, you’ll find bleak realities with complicated, adult relationships. I like to explore broken homes, faded relationships, regret, self-loathing, and distrust. These are all-too-human horrors that are known and experienced the world over and are at the forefront of the stories I tell.

But it isn’t all negative. Other common human experiences of hope and love are often themes I explore in my stories. The human experience is more than just the bleak, and those highlights of the good are what ultimately make the horror so awful.

Beneath the surface of these mundane experiences, though, you’ll find layers of reality being stripped away. The loss of sanity is muddled with intrusive magic. Insomnia leads to nightmares of alien vistas and the waking world becomes home to liminal spaces, cosmic dimensions, and dreamscapes. The unsettling, the strange, and the unknowable hammer the background of everyday horror reinforcing just how small humans are on the grand scale of the universe.

And through it all, there’s always a wriggling thread of terror. An unsettling feeling, a sense of impending doom, or the presence of death itself. Nightmarism is all about creating a surreal sense of dread in a very realistic experience.

I hope that this gives you a better sense of what my writing is all about. Nightmarism is a genre that I’m excited to continue exploring. If you’re a fan of horror, literary fiction, magical realism, or weird fiction, I’d like to invite you into my world of waking nightmares.

Welcome.

I keep promising I’m going to delve into nightmarism, but before I can do that, you must understand my influences.

I’ve already covered the marks left on my psyche by Catholicism and the internet. Let me shine a light on a much bigger influence:

Hypnagogia.

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in blood. The sheets were soaked in it. Butters lay next to me, eviscerated, his insides spread out all over the blankets. A few panicked seconds later, the hallucination faded, the splatters of red melted back into the pattern on the linens, and I stroked the sleeping dog. I stayed up for a while that night, all hints of sleep chased away.

Several nights ago, I woke up at around midnight and my entire room was glowing a venomous green, like an alien ship was hovering outside my window, bathing the entirety of my bedroom in its light. I sat up, staring at my green walls, not daring to look out the window behind me, blinking and rubbing my eyes, trying to figure out where the light was coming from. Had someone changed the light bulbs in the alley? Was someone shining an emergency light into my room? What did green emergency lights mean? As I pondered these questions and looked around my room, the color faded. Green became shadowy off-white. My bedroom returned to normal and I was finally fully awake.

Last night, I woke up and there was a woman standing in the corner of my bedroom. Actually, to be specific, she was hovering a foot off the ground. She had her back to me and her head down, her long, dark hair covering her face. She didn’t move or make a sound, and a few seconds later, as my waking mind battled my sleeping one, her body disappeared and the curtain of disheveled hair reverted back to the lampshade it always was.

This weird phenomenon—these hallucinations—is thanks to hypnagogia. I have no idea what causes them, as I have no idea why they have become more frequent in the last few months. These hallucinations affect me as a person, of course, but also as a writer.

I am constantly trying to play catch up when it comes to sleep. When the norm is interrupted, nightmare-plagued sleep with panicked waking hallucinations interspersed throughout, you better believe it affects my outlook on life. Never mind how rested I feel during the day.

And as a writer?

They say to write what you know, and I know nightmares. I know hypnagogia. I know nighttime disturbances and hauntings and midnight horrors. I’ve lived with them since I was a child. I have become intimate with the anxiety that comes when the sun is down and our brains are in nocturnal mode. Terror isn’t the other, for me. It’s always—commonplace. I soak in those waters every night and when the sun rises, I have to choose whether I’m left with a feeling of fatigue and a damaged emotional state, or I can plumb the depths of those treacherous waters and wring out some use from them.

Some days, I can only do the former. Wallowing, yawning, grumping. On other days, the good days, I do the latter. I wrestle the incubus and put it in a chokehold. I beat it into submission and tell it to whisper its secrets to me. And I add every new secret to an ever-growing list of ideas and inspiration for my writing.

I went out to lunch with an old friend recently and he asked me, do you ever worry you’re going to run out of ideas?

It was an easy answer.

No.

I am inundated with them every night. I could write ideas down from now until my dying day and never have time to use them all.

I am a writer, and I am blessed by nightmares.

I’ve been shocking myself lately.

As I’ve been working on this horror novella, especially during the drafting process, I found myself pushing my boundaries of comfort. I may be an atheist and a horror writer now, but I was raised Roman Catholic and those hooks of so-called decency still ensnare me.

I made myself squirm, with the goal of making my readers squirm, but even I had to take pause and consider what I was writing.

Where did this come from? From where am I drawing these details?

The internet is a likely culprit. I’m a millennial, after all. My formative years were when the Internet was the wild west. When it was horrific, new, and dangerous. Not like it is now, a slow rot of cancer that whips us from apathy to rage at gigabit speeds. No, the new internet was scarring. Shocking. Nascent.

And it was on those just-born pages where maybe I started to cultivate the horrible within myself. I’ve seen some horrific things on the internet, and I don’t just mean two girls, one cup, goatse, or beheadings. I’m not talking about haunted e-mail chains, copypasta, and cursed websites. No, I stumbled upon some truly awful things. I was ten years old when I saw something so vile it changed my perception of humanity forever. And that darkness has likely stuck with me ever since.

So yes, the internet is part of the reason I write horror. It raised me. Literally and figuratively. In the time when I was learning teenage independence, in the years when I left home to go to boarding school, a place with the barest amount of adult supervision, the internet was shepherding me into adulthood.

But that’s not the whole story. I was raised Roman Catholic and if the internet is all of humanity’s sins at your fingertips, Catholicism is the comfortable chair you sit in to enjoy your vices.

For who created sin?

As damaging as the internet was to my psyche, and continues to be to my health, how damaging was all the talk of fire and brimstone to a child? How impressed upon me were fear and damnation? I grew up in Europe, so I toured the bone ossuaries and skeleton chapels. I saw the torture devices of the Inquisition. I stood beneath the statue of Archangel Michael slaying the dragon. And I fell under the spell of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, at seven years old.

All products of Catholicism.

No, all of the blame cannot be placed at the feet of the internet. The horrific things were already there inside of me before I ever loaded the first website. How dare the vestigial religion be shocked by what I’m writing now when it is its architect? How dare the creator of sin and hell judge my words?

You’re going to hear a lot about nightmarism in my upcoming blog and social media posts. It’s the name I’ve given my kind of horror writing. I’m looking forward to exploring what that is with you, but in the meantime, I leave you with this:

I’m going to keep writing my nightmarist fiction until I kill the last vestiges of Catholicism within me. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Stay frosty, my friends.

As I sit in my living room, computer on my lap, listening to Nas telling me that death is the cousin of sleep, I can’t help but drift off into my alternate life.

In this other life, I still smoke. I still drink. This version of me is awake at night and sleeps during the day. He takes walks around deserted Los Angeles streets, he watches the sun set on the pacific, and he cruises around Mulholland at midnight with the windows open and the music up.

In this fantasy, I’m also a writer. And I don’t mean a writer like I’m a writer now. And I’m not gate-keeping the term, either. If you write, you’re a writer. But in this other life, I’m a…

writer.

I’ve got the agent e-mailling me asking me how the latest manuscript is doing. I’ve got the tortured writer mentality and a book tour looming. The desk with an old typewriter and a half empty (‘cause I’m a pessimist) bottle of rye.

It’s a vibe.

And then I snap back to reality. The reality where if I tried staying up all night I’d have a three day sleep hangover. The reality where if I still smoked and drank, I very well could be dead already.

The Nas song is over, I click shuffle until I settle on something else to suit my melancholy mood, and get back to work.

I wish this was a rarer occurrence, but these little fantasy trips I take into a different timeline of myself—these peeks into a parallel universe—are like vacations. And, more importantly, they sell me on the future I’m building.

Not because I think that’s what my future is going to be like. I don’t think I even want that future. I think if I actually lived like that, I would be miserable.

Maybe that romanticization is hell, and I’m just trying to stay out of it.

Still. When I’m not checking in on my black and white writer self, I grieve. I grieve because it is a certainty that I will never have that and, regardless of whether I want it or not, the knowledge that I will forever be without it, is a funerary weight on my chest.

So, like a widow, I’ll keep re-living the fantasy and I’ll keep mourning at the knowledge that it’ll never be. And I’ll write blog posts and submit short stories and send out query letters so that I can live a realer, more tangible, and possible fantasy.

It’s award season and, therefore, time for authors to be shouting their accomplishments from the rooftops even more so than usual. Weird that this is the way it’s done, but don’t hate the player, hate the game.

On a more serious note, I’d be very honored if you considered the following stories for awards, took the time to read them, or even simply recommended them to a friend. You’re a gem.

“Bicicleta” | Los Suelos Anthology | February 2022 | Link (English) | Link (Spanish)

“Why the Gray Bird Sings” | Dark Recesses Press, Vol 6 - Issue 15 | April 2022 | Link (contact for PDF copy)

“Obsidian Never Glitters in a Void” | Space Fantasy Magazine, Issue #1 | July 2022 | Link

“Retinopathy” | Speculative City Magazine, Issue #13 | August 2022 | Link

First published in Murder Park After Dark, Volume III in October 2020

It started as a little bit of pressure. A stuffed up nose and a twinge of pain. It wasn’t even that bad at first. As I went through my day, going to the gym, going to work, running errands, it faded into the background and I forgot about it.

Over the course of the next few days, the pressure began to build. It spread to my temples, to the top of my head. It felt like someone was pushing the back of my eyeball, applying a steady thumb. Trying to pop it out.

Even then, I lived with the pain for a while, hoping it would get better. I kept hydrated. I wore sunglasses more. I took Excedrin until my stomach hurt.

It didn’t get any better.

I snapped at my wife. I tried apologizing, but she didn’t let me into the bedroom that night.

That was the last night of sleep I got, on our downstairs couch. I dreamed of a red sky and squirming black bodies stretching out to the horizon.

The next day, the pain had only increased. Light and sound made me want to vomit. By the time my wife came down, I was writhing in pain.

She took me to urgent care.

The fluorescent lights in the waiting room buzzed and I tried closing my eyes. I only saw that same red sky.

When I saw the doctor, she diagnosed me with retinal migraines.  She gave me Topamax and sent me home, with instructions to stay in a dark, quiet room, stay hydrated, and stay away from chocolate, wine, and fatty foods. She also gave me an appointment in three days to see a neurologist.

Those three days were hell. Every single sound, every whispered question from my wife, was a lance of molten fire through my skull. Every car that passed outside, every flap of a bird’s wing, bloomed new pain in my eye socket.

I considered ending it all during those three days. Laying there, in the dark, unable to close my eyes because the weight of my eyelid on my cornea was too painful. Unable to keep them open because even the faint crack of light coming in through the blinds was searing agony.

By the time I saw the neurologist, I hadn’t slept in three days. They admitted me immediately.

#

Every sound in the MRI machine was a new sledgehammer to my eye socket.

Stay still, they told me. Don’t move, they said. How about you lay down here and have this pain in your fucking skull and try to stay still.

It took three attempts before they got the images.

#

The Topamax isn’t working, I said, as the neurologist looked at the images. I need something else.

The sound of my own voice made me want to vomit in pain.

I can see why, he replied. There’s nothing here to indicate you’re having a migraine.

What are you talking about? This migraine is reducing me to a vegetable. You have to do something. The pain, the fucking pain.

He placed the images down so calmly I wanted to jump across his minimalistic post-modern fuck-stack of a desk and press my thumbs into his eyelids and pop—

Don’t worry, he said with a smug smile. We will get to the bottom of this. For now, here’s a prescription and a referral to another specialist. I know this seems like—

I snatched the two pieces of paper and left. I didn’t even notice my wife was with me until she got into the car after me.

“Are you sure you should be driving?“

“I’m fine.”

#

I pinched the referral between my thumb and forefinger. The pain of the migraine—it was a fucking migraine—had subsided to a manageable roar. Like standing next to a space shuttle launch.

The words were blurry, but the postscript wasn’t. Psy.D.

A psychiatry referral.

I crumpled the piece of paper and threw it away.

I’m not making this up, you fuck. The pain is real. The changes are there. How can you explain me being able to see this black planet with the red sky?

#

The Vicodin isn’t helping. I’m taking double, triple the dose. Acid churns in my stomach. My fingertips pulse numb. The pain only grows.

Now I’m out of pills and the pain is worse than ever.

I inspect my bug-eye in the mirror. A bulbous, shiny thing that sticks out of my face, red and angry. I’m not looking at myself; that isn’t me. I brush my finger against the bottom lid. Pain lances through my skull and, for a moment, I think my eye is going to explode. The lights above me flicker. Am I going crazy?

“Honey, are you all right?”

“Go away.”

I tilt my face so my left eye stares into my right, and the fucking thing shimmers. I lean closer.

Something beneath the surface wriggles and I cough bile into the basin from the pain. The porcelain of the sink is cold and wet from my palms. My mouth tastes like battery acid.

And the pain…

Needles stab through the front half of my brain and scratch at the inside of my skull, digging grooves into the bone and slicing my brain matter. My knuckles crack under the strain of my grip, but I can’t let go.

“Honey, please—”

“Go away!”

It’s growing. Through the haze of tears, my right eye is swelling even bigger. Everything is turning red.

I have to do it. Whatever is in there, I have to let it out, or it’s going to kill me. I have to give it my eye or I’ll lose everything.

I poke my bottom lid and my eye pops.

Flecks of it splatter the mirror, the sink, my face. A red hole stares back at me where my eye used to be.

There’s something in the hole.

A chitinous leg stretches out and stabs the mirror. Spiderweb veins crackle out from the impact and shards fall into the sink, breaking into a hundred twinkling pieces. Another leg squeezes through the small hole, pressing against the other, and digs into the wall for a better grip. I should be screaming, but I can’t.

A third leg slips out, stretching my eye socket as it thrusts forward. I hear my cheekbone crack and my mouth falls open, but still I say nothing, do nothing. It slashes at my reflection once before hooking around the medicine cabinet.

With the three legs, it pulls itself out. The bulbous body seeps out through the crowded hole in my face, widening it with its bulk. The bones of my face crack and shift, giving way to the creature pulling itself free.

And then it’s out, slipping the last of its legs through the ruined crater in my face. It falls into the sink and flails in the shards of glass, filling the basin with its amorphous body.

“I’m coming in.”

No, don’t, I try to say, but I’m frozen. The door opens and she sees everything. She starts screaming and the sound nearly splits my head open.

Another leg stabs out of my eye, followed by another. A second creature squeezes out of my ravaged skull and the pain is a shockwave of heat through my body.

The first creature hisses through a ragged orifice of teeth at my wife, but the second is bigger. Faster. It stabs her through the forehead and pulls the rest of itself free.

Her screaming finally stops.

A third flops out of my face onto the counter. And another. So many. One after the other, they pull themselves free from me and crowd the room. Some set to killing each other, others to eating my wife. Some scurry out the door. A window breaks. The front door shatters.

As they pour out of me, sound fades. Light dims.

The pain finally stops. 

You remember the meteor shower.

He insisted he couldn’t come, but you guilted him into it anyway. He was the one leaving you, after all.

You went to your favorite spot, that clearing off the old bike trail. Where he’d first kissed you against that rust bucket of a car. You took the lead, pulling him onto the hood after you. It was still warm from a day in the summer sun and you settled into the dent like it had been molded to your bodies.

Trails of light streaked across the open sky and you couldn’t help brushing your fingers against his. That ripple of electricity you felt? The one that made you smile? He felt it, too. He just didn’t know what it meant. Not like you did. He was too busy worrying about how far the drive was from Ohio to California.

I’ll meet you there, you whispered. He didn’t hear you over the swelling cicadas. It was a fleeting thought, drawn out by the searing tail of falling space dust.

Last you heard, he had gotten into med school.

Now, you lay in that same dent and spark a cigarette. The sky is darkening. The hood is uncomfortable and the wind makes you shiver. There are no meteors tonight.

California is as far away as it ever was.

They’re six feet apart.

We aren’t.

We’re packed together, coiled between steel barriers under a cloudless sky. I breathe in
the hot air. It smells of summer and dust. I’ve missed this.

They call out next and we shuffle forward. I bump into the man in front of me. He
doesn’t notice, only coughs wetly. The woman behind me stumbles. Her breathing is shallow and
quick. Over the sea of bowed heads and slumped shoulders looms a white tent.

They’re six feet apart, with plexiglass shields and breathing apparatuses.

We aren’t.

Because it’s too late for us.