Discovering the Horror-Loving Mind Behind Carnage House: An Interview with Josh Darling

Does horror pull you in? Does it make you feel at ease or does it shock you to your core? Are you a fan of true splatterpunk? Josh Darling is, and makes publishing stories of true splatterpunk his life’s goal. Josh is the mind behind the Carnage House Press, an ezine that offers aspiring writers the chance to write stories and get published, provided their stories fit the press’ vision of splatterpunk horror.

Josh was kind enough to conduct this interview over the phone and I took down his answers as we spoke.

The interview was done between Jerry Blaze (JB) and Josh Darling (JD).

JB: Hello! How are you?

JD: Oh shit, I don’t know, that’s a lot to answer right now (lol).

JB: Tell us (for the sake of breaking the ice) who you are and what your company is?

JD: I’m Josh Darling. I am the editor-in-chief at Carnage House and we are a pro-splatterpunk ezine. We’re branching out, albeit very slowly, to publishing books.

JB: Do you own Carnage House?

JD: I co-own it with Jaque Day Palone. It was my idea, but we’re both partners and she’s the other editor. I’m the face, essentially THE Lloyd Kaufman, and like Lloyd, I have a secret partner. I know I’m the face, but every face has a body, and that’s what’s important.

JB: What inspired you to be a publisher?

JD: Um, so that’s a little tricky. Most people get into business because they want money, I got in because I saw a big hole and the hole was a lot of people publish splatterpunk books, but there’s not a lot of people who develop short stories and the Carnage House approach to publishing is unique because we really work the story hard. We try to bring a new dimension to writers in what we publish. It's why we publish quarterly because it's all about quality and how much time it takes. And I wanted the base of my motivation to be helping authors, since it's really hard if you don’t want to write a book, or if they are just starting out. The inspiration is to write a short story, because that’s where you learn. I figured I could get into this and so did the others involved to enrich authors and people. It's a labor of love.

JB: When did you decide you were going to start publishing literature?

JD: Two years ago, I felt like there wasn’t any magazine for splatterpunk or Extreme Horror; I’m old, so my definition of both of those things is very old, but I try to keep current like the kids today who don’t read books. I wanted to create a space for people who want to have that voice and a place where authors can get published. It’s hard to write a book, a story or even learn those things. Not a lot of people push quality in genre and subgenre when it comes to writing, it's sad to me. Plus, Jaque was a copyeditor, and her skills are just crazy (in a good way).

JB: What is your most successful publication to date?

JD: The Best of Carnage House, Year One. We are prepping part two (released the week before Thanksgiving) and we have 2 others, “Absorbed by Excrement” by Mike Swain (week before Labor Day) and another anthology called “I Shit on Your Grave,” a fecal frenzy of splatterpunk stories that are for the whole family! Last year, our site had 120,000 hits and now, at six months into this year, we’re nearing 100,000 hits!

JB: What is your process of choosing a story to publish?

JD: So, Carnage House is actually a committee of four editors, and what we do is we grade the story from “A to Waffle” (Waffle being bad). When it gets rejected, it's usually because of five reasons:

1. It’s not splatterpunk enough, no gore.

2. It's boring, not plot driven.

3. The characters are death fodder, no actual people.

4. Grammar, if it's insane or makes no sense.

5. Nonsensical story-matter.

One of the nice things is we all jointly tick off the reasons why we don’t accept it. That way, when I reject them, I can give a clear reason. The top 2 reasons are usually because there’s no plot or doesn’t read as splatterpunk with those stories we usually haven’t read past Page 2. If you don’t get published by us, it’s probably because you didn’t read our guidelines.

JB: Do you have any particular interests or tropes in horror?

JD: So, eventually, I would like to do a sexual splatterpunk anthology for Carnage House. I'm a huge fan of Love in Vain and Hottest Blood anthologies and I loved the writings found in them. The authors were crazy good. I fall in the suburbs with half of what I write, because they really are freaking awful (lol). I love short stories and novellas; I prefer minimalist horror in the vein of Gordon Lish. Writing should be entertaining, otherwise it's boring and I’m not into it.

JB: What is your favorite subgenre of horror to publish stories?

JD: Splatterpunk and Extreme Horror, hopefully with GoreSmut in the future.

JB: What is your definition of splatterpunk?

JD: A splatterpunk story to me is when a story is violent and extreme, but it has to have layers. Not necessarily a social commentary, but it should have a message hidden within. When I started reading horror, it was just horror; splatterpunk wasn’t invented yet. I fell in love with Clive Barker’s work, especially the seedy and sexual undercurrent of the Hellbound Heart. There’s nothing prior to it and the language was just pristine, it was probably the most minimal of all languages he uses in his writing. It wasn’t splatterpunk or Extreme Horror, it was just Horror as far as I was concerned. I had a problem with marketing for years when I was looking for splatterpunk, but thought it was just generic horror. Some splatterpunk is like reading an R-rated movie and people who love horror fiction love their R-rated movies, but seem to hate it in book form and some R-rated horror is splatterpunk, but I think it could do with a bit of extreme or gore to it. If social commentary done in horror is done wrong, it’s preaching. If social commentary is done correctly, you might not catch it. People say the Hellbound Heart is splatterpunk, due to its talks of incest and sexual gratification through violence, or they say it’s just a good horror story. I think a good storyteller is not a preacher.

JB: Which of your publications do you wish people knew more about?

JD: Nine Horror Stories: The Sequel. I just haven’t gotten around to writing the first one yet. Yes, it's real, and there are nine horror stories in it.

JB: Do you think that indie presses are more viable and potentially lead to more success than self-publishing?

JD: That’s a complicated question. An indie press with a basic concept of marketing or one publicist can actually sell a lot of books, but there's an upside and a downside to signing with an indie press. I see a lot of publishers that call themselves as such, but they don’t edit the book, use a substandard photoshop cover and then they don’t publicise the book. What’s the point? Then it falls to the author to do the work while making less money than doing it all themselves, so there is that aspect of it. It’s honestly case by case because there are publishers that DO go to bat for their authors, like some big-name indie authors who have loads of success. The hardest thing when you’re an author starting out is you have to, unfortunately, go out there to get out there. You have to publish x amount of books that won’t sell until they start to sell and you need someone who’s gonna sell you, as you know.

JB: What do you think about book awards?

JD: I hate them. I feel like artists are not dogs running against each other. Most of them, from what I’ve seen, are more about politics instead of the quality of the books. However, Carnage House DOES do a yearly “Best of” anthology, but it's not for one person, but for many to help propel the writers in the book. It's not over popularity of the writer, but more so from our own voting on what stories we liked the most as a committee. An award only helps one person, the person who gets it and aggrandizement of the institution.

JB: What do you think about AI in covers, writing, etc.?

JD: Fuck it! The thing with AI is that art is about the process and even lowbrow art is still about the process. How do we get from the beginning to the end of the journey? Art, rather its Hamlet or a story about a shit monster, all has something in it. It’s not the soul or the ghost of the story, it's the person who creates it. And even if an artist makes a piece of art they never share, they can look at it and see tiny bits of their psyche exploded throughout the whole thing. AI doesn’t have a psyche. Yeah, AI is at the point where it can write things that an AI detector can’t detect, but rather or not its detectable point of art is a symbiotic relationship between the creator, the piece and the audience. With the AI, the creator and piece have no relationship. It's not art and the most arrogant thing I’ve seen from the people defending AI is that it allows people with learning disabilities to now write. As a person with learning disabilities who’s been writing since the 80s, I see that as the most condescending bullshit. It’s literally spitting in my face.

JB: What do you think of book labels based on word count? Short, novelette, novella, novel?

JD: Carnage House just publishes books. I do think the price should reflect the length of the book, but I think a story should have a story in it that hasn’t been filled with filler-prose. In the future, we plan to put out longer books, but we won’t worry about labels.

JB: What are your dreams as a publisher? Ultimate goal? Etc.?

JD: I want to say to kill and eat an endangered species, but I feel that might not be the right answer.

JB: Where do you see the horror community going?

JD: The grave. The problem we have is that there’s not enough young people writing and when a lot of people want to come into the community, there’s too many gatekeepers and people clutching their pearls, they’re not embraced nor educated on how to write. They get told what’s wrong and what can be done better. Carnage House is here to support new authors, we’re looking for the next generation, we’ve published only two or three people in their early-twenties. They were the only ones in their early twenties that submitted and gave us their best stories. If you look at any community, you’ll see the older crowd and wonder where is the next gen? It really worries me. I think the same could be said about the film community as well, though horror movies are making loads of money, now horror books need to do the same. My biggest concern is that there are too many gray hairs in this field and not enough purple ones.

JB: Any advice for aspiring publishers?

JD: Don’t use my business model. Carnage House was not designed to turn a profit; it was designed to operate at a loss. It was designed to serve the authors and fans. It’s a passion project. It's something we love. Our business model is not built on the best way to bring it in. Oh, and really important, stay in school and don’t do drugs.

Find more about Josh Darling and Carnage House at this link and Facebook.