TOD A19 Orrin Grey: Who’s Afraid of the Painted Monster?

October 5, 2017
12 mins to read

In this archival podcast Scott Nicolay interviews Orrin Grey, author of Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts and Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings. It originally aired on November 11, 2015. This broadcast features an archival edition of News from the Weird with Justin Steele, plus Bonus New Content including more cinematic chat with Orrin and also Max Booth III and Lori Michelle previewing Lost Films from Perpetual Motion Machine Press/Dark Moon Digest.

Show Notes

Orrin Grey, author of Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, shares the secret origins of his latest collection including how artist Nick Gucker deftly worked details from all the stories into a monstrously macabre cover, the dialogue with horror cinema from Universal to Hammer to giallo that runs through his wonderfully plotted works, what he describes as a ‘Clive Barker influence’, exploring “philosophy” through narrative, using tropes as shorthand but in surprising, unconventional ways, ghost stories not about ghosts as we expect them to be, similarities to Robert Aickman, acknowledging and celebrating dramatic influences from William Shakespeare to William Castle, the extraordinary significance of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets starring Boris Karloff and how that film juxtaposed an older Gothic, creepy school of horror with the modern paranoia-laced violent horror of the Sixties, scholarly approaches versus jazz riffing on many different traditions of horror film and literature especially in the title story, his love of wax museums, the dialogue between the stories in both of his anthologies, John Langan who wrote the introduction, his obsession with obsession, The Prestige, twin novella finales about selling your soul to the Devil, what he learned about pacing from his “hero” Mike Mignola and giving the Golem the Universal treatment via Hellboy pulp expressionist styling, affinities with Belgian Weird author Jean Ray and buried Malpertuis references in ‘Painted Monsters’, Old Dark House movies, death as a recurring theme in every single story, what’s next for Orrin Grey including stories, novellas, and a nonfiction book about horror films, talking movies with Gemma Files, musing about seeing his own work someday on film, and his recent reading recommendations including Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Amanda Downum.

News from The Weird

(01:24:08) Justin Steele reviews Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, and joins Scott for coverage of World Fantasy Convention 2015 and the World Fantasy Awards, as well as exciting collections, novels, and other works by some of the biggest names in The Weird.

Bonus New Content: More Orrin Grey! Plus Max Booth III & Lori Michelle Call for Lost Films!

(02:00:02) In an exclusive new segment, Orrin Grey reappears to ruminate on his guest activities at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Oct 6-8, 2017, Portland, OR), a new hardcover limited edition of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, his first collection, by Strix Publishing, and recent anthologies where you can find his fiction including the upcoming Tales from a Talking Board (WordHorde), The Madness of Dr. Caligari (Fedogan & Bremer), Terror in 16-Bits (Muzzleland Press), Darker Companions (PS Publishing) and more. Orrin also talks movies including Monsters from the Vault, his collection of essays on vintage horror films for Innsmouth Free Press, and finding good qualities in horrible horror movies but not in Prometheus.