If you like science fiction, fantasy, and horror, you’re probably already familiar with Jason Sizemore, the head honcho at Apex Publications. I got to know him a couple of years ago, when he published my short story, “Frank,” in Apex Magazine. (If you’re nervous about reading it, I assure you, it’s not a story about what a racist Lovecraft was, but instead about how an evil scientist’s zombie henchman teaches a woman to drive stick.) He regularly gives pretty awesome interviews–which you can read here, here, here, or here, just for starters–so, rather than retread familiar ground in my short time, I went straight for the questions about my favorite book he’s published and things pertinent to our discussions. He was kind enough to oblige. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style.

Me: This past October I saw your author, Chesya Burke at the Southern Festival of Books. She was on a panel with George Singleton. There was supposed to be another author, but she couldn’t make it. Anyway, with just the two of them, the panel blew my mind. She writes horror stories that can be pretty damn funny and Singleton writes funny stories that can also be very horrifying.

It really got me thinking about how horror and humor compliment each other — and clearly Chucky and Freddie are funny (or supposed to be) and Cabin in the Woods has some great humorous moments. I’m just not sure why they work so well together. What do you think?

Jason: I won’t pretend to be a psychoanalyst, but I’ll give you what I *think* horror and humor works so well together. Horror makes us face aspects of our life that make us uncomfortable. This can be a variety of things… fear of death (probably the most common device used in horror)… the fear of pain, the fear of loss, etc. When we’re uncomfortable, we’re quick to find something that will cut the tension and fear. Humor does a good job of giving us an emotional distance from fear.
Gallows humor has been around a long time. I suspect guys like Joss Whedon, Sam Raimi, and Joe Lansdale have a better understanding of this dynamic, and thus why they’re famous and critically loved.

Speaking of Burke, I love her book Let’s Play White. It’s angry, funny, and scary as hell. How did you guys end up publishing that?

Speaking on behalf of Chesya, thank you! I’m always delighted when I hear a reader enjoys the work Apex publishes.

The genesis of Let’s Play White can be traced to World Fantasy Con in 2010 (the WFC held in Columbus, OH). At a professional convention like WFC, if you’re a publisher, editor, or agent, you should be ready to accept pitches from authors (after all, that is the primary reason many authors attend). So I was taking pitches throughout the weekend while working the Apex table. One of the line of writers who shared their book idea with me was Chesya. Chesya had several advantages over most other authors that weekend. She had read many of our books. She knew that I have an affinity for publishing stuff that can be considered unique, a bit edgy. And she had cultivated a friendly and professional relationship with me over the past four years. All the same, I would have published Let’s Play White without any of those factors based on the strength of her work. Let’s Play White is written by female person of color from southeast KY currently living in Georgia. She might have one of the most unique perspectives in all of genre literature.  This gives her stories an entertaining, eye-opening quality. She also knows how to ratchet the horror and stretch her imagination.

You and I live in the South. Okay, the South-ish. We live in a region of great ghost stories. And we live in a land of large houses where terrible things happened. Where’s our iconic haunted house story? How come New England spawns so many and we so few?

New England (and I would add Great Britain) certainly are the standard bearers when it comes to haunted house stories. But I would argue that the South has a fair share of well known stories. Lexington (KY) has several semi-famous haunted houses (Whitehall, chief among them).

Perhaps since there are so many supernatural things going on in the South, that the ghost house stories only seem to stick in a regional manner? I had never considered this question before. Now it will bother me to no end!

Did you read Paul Elie’s blathering about belief and novels of belief in the New York Times? Maybe I’ve tipped my hand by framing the question this way, but it seems like he missed the forest for the few trees he’s familiar with. Apex Publications is a small operation, and yet, just flipping through your titles, there are angels and crosses and other religious iconography and you’ve published two collections (Dark Faith and Dark Faith: Invocations) that are specifically about belief and believers. Is the problem that Elie’s not looking in the right places for the work he seeks? Is that because of the stupid way our culture treats genre fiction and literature like two separate things?

That last thing you said. Walk through the genre aisles and you’ll see no end of angel wings, demons, pagan imagery, etc. Paul Elie obviously needs to do some research before he talks out his ass about a subject he has no clue about. I believe I will mail him a copy of Dark Faith signed by the editors.

Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard leveled New England Patriots running back Stevan Ridley during the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s AFC Championship game, causing Ridley to fumble and leaving him motionless on the ground. That Ridley was hurt was apparent immediately when he ended up in the “fencing position” — arms and toes up to the sky:

The fumble came at a big moment. Ridley and the Patriots were down eight points with about 13 minutes to go, but the fumble gave the ball back to the Ravens, who promptly scored another touchdown and effectively sealed their trip to the Super Bowl. After the game, Ravens coach John Harbaugh called the hit “football at its finest“:

“That was the turning point of the game,” John Harbaugh said. “That was the turning point of the football game there on the 40-yard-line. It was just a tremendous hit. It was football at its finest. It was Bernard Pollard making a great physical tackle — just as good a tackle as you’re ever going to see in football right there. That just probably turned the game around right there.”

There’s no disputing the play was a turning point, and there was absolutely nothing illegal about it either. But that coaches view plays like that as football at its finest, and that players view injuries the way they say they do in Tom Junod’s excellent new Esquire piece, serves as a reminder that there is a significant gap between the concerns of people inside the game and those outside it about making it safer. If “football at its finest” involves leaving a guy motionless on the turf, I suppose I don’t have much interest in the finest points of the game.

Spartacus, a retelling of the famous slave rebellion currently airing on Starz, somehow never seems to get mentioned in conversations about “prestige television.” While a few critics (and a decently sized audience) champion the show, the premiere of its final season this Friday isn’t being greeted with anything close to the fanfare accompanying, say, Game of Thrones, the show’s most natural peer.

That’s a shame. Over the course of its past three seasons, Spartacus creator Steven S. DeKnight (of Buffy and Angel fame) and his team have developed one of the most insightful progressive social critiques on television, blending a bone-chilling depiction of the effects of structural oppression on individual lives a society with a quietly egalitarian take on gender and sexual orientation.

Spartacus’ basic approach is that gladiators aren’t, aside from their combat skills, all that special: they’re one type of slave in a society constructed around human bondage and class oppression. As one Roman puts it, Spartacus is “admired as a gladiator, yet despised as a slave” — someone whose bloody exploits are to be celebrated but, when push comes to shove, exists to be used and abused in the same way as any other kind of slave.

The systematic abuse inflicted on slaves motivates the main plot arc, the gladiator revolt and its growth into a real military challenge to the might of Rome. But the show’s dynamic isn’t as simple as “Romans are evil, hence slaves rebel.” Each of the main rebel characters is vividly drawn, fighting despite hopeless odds for their own reasons — reasons that are themselves provided by machiavellian Romans.

In a twisted way, the Roman oppressors are as, if not more, interesting than the gladiators and other slaves. Roman society is depicted as an unending quest for social standing, where those lower on the totem pole are targets of constant abuse by their so-called betters. While not subject to the routine, legally sanctioned murder and rape that marks the lives of the show’s slaves, wealthy Romans experience everything from petty social humiliation to the extra-judicial slaughter of their entire households by a rival for power. In Spartacus‘ Rome, standing is worth everything – up to and including your life.

In that world, cruel abuse of slaves is made brutally rational. Because currying favor and building alliances with Romans who can secure your standing can make-or-break your family’s fortunes, it makes sense (from the point of view of the Romans) to use every tool at your disposal to do so. Slaves are unique in that they are human, and hence can be used to put on glorious, bloody spectacles or to satisfy the most depraved sexual desires without any legal recourse. So when powerful Roman Varis asks that gladiator Oenomaus’ best friend (Gannicus) and wife (Melitta) have sex, the Roman who owns them, Batiatus, has little choice but to accept, as doing otherwise would lose him the favor of a social better. Even if Batiatus cared that he was forcing his slaves to rape each other (though he probably didn’t), the class structure of Roman society forced his hand.

By treating oppression as something that’s basically structural, rather than a thing inflicted by individual bad apples, Spartacus gives flesh to a core progressive insight about the power and character of social oppression. Progressives often speak about racism, sexism, and classism as impersonal forces, things that exist in the world independent of how individual people think about them. It can sometimes be hard to connect concrete acts of discrimination and violence to this airier description. But Spartacus is a vivid illustration of how a system founded on a particular form of classism directly, inevitably leads to individual acts of brutality. The social logic of Rome corrupts people’s incentives, giving even Romans capable of extending sympathy to slaves (like Batiatus’ wife Lucretia) cause to treat them in the most inhuman fashion imaginable.

Spartacus‘ critique isn’t just limited to class. The show’s Rome is unmistakably gendered: Roman women, denied prestigious posts in the military and the Senate, can only exercise power indirectly, participating in the struggle for social power through behind-the-scenes politicking. These Roman women are by no means helpless damsels — perhaps the two most effective, intelligent operators on the show are Lucretia and the high-born Illythia — but when they attempt to assert equality in familial or political decisions, they run up against the limits of what Roman society will allow them to do. And while slaves male and female are both subject to sexual abuse by Romans, there’s no doubt that female slaves bear by far the worst of it. One of the clearest markers of the rebels’ moral superiority, by contrast, is their comparatively egalitarian approach to gender. The season 3 relationship between rebel gladiator Crixus and Naevia, a survivor of repeated sexual assaults, is an honest, touching depiction of a supportive partnership. The rebel army also allows women to serve as equals in combat, to deadly effect.

The show’s method of challenging other sexual norms is more indirect. Two of the most formidable gladiators we meet, Barca and Agron, are in what are almost certainly the most consensual, loving relationships ever to show up on the screen — with other men. In Barca’s case, at least, it’s clearly depicted as an orientation. But no one on the show treats this as wrong or strange; LGBT relationships are treated in the same fashion as heterosexual ones. That homosexual partnerships are seen as unproblematic in Roman times serves to point out how arbitrary the elevation of heterosexuality as morally unique in some contemporary circles really is.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t have its rough spots. The pervasive, graphic violence and nudity — really, it makes Game of Thrones look like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — arguably undermines the show’s critique of deriving pleasure from the pain and humiliation of others, especially in the first few episodes where that theme wasn’t particularly well developed. But there’s an equally persuasive case in the reverse. Spartacus is, in my view, asking its audience to reflect on why it likes seeing sex and violence packaged together, and what the relationship is between today’s television viewer and the vicious Romans they’re ostensibly rooting against. That one of the second season’s most emotionally satisfying moments involves the destruction of a gladiatorial arena, with spectators lining the stands, sharpens the point.

So Spartacus doesn’t deserve the 300-lite reputation it has in some circles. It’s one of the most deftly executed, socially conscious shows on television. And it’s certainly worth your time.

This weekend I stumbled across The Revenant on Cinemax. According to Wikipedia, this film won a ton of awards, but I somehow missed it when it was in theaters (or maybe it never came to Nashville?) Either way, I was just looking for something cheesy to watch and there it was. It’s so good that I ended up watching it twice. (Fair warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Not that it’s a perfect movie. It runs long and calls individual Wiccans “Wiccas.” But it’s really good.

The general premise of the movie is that Bart Gregory, played by David Anders, dies in the Iraq War and his body is shipped home for burial. He comes back from the dead, and his best friend, Joey, played by Chris Wylde, helps him cope, through murder, mayhem, and blood-drinking.

But everything you’d expect to see in a movie about the difficulties of coming home are there — how you’ve been through something you have a hard time understanding yourself and the people around you aren’t that well-equipped to help you with; how you feel like you might have been changed into something you can’t get back from; how you are a danger to the people you love because of those changes; and that there is no place for you in civilian society. Plus a lot about how others might see you as a bit of a bad-ass while you feel bumbling and uncertain about returning to normal life and about how the messes you made beforehand are still waiting for you when you get back.

And the ending is so similar to what happened to a guy I know that it shocked me. I know this kind of marks me as a fool, but part of why I had to watch it again was the dawning realization that, in order for that last joke to work, it must happen A LOT–that people who are in no shape to return back to the theater of war that so messed them up in the first place don’t get to get out of fighting. My mind had settled on, “Well, what happened to the guy I know is terrible, but it must be a fluke.” My mind was wrong.

If this were a straight-up drama, you’d suffocate under the weight of how depressing it is. But those themes, in this movie, are alternately scary and hilarious. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what scares people and why (because I normally write about the Tennessee State Legislature) and why people enjoy horror as a genre.

Read more

Yesterday’s inauguration ceremony might be the most singular American political event in decades. To mark both the second swearing in of the country’s first black president and the day set aside to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the ceremony included a prayer by Medgar Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams. President Obama’s own speech was one of his most insistently progressive, calling for the civil rights of LGBT Americans to be recognized. Gay Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco recited “One Today,” a meditation on the diversity of the country we all (sometimes begrudgingly) share.

Even the singers chosen for the ceremony might have been a nod to our need for democracy in entertainment, with American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson singing a powerful rendition of “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee.” But the most surprising moment was Beyonce’s performance of the national anthem. In a ceremony dedicated to celebrating the expansion of the American experience, the country’s most recognizable singer may have given one of the most conservative live performances of her career:

Of course, “conservative” is a relative term. Beyonce’s singing is always flawless and sometimes needlessly acrobatic; there are times when she sounds so perfect that it’s hard to find the emotion behind her voice. But yesterday she seemed focused on the song and its significance rather than technique. And even during her runs and other touches of color, Beyonce stayed disciplined and controlled; she brought drama with her gestures and a determined expression, but her voice was strong without being overpowering.

Four years ago, Beyonce was clearly giddy when she sang “At Last” for the Obamas at the 2009 Neighborhood Ball. Yesterday, she paid respect to the occasion with an almost muted performance. There are so few classic renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner because it’s sung so often as to be unremarkable—but Beyonce’s toned-down version could join that short list.

Many thanks to Alyssa for hosting me, my fellow guest bloggers for keeping me on my toes, and the Think Progress readers. This has been kind of awesome.