In the brilliantly titled “All the Good You Did Not Do,” regular security guy Saul unthinkingly saves the world from a zombie outbreak. We genre fans all know what happens when the zombies get loose—the survivors running through the streets, hunkering down in abandoned buildings and shopping malls—but what happens when the zombie apocalypse is averted by the spontaneous actions of one hero? And how does it feel, in our modern, capitalist, perpetually online world, to be that guy?
Jolie Toomajan is a PhD candidate, writer, editor, and all-around ghoul. Her dissertation in progress is focused on the women who wrote for Weird Tales and her work has appeared in Upon a Thrice Time, Death in the Mouth, and Black Static (among other places). She is editor of Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction. Despite all of this, she would investigate a clown hanging out in a sewer grate. You can find her anywhere @JolieToomajan.
Marissa van Uden: “All the Good You Did Not Do” is such a unique take on the zombie genre, exploring the aftermath of accidentally saving the world and what it’s like for someone who expects to be hailed as a hero to go home and face reality … in all of its indifference. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired this piece, and how the story developed from there?
Jolie Toomajan: This story was inspired by Travis the Chimp combined with Free Britney. We've been going through what I call a reconsidering of cultural narratives. From the woman who was burned by McDonald's coffee to Britney Spears to Monica Lewinsky, reconsidering how we treated people in the media and larger cultures in the past. And so, with a lot of that on my mind, I saw the movie Nope, which reminded me of Travis the Chimp. For those who don't know, in the late 2000s, a woman's pet chimpanzee attacked a friend of hers. Travis was unable to be stopped, and the police had to intervene and kill him. There was a ton of grotesque spectacle around this; if I recall correctly, the revelation of this woman's mangled face was a major episode of Oprah, where they also played the 911 call, which is incredibly difficult to hear. Both the incident and the resulting ghoulish spectacle stuck with me over the years. Something about all of it struck me as very heartless.
So, when I was reminded of this by the movie, I looked to see whether that might be a spot for reconsidering. I discovered that the police officer who had to stop that attack was denied coverage for his PTSD at first (https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/stamford-cop-who-shot-chimp-denied-stress-claim-368312.php). Because the situation involved an animal, apparently it didn't count (and I suppose the woman he found ripped apart wasn't enough for them to approve the claim either). Now, I have a complicated relationship with even the idea of the police, but that final detail made me sick; it stuck in my head. This man ended a situation that was completely avoidable, no fault of his, and killed an animal that was beloved to him to save other people, and we gave him the middle finger for it. It reminded me of how we denied benefits to 9/11 first responders. The unfair ways that we means test financial assistance for people who are starving but just fling a billion dollars at whatever is “too big to fail.” Every time, someone's health insurance has decided the worth of their life down to the penny. We laud heroism, but when it comes down to action, we don't give a damn about heroes or each other. I find that way of thinking perverse, and the logical implications horrific. For me, that kind of perversity is the perfect place to sit a horror story. It truly could be any one of us.
MVU: Wow, I had no idea the officer in that case was denied his PTSD coverage at first. Our institutions really do just add to the horror of life.
Regarding the ghoulish spectacle and audience hunger for it, when Saul receives a brief flurry of media and online attention, people treat him as if he has wisdom to impart. You have these great lines that capture the desperate hunger of online audiences in such a visual way: he’s an “absent father to a thousand children he will never meet. He loves all of them, too. He pictures them as baby birds, waxy mouths agape, bug-eyed and sick-skinned.” Do you think modern culture does treat celebrities a bit like wise, almost mythical parental figures who are supposed to love us back? And are we getting worse with that?
JT: There is absolutely a kind of parentification of popular figures that happens. And in my opinion, parasocial relationships are currently at a fever pitch. Go into any famous person's comments and you'll see a sea of “Mother!” I even do it myself (Courtney Love is my problematic rich aunt). To me, it strikes of a human need to be guided and looked out for. The world makes no sense, so having something to model yourself after is a necessary evil. We've all got to survive emotionally. But it's not healthy and it's not sustainable from the point of view of the audience or the figure. And that kind of open-mouthed, yearning expectation from a million people all at once seems terrifying and still very lonely to me. And especially terrifying and lonely if, like Saul, you really just want to help.
MVU: Throughout this story, the narrative is reframing and rewriting itself. From the very first scene, Saul is immediately reframing what just happened, and then companies are telling a hero story (a hero they sponsor), and the insurance company is rewriting the story another way to avoid actually helping an individual, and the research lab prefers its own version of events. Was this constant reframing of events something you set out to do from the start, or did it emerge through the character and his experiences? And is the way we mentally rewrite our life experiences something you think about a lot?
JT: I sat down intending to write a story about failures, and I didn't intend to get into the failure of memory and narrative to start, but as soon as I started revising, it became apparent that the concept of re- and overwriting should be important. Because the recounting of this event, which took all of 18 seconds, is key to everyone, like you said. There’s a version of the event that is important to Saul for his purposes and a version of the event that is important to the insurance company for their purposes and a version of the events that is important to the public and so on. I was interested in the way that (in both good and bad ways) sometimes simply saying something is enough to make it true like a kind of magic, both good and bad magic. The lie Saul tells himself in the first scene, for example, and the way Greg and Heather are immediately stripped of their humanity simply because some people said so.
MVU: You’re writing your dissertation on the women who wrote for Weird Tales. This is such a cool dissertation subject! Can you tell us a little about them? Maybe an intriguing piece of research or something that surprised you? Whose stories would you recommend readers should absolutely go and look for?
JT: Weird Tales published a lot of women, and repeatedly published a lot of women, who have really been lost or ignored and they shouldn’t be. Our entire concept of the weird and the cosmic seems to come from male authors, but these women were writing it, too, and much differently from the men. The thing that surprised me was the sheer number of women involved from the beginning. There weren’t a couple women; women were responsible for about 20% of the fiction and 40% of the poetry in Weird Tales alone. While dealing with a level of inequality that women dealt with from 1924 until 1954, they were still writing in huge numbers. They got out on that heavily slanted playing field and killed it. We’ve always been here, no matter how hard some people wish to deny that.
My favorite is Margaret St. Clair, hands down. A lot of her work stands the test of time, and she loves to write a good, satisfying “You got what you deserved” tale. I think everyone should read “The Gardener” and “The Corn Dance,” but in my opinion “The Little Red Owl” is one of the most disturbing stories I’ve ever read. It doesn’t have the larger implications of the other two, but it’s just an expertly told, disturbing Gothic yarn. I could talk about the tricks she uses in that story all day.
MVU: Margaret St. Clair has been on my must-read list for way too long. I must get to her stories! Thank you for the reminder.
I loved your story “Water Goes, Sand Remains”, which was first published in the amazing anthology Death in the Mouth: Original Horror by People of Color and then reprinted in the Brave New Weird anthology by Tenebrous Press, highlighting some of the best New Weird published in 2022. The story, set around the saline Lake Van during the Armenian Genocide, interweaves real folklore and history of this place with a fantastical real-time horror. Could you share a bit more with our readers about this story, your inspiration or what it means to you?
JT: I’m Armenian! I'm both Armenian and Jewish, actually, so I have exactly as much generational trauma as you’re imagining right now. On one side of my history, you have what is possibly the most recognized genocide in the world, and on the other side, you have one that is actively suppressed. But one of the things that I have taken from having such a unique view is the amount of difference recognition/visibility makes towards healing. And I also feel like I owe a massive debt to my ancestors on both sides for possessing a level of determination and bravery I can’t fathom; I feel a duty to honor them.
My goal for that story was complicated. My family is not from Van, we’re Kharpertsi, but the story of the defense of Van is pretty legendary. They came with an army for a trade city full of carpet weavers and pharmacists, and we gave them the business. There is a sense of pride to that level of resistance. But I didn’t want to tell a simple war story where that was presented as a wholly unproblematic option. I wanted to talk about the ways that necessary resistance is both awe-inspiring and damaging, something you would do in a blink but never want your children to have to do, so filtering the story through a mother-daughter relationship was the most compelling lens for me.
It was unfortunately inspired by events that are still going on. Azerbaijan has been attempting to perpetrate another genocide in a small territory of indigenous Armenians in Artsakh. When I started writing the story, there were bombings. Now, for months, Azerbaijan has blocked a main corridor to the territory, depriving 120,000 people of food and medicine, leaving children who were away from the territory at the time separated from their parents (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/kim-kardashian-op-ed-joe-biden-armenian-genocide-azerbaijan-sanctions-1234820577/amp/). The hardest part is how invisible it all is. That continued invisibility is why I’m going to keep writing Armenian stories.
MVU: I’m so glad you do write them. That story was so affecting, and beautifully written.
As a fellow fan of the Weird, I have to ask, what do you love most about writing or reading this genre, and what were the stories that first drew you in?
JT: I was that little kid who had The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and my mother was a huge fan of the original Twilight Zone, so I started early. But the first story that introduced me to the weird specifically was also in Weird Tales, actually decades before I would come to do any of this work. The people who lived upstairs from my grandparents when I was growing up kindly let me borrow books from them constantly (thanks, Vinny and Debbie!). At one point, they loaned me an anthology of cat horror, and I discovered CL Moore’s “Shambleau” (which is not at all about a cat …). That story blew my mind. It blew my mind for twenty years. It never left me. The monster, the morality of it, and frankly the way it condemned masculine arrogance. I was too young at the time I read it to conceptualize “weird” literature, but after that, I had a definitive “I know what I like when I see it” response to the genre. I will say it’s been a truly satisfying little life moment to have a whole section of my dissertation dedicated to a story I fell in love with when I was a young girl.
MVU: Amazing! I love this so much, and thank you for another story to seek out (I’m looking at the cover art now and just … wow).
In addition to writing, you’re also an editor who recently put out your first anthology, the incredible Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, an anthology of feminist dark fiction created to support abortion rights in the US. What were the biggest surprises in putting together your first anthology, and what was the biggest challenge? And how GOOD did it feel to send that money to the charity in the end?
JT: I didn’t have too many surprises, other than realizing that everything was actually going to take twice as long as I thought. First-time editor blues! The biggest challenge was whittling down the slush pile. I know people say that like 97% of every slush pile is garbage or whatever … I did not have that problem. My original long list was something like 75 stories. It was completely ridiculous. And it was terrible to cut down. I really believe that certain stories need to be told, and the ones in AAFS fall into that category. I would love to do something like it again when I recover from doing it the first time.
I did a little dance and then cried when we sent the first check. And we’re not done! AAFS is still available, abortion rights are still under attack, and we’re making donations every quarter, I believe. And if you liked “All The Good You Did Not Do,” you are going to love AAFS. We have print and digital options available right here: https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/store/pre-order-aseptic-and-faintly-sadistic-anthology.
MVU: As if you’re not already busy enough, you also have a new novel coming out with the amazing Tenebrous Press! It’s described as a “composite novel” about a haunted house, co-written with Carson Winter (who we are also a big fan of at Apex Magazine, by the way). Can you tell us a bit about what a composite novel is, and what this cowriting process looked like?
JT: A composite novel is a series of stories that can be read alone, but when read together provides a fuller understanding, much like a novel would. I think the other term for that is “short story cycle.” We actually figured out that, through several technicalities in the way we built the book, it could technically be eligible in like 75% of award categories, which I thought was pretty funny. It’s a postmodern nightmare, and I love it. I’m very proud of it. Carson and I move through the history of Posthaste Manor from its construction to destruction; each chapter generally features a different narrator from a different point in its history, but there are also … more constant presences.
Working with Carson was an absolute joy. The cowriting process was exceptionally easy; it was like we’d been writing partners for years. Once we had the general topic, we pinged one another pretty often to keep the other one abreast of what we were doing, the characters we were creating, and the ways they could interact. A lot of it came very naturally. It was an amazing experience.
Carson and I are very different writers, both style-wise and process-wise, but I think we have a lot of the same concerns in our fiction. We’re both interested in how the world around us is already perverse and wrong. It made for an amazing book. I can’t wait for everyone to see it.
Posthaste Manor should be out by the time this is printed, but you can find ordering information about it from Tenebrous Press right here: https://linktr.ee/tenebrouspress.
MVU: Thank you so much for joining us to chat today! To sign us out, can you tell us about anything exciting your working on at the moment, or any other new stories we should look out for?
JT: I have to defend that dissertation in about eight weeks, so I’m doing nothing but that at the moment! As soon as I recover, I have plans to put together a collection or two and then possibly try my hand at a novel. I seem to be obsessed with the apocalypse lately. A lot of my stories are about the end of the world (or very nearly), and I’m just going to let that keep going until I’m done.
