Adam McOmber’s sixth book, Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence Press) is an accomplished, deeply imaginative collection of literary horror flash fiction. McOmber is virtuosic at building suspense and creating harrowing situations that ensnare his characters in traps both physical and psychological. Reading the stories in Fantasy Kit is likely to cause a sensation to arise in the reader akin to the feeling of watching someone sink slowly into quicksand.

Many of McOmber’s protagonists are seduced or are themselves seducers, sex used as a tool to gain advantage or to serve as a path to oblivion and possibly willed self-erasure—it’s never quite clear who has the upper hand. Men seduce other men, but no one seems to achieve peace or satisfaction: there is instead a heightened restlessness, an unappeased hunger that pervades these engrossing, formally diverse stories.

More personal and self-interrogating than McOmber’s previous story collections, This New and Poisonous Air and My House Gathers Desires, he continues to explore themes that appear in his previous collections as well as his three novels, The White Forest, Jesus and John, and The Ghost Finders: the fusion of the real and the surreal, the unknowable mysteries at the heart of human existence, the perils and pleasures of erotic desire, and the unbridgeable gaps—willed or unwilled—that exist between strangers and intimates alike.

Christine Sneed interviewed Adam McOmber via email and Google docs for The National Book Review.

Q: Many of your stories, both those in Fantasy Kit and in other books you’ve published, take place in the past, sometimes the distant past—during the Roman empire, for example, or more recently in England of the 18th and 19th centuries. What spurs you to write stories set in these eras?

A: There’s a long history in speculative fiction of using the past as a setting. Poe, Lovecraft, and Hawthorne all frequently set stories in eras prior to their own. Angela Carter made a similar move in some of my favorites by her, “Our Lady of the House of Love,” for instance, or “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe.” Isak Dinesen also set many of her stories in the past in her lovely and weird Seven Gothic Tales. Those authors certainly inform my own work. I think there’s something so aesthetically pleasing about allowing the imagination to play in a prior era. It feels a little like doing drag, honestly, putting on this kind of restrictive, impossible costume and seeing where that might take you. I find those limitations oddly freeing.

The historical setting creates an interesting, complicated vessel for the contemporary queer feeling I’m trying to express to the reader. Maybe I could express that feeling in some other way, but using a historical setting is what excites me. I would also add that I guess that I don’t really like the contemporary era, 2022 just seems kind of awful, honestly. Even the “modern” stories in Fantasy Kit are not actually set in the world of today. I usually use the year 1994 as a time marker for stories that feel more contemporary. That’s the year I graduated high school. I’m pretty sure nothing I’ve ever written is set after 1994—unless it’s set in a distant future that actually feels more like the past, a future that looks like a medieval village for instance.

Q: Would you say the license fiction offers writers to fully imagine (and thus inhabit) a different time and place is what initially attracted you to writing short stories and novels? And because the present moment is so difficult for many, do you think fiction, particularly speculative fiction, is popular with readers and writers in part because it does provide a kind of relief from the mundane horrors of the quotidian?

A: Reading was most certainly an escape for me when I was growing up in Ohio. I was raised in a small Christian farm community, and it definitely wasn’t a great place for a young gay kid to be. The speculative certainly allows us to imagine other selves and other places. It can provide a wonderful release for a while. But reality always creeps back in, you know? You have to close the book eventually. Stop the story. Maybe, in a way, that’s what many of the pieces are about in Fantasy Kit. They present a speculative space that’s haunted by the “real.” The characters cannot fully immerse themselves. They can’t fully escape. Something is always there behind them, reaching out to touch their shoulders.

I think too that Fantasy Kit is also a collection that explores the ruins of fantasy and the mind of the aging fabulist. After all your fantasizing is through, what are you left with? Fragments. Little worried-over pieces. And you can try your best to put them back together, to make something bright and new and whole…but it won’t look right. You can’t make it what it once was. Or at least what you imagine it once was.

Q: Several of the stories in Fantasy Kit are like fever dreams and highly charged with portent. In “The Dogs,” this line particularly struck me: “The hero understood there are countries in dreams from which one can never quite fully return.” More than a few of your characters are trapped in some sort of purgatorial space between sleeping and waking, life and death. Would you speak to this?

A: I am definitely interested in exploring the pleasure that comes from dreams (including the pleasure that comes from waking dreams). But I also think there’s a real danger in dreams. A possibility of losing oneself to them. Many of my stories are about protagonists who have woven a kind of protective dream structure around themselves—a place they can escape. There’s the boy who’s wandering in his father’s field in the story called “The Cornfield” for instance. He’s worried about becoming a farmer, being compelled to get married and join a bowling league. He’s trying to avoid that life at all costs by telling himself stories about haunted houses. He wants to escape into one of those stories…to meet someone, a beloved, there. But inevitably, such dream structures become slippery. It’s difficult to keep one’s balance. And, as I mentioned, reality always comes calling.

By the way, your question made me think about this recurring dream I’ve had since I was a teenager. In the dream, I meet this perfect guy. Someone I’m so in love with. I can picture him now. I know exactly what he looks like. And in the dream, we go to the county fair together. There was a great fair in my hometown in Ohio. When I was growing up, I always thought it was such a romantic place—all those warm lights surrounded by dark fields. So anyway, there’s usually a part in this dream where I realize that I’m dreaming. None of it’s real, even though I so badly want it to be real. And there’s a real horror in that, you know? Not just a sadness, but a horror. You’re going to wake up. You’re going to lose the guy. It’s a real nightmare.

Q: The title story is written as a multiple-choice test which I’d say explores three of literature’s great themes: war, sex, and death. Did you begin with this structure, or did it evolve after you started writing?

A: I started this book as a kind of writing contest with my friend Brian Leung. One summer, for seven days straight, we sent each other stories. I had to wake up each morning and think of an interesting story to tell. And what I realized was, in order to keep things compelling, I really needed to focus on structure. Normally, I speculate worlds in my fiction, but in Fantasy Kit I realized I could speculate structure as well. That’s what you’re seeing in the title story. I wanted to tell something about these two soldiers I was imagining, but I wanted to tell it in a way that was surprising in order to keep my friend interested, I suppose. So, you’ll see a lot of different experimental forms in this book. I think of it as a book of permissions. I was giving myself permission as a writer to play and have fun. And I hope that, in some way, I’m giving the reader permission as well to be playful in their own writing or at least to enjoy playing in my fragmentary worlds.

Q: You refer to various historical and literary figures throughout this collection, for example, Saint Sebastian, Pan, Winnie the Pooh, John the Apostle, Christ, and in some cases, you write alternate narratives for them. A diverse group, to say the least. How did you put this collection together? Tangentially, were there other stories you wrote while writing those in Fantasy Kit that you didn’t include?

A: I’ll answer the second part of the question first. There are always stories that get kicked out of a collection. There are also stories that don’t take off and stories that never get written. Many experiments simply fizzle. The pieces in Fantasy Kit are the best of the experiments, the work that really seemed to resonate.

In terms of the kind of strange parade of historical characters, I honestly have no idea where all that came from. A book that contains Winnie the Pooh and Jesus might seem very strange from the outside, but it felt completely normal to me as I was writing these pieces. I just allowed myself to travel where the imagination took me. Many of the figures depicted in this book fascinated me in childhood, honestly. I love the idea of the Hundred Acre Wood. And Jesus was certainly a big part of my upbringing as were the ancient aliens in my story “Let Us Go and Serve Other Gods” (my mom kept a book on her nightstand called God Drives a Flying Saucer, and I was obsessed with that book when I was seven or eight years old.)

For this book, I just took all those characters I was so interested in and led them down a slightly darker path in the forest. I found something creepy in each of them because that’s where my imagination likes to go.

Q: Two of my favorite stories, “Man with Pillow” and “The Pool Party,” are what I’d call ghost stories—in the psychological sense, not in the slasher or monster movie vein. A craft question: what elements do you consider essential for a successful ghost story?

A: When I write a ghost story, I think about the concepts of the “unseeable” and the “unknowable.” The best ghosts cannot be seen clearly or completely. Check out the stories of M.R. James for great examples of this or Sarah Waters’ novel The Little Stranger. In addition, they cannot be completely knowable either, meaning the ghost cannot be fully comprehended either by the protagonist or the reader.

In “Man with Pillow” the possible ghost holds a pillow over his own face. He is unseeable. But we also don’t really understand why he is doing that action. It’s creepy because it doesn’t make much sense. It also seems to be connected in some way to the unseeable past of the protagonist’s boyfriend. In “The Pool Party,” the ghost is unseeable in that he keeps his face turned toward the pool fence. He will not turn around so the rest of the partygoers can know who he is. He is unknowable because the protagonist cannot fully understand his past. The ghost—a dead teenager—had a life that the protagonist was not supposed to look at directly. If I say too much here, it will give away the whole story. But I would definitely say those are the two concepts I think about the most. The ghost cannot fully be seen and there has to be something about it that cannot fully be known.

Q: The reader’s fear is rooted most fully in these unknowns; I think you could say. And suspense originates here too, i.e. the anxiety of not knowing what you’ll encounter next.

A: Yes, I agree with that. In fact, with Fantasy Kit, I tried to keep myself in a state of suspense as well. I frequently wasn’t sure what was going to come next…not until I saw the words appear on the page. Each story has so many little twists in its path, weird little surprises to encounter. It was an oddly freeing experience to write this book. I was glad to surprise myself again.

Q: What are you working on currently?

I just finished a queer, erotic retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. It will be published by Lethe Press in October of this year. Honestly, I think it’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever written, and I really hope people will check it out.

Now, I’m trying to find another project that compels me. I’ve started three different novel projects. One is my attempt at writing a cabin-in-the-woods style slasher story. Another is about an automaton who acts as an assistant to a detective in Edwardian London. And then finally, there’s a story about an actor in 1930s’ Hollywood who is not what he seems to be. Honestly, I’m not sure if any of those will work, but I try to allow myself to play until I find something that feels really exciting. A story I don’t want to stop telling.

Christine Sneed is the author of four books, most recently Paris, He Said and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her fifth book, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, along with a short fiction anthology she edited, Love in the Time of Time’s Up, are forthcoming in October. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and O Magazine. She has received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, among other honors. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University and Regis University and lives in Pasadena, California.