“I can’t imagine wanting to fence off the world of fiction into one tiny plot.”

An Interview with Short Story Writer and Editor Lincoln Michel

I’ve known Lincoln Michel for nearly a decade. We got our MFAs together at Columbia where we became close friends—drawn together not only by our mutual love of Twin Peaks and heavy metal, but what emerged as a profound aesthetic kinship for the high camp of popular genre fiction (Stephen King, Ray Bradbury) alongside cerebral classics of the uncanny (Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Bruno Schulz). In our time together at Columbia and in the years that followed, we discussed books and traded book recommendations prolifically, our sphere of influence widening to include a host of 21st century experimenters (Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, Laura van den Berg, Brian Evenson). All this went into our stabs at short fiction—for my part sprawling penny dreadfuls with byzantine language and entropic plotting, for his, hyper-real, discomfiting vignettes that laid bare the strangeness of everyday life.

In October 2015, Lincoln published his debut story collection Upright Beasts with Coffee House Press. I was struck by both the consistency and diversity of his vision. To read Upright Beasts is to enter a disconcertingly familiar world—one where isolated schoolchildren enact grand tragedies of violence, alienation and thwarted intimacy; where beleaguered Joe-Schmo’s double-down on troubled notions of masculinity; and where solipsistic twentysomething’s come into confrontation with hideous beings from provinces beyond human knowing. To re-read the book was to read it afresh.

Lincoln is also a stylist as highly layered as he is restrained, with diction so sharp it can skin you alive, recalling the best of Italo Calvino, Kathryn Davis, Denis Johnson. Not to mention the fact he’s incredibly funny—Jack Handey on a bad shroom trip—with salvos that crumble upon the abyss that yawns beyond even the most ordered life.

Over two weeks in October we emailed back and forth about Lincoln’s debut collection, the usefulness of genre traditions, demolishing readers’ expectations, and the nourishing persistence of the uncanny in day to day life.

—Adrian Van Young

I. HILLS COVERED IN KUDZU

THE BELIEVER: One thing that struck me were the subdivisions in the book: “Upright Beasts”, “North American Mammals”, “Familiar Creatures”, and “Megafauna.” They’re subdivisions that could serve to separate the stories according to genre, or how they move from realist into fantastical and then back again—or even the tone, like movements in a musical piece.

Can you describe some of your thinking behind making the conscious decision to group the stories together in this way?

LINCOLN MICHEL: The ordering of the collection is definitely something I struggled with for a long time. I always knew that I wanted an eclectic collection...