Four Questions with Lee Rozelle
I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Lee Rozelle’s upcoming speculative fiction collection, Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales, and I’m excited he stopped by to participate in my “Four Questions” series. His answers prove to be both thought-provoking and dread-inducing.
Tamika Thompson: What is horror?
Lee Rozelle: For me, horror comes from a morphological revolting, like when my body revolts from my mind. When I experience horror, my body might shiver, or dry heave, or whine aloud without my mind’s permission. It’s a feeling like something is pulling apart inside me, my organs and lymphatic system in the process of rebellion. When I do body scan meditation, I breathe and make specific parts of by body calm. But sometimes I feel this pecan-sized knot growing on my cheek. The pecan-sized knot on my cheek is revolting. It is telling me that there’s something wrong inside me, that something is trying to get out. When the body revolts, spaces come available inside the body-mind where you can reassemble yourself. There’s also residual matter that can be expelled. Terror, on the other hand, is when my mind revolts from my body. But that’s a different story…
Thompson: What is the spookiest experience you've ever had?
Rozelle: Years ago, when I was canoeing down Hatchet Creek, I saw these girls and children under a double bridge. They had rotten smiles and misshapen ink pen tattoos. But there was one girl under there with long black hair, and she beckoned me with her eyes. Because some of them had knives and brass knuckles, the children spooked me a little, so I kept paddling. As the sun was setting, I found a nice campsite a mile or two down the creek, but part of me wanted to go back under that bridge. In my tent I couldn’t sleep, so I began to walk through the woods. It took me a couple of hours to get back to the bridge. As I came upon a clearing, I heard this screeching car radio music and saw a smoky camp fire. As I walked closer to the road, a blast of headlights hit me, a car moved slowly back and forth over the bridge. I ran away. Two days later, I am told, a corpse was found under the bridge.
Thompson: What is the scariest book you've read and what about it frightened you?
Rozelle: When I was five, a very old woman we called Miss Mamie gave me a book called How to Get to Heaven, or something like that. It was the scariest thing I have ever read. As I remember, it was a little picture book, and on the cover was a little boy standing on cliff who looked confused. Opening the book for the first time, I saw that there was one cliff on the left side of the page, a higher cliff on the right, and a big chasm in the middle. The book introduced character after character—friendly looking people, I thought—who tried to do various things to get to heaven—like make money or do good deeds—but they all fell from the cliff into the abyss below. I didn’t see where the people went when they fell off the cliff, but I could imagine what was happening to them. At the end of the book, a white boy stood at the cliff, but he had accepted Jesus as his personal savior and therefore got to walk across a wooden bridge shaped like a crucifix to get to the other side. The paradox of a decent person burning in hell was not lost on me, even at that age. The whole thing disgusted me.
Thompson: Your upcoming collection, Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales, includes twelve interconnected stories set in Tallapoochee, a town “plagued by an experimental toxin” that turns people into “genetically modified freaks.” What was the inspiration for this fictional “Southern backwater,” and how did you build the world for this book?
Rozelle: Five years ago, I saw a photograph of a fish that seemed to be standing on its head underwater, floating wrong, alive but kind of sideways and upside down. Traces of human antidepressants in the water, I found, can cause all kinds of effects on fish. That fish wormed around in my imagination for quite a while. I began to imagine fish with human appendages, flaccid human sex organs, and human teeth. Slowly the fish creatures in my mind grew more and more human.
Images of naiads, mermaids, fish monsters, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon started creeping into my imagination as I tried to write stories about other things. The characters in all of the stories started turning into fish. I couldn’t help it.
Lee Rozelle is the author of Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales, forthcoming from Montag Press. His novel Ballad of Jasmine Wills is available in paperback, on Kindle Unlimited and audiobook. He's the author of nonfiction books Zombiescapes & Phantom Zones and Ecosublime, and he has published short stories in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Southern Humanities Review, HellBound Books' Anthology of Bizarro, Shadowy Natures by Dark Ink Books, If I Die Before I Wake Volume 3, and the Scare You to Sleep podcast. Learn more at leerozelle.com.
