{"id":281,"date":"2015-03-24T18:25:03","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T18:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/?p=281"},"modified":"2015-03-24T18:26:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T18:26:42","slug":"funerals-mourning-and-the-clawfoot-requiem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/funerals-mourning-and-the-clawfoot-requiem\/","title":{"rendered":"Funerals, Mourning, and “The Clawfoot Requiem”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month, my short story, “The Clawfoot Requiem,” made its debut in the March issue of LampLight.\u00a0The\u00a0horror tale follows Sabrina, a woman\u00a0mourning the suicide of her sister. But instead of the usual black garb and\u00a0graveyard wreaths, she copes by building a shrine to the blood-filled bathtub where\u00a0her sister died. Gruesome and wistful, all wrapped into one clawfooted package.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Being a horror author, death is a huge part of the job. Not every story I write\u00a0features\u00a0mortality at the forefront, but\u00a0it often sneaks in\u00a0one way or another. Everything from the threat of dying to\u00a0coping with loss after the fact\u00a0is fodder for genre writers.<\/p>\n

For me, mourning rituals in particular have always held an especially macabre appeal. Growing up, it seemed like we were attending a\u00a0family funeral every other month.\u00a0I quickly learned to hate what I considered the barbaric custom of calling hours. Staring at the\u00a0embalmed faces of deceased loved ones in coffins became such an abhorrent pastime that by age nine, I lodged a formal complaint with my parents,\u00a0begging to be released from the funeral parlor circuit. Because they knew how important it was to me, they honored my request, and I didn’t attend another funeral\u00a0for a full decade.<\/p>\n

However, being a bizarrely curious child, my funerary fascination didn’t end there. I started researching why we mourn the way we do. In\u00a0a truly morbid pre-internet montage, I amassed book after book, some with round-ups of mourning customs, some with Victorian death pictures that haunted me long after the book retired to a shelf.\u00a0Yes, while other girls my age read teeny bopper\u00a0magazines, I learned about death rituals.\u00a0All in a day’s work for a girl who earned the nickname “Gwensday Addams” before entering the\u00a0second grade.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Flash forward two decades later, and my research never ends.\u00a0There’s always another custom to learn.\u00a0Last year, on International Vulture Awareness Day<\/a>, I went to the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The Aviary’s\u00a0all-day event\u00a0spotlighted\u00a0the crisis of Asian vultures that are\u00a0perishing in mass numbers\u00a0thanks to an anti-inflammatory drug administered to cows. This mass vulture die-off has affected everyone in the area, dramatically increasing the rate of rabies throughout India. It has also impacted groups like the Zoroastrians who can no longer complete a venerated tradition of placing their deceased on top of a dakhma, an elevated structure designed to draw in scavenger birds.<\/p>\n

This is where mourning gets really interesting and nuanced. For the Zoroastrians,\u00a0it’s horrifying when a vulture doesn’t arrive to eat Grandma.\u00a0But\u00a0to us Westerners, the\u00a0notion of leaving\u00a0anyone—even a complete\u00a0stranger—out for carrion seekers is more than a little disturbing.<\/p>\n

So while keeping a bathtub brimming with blood isn’t exactly in the textbooks as normal, who decides what is<\/em> normal anyhow? From anthropological and sociological perspectives, it’s a synergy of time and place.\u00a0Today’s mourning practices\u00a0could look ghoulish a hundred years from now. By that rationale, my character Sabrina in “The Clawfoot Requiem” might just be a woman ahead of her time.<\/p>\n

Has all this creepy talk piqued your interest in a\u00a0scary story? Check out “The Clawfoot Requiem” and four other unnerving tales in the latest issue<\/a> of LampLight. Horror lovers won’t be disappointed.<\/p>\n

Happy reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month, my short story, “The Clawfoot Requiem,” made its debut in the March issue of LampLight.\u00a0The\u00a0horror tale follows Sabrina, a woman\u00a0mourning the suicide of her sister. But instead of the usual black garb and\u00a0graveyard wreaths, she copes by building a shrine to the blood-filled bathtub where\u00a0her sister died. Gruesome and wistful, all wrapped into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-lamplight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}