Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m really excited to welcome Alan Lastufka to the site! Alan pulls double duty in the world of publishing, as both an author and a publisher, running the independent small press Shortwave Publishing. I’ve read (and loved) two Shortwave books this year, and have been eyeing up more, so I was delighted when Alan agreed to write something for the site. I’m particularly interested in the way Shortwave is able to explore both horror and science fiction in its catalogue, and the way the two genres are increasingly intermingling – and that’s the subject that Alan has tackled in this post! So read on to find out more about Alan, his writing, and the intriguing Shortwave catalogue…
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Alan Lastufka: Two days before my tenth birthday, my parents took me to see Alien 3 on opening night. It was an experience none of us expected.
I’d seen the original Alien a time or two, and the sequel, Aliens, a ton, as it was in constant rotation in our VCR…but here was a darker, scarier, more nihilistic film. The military hijinks and one-liners were gone, and in their place we got a verified horror sci-fi film. And I was hooked.
I was a horror kid growing up. I had sci-fi friends (Star Trek nerds) and sci-fi cousins (Star Wars nerds), but I passed over phasers and lightsabers for hockey masks and knives for fingers. I had a subscription to Fangoria. I begged my parents to rent Puppet Master, and then had to sleep in their bed that night. I wrote short stories with titles like “In the Basement” and “Horror House”.
Horror, as a genre, became my personality. By high school I was goth, wearing torn up pantyhose on my arms and painting my nails black. It was 1998, after all, and my Discman held nothing but Nine Inch Nails.
Fast-forward to college and, incidentally, I found myself watching and reading more sci-fi. The Matrix trilogy was huge. Minority Report was awesome. I, Robot took over my DVD player for at least a month straight. Yet I barely noticed when the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake dropped.
What was happening to me?
Apparently, it wasn’t me who was changing. No, the scales were tipping but they weren’t shifting from one genre to the other – they were on a collision course. Throughout the rest of the 2000s we’d get banger after banger that harkened back to the experience of seeing Alien 3 in the theater a decade earlier.
Pitch Black, I Am Legend, Eight Legged Freaks, Dreamcatcher, Cloverfield, The Mist, Resident Evil, hell, even our old pal Jason Voorhees went to space!
While the idea of sci-fi horror wasn’t new, one could argue it had never been – and hasn’t again been – as popular or commercially viable as in the first decade of the 2000s.
But somehow, it worked!
So much science fiction is fertile ground for horrific elements. Every space station is a haunted house, inhabited not by ghosts, but the ship’s disembodied AI computers. They’re eerily similar when you think about it. They can see and hear everything; there is no hiding, no escape. Unseen, they can shut doors, crank up the heat, set off alarms, and seem nearly impossible to kill or even fight back against.
Every colony on some far away planet is a small town with shared secrets and strange things creeping in the shadows, having their own unique rituals and beliefs. What does religion or family or community look like with a population of a few hundred or few thousand on some distant moon? What indigenous life would we domesticate… or be devoured by?
Even the very vastness of space itself ensures our characters are always isolated, which is, like, the number one rule in horror!
And the flip side? Also true… Every monster is a scientific marvel. What could we learn from dissecting Pumpkinhead? Which medical advancements could we make if we understood the technology of the Predators?
And the supernatural? Hauntings and possessions could be explained by alternate planes of existence, alternate realities. A glitch in the Matrix would result in the most intense nightmare from which you couldn’t simply pinch yourself awake.
How about the franchise monsters? The unkillable Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, for example. How many ways can we resurrect a maggot-infested corpse? Well, before he went to space, our best bud Jason was brought back to life with a bolt of lightning. Can I get Dr. Magnus Pyke to yell “Science!” here?!
Grown-up now and beginning my writing/publishing career just last year, I’m hoping to honor both my horror and my science fiction roots. My debut novel, Face the Night, leaned heavily into horror and supernatural elements, while my latest published short story, Book of the Future, put tech before the terror. I am now both an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and Full Member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA).
The titles I’ve published follow suit. While our books might be shelved in different sections of the bookstore, I believe they share more than they don’t. From the bloody and chilling horror of Clay McLeod Chapman (Stay on the Line) and Caitlin Marceau (A Cold That Burns Like Fire) to the dark dystopian sci-fi of Ai Jiang (I Am AI) and Lyndsey Croal (Have You Decided on Your Question), our works span alternate supernatural planes of existence where someone – or something – reaches out from seemingly impossible distances while also examining the desire to live a different life at any cost, including insanity or death.
Shortwave Publishing lives at this intersection of sci-fi and horror. And we don’t plan on moving out any time soon.
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Alan Lastufka is an award-winning author and the owner of Shortwave Publishing, an independent small press based in the Pacific Northwest. Shortwave offers a selection of original books, zines, and stories with a focus on horror and science fiction.
Lastufka’s debut novel, Face the Night, received a starred Kirkus review, was a finalist for Best New Horror Novel at the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and won the 2022 Hoffer Award for Best Commercial Fiction. It was also listed as one of the 100 Best Indie Books of the Year by Kirkus.
Check out Alan’s website and the Shortwave Publishing website for more information.
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Huge thanks to Alan for writing this great post! As I said earlier, I’ve loved both Shortwave books I’ve read this year (review links below), and I’m definitely looking forward to reading more next year! And Face the Night sounds creepy but brilliant, so that might just find its way onto my reading list next year too.
Check out my review of Have You Decided On Your Question by Lyndsey Croal
Check out my review of I Am AI by Ai Jiang
Face the Night is out now – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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