This month I’m speaking to Caleb Bethea about their debut novel Disco Murder City, published by Maudlin House this September. This is a seductive, trippy story soaked in blood and sequins. Murder City is a nightmarish world where sleep paralysis demons stalk the dancefloor, committing extreme acts of violence in the nightclubs of this metropolis. And stalking the demons is our main character Netti, a cartoon animator lost amongst the chaos. But as the novel progresses, we learn that Netti’s fascination with the demons has a deeper significance. This book has an unsettling dream logic that never allows you to ground yourself before the next feverish encounter comes along.
Caleb’s short fiction has appeared in HAD, X-R-A-Y, hex, ergot., Bruiser, Maudlin House and Tenebrous Press’ Thank You For Joining the Algorithm. Follow them on all the apps at @caleb_bethea_
Rebecca Summerling: Hi Caleb, thanks so much for talking to us about Disco Murder City! This book explores two of my favourite settings in fiction: cities and nightlife venues like bars, clubs etc. I think the latter is underexplored. What do you think makes nightclubs such a potent setting for horror in particular?
Caleb Bethea: Short answer: I’m just a slut for a cinematic setting! Better answer: A room full of sweat, glitter, neon, and maybe a little blood is a setting where social inhibitions are checked at the door. One second, you’re on the street by the sandwich shop; the next, you’re stepping through the threshold and all the bodies are technicolored in the club lights.
The bonus is that choosing a setting where social inhibitions are out the window, it feels a little more natural to drop narrative inhibitions. In writing it, I experienced this cyclical effect where the more I played with POV and temporality, the more I found a tone that allowed for these characters to do odd shit. The characters doing odd shit, naturally, left room for more experimentation in form. On and on. Curioser and curioser.
The novel finds Netti in an in-between phase in his life. He has cleaned up his act but is carrying around a heavy sense of guilt. He’s undergoing another sense of self discovery which could not have come about had he not gone through the first. Why was it important to tell this story at this point in Netti’s journey?
Netti has an oscillating identity—a person in recovery, a person relapsing, a male, a son, a cartoonist, a detective, all of which have to fit with a certain amount of force. He’s like many of the other many other characters in DMC that aren’t fixed in time and space. I even went so far as to make some characters figuratively faceless (along with demons that are literally faceless). So, Netti is on this quest, wondering what it means to have skin when the city around you has no face.
His guilt also has no face, but he carries it in his body. This sensation is one I pulled from my own experience growing up, deeply internalizing the Bible’s teachings on sin and the need to be redeemed from our own vile nature. Fortunately, for Netti, he gets to play out these in-between feelings in the Disco. If we could all be so lucky!
Netti is a cartoon animator who works for a sinister and corrupt studio. There’s a running theme in the book about the commodification of the arts. Could you tell us more about that?
I began writing this novel when I was still copywriting at a social media marketing agency. It was a startup that got a great start because we were in the right place at the right time when the pandemic first hit. I’d quit teaching to go to my MFA program full-time and had to do this gig to pay the bills. While I certainly had a better time than any marketer in Murder City, it wasn’t hard to capture the feeling of soul-crushing creative output as the world is ending all around you.
So, there’s a lot of personal experience baked in there (as personal as a sleep paralysis demon outbreak novel can be), but there’s something I love about the absurdity of characters creating art at varying levels of competency for shitty payment—especially when their reality is ripping at the seams. Because isn’t that all of us? What else is there to do, when the end is nigh, but to create new shit?
I really like the way you play with genre in your work (I’m also thinking here of your story “Trail of Small Clowns” published in X-R-A-Y). Is that something you think about when writing?
I’ve got an image that I’ve shared too many times over beers, but I try to imagine my tropes as being submerged in water for long amounts of time. They start as these narrative objects that have become a part of my brain over the last three decades, but when I pull them up out of the water, they’re slimy, grotesque, shiny, and beautiful—swollen into something new. The “process” allows me to indulge in genre conventions I love as a fan, but also to hopefully offer the reader something they haven’t interacted with before,
In short, I love to take a genre trope and give her more anxiety and gender dysphoria. Demons, clowns, masked killers, whatever works!
Is there a Disco Murder City soundtrack and if so, what songs are on it?
There are three answers to this.
Of course, there’s Disco. I love the Blakean blurring of Innocence and Experience that Disco employs–the sentimentality and the sweat, the earnestness and the horniness.
Structurally, I also found myself contemplating a lot of Grindcore. Bands like Pig Destroyer, The Locust, Full of Hell, and Party Cannon. I adore the genre’s obsession with how many rhythm changes they can cram into a two minute track. I tried to emulate this in my own story structure, employing stories within stories within left turns within rabbit holes.
As far as tone, I was most drawn to the microgenre of Witch House. It began in the late stages of MySpace collapse and you can hear it in the distortions of bright synths and harrowing bass lines. Naturally, DISCO MURDER CITY exists more in an analog space, but it couldn’t escape the haunting sad harmonies that compose all those club bangers. For many passages, I tried to push the prose past a breaking point to achieve the effect of a blown out subwoofer. Ears will bleed (that’s the hope)!
What were the cultural touchstones for you when you came up with the idea for this book? I was really reminded of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in particular, with its surreal, drug fueled escapades.
To the best of my memory, this premise came from watching Prom Night. There’s a scuffle at the end with disco lights on the dancefloor and the vibe stuck with me. I was also watching a lot of other 80s flicks while reading W.G. Sebald, so I quickly fell in love with the idea of latex-coded demons caught in a story that bucked at traditional structure.
While writing, I certainly found myself echoing Murakami’s novels and Twin Peaks (RIP David Lynch). There were magical realism influences as well like Borges and Cortazer. For all those smart stories, I never let myself lose the “dumb” ones too. Shitty 80s slashers and cheap practical effects pointed me toward that more belligerent tone and style.
I can also never escape the hallucinatory storytelling of works like Fear and Loathing and Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL. In the case of the former, I particularly loved the bleak post-Summer-of-Love visions of hell. In the latter, I can see its influence on me with 20th century city meets Old Testament judgement situation.
Can you share anything that you’re working on at the moment? What’s next for you?
Hell yeah, I can share. I’m currently subbing around a short collection of experimental clown horror. It started as a joke on Twitter, but now it’s a book! I’ve also recently started a Roger-Rabbit-meets-Chainsaw-Man theme park novel. It’s early days there, but it’s the kind of story that needs to come out of my brain right now.