Carson Winter is an author, punker, and raw nerve. His fiction has been featured in Apex, Vastarien, and Tales to Terrify, among others. “The Guts of Myth” was published in volume one of Dread Stone Press’ Split Scream series. His novella, Soft Targets, is out now from Tenebrous Press. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

“Imagine that–language being a dangerous thing”: Carson Winter’s The Corpse Priest 

RSL: Corpse Priest is new ground for you. A sword and sorcery novella, blending weird and fantasy and horror all into one story. What made you want to write this story, and now? 

One of my primary creative motivations is to write the stories I’d like to read. When I was thinking about The Corpse Priest, I was thinking about the grand potential that sword & sorcery held in my head, but lamenting the fact that I never quite found the story that scratched that itch. In fact, through most of my history as a reader, I’ve been something of a curmudgeon towards fantasy. I’ve liked what I have read, but often found myself opposed to its creative priorities. 

With that starting point, I started imagining a fantasy story that I would be really excited about as both author and reader, slamming its genre tropes as figurative action figures against my other interests—namely weird fiction a la Thomas Ligotti. 

I think for an author, the idea of “play” is incredibly important to the creative process. The first step is always to entertain myself, and then when I have that foundation, I can go about shaping it into a story. 

RSL: There’s a lot of really interesting developments around culture, identity, and language. What about the societies in this novella propelled you to these themes? 

There’s a lot of talk about worldbuilding in fantasy circles, and I see it almost as a black hole that threatens to consume the author. I had a wariness about building out the world too much, because I didn’t want it to eclipse Corpse’s psychological drama. 

But places are very important in The Corpse Priest because they define their characters. With each character, I wanted to develop the idea that who we are is at least partially based on our environments. This is reflected in Corpse, who believes that life is a disease he must be cured of, but is stuck because his body is programmed to fear its end over all else. I think it’s very interesting to consider why we are the people we are. Is Mirth truly a machine for kindness or is she higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs because she was born rich, and is able to self-actualize through charity?

They’re not easy questions to answer, but at the heart of it all is the conflict between self and setting—a friction that fantasy is well primed to interrogate. 

RSL: Can you expand more on what specifically you wanted to do with language? There’s a lot of slang, neologisms, myths, and a distinct sense of place you seem to have captured. The name “La’dir” sticks out to me as a scouser, for example. 

I often think about language as the lens through which we interpret our world. It’s impossible for me to imagine how I would view our world without the benefit of language, which to me suggests that it is fundamental to our perception. 

In The Corpse Priest, I didn’t have any specific source for the language, except that I wanted them to feel both foreign and familiar. Almost as if they were words we’d use now, but went through a game of telephone that rendered them incomprehensible. 

With La’Dir, his name is something of a pun, taken from the French dire—to say. In The Corpse Priest, words have literal power, not just figurative. While La’Dir does not use magic natively, I thought it might be an old aspirational name in Dross Toll and communicate—albeit incredibly subtextually—the relationship between words, magic, and class. 

RSL: You’ve clearly tapped into this Winterian aim of negotiating with why we tell stories, and how they are told. Do you think the main character, Corpse, represents anything subversive about heroes, protagonist’s goals, and how their status as a character matters to the story? If not him, then anyone else? 

Corpse has a foot in both worlds—he’s very much the traditional sword & sorcery hero in that he’s a capable warrior and skilled with a sword, but he’s atypically plagued with self-doubt and melancholy. 

It was important to me to show a different kind of hero, but it also sprung from the setting. Of course Corpse would have different, maybe even unrecognizable motivations than us! He lives in a death-worshipping tribe that sleeps in graves! That shit’s fucking nuts!

Part of how Corpse departs from heroic depictions is really just an honest appraisal of who he’d be, based on the world he grew up in. To do anything else would be a disservice to his history. 

RSL: Near the middle of this novella, language and its failings for humans comes front and centre. Very often, characters are searching for the right way to say something—or even left saying nothing at all. Did you find yourself knowing you would be trying to illustrate the anxiety of having words to speak? 

It’s funny how that sort of thing seeps into a story. I wasn’t aware I was doing it, but how people express themselves and our relationship to words is a very active theme in The Corpse Priest. 

Even Corpse, when forced to bounce off others, seems to understand the impossibility and strangeness of his situation, despite it being all he knows. This sort of internal conflict runs so deep that even words can’t articulate it. Communication—both its power and its limits—bind and free the characters at various turns. 

RSL: Words routinely feel terrifying and powerful in this novella. Did the setting or the genre have anything to do with this, or was it merely a theme that arrived with the story? Between mages who are scared to whisper words, or cultural beliefs devastating entire cities, I wonder if you felt the theme informed the setting, or the setting invited the theme? 

I knew early on in my first draft that I wanted a thematic connection between magic and death. 

The rules followed a pretty simple logic—you trade time for magic. With that premise, everything else sort of fell into place. It was easy to imagine how a world could be built, but also forgotten when the price paid for shortcuts is so high. I think it also creates an interesting history within the world, where you can imagine the great-great grandparents of those living in Dross Toll dropping dead young, but leaving a legacy. And perhaps those kids, growing up with a farm (but no parents), would develop their own biases against magic. 

To create an interesting world, I think you just need to pull at the threads of your imagination and see what happens, and reckon with it honestly. 

RSL: There’s a lot of power structures in this novella. The misanthropic antenatalists in the woods that Corpse fled from, the Count’s vampiric consumption of his people through violence—and the languageless revenants, and the tower around which the story revolves. Do you think the emerging idea of belief systems is tied to language on a basic level in this novella? 

The belief systems in The Corpse Priest are most tied to the intangibles of the individual, I believe, but use language to disguise the ethereal as concrete. Are the Malwoodsian the way they are because of themselves or their culture? Or a better question: how did the Malwoodsian culture come to be? 

What we know is this: of all the belief systems in the novella, it is only the Malwoodsians who have any interest in proselytizing. By elevating an individual’s wiring to a worldview, and enforcing it, it becomes a belief system. In this case, I’d say violence is the greater driver than language—although the latter is how we transform these urges and actions into attractive propaganda. 

RSL: In the oldest story structures, there’s often a heavy price paid, or some kind of rebirth. By the end of this novella, we have your own kind of creation myth and that seems to inform the story here, the Martyr’s double-heads, the magicks that Dross Toll has forgotten. Do you think the narrative you set out to build this backdrop beforehand, or did it emerge in the first drafts? How much of this story about change, semantic drift, beliefs and their horrors did you want to be a product of this world you’ve created? 

With any story, I usually develop the seed of a premise and play out the concept in my head, then, I ask myself questions. 

What if a hero was a philosophical pessimist? Where would this hero come from? Who would he call friends? What would his relationship with sex be? What beliefs would present an interesting foil to his own? 

Asking these questions gave me the floor from which I could build the rest of the world and discover what was important to me about the initial idea. For example, the Two-Headed Martyr is a reflection of a lot of Corpse’s anxieties, but represents a different path toward resolving that anguish. The religious stories involving the Martyr aren’t just super fun for me to write, but an interesting way to explore this world’s (and our own’s) relationship with death—which for many of us is the ground zero from which all horror grows. 

RSL: There’s a really poignant moment later on, where the narrative reveals Corpse’s thoughts that Dross Toll was just a ‘pit stop’ on the way somewhere else. Does this mean you wanted a larger point about where stories happen for us as people, or is it something else? 

When writing The Corpse Priest, despite all the philosophical underpinnings, I knew fundamentally that this was an action story. Reading through Moorcock and Conan, I realized that despite the fantasy settings, these stories weren’t a far cry from the action flicks I’d watch on lazy Sunday afternoons. They feature stoic heroes, a driving mission, and really evil bad guys that receive brutal comeuppance. 

To bring the idea closer to home, I specifically sought influence from these flicks, using First Blood’s “stranger comes to town and gets harassed” beats as a blueprint for Corpse. 

Another action genre that I love are old samurai movies, stuff like Lone Wolf and Cub and Zatoichi. These heroes always seem to be eternally wandering. In Zatoichi’s case, he wanders because that’s what he does. With Ogami Itto, his travels are in service of a much grander mission of revenge, but along the way he becomes embroiled in other action. 

I always found the literal hero’s journey as a comforting trope, but I also like that it reflects a psychological state of change—the idea that whatever the hero is going through is so great, that it cannot be solved by anything less than a quest. For Corpse, the long road ahead is symbolic of the emotional work he must do to find his own enlightenment. 

RSL: Count Viniri really feels like the foil to Corpse’s own problems. Both seem to be the product of an overarching structure, but they have entirely different responses. Does the ending section’s events have anything to do, perhaps, with how and why they differ so much? Or, inversely, on why they might seem so similar? 

Absolutely. They are both terrified of death, but it manifests in different ways. For Corpse, life is an addiction that he’s had since birth. He was born to feel fear, but he also can’t commit to the act of suicide. His brain doesn’t allow it. For him, this is his tragedy. It’s dealing with the raw state of existence and the body he was given. 

Viniri is also terrified of death, but for him I think it’s because life is intimately tied to the idea of a legacy to him. Being alive is a game you play where you become the most renowned, have the best painting of yourself in the hallway, and build a reputation to last for eons. But this also means, for Viniri, death is the Game Over screen. It’s where you finally have to count your money and deeds and his fear is that nothing he can do will be enough. 

RSL: The novella really managed to entertain, engage, and deal with quite heavy themes about why we choose to live, why we have beliefs or don’t, and, ultimately, why we read stories. Did writing the novella itself have a kind of effect on you as an author, the same way that stories do to people in the text? Reading it felt like being part of the world’s events, and the ending informed that for me. 

Every story for me begins with some element of self-expression. Sometimes I joke that all of my characters are me through a kaleidoscopic lens. 

I don’t share Corpse’s views exactly, but I can empathize with them. I’ve long struggled with intrusive thoughts and fears about my own death. I also relate to Viniri’s desire for his legacy. In some ways, you could say the story is a therapeutic exercise where I kill the part of me who so desperately desires status. 

But I also see myself in Mirth, La’Dir, Gaart, and others amidst the cast. They’re all just people, trying to figure shit out—much like the author. 

The Corpse Priest is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org