Most horror authors are asked if they had something terrible happen to them in their early childhood that would compel them to write such heinous, gruesome, terrifying, and slithering stories and with what appears to be an ease that makes the horror author no worse than their villain. 

Turns out, horror writers had pretty normal childhoods and still live pretty normal lives. Yet the horrors persist. 

Matthew Lyons is very much a “gardener.” While some authors write stories by the seats of their pants and others plot them scene by scene, Lyons is looking all around his world, he’s listening to conversations, finding interesting settings, and tending to the roots so that they may fruit, flower, blossom, or otherwise produce some artifact from a weird place. 

“Art in general and especially something as intense, and in-depth, and long-term as novel writing, you kind of end up cobbling together the whole thing from everything you can. If it feels right, it feels right.” 

Lyons’ new novel “Mask of Flies” starts out as a heist gone wrong. In the characters’ flight they land in the San Luis Valley. They hole up in a cabin up in the Valley’s surrounding mountains and things take a dark and twisted turn. 

Meet Lyons tonight at First Fridays in Downtown Alamosa, where the theme is Scribing & Vibing.

Originally from Arvada, Lyons lived in New York for the better part of a decade and just before the world got weird, moved back to Colorado. “There’s nothing more horrifying in this world than moving back to your home town only to find out it got real hip in the time you were gone.”

During the pandemic, Lyons decided that the San Luis Valley needed a visit. “The Valley was just there. Just waiting.” 

Although he tries to make it down to the Valley a couple times a year, that first visit was enough to kick off the cordite cartridge of creativity. 

There’s an “existential peace” that exists in the San Luis Valley, he says. At the same, it is “existentially spooky.” 

Ask anyone who’s spent time here. Ask the locals. Ask the family who drove through and didn’t even stop for gas. There’s nothing else like the San Luis Valley. 

He tells people when he’s asked about the San Luis Valley that it takes place in a part of Colorado that not a lot of people know about and “it’s so beautiful and yet it is so rich with the supernatural and the odd and it is this… I just try to paint what I think is a fair picture of the Valley as this gorgeous, peaceful, humblingly beautiful place that is shot through with high weirdness.”

You don’t have to take a drive to the UFO Watchtower or Crestone ziggurat to get a good sense of just how strange this place is. You don’t even really have to go that far out of any one of the Valley’s towns at night to see more stars in one blink than most people will see in their entire lives. It sure is beautiful. 

But if you’re the author of horror or weird fiction, the sky can look pretty spooky. At any point in time, something could blot out all the stars and reach down and pluck you from the earth. Or something from below the ground would swallow you up.

CHAPTER ONE

“Horror writing is a beautiful process,” Lyons said, and it’s something we can use to understand the world we’re in, or at least try to. “That is beautiful and terrifying.” 

Lyons points out that we are a storytelling species. “Human history is the story of stories.” 

With his sister, Lyons was raised by his mom, grandma, and two uncles. His mom is a retired elementary school teacher and growing up she would read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to him and his sister. A seemingly terrible childhood event that would no doubt inspire years of horror fiction. 

“I remember being enchanted by the power of the words I was hearing. It was beautiful.” 

The family legend is that he would “tend to, as a child, walk around with a pad and a pen and I didn’t really know how to use em but I knew this is how stories happened.”

He would find any adult he could and have them write down whatever story he was telling. He’s been chasing stories ever since. 

“The power of a good story can not possibly be overstated to me.”

From listening to the adventures of Frodo and Bilbo, Lyons got into detective fiction in high school. It was only later that he got into writing horror. As any normal millennial, he said, he read a lot of Goosebumps and then ended up at Stephen King. “As one does.”

He later studied writing in college. It’s what captivated him. For him, the “old magic” lies in books, so he wanted to write books. 

Horror deals with people in their most private, vulnerable moments, Lyons said, and as readers, as writers, we have to ask ourselves, “How far back do we peel the wallpaper?”

He’s had a sense of the lurid or the fringe since he was a kid, he said. “I don’t know what it is. It’s something about the secrets underneath the thing.” 

While in New York, Lyons worked as a copywriter for Macy’s. “All the while I was essentially just kind of brute-forcing my system into becoming the best writer I could by essentially excessively caffeinating myself to the point and conditioning myself to wake up at 4:30 to write.”

Lyons went on, as most horror authors do, to publish short stories in magazines run by cigarette- and adderall-addicted story junkies, DIY ‘zines filled with repulsively good and just repulsive horror, and tossing them at any one who would publish them. 

A short story of his published in Tough, called “Brothers Brujo,” was selected as a Best American Short Story in 2018. 

“Sold my first novel shortly after.” 

Like most artists Lyons enjoys a day job. He’s an advertising and marketing copywriter for some tech companies up in the Front Range area. “Words have always kind of been the thing for me.”

WEIRD, MAN

There are plenty of sub-genres in fiction and in horror. Too many to list. But there is often a surplus of overlap when it comes to “weird fiction.” 

“At its core it does kind of this weird double magic trick where it asks questions that don’t have easy answers but then it provides answers that aren’t easily understood.” 

The genre tries to go beyond ghosts and demons and aliens and instead ask what would those things actually look like? How would the human mind comprehend coming face-to-face with the incomprehensible? All as reflections of our most vulnerable desires, fears, wants and needs. 

For Lyons, “It’s a fun thing to do. I’m not the literary guy.” 

He’s done his literature courses but “for me, just being able to tell someone a story at the speed of thought is the goal. But being able to tell a story at the speed of thought and resolutely let people figure out what the metaphor or the allegory is at the center of the piece, that’s really cool. That invites reader participation.” 

Propulsive, readable prose is how he writes 

But even with fast prose, “weird gives itself permission to do right by itself on its own terms, rather than ‘I don’t understand what the monster is.’ You don’t need to, that’s not really the point.”

He quotes Thomas Pynchon: “Why should things be easy to understand?”

“What weird fiction does best or what it means to me is artists giving themselves permission to not spoon-feed the answers to their audiences. Horror is so good at trafficking in metaphor and allusion.”

MOSCAS

“The book in so many ways is kind of a love letter to the Valley.” 

What stood out to Lyons the most during his first visit to the San Luis Valley wasn’t necessarily the haunting beauty, but the people. He said everyone is just “so goddamn nice.” 

While writing he said he tried to “capture the high weirdness and the beauty, otherwise it would have been a little bit bullshit it would have been otherwise an inaccurate portail…. Do it right or not at all.” 

He saw an opportunity to shine another light on a pretty special place. “I’ve never seen anything set in the Valley, really.”

There’s a “geologic primitiveness” that gives the Valley an opportunity to tell stories at any point in time. Past or future. 

His story starts when the Valley “opens up” just south of Poncha Pass at the north end. From there, his characters make their way up into the mountains. The main character’s family has a hunting cabin “way back” in the mountains they decide to hole up in. 

A fictional diner in Alamosa is a set piece and El Super Taco gets a shoutout. For the most part the story takes place up in the mountains and both fictionalized towns and real ones. 

The Valley has a “singular vibe that trying to capture it was a huge challenge.” But Lyons said he’s “pretty damn proud” of what he did.