Interview with Valkyrie Loughcrewe
1. Thank you so much for joining me! For those who don’t know you, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your work?
Well I've been making music and little short horror stuff on youtube under the name surgeryhead for a while, I also make tabletop RPGs and indie games, but this whole time I've also been writing horror fiction. Short stuff mostly, mostly self published- a couple of anthologies and various stories on my website (lordsofthevideowasteland.com) but I've been writing since I was a kid, and it's always been
horror. I don't know why, just has been! And finally with Crom Cruach I seem to have come out with something people reckon is worth printing, so that's exciting!
2. Congratulations on your upcoming release Crom Cruach! Without giving away any spoilers, could you please tell us a bit about this story?
Crom Cruach is about a near future Ireland after a communist revolution has changed everything. There's a series of murders in a small rural community, and a local church is burned down, and even weirder things start to happen. This sort of kicks off a satanic panic as certain townspeople who aren't so happy with the new order pin the blame on a small commune of queer pagans. It's got black gloved killers and a good bit of gore and some really weird supernatural elements. It's also written in a sort of poetic style, like I was trying to get the prose to convey this air of ancient mysticism hanging underneath everything- but at it's heart it's like a weird VHS slasher movie.
3. What inspired Crom Cruach?
Real life politics for one, the spectre of war that hangs over Ireland, all those unresolved political tensions. The spectre of church abuses. Post Colonial trauma. But I'm obsessed with telling real stories about real things through an extremely lurid genre lense, so it's all dressed up like some kind of Dario Argento/Lucio Fulci movie. The pacing and style of the prose as well was very inspired by abrasive experimental techno, especially the band schxchxchxchx, as well as black metal and doom metal- but don't let that put you off, it's just a bit lyrical and rhymy. It doesn't go full house of leaves or anything.
4. In addition to writing, you’re also a musician. How would you classify your music?
Valkyrie Loughcrewe
With Surgeryhead, I suppose you could all class it as "industrial". I started off doing synthwave/french electro inspired stuff but the metal/industrial edge was always there. I like to flit between electro, dark ambient, metal, EDM... All kinds of styles! I have a thrash metal project as well which I've been having a lot of fun with called Argento. I'm nearly finished the first full length album for that called First Comes Madness... Then Comes Death! Which I sort of released on bandcamp track by track- which was a super messy way to release an album that I won't be doing again.
5. Have you ever made a soundtrack to your own stories?
Oh yes, all my music is like a soundtrack to a story I haven't written yet!
6. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, which bands?
For Crom I listened to a lot of schxchxchxchx and other artists like that- Andy Stott was another one. I have another novella out to submission right now which was a lot of darksynth and Electric Wizard, and I literally just finished writing a novel just before I started this interview which was entirely fuelled by death/doom metal. That one's gonna be gnarly.
7. What sparked your love of the horror genre?
I honestly have no idea. I've always just liked monsters and gore and ghost stories! It's something I interrogated a lot in my early 20s and tried to develop a rationale and philosophy around why I like it so much, and that helped me hone my creative voice, but nowadays i'm just sort of like "I dunno, it's cool!"
8. Where can people find you online?
I am on twitter as @surgeryhead, bandcamp as surgeryhead.bandcamp.com for all my music and lordsofthevideowasteland.com for my fiction, I have some comics I want to upload there, and I need to set up that site to link to my music properly, but the fiction part of it works fine, haha... I can never seem to find a good time to really dedicate to website maintenance.
