The Seemingly Unknowable Darkness: A Conversation with Fiction Writer Lena Valencia
Author of Mystery Lights and One Story managing editor
Last two days for submissions: the Drue Heinz Prize for a short story collection or a combination of short stories and novellas (150-300 double-spaced pages total), fee free, submissions accepted through June 30. Guidelines and portal to submit here.
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This past spring I read four story collections in preparation for a short story panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Today’s interviewee, Lena Valencia, was one of the writers whose books I read*, and I loved the immersive, uncanny, and sometimes darkly comic stories in her debut collection, Mystery Lights, which Tin House published last year. Mystery Lights was named one of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of 2024 and an Esquire Best Horror Book of 2024—among other distinctions and honors.
Lena lives in New York but is originally from southern California, where some of the stories in her collection are set. I especially admired how well she writes about complex family relations, desire, and how skillfully she describes and enlivens (frequently very chillingly) the austere and beautiful Southwestern desert. As you’ll find in our interview, she’s fascinated by the supernatural. She’s also very good at writing about the threat of violence, sexual and otherwise.
Christine/Bookish: Your stories often blur the line between the real and the surreal, and I also loved that some of them took place in or near Joshua Tree - the desert can be such an eerie place. What attracts you to horror and the surreal?
Lena Valencia: Supernatural horror is a way to make fear something that we can see the outlines of—to make literal the seemingly unknowable darkness that we all experience—in the form of a monster, for example, or a ghost. The horror writer Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro sums this up quite eloquently in a recent interview in The Writer’s Chronicle on the “horror renaissance” in fiction when she says that “horror offers a way to grapple with fear in a more tangible way.”
It’s also a genre that comes with a set of traditions to work with or against, which is an exciting craft challenge. Take the desert setting: when we imagine a setting for a horror story, we imagine a forest, or maybe an old house—somewhere with plenty of shadows to conceal ghosts, monsters, and other predators. I wanted to try to recreate that tension in the desert, a place which is bright and open and exposed.
And yet, as you say, there is definitely an eeriness to it. That woozy feeling that comes when you’re dehydrated, the spiny plants everywhere, the way scale is warped and confusing—all of that makes the landscape ripe for horror.
CS: In some of the stories in Mystery Lights, there are "mudmen" (cave-dwelling humanoid creatures), ghostly presences, aliens, and other paranormal phenomena. Are there particular myths, fairy tales, and authors who have had a strong influence on your writing?
LV: I’ve always been drawn to the weird in fiction. Growing up, my parents encouraged me to read the classics from a young age, so I read a lot of Greek mythology and Grimm’s fairy tales. When I got a little older, my father introduced me to E.T.A Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe.
At the same time, I loved the more contemporary ‘90s-kid horror fare such as the Goosebumps series and the TV show Are You Afraid of the Dark? I feel like this combination of “literary” horror and pulpy scares has informed my taste as an adult reader and writer.
One narrative that I find myself returning to in a lot of my work is Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, which I first encountered in a philosophy class as an undergraduate. It’s a story that blurs lines between reality and imagination and underscores the seductive danger of a charismatic individual—both themes I explore to varying degrees in the collection. The stories in Mystery Lights are also heavily influenced by the work of Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link, and Mariana Enríquez.
I also love horror movies. David Lynch (RIP) and the early work of David Cronenberg have been very influential, as have newer indie horror films, many of which are made by people in marginalized groups who have been excluded from the horror canon. It’s an exciting time for horror.
CS: How do you approach endings in short fiction?
Crafting a story ending is delicate work, and I’m sure I’m not the only writer who has spent hours meticulously writing and rewriting final paragraphs. I’m a fan of endings that don’t tie everything up into neat little bows, that leave some questions unanswered or maybe raise new ones.
That said, I want readers to leave the story feeling at least somewhat satisfied, so it really is a balancing act. I think it was the author Hannah Tinti (who also happens to be my boss) who once mentioned that one technique for ending a story was to make the ending an echo of the beginning. I found this especially helpful as I was revising the stories and looking at how the beginnings and endings were talking to each other.
CS: As both a writer and someone who’s worked in publishing and editing, how does your editorial eye affect your own writing?
LV: Watching master editors at work has made me a more careful writer and reviser. I think that the most important thing that working in publishing has taught me is not to take rejection personally. There are so many writers applying and submitting to opportunities. Rejection is a normal part of the process of putting yourself out there as an artist.
CS: How did you approach putting together your story collection? Did you have a primary theme in mind at the beginning, or did it emerge later?
LV: I’d just written the story “Mystery Lights” and was using it to submit my application for the Elizabeth George Foundation grant. I found that there was more about the desert—particularly about outsiders encountering the desert and their perceptions of it—that I wanted to explore in my writing.
I decided to propose a collection of stories set in the American Southwest, a place to which I’m a relative outsider living in New York City after having grown up in Los Angeles, but where my father and grandmother have roots; a place that looms large in the American consciousness as both a harsh landscape with a violent history (and, to some degree, a violent present) and a place for influencers to pose for arty photos on boulders in the sunset. Once I had this unifying theme of place in mind, it became easier for me to see and enhance the connective tissue between the stories.
📗 Excerpt from Mystery Lights, “Dogs”:
Lena Valencia is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights (Tin House Books/Dead Ink Books), which was longlisted for the Story Prize, named a Best Short Story Collection of 2024 by Electric Literature, and a Best Horror Book of 2024 by Esquire. Her fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Baffler, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from the New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit. Find out more at lenavalencia.com
*An interview with another L.A. Times Festival of Books panel participant, Robin Romm, is accessible here.
I loved “Mystery Lights” and it was great to hear about its origins!