https://www.fictamystica.com

Gene died on Saturday, 29 April 2023. The world has lost one of its last true artists, one who cared more about his craft than he did about sales and money.

What’s meant by “fictamystica”? What are some examples?

Fictamystica is mystical realism. This means presenting mystical situations in realistic terms. It can be outright supernatural or the ghostly breath of a possibility guessed at. A scent caught for an instant, a glimmer in dark woods.

It spans genres, being more style or touch of the eerie than a list of necessary, solid elements. Stories of any kind can touch upon, or be touched by, fictamystica’s atmospheric wisps, suggestions, and echoes.

Generally in fictamystica tales a miscellany of eerie insights arise as average people encounter unsuspected beings, enter unseen worlds, or touch aspects of reality they never thought possible. Whether actually or metaphorically, fictamystica offers a reader chances to see past the surface of things. 

Here’s a partial list of works that can be considered fictamystica.

Off the top of my head … 

From fantasy there are examples such as:

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay 

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson 

Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd 

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H P Lovecraft 

Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith

Titus Groan, Gormenghast, & Titus Alone by Melvyn Peake

Nine Princes in Amber and sequels by Roger Zelazny

From science fiction we see fictamystica in:

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream & Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison

From gothic fiction we find:

Narrative of A Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe

At the Mountains of Madness by H P Lovecraft

The Beetle by Richard Marsh

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Darling by Mercedes M. Yardley

The Unburied by Charles Palliser

The Seance by John Harwood

The Occultist by Polly Schattel

From horror there are:

Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell

The Drowned Girl & The Red Tree by Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan

Imajica by Clive Barker

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

Collected Stories of Algernon Blackwood

Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce

Dark Eidolon & Others by Arthur Machen

Nameless by Mercedes M. Yardley

On An Odd Note by Gerald Kersh

Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

From mainstream and literary categories, these:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Man on the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic & Melanie Tem

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Babel by R F Kuang

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Her Body And Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Experimental Film by Gemma Files

Flicker by Theodore Roszak 

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

From mystery and suspense we can cull:

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

The IT Girl, The Lying Game, & In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell

From romance we can find:

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber 

And too many others to mention. 

Fictamystica means seeing things from a particular vantage and slant, in a different light, so discussion will bubble up over what books fit and why. This is fine, a healthy discourse sustains growth.

Hope you enjoy exploring the site and discovering the fictamystica tone. 

/ Gene Stewart

Seeing Through Words

So yesterday I finally had a breakthrough in solving a knotty problem that has puzzled me, and Susie, and some others, for a long, long time.  Years, perhaps decades.

The quandary?  How to present my work, especially my novels, so the agents and publishers will see them as part of a unified marketable whole.  My novels do not tend easily to fall into an established category.  This makes it hard for agents and publishers to see a way to promote me, or to isolate an audience my work will appeal to.  So I need a kind of market imprint, a trademark, a branding of sorts, so that they can make Gene Stewart your one-stop shopping source for a given consistent experience.

Tough, hm?

Jay Lake, fellow member of the Omaha Beach Party, who from Seattle each month, published Mainspring and Escapement through Tor, so they became his most visible works.  They are both set in a world that takes the Clockmaker’s Universe literally — the planets all move on big brass gears and so on — so he coined the term Clockpunk to describe this.  It’s become a sliver genre and he was its main source.

Good marketing.  You like this, here’s where to get more.

Okay, so Susie and I discussed my novels.  What, if anything, do they have in common.  And we came up with epiphany.  All of them, in one way or another, deal with an individual confronting an unseen, unknown world, or hidden agenda, and having to deal with the consequences of a wider viewpoint.  That is epiphany.

Well, okay, fine, but now we need a way to express that, one that looks good or sounds catchy, etc.  We were fooling around with the -punk suffix, the blank-punk formula, like Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Clockpunk, etc.  All we came up with were the lame Epiphapunk, or the confusing Eurekapunk.

Neither of those were going to work.

Then I dug back into my search for a term to describe my writing in terms of realism.  I’d jokingly called it Gothic Realism, but that’s inaccurate, as I don’t use moldy castles and vampires, even if I do often capture the eeriness.   I looked at irreality, noir, and surrealism, and many others both academically formal and otherwise, but none fit my work well.

Words are not story.

Then it struck me:  what I’m writing is, always one way or another, mystical.  It peers, or leaps, into other worlds, and deals with unseen forces.  Mysticism informs the work.  Revelations, epiphanies, and the shamanic experience infuse my work.  Most of what I write includes such tropes and topos as hallucinatory changes, encounters with strange Others, and so on.

So I dug into all that and also into Fiction as a conceptual term, looking into the academia.

What I came up with is this:

Mystical realism describes what I’m up to most of the time.  Mysticism informs all my work, be it writing, art, or music, fine, but Mystipunk sounds too much like Mistah Punk. We can’t really call it Mystic Punk, either, because the punk part is a wobbly fit at best, and the term sounds stupid anyway.

I write mystica.   I present the Vista Mystica, the mystical vision, or involve my characters in it.  Here, then, is the term I’ve created:

Fictamystica.

It is the fiction of mystical realism.

Fictamystica includes such mottos, watchwords, and principles as:  Nonfactual truth, avoiding facts to reveal a truth, and the notion that in story lies reality. Want facts?  Read nonfiction.  Want truth?  Fictamystica.  The notion that only by telling a story can a truth be revealed is an ancient one.

I can see sayings pulled from such ideas appearing on tee shirts and used in essays, articles, and reviews.  It’s a good promotable movement with a commercially sexy & marketable aspect to it, with many evocative, intriguing memes attached to it.

Best of all, it developed without me noticing, naturally, over the course of my 42 years of writing.  It’s not a label to be slapped onto any old container, it is an organic result of growth, the grain in my fiction’s wood.

Finally I’ll have an answer when people find out I’m a writer and ask me what I write.

I write to reveal what words cannot say.

Fictamystica.

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