q&a: richard thomas discusses his next project, gamut.

Soon after I read Richard Thomas's Staring into The Abyss and became a little more afraid of human beings, I was thrilled to find a story of his on my desk. Our then fiction editor said, with true editorial eloquence, "It's genre-y, you know? But the good genre-y." The story, "Chrysalis," was about shoveling coal and madness, which now seems an apt metaphor for what Thomas does for the world of dark fiction—Between writing his own neo-noir stories and novels, promoting his Windy City Dark Mysteries Series, editing Dark House Press, teaching writing classes, and writing his Storyville column at LitReactor, Thomas has found time for another project: Gamut, an online magazine focused on a broad cross-section of dark literature. During February, Thomas will be promoting and raising funds for the new magazine through a Kickstarter campaign, where a reasonable donation will get you a subscription in advance. As if he wasn't already busy enough, he took the time to answer some my questions about Gamut and what else is going on in his world.

What made you choose an online format for Gamut?

Quite a few things, actually.

Was it strictly an issue of cost?

No, although that was part of it. I’d been crunching the numbers for years and the printing, formatting, design and postage was always something that seemed to get in the way, whether it was a small print run or POD. This takes a lot of the risk out of it, and we can get work online with great art in a much shorter time period, more often, and with a lot fewer headaches.

Will material just be available online or also in digital form?

For now, just online. We may look into ebooks and/or a Best of Gamut down the road a bit. It also depends on the stretch goals, not only reaching our base goal, but more than the minimum, which will allow us to do so much more.

How will subscribers access content?

It’ll be a login/password, the content behind a pay wall.

$5 a month seems completely reasonable; how much content should they expect?

Actually, it’s $2.50 a month to start. We’re looking at over 400,000 words a year. We’ll have new fiction every week, as well as reprint fiction, poetry, columns, and if we hit a few stretch goals, a Saturday Night Special serialization of

Stripped: A Memoir by Jacklyn Dre Marceau, one of the most talented authors in my MFA program, as well as Flash Fiction Friday, and the expansion of other areas—more non-fiction, as well as more fiction and reprints, per month. Ideally, we’d like to have new material every day. One of the exclusive aspects of the Kickstarter is that the $30 a year initial rate will never be offered again. Our regular rate will be $60 a year (still only $5 a month). If you subscribe at our Kickstarter, you can keep that rate of $30 a year indefinitely—as long as you renew, and never let your subscription lapse. That’s something I wanted to do, to reward people for their initial support, by being early adopters, and joining the excitement of creating something new. You can also buy more than one subscription, to gift to friends and family—or even use as your own promotional rewards as an author, whatever you want to do.

Will content be published continuously or at specific intervals?

Both. We’ll have a set schedule, as I said, such as new fiction every Monday, and then we’ll fill in any gaps in the regular schedule depending on our budget, how much we raise.

Do you see online and digital publications as a means to make fair author payment sustainable?

I do. Print has certain hurdles, fixed costs, and it makes it difficult to stay profitable if you can’t sell a base number of magazines, or books. By doing this online, and with a subscription model, if we can get our base of 1,700 people, and they renew every year, we’ll have that set budget. I do hope we’ll continue to grow, and retain our subscribers as well. It was important to us to pay ten cents a word, double the current professional pay rate, in order to get the best submissions, and to solicit authors that are already publishing and doing well.

You’ve said that you’d like Gamut to be a part of the landscape made up by a number of top-notch magazines—Tor, Nightmare, Shimmer, Apex, Clarkesworld, Black Static, Shock Totem, Cemetery Dance­­. What would you like to add to that landscape? What will set Gamut apart?

Great question. Each one of these magazines has its own aesthetic, and Gamut will, too. While there will certainly be crossover, the kind of neo-noir, speculative fiction with a literary bent that I’m publishing will probably include some stories that they wouldn’t take. Not all of our writing will be supernatural, for example. Some could be Southern gothic, or just gritty literary fiction. Some of our authors are not speculative at all, writing dark literary fiction, and that’s something I enjoy as well. I love all of those magazines and websites, but we won’t seek out “classic” anything—whether it’s horror, fantasy, science fiction, or crime. We want new voices, those genre-bending, hybrid authors, that contemporary weird fiction that is so compelling. You can see it in The New Yorker and the Best American, and of course it’s already in the Best Horror anthologies, but it’s also on television with the first year of True Detective, and in film, like Under the Skin, Spring, Ex Machina, Enemy, and hopefully the upcoming The Witch.

How have some of the writers you worked with responded to the project? Have any of them offered input that was particularly formative?

For sure. I asked a few of them about rates, and for many that ten cent mark was where they’d like it to be (or higher, of course). I think many also want a good home for reprint fiction. We talked about ideal length in a story, and art, and other aspects that would make Gamut a place where readers (and authors) want to hang out, and submit. We talked about rewards, and whether of not to do t-shirts and all of that swag (we aren’t for now, but are set up to do that down the road). Part of the reason I solicited work from 40 authors was that I wanted to show the quality of work I’m seeking, as well as show the range of voices I want to publish.

Can you tell us what original fiction is going to be up to bat first? Anything you’re especially excited about?

I can’t really, no—because we don’t have it in hand. If the Kickstarter is successful, then we’ll get our stories—we won’t launch the website until 1/1/17. I am confident that every author I’ve spoken to will turn in amazing fiction, or I wouldn’t have reached out to them. I’ve been reading most of these writers for years, am a big fan, and can’t wait to get their stories. With others that are newer, I’ve been blown away by reading their recent work. There are so many emerging authors, I definitely want to support them, as well. And I definitely have a long list of reprints I’ll be going after. So, I’m excited about all of the authors, the staff I have in place to help me, the columnists I’ve got set up, and the illustrators and photographers as well. The first stories, they’ll probably be the voices you’ve seen me publish in The New Black, Exigencies, Burnt Tongues (with Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Widmyer) and The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers. It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of Stephen Graham Jones, so I wouldn’t be shocked if he was up first, or Brian Evenson, or Livia Llewellyn, or Laird Barron, or Damien Angelica Walters…really, I could just go down the list. Each one of these authors has moved me, thrilled me, shocked me—and taught me how to be a better writer.

And, since we have you, a few just for you:

What do you consider the three most heinous crimes committed in literary history?

I assume you’re talking about things done by fictional characters? The first thing to pop into my head is the end of Hannibal. Of course, there are several scenes in Blood Meridian, I think maybe the scalping scene, the Indians riding in—although there are some horrific moments with babies, right? I have to admit that the scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, what she was willing to do to keep her child from going back into slavery, that was pretty shocking. You could probably just list all of American Psycho, right? George R. R. Martin—just his whole epic saga, “The Red Wedding,” man, so many instances in that series. The ending for Of Mice and Men made me cry. Isn’t somebody skinned alive in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? Ha, so much brutality. Terrible.

Which two literary monsters would you like to see in a death match, and which one would your money be on?

Probably The Judge from Blood Meridian and Patrick Bateman, and I think my money is on The Judge.

What’s next for Dark House?

Two new books for 2016—Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters out 2/29/16—an innovative haunted house, ghost story—and Scratch by Steve Himmer out in October, a very cool rural legend. Very excited about both books, two very talented authors.

What’s next for you?

Big year for me as well. Breaker (Random House Alibi) just came out, my third novel, and second book in the Windy City Dark Mystery Series, a mash-up of Leon: The Professional, The Green Mile, and To Kill a Mockingbird. My third collection of stories, Tribulations, is out with Crystal Lake in March. A novel-in-novellas with Dzanc Books, The Soul Standard, is four interlinking stories, over four seasons, in four different parts of the city, with Nik Korpon, Axel Taiari, and Caleb Ross—kind of a Sin City thing. And then I have two stories set for publication: “The Offering on the Hill” in Chiral Mad 3 (alongside Stephen King and Jack Ketchum) and “Repent” in Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (alongside Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker) with an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk. And of course Gamut, the Kickstarter, is launching on 2/1/16, trying to raise $52,000.

Thanks for having me! Some great questions.

Check out the Kickstarter.