Vivian Moira Valentine (she/her) is a rad trans lady who loves monsters. When she was a child, she found the Crestwood House Monster Series at her local library and it’s all been downhill from there. Now everything she likes is horrible. When not writing, Vivi enjoys card and board games and plotting out more tabletop RPG campaigns than she will ever have time to run. Vivi lives in Virginia Beach with her amazing wife Frankie and their son, as well as an ever-growing collection of action figures. She is the author of The Amelia Temple Series, and her short fiction has appeared in a number of publications.
Book Links: mybook.to/AmeliaTemple
BlueSky: @itsviviactually.bsky.social
What made you choose the 1950s as the setting for the Amelia Temple series, and how does the setting work with the development of the characters and their identities?
I chose the 1950s for three reasons, two thematic and one practical. On the thematical level, there’s this cartoon version of the 1950s in the US that has captured imaginations for generations. America was Strong, the Family was Strong, and Those People Knew Their Place, Darnit. As the sort of person who wouldn’t be allowed to exist back then, I find deconstructing that cartoon to be irresistible.
The 1950s were a time of prosperity for some people, but even that prosperity was a thin wallpaper over rotten drywall. For the rest, it was a time of repression, oppression and suppression. The decade also serves as the next generation after the pulps. It’s fun to assume something like the stories of Lovecraft and others happened in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and then ask, what happened next? What did those weird fiction protagonists do as they got older, what did their children and mentees do?
Practically, the 1950s also serve as one of the last times Amelia Temple can plausibly emerge into society with a handful of forged identifying documents and no real formal education to speak of. If the series took place a generation later, the fact that she doesn’t legally exist would become a lot harder to handwave.
How do you see your work interacting with weird fiction from that period, and what drew you to incorporate these mythos elements?
I’m definitely in conversation with the pulp writers, although from my end a lot of that conversation can be summed up as, “You guys had some messed-up ideas.” I want to focus my attention on the sort of people Lovecraft et al would have considered to be monsters. Horror frequently deals in the fear of the outsider, the other. Queer horror more often explores the fear of being the other. On the one hand, that means Black people, queer people, political radicals, etc. On the other, it means asking, “What if Wilbur Whateley was a trans woman?” I like to think that my existence as a trans woman is proof that Lovecraft was right in the wrong way. What happens when we reject the shackles of propriety? We dance to race music, we reject the gender binary, we drink and we cuss and we shout and revel and enjoy ourselves, and it’s awesome.
I like swimming in the pool of cosmic horror, although in my case that means looking at the uncaring vastness of the universe and feeling awe instead of terror at my insignificance. However, I didn’t want to shackle myself to Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothery. If you look at his own work, the Mythos doesn’t really hang together in clear taxonomies; I don’t think he cared too much about fitting everything into neat little categories for a Monster Manual. Later writers have gone and made things more defined, and I didn’t want to restrict myself or explain why My Shoggoths Are Different. I like to think that I’ve taken the spirit of the Mythos in formulating a messy cosmos of my own. Nothing is clearly defined; while people within the texts have tried to impose some order onto it, it’s deliberately incomplete and contradictory. No one has the full picture, not even Amelia herself.
As you’ve plotted the other books in the series, have any characters surprised you in terms of their development and arcs?
It took me a while to get a handle on Lucille Sweeney! In the original novella that became Beneath Strange Lights, she was just the girlfriend. It wasn’t until about halfway through Against Fearful Lies that I understood she had the heart of a pulp adventurer. It makes plotting a lot easier; left to her own devices, Amelia doesn’t really want to be a protagonist, but she’ll follow Luci into all sorts of trouble.
What were your strongest influences for the series in general, and the latest book in particular?
The Amelia Temple Series owes a lot to Ruthanna Emrys. Her Innsmouth Legacy books got me thinking about Lovecraft’s work in a way that quickly created Amelia Temple.
Amelia may be the most human of the various eldritch horrors readers encounter, but all of my gods and aliens and demons are fairly comprehensible. The Watchers Above are just colonizers, albeit even better at it than white people! Another really big influence is Grant Morrison’s late-Nineties comic series The Invisibles. Mostly because it informs how I approach the conspiracy of mad science wizards who are behind everything.
Conspiracy theory is uncomfortable to play with once you realize most of them are just thinly disguised antisemitism. The Invisibles solves that by centering its conspiracy around members of the Establishment – specifically, a British intelligence officer with ties to the Royal Family and a senior US military officer. I’ve tried to follow that lead with the Apollonian Society for Illumination and its offshoots. There’s no secret group running things behind the scenes; it’s the same government officials and rich corporatists you thought were in charge, and they’re up to even worse things than you imagined.
How do you approach queerness and queer identity in your work, and what informs this approach?
My view on queerness is that the whole point is to get away from boxes and prescriptive labels. With regard to sex, gender, sexual orientation and all of that, I think we’re all fumbling in the dark trying to describe the elephant. A label is useful if it’s something you picked out that makes sense to you; it’s not something to be imposed on another person. Because of the time period, it’s difficult to have the characters talk about this openly. Not only is it forbidden, a lot of the language we take for granted hasn’t yet been developed or widely disseminated.
I try to approach these as needless restrictions for the characters to navigate – there’s a point early in Book Three where Amelia laments that her new friends can’t just talk to her about their queerness. At the same time, it doesn’t prevent the characters from finding one another, just as it didn’t prevent our elders who lived through those times. Queerness is, ultimately, liberating … in exactly the way that would make Lovecraft turn in his grave.
If you had to pick 3 things you want readers to take away from your work, what would they be?
1. Evil isn’t a force or an identity or an energy. It’s nothing more and nothing less than treating other people as things.
2. Being an outsider is frightening, but it’s also liberating.
3. Girls kissing makes everything better.
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