Ryan Leeds

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/10/the-big-idea-mike-allen-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57728

Creepy crawlies can become less creepy when you characterize them. Such is the case for author Mike Allen, who shares with us his initial fear of spiders that has turned into more of a cautious appreciation. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest spooky story, Trail of Shadows, and see the web he’s spun for us.

MIKE ALLEN:

My Southern Gothic-meets-surreal horror novel Trail of Shadows is a story of spirit beings and murderous monsters set in the Appalachian Mountains, where I’ve lived since the second grade. Rooted in the condition of living in a community without truly being part of it, the book draws from experiences had while traveling north and south along the mountain range. 

But it’s also rooted in close encounters of the arachnid kind — and anyone who thinks that’s a digression rather than a central part of the rural Appalachian experience has not:

1. Walked face-first through a spiderweb while hiking a wooded mountain trail…
2. Jumped into a hay bale in a barn and found themselves face to face with the spiders that build their nests all through the walls…
3. Seen the exodus of spiders and stranger things that scurry toward the house when the backyard creek overflows its banks….

The inspirations for several of the major characters in Trail of Shadows live their lives right outside my front door. I’ve seen as many as five dangling out in the dark, patiently waiting for prey to come to them, their webs strategically positioned around the porch light such that swinging the screen door open leaves them undisturbed.

Once upon a time, I would have struggled to tolerate their presence. But the years spent working on this book have actually had a positive effect on the severe arachnophobia acquired when I was a wee child on Guam Island.

(I cannot guarantee the same for readers — my novel is, after all, intended as a Halloween scare fest, part coming of age story, part fever dream, part nightmare.)

For context, a timeline: my parents met while working toward their degrees in microbiology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. On completing his Ph.D., my father took a job teaching — at the University of Guam.

I was still a toddler when this young couple moved across the ocean. Thus, despite hailing from the Great White North, my first childhood memories formed on Guam. The constant sun; the coconut and papaya trees; cowrie shells on the beach; the coral beneath one’s feet (ouch!); the jellyfish wrapped around one’s leg (googolplex ouch!); the lizards that always left their tails behind . . . and the bright yellow spiders with leg spans as wide as my head, that paralyzed me with terror.

Really, the spiders weren’t to blame, I know, but an intense fear of eight-legged critters hung with me into adulthood. My journey from spider detestation to spider appreciation began with a private joke shared with my wife and creative partner-in-crime, Anita. 

One fine night, we happened to notice that a second couple had taken up residence in our house, underneath our porch’s tin roof. The larger and rounder of the pair was clearly the lady of the manor; the other, smaller and narrower, obviously the gentleman; both with eight spindly legs.

They weren’t exactly cute to our human eyes, but we found something charming about our new tenants all the same. Anita gave them appropriately old-fashioned sounding names: Gertrude and Herman.

Those names carried over; for years, it’s been our routine to call these large orb weavers “Gertrude spiders.”

The original Gertrude and Herman live on, or so I like to imagine, in the pages of Trail of Shadows. The story concerns people possessed of the ability to phase into the world of spirits, known as the argent realms or the Underside. Someone who can do this, who can at will cross into the Underside and back again, appears in those lands as an enormous, phantasmal animal.

Early in his journey toward perilous discovery, my bewildered hero encounters an unnerving but helpful couple named Herman and Gertrude Crabbe. I’ll give you one guess what their spirit shapes turn out to be.

It’s hardly a spoiler to share that the Crabbes aren’t the only members of the spider tribe that my puma-form protagonist meets. Their alignments range from neutral but good-natured to malevolent predation. I find myself wickedly fond of even the most frightening of their number.

Living with these characters in my head has made it easier for me to peacefully cohabit with their real-life counterparts. I still can’t say that I’d invite a spider to run across me — though I have allowed a tarantula to crawl over my hand, and was startled by its soft, gentle steps.

Nowadays, though, I can lean close to admire the quarter-sized orb weavers with their legs striped like witch stockings, and watch as they spin their summer webs above our front steps. 

Trail of Shadows: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author’s socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Threads|Bluesky

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/08/the-big-idea-courtney-floyd/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57673

Though neurodivergent people tend to love the world of academia and absorbing information, the systems and structure of higher education is often antithetical to the needs of differently abled people, both mentally and physically. Author Courtney Floyd expands on this in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Higher Magic, as she recounts her experience with earning her PhD and seeing how the world of education wasn’t designed with inclusivity and accessibility in mind.

COURTNEY FLOYD:

When I first sat down to write the first draft of Higher Magic, I was two years out of my PhD program and still trying to balance the sum of my time there. My sense of the possible had shifted profoundly as I studied literature, learned to research, traveled to conferences and archives, and honed my analytical and interpretive skills. My life had changed for the better. But I was still discovering the many ways my program had taught me to ignore my body and push through exhaustion and anxiety, no matter the cost. 

In higher education, you’re supposed to act as though you’re nothing but a floating brain. Oh, nobody ever says that outright. Especially not when you’re a first generation student who slid sideways into the academy and, to everyone’s bewilderment, stuck around. But the expectation is there. Lurking.

I learned to see it sidelong, in the way I was expected to write without using the first person and also in the lack of understanding some professors showed when I couldn’t attend office hours or study groups because I was juggling several jobs to pay my tuition. It reared its head in my mentor’s office, when she snapped impatiently at me because I got jury duty, and couldn’t defer it. It showed up with the brain fog and intense hand cramps after two-hour midterms in which I had to handwrite entire essays. 

I came to see it even more clearly as an instructor, in the way boilerplate attendance policies penalized students who were late because of health issues or irregular bus schedules. It haunted me, one term, when one of my students––a veteran who’d recently undergone major surgery––apologized for every single essay he turned in, not because it was late but because he was worried his medication had made him incoherent. 

By the end of my time in grad school, I saw the floating brain edict at work every day. In the exam prep or the job search eating up my own and my peers’ lives, turning us into bleary-eyed shadows. In the exhausted way my officemate staggered back from her two week maternity leave, which we’d gone on strike only a year earlier to get. In the student in my cohort who weighed the cost on her mental health and withdrew from the program.

Mind over matter is a brutal either/or. 

Either you’re smart enough to figure it out, or you’ll drop out. Either you’ll burn your candle at both ends, or you’ll snuff yourself out trying.

In her book Teaching to Transgress, Black feminist scholar and educator, bell hooks, writes that in classrooms and other institutionalized spaces, “the person who is the most powerful has the privilege of denying their body,” of becoming the invisible default. The cog at the center of the complicated machine. But, as we’ve seen in the past couple of years, when our bodies become too inconvenient–too vocal or visible or vexing–the people in power (in and beyond the ivory tower) can decide to deny our bodies, too. Or make them disappear.

In SFF, we love a good literalized metaphor. When I first had the idea for Higher Magic, graduate students weren’t being literally disappeared for protesting, but students were being quietly pushed out of the academy for needing access and inclusion. For needing systems built to support white, male, nondisabled scholars to change, just a little, so that others could participate.

Fresh out of PhD school in 2019, I knew I wanted to write about that kind of disappearing. Because bell hooks didn’t just pinpoint a problem, she shared a solution, too: “Once we start talking in the classroom about the body, and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically changing the way power orchestrate[s] itself.” 

Enter Dorothe Bartleby, a first-generation, neurodivergent grad student who is trying her best to be a floating brain at the start of Higher Magic. She quickly learns it’s not sustainable, and spends the rest of the book slowly figuring out how to be a body and a brain at the same time. While tracking down her disappearing students. And getting ready for her last attempt at passing her qualifying exam.

As heavy as all of that is, Bartleby’s story isn’t somber or dark. As she notes early on, “I’d come ready for the slog. I’d thrown myself into it. Battled through overwhelm, exhaustion, burnout. … And I’d done it all because I loved it. The magic. The camaraderie. The sense that I was contributing to something that mattered.”

In writing Bartleby’s story, I tried to balance my exploration of disability, neurodivergence, and embodiment in higher education with the things that carry so many of us through the (unnecessarily) difficult parts of our degrees: curiosity, passion, camaraderie, and love. There are joyful info dumps about research, plot-relevant spreadsheets, plentiful snack breaks and magic cookie recipes. In grad school, research comes alive and ignites our days. It informs our worlds. And sometimes, if there’s a bit of magic in the air, it begins to narrate us in the form of a talking skull.

The big idea in Higher Magic isn’t just that disabled and neurodivergent folks belong in higher ed and deserve to shape what it becomes, it’s that our joy, interests, and whimsy do as well.

Higher Magic: Harlequin|Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Yankee Bookshop (for signed copies)

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/08/the-big-idea-courtney-floyd/

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