Of Broken Heroes and Haunted Worlds: Matt Spencer Talks Storytelling and Identity

If you’re a fan of dark fantasy, gritty mythology, and stories that aren’t afraid to peer into the shadowy corners of the human psyche, then Matt Spencer’s work is a must-read. In this exclusive author interview, Matt opens up about the inspirations behind his genre-blending stories, from Victorian horror to post-apocalyptic adventures, and the deeply personal threads woven throughout his fiction. Whether he’s exploring faith, fractured identities, or forbidden love, Spencer delivers narratives that are emotionally raw, spiritually charged, and unapologetically bold. Read on to discover the mind behind the mythos.

Across the collection, each story feels like a distinct voice—ranging from gothic to mythic to post-apocalyptic. How do you shift your narrative tone so effectively between stories?

I prefer to avoid being a one-trick pony. I love and appreciate all kinds of literature, from shamelessly pulpy, to “literary fiction”, to the bonkers experimental, to everything in between and any possible combination thereof. I follow my muses where they lead me…then I slip the leash, go nuts, and see what the fuck happens.

Many of these stories deal with spiritual conflict and religious structures. What draws you to write about faith, gods, and belief systems?

 

I have my own personal spiritual beliefs and practices, which are ever evolving, ever curious. I grew up surrounded by a lot of dogmatic, fundamentalist old-time religion (in the middle of the Bible Belt, basically), the toxic elements of which have a lot to do with my lifelong anger-issues, for which my writing remains my healthiest outlet…well, that and fencing/sparring/boxing/HEMA fighting. Having a dark sense of humor also helps. Anyway, I tend to be suspicious at best of organized religion, for how it all too frequently breeds rigidly dogmatic, cultish, browbeating groupthink, with all the negative consequences that’s had on humanity, throughout history, what we’re still dealing with today in the modern socio-political landscape. Whenever possible, though, I prefer to look at the world with nuance. For one thing, secular ideological belief systems, I’ve learned all too well, can be just as rigid, toxic and harmful, including those coming from a place of good intentions. At the same time, there’s a fluid spectrum to different people’s personal relationship to faith, religion, spirituality, or lack thereof, that’s as complex and varied as humanity in general, and it's a thing I find endlessly fascinating.

Your characters—especially in And the Madness Demanded a Shape and Chapel of the Falcon—often wrestle with identity, morality, and destiny. How do you approach character development in stories that span lifetimes or alternate worlds?

 

Both of those tales are all about “Stories within stories.” One of my favourite quotes is “A myth is a story that has never happened but is always happening.” I think it was Joseph Campbell who said that. And the Madness Demanded a Shape is, among other things, about a protagonist coming to terms with his own internal duality—who he is in his waking life, in this ugly, soul-grinding “reality” we all share, versus the shadow-self of an alternate lifetime to which he’s awakened…two sides that are on the surface polar opposites, the latter being the sort of man he’s maybe always secretly wished he could be, though that turns out to be rather terrifying once he comes face to face with it. Still, “that guy” is, for better or worse, a valid, undeniable part of his true self.

As for questions of morality, with all the ambiguity and shades of grey etcetera…well, that’s been one of my primary fascinations in character-driven stories for as long as I can remember. I like exploring those uncomfortable lines, what drives people to make the choices they make, who they turn out to be, how and why different people see the world the way they do, what we convince ourselves is acceptable or unacceptable under what circumstances. That’s part of what draws me to write stories of violent, dangerous, intense situations. Watching how different people navigate and react to their circumstances is simply the stuff of great drama and melodrama. And yeah, I like making it emotionally, psychologically and morally uncomfortable for the readers, denying cut-and-dry answers. Most of my favourite stories—in literature, cinema, song, etcetera—are the ones that have that effect on me, so that’s the effect I want to have on readers.

 

The concept of time flows differently in Some Way Home and Madness Demanded a Shape. How do you handle writing nonlinear time or alternate timelines in a way that stays emotionally grounded?

 

As for keeping it grounded, it’s basically the same as any other mode of story/structure; I write the rough draft where I’m just telling the story to myself, then I iron it out in subsequent drafts so eventually it actually makes sense.

 I think everyone, at some point, looks back on their life, reflects on the choices they’ve made, roads not taken, roads they wish they hadn’t taken, and thinks, “How might things have turned out differently, if I’d just done A-B-C instead of X-W-Z? What would I do if I was offered a chance to go back in time, to some crucial turning point, and tell my younger self to do something else?” The protagonist in Some Way Home thinks he’s being offered that opportunity, but in the form that may well be a Faustian bargain, where he maybe forgot to read the fine print. Like Faulkner put it, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”

Several stories—like Diary of a Captive Demon—play with the idea of toxic or complex relationships. What fascinates you about writing these kinds of dynamics?

 

Real life, unfortunately. At different points in my life, I’ve found myself in my share of different kinds of unhealthy relationship dynamics, be that friendship/partnership/romantic/whathaveyou…including times where in hindsight, yeah, I was the asshole who done fucked up, other times where no, I was totally the one being dicked around with and I absolutely should not have put up with that bullshit for as long as I did…and of course, times where it was somewhere in between…which, let’s face it, is usually the case, with people in general.

As for Diary of a Captive Demon, the scenario occurred to me as a fun concept to play around with. As I got deeper into writing it, I found myself unpacking a lot of leftover bullshit from an earlier time in my life that I apparently still needed to get off my chest.

You have a rich mythology running through multiple stories—terms like the Spirelights, Schomites, and the Road of Stolen Teeth reappear across tales. Are these connections intentional, and do you envision a larger shared mythos behind the scenes?

 

Oh yeah. The story Just Like Uncle Joel Said is a “side-quel”, if you will, to the Deschembine Trilogy. You can read all about it in The Night and the Land, The Trail of the Beast, and The Blazing Chief. As for what life was like in old Deschemb…well, hopefully my novel Changing of the Guards will be back in print soon. In the meantime, you can get a taste for it in the adventures of Tia and Ketz, as seen in the novel The Renegade God, plus in my two prior short fiction collections, where the twins put in appearances. I didn’t realize I’d mentioned the Road of Stolen Teeth in anything other than Chapel of the Falcon, but yeah, there are some other Frederick Hawthorne stories still in print floating around out there, including in the aforementioned collections.

 

The use of old-fashioned language and British/Victorian-style slang in Chapel of Falcon adds a unique texture. What influenced that stylistic choice?

 

I grew up reading Victorian Gothic literature, as well as watching a lot of old Universal and Hammer flicks. Y’know, Frankenstein, Dracula, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, all those guys. Frederick Hawthorne originally sprang from a combination of all that and researching the real-life history of Victorian London, particularly the East End. Frederick’s world is equal parts history, romanticism, and Hammer Horror, flavored with fractured misremembrances of my own grotty, frequently homeless street-kid twenties.

In Dragons on the Back Road, you incorporated a lighter tone with pop culture references and classic adventure tropes. Was that story a conscious contrast to the heavier themes of the others?

 

I mean, no, because I wasn’t writing it with those other stories in mind. It began as an anecdote from real life, about my best friend and I…then while I was writing it down, I went, “Sure, but what if…?” So I went nuts with that and had some fun. By the time I’d sold enough stories to put together a new collection, it was one of the ones I read back over and still liked enough to include.

 

Many of your stories focus on marginalized or broken characters—veterans, outcasts, witches, immortals. What draws you to telling their stories?

 

I mean, I guess, in short, because those of my people…the damaged, the hurting, the marginalized, the angry, the confused, the ones who keep getting knocked down and still keep getting back up, still swinging. The ones who eventually make it or don’t.

 

Themes of love—especially forbidden or reincarnated love—are strong in this collection. What’s your personal connection to that idea, and how do you approach it differently in each story?

 

I guess I’m still just a bittersweet hopeless romantic. It’s different in every story, just like any real-life situations in which people find each other, all the bonkers, fantastical shit that happens in my stories notwithstanding. At the moment anyway, the relationship in And the Madness Demanded a Shape feels like maybe the most beautiful love-story I’ve written, at least in quite a long while, as twisted as that might sound.

 

The story structure in some pieces is deliberately complex, especially in Chapel of Falcon. How do you balance experimental storytelling with readability?

 

In Chapel of the Falcon, that creative decision originally had something to do with re-reading the original Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories around the same time. In the first two Holmes novels, Doyle clearly had no idea what the characters of Holmes and Watson would become, as fixtures of pop-culture that endure and grow within the collective consciousness beyond his lifetime. He was just having fun fucking around and finding out as he went. In the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlett, the first half is basically the template of what would come to be a standard Sherlock Holmes adventure, with Holmes and Watson meeting for the first time, at the cusp of that odd-couple friendship that will come to define them both, then they go around, solving the case. Then halfway through, Holmes finds his way to the end of the mystery…and the whole second half is this extended flashback, almost a completely different book, essentially a Western, where we’re absolutely on the side of this doomed romantic hero and heroine, where the hero winds up on a murderous rampage of revenge, avenging the death of his lost love. And by the end it all circles back around, to where he’s the culprit in the murder mystery Holmes has been solving, which puts Holmes in a moral conundrum he wasn’t prepared for. I found myself playing with a similar story within a story structure in Chapel, while also using the surreal, supernatural element to make it my own.

 

The landscapes in your stories are vivid—mountains, chapels, forests, crumbling cities. Do you draw from real-world places when building these settings?

 

Yes, I do. Particularly when writing otherworldly fantasy, I often draw a lot on the natural landscape of my beloved adopted home-state of Vermont. All the maze-like forest trails of this region, so rich and colorful in local history and folklore, has always entranced me, ever since I first discovered it as a young man. There’s always been something dreamlike and otherworldly about it, at least to me, which I want to convey. My college mentor Jay Craven helped ingrain in me a deep appreciation for it, particularly with his films Where the Rivers Flow North and Disappearances. I love laying on the atmosphere thick and vivid, wherever a story calls for it, but to be honest, I often kinda feel like that’s one of those things I want to do, but I’m never really sure if I’m good at it. So thank you for that.

Was there a story in this collection that challenged you the most as a writer? If so, why?

 

And the Madness Demanded a Shape is my sentimental favorite in the collection, certainly the most personal. I found myself falling in love with the characters to such a degree that I agonized over getting it as close to just right as possible…all while writing it on a deadline for the anthology it originally appeared in. So that was a crunch-time challenge. In the end, I feel like I nailed it in more ways than not.

 

Lastly, what do you hope readers take away from this collection—emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually?

I’ve always loved a good story. The best stories, in my opinion, give us both escape from real life, yet also, paradoxically, lead us to something true within ourselves that’s worth grappling with. In all the horror, adventure, thrills, action, disconcertion, guilty titillation, discomfort, and everything in between, there’s truth. The yarns I spin are my truth. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Matt Spencer’s stories don’t just entertain—they challenge, provoke, and linger. With a powerful mix of visceral storytelling and philosophical depth, his work invites readers to confront complex truths about morality, memory, and the self. If this interview sparked your curiosity, be sure to dive into his collection and discover a literary world unlike any other. And as always, share your thoughts in the comments—what story or theme from Matt’s universe resonates most with you?