The Weird and Wonderful:

By Thio Isobel Moss

I was recently asked why I write and read fantasy.

I am a particular reader. I know I would enjoy most of the mainstream books out there…up to a point. Our world is big on branding. We like to advertise our affiliations; we derive a strong sense of identity from the variables we choose.

I’m weird.

I don’t want to make this sound like a conscious choice (it wasn’t), but I have never succeeded in being typical. Moving around growing up, I was always the new kid. I was overweight, had glasses, was quiet, and smart. I discovered that when things were being said to and about me, I wouldn’t listen. I don’t mean I ignored it; I could focus to the point where my brain didn’t know my ears were sending it signals. This skill came in very handy.

I had friends, good ones, but they often were in other classes, went to different schools, or lived out of state. So, much of my life was lived internally, keeping quiet and flying under the radar. Outside of school, I depended heavily on my family.

My dad is a natural storyteller, and I grew up hearing jokes using wordplay, tall tales (walking up hill both ways), and about natural wonders such as Spook Light.

Spook Light is a light that appears at night and seems to move, like a swinging lantern. Such phenomena are surprisingly common, and they have been scientifically studied but never explained. There are folktales and urban legends surrounding it, and a great deal of anecdotal testimony saying that if you get too close, your car will shut off.

This happened to my dad and his friends when they were young, but he thinks that was down to user error. It wasn’t until I was a teen that I got to see Spook Light for myself. My dad took me and, at one point, our car did shut off. My dad, an experienced and excellent driver of both four-wheeled vehicles as well as two (he wooed my mother with a motorcycle), fully blames himself for the misadventure.

However, the whole experience was quite disappointing.

I have a vivid imagination. I see faces in anything with even a slight texture. I once sat petrified in my car for about five minutes after getting home late at night. There was a glowing, floating ball of red about three hundred feet down the street behind me. Finally, I scraped up some courage and took my foot off the brake, planning to make a run to get inside the house.

The ball disappeared.

My brake lights had been reflecting off the back of a stop sign.

As a kid, the covers of a few of my Nancy Drews kept me awake all night until I’d finished the book because they scared me—notably the Clue of the Velvet Mask and The Clue of the Dancing Puppet. Ironically, Titan, my Maine Coon mix baby boy, is mostly black and looks a good bit like that velvet mask cover. In any case, I was primed to be frightened out of my wits by Spook Light. But…I wasn’t.

It was just a light that moved around.

Still, it led to an interest in natural mysteries: the Oregon Vortex, lenticular clouds, tornadoes, ball lightning, sailing stones, the Taos hum, the Great Attractor in space, etc.

There was an episode of Dr. Who (David Tennant, I think) where things in the shadows of a library ate anyone they touched. I was riveted until it was explained—microscopic carnivore dust or something of the like. It was a real let-down. I’m not sure what I wanted or expected, but it wasn’t that. The weeping angels were much better.

Perhaps I don’t need solutions, but I do need mysteries?

In high school, my brother got me interested in high fantasy, and I followed a Jane Austen binge with The Wheel of Time. In college, a friend introduced me to urban fantasy, and nothing has been the same since. She started me with Laurell K. Hamilton, which was an education in itself. I found Ilona Andrews on my own.

I love all types of fantasy, but I am a particular reader. What clicks tends toward magical realism or space opera. I like a blend of realism, technology, humor, romance, and magic. I live and read in the niches.

As for my writing, it’s a strange journey. I thought I knew how it would go. I had a list of the books I would write and in what order. There is still a list, but not the same one. Out of nowhere, something will grab my attention, jumping up and down in my brain until I work on it.

The ingredients, by and large, seem to remain the same. Some ideas lean more toward magic, and some more toward tech. There’s one that won’t arrive for a year or two, but I’m so excited about it. It’ll be gritty, grim, and will rely less on magic. I can’t wait!

That said, I am a happy-endings author. Some authors can pull off a beautifully tragic ending, or one that’s just gruesome. I cannot. I love a little gross-out humor, but I like to end on a high note.

And I like wonder. I like driving across Kansas and wondering, are those clouds on the horizon? They’re not moving. Nope, they’re Colorado mountains. I like the vastness of the ocean and the feeling that you’re moving when you stand still in the shallows.

Fantasy preserves wonder—the beauty that’s monstrous, the monster that’s gentle, the juxtaposition of truth and the impossible. We will never solve all of our world’s mysteries, though we will never stop searching shadows, and we will never stop telling ourselves and each other stories.