Lucas Mangum, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk

Lucas Mangum, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk

By Lionel Ray Green

For Lucas Mangum, third time’s the charm at the Splatterpunk Awards. After receiving nominations in 2021 and 2020, Mangum won his first trophy at the 2024 Splatterpunk Awards for his novella Snow Angels.

Born in San Diego and raised in Philadelphia, Mangum now lives in Austin, Texas, with his family. Austin is also the home of KillerCon, the horror convention where the Splatterpunk Awards are presented annually.

Lucas Mangum’s talent for well-written but disturbing tales earned him a Splatterpunk Awards nomination for his 2019 novella Saint Sadist, a story about a pregnant teenager on the run who’s taken in by an environmental doomsday cult. The next year, his collaboration with five-time Splatterpunk Awards winner Ryan Harding titled Pandemonium received a nomination for Best Novel. His most recent novella, Barn Door to Hell, was released in April.

Fresh from his win on August 10, Lucas Mangum agreed to an exclusive interview for Ginger Nuts of Horror about his works and what the Splatterpunk Awards mean to him.

Lucas Mangum, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk

GREEN: Snow Angels is billed as your ode to classical supernatural horror and a novel about reckoning with the sins of the past. Your chillingly creepy opening scene had my mind shooting straight to The Fog. What inspired your Splatterpunk Award-winning novella?

MANGUM: Snow Angels owes a lot to The Fog, as you mentioned. I appreciate the overall presentation of that film, with its dense atmosphere, isolated setting, spooky villains, and how its working-class characters must come to terms with the misdeeds of their forefathers. Horror – particularly American horror – is very concerned with the unresolved past because history is bloodstained and full of monsters. It’s a lot for everyday people to wrap their brains around, especially when facing those unresolved chapters becomes unavoidable.

The Fog is probably the only thing I borrowed from specifically, but from “Masque of the Red Death” to ‘Salem’s Lot to Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, horror focuses a lot on the past coming back to haunt us, so when I set out to write something “classical,” I was kind of inspired by a little bit of everything from the genre’s rich history.

A lot of my work tends to be either deeply psychological or in-the-moment, but with Snow Angels, I challenged myself to do something harkened back to the past, and what better way to do that than to look to the masters of the genre who had come before me. As far as why I like supernatural horror: I grew up with a lot of the tropes, so there’s a comfort and familiarity to them for me, but if winning a Splatterpunk Award for Snow Angels shows anything, the supernatural still has fuel in the tank, and its use transcends mere nostalgia.

GREEN: Your novel Pandemonium with Ryan Harding uses an underground wrestling show featuring the deadly wrestler Crimson Executioner as the creative setting for a ritual to open the gates of Hell. How much fun was it for you to play in the wrestling arena with your writing?

MANGUM: Not counting stuff I’ve written as a kid, Pandemonium is the project I’ve had the most fun writing. I am a huge wrestling fan, and the knowledge attained by my decades of following the sport gave me some characters I could really sink my teeth into. I have all this accidental research built up from watching wrestling programs and documentaries, listening to podcasts, and reading biographies, and it was cool getting to put all that knowledge to use.

Plus, Ryan is just an easy guy to work with. Pro wrestling appeals to me for the stories, the larger-than-life characters, and the fact that the business and its fans have an almost-secret language. There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to wrestling terminology, and it’s truly fascinating, even if you aren’t a fan of the business. My favorite pro wrestlers are The Undertaker as an overall character, CM Punk as a talker, and Bret Hart as a pure in-ring worker.

GREEN: How did the collaboration for Pandemonium develop with Harding?

MANGUM: Oh, this was cool! Around KillerCon 2019, we started corresponding regularly. The subject of zombies came up, and he mentioned that if he was to write a zombie story, he’d want the resurrected villains to have more in common with the antagonists from the Italian Demons movies than the traditional undead. As a fan of Euro horror myself, I’d had a similar thought, so I pitched him the idea of doing something in that vein, using a wrestling event as the catalyst for people getting possessed. He agreed, and while we didn’t outline, we brainstormed extensively, and whenever we’d send each other what we just wrote, we’d include any notes or ideas we had for where we’d like things to go. Pandemonium isn’t my only wrestling-based horror book: Bladejob published by Madness Heart Press also fits into that category, but it’s smaller in scale and more psychological. 

GREEN: Your novella Saint Sadist is a stylishly written but disturbing tale of a teenager carrying her father’s child who’s taken in by a cult. One of your peers described it as “an unpleasant, raw, and disgusting masterpiece.” What’s the appeal of venturing into taboo territory for talented authors like yourself?

MANGUM: Venturing into taboo territory can serve multiple functions for an author. First, I think an author should know their limitations –   what subjects they won’t write about, sure, but also how far they’re willing to go. It can be like the psychological or emotional equivalent to jumping out of a plane. Interestingly, I enjoy this sort of mental thrill-seeking, but you won’t ever catch me skydiving. Second – and this is where true splatterpunk comes in – a writer who has something to say beyond the story itself, some social commentary or political statement, will find that they’re a lot more likely to get people to take notice if they’re as loud and outrageous as possible.

And then there’s the purely mercenary aspect of it: extreme horror is a niche, but it’s a strong niche. In other words, if you want to find a readership, break some taboos! Just be prepared for the fact that not everyone is going to like it. Some, in fact, will loathe it, and you for doing it. Saint Sadist was a combination of the first two for me. My partner recently asked me if it’s my favorite book. It’s hard to say because I feel like I’m a much better writer now, but that’s the one people bring up to me the most when I’m at conventions or interacting with readers online. Without it, I wouldn’t have half the reputation I’ve gained over the last several years. That book made people take notice.

GREEN: What do you think the creation of the Splatterpunk Awards, which debuted in 2018, has meant to the extreme horror subgenre as a whole and to you personally as an author?

MANGUM: I joked during my acceptance speech that “nobody in this room is winning a Stoker.” And while I was joking, there is truth to that. Extreme horror and splatterpunk tend to have a reputation among the Stoker crowd. I’m not saying I don’t understand why it has that reputation, and I certainly don’t harbor any ill will toward anyone whose sole “crime” is not liking the type of books I write. As a reader, I enjoy literary, quiet, cosmic, and psychological horror just as much as I enjoy a good slice of splatterpunk. I also get along well with authors from all those subgenres.

That said, splatterpunk and extreme horror have so many talented people working within those genre variants who just don’t deliver what readers and scholars of more mainstream horror variants prefer. Sometimes there is crossover, but it’s rare. The creation of the Splatterpunk Awards gives these creators a way to have their work recognized when it might not be otherwise. Writing is a lonely profession, so a little validation goes a long way. To me personally, the Splatterpunk Award has meant a lot. It’s one thing to say I write because I need to or enjoy it; it’s another thing entirely when you’re holding one of these things with your name and the words “Best Novella” on it. I’m grateful to have been nominated three times, but winning is something else entirely. It’s hard to put into words.

Barn Door to Hell by Lucas Mangum

The barn on Alvin West’s land houses a dark secret. It’s the reason the crops grow so lushly on the farmland, while the surrounding farms lay barren. It’s the reason the people of Reaper’s Bend always speak of his family in hushed tones.

Carson Reid is new in town. A fledgling journalist still living with her parents, she sees the lore surrounding the West property and how it affects her new neighbors as fodder for what could be her breakout story. When an ill-fated trip to the property inadvertently releases the entity contained in the barn, she plunges herself and the town’s population into a desperate fight for survival.

From the twisted imagination of Lucas Mangum comes a gruesome tale of diabolical evil.

Lucas Mangum

Hello, and welcome to Fiction for the Cosmically Disturbed, a weekly newsletter for family, friends, and readers of me, Lucas Mangum. I’m the author of over a dozen books, two of which were nominated for Splatterpunk Awards, and I co-host Make Your Own Damn Podcast, an odyssey into the world of DIY and exploitation cinema, with bizarro maven Jeff Burk.

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