Matthew Cheney
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melikhovo.bsky.social
Matthew Cheney
@melikhovo.bsky.social
2.4K followers 910 following 1.1K posts
Writer, teacher, person.

Books from Black Lawrence, Bloomsbury Academic, punctum, Third Man, Lethe. Horror fiction, modernism, pedagogy, weirdness.

(Would love to post less about politics, but, well, look outside...)

https://matthewcheney.net
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melikhovo.bsky.social
The Doom Generation, written & directed by Gregg Araki, would count as both doom horror (obviously) and shoegaze horror!
Still from The Doom Generation. Frame dominated by light blue sky. Three people in lower foreground: a man with a cowboy hat and open shirt, a black-haired woman with white sunglasses and white blouse with red tint (maybe bloodstained), and a man with an incredulous look on his face and a yellow and blue striped shirt.
November 13, 2025 at 12:55 AM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Well done, NYC.

Even the NY Times has to report it!
Screenshot of New York Times website with headline "Live Updates: Mamdani Wins NYC Mayor's Race After Highest Turnout in Decades" and subhead "Zohran Mamdani, whose triumphant campaign was built on progressive ideas and a relentless focus on affordability, will become the city's youngest mayor in more than a century."
November 5, 2025 at 2:39 AM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Here's the ending in the Weidenfeld & Nicolson hardcover from 1985, which is correct.
Black text on a cream-colored page. "After a day, birds came, foxes came, flies, butterflies, wasps came, Judd moved, Judd shifted, Judd gave birth. In his belly maggots warmed themselves, in a vixen's den the good flesh of his thigh was fought over. After that, it was quick. The bones yellowing, the bones crumbling: soon, an empty space which he had once filled with breath and opinions. Darkness, light, darkness, light. He interrupted neither with his name." OPINIONS, not ONIONS Dustjacket of 1985 UK hardcover of The Books of Blood volume 1. Various figures, including a prominently naked white man, his nether regions conveniently covered by a picture of Clive Barker held up by a demon-like creature (also naked) with a knife in its skull and blood dripping down. So many monsters and figures and such in this picture that it would take me 5,000 words to describe it all, I'm afraid.
October 25, 2025 at 5:55 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Here's the way many of us first read the ending of "In the Hills, the Cities". (This is from the paperback that I whined & cajoled my skeptical mother into letting me buy at the grocery store when I was a kid.)
Cover of US paperback of volume 1 of Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Reddish pink colors dominating. A kind of mask thing in the foreground with reddish pink glow coming from holes for eyes, nostrils, mouth. Craggy teeth. Last page of US paperback of Books of Blood volume 1. Page 210 at top and Clive Barker's name. Then text: "It all meant nothing. Nothing at all. Boom— Boom— Popolac walked, the noise of its steps receding to the east. Popolac walked, the hum of its voice lost in the night. [space break] After a day, birds came, foxes came, flies, butterflies, wasps came. Judd moved, Judd shifted, Judd gave birth. In his belly maggots warmed themselves, in a vixen's den the good flesh of his thigh was fought over. After that, it was quick. The bones yellowing, the bones crumbling: soon, an empty space which he had once filled with breath and onions. Darkness, light, darkness, light. He interrupted neither with his name."
October 25, 2025 at 5:55 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
In fact, @kellylink.bsky.social mentions the Barthelme connection in her preface to MOON SONGS.
Two paragraphs from Kelly Link's preface to MOON SONGS: THE SELECTED STORIES OF CAROL EMSHWILLER: And I remember the critique she gave to my story, that critique a story itself of how, when she had first begun to write short stories, an editor had said to her, “These are quite good, but they are too much like Donald Barthelme’s stories.” Emshwiller had not, in fact, read any Barthelme, but after this conversation, she sat down with his work and then set out to deliberately write something quite different. And, of course, what she hoped I would take away was that my story was, perhaps, too Emshwillerian, and I should carve out another corner. And what I have always thought, once I began to read her work, was: if only! If only I knew how to do what Emshwiller does!
October 22, 2025 at 8:49 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Recently visited a class that had read my story "Wild Longing" (in Last Vanishing Man) and had to explain that I wrote the part about the Birchers and their anti-fluoride quest almost 10 years ago, thinking it was a way to indicate a character on far side of lunatic fringe. Never imagined today...
Image of part of a page of the book The Last Vanishing Man (published by Third Man Books, 2023) for the story "Wild Longing". Black text on white background. Three paragraphs. Text reads: “I can understand conservatism,” Tom said. “That’s common. Misguided, but normal. Even fascism. But the John Birch Society? The fluoride-in-the-water-is-a-Communist-plot people? Didn’t they fade away in the ’60s?” “Some of the pamphlets and newsletters he had were pretty recent.” “Loneliness,” Rebekah said, “makes people fall into themselves. They lose sense of the world.”
October 21, 2025 at 5:04 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Happy birthday to Ursula K. Le Guin (21 Oct 1929 – 22 Jan 2018), who lived much of her life in Portland, OR.

I bet she liked frogs.
US Postal Service stamp honoring Ursula K. Le Guin. Painted image of grey-haired Le Guin in foreground; background an icy landscape with two figures and maybe a sled or something like that, I guess to illustrate a moment from Left Hand of Darkness, one of her most famous novels. Mountains in far background might be from Washington State. It's hardly the most beautiful or even coherent stamp ever made, but I'm nonetheless tickled that there's a Le Guin stamp.
October 21, 2025 at 4:45 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Today is the 100th birthday of the great Angela Lansbury — and the 171st birthday of Oscar Wilde.

In 1945, Lansbury won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Sibyl Vane in the (very good) film based on Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray".
Post for Turner Classic Movies showing of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mostly black and white (or sepia) image with Lansbury at the center. Red lettering for title. Signed by Lansbury above the title. (image via an eBay sale) Black and white publicity photo of Angela Lansbury as Sybil Vane, dressed in Victorian attire, including a hat with what looks like a dead bird on top of it.
October 16, 2025 at 3:04 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
This is from this year's conference. Just imagine next year!

(Meant to tell @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social about this and forgot in midst of busy-ness. Good stuff on art, freedom, and estrangement in To the Lighthouse & Annihilation from Chris Gortmaker from U Chicago.)
A screen in a conference room. Projected onto it are the covers of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in the original edition with art by Vanessa Bell and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer in the recent US paperback edition.
October 14, 2025 at 4:33 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Here's a picture of one of the pages of notes on differences between the drafts. These notes run from p. 95 to p. 111, so not insignificant — but these are the types of differences between the drafts. Punctuation. Paragraphs. A few words.
A table of textual notes. Two columns of about 30 lines of words, with the individual words separated by solid black horizontal lines.
October 7, 2025 at 3:06 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Saturday afternoon at the @moderniststudies.bsky.social conference in Boston, I'll be on this panel. Paper's done but I somehow need to cut 5 minutes or so. Sigh. I think I'll chop some details so I don't have to cut any of the "Burn it all down!" passages about higher ed...
Panel description from the Modernist Studies Association conference program. Black letters on white background. Panel, Pedagogy Stream: Pedagogies in Woolf, West, and Pound Chair: Benjamin D. Hagen, University of South Dakota Matthew Cheney, Plymouth State University, "On Not Knowing Professors: Virginia Woolf's Outsider Pedagogy for Common Readers" James Dunnigan, University of Toronto, "Monumentality and Inscription in Ezra Pound's Cantos" Maria Rossini, University of Michigan, "Different Forms of Modernist Difficulty: Anti-Generative Al Pedagogy through Patria Mia"
October 6, 2025 at 8:39 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
October 5, 2025 at 8:44 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
I deleted my Substack account (which I used only to read a few free newsletters), yet got this email, a rightwing screed, which I never subscribed to even when I had an account. Please, writers, move to Ghost or something else, get away from this fascism-enabling, spam-producing stalker service.
Black text on white background. Title: "The Disturbing Ties Between the SPLC and Antifa". Byline: Tyler O'Neil. Date: October 1. One paragraph: "The organization that put Charlie Kirk’s organization on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan ahead of his assassination last week also has a long history of carrying water for the violent Antifa movement that President Donald Trump has targeted for investigation."
October 1, 2025 at 3:15 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
From @audreywatters.bsky.social on the griefs and utopian nostalgia (fantasies) of AI and education.

2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/surrender-bu...
Two paragraphs of black text on white background: "But let's be clear: the rejection of "AI" is not nostalgia; it is not a longing for some once-upon-a-time of school. Certainly many educators – at both the K-12 and university level – say they're experiencing a great sense of loss; many describe what "AI" is doing (or threatens to do) to education using the language of grief. But this isn't a denial of the future; it is grief about a future denied: their students', their own."
October 1, 2025 at 2:27 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Grateful to the editors of @nplusonemag.com for the clarity and force of this editorial.

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...
Black text on a sepia background: "As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts. We dig ourselves deeper into crises that have been made worse by technology, from the erosion of electoral democracy to the intensification of climate change. We condone platforms that not only urge children to commit suicide, they instruct them on how to tie the noose. We hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism."
September 29, 2025 at 7:55 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Reading Tim Lucas's 1993 defense of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me". He compares it to Fuller's "Naked Kiss" and notes that NK has just been given a laserdisc by @criterion.bsky.social and one day Lynch's film will likely be so esteemed. And, indeed, in 2017 it got a well-deserved Criterion edition.
Cover of Video Watchdog magazine number 16, March/April 1993. Image of a very white face on the cover with yellowed teeth and disturbing smile. Below, in a section with a garish green background, the title of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in yellow letters for the title and red for the subtitle. First page of Tim Lucas's article "One Chance Out: Between Two Worlds: Notes on Twin Peaks — Fire Walk with Me". All black background, white letters and image. Image of a woman on her stomach, arms splayed, face in a monstrous sort of grin. White text on black background: "As Stephen R. Bissette has pointed out to me, THE NAKED KISS was not only disliked by critics and audiences of its day, but reviled-much like FIRE WALK WITH ME, which, on its most essential level, is the story of a molested child. Today, THE NAKED KISS is regarded as a cult classic; it is one of the few films of its era to have been chosen for letterboxed preservation in The Voyager Company's distinguished Criterion Collection of laserdiscs. It seems likely, considering this precedent, that FIRE WALK WITH ME will also survive the abuses of its infancy to an esteemed maturity."
September 25, 2025 at 5:51 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
post a movie you LOVE with a terrible rotten tomatoes score

(Domino is an all-time favorite of mine, which seems to make me ... unique...)
Screenshot of Rotten Tomatoes score for the movie Domino from 2005, directed by Tony Scott, with a green exploded tomato and 18% approval score for critics. Beside that is an icon of a spilled container of popcorn with a 56% audience score.
September 17, 2025 at 1:55 AM
melikhovo.bsky.social
We've gotten some good work done together!
A large brown, black, and white cat and a man sit on a couch. The man is working on a laptop computer, the cat beside him supervises.
September 9, 2025 at 12:46 AM
melikhovo.bsky.social
As I've been spending time rereading The Common Reader recently, I've been reminded of what a great writer of concluding paragraphs Woolf was. E.g., from the essay "Miss Mitford", about a biography by "Miss Hill", who, Woolf says, is concerned that ladies be ladylike, even if they have fathers.
Black text on white background, the final paragraph of the essay "Miss Mitford", which is pretty long and exceeds the character limit for alt text. I can note here, however, that "Miss Mitford" is Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) and "Miss Hill" is Constance Hill, author of the book "Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings", published in 1920.
September 5, 2025 at 2:01 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
This morning, I spent some time with "Dr. Bentley", a sharp portrait of the corruptions of academia and the fatal trivialities of scholarship.
Black text on white background: "The greatest of our scholars, the man who read Greek as the most expert of us read English not merely with an accurate sense of meaning and grammar but with a sensibility so subtle and widespread that he perceived relations and suggestions of language which enabled him to fetch up from oblivion lost lines and inspire new life into the little fragments that remained, the man who should have been steeped in beauty (if what they say of the Classics is true) as a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness was, on the contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind."
September 5, 2025 at 2:01 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
I might have found a way into a story I've been trying to write for 6 months with no luck. Just required a bit of summoning.
Three books in a pile on a desk: Dictionary of Demonology, Encyclopedia of the Occult, and The Dictionary of Demons.
September 4, 2025 at 5:00 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Bloomsbury Academic is harassing its writers to sign on to some stupid "AI" thing. I got 3 emails about it just today.

(Yes, there's a typo in the email. I was exasperated. Can I get away with calling it an homage to 1 of my favorite bands, The The? "The future is now, but it's all going wrong.")
Email to Bloomsbury Academic reading: "Please stop harassing me about this. I do not want to be associated with anything having to do with "AI", a destructive technology that does nothing but make the worst people on the planet rich while destroying the fabric of society and the biosphere. STOP. Sincerely, Matthew Cheney"
September 4, 2025 at 2:36 AM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Oooh, my favorite local bookstore, @gibsonsbookstore.bsky.social, has 5 copies of MOON SONGS on hand just in time for their sale this weekend. Emshwillerians the world over should come to Concord, NH this weekend and buy books. Make your vacation plans now!

gibsonsbookstore.com/book/9798989...
Screenshot from Gibson's Bookstore (Concord, New Hampshire) website. In section titled "What's New on Our Front Tables this Week", four books included in image: a memoir by Moon Unit Zappa, Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, a biography of Audre Lorde (new in paperback), and a book by James Herriot. All very colorful and definitely worth buying!
August 19, 2025 at 6:55 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
Gavin, I repeat a little story about our first meeting, which involved Carol, here: matthewcheney.net/blog/moon-so...

(I am oddly fond of stories that make me look like a schmuck!)
Excerpt from blog post. Text: "Here’s a tale I’ve told before, but which bears repeating here: In the mid-to-late-’90s, I was home for the summer from college in New York, and I went down to Boston and stopped in at my favorite bookstore, Avenue Victor Hugo. I picked up a copy of Century magazine, with a story by Carol in it, and her novel Leaping Man Hill. The clerk was a tall guy with a Scottish accent. “If you like Century and Carol Emshwiller,” he said, “you might like a little zine I’ve started publishing.” Reader, I scoffed. This person thought he was publishing something in the same league as Carol Emshwiller?! I was polite but abruptly left without taking a copy of the zine. Of course, that was Gavin and the zine was Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which would publish some of Carol’s stories, and would even publish one of my own (“The Lake”) quite a few years later. Few publishers and publications have been as important to my life, and Gavin and Kelly have for decades been some of my favorite people on this, or any other, planet."
August 19, 2025 at 4:18 PM
melikhovo.bsky.social
I'm so grateful to everyone who has ever talked about Carol Emshwiller with me. I'm thankful to her family, and to Third Man Books, and to Kelly for her beautiful, moving, funny foreword.

The acknowledgments in the book are just a glimpse of all to whom I owe thanks.
Acknowledgments (page 1): This book would not exist without the support of Carol Emsh- willer’s children Eve, Peter, and Susan. As literary executor for her mother’s estate, Susan provided me with carte blanche to create the book I envisioned, and I hope that the results honor that great trust and leap of faith. Over the years, I have had conversations with many friends about the work of Carol Emshwiller, and those conversations influenced this selection. When I graduated from high school, James Patrick Kelly sent me a copy of The Norton Book of Science Fiction signed by everyone at that year’s Sycamore Hill writers conference, including Carol Emshwiller, and I remember the thrill of seeing her signature and wondering what the human being behind some of my favorite stories was like in person. Not too many years later, I had the opportunity to let Carol know that I was the strange kid whose book Jim had asked her to sign. Later, conversations with Christopher Barzak, Richard Bowes, Samuel Delany, Gregory Feeley, John Kessel, Meghan McCarron, and Ann VanderMeer stuck with me enough to affect how I chose stories for this volume. To them and every other enthusiastic Emshwillerian, I feel immense gratitude. Acknowledgments (page 2): Kelly Link deserves thanks not only for taking the time to write an introduction for this volume, but also for her decades of championing Carol Emshwiller’s work. Some of the first books Kelly published with her husband Gavin J. Grant at Small Beer Press were key works by Carol: the novel The Mount and the collection Report to the Men’s Club, and they also published her stories in their zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and reprinted Carol’s first novel, Carmen Dog. Kelly and Gavin’s commitment to Carol’s work in the first part of the 21st century was essential to many of us being able to appreciate the full range and magic of her writing. Thank you, too, to Luis Ortiz and Nonstop Press for their editions of The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, which made so many hard-to-find stories available once again. Putting Moon Songs together would have been vastly more difficult without those volumes. Also important for my work was Luis’s important biographical art book Emshwiller: Infinity x Two: The Art & Life of Ed & Carol Emshwiller. The Third Man Books and Third Man Records staff have been a delight to work with. Art director Jordan Williams and designer Amin Qutteineh make the process of design and production a joy and inspiration. Editor-in-chief Chet Weise not only supported my rather off-the-cuff idea to bring this book into the world, but also provided essential work on the manuscript as I rushed to get it finished. I am honored to be able to welcome Carol Emshwiller into the Third Man family; I hope she would like this little home we are giving to her words.
August 19, 2025 at 3:58 PM