Episode 32: Steve Toase - Unearthing the Invisible

Strange Exiles

1×

0:00

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:07:44

-1:07:44

Episode 32: Steve Toase - Unearthing the Invisible

Horror author, field archaeologist and anti-homelessness advocate Steve Toase on folk horror, falling through the cracks, and digging up the past

Bram E. Gieben

Jan 09, 2025

Transcript

In Episode 32 I speak to Steve Toase, author of short stories, nonfiction and essays, and a practicing field archaeologist. Steve is the creator of the Haunt Harrogate project (alongside Becky Cherriman), highlighting and sharing the stories of people from the area experiencing homelessness.

He is the author of two short story collections, 2024’s archaeology-themed Dirt Upon My Skin, and his 2021 cross-genre debut, To Drown in Dark Water. He’s been published in Reactor Magazine, Interzone and a great many other places.

Links and recommendations from Steve Toase

As the conversation begins, we briefly discuss Steve’s work in field archaeology. Recent examples of this include the discovery of King Richard III’s body in a car park, and dinosaur tracks in a quarry near Oxford. We return to archaeology after a discussion of his efforts as a writer in the early to mid-2000s.

Steve’s first crack at creative writing was through a course run by The Writers Bureau. Over the years he has also attended criticism or ‘crit groups’ run by local writers, as well as open mics, where he performed his flash fiction alongside readers sharing their performance poetry. His early fiction was published on my 2007 website Weaponizer. It’s now defunct, but you can have a little poke around some of the stories we published via the Wayback Machine.

Later we talk about Writers Bloc, based in Edinburgh, the crit group and performance-makers I spent a few years attending, working on performances for the Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Book Festival. The group has produced or been affiliated with many great writers, not limited to the likes of Hannu Rajaniemi, Rhiannon A. Grist, and Andrew J. Wilson, editor of the Nova Scotia SF anthologies.

Steve spoke about his work on a project for the Cultural Olympiad in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics. It was intended to share some of the cultural spotlight with regions outside London. The project Steve worked on contribut towards a book and exhibition looking at the tradition of cricket in North Yorkshire. Here’s a long read from The Guardian on the project.

This led to him working with the interdisciplinary artist, poet and writer Tessa Gordiziejko, who would go on to produce Steve’s work on the Haunt project, alongside Becky Cherriman, another local Harrogate author with experience of homelessness and vulnerable housing. Here’s a little more about the collaboration in 2012, including some video.

As Steve explains, Haunt Harrogate focused on telling stories from the lived experience of people going through homelessness in the Harrogate area. Conceived by Steve with help from Gordiziejko, Cherriman and others, the project published and performed works of poetry and prose by the people involved, letting them explain in their own words what losing your home, sofa-surfing, or living on the streets actually feels like.

You can listen to some audio from the Haunt project here. The Haunt publication Steve mentions is sold out, but all the stories written for the project are available to read online.

This all stands in contrast to the familiar cliches and narratives we see when homeless people are depicted in fiction, as Steve explores in his eye-opening article for Reactor Magazine (aslo known as Tor). He absolutely nails the way that (especially genre) fiction and media relegates these human experiences to non-personhood and the ‘other’:

The person experiencing homelessness is the first to see the aliens arrive, the monster stalk the streets, the first to die at the serial killer’s blade, or the first to be possessed. Examples of this abound… The identity of the person experiencing homelessness is unimportant, they are merely an object to move on the story.

Steve compares the way he unpacks these tropes to the concept of ‘fridging’, first identified by the legendary comics writer Gail Simone in 1999. She cites the famous panel from Green Lantern: A New Dawn where 90s Green Lantern Kyle Rayner finds his murdered girlfriend in the refrigerator.

Simone went on to create the website Women in Refrigerators to try and explode the trope. This was a successful project in many ways — while ‘fridging’ is no less common perhaps, it is called out far more often as lazy, sexist writing than it was before Simone’s intervention.

*Cover of* The Invisibles, Vol. 3, Issue 4 (2000). Art by Brian Bolland.

We mention a few equivalent tropes that Steve’s article explored, including the character of Mad Tom O’ Bedlam in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, and how ‘holy fool’ characters — from The Fool in King Lear to Robin Williams in The Fisher King, and beyond — are similar to the cinematic trope of the ‘magical negro’ identified by Spike Lee in the early 2000s.

Steve goes on to unpack a couple of terms used to describe the different gradations and situations subsumed under the catch-all term of ‘homelessness’ — Steve believes it’s important to grasp these, if you want to understand how these different experiences are related, but distinct. There are those who are vulnerably housed, meaning their situation is precarious — perhaps they are from a troubled family background, or are living in and out of sheltered housing or hostels. They could be renting grimy, substandard bedsits, with few rights as a tenant.

There are those who have ‘no fixed abode’ (NFA) — this could include people who have gone from a vulnerable situation including hostels and sofa-surfing into a more grave set of circumstances. Having no fixed address at all means less access to services like banking or access to benefits. Ultimately it could lead to living on the streets, which is the situation most of us probably imagine when we think of ‘homelessness’ — often described as ‘rough sleeping’, which doesn’t really cover the depths of deprivation that situation entails.

The UK charity Crisis has some more information and statistics about the various types of homelessness, and why so many people’s experiences remain ‘hidden’ from view. Part of the aim of Haunt was to surface the experiences of the ‘invisible’ homeless — those in vulnerable or precarious situations, who are more at risk of falling through the cracks in our broken societies. Steve specifically mentions the work of SASH in North Yorkshire, who work with children and young adults. Please donate something to them if you’re able to, and you enjoyed this podcast.

Steve talks about the astonishing novel The City & The City by China Miéville. I’ve read this one a few times, and had never really considered the tricksy literary mechanism whereby the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma avoid each others’ gazes or risk prosecution by the state as a metaphor for homelessness — but it makes perfect sense. Seek out the novel at all costs, avoid the rather dreary and literal BBC TV adaptation.

We also briefly mention my two conversations with journalist and futurist Joshua Ellis, which took place in 2023, and in 2021. We discuss Josh’s DIY approach to helping the homeless population of Las Vegas in both of these episodes, and also the implications of ‘autonomous zones’ like Slab City in California. We also discuss Tom Wall’s 2024 Guardian piece on the Bristol delivery service drivers priced out of the city, and living in vulnerably housed situations.

We go on to talk more about Steve’s work as a field archaeologist, and how this feeds into his work as a horror writer, particularly in his collection Dirt Upon My Skin, published in 2024 by Black Shuck Books.

Steve starts by mentioning a few folk horror classics that feature the theme of unearthing the past — these are Nigel Kneale’s classic Quatermass and the Pit (1967 — link goes to an online copy of the film), Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm (1989). These are all classics, and fertile ground for the exploration of archaeological themes in folk horror.

I mentioned the story of Naia again, a female Ice Age skeleton found in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in 2007 whose bones showed telltale signs of domestic abuse, as discussed further in these papers by Wilkinson and Van Wagenson, Crevecouer et. al., Slaus and Novak, among many others. I first discussed this story in Episode 29.

Steve mentions a 2008 paper he read on the subject by Rebecca Redfern (it’s paywalled unfortunately, but drop a comment if you would like a PDF). Here’s the story of the child’s remains found at Hadrian’s Wall, which he offers as another example of history that is well and truly ‘buried’ — until archaeologists explore it further. His thinking on this was influenced by the book Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites of Passage, by Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather.

We also very briefly discuss the colonialist version of this kind of archaeological erasure, as in the example of the Kush empire, located in present-day Sudan, whose pyramid-building preceded Egypt’s rise as a kingdom. Their achievements were largely ignored by early explorers and archaeologists with preconceived notions about the ‘Hellenic’ origins of Egyptian techniques and mythology.

Later, Steve mentions The Making of the English Landscape by W.G. Hoskins, which created some of the signifiers of the idyllic, pastoral, nostalgic past the English like to (re)imagine for themselves. He recalls listening to the band Chumbawumba’s 1988 album English Rebel Songs, which may surprise those of you who only know them from their brief stint as a chart-topping novelty band with 89 million views.

We go back to folk horror, and Steve briefly mentions early pioneers some include in that genre, like Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James. He taps 2004’s Dead Man’s Shoes, a tense and elegiac classic from Shane Meadows, as a brilliant example of a modern take on the genre. He also mentions the more recent My House (2023) as a relevant, more ‘urban weird’ take on these themes, and the author Stephen Graham Jones, who writes folk horror from an indigenous American perspective. For some of my thoughts on recent folk horror classics, check out my essay for Revol Press on Midsommar and Joker.

Steve briefly mentions our old friend Cameron Callahan, hit the link to find out more about his publications, including Scrambled Circuits. We finish by talking about Steve’s short story collection To Drown in Dark Water, from Undertow Publications, which mixes horror, cyberpunk and some very strange occult shenanigans in a way that’s unpredictable, uncomfortable, and very difficult to put down if read before bedtime.

Have a read of some of Steve’s short fiction at the links below, and find out more about his work on Haunt and other projects over at his website.

Coming up in 2025

I’ve already got some incredible guests from the worlds of music, philosophy, criticism, art and beyond booked for interviews, and there’s much more to come in 2025.

Thanks for sticking with us! Here are a few links to writing or media about some of the topics and people I hope to feature this year.

Is there anyone you’d like to see on the show (or back on the show)? Let me know in the comments! For now, here are a few spoilers…