What's the most improbable but true thing about you?
My parents are both from New York State, but my wife has traced a line of my family tree back a few centuries to one of the founding families of my Connecticut home town. Plus, some were United Empire Loyalists who fled to Canada during the Revolutionary War and settled a few hours away from where I now live in Ottawa.

Why did you choose to submit to Horror Over the Handlebars?
I’m from Connecticut, but moved away 25 years ago yet still consider myself a New Englander. I’d written my story “Below the Surface, You Can Only Imagine” about ten years ago, always picturing it in my home town, but it had never found a home so I trunked it. Then I saw Horror Over the Handlebars and everything clicked. A story about lost quarries somewhere out in the woods, it never fit in a contemporary setting since technology like Google Maps would let one find them. But, having it set in the 80s and 90s fixed that. Tying a plot element to be the result of Hurricane Gloria and it all fit.

Tell us a little about your story, “Below the Surface, We Can Only Imagine” and its genesis.
It was inspired by the R.E.M. song “Nightswimming,” which always struck me as a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, regret and something subtly sinister. I took a number of elements from the song—the end of summer, the moon, swimming—but especially the line “You, I thought I knew you.” A favorite theme in my writing is what I call “the time between” and how those slow, uneventful days can be more powerful than a moment of sudden change. “Below the Surface” plays with this and asks how well do we really know our friends especially as we slowly drift apart?

Tell us about “Nathan’s Night in Norwich” in Horror Over the Handlebars and what you liked about it.
What a great mix of horror elements! We start with that all-too-familiar situation of our goofy friend our parents seem to like more than us, dash in some creepy atmosphere and local cryptid legend, and then we drop headlong into a mix of fun horror-adventure and stomach-dropping dread. I’d love to see a sequel set years later after the Norwich State Hospital is gone and where the cryptids migrated.

If you could time travel, where would you go, what would you do, and why would you do that?
I would go back to find seventh grade me and tell him to take French, not Spanish, in middle school because it will help him later in life. To prevent a paradox, I wouldn’t reveal he would eventually end up living in Ottawa, Ontario, which is Canada’s capital and where one must be at least functionally bilingual in English and French to advance in their career.

Who would you bring back from the dead for one hour and what would you do with them?
Shirley Jackson and politely ask her to critique a story while secretly trying not to gush how much I love her writing or how influential she will be, but not revealing that people will go Poe / Lovecraft / King in the build up to modern horror and completely skip her.

What's your favorite piece of art? Could be music, writing, sculpture, painting...
The movie SE7EN. There are plenty more works on my list—Stephen King’s IT, Strauss’s “The Blue Danube”, Rodin’s The Gates of Hell—but SE7EN’s tone, mood, visuals and music perfectly captured my despondence and nihilism as a recent college graduate coming to realize how hopeless the mid-90s seemed. But most importantly, it was the first movie date with my wife-to-be and she grabbed onto me during the “Sloth” scene’s jump scare.

What are you most proud of creating?
The short story “Touch the Sky, They Say” (https://aescifi.ca/touch-the-sky-they-say/). I’m not sure if it’s my best, but my favorite since I’d just wrapped up moderating a panel at a convention and someone asked if I was the Matt Moore who’d written that piece. When I said I was, she thanked me and said she had been in a very dark place when she read it, and it was exactly the story she needed at exactly that moment to start healing. I’ve won awards and been in “Years Best” anthologies—all of that pales compared to what that woman told me.

What's next on your literary horizon?
I am finishing a novel called A Nice Place to Live, outlining three more, and have about 20 short stories in various states of revisions.

Where can readers connect with you online?
My bare bones website is mattmoorewrites.com. I’m also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads and Bluesky.