Discussing Academic Writing and Lovecraftian Horror with Giacomo Calabria
- schiffnerhs
- Jan 19
- 4 min read
Interview by Hannah Sophie Schiffner
Giacomo Calabria, writing under the pseudonym “Jacopo della Quercia,” is an award-winning educator, essayist, novelist, and taught as a scholar with Humanities New York across a decade.
His novels include License to Quill, “a James Bond-esque spy thriller starring William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe during history’s real life Gunpowder Plot,” and The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy, a “historical thriller” with “an equal-parts cocktail of action, adventure, science-fiction and comedy.”
His publications blend humor, thriller, and horror for an entertaining and educational spin on history. Whether Lovecraftian technique or Shakespearean drama, Calabria weaves history and popular culture into compelling modern narratives.
His recent publication At the Mountains of Madness (Choose Your Own Adventure New Classics) embraces the weird and Lovecraftian in a story adapted to our times of AI innovation and civic imagination.
How does your approach to writing and research differ between your academic writing and your novels?
Narrative fiction is obviously a different animal when compared to academic writing, but the two have more in common than you would think. In both cases, you’re telling a story, and anyone should want to tell their story as well as possible. This requires research, experimentation, and an understanding of your audience and their expectations. However, the research that goes into creative fiction is more unpredictable than the work that goes into issue-focused academic writing. In creative fiction, you might find yourself researching topics as seemingly disconnected as lucid dreaming, Nebuchadnezzar, and vintage wristwatches for a single paragraph—as I did for a detective noir I wrote.
How have the elements of horror, thriller and humor allowed you to make history and literature such as Shakespeare, Dante, and Machiavelli accessible to a contemporary audience?
I try to incorporate diverse elements and occasionally conflicting emotions into my stories for two reasons: one, it allows readers of any taste to find something in my books they might enjoy, and two, because that’s what life is like. The world is filled with contrasts. I remember reading an article when I was a teenager about the storming of Pointe du Hoc during D-Day. In the write-up, which was dead-serious, the first soldier up the ropes dropped his pants and took a dump. History is rank with comedy and tragedy, and so many of the greatest writers knew that. Shakespeare put dirty jokes in Hamlet, Machiavelli penned two comedies, and at least one canto in Dante’s Inferno ends with a fart. As long as I keep finding details like these in history books and literature, I consider it my duty as an educator to share them with the world.
How did you come up with the idea for your newest publication, At the Mountains of Madness (Choose Your Own Adventure New Classics)?
I shared several ideas with Chooseco that involved works in the public domain: Dracula, Treasure Island, and even original Mickey Mouse stories were considered! My editor eventually settled on H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness due to the author’s enormous fan base and the creative opportunities his work offered us behind the scenes. My publishers wanted something fun and scary, so it was off to Antarctica for us!
I’ve heard that you like to place “easter eggs” in your writing for readers to discover later when googling the topic. How did you address writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book that encourages re-reading and rediscovery of the narrative?
Choose Your Own Adventure books encourage readers to tread backward and explore some of the undiscovered pathways in each story. I used this method to my advantage by revealing juicy tidbits about each character in my book that readers could only find by re-reading it. Many of these easter eggs are throwbacks to Lovecraft’s other works, but some of them reference books, movies, and even video games that themselves were influenced by H.P. Lovecraft! I also included a secret ending to the story that readers could only finding by breaking the rules laid out in the book. I will say no more about this ending, save that I worked closely with the illustrator to make sure that the necessary clues to find the ending were spelled out to the reader!
How did you use Lovecraftian horror to address modern themes, such as AI and our complicated relationship with it?
That was quite the challenge because I originally didn’t have any references to AI in my pitch. My publisher asked me to include it in the story—and to make it villainous! Fortunately, I found a brief reference to artificial minds in Lovecraft’s writing that permitted me to incorporate AI, a seemingly new invention, into both my story and the larger Cthulhu mythos. I wove more modern themes like slavery, institutional corruption, unethical experimentation, and PTSD into the narrative whenever it seemed appropriate for my cast of predominantly teenaged characters. The isolation these campers feel in Antarctica when confronting both personal struggles and monsters is meant to illustrate how helpless many teenagers and adults feel when facing some of the “monsters” of today. Helplessness, nihilism, insignificance, agoraphobia: these are all hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror.
Do you have any future projects you can tell us about?
I’m always working on something, but whether that something gets published hinges heavily on outside factors: book sales, reviews, popularity, consumer trends, etcetera. I would love to write a sequel to this Choose Your Own Adventure we just discussed, but I also have ideas and sample treatments for completely different projects: novels, epic poems, graphic novels, and even academic texts. The latter is something I’m particularly interested in sharing at NEPCA someday since it covers Disney studies, so if you know any publishers who might be interested in what I’m working on, please let me know!
Check out Calabria's work here:
Recent publications:
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