• A chat with World Fantasy Award 2023 finalist Dennis Mombauer

To write is to create and to have that creation recognised globally is the dream of many writers. Last week, Dennis Mombauer, a German living and working in Sri Lanka, was recognised by not one but two esteemed fiction writing panels. 

His book ‘The House of Drought,’ a fantasy novella with a touch of horror set in Sri Lanka, is one of five finalists for the World Fantasy Awards, among the former winners of which is renowned author George R.R. Martin. ‘The House of Drought’ has also been nominated as a novella for the 2023 Utopia Awards, presented in association with the Climate Fiction Conference (CliFiCon23). 

Dennis lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he works as a consultant on climate change. In his spare time, he is a writer of weird fiction and textual experiments. He is co-publisher of a German magazine for experimental fiction, ‘Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism’. He has also published a collection of short stories under the title ‘The House of the Dark Whale’. ‘The House of Drought’ is his first published English novella and his biggest English publication to date. 

On the back of these nominations, The Sunday Morning Brunch reached out to Dennis for more on ‘The House of Drought’ and its themes. 

‘The House of Drought’ story

“It’s a novella set in Sri Lanka about an old colonial mansion and the different people who have lived there over the years,” Dennis shared, adding that there was a haunted house element to the story and the novella captured the encounters these different people had with the house, getting lost in its many hidden areas. The novella also looks at the mansion as a colonial object planted in an area that is not entirely friendly to the house.

The stories of the people who interact with the house are quite different – from people who have properly lived in the house to those seeking temporary shelter at the house to a photojournalist making a documentary about the house and slowly becoming obsessed with it. 

In terms of fantasy, this comes in through Dennis’s haunted house and the overall setting of the story. “It’s set in Sri Lanka, but in a somewhat weird version of it. This novella is what I call weird fiction or weird horror. There’s a supernatural element to it and a generally weird element to it. Things are slightly off and this creates an element of alienation,” Dennis explained. 

Part of this alienation, Dennis shared, came from the fact that as a foreigner living in Sri Lanka, he realised that his experiences of Sri Lanka would not always be the same as those of Sri Lankans and through ‘The House of Drought,’ he was not looking to specifically tell a Sri Lankan story, because that was not something he would ever be able to fully portray nor narrate. 

“The novella is set in Sri Lanka, but not necessarily in Sri Lanka. It also covers topics related to Sri Lanka like climate change but which are not uniquely Sri Lankan stories,” he said, adding that as a foreigner, he also felt that uniquely Sri Lankan stories were not his to tell, and so, through ‘The House of Drought’ he focused on stories that affected Sri Lanka but were also universal at the same time. 

However, the setting of the colonial mansion and the stories of the people who interact with it all do draw inspiration from the many places he has visited in Sri Lanka and the different people and situations he has observed. 

Weaving in climate change to tell a modern horror story

Professionally, Dennis works closely with climate change, consulting with a non-profit think tank on research projects, creating knowledge products and publications, and contributing to media and other publications on climate change and ecosystems conservation. 

Climate change, of course, is the significant long-term alteration of Earth’s average weather patterns because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The impacts of climate change are vast, from global warming to rising sea levels to extreme weather events and shifts in ecosystems biodiversity and agriculture. Proactively addressing and mitigating the impacts of climate change now is crucial to safeguarding the planet’s future, wellbeing, and resources, both for ourselves and for future generations. 

As a novella, ‘The House of Drought’ deals significantly with the theme of climate change. 

“What I wanted to do when writing, and I hope I have succeeded in doing so, was to bring in climate change – not in the sense of educating or investigating climate change but treating it as a spectral element or feeling that affects people in the book in various ways,” Dennis explained of how he made climate change a theme of ‘The House of Drought,’ adding that characters were not engaging with climate change as a clear and direct entity or phenomenon, but rather they dealt with things that were impacts of climate change, like drought and water scarcity. 

Especially since the impacts of climate change are so far-reaching and so universal, the house in ‘The House of Drought’ provides an allegory for climate change in the form of the house itself and the different encounters and experiences surrounding it. 

Climate change as a theme and how it impacts people, Dennis pointed out, was not something that often came up in fiction, save for a few notable exceptions. Incidentally, the publisher of ‘The House of Drought,’ Stelliform Press, is a small independent literary group that focuses on works of creative fiction and non-fiction which address Earth-focused issues like climate change and ecological destruction. 

Dennis shared that the publishing of ‘The House of Drought’ would not have been possible if not for Stelliform’s commitment to helping him tell his story and that he was very grateful to have been able to work with a publisher focused on telling stories that dealt with environmental issues.

Moving behind the page

To be recognised by the World Fantasy Awards is an incredible achievement and not one Dennis was expecting, especially since there is no application process – to Dennis’s knowledge, the panel reviews all fantasy books released over the course of the year and picks out the most award-worthy. 

“I was really happy and surprised to be nominated for both the World Fantasy Awards and the Utopia Awards. It was so completely out of the blue,” Dennis said, adding that just being nominated had been an incredible honour, and above all, he was very happy to know that people were enjoying the book. 

We also dug into Dennis’s process a bit and learned that as a writer, he puts quite a bit of thought into his books before he writes. “I’m something of a methodical writer, but not as much as I would like to be,” he shared. “I plan it and have a rough outline to know where the story is going to go.” 

The rest is about filling in blank spots to complete the story. Dennis did share that he did not limit himself to writing in a linear manner, writing whichever chapter seemed most suitable at the time. 

What is important to Dennis, however, is research and ‘The House of Drought’ did put to use a lot of research. Much of this research was on climate change, but then again, there was a lot of research on haunted houses and how they work, especially in storytelling, and then research on mythology and folklore, both Sri Lankan and international. 

Dennis’s next creative project is his first full-length novel. “I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. It’s something of an urban patchwork story [the working title for this novel is called ‘Urban Patchwork’],” Dennis explained. “It’s set in a city and follows 12 different characters across three seasons. The city itself is a fictionalised city which is a mix of cities I have experienced in both Germany and Sri Lanka – a mixed Eurasian city, so to speak – and the characters experience a number of weird phenomena.” 

This new novel will also deal with the overall theme of climate change depicted in the encounters and phenomena the characters experience. “It’s been complex for me and is not a horror story per se,” Dennis concluded, adding that he was looking forward to the release of the book in late 2023.

Info box

‘The House of Drought’ is available for purchase on Amazon and on Bookshop.org. You can also find Dennis on Twitter @DMombauerWriter