Roman Countrymen

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/08/the-big-idea-haralambi-markov/

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Death is a rather big part of life, so it makes sense that author Haralambi Markov kept writing about it, whether that was intentional on his part or not. In the Big Idea for his newest collection of short stories, Markov talks about his own experience with mental illness and death that contributed to this horrific yet strangely hopeful collection titled The Language of Knives.

HARALAMBI MARKOV:

“You want to die.”

That’s the first thing a friend of mine told me after reading the first stories I’d written. We were in high school at the time. The second thing he told me is that I shouldn’t write in English before learning how to do it in Bulgarian, because that’s my mother tongue. He was a writer as well, although he wrote literary fiction and listened to Mozart. I respected him a lot at the time, which is probably why I took great offense at both statements and chose to ignore him. 

I continued to write in English—definitely the right decision, although there’s a whole separate essay to be written about the difference in my approach to writing in two different languages—and I mostly tried to forget the comment about death. But I couldn’t really shake it off. Not when I consistently return to death and dying as themes in my work, even when I was trying to write science fiction and fantasy. The whole conceit of “The Language of Knives,” the title story in my collection, is the meticulous rendering of a body to blood, bone, and meat before being presented as cake to the Gods to be granted entry into the afterlife. The transition to horror and weird fiction happened on its own without much of a conscious choice.

Over the years, I developed deep bouts of depression. I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder for about seven years now, but have been living with it for far longer, and until my medication started working, I really, really wanted to die. If I have to summarize the big idea behind my collection, as much as my body of work over the past decade can have one, it would be the horror of existing and how one deals with an enormous death drive.

I didn’t realize I was fantasizing about my own death until much later, when I first experienced serious depression. It felt very hopeless, and much of my university years were filled with suicidal ideation. You find some of the weight of that in my story “Nine Tongues Tell of,” where the protagonist Damyana willingly follows a halla—a predatory weather spirit—to its lair, even if that means death rather than facing the prospect of yet another bleak day. Similarly, Lazar from “The Town the Forest Ate” finds himself alone in a cursed forest at night, compelled by a samodiva to skin himself alive. A terrible fate for sure, but also a quick escape from a curse placed upon his entire town. 

Both stories view surrender to death as cathartic. Death is the ultimate liberation from life that feels like an inescapable trap. I don’t think I was consciously writing about my own death, but felt such relief upon finishing each story. I found joy in the symbolic death through botanical transformation in “When Raspberries Bloom in August”; self-acceptance in the body horror of “Holding Hands with Monsters,” where my protagonist chooses to become a monster after being visited by one each night for years; and reconciliation with the past as my protagonist faced extinction in the eco-horror of “Convalescence.”

A lie I maintained until as recently as arranging the stories in my manuscript was that my writing was not autobiographical. Very much not true. Reading the book, to me personally, felt like I was trying to work out how to be for the past thirteen years. All the ways I metaphorically experienced death through my characters became all my attempts to live and make a life worth living. A crucial moment in “The Drowning Line” has my protagonist confront and overcome the ghost of an ancestor, who has made each member of his bloodline drown in the place where he was drowned centuries ago. Similarly, in “Baba Yaga Helps Build a House,” Hristian overcomes his grandmother, Baba Yaga, and earns a new beginning. In “Swallow,” my protagonist summons the ghost of his deceased father, also a medium, and is able to leave an abusive relationship. Yes, there’s death and carnage, but that’s on par for the genre. The point is that the latter portion of my collection contains hope that there is an after and it’s better than what was before. 

I’ve been in remission for a year and seven months, and before that, have done remarkably better in my thirties than in my twenties. To my high-school friend, I concede. You were right, but I am thrilled to say that your assessment is not true anymore.

The Language of Knives: Amazon|Bookshop|Barnes & Noble|iBooks|Kobo|Google Play

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/08/the-big-idea-haralambi-markov/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61502