Nathaniel Mumau lives in Michigan with his magnificent wife, Adrianna. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Unidentified Funny Objects 10, Cloaked Press’s 2026 Spring Into SciFi anthology, and Tales From the Little Library. 

Nathaniel’s story ‘The Evil Painting’—in which the evil effect of the evil painting might travel beyond its viewers—features in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION. The anthology’s editor Tejaswinee Roychowdhury interviewed him to find out about his literary influences.

How do you perceive speculative fiction vis-à-vis the world around you?

Speculative fiction is what we wish could happen, or what we hope will never happen. That could potentially describe every human experience ever, but it does not! For instance: you may be hard-pressed to find a speculative fiction story about doing paperwork. How mundane! How drab! But imagine you were filing paperwork to be granted superpowers by the government. Or the paperwork was a declaration of war against spiders. Or the paperwork morphed into a spider itself, and attacked you! Those could be stories worth reading, or at least stories worth writing.

Who and/or what are some of your influences while writing speculative fiction?

Jason Pargin’s stories encourage me to write about normal, unskilled people who find themselves in outlandish situations. Neal Shusterman helps me pay special attention to a character’s voice and arc. David Lubar reminds me to pursue any idea, no matter how cockamamie.

Tell us about the creative process behind your story.

The way people interact with media is appalling or groundbreaking, depending on who you ask. One thing we can all agree on: the discussion is nuanced. I thought it would be interesting to discard nuance in light of this question: If you knew an artwork was absolutely, without a doubt, completely and purely evil … would you look at it? There are many stories written about occultic objects and their sinister influence, but perhaps not quite as many stories have been written about the worrywarts who refuse to handle such objects. It’s just kind of a funny idea (at least, to me) to write about people getting so worked up over something they simply do not have to look at. In fact, you don’t even have to read my story, if you don’t want to… But, then again, it could be a really good story…