Author Dale Brumfield thinks that Richmond has always had a palpable aura of strangeness. His new short story collection, “King Size Peggy & 8 More Tall Tales,” tells nine dark-humored tales that he says fit only too perfectly in River City.

“If you love the weirdness of Richmond, especially old Richmond,  this book will be right up your alley,” says the writer, researcher and cultural historian [also an occasional contributor to Style Weekly] and a twice-nominated Library of Virginia book honoree.

Brumfield’s career has been beautifully schizophrenic. Best known as the advocate who, as field director for Virginians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and author of the acclaimed “Closing the Slaughterhouse,” he helped to usher in the end of capital punishment in Virginia in 2021. But there are other Dale Brumfields — among them, the cartoonist and humorist who co-founded one of RVA’s greatest ‘zines, ThroTTle, and the scribe behind surreal works of fiction such as “Standers” and “Naked Savages.”

“King Size Peggy & 8 More Tall Tales” (HJH/Ingram) will have its book launch on Wednesday, March 11 at Main Line Brewery. At the party, the author will read a short passage from the book and King Size Peggy herself may make an appearance. “And I was thinking maybe I’d do an interpretive dance,” he laughs.

Style Weekly: How did this new short story collection come about?

Dale Brumfield: I’ve done five history books, six novels, one memoir, and this is my first crack at short fiction. So this is a marked departure from me, and they’re pretty long stories. This is a 180-page book with only nine stories.

Are these stories you’ve had for awhile or did you write them specifically for a book?

A couple of them were stories that I did in grad school that I thought were good stories and I believed in them, and they got good responses from my fellow students, and I’ve just been sitting on them. I hated the thought of these stories just sitting in my laptop doing nothing, taking up space.

So I started trotting them out and, really, it became part of my therapy when Susan was sick [his wife, Susan Brumfield, died in 2024). I was spending so much time with her that I needed an outlet for my creativity because, you know, you can go crazy if you’re so solely focused on caregiving. So whenever I had some time to myself, I would just pull up one of those stories and they would make me laugh or smile.

How do you go back and forth between weighty topics, like Virginia’s death penalty and the history of lynching, to these more humorous, fantastical stories?

It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’ve got two brains. I’ve been [writing about] slavery and the death penalty for a couple of years now, and also working on these fiction stories, which I call an “American Grotesk” form of writing. It’s ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations who basically have to claw their way out or die trying. What dawned on me is there’s very little difference between my nonfiction and my fiction, using that description. So it’s basically mining the same material.

It sounds like you are writing noir. What’s the difference?

Well, it’s more like Southern Gothic, like Flannery O’Connor. Not that I’m in that class but I’m kind of drawing on the same themes… this Southern hopelessness. These stories are distinctly Richmond too. Not all of them take place in Richmond, but they’ve got that weird ‘only in this city’ kind of vibe.

King Size Peggy is a character I recognize from a parody magazine you published years ago. Is that a character you just kept in your head?

Do you want me to tell the story of King Size Peggy? It was January of 1981 and this 8-foot tall woman with a plastic head suddenly appeared on the balcony at 916 West Franklin [the then-home of VCU’s student paper, The Commonwealth Times] holding a misspelled sign that said, “Weclome new students,” and waving at the new student orientation tours. These were students and their parents who were just coming to look at VCU. After waving to several groups, one of the administrators from student services came up to the Commonwealth Times and asked, ‘Who was that on the balcony earlier?’ And I said, ‘Oh, that was King Size Peggy.’ And he gets right down in my face and he goes, ‘Well, King Size Peggy needs to go away.’ Apparently they had gotten complaints from prospective students and parents, and the administration cast a pretty acidic eye on her. I told him, ‘You know, if they can’t handle King Size Peggy, they have no business coming to VCU.’

Where did you get King Size Peggy?

I am King Size Peggy. I just had a trench coat pulled up over my head and a female mannequin head that my friend Ronnie Sampson and I found in an alley. We just tied the head in place with a green scarf. The name comes from the old 1948 Tex Avery cartoon, ‘King Size Canary.’ Later, when I published my one-shot magazine, ‘Not the Green Section,’ which was a parody of the Richmond News Leader’s weekly entertainment guide, the [front page] headline said, “New film to be filmed in Richmond,” and it was King Size Peggy, stomping, Godzilla style, through the city of Richmond.

But that wasn’t it for Peggy. Why’d you revive her for a short story? 

It was a really good kernel of an idea. You have an 8-foot-tall woman with a plastic head that this guy starts seeing hanging around neighborhood children. I won’t go into great detail, but that’s a great setup.

There’s another story where a guy is in a facility somewhere, and his job is to create a doomsday broadcast, a movie that could be shown over and over on any surviving television stations after nuclear Armageddon. And he needs to find a host. So who does he find as a host? Somebody they can trust, someone who makes people feel good… the absurdity of the whole setup, it just lends itself to so many possibilities.

Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, you are incredibly prolific. Do you ever contend with writer’s block? How do you maintain the productivity? 

To me, it’s the excitement of the subject matter. If I’m excited and I really believe in it and know that there’s a book there, I seem to have no problem just tackling the material and running with it. It’s hard to explain, but I think it has to do with the excitement of the find. Like, “Richmond Independent Press[:A History of the Underground Zine Scene,”] you know, that was an incredibly exciting book to write. “Virginia State Penitentiary: A Notorious History” was a very exciting book because I knew no one had ever tackled this subject matter before. I felt like I was the one to do it.

How do you maintain that level of enthusiasm for fiction, where it’s all in your head? Is it just getting captured by a funny idea?

Yeah, it all boils down to the kernel of the idea. Like one of my stories [features] a guy who’s kind of OCD. He might be on the spectrum a little bit, and he’s staying in a motel room in Norfolk and he’s absolutely convinced that someone else is staying in his motel room when he’s not there. That’s the germ. Now, think of the places that that can go. He goes as far as to hire a homeless man to hide in the room to try to catch who’s coming in, and living there when he’s not there. What happens to him?

These tangents, all these possibilities just open up, and ideas just start flowing.

“King Size Peggy & 8 More Tall Tales” will have a book launch party on Wednesday, March 11 at Main Line Brewery. 6 p.m. For more information on Dale Brumfield, go to www.dalebrumfield.net

[Disclosure: The author contributed a foreword to Brumfield’s 2013 book, “Richmond Independent Press: A History of the Underground Zine Scene”)