Join professors and published authors Jeffrey Bean and Darrin Doyle at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 19 in the Charles V. Park Library Baber Room as they read their latest literary material.

Doyle will read selections from his new book, "The Dark will End the Dark," which was released March 13. This is a collection of short stories that embrace surrealism and will primarily focus on horror fiction pieces on the human body gone wrong.

Bean will read poetry from his recently-published poetry chapbook, "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window," which was published last year after Bean won the Cowles Copperdome Poetry Chapbook award. Bean will also read several other assorted poems, some on the subject of voyeurism.

Central Michigan Life sat down with both to discuss their work and give the community a preview for their work.

"The Dark will End the Dark" is a collection of short stories. Are there any overarching themes?

DOYLE: There are some flash-fiction pieces, and longer chapters that focus on different body parts.

For example, they will be a chapter called Head, where a man's head stops functioning but the rest of his body still operates. These short pieces sort of straddle the line between realism and surrealism, but each one has the idea of something going wrong with the human body.

There's one story where someone has unending hiccups that won't abate, and another focusing on unsightly sores.

The genre is called gothic or horror, but they have a lot of dark humor within too.

Was injecting humor used to offset the subject matter, or did it come up naturally?

DOYLE: I think it just came naturally. I love humor and I can't stay completely serious while writing most of the time. It's also what I grew up with, stuff like Monty Python and Evil Dead, where all these grisly things take place but it's also hysterical.

Also, I think comedy can say a lot about human nature. I've found that I don't have to be completely dramatic to ask real human questions.

Why body horror as a subject? Is it a fear of yours?

DOYLE: I think it's common to feel a sense of frailty about the body and how that affects the mind.

When things go wrong physically, I think it would be hard for anyone to maintain any spiritual wellness or emotional wellness.

It's also a way of confronting mortality. A great writer once said that there are only two topics: sex and death.

Your novel, "The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo," is set in Michigan. Are all of your stories set in the state?

DOYLE: Yes, there's the Trip to Traverse City, which is about a group of people on a boat which is encased by fog.

It's a sort of allegory for the idea of death and not knowing what is out there. I like writing what I know.

Tell me about your material.

BEAN: I just had a book come out, a chapbook. It's a slimmer volume of poetry than a full-length collection. I'm seeing this as a sort of book launch for it.

This is the first time I've read this material to a CMU crowd. That'll be half of the reading, the rest will be things I've completed over the past few months.

A lot have been published, some haven't. A lot of these are a couple of years old but some are brand new that I've never read, and that's one thing I really like about doing live readings.

I always try to read fresh, new stuff. It motivates me to keep writing, and it helps me learn more about my own work.

Is there a theme in your collection?

BEAN: "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window" is a series inspired by the visual work of Vermeer, a Dutch painter who lived in the (17th) century.

A lot of those feature a female figure and there is some where the speaker of the poem is addressing a person whom he is in love with.

Also, it traces a chronology that starts with infatuation and then, by the end, features poems about parenthood and serious relationships. Since I started writing poems in high school, I've always returned to art or music to write.

What other work will you read?

BEAN: There's a new project I've been working on for a few years.

It's a sequence of poems I've written from the point of view of a voyeur, who is obsessed with watching his neighbor. He's this deviant, and I've been working on developing his character for a while now. That will be a part of it.

It always garners some interesting reactions from the audience (laughs). We live in this sort of voyeuristic age with the ability to look at people on Facebook, where the NSA can watch us.

That connects a bit to the literal voyeurism that he embodies.