An Interview with Kevin Hearne
Thanks to Kevin Hearne for taking the time to answer my ridiculous questions. Don’t forget to check out my review of Hexed. Now for the interview: First things first: what drew you into writing in the first place, and why fantasy in particular? I was drawn into writing by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. Chief’s voice is so well done and I wanted to be able to grab somebody the way that book grabbed me. I wound up writing fantasy mostly because that’s what I enjoy reading more than anything else. Your Iron Druid series draws heavily from Celtic folklore, including figures like the Morrigan and other members of the fae “pantheon.” Why did you focus specifically on the Celtic/Irish roots for your main character, Atticus? What is so interesting about Celtic folklore for you (and, perhaps, for us)? Part of this comes from my loathing for Disney and what they were doing to “fairies.” My daughter thought fairies were cute and helpful and delicate and it was driving me nuts. But then I realized it wasn’t just Disney — there were any number of other sources that had strayed quite far from the original Irish roots of the Sidhe. I’m an Irish/English mutt, so the focus on the lore was naturally interesting to me. For others, I’d think the mythology would be interesting in its own right, since the Irish didn’t follow the same patterns as others. Most cultures have goddesses of love, not gods, for example, and the Irish god of love, Aenghus Óg, was kind of a dick. An interesting aspect of your novel is that it places limits on the various religious deities and figures. Gods, we learn, can be killed. Every “faith” has a magic system unique to it, which has weaknesses or strengths in relation to other magic systems. How did this world in which practically every deity that ever “lived” actually exists come to be? I asked myself why only the Irish pantheon would still be alive and well in the present day when there were so many other great traditions out there. And what it all came down to was that I couldn’t come up with a reason to make the Irish the “one true faith.” The great truth is that we all construct our own truths in our efforts to improve ourselves, and besides, it turned out to be much more fun to write with an inclusive view of the world than an exclusive one. Were you at all concerned that your audience would be too unfamiliar with the various mythologies Hexed plays with? Atticus does, after all, explain a great deal of things, but it’s obvious that he can’t explain it all. No concerns at all. I respect the readers. Fantasy readers in general have some pretty good brains, and if they want to know more about something, they’ll go learn. As a reader myself, I love it when I find books that teach me something and spark a little personal investigation. Would it be fair to assume that you are a dog lover based on Atticus’ relationship with Oberon? In a lot of ways, the two characters have an intimate connection that most people wish they had with their pets (and dog-like critters appear frequently in your book). Why do dog-like “things” dominate the cast of Hexed? I’m certainly a dog person, but the number of canine characters in this particular book is a coincidence. I didn’t have any particular point to make with them. But I can say this series was spawned around the characters of Atticus and Oberon—it was always a story about a man and his dog. All the rest of it came later: those two characters are the core. One of your main villains, the Bacchants, could be described as the moral antithesis of civilized society. Hexed walks a fine line in regards to their conduct, since a lot of what you describe as their modus operandi is sexual in nature. Were you concerned while writing the Bacchants that you might cross a line for many readers? Yeah, I’m not really one who appreciates play-by-play accounts of sexual encounters, because if I wanted that, I could go grab something out of the erotica section. I’m assuming that my readers would similarly appreciate a couple of sentences to paint a broad picture and then just leave it at that. Hexed does deal with religion(s), and a good deal of emphasis is placed on “dead religions” and Christian faith. Was writing about such things a challenge, especially considering the potential for alienation your religious themes could have? Challenging, sure. But completely and utterly fun. By choosing to be inclusive (the Jewish faith, which is very much alive, is also featured prominently), I’m also choosing to be respectful of all those various faiths. Every one is portrayed as puissant and vital to those who believe in them. I don’t go around dissing anyone, with the possible exception of Thor. So the only bone of contention I’ve heard is from people who are offended that I’m treating all religions with respect, as if their religion is the only one that matters. You can imagine how much I care for the opinions of such arrogant people. All three of your Iron Druid novels came out in quick succession (Hounded in May, Hexed in June, and Hammered in July). What do you think are the benefits and pitfalls of such a quick publishing schedule? The benefits greatly outweigh the pitfalls. I got plenty of attention and lots of fans who jumped into the series rather than waiting for it to end. In terms of pitfalls, the only downside is that I couldn’t keep up with the publicity side of things; I couldn’t write enough guest blogs and so on to keep up, and I was exhausted. Still, it was a good exhaustion, because everything I managed to find time to do paid some sort of dividend.
An Interview with Andy Remic
(Note: This interview was originally meant to be in audio form for The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Due to technical constraints, Mr. Remic and I decided to conduct the interview in text form.) The lovely Andy Remic has been so kind as to answer a few questions for my blog. I’ve reviewed two of his works (Kell’s Legend and Serial Killers Inc.) and loved both of them. You should definitely give his work a try, or something bad will happen to you. Here’s the interview You’ve recently started up Anarchy Books. What is Anarchy Books and how did you come to be a part of it? What’s the story? I’d written a couple of novels which were not of my “genre” (SFF) and, like every other author, have seen the gradual acceleration of digital publishing during the last couple of years following in the footsteps of the digital music world; and I thought, “why the hell not?” I knew some of my books were doing well digitally, and simply decided I’d give it a try as a vehicle for some of my different genre works. Then I discovered other friends/writers wanted to jump onboard as well, hence Anarchy Books! Ultimately, I suppose it’s my longterm backup plan for when I’ve sexually offended every single publisher I’ve ever worked with, and they all lock me out of the Big Boys Club and in a dark dungeon filled with chains and torture devices. Kinky, these publishing types, y’know ;-). Since Anarchy Books is heavily oriented towards ebooks, what do you think the future of publishing is going to look like? Will ebooks take over the publishing industry? Will they peak at 35% like some say? Will print books become collectibles created by places like Subterranean? I think with platforms like iPad2 and Kindle, the explosion is still happening. Yes, I love to hold a paperback in my bear paws, but if I go to Florida for 3 weeks I can read 15 novels. That’s a lot of weight (read extorted dollars) for the US authorities to add to my airport bill. So a digital reader for me is perfect. It’s also perfect for proof reading my own works, and the wonderful works of my Anarchy Authors. And I think, as younger audiences grow up with digital devices intrinsic to their lives and learning, it will seem abnormal for them to hold a paper book – gradually, these “relics” will go the way of vinyl. Maybe. (The madness being, I am now collecting vinyl again!!). I truly think one day digital ebook sales will outweigh their print companions. And let’s be positive – they’re eco friendly, right? Hurrah! And they also give “the little guy” a chance to get work into the public domain. Your first book released from Anarchy Books is Serial Killers Inc. Can you tell us a little about it? What was the inspiration for the book? Lots of things came together to create this book. I fancied writing a straight hardcore thriller, just for the hell of it – so wrote it without a contract, whilst still fulfilling my SF contracts. I’d been spending a lot of time in Glasgow and London, and wanted to represent these two great cities in some way (and obviously kill characters on their mean streets). And I wanted to write about a sleazy hedonist – so that I could hurt him. A lot. Finally, I despise serial killers, and despise the fact that people can become famous for doing basic inhuman acts to the innocent. I wanted some omniscient payback. It was a pleasure modifying the history of certain real serial killers in the book; writing how it ought to be, not how it was. Your fiction doesn’t pull any punches. Your characters are sometimes vulgar and have awful experiences (such as in Serial Killers Inc), and your action is often gritty and sometimes surreal in its no-holds-barred approach. What drew you to this kind of storytelling over the more common withdrawn narratives? When writing, I find good manners boring. I find passive protagonists the most dull people to read. Watching Dr Who back-to-back for all eternity waving his fecky little sonic screwdriver and pumping his bike pump in the TARDIS is my vision of HELL! When I read a book, I want to read about bastards doing bad things to other bastards. I want nasty policemen hunting down villains and making them pay. I want to read about insane soldiers crucifying paedophiles. And only a few writers seem to write what I want to read, so I write some of it myself. Why write this violence and mayhem, I hear you cry whilst sharpening your pitchfork?? Call it a low boredom threshold and an accelerated cynicism of the world. What do you think is the advantage of this form, if any, and do you think gritty SF/F is making the genre more popular, or do you think it’s a niche kind of writing? I think different readers just like different things. I mean, I absolutely love PKD and yet his work is a world away from mine in terms of aggression and violence. Yes, writers like Joe Abercrombie and Richard Morgan (and me) have dirtied up the fantasy stakes a little bit, and that’s cool, but as long as different readers want to buy different styles of book, then people will write them (thank God!). I’m not convinced gritty SFF is making the genre more popular, because there will always be those readers who love the flowing poetic writings of Tolkien, say. I like them myself. I’m thrilled the genres are booming and SF especially has crawled away from its 1950s pit. SF and F deserve to be up there in neon lights getting the Big Awards and earning the Big Bucks. What is your process for writing the kinds of books you write? (Or, do you hang out with serial killers or take a time machine to olden times to
Interview w/ Darren Shan
I’ve had the pleasure to interview Darren Shan, whose newest book, The Procession of the Dead, came out on the 4th of June. You can find out more about Mr. Shan and his various books, including the Cirque du Freak and Demonata books, at his website. Now for the interview: First, thanks very much for doing this interview. Could you let folks know a bit about who you are? What first inspired you to try your hand at writing (for fun and professionally, if you can disentangle the two)? I’ve spent the last ten years writing books for older children and teenagers — Cirque Du Freak and The Demonata — but I actually started out writing for adults, and now I have returned to that field with Procession of the Dead, the first of a trilogy. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was 5 or 6 years old. I just love telling stories! I began trying to write books when I was a teenager, completed my first full draft when I was 17, and powered on from there. I began writing full time when I was 23 and got my first cheque a couple of years or so later. I struggled to get off the mark with my adult books initially, but then Cirque Du Freak came along by accident — I didn’t plan to write children’s books for a living; I just wanted to try it for fun! Fifteen million book sales later, I’ve never looked back!Who are some of the books/writers who have most influenced you? Likewise, who are some of your favorite authors/books from the last ten years? Stephen King’s been my biggest single influence, but I like to read widely and have been directly inspired by all sorts of writers, from Mark Twain and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, to Jonathan Carroll and James Ellroy, and many, many more. From the last ten or so years, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman has impressed me the most. I also loved Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Your bio indicates that you are a huge movie and comic fan. Which movies and comics do you find yourself going back to over and over and what draws you to them? With movies, all sorts, but some of the ones which I watch religiously every few years or so are everything by Sergio Leone, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Being There (the Peter Sellers film), The Chocolate War, Pulp Fiction, the Star Wars movies, the Godfather films, The Searchers… As for comics, The Watchmen is absolutely amazing and my favourite single work of any medium. V For Vendetta, Miracleman, The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, Love & Rockets, Cerebus, The Sandman, Bone. What does your writing space look like? Are you the messy desk type, or the old cushy chair with the patches type? Pen and paper, old typewriter, or computer? I write on a PC, and I like organised chaos! My office is fairly tidy, and my books are stacked meticulously on their shelves, but there are always bits of paper everywhere, books on the floor waiting to be sorted through and shelved (my books are published in almost 40 countries, so I get lots of foreign editions in the post every month!), CDs of photos waiting to be uploaded to my site, and so on. It’s all fine as long as nobody comes in to disturb it!Do you develop your novels, whether in The City Trilogy or your previous series, with the idea of a series in mind, or do they sort of take a life of their own after the first book? What for you is the most difficult aspect of writing a series of books? No, all of my three series to date started out as stand-alone story ideas. With Cirque Du Freak I knew there would be room to do some sequels if I felt like it, but I didn’t have a long series planned. With Lord Loss and Procession of the Dead I never dreamt that either would be the first book of a series. But after I’d written them, I came up with ideas for stories that tied in with them and took things from there.Procession of the Dead reminds me a lot of Gangs of New York and some of the work by Brian Evenson (along with other 1920s-30s-styled books/movies). What was the inspiration for this particular novel? How did it develop in your head? And why blind Incan priests who seem to be invisible to everyone else? It actually started life when I was watching Barton Fink! I wanted to write a quirky, funny book about an insurance agent and his wacky mentor. But as I played around with ideas it quickly became something more sinister and involved. I wrote the first draft back in the early 90s. Other influences would have been the Godfather movies, Once Upon A Time In America, the old gangster movies that I’ve always loved (the ones with Jimmy Cangey, George Raft, Bogie, etc), the books of Jonathan Carroll. The Incan angle came after I’d pieced together most of the main story. I was looking for a good title for the book, and I remembered reading an Incan calendar some months earlier. When I went back to it, I liked what I found and chose the names for the chapter headings. Then, as I worked on the book and subsequent drafts, the Incans just sort of grew and became more integral. Your books have a particularly dark fantasy slant to them, and Procession of the Dead certainly seems to play even more with the dark, odd, and bizarre. What draws you to the dark and the bizarre and what do you think it is that intrigues us, as readers, about such things? I think it has to do with our fear of death. We’re aware that we have limited time on this planet, and I think most
Interview w/ Susan Beth Pfeffer
I’ve interviewed Susan two times before, which you can see here and here. Thanks again to Susan for taking the time out of her day to answer my questions once more, this time about her most recent novel, This World We Live In (my review can be found here). Here goes: This World We Live In marks the third novel in your post-apocalyptic Earth series for young adults. What was it like finally returning to some of your previous characters? When I was first working out the idea for a third book, I was a little nervous about returning to Miranda and, in particular, her diary. A lot had changed in my life since I’d written Life As We Knew It, and I didn’t know if I could slip back into her mind. I wasn’t concerned about Alex from The Dead and the Gone, since there was a gap of several months between the end of d&g (which ends before New Year’s) and the start of This World We Live In (which starts late April). But a month or less would have passed between LAWKI and TWWLI, and I was concerned that Miranda hadn’t changed, but I had. But once I began writing, Miranda came right back to me. I had Matt make a major life change, which affected how he behaved and made things more fun for me. I created two new characters and there was less focus on Mom.Was merging casts for this novel particularly difficult? What was most challenging for you? The trickiest part was that time gap. I knew from the time I wrote The Dead and the Gone that if there was a third book, Miranda and Alex would meet. But I had to figure out where Alex and Julie were during the winter and, of course, how to get Miranda and Alex at the same place at the same time. For a while, I assumed Miranda was no longer in her house and she and Alex would meet on the road somewhere. But Alex had a minimum of a three month head start on the road, so I could never get that to work. It was an enormous relief to me when I figured out how to have Alex show up in Pennsylvania, rather than Miranda showing up in Ohio or Indiana (or Texas or anyplace). As soon as I worked that out, the rest of the book was fairly easy to work out. I knew that I wanted the book to end with something big and bad, but I went through some different variations of big and bad before I was satisfied. But that’s just part of the process.One of the interesting things about This World We Live In is that it is both a science fiction survival story and a story about the interaction between family members, all within the epistolary format (which you have used since the start of the series). This seems to be a very difficult way to develop relationships among new characters, and yet you manage to do just that through the journal entries of the main character. Can you talk about how you managed to do this? Did the epistolary format hinder you as a writer, perhaps forcing you to plan your narrative in more detail than you have had to do for your other novels? I loved writing Life As We Knew It, and a lot of what I loved about it was the diary format. Diary books are so easy. You’re limited to just what your main character sees. You don’t have to worry about fancy writing (which I’m incapable of, but it’s nice to have an excuse not to try). It really feels like the diary keeper is doing all the work for you; she’s dictating and I’m just writing it down. The Dead and the Gone was harder because it was third person. I considered doing This World We Live In in third person, but decided against that. If Miranda was going to be the viewpoint character, then it was back to her diary I needed to go. This World We Live In was a very tricky book to work out, because it was a sequel to two different books, and there were going to be people who read it without having read Life As We Knew It or The Dead and the Gone (there are actually some people who haven’t read either book, and I was aware of that possibility as well). I had to let readers know just enough, but not too much, since I assumed people who’d read one of the two books might go back and read the other one. I don’t think I’ve ever thought through a book as much as I did TWWLI. It took lots and lots of brain cells.Cats make a prominent appearance in your post-apocalyptic novels, and also on your blog. What’s the deal? Why cats? (You pulled my heartstrings with the death of the family cat in this series, by the way.) When I was growing up, I wanted to have a dog, but my parents wouldn’t let me. I didn’t push to get a cat, but they probably would have said no to that as well. As soon as I had my first apartment, when I was in college, I got a kitten, and I’ve had a cat or cats pretty much ever since. I went for a few months a couple of years ago, after my two cats had died, and I was uncertain if I wanted to take on another pet. But the desire for a cat overwhelmed me, and I adopted a little black and white I named Scooter. Scooter is a lunatic, but there was no way of predicting that when I looked at his darling kitten face. I spent this weekend listening to the Listening Library audiobook version of This World We Live In (Emily Bauer, who was also the reader for Life As We Knew
Interview w/ Jack Skillingstead
Jack Skillingstead was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. You can read my review of his novel, Harbinger, here. Thanks again to Mr. Skillingstead for his time and patience. Here goes: First things first, can you tell us a little about yourself (a sort of mini bio)? I was born in a working class suburb of Seattle and grew up there, which I suppose formed my character in all the usual ways of environmental influences. My dad was a model builder for the Boeing company. He worked on the moon buggy for the later Apollo missions and built wind tunnel models for the piggy-back 747 / space shuttle. I remember him being quite excited about that project. My mother was a housewife and the big reader in the house. I remember being impressed, as a small child, that she was reading a science fiction story — the Post’s serialization of Asimov’s “Fantastic Voyage.” I learned to read by following along with my mother’s repeated out loud readings to me of favorite comic books. And I remember the exact moment the black marks in the word balloon became a recognizable word. The word was “said.” Bradbury claims to remember being born. I don’t remember that, but I remember my birth as a word-recognizer. That remains the most important educational step in my autodidactic life. As for formal education, mine proceeded along unremarkable lines. I have three brothers and one sister, all older. My own kids are grown. One is a student at Chapman University in California, the other is following a more erratic path in life — as have I. Currently I live in the city with fellow writer Nancy Kress, which makes life very pleasant. Who are some of your favorite authors and what are some of your favorite books? What are you currently reading? I especially love the stories and novels of Daryl Gregory. He’s a kindred spirit. Paolo Bacigulupi is doing incredible work, of course. The short stories of Ted Kosmatka are all knockouts, and Del Rey is doing his first novel, The Helix Game, next year. I’m very much looking forward to that one. Those are some of my contemporaries, in terms of publishing time lines, though I’m a little older than all of them. I’m also enamored with Kessel, Kress, Willis, Haldeman and numerous others. Going back, it’s Bradbury, Matheson, Beaumont, Ellison, Sturgeon and Zelazny. These are all writers I return to again and again. I’m talking about genre now, that’s leaving out mainstream and classic writers. Currently I’m reading Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg and Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose, which is a study of Victorian-era marriages of literary types. What drew you into writing, and, specifically, what drew you to science fiction? From my earliest memory I’ve been attracted to science fiction, fantasy and horror. When I was younger — teenage through 20s — the emphasis was more on horror. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Weird Tales era Bradbury, Richard Matheson’s short stories plus Hell House and of course I Am Legend. Stephen King. Peter Staub’s early novels, pre Ghost Story. This was also a time when I read a lot real-world horror — the fast and dirty novels of James Ellroy, for instance. Holy shit! Blood On The Moon. Suicide Hill. That stuff was disturbing. But to get back to your question, I can’t tell you what drew me and continues to draw me to science fiction. People simply have different filters. My filters catch anything that occurs off the straight and narrow path of the mainstream. As for writing my own stories, I always wanted to do that, though my approach was in more of an optimistic vein when I was a kid and thought I’d write Star Trek type stories. When I actually started producing fiction the quality was pretty wretched, and whatever hotspots occurred usually came out of the dark side of my psyche. So it has been ever since. John Clute said something very perceptive is his mini-review of my collection. He said, paraphrasing, sometimes the stories seemed like a form of therapy. I would only add that these therapy sessions, like real therapy, tended to yield the most interesting results the darker and less certain the outcome.Your novel, Harbinger, is placed in a rather interesting place within the spectrum of narratives about immortals. While fantasy has largely focused on vampires and other inhuman immortals, your novel takes a more science-fictional approach to the concept. What inspired you to write Harbinger? There is a science fiction cliché: The ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. I wanted to see what happened to an ordinarily warped man in extraordinary circumstances — the man so warped and the circumstances so extraordinary that the reader, at times, wouldn’t even know if the circumstances were real. This is a little bit of a Phillip K. Dick approach, but I also wanted the book to be fun and adventurous. And of course it had to be tied in to me personally — you know, a “therapy” book. My first inspiration to write it at all was simply that I wanted to do a novel that I could sell. I’d already written several that hadn’t been successful. This felt like a do-or-die effort. It was time. Of course, the book got rejected all over the place, and I didn’t die as a result. And it did eventually find a publisher. You’re right about the current tendency to focus on vampires, but I don’t think Ellis Herrick is too far out of the spectrum of immortals in science fiction history. Zelazny wrote about science fiction based immortals all the time, as did other accomplished writers in decades past. Personally, I can’t get behind romanticizing the vampire, though I did like the first two Ann Rice books. Additionally, what do you think it is that draws us to immortals? Why are we fascinated by characters who can live forever and why do we keep coming
Interview w/ Brian Evenson
Below is my interview with Brian Evenson, author of Last Days from Underland Press and many other novels. Please check out his latest novel, Last Days. It’s good stuff! Now, here goes: Thanks for doing this interview. First things first, tell us a bit about yourself? Where do you hail from and other biographical goodies? I was born in Iowa and grew up in Utah (I was raised Mormon, but have left the church), but have lived in a number of other places since–Seattle, Syracuse, NY, Stillwater, OK, Milwaukee, France, Denver, etc. Currently I live in Providence, Rhode Island, where I teach creative writing at Brown University. Who/what are some of your favorite authors/books? Some of the people I always go back to are Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, especially the trilogy, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Muriel Spark, Isak Dinesen, Henry Green, and Cormac McCarthy. Recently I’ve been reading and enjoying Roberto Bolano and a French writer named Antoine Volodine. There are a few Poe and Lovecraft stories that I love. I’ve just rediscovered J. G. Ballard and am glad to have done so–his story “The Drowned Giant” is really terrific. As soon as I finish this interview, I’m sure I’ll remember a dozen things I should have mentioned… As a professor at Brown University (and a previous professor at numerous other universities), what has your experience been like with young creative writers? Do you notice any unique trends in the quality or styles of fiction coming into existence over the last decade? Is there an overabundance of overconfidence beyond what is considered normal? I like teaching a great deal and it’s always interesting to see what up and coming writers are reading and thinking about. In terms of influences and trends, things seems to come in waves–books and stories that undergrads love one year are completely forgotten or even hated by the students who come two or three years later. I think the biggest trend I’ve noticed, maybe partly because it’s something I’ve encouraged, is that I see more students reading across genre boundaries now than I did ten years ago. The boundaries between literary and genre fiction are a lot more flexible than they once were and that’s reflected in student work–there’s less interest in strictly realistic fiction and more acceptance of fiction that ten or fifteen years ago people would have dismissed as being non-realistic. I think that’s largely due to exceptionally talented writers like Kelly Link and George Saunders writing in a way that made those distinctions seem less important than they do when, say, you’re reading 70s dirty realism. I don’t think there’s an overabundance of confidence among the students–when there is, it’s usually in students that have the least to be confident about. I think, at least at Brown the opposite is true, that many students are almost too self-conscious and self-critical and as a result are in danger of crippling themselves. They have to be taught to see what’s worthwhile in their work and how to make the most of it. I think a lot of students are ambitious, but also very aware that the stories they write don’t measure up to their ambitions: a smart self-critical student who’s actually a pretty good writer can also be very good at talking himself or herself out of ever publishing because the work isn’t as good as, say, Chekhov. The thing they forget is that a good portion of the time Chekhov himself isn’t as good as Chekhov: only a fraction of his stories are really great. You’ve written nine books—eight books of fiction and one critical book. What drew you into writing fiction in the first place? Additionally, what drew you to the dark side of fiction? I’ve always loved to read, and loved to read fiction–I think it offers readers things that non-fiction or poetry just don’t offer. I started writing fiction when I was fairly young, partly in response to my mother writing and publishing a science fiction story. I think I kept writing because it gave me a kind of satisfaction that I didn’t seem to be able to find in any other activity. As for what drew me to the dark side of fiction, I’m not sure. I think I gravitated naturally toward it, maybe partly because I grew up in a culture that was relentlessly cheerful and insisted on looking at the bright side of things. That attitude, perhaps not surprisingly, made me intensely aware of what wasn’t being said, of what was being passed over, of the darker, stranger side of things. When I was fourteen or so my father gave me a volume of Kafka’s stories. It immediately clicked for me, seemed to express exactly the kind of things that the Mormon culture around me was very deliberately trying not to think about. I think, too, that that dark side gives us inroads into the nature of consciousness in a way that the bright sunny side never does, that it reveals things about human nature that are the foundation for the way the mind works. What made you write Last Days (and the story that preceded it)? Did you read something somewhere? Was it a random thought? Did your town actually have a roving cult of amputees? I think it came very simply from thinking for years and years about the Biblical verse that opens the volume, encouraging you to remove parts of yourself if they offend you–at first thinking it was rhetorical flourish and symbolic but then thinking “Well, okay, what if we take it literally? Could it serve as the basis for a gospel?” From there everything imagined itself into existence. I wish that my town had had a cult of roving amputees, but no such luck. I did live across the street when I was very, very young from someone who had lost his hand and I was somewhat fascinated by and frightened of him. The pace of Last Days is fairly quick, not