Thanks for joining us. How the devil are you?
Damn fine. Hope you’re well yourself.
It was awesome. I got a couple of days in Paris, with a signing at a great wee bookshop called Libraire Scylla and a meal in an Arab restaurant after. And another day on the way back, and a lunch with a whole host of French writers, editors and similar. And the festival itself in Épinal was great. Quite different from the usual convention in a lot of ways, which was interesting. Of course, the best part of it was hanging out, chatting with European writers, readers, Florence (my translator for Vellum and Ink), Annaig (my interpretor for the festival), David Anthony Durham (who’s a great guy) — too many people to mention individually. I think the most ineresting thing is seeing this whole scene that you just don’t otherwise have a sense of in the anglophone world, because there’s so little translation from other languages into English. (Like with Utopiales last year, I came back thinking that *something has to be done* about that. Unfortunately, I don’t really know what. I kind of want to noise up some people and see if anyone’s willing to start up… some mad project of some sort.)
So, I finally got my hands on ‘Escape From Hell!’, and I have to say it was an absolute blast to read. What prompted the idea for it?
A drunken conversation in the pub, to be honest, with my mate Mags. I think we may have been throwing around ideas for gonzo movies we should make, her being a filmmaker and me being a writer; and I suggested Escape from Hell!, said in that deep gruff cinema voice where the exclamation mark is audible. We started riffing on the whole idea of the ultimate prison break, what sort of characters you’d want, who you’d cast in the role, and the basics of it came together pretty quickly, the big opening with the Statue of Justice, the closing dialogue lines. It had such a shameless pulp swagger to it and such a balls-out fuck-you attitude to Christianity that you’d have to be mad to make it as a movie — cause they’d be burning you in effigy all across the Bible Belt — but I couldn’t resist fleshing out the basic storyline after. I had vague thoughts of writing the full script just for the sake of it, but didn’t do anything about it. Then a good while later I ground to a halt on a novella I was contracted to do for Monkeybrain Books (in part, the result of another drunken conversation about the good old days when books were 150 pages rather than 500 pages). I’d gone past deadline and wasn’t getting anywhere, and Escape from Hell! just started whispering in my head, “You know, I could be a novella.” I mean, novellas convert pretty well into movies. Short stories are a bit slim, and novels are too meaty, but there’s just the right amount of story in a novella. So I figured it should work in reverse. So I talked to Chris Roberson at Monkeybrain, pitched him this gonzo Gnostic action story — a hitman, a hooker, a hobo and a homo, in the ultimate prison break — and he loved it.
Even though it has no direct connection to The Book of All Hours, its structural style is still somewhat similar. Is it much of a supposition that the characters in Escape From Hell! are, if you like, very distant counterparts to the four main characters in Vellum and Ink?
Well, there’s a fundamental character-type shared between Seven, the hitman in EfH! and Joey in TBoAH, in so far as them both being bad-ass motherfuckers with no compunction about killing anyone who gets in their way. And I could probably see some similarities between Belle and Phreedom, in terms of them both having their life ripped apart and coming out of it hard-as-nails. But Eli and Matthew don’t really correspond to any of the characters in TBoAH for me. Eli’s broken in a different way from Jack, smart in a different way from Fox, and as quiet as Finnan is mouthy. Matthew? He’s gay, but he’s way more insecure and fucked-up about it even than Jack at his most repressed, certainly not the flirty fairy that Puck is. I suspect most of the correspondances are a by-product of going for classic character types in both works — archetypes in TBoAH and Hollywood tropes in EfH!
Pretty obvious question, this, but I guess Matthew was based on Matthew Shepard?
It’s a reference, of course, but the name and death-by-gaybashing are really just… pointers. Little reminders. In all other respects, he’s not really meant to map to Shepard, not like he’s modeled on him. Matthew’s personality bears no relation to anything I’ve read about Shepard. And his background… I sort of see him as coming from Kansas or Iowa rather than Wyoming — somewhere more cornfields than cowboys. Smallville, basically. Really, he’s just my invention, with a couple of touches added to point the astute reader back at the shit that goes on in the real-world. I’ll leave it to Fred Phelps to imagine Matthew Shepard in Hell.
Through the book, there is a an enormous amount of humour underlying everything. Is it safe to say that you yourself had a riot writing it?
Heh, for a large part of it, yes, but I did hit a major wall about halfway through, and found myself really struggling. I’m not sure if it was despite or *because* of the fact that I had it almost completely blocked out before starting, with a lot of the dialogue even, one-liners and snappy exchanges. Maybe because I’d already had all those buzzy moments of satori where you realise, “Hey! I can do this here! And that there! And — ooh! ooh! — if I have X say Y here, it’ll be *awesome*!” With all the detail I already had, about midway through I became acutely aware that it was going to be pushing right up to the word-limit. And with a lot of the fun stuff already basically written, I felt kind of constrained to a workmanlike filling-in-the-gaps. And I was vaguely aware that something else was missing. It was only when I hit on a little stylistic twist in my approach to Lucifer (which I don’t want to spoil here) that a new level opened up in the book, and I found the path again. But the more annoying the obstacle, when you’re writing, the greater the pay-off when you get through it.
In the interview you did for me a few years back, you made mention that you had plans to work on a re-telling of Gilgamesh. Is this still on the cards?
It’s still on the cards, but it’s bubbling away on the back-burner at the moment. I’ve got the basic structure in place, written extensive notes, parts of the text here and there, and I know pretty much the whole shape of it now. But it needs to gestate for a while longer, it seems. I sort of think I have some autonomous part of my psyche that works on my fiction unconsciously and only releases it into my conscious mind when it’s good and ready. Like when I sit down at the laptop and try to access that part of my brain, all I get is one of those “site under construction” web pages. It’s annoying as fuck, but I find I can’t force it. It may be I’m just not fucking disciplined enough yet, of course. But my Muse seems to be a fucking intransigent bastard at times.
So at the moment, I’m playing around with ideas for two potential sequels to Escape from Hell! — Assault! On Heaven! and Battle! For the Planet! Of the Dead! As you can see I’m incrementing the exclamation marks with each volume. All titles should be read with that booming, gravelly Hollywood voice-over sound. I sort of wonder if this is my Muse again, still recovering from The Book of All Hours, insisting that we do something that’s good old-fashioned pulp right now, until we’re ready to get down and dirty with… well… the oldest story in written history that also just happens to be a profound mediation on the nature of humanity and mortality.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch. I got a pre-release copy direct from the source, and it’s fucking awesome — of course. Obviously I can’t say too much, given that the book’s not even out yet, but it’s Jeff’s last Ambergris work, and a fitting end to the series. Noirish and bloody, and it zeroes in on some of the big mysteries that are alluded to in City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword.
What was the last album you bought or, ahem, downloaded?
No Motive, by 3 Teens Kill 4 — an 80s post-punk / New Wave band from New York, with a couple of gay members in their ranks. The East Village Boys website had a link to a free download (so it’s all nice and legit), so I thought I’d check them out. Haven’t listened to it all yet, but I’m liking what I’ve heard so far. I won’t try and describe it, but if you like that good side of the 80s music scene, you should check them out.
Something of an old tradition, but if ever you find yourself in Budapest, I owe you a drink for taking the time out for doing this interview.
Why, thank you. And you know if you’re ever in Glasgow…
Cheers Hal.
Cheers, man.
Hal should go after a couple of guys, Niven and Purnelle, for stealing his title. I think they have a little money, too.