It’s late afternoon, day five million of this insatiable year, and I’m melting into an overstuffed chair, doing whatever I’m doing on my computer—checking email, collecting fun facts about my father’s mortality, finding new things to be ashamed of—when suddenly I hear a sound like a leaking balloon and I glance up and there he is, the dog I’ve married into owning, lying belly up on the couch, looking like he was dropped from a helicopter and landed comfortably on his back. Paws to the sky, tongue lolling from his mouth. He’s taking me in with upside-down eyes, waiting to see if I’m going to move in the direction of the door that leads to squirrels or the door that leads to the box full of the matzoh he’s recently developed a taste for. I’m not. I’m not even his real dog dad. I’m just a sad guy in a big chair, looking at a dog over the top of the computer I’m too often looking into, thus the neck pain, the ache behind my eyes, between my lungs. I shut the computer, though, and as I do, the dog cocks his head, angling for a better view of my feet. He’s got one front paw folded, the other extended, like young Travolta. He’s half asleep but looking to dance. He’s ready if I am.
We stood on top of our worlds as we knew them. The fall could kill us. Or worse. All part of the thrill. Henny, Walsh, and I were on the last level of scaffolding wrapped around the Bronson Windmill in Fairfield. We were heading into our senior year at Greenfield College Preparatory School. If you think we had on boat shoes judging from the last sentence, you’re wrong. Only Henny and I had on boat shoes. Walsh wore oversized flipflops with bottle openers on the soles. We sat down, dangling our feet over the edge of the scaffolding, swinging them back and forth above the hundred foot drop. Our cargo shorts were still damp from earlier when we jumped off the cliffs at Devil’s Glen into the river below, oblivious the devil was ever there or ever anywhere.Henny and Walsh were two of my best friends. I looked over at them. Walsh with his pellet gun slung over his shoulder and his Marine haircut to be like his older brother over in Afghanistan. Henny had our communal bong, Sir Bubbles Puffington II, in the padded bong case, slung over his shoulder like it was a bazooka. His babyface was angelic and devilish at the same time. Henny was short for Hennessy. He always told everyone he was from the Hennessy Cognac family. He wasn’t. His dad worked on Wall Street.I sat beside Henny and Walsh with a plastic bag full of three Coors Light forties from the bodega in Bridgeport that never ID’d us. I handed them their forties and we twisted the caps off.“Boat shoes are the cowboy boots of Connecticut.” Henny clicked the toes of his shoes together.“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Walsh laughed.I looked out at the view. The windmill was on the tallest hill in town. We had a panoramic view. The kinda view suckers in our town paid millions of dollars to wake up to every morning. Ours was better though because it was free. Free for a limited time only though. The windmill used to power a dairy farm in the 1800s for some dude named Bronson. Then it was a nonfunctioning windmill for awhile, preserved to remind everyone of what came before us. Then a cell phone company bought it and decided to repurpose it into a cell tower which was why the scaffolding was up that summer. It was still gonna be a windmill on the outside, but it was gonna be a windmill wired to the gills with cell phone stuff too. Change can be crazy like that, turning a historic windmill into a cell tower, restoring it so it didn’t fall in on itself, didn’t just crumble to pieces. As for us three, we were falling in on ourselves a little up there at the top of our worlds as we knew them.I looked up at the sky. A high-flying jet from JFK or Laguardia was a fly buzzing over the clear blue edge of God’s dead face. God was dead to me then. Every plane, even high-flying ones, still looked like another news cycle. Walsh took his pellet gun off his shoulder and aimed it at the far off plane. I looked out instead of up, at Long Island Sound, what we call The Sound in Connecticut. To the east was The Sound, then Long Island itself, then the Atlantic. To the south, The City. The horizon aligned with the last level of scaffolding so perfectly at some angles it looked like a gangplank leading directly to the Manhattan skyline where things happened. We didn’t climb up for the view though. The view was a byproduct like resin caked in our bong. We climbed up to shout fuck you down at our town below, the words echoing back at us, too young to know what being on top of our worlds meant.It was the summer of 2004. The summer we climbed that damn windmill every chance we got. But that night was our last. After we smoked the bong and threw our empty forty bottles up in the air, after Walsh shot at them and missed, after the bottles shattered on a stonewall below, and after we shouted our fuck yous and climbed back down, we got in a bit of a pickle. We were smoking the bong again in Henny’s Jeep on the road beneath the windmill. Henny and Walsh were in the front seats. I was always paranoid, so I turned around and looked out the back window. A cop car had materialized outta nowhere a few hundred feet behind us. A cop got out, drew his handgun, aimed it down at the asphalt and tiptoed towards our car. I turned around and hunched into the front seats.“Cop, for real.” I placed the smoking bong between my legs in the backseat, covering the mouthpiece with my palm.Henny sprayed the Ozium and put all the windows down. We trained for this regularly. We were prepared. I looked out the back window again. The cop continued his slow march, one step at a time. When he got to the back bumper, I faced forward and stared straight ahead. I shoved my bag of weed under the driver seat. In my peripheral, the cop was almost at the driver-side window. That was when Walsh got out of the passenger seat. Walsh had his hands up. I didn’t know if it was because the cop told him to put his hands up, or he did it to show the cop he wasn’t holding anything. It was a blur. “Just meeting up to go out for the night.” Walsh walked towards his brother’s Wrangler he was allowed to drive while his brother was off at war. “I’m getting in my car. We’re leaving now. Sorry for any trouble, Officer.”The cop seemed confused. The cop holstered his gun and continued walking up to the driver-side window. He bent down to look at Henny. He looked like a rookie, only a few years older than us maybe. I cupped my palm over the bong even harder.“What’s on your lap?” the cop asked Henny.Henny was a smart dude. He was no idiot. He’d tell the cop it was oregano, spices for our youth group’s pizza night. He’d say anything except a bag of weed, Officer.“A bag of weed, Officer,” Henny said.A bag of weed, Officer. The honesty angle. The cop will understand. He was a teenager not too long ago.“Outta the car!” Rookie Cop screamed. “Put your hands above your heads where I can see them.”I took my hand off the bong. There wasn’t any smoke left anyway. Things got hazy for a few minutes. More cops arrived. Next thing I remember was us sitting on a curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs, unable to swat away mosquitoes eating us alive. So many cop cars it looked like a murder scene. Our wallets, cell phones, bags of weed, the bong, and the pellet gun were on the hood of Henny’s car.Rookie Cop told another cop “Three Stooges here were shooting that pellet gun on private property and smoking that big bong.” Rookie Cop had his hand on his holstered gun. “I responded to a shots fired call, guns blazing. Lady reported three men on top of the windmill shooting a gun. You believe it?”The other cop swatted a mosquito on his forearm, smushing it into blood and said “Don’t look like these three’ll be curing cancer anytime soon.”So the three of us sat on the curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs like a real meeting of the minds. I stared at our warped reflections on a cop car door. Walsh was crying. He struggled to wipe his tears with his shoulder because of his glasses. He kept muttering our lives were over, that colleges wouldn’t take us with criminal records. I looked over at Henny who had this smirk on his face like getting arrested was something to cross off his bucket list. I looked at myself. My hair was cut high and tight because Mom never let me grow it out and it was so blonde I got called Village of the Damned kid at school sometimes. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t think getting arrested was badass. I’d also be lying if I told you part of me wasn’t scared shitless.“I need the three bags in the back of the Jeep,” I told the cops. “My parents are divorced. I’m going to my dad’s tonight.”I was always explaining my parent’s divorce to people and not because I wanted to. And I was always having to lug around my duffel bag, backpack, and PS2 in its travel case whenever I went from one house to the other.“Relax, sweetheart.” One of the cops said. “You’ll get your bags.”The cops finished searching Henny and Walsh’s cars. Read us our rights. Crammed us into the back of one cop car. Our hands still cuffed and smushed behind our backs. We weren’t buckled in with seatbelts. Rookie Cop got in the car, turned it on, and hit the gas. But the cop car was still in park. The engine revved so loud all the other cops stopped what they were doing to laugh and bust Rookie Cop’s balls. I was surprised cops made mistakes too. I thought about asking him if they taught him that in the academy. Make the other cops laugh, bust his balls back after he busted ours, you know, live a little. Cops and robbers shit. But I remained silent.Once Rookie Cop figured out how to put the car in drive, we drove off. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen was playing on the radio. Reality hit me when we passed Mom and Pat’s house. Pat was my stepdad. It was the house I’d gotten picked up from less than an hour before, after I finished an SAT practice test and Mom searched my bags and my cargo short pockets for drugs, but she didn’t check the waistband of my boxers where I stashed the half ounce. I saw our white house with green shutters. Our golden retriever, Max, ran along the Invisible Fence line at the edge of his existence. I saw the giant sun-faded American flag that Pat had fastened to a clothesline he nailed between two trees almost three years ago, the week after The Towers fell and everyone put those little plastic flags in their car windows. The flag was three thousand ghosts flailing in the August breeze. The flag was a lot of things I didn’t understand.Rookie Cop drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, softly singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” and mumble singing the verses. Every turn felt like the game Jell-O, our weight shifting into each other with the curving hills of backcountry Fairfield as we passed big houses with nuclear green lawns. Downtown, the houses got smaller, but the lawns were still nuclear green. Bush and Kerry yard signs everywhere. Sidewalks appeared. Everyone was staring at our meeting of the minds going on in the back of that cramped cop car. Joggers. Dog-walkers. Labs and golden retrievers. Lance-Armstrong-looking wannabes on expensive bikes. Young commuter couples walking into restaurants. Moms or nannies pushing babies in strollers with ridiculously oversized wheels. Old men with War Veteran snapbacks watering their driveways with gardenhoses. A gang of kids with glow stick necklaces around their necks about to bike through the haunted graveyard. OxyContin-addicted Phishheads from our youth group who robbed us for a half pound of pot smoking cigs outside the pizza shop they work at. Even a laminated memorial picture stapled to a tree, the picture of this kid who killed himself driving drunk a year ago. All of them had eyes that followed us. I was facing the kinds of consequences Mom and Pat had tried to prevent for years. They were always saying they didn’t want to see me end up like my stepbrother Ralphie. He’d faced all kinds of consequences from drugs.We passed Fairfield train station. Commuters walked up the stairs from a northbound local. If we hadn’t gotten arrested, we’d have driven in circles smoking the bong until we ended up at McDonald’s and ordered McDoubles with Big Mac sauce off the Dollar Menu. Henny would’ve dropped me off at the train station for the last train out of Fairfield, the 11:48 local to Stamford. I’d’ve taken the forty minute train ride, transferring once in Stamford onto the local to Grand Central which stopped in Cos Cob, a neighborhood of Greenwich without mansions, where Dad lived. Every Monday night and every other weekend, I went to Dad’s where I had no curfew, unlike Mom’s where I had to be home at 10PM sharp.Rookie Cop pulled into the back of the police station as Bruce screamed at the end of the song. We were unloaded from the car in an area resembling a grocery store loading dock. Henny and I smirked when we looked at each other. Walsh didn’t smirk whatsoever. We were led single-file into the station like a sad little parade. Henny and I were being charged with possession of marijuana (our separate bags were combined, a little cop trick, but still weighed a gram and a half short of a felony) and possession of drug paraphernalia. Walsh was being charged with the same, plus something about the pellet gun. Rookie Cop led me over to the fingerprint station. As he pressed and rolled each fingertip into the ink pad, then onto their little squares on the sheet of paper, I stared at a McGruff the Crime Dog poster. I’d met McGruff once when he came to my school in third grade for a D.A.R.E. rally while a uniformed cop helped him waddle around the gym. On the walk back to our classroom, we’d all seen it. A bald man with an upper and lower body much-like Scruff’s, but human hands smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich. Scruff’s hollow head and front paw gloves were lying on the grass beneath the man’s paws. It was like learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. Scruff couldn’t take a bite out of a sandwich, let alone crime.When the fingerprinting was over, the ink stained my fingertips, smudges I’d carry into the future. Another cop took my mugshot. It was nice not having someone telling me to smile a real smile for once which was what Mom always said. I called Dad instead of Mom for my phone call. I’d’ve rather stayed in jail than gone back to Mom’s that night and faced Pat who sometimes cared so much about me I wondered if he cared about me at all or if maybe it was some long gone version of himself he was trying to save.“Dad, I got arrested. I’m at the Fairfield Police Station,” I said.“Jesus Christ, Sean. You were arrested a month ago.”That was true. I’d been arrested the month before in the parking lot of this Connecticut fast food chain called Duchess for yelling the chorus to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba at the top of my lungs and also for underage drinking. It was only a summons. No handcuffs. No cell. Just twenty hours community service and some fines.“What happened?” Dad asked.“We were smoking pot.”“I’m leaving now.” Dad sighed. I heard my stepmom, Paula, in the background, saying “What is it? What happened?” Then dial tone.I was led to a cell by a desk job cop. The cement block walls in the small row of cells made everything echo. A drunk guy in a wrinkled suit with no tie was in one of the other cells. He had his hands on the bars. He reminded me of the pirate trying to coax the keys to the cell from the dog while the jail burned in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. “When am I getting outta here?” the drunk guy asked. Desk Job remained silent and pointed at the empty cell for me. I walked in. The bars slammed shut behind me. I was alone. I thought about how being arrested would effect the future Mom had planned for me. College, all that stuff. The future I had planned for myself didn’t exist.Walsh was led to my cell shortly after. I wanted to say something to him like it was gonna be alright, but I wasn’t sure if things would be alright. Henny was dumped in shortly after Walsh. We were quiet for a while. The air-conditioning was blasting. It was freezing.“Our lives are over,” Walsh said. “I’m eighteen. I’m gonna be charged as an adult.”“It was some pot and a pellet gun,” Henny said. “We’ll be fine. Fuck the cops.”Henny gave the finger to the camera mounted to the ceiling. I shook my head and slouched up against the cement wall. My teeth clattered from the cold. Walsh cried again. In the moment, I felt strong not crying. I felt like a man, like an adult, like I was ready for the real world, though it would still be three months until I could legally buy cigarettes and blunt wraps or fight a war for oil or vote for one moron or another. My mind back then told me when you get arrested for smoking pot and shooting a pellet gun and you don’t cry, you become a man. Walsh was the manliest of us three. That was the weird thing. I pulled my arms and my head into my t-shirt so it was a little tent. There was a buzzing sound. I peered out through one of my sleeves. Desk Job came into the hallway, opened the cell door with a set of keys, and told Walsh his parents were there. Walsh got up and told the cop his life was over. Desk Job remained silent as he led Walsh away.I thought about Ralphie again. About how he’d been arrested a couple times. About how he ended up. About how Mom and Pat were gonna say I was on the same road as him, a predestined path to destruction because they’d been saying that since they caught me with a pack of EZ-Widers and a few weed stems and seeds freshman year and acted like I was shooting dope into my jugular. I already knew drugs were bad. I also knew they were good. And cool. I already knew drugs were bad though because of how Ralphie ended up, but I wasn’t doing the kind of drug he ended up doing. I swore to God on my mother on my father on my life I never ever would.“I got the munchies.” Henny laughed as he laid back on the bunk with his hands behind his head. “Do you think we’ll get any Burger King? My cousin got Burger King when he got arrested. Or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows?”I told him I didn’t think so. I told him I didn’t think we’d get any Burger King like his cousin or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows. I needed to tell myself something too. I needed to be like, self, listen up, when you’re in a holding cell, there’s always something you need to tell yourself. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of poor decisions. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of anything as a matter of fact. You need to tell yourself you're powerless over most of the things you wanna control and everything you think you know about life when you’re seventeen is bologna. You need to tell yourself you’re an idiot kid dousing his life in gasoline. But you don’t tell yourself anything like that because you haven’t lived enough to know the difference between what you can and cannot change. You need to ruin your life before you can tell yourself not to ruin your life. So instead, you sit and you wait for your parents to bail you out. You sit and you wait next to a drunk man in a suit with his hands on the bars like the cell is on fire and the keys are gone. You sit and you wait for the cell to burn down around you or for the cell to burn you up with it. You sit and you wait and from the top of your world you scream fuck you down at anyone trying to save you. You sit and you wait and you scream and all you hear are your own echoes.
I was introduced to Jeffery Renard Allen’s brilliant short story collection, Fat Time(Greywolf Press, 2023), by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (prize winning author of Dancing Elephants). At the time I was a participant in her short story class. She made a habit of urging me to get out of my reading rut and explore the work of writers from divergent cultural backgrounds. Chaya had plenty of good things to say about Allen’s Fat Time, so I bought a copy.I should explain that I come from the opposite end of the cultural universe from Mr. Allen and the characters he portrays. I’m a seventy-plus-year-old retired programmer who grew up in Houston, middle class and Jewish. My reading has been a steady diet of southern gothic writers and the British and American classics. By contrast, Mr. Allen grew up in South Chicago and worked his way to a successful academic and literary career. His characters in Fat Time are people of color. Some from desperate circumstances. Some with world-class talent. Some brutalized. Some celebrated. Their stories are different as different can be from my own lived experience. And yet, I was enthralled. His stories were lyrical, literary and challenging in the best way. They took me to places I will never know.Mr. Allen responded quickly to my request for an interview, proving to be very approachable and an altogether authentic and decent fellow. He kindly agreed to answer a slate of questions. Some are about the Fat Time collection. Some are about craft. Some are about a writer’s life. Sometimes we’re lucky to connect in real time with a writer who affected us.KM: Mr. Allen, thank you for agreeing to an interview.JRA: Call me Jeff.KM: Cool. Let’s dig in. I found the writing in Fat Time beautifully lyrical. It’s also a complex and demanding read. When you compose, how much weight do you give to the reader experience?JRA: My first concern is to myself. In a nutshell, I write primarily because it’s what I do, writing is who I am. I work hard to create the best manuscript I can, something that I feel is an honest reflection of how I see the world. For whatever reason, I have a hard time telling a story straight. Also, language excites me. Language is my entry point to creation, meaning that part of my individuality as a writer gets expressed in my singular approach to words and syntax and rhythm.Some of my favorite writers—Proust, Faulkner, Nabokov, Henry James, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison in Beloved—are demanding. They don’t/didn’t cut corners. (Well, James did try his hand at playwriting because he was desperate for money.) They were smarter than I am.Even if you consciously try to shape a manuscript to be more “commercial,” there is no guarantee that it will find a popular audience. As writers, we have little control over the market. Obviously, publishers spend a lot of time and money promoting a small number of books. But for me, writing is one thing, the publishing industry is another. Writing is an act of faith. All I can do is try to write the best manuscript I can.KM: How would you describe your ideal reader?JRA: They would be a person who enjoys and appreciates the pleasures and rewards of literary fiction, literary narrative. I am a political person, a progressive, a social democrat and internationalist committed to justice, for all people. Social and political concerns certainly inform my work, but they are secondary. I don’t believe that literature is an effective way to change political discourse or change the world. Not to badmouth anyone, but it seems to me that almost everyone in America now has political pretensions. It has become expected of us. I’m not interested in trends.I do my work. That said, I still hope to gain a larger readership over time. I am a huge fan of Michael Ondaatje. Somehow, he has been able to strike a balance between serious literary fiction and a popular readership. May I do the same.KM: The stories in Fat Time are vivid; the descriptions specific, often metaphorical and highly decorated. For example, the scene in “Heads” at the shawarma shop. “...the rim of the sky catching fire”, “trees bent like fingers,” “building ballooning,” and “tangled stalks of words.” All in the length of a random page. It’s lavish. When you compose, do these images tend to flow out in your initial visualization? Or are they primarily the result of considered and scrupulous revision?JRA: I’m gifted with a knack for metaphor. Simile, metaphor, and image—those come naturally to me. I think visually. (On one level I’m a failed visual artist. When I was a kid, I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for several years.)I’m also a poet. Although I rarely write poetry these days, I still read a lot of poetry for inspiration. Perhaps I remain a poet at heart. As memory serves me, Jean Cocteau—poet, filmmaker, novelist, visual artist—said that he was a poet at heart and a poet in everything he created. The same could be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini, another multi- faceted artist.When it comes to metaphor, I would not separate that device from everything else that happens on the page. Namely, sound, music is important. I find tremendous inspiration in music, especially jazz, artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker, among others. (On another level I’m a failed musician.) I strive for a type of syncopation in my prose. And I also strive for a type of layering, multiple directions and voicings.KM: Are you ever concerned that a metaphor might be strained or that it bogs down the flow of the narrative?JRA: In the revision process, I edit to make sure that I’m not overwriting, to avoid things like hyperbole, mixed metaphor, and sentimentality. But, as you know, writing is always paradoxical. So much goes into the initial drafts. I keep informal notebooks for every manuscript where I write down metaphors, images, sentences, and ideas. Revising is largely about concreteness and precision. As a writer I strive to be a stylist. Lyricism is not the same as purple prose.That said, I admire and appreciate all kinds of writing, including minimalists and writers who strive for a transparency of style. The important thing is to write well. And writing well is always hard. I maintain tremendous respect for anyone who gives their life to this largely thankless profession.KM: How do you begin writing a story? Do you typically start with a scene? A character? An oddity? As you’re building up a story, how do you tend to grow the narrative? Chronologically? Thematically? A Character reaction to circumstance? Some other method?JRA: I’m not sure if I have one formula for starting a story. First, let me speak to the pre- writing process. I’m in the early stages of planning a new collection of twelve stories, and perhaps the only commonality is that I want to write about some real people who interest me: Kunle Adeyanju, Virgil Abloh, Paul Robeson, Ota Benga, the Fiske Jubilee Singers, my former brother-in-law who has spent most of his life incarcerated, etc. I’m usually inspired by characters and situations. (What was life like for Paul Robeson when he lived in the Soviet Union? He never spoke about his time there. That gap in knowledge affords a space for my imagination.)When I begin writing, my general strategy is to start at a place in the story that I think I know best. That might be an image or a scene. It might be the beginning or the ending. Then I try to sketch out the overall shape of the story in a very rough and fragmented draft. At some point I begin to fill out the story scene by scene, section by section, although that filling in may not happen in strict chronological order.KM: The Fat Time stories are divided into Parts 1 and 2. What considerations went into that split and the ordering of the stories of the book?JRA: I don’t think of Fat Time as a collection of interrelated stories. I’m sure there are correspondences, but I did not plan those relationships. I had thirty ideas for stories and didn’t know if they would be one book or two or three. But I whittled those ideas down to the twelve stories in the published book.In some ways the stories are a mixed bag. Some stories are about Africa. Other stories are about the U.S.A. Some stories are set in the past. Others are set in the present or the future. Some stories are riffs on real people or inspired by real people. Others are about completely imagined people. In organizing the stories, I placed them in an order that made sense to me. I do think there is a sense of narrative momentum as you move from one piece to another. And the collection seemed to naturally fall into two parts.KM: Did the editors participate in the ordering?JRA: My editor at Graywolf Press, Ethan Nosowsky, did not make any suggestions about the ordering of the stories, although he gave many other important suggestions. However, he did with my first collection, Holding Pattern. He even suggested that I retitle the collection. (It was initially called Bread and the Land after one of the stories in the collection.)In the new collection of twelve stories I’m working on, six stories are set in the past while the other six are set in the present. Pretty simple.KM: The stories in Fat Time include historical characters. They might be considered historical fictions. I once heard Hillary Mantel give a talk. She said that in her books about Thomas Cromwell, she was deeply concerned that the narrative be historically accurate. The fiction was used to animate her characters. During the talk, she proposed a moral high ground for historical novelists. She argued that “...We shouldn’t recirculate the errors of the past generation or their prejudices. We should join in an honest project to help the public understand that history is not just a body of knowledge but an interpretive skill.” Do you feel constrained to avoid ‘alternative facts’? Is it important that a reader of Fat Time finish the story with an accurate understanding of Jack Johnston, or of the atrocities in South Africa, or the degenerate life of Francis Bacon?JRA: I don’t think of myself as a writer of historical fiction. I have no interest in writing fictional narratives that dramatize events and people of the past. Instead, I write riffs on real people, places, and situations, what some people might call alternative histories. I view this as a form of speculative fiction, more so given the supernatural elements in my fiction. I would characterize myself as a modernist in terms of technique and my concerns. But I’m also a fabulist.When I do research, I’m not driven solely by a concern for historical accuracy. I’m also looking for gaps in the historical record that will allow me to invent narrative. And I’m also looking for interesting facts that I can riff on. For example, I read that Francis Bacon lived in South Africa for a time during his early adulthood. Given my interest in Africa, that was a fact I knew I needed to use. Then I thought about something my doctor had told me years earlier. She had a photograph of herself petting a lion taken on a safari in Kenya. She explained to me that in that moment she was so terrified of the lion that she urinated on herself. In “Heads,” Bacon urinates on himself when he pets a lion in South Africa. This is often how things come together for me when I compose a story.As for Jack Johnson, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about how he spent his time in Australia when he went there in 1908 to fight Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship. That was the starting point for the story “Fat Time.”For the Miles Davis story, “Pinocchio,” my original plan was to write a fragmented narrative that dramatized various anecdotes I heard about Miles from various people who knew him, incidents that I had never seen in any of the biographies about him. But then other things began to make it into the story. For example, the nephew in the story is based on my friend Anthony Chisom who died tragically the way the nephew dies in the story. In addition, my Miles Davis is still alive and well. His evil deeds extend his longevity, lengthen his life, my take on the Pinocchio story. And, of course, Miles recorded a song called “Pinocchio,” which was, among other things, inspired by the Disney cartoon.KM: I found your use of time very inventive. For example, the story “Fall” begins in the middle and folds back in time as if told in a recollection. That’s preceded by “Testimonial” which reads like a prologue to “Fall.” It’s a puzzle at first. There aren’t many clues. These relative placements were disorienting, but make perfect sense on second reading. How do you arrive at the sequence of the story telling? Do you have a design in mind? Perhaps there’s an effort to replicate a dinner-table conversation where the teller leaves out important details that must be filled in with digressions. Or is the order governed by the sequence of composition? Or some other method that you could describe?JRA: Every story comes about differently. (Miles Davis advised, “Play what the day recommends.”) “Testimonial” is the earliest story in the collection since I wrote it in October 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. It was my response to 9/11 and came to me in the form of a dream.“Fall” was more planned. I saw the Nat Turner film, The Birth of a Nation, back in 2016 when it first came out, and I was so disappointed with the film that I began making plans to write my own story based on Nat Turner. Then I began to think about Nat Turner in terms of certain conflicts in the political world today. I spent a lot of time in Tanzania and learned about the horrible phenomenon where people with albinism there are hunted for their body parts. So I decided to do a kind of retelling of Nat Turner’s revolt focused on people with albinism in a fictional African country with Turner’s “confession” still serving as a model (structural) for the piece.Overall, I see every element of a story in terms of the progressive development of conflict. So, for example, I don’t think of flashbacks or past action as “exposition.” Timewise a story can move in any direction and push the conflict. Also, asides and dreams can amplify the conflict. I’m drawn to the sea of African time where past, present, and future exist all at once. And I think of reality as a layered continuum encompassing the unconscious, dreams, fantasies, altered states, and the everyday. So rarely do I think of a narrative in terms of beginning, middle, and ending. Much else can happen. For me, narrative is always mythical, archetypal. I’m not a realist. And linear narratives feel artificial to me. I’m more drawn to broken and circular narratives, what I call “shadow narration.”KM: Could I get you to think back to your days as an emerging writer? No doubt you received comments from other writers, instructors, and editors. Some helpful; some not. There seems to be two verdicts... our own and our readers. When revising, do you make pragmatic compromises on the advice of a trusted reader? How did you, or do you, go about reconciling the two?JRA: I don’t have any first readers, although I do from time to time share a recently finished manuscript with a friend. Usually, I have a strong sense that a manuscript is or isn’t working because I’m a slow writer and spend a lot of time trying to get everything right. But I’m also aware that a good editor can see things that a writer can’t. I speak from experience since I’ve had the good fortune of working with people like Ethan Nosowsky, my editor at Graywolf Press.In composing a manuscript, I think it’s important for a writer to have a strong sense of what s/he hopes to achieve and say in a manuscript before seeking out the feedback of others. I don’t think it’s the job of a first reader (or workshop cohort) to “correct” your manuscript. Part of the process of developing as a writer is coming into your own with regard to voice, vision, and value. How do you see the world? How can you articulate what you see in language that is uniquely your own? Finding answers to these questions will involve discovering what you value in literature (and in other art forms). Which writers speak to you? Why? As a developing writer, ninety percent of what you learn comes from reading and from learning how to read properly. I like craft books that focus on reading. I’ll mention two here. I really like Francine Prose’s How to Read Like a Writer. The title says it all. I’m also a big fan of Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design, which focuses on structure as opposed to the workshop format.Some writers don’t believe in the workshop process because workshops can take a boilerplate approach that allows no room for individual expression or innovation. As well, some developing writers will take every opinion in a workshop as the truth and try to respond accordingly. I would advise the writer to listen to the people in the workshop who seem to understand what he is attempting to do in a manuscript.However, every writer is different. Some people rely on readers. Others don’t. As I said earlier, I don’t. To each his own.It’s worth bearing in mind that the workshop is an American invention, and that most writers in other parts of the world develop outside of the workshop system. However, an MFA writing program can have its benefits like affording one time to focus on writing and reading in a supportive community of like-minded writers.KM: You write frankly and vividly about sex between the characters in “Big Ugly Baby.” Do you have any advice for writing sex scenes? Any words of caution? Any red lines that shouldn’t be crossed?JRA: It goes without saying that it’s hard to write about sex in literary fiction or any literary narrative, for that matter. Usually, sex in literary fiction is psychological. But that can easily become a cliché. So how can you write about sex and make it fresh and interesting, without it becoming either trite or pornographic? A year or two ago I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the first time and was surprised that so many people at one time found the novel scandalous. I found the novel moving and powerful. Lawrence often gets a bad rap, but I think his best work—the short stories and novels like Women in Love—are as good as anything. Lawrence was doing his best to figure out love, both heterosexual and homosexual, and he tried to write about it honestly, even if he got some things wrong. His work never feels pornographic to me.But pornography can be a good thing if you’re writing satire. Satire is best when it offends. (Think of the brilliant South Park. Or think about Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is in large part about a dude who gets an erection whenever the Nazi’s fire a V rocket at London.) So if you’re writing satire, you may want to cross all the red lines when it comes to sex.KM: Do you consider yourself to be a polemical writer? I was wondering because “Orbits” struck me as a polemical piece. It’s a fantasy about the life of the black princess Laila. The daughter of the world’s leader, a descendant of Malcom X, who, with the aid of Moon People, have ascended to the leadership of the world government. It’s a troubled time. A porcine curse has turned black people into pigs. White devils have tails amputated and they turn green if they die. Survival of the race depends on good relations with the Moon. Is it reading too much into the story to find racial overtones in this cast of characters?J.R.A.: I’m not a polemical writer. As I said earlier, I’m a fabulist. Before anything else, “Orbits” is a work of speculative fiction. This story has a specific origin. Some years ago, I met Elijah Muhammad’s youngest daughter. She explained that when she was a girl growing up in Chicago, she and her father lived across the street from Muhammad Ali. Ali gave her her sixteenth birthday party at his home. That was the origin of the story. Something else happened. Once, I was on a bus in Brooklyn and overheard an older member of the Nation of Islam telling a teenage boy that there are people living on the moon. These people live inside the moon and have a lifespan of a hundred years. The third source of the story was an incident that I witnessed when I was in high school in the late seventies. I developed this coming-of-age story from three different sources. Other things in the story riff on the actual beliefs of the Nation of Islam.KM: Cultural norms change. For example, Flannery O'Connor wrote her satires when racism was normalized in the culture. Her stories use lashing humor and demeaning stereotypes to make moral statements. They often rile people up. It seems to me that a story like “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is still relevant to our time. Do you think someone like Flannery O'Connor is worth reading in the current cultural context? Should she still be read? Or is the preservation of her work like a statute of Bedford Forest, something to be shunned?JRA: I don’t believe in censorship. That includes “canceling” artists for their aberrant beliefs or abhorrent behavior. Just as some readers might be offended by some of the racist statements Flannery O’Connor made in interviews, other readers might object to the heavily Catholic nature of her fiction. Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite writers. I find her stories brilliant on many levels—funny, wicked, violent, and highly symbolic and resonant.If I read a story or look at a painting or see or movie or listen to a piece of music, I take the art for what it is. I don’t know anything about the person who created it. If I’m impressed or blown away by the art, I will probably do some research and find out more about the artist. But I’m not doing so as a way of discovering some troubling facts about the artist for the purpose of dismissing the artist and his/her work. I think we need to rebel against that Stalinist approach to art and artists.KM: I’m retired now, but when I was working, I did a poor job of keeping the working hours in check. I was captive to my obligations. As you were coming up as a writer, did you ever struggle choosing between life and the project of writing? Is there any warning you might offer to young writers making their way? Any hints about the best way to balance the creative and commercial portions of the job?JRA: In an interview once, Miles Davis said something like “Music is ninety percent of my life. My wife and friends are the other ten percent.” I think here he speaks to the obsessive nature of art. My experience has been that making art is an obsession. You do it because you have to. You don’t have a choice. It’s a calling. It’s who you are.On a typical day, I wake up early, before 5:00. I walk for 90 minutes. Then I start writing. I work for four hours. I try to find time later in the day to read for at least two hours. And I also jot down notes and ideas. That’s a full day. But time has to be made for your partner, your family, and whatever else. And even when you’re not writing, you’re thinking about it, mulling over some idea or problem. In an interview, Miles Davis says, “I think about music all the time. I’m even thinking about it now.” That’s how it is, making, creating.I don’t believe there is an easy solution to the work-life balance. The reality is, if you are genuinely an artist, writing needs to be something more than a hobby. You have no choice but to maintain a schedule. The disciple of a schedule is crucial to creating work. The best you can do is work out some compromise with your partner and family. And you have to also earn a living.When I taught full-time, I asked for classes in the afternoon and evening so that I could write in the mornings. But I know some writers who can’t write for an entire semester when they teach. They completely focus on teaching.When I go away to an artist residency, I put in more than four hours a day, usually at least eight hours. I have even worked around the clock.Writing is a torturous process. The process is hard, both mentally and physically demanding. However, if I take a day off from working/writing I feel guilty. Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse.KM: Writing is often described as a lonely pursuit. However, it’s my understanding that to have a literary career today, it’s necessary to take a leading role in the marketing and promotion of your own work. Is that your experience? Do you see yourself reading on stage as you write? Does a successful writing career demand a person develop performance skills? Would you advise an emerging writer to cultivate some showmanship? Is getting a book published a little like the dog who catches a bus?J.R.A.: In today’s market, reclusive writers like J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Octavia Butler would not get published. One reality of the publishing industry today is that publishers expect you to promote your work through public appearances and on the Internet. So it is.That said, writers are not actors. And not every writer is a performer or showman. (Harlan Ellison would go to a bookstore and sit in the window writing a new story. That evening he would read the story to the public.) I would encourage a writer to simply feel comfortable and confident in public. And read your work in your natural voice, with your inflections and rhythms.It's also important to find a suitable passage to read before an audience. Not every passage is suitable to a reading. Select a passage that reads well. And remember to look at the audience from time to time. Make eye contact.KM: Before closing, I’ve got to ask, what book did Lamont pull off the shelf in “Big Ugly Baby” or Laila in “Orbits.” I’m sometimes asked by friends for short story suggestions. With emerging authors in mind, are there three short stories by contemporary authors you would consider essential reading? Are there three short story collections by contemporary authors you consider essential? What’s important about those works?J.R.A.: I recently read a terrific collection by a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World. The stories were surprising and never predictable. Most serious readers by now should know Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections, Lost in the City and Aunt Hagar’s Children. Jones is like nobody else. The stories are smooth and simple on the surface, with the energy and momentum of spoken tales. He brings his characters alive on the page. I’m also a huge fan of John Keene’s Counternarratives. Keene explores a wide range of locales, forms, modes, and voices in this masterful collection.But let me not stop there. John Edgar Wideman is a master of the short story. Wideman totally reimagines the form through a narrative voice that both is and isn’t him, that both is and isn’t autobiographical. Start with his first collection, Damballah, and read all of them. The Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett is also a terrific short story writer. His stories are traditional in form, but they sparkle and are alive. The late Mavis Gallant is not a contemporary, but she is one of my favorite writers. I would recommend her collection Paris Stories, which was curated by Michael Ondaatje. She has a Chekhovian range where each story has the depth of a novel. She was a remarkable stylist and always found innovative ways to approach the short story form.KM: Thanks Jeff. You’ve been very generous. This has been a wonderful experience.J.R.A.: No sweat. Happy to do it.
I always thought I was a science project. Maybe all girls are. Today I listen too hard and become a sound reflector, sound detective. I click my converse and my head splits like Zeus. Through my skull my alloy daughter emerges. She is like me but picks up gossip frequencies. Particular metal. Flagellum and scape. Dipoles and cables. A sci-fi fascinator for prom. Now more radio than girl. I lean, press, pick up the waves of other girls. Someone said the trees were moving, but it was the world. Silence does not exist here on the moon, in this girls bathroom. Talk, talk, talk. Some of it alien. Who is wearing a bra that doesn’t need one? I search for my name in the washroom static: somebody fell down the stairs at a party, somebody had sex, somebody is too messed up to go back to class, someone is climbing out the window, someone’s period, someone studied and failed, someone talked too much shit. My name isn’t on the air today. I will be patient and ritualistic. I will take tests instead of falling out of the nest. One day soon I will be on the girl radio and they’ll send my name up like a rescue flare asking me how I got out.
Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order on this “Recommends” list, I’m choosing to focus on Void-related works. Otherwise, there’s just too much out there to love. Joe Koch, The Shipwreck of Cerberus(self-published limited edition, 2023)Joe Koch is known around the void as the “King of Horror,” and The Shipwreck of Cerberus is the perfect example of why. It’s adorably small, like a Filthy Loot book, and a Joe Koch limited edition. He was kind enough to set aside my numbered copy so I could pick it up at VoidCon 2023. The action revolves around Rex, who has some interesting sexual encounters with a green woman and an actor-father figure whose decapitated head Rex has an established relationship with. The magic of the book is how you can open it to any page and read a beautiful sentence that evokes an immanent and other-worldly image. Joe Koch gives zero fucks about making it easy for the reader, because he is more concerned with being superb.Brian Allen Carr, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press, 2013)I got this from Brian at VoidCon 2024 because it’s the one nobody else has and holy fuck, Brian Allen Carr is good. This is a short novel about a guy with very long arms just killing the fuck out of everybody, but the emotional sincerity of this character, his trials and tribulations, and his love for Edie ring so true. There’s a category of art that’s just the plain and simple statement of something soul crushing, and Brian Allen Carr is in there, along with Fred Eaglesmith, Neil Young, and Cormac McCarthy. I also feel a bit like Carr has tricked me into empathizing so hard with this long-armed murderer. But I am with him, for him, and I don’t care what he has done. I believe it was inevitable, understandable, and he should be lauded as a genuine hero in an unkind world—a tragic hero. OF Cieri, Lockdown Laureate(Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I picked up this collection from Castaigne Publishing after reading OF’s Backmask, which I gather got a whole lot more attention than these stories. There’s one blurb on the back from Evan Dean Shelton, who is the publisher. But damn, people, read this book. It’s beautifully illustrated by Rachel Lilim. The paper is good quality, and the cover can take a harder beating than anything I’ve had printed on demand. And then there are the stories. It’s the kind of grimy literature that makes you feel the best and worst parts of being alive simultaneously. It’s isolation and social performance and an interiority you’d be privileged to access and oh wait you can if you just read the book. I read the whole thing on one plane trip. OF has style plus content plus a gracefulness of expression that propels you forward in the text. I loved every minute of it.Michael Tichy, Wound of the West(Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I traded Tichy for this collection of “Four Harrowing Tales from the Draw” at VoidCon 2023, and goddamn, Tichy can write. The West is the old timey American west, and the wound is a scalping that the character in the first story survives. Tichy writes like someone who’s been scalped and left for dead and then come to accept it. There’s a gravity to it and a peace. Just read this: “Will is eating the same hare, drinking the same muddy water, sweeping the creeping sand out of a doorway that you stare at each day and hope, pray that some shadow comes to break the light apart. That someone will darken that doorway and kill you or save you, because you can’t do either yourself, and at this point both come to the same.” It’s devastating how at home with despair he is. Highly fucking recommended.Justin Lutz, Give Unto Us(Ghoulish Books, 2024)I picked up Justin Lutz’s novella at VoidCon 2024, after I previously wrote a blurb for his short story collection Gone to Seed, at the request of Ira from Filthy Loot. Give Unto Us is a hole story—a family (mom, dad, and toddler) move into a lakeside house that turns out to have a sandpit in the backyard, and the sandpit exchanges items they drop in for items it acquired from the previous owner before his unexpected death. Of all the void books, Justin Lutz seems pretty normal, in the sense I could see this selling copies. I would definitely watch this movie, and I would gleefully watch the part where Trevor just fucking boots his toddler (away from the sandpit), because Lutz understands that it’s funny when children get hurt. What jumped out at me about this book and from talking to Justin is how much he loves his wife. There’s a capacity to write characters and plots that I think he gets from the fact that he just loves his wife to death, and it’s obvious from the first page all the way to the acknowledgments. I don’t know; it’s just so fucking nice to read a woman who was written by a man who actually fucking loves his wife, and I think that makes Lutz a better writer—and a better person—than a lot of other horror figures.Rios de la Luz, An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints(Broken River Books, 2023)I will always associate the Broken River Collective with the void, because they were well-represented in its inaugural year, even though I didn’t meet Rios until a few months later at AWP. Her book of short stories feels like the rose+eyeball+anatomical heart being pierced by the fiery dagger that graces the back cover. Her prose is piercing, impossible, and bloody. The back of the book says that the stories within were inspired by motherhood, and she does not hold back. It’s the lyrics of music inspired by the heavens and the answer to the question of what if emotions had viscera. David Simmons, Eradicator (Apocalypse Party, 2025)Simmons is a grotesque master of ceremonies with a heart of gold. He had the crowd mesmerized when he read a story called “Whole Time” at VoidCon 2023. (You can listen to it on the Agitator Patreon site for free.) After that, I read the Ghosts of East Baltimore and Ghosts of West Baltimore set, which tell the tale of Worm, a recent felon whose release catalyzes a series of absurd and gory events. So obviously when I had the opportunity to read the manuscript for Eradicator, I jumped at it. Simmons is hitting at the extremes with this one. It’s hilarious, disgusting, relatable… if you laughed at the end of The Substance, check out Eradicator, forthcoming 2025. Alexandrine Ogundimu, The Longest Summer(CLASH Books, 2023)I feel like Alexandrine Ogundimu should be on every list. For me, she’s the third in a triangle of horror writing grounded in filth and despair, alongside Elle Nash and BR Yeager. This novel is hard to summarize, because its effect has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with the fact that Ogundimu’s sentences feel like they were only made possible after a hard run through a deep pool of pain and self-reflection. It’s biting and revelatory in a way that, “This is a book about someone accused of stealing from a store that seems very similar to but legally distinct from Hot Topic” doesn’t capture. Alexandrine participated in the void prompts leading up to VoidCon 2023 (This was a series of writing prompts using a word-of-the-day distributed by group chat on Twitter.) Maybe next year she’ll show up for real.Stanley Stepanic, A Vamp There Was(Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2024)This book has three parts – the first part epistolary fiction about a man named Middy who falls in with a vamp who happens to be a vampire, and this fiction is supplemented by historically accurate facts about Fredericksburg, Virginia in the 1920’s. This is followed up by a scholarly essay on how the “vamp” character of the time is conceptually distinct from a vampire but certainly meant to recall the bloodsucker’s image. Rising feminism finally made women threatening enough to take on the role. The title is a nod to the 1915 film A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara as the seductress who ruins the life of an unsuspecting family man. The rest of the book gives short biographies of notable vamps of the time, which reminded me of Debra Nails’ The People of Plato. This book shines in how it provides the explicit historical context for its own story, and I’ll always remember this aha moment from when Stepanic is putting the pieces together for me about how, according to the historical record, woman becomes monstrous simultaneously as she becomes capable of exerting her own agency—that for a whole movement in popular culture, becoming master of one’s own fate and becoming a monster are the same thing.Honourable mentions to Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, whose books I blurbed. (You can go read about them on the publishers’ websites.)
The factory closed the week before Christmas. The owner had moved his operations to Bangladesh. Emanuel had spent eleven years on the assembly line. It was the only job he knew. Marta, his wife, could no longer cut hair. Her condition made her hands tremble to the point that her clients had begun to complain about nicks on their necks and ears. They were three months behind on rent, the electricity was shut off. Their kids were eating crackers and trekking through the snow with holes in their shoes.Emanuel had once had luck betting on football matches. That ended, as all good things do. He owed Ahmad, his bookie, three thousand francs. The man had already taken his scooter. Now the threats began.“Your wife is very lovely,” he said. “It would be a shame to put her to work, if you know what I mean.” “You know my situation,” Emmanuel said.“Meet me tonight,” Ahmad said, “and your problem will be solved.”Emmanuel tucked the children into bed, kissed his wife, and put on his threadbare coat.A wet snow was falling. Sloshy puddles had appeared on the street. The air was cold enough to make Emmanuel’s teeth chatter. He slipped into a dive bar he had often passed but never entered. Some men were yelling at the barmaid. Emmanuel ordered a glass of whiskey and downed it in a gulp. He ordered two more and found himself quickly drunk. Ahmed was waiting on the street in the posh neighborhood he’d directed Emmanuel to. “What do you want?” Emmanuel said.Ahmad lit a cigarette. “Not far from here lives a banker. You’re going to rob him.”They walked a few blocks and stopped in the shadows of the hedgerows surrounding a grand house.“See that window?” Ahmad said. “Climb in. Go up the stairs. The bedroom is on the right. In the banker’s closet, you’ll find a large, gilded box filled with his dead wife’s jewelry. All you have to do is get the box and bring it here.”“How do you know this?”“In another life, I was a woodworker. I built his cabinets.”Emmanuel clambered through the window. The house was dark but for a sliver of moonlight through the window. In the living room, a portrait of the banker and his wife hung above the mantle. Emmanuel crept up the stairs and snuck into the bedroom. The banker was snoring loudly. There was something ridiculous about the old man’s head on its enormous pillow. Emmanuel knew that if he didn’t take the box this very moment, he never would. Do this for your family, he thought. The box sat glimmering on a shelf. He snatched it quickly, too quickly, and slammed his knee into the closet door.“Who’s there?” the banker said. Emmanuel’s foot snagged on the rug. No sooner had he fallen than the banker punched his back. Somehow in the dark, Emmanuel found the box and smashed the banker’s face. The old man staggered back and crumpled to the floor.“I’m so sorry!” Emmanuel cried. “I’m so sorry!”The banker’s eyes fluttered, his lips bubbling with spittle and blood. “Help me, please!”Emmanuel wanted nothing more than to get away, but the banker gripped his coat. The old man was surprisingly strong. Emmanuel had to wrench himself loose, finger by finger. He ran down the stairs and out the door. Ahmad stood across the street, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Emmanuel thrust the box into his hands. Ahmad opened it and smiled.“Your debt is settled,” he said. Emmanuel stumbled home and collapsed to the bathroom floor. He lay there for a long time, praying that God would not punish a man in this position. After a time, he felt better. He undressed and crawled into bed beside his wife.“Are you okay?” she said.“Go back to sleep,” he said.
In town there were a series of murders. Each attack occurred beneath the almond tree spiking through the pavement in the center of Second Ave. No one seemed to care. Everyone walked the sidewalks as if nothing strange had happened. They chatted about the weather and watched the mailman wander the knotted maze of the streets. They met up for brunch and dinner and played games with their children and dogs in the park. My wife and I were terrified. We drove to the supermarket using an alternate route each day. We avoided our friends on the weekends in fear of their possible secret lives of violence. We breathed the flakes of obsidian in the air and vomited blood into the downstairs toilet each night. It was a strange year. In December, the wagonwheel of reeking bodies disappeared underneath a jagged tarp of glistening snow. The engines of our cars screamed upon starting. Our neon lips shimmered within the milky glow of the chilled sunlight.
Steve Aylett, The Book Lovers (Snowbooks, 2024) [caption id="attachment_16833" align="alignright" width="301"] .[/caption]Steve Aylett is back with a new novel that could very well be his best work yet. In The Book Lovers, Aylett’s fireworks are at maximum intensity – dazzling, dizzying, and coming straight at you. Launched from one of the all-time great opening lines – ‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best’ – the text is hilarious, profound, and just a delight to engage with. Almost every sentence is rich, full of meaning, and contains enough avenues of thought to construct a city around. The majority of these sentences lay out truths so deep one wants to sit and spend an afternoon contemplating them. The writing, however, sweeps you along, crackling with electricity, megavolts on their way to illuminate heart, brain, and soul. I’m not the only one singing such high praises, the cover – and the artwork is lovely – features similar commendations from Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, and Robin Ince. No one writes prose like Steve Aylett, or has quite such a singular worldview, ultra-cynical but way too funny to be completely despairing. His is a precision that appears out of thin air a millimeter away from its target. “‘It’ll get worse before it gets better’ – the fact that this statement is perennial should tell you something,” explains Sophie Shafto. Hugo Carpstein tells Inspector Nightjar “It’s your job to depict justice, isn’t it?” It’s that ‘depict’ that is perfect, saying so much about the surface level workings of government and its employees. As referenced above, there’s some of Aylett’s best character names too, and this is reflected in the version of 1885 London the book is set in, with locations such as Shroomsbury, Kimlico and Biccadilly. Another excellent joke I want to point out is ‘Albion holds its citizens in two cupped hands, and is sometimes so pleased it applauds.’The setting is quite literally a steampunk world. Steam being one of the three main forces that powers industry here. The other two being voltaics and the wonderful ‘denial engine’, which the human race has most likely been running on since the dawn of time. There’s more plot here than in a typical Aylett book, though one can be forgiven, what with everything else going on, for not catching every detail. Sophie, daughter of magnate Lord Shafto, has been kidnapped and Inspector Nightjar is on the case, interrogating a cast of personalities who, whether given the chance to speak or not, spout sidesplitting bizarre complaints often only tangentially related to the topic at hand. With the book being so much about, well, books, it is tempting to look for Aylett himself behind the masks of say Hugo Carpstein or Sir Percy Valentine, and a description of the writer Emmanuel Feste describes our author to a tee – “an obscurity with a sixth sense of humour who was said to have blown ‘a swarm out of a whistle’, shouting from one horizon to the next about how morality is not altered by altitude and annoying all by demanding that his pursuers keep up.” Sophie Shafto is a precocious youth who has sensed the importance of books from an early age. “In a box of sunlight by the window she tasted a vibratory honeychain of ideas confirming that human beings think and feel, a fact unacknowledged by the real people in her young life.” Books abound through the text, as they should in something called The Book Lovers, and there is a lovely bit of prescience in the fact that despite this being the late 19th century the population has become engrossed in ‘mirrored books’, complete with leather spines, held in one’s hand and gazed at all day long, an excellent dig at cell phone culture. And while these are an example of the superficiality of the masses, The Book Lovers is a testament to the power of books – in what it says about them and what it is itself. Kevin Maloney, Horse Girl Fever: Stories (Clash Books, 2025)In Kevin Maloney’s fiction there is always something wondrous happening, often pop-culturally infused, and the narrator is keenly aware of both. They happen to and around him, and his retelling of such experiences is almost always hilarious. This is greatly aided by the hyperawareness of their own shortcomings and willingness to dive headfirst into them. Maloney’s narrators keep falling deeply in love with every woman they see, whisk the willing of these off to exotic locales, and will most likely at some point vomit over themselves from drink, drugs, or a cocktail of the two. That’s not to say these stories are purely comedy or that the frequently dark subject matter – suicidal strippers, surprise deaths, teenage drug addicts and dealers – aren’t handled with concerned care. And the tone itself is never too dark, even when worlds are completely falling apart. I won’t conjecture that this is Maloney’s reason for writing these stories, but there is a (often desperate) need on the part of the narrators to connect with another human being, body and soul, no matter what the cost. Fortunately, some of these objects of affection are aware this isn’t in his best interest. For instance in the final story, ‘Epicenter’, where – after he’s been tossed into the alleyway by a gigantic bouncer and there attacked and bitten by a rat – a stripper tells him he doesn’t want to date her. Maloney’s presented circumstances seem as much jokes as they are all-too-real possibilities. There’s a lot of ridiculousness but it’s the kind of ridiculousness that is life. And I can’t overemphasize how funny Maloney is. A lot of that is down to his killer succinctness. His ability to give a tight, honest assessment of a situation with optimal word choice is powerful indeed. The first three stories – ‘Ghost’, ‘Hannahs’, and the titular ‘Horse Girl Fever’ – all blend comedy and tragedy in the above manner and offer the widest range of emotions in this collection. Next up, ‘King Of The Pit’ is less nuanced, an account of seeing Alice In Chains during the third Lollapalooza, but it keeps getting funnier and funnier as undefined drugs crank up the mayhem of that strange bonding ritual known as the mosh pit. ‘Wrath Of The Red-Eyed Wizard’ is an ode to navigating work, alcohol, and sex after turning 40, while ‘Malaria Diaries’ sees the narrator and his whirlwind romantic partner cheating death down in Columbia. ‘The Informant’, one of the best stories of the bunch, takes things back to pure comedy, though the setting is still pretty dark – a dry run for drug smuggling gone very wrong. Within the humor, Maloney manages to throw in some wonderful descriptions of the U.S. Southwest – “spent the night whizzing across the mystical dreamscape that some people insist on calling Arizona”. The drugs keep on coming, and ‘No No’ is a first person recreation of Dock Ellis’ 1970 no-hitter, pitched under the influence of LSD. Given the subject matter, it fits right in. ‘Bloop’ is also a highlight, a few days spent experimenting with a drug called Lotricaine, an anti-fungal cream for birds. This new high goes beyond ketamine, which itself is excellently described as “makes you feel like you ripped the wings off a Pegasus and used them to fly over the city of your birth, laughing at your enemies”. The past few years have proved that autofiction can be very funny indeed, with Maloney’s 2023 novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim being one of the best of the genre. Horse Girl Fever proves a fine addition to his work. Madeline Cash, Earth Angel (Clash Books, 2023)Speaking of hilarious autofiction, Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel is a delight. Cash’s prose is sharp, crisp, ironic yet real in a very pleasing way. Her dialogue is even punchier. Nothing wasted here. Her descriptions are always charmingly odd yet perfect to the situation. The humor comes from numerous angles – irony, a childlike wonder at the shit adults get up to, bemusement at all human interactions, wry acceptance of particularly puzzling aspects of modern life even while our humanness rails against them. In the first story, plagues have descended upon us, but at least this proves that God exists. This is followed by ‘The Jester’s Privilege’, an over-the-top account of a ludicrous though entirely-plausible-in-this-day-and-age PR job, changing the public face of a terrorist organization. While that’s happening the narrator also deals with a heavy friendship rivalry based on status, this derived from work and lovelife, and her own tepid uncertain romantic relationship. And kudos for a couple hilariously dark lines in a wedding speech. The two best stories are the title tale and ‘Slumber Party’. The latter being one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Nearly every sentence is a gem. The narrator wants to have a sleepover for her 30th birthday but after it becomes apparent how out-of-touch she is with her closest friends, she hires a company to create the experience for her. The corporateness of the affair is outrageously funny while the cost of the whole thing is simply outrageous. Cash has a unique sense of callback, always unexpected and, again, very droll. While Cash’s work is mostly comical, it’s not all so. There are keen observations about the awful way men too often treat women. One aspect of the title story is Anika’s truly horrific boyfriend, the famous actor Jake Willner, an ultra-violent control freak. While Cash details Anika’s attachment to him, Anika also of course has her own agency, the main part of the story being her interactions with the CEO of ‘Nosi’, a highly toxic and controversial fragrance machine manufacturer, who she’s tied to a membership program impossible to get out of. The different layers ‘Nosi’ operates on is bound to bring a smile. Another arrow in Cash’s comedic bow is when she has characters drop matter-of-fact truths. There are many excellent uses throughout the book, delivered in sniper-esque single shots, and said CEO neatly summing up Jake Willner on page 76 is exceptionally devastating. Cash also has a great sense of how amusingly complicated anything can get, shown at the end of ‘Earth Angel’ when she explains why Anika’s little brother doesn’t want to press charges against the car that broke his tibia. All the best qualities of Cash’s work culminate in this story. And these seeds blossom across this entire collection.John Patrick Higgins, Fine(Sagging Meniscus, 2024)With his debut novel, Higgins capitalizes on the dark humor offered up in his short dental surgery memoir, Teeth. Fine is not strictly a comedy novel, however. While there’s jokes aplenty – and almost every chapter title is a pun – the prose tends more towards Martin Amis than Wodehouse. That said, Wodehouse is mentioned by name in the getting-to-know-me third chapter, as Leave It To Psmith is protagonist Paul Reverb’s favourite book, The Smiths his favourite band. So complete a picture do we get of Reverb’s likes and dislikes, it would be understandable to take this as more autobiography. Higgins, outside of the book, has stated this is definitely not the case. But top marks for making it so believable. Reverb is at work on a Young Adult novel about a hypnotist vampire by the name of Count Backwards. Interestingly, this pursuit is not the main focus of the story. Rather we see Paul as he comes to grips with uncomfortable parts of his personality and as he tries to be a better person. It’s just that in doing so, things tend to turn out pretty badly for him. Of course there’s other times where he’s not trying at all. One of the funniest bits in the novel is the ‘Through a glass, Barclay’s’ chapter, about a ‘dedicated wank day’ gone horribly and hilariously wrong. Much more wrong than you could imagine. And that’s not the only time in the novel there’s an issue with the same activity, the next being an incident which has the funniest description of a penis I’ve ever read – “furious and red, like a man arguing with a deckchair attendant”. It’s not all that obscene, though. There’s pop culture references galore throughout, for Paul has, as you might guess, a sizeable record collection and is very fond of film. As often goes hand in hand with these, he’s not so adept in the romance and socializing departments. These matters aren’t always played for laughs, though Higgins’ strong comic touch is never far away. There’s a quite touching funeral scene that nevertheless spawns a few good jokes. And without wishing to give anything away, the twist at the end is handled very well, especially considering how poorly it could have come off. But rather it is proof of Higgins’ talent that the denouement is so pleasing.
I was almost five years old, it was Christmas day, and I knew something was wrong because I’d gotten everything I’d asked for: a blue and white-checked gingham romper with buttons up the front; black, mid-calf cowboy boots with red stitching; and, most surprisingly, a fluffy black puppy with a bright white chest whom I would come to call Kentucky.I had never been to Kentucky and am not even sure how I’d learned the name, but I’d tested out several words from my dog name list and determined this was the best one.
A dog’s name should ring out when shouted. “Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy!” I hollered from the back door, “Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyy!” I liked the way it sounded in the wind across the field. Yep, I thought, he would come to that.
***
My mother, her boyfriend Sonny, and I had just moved into an old farmhouse. It sat in the middle of a field at the edge of a trailer park down the gravel road from a lake, just north of the invisible line separating North Carolina from Virginia. They chose Virginia because that’s where Sonny’s three best friends had decided to start a business together, and they were cutting him in. They were dental techs–the fancy word for people who make false teeth–and running your own studio was the only way to make actual money in that profession back then. We were poor, so we moved.As we drove out of North Carolina and into Virginia, my mom pointed out countless road signs that told us Virginia was for lovers. I whispered Virginia is for lovers over and over again like an incantation under my breath–all the way until we made it to the new house. Maybe if I said it enough times, it might actually come true, I thought. Maybe we could really love each other there. And we did. Our Kerr Lake year was the happiest of my life. The house was old. The roof was a rusty blue tin that sounded like needles when it rained. The downstairs floor was made of shellacked brick that stayed cool all year long. Mine was the only bedroom. It was downstairs next to the kitchen, and my mom and Sonny slept upstairs in a small loft. The kitchen was tiny, with a half-sized oven, two burners, and a built-in griddle top. There was a fireplace, but there was no insulation. It was perfect.
***
Me, Kentucky, the boots, and the romper were inseparable. So inseparable that, even after days of wear, my mom would have to wait until I was asleep to take the romper from me and put it in the wash. When I’d awaken and realize it was gone, I’d be totally inconsolable while waiting for it to dry. I’d end up wearing that thing for years, only abandoning it once it started giving me a permanent wedgie that no amount of slumping could disguise. Just a few days after Christmas I came home from school and my mom was acting weird–extra nice–when she greeted me at the door. I noticed a swing inside, hanging from the eaves. It was made from two long ropes and a flat piece of wood, shellacked just like the brick floor. I wondered where it came from and why it was inside.“Do you want to, maybe, swing on it?” my mom asked playfully as she gestured toward it.Of COURSE I wanted to swing on it! I was the only kid I knew to have a swing INSIDE the house, and I couldn’t wait to brag about it to everybody at school.“Where did it come from!?” I asked.“Sonny made this for you.”“Really? Why?” I was suspicious considering Christmas had already passed.“Because he loves you.” She pushed me on the swing, high into the air, in the middle of the house. I pumped my legs, but the whole thing felt strange. Like a trap. And I wondered if I’d get punished later even though the whole thing had been her idea.“Hey,” she continued, “What would you think about Sonny becoming your dad?”I stopped swinging my legs. “But I already have a dad.”“Well,” she pushed, “What if Sonny were your dad instead?”“How does that work?”“Sonny would sign some papers saying he wants to be your dad, and after, your birth certificate would show his name instead of Mark’s.” “Will he want me to call him ‘Dad?’” I asked. I had never even called my birth father ‘Dad.’ I called him by his first name, Mark. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the word.“I’m sure,” my mother responded.I thought back to the last time I’d seen Mark. It had been a few months—our final visit together before we moved to Virginia—and as my mom drove us away, he cried, “Ryan! Ryan! Don’t go!” His arms were outstretched, but he ran slowly. Even at that age, I could tell the difference between acting and sincerity, and he wasn’t trying hard enough to fool me. But it didn’t matter. Just hearing the words felt good. I didn’t care that they weren’t real. But then I remembered how my mom told me that when I was a baby and she had to leave for work, Mark would place me, screaming, in front of the window facing the driveway so she’d feel guilty as she pulled away. I didn’t know what to think. I felt the swing hard beneath me. I felt the boots snug on my feet. The gingham, scratching against my soft skin. I watched Kentucky, asleep on the sofa facing the back window. I liked this life–this house, this place, how we were together–and I wanted to keep it. So I said yes, and wondered when I was supposed to start calling Sonny "Dad."
***
My mom loved creative types but craved the stability of a solid career. The two didn’t usually go together but Sonny seemed to fit the bill. They were in their mid-twenties when they met at a houseparty. Sonny’s band was playing, and his stage presence caught her attention. Learning that he also had a career got her hooked. To earn a living, he’d found a trade where he could make use of his creativity–one where his skills in porcelain and carving and color theory set him apart. Back then in the early 90’s, before advanced computer software and 3D printers, dental techs had to be artisans–each tooth a tiny, nuanced sculpture that you had to get just right. It wasn’t the best job in the world but it was enough, and it was steady, and so was he. Once Sonny entered our lives, we were safe, we had a regular place to live, and for the first time, I felt a sense of belonging and possibility that dissolved the anxieties our former conditions had produced.
***
January was really cold. The grass crunched underfoot. ‘Tucky played in the snow. I had started visiting a neighbor when I got bored–the woman living in the house across the field from ours. She managed the trailer park down the gravel road and I’d stop by to help her move rocks around. Something about creating sections for her garden.One day she told me how, when mama birds were really desperate, they would build their nest right on top of another family’s. They were willing to kill, she explained, to give their babies a safe place to hatch. I didn’t believe it. But then she opened a birdhouse and showed me two nests, one stacked on top of the other. She lifted the top one so I could peek between the layers and, sure enough, the bottom nest was filled with brittle, unhatched, abandoned eggs. I thought about the mama bird. I wondered if she’d ever gotten over it.
***
Winter turned to Spring and all the conversations I overheard in the house centered around wedding planning. Late at night when I should have been sleeping, I’d press my ear to the crack at the bottom of my bedroom door and hope to hear my mom and Sonny talking about it. I’m not sure what I thought I’d learn but I distinctly remember wondering when the whole dad switch was going to happen and if it would coincide with the wedding. Maybe it had already happened. I didn’t know how these things worked. I was looking for clues.One night I heard them argue. Sonny’s business partners had decided to cut him out of the business, but they had already agreed to be his groomsmen. They could afford to keep him on as a part-time employee for a little while, but he would have to find a new job soon. How would they pay for the wedding? What would he do? Where would we live? My mom was furious and said he should uninvite them, but he said no. Spring turned to Summer, and Sonny married my mom in the backyard underneath the big oak tree. It was beautiful. My mother wore a faded rose silk antique dress she had found at a thrift store. The sleeves were puffy, the skirt was full, and it seemed to have a hundred pearl buttons going up the back. She couldn’t reach them herself, so she had to be buttoned in and unbuttoned by somebody else. It was probably a young girl’s cotillion dress at one time. I was the flower girl. I walked down the aisle first after Sonny, and stood beside him waiting for my mom. Sonny was fairly tall–about six feet–and stayed tan all year long. He was fit in a casual kind of way, with greenish hazel eyes, and had a tidy, permed, chestnut mullet. I’d never seen him this dressed up before and he looked funny in his tux, like he didn’t belong in there.My mom came down the aisle next and she looked like a goddamned angel. There had been a light drizzle that morning–a sign of good fortune, everyone said–and the whole world glowed. The sun streamed down softly from behind the clouds and created a halo behind her. I didn’t recognize either of them, looking so adult and dressed up and respectable. The couple said their vows, and Sonny gave my mother a gold wedding band that he had made. They kissed, everyone clapped, and then Sonny turned to me. He pulled another ring out of his jacket pocket and got down on my level. He took my little gloved hand, put a tiny gold ring on one of my little gloved fingers, and said something like, “I’m yours for life, too.” I cried. His groomsmen weeped. And the bridesmaids swooned. Sonny was a good, good man.
***
Sonny couldn’t find work after all, so not long after the wedding, we had to move back to North Carolina. My mom’s drinking picked up again and she began getting jealous of how much time Sonny and I spent together. One night when she was drinking and just the two of us were watching T.V. in the den, she looked over at me and said, “You know, the only way a new person can adopt you is if the other one agrees to give you up.”“Your father,” she said, “owed a lot of child support. So I told him that if he gave me a computer, and signed you over to Sonny, I’d agree not to sue.”She laughed, “Can you believe that!?” and then went to bed.I turned off the T.V. and walked to the guest room where we kept our IBM. This room would become a nursery just two years later but, for now, the only person using it was Sonny. He’d get high and then spend hours alone with the door closed, creating portraits of Jerry Garcia in Microsoft Paint. I looked at the computer and wondered how much it weighed. How much it was worth. I called Mark to ask but he did not answer. I went into the garage where ‘Tucky lived and cuddled him for a while in his dog bed before going to my room.
***
A couple years passed, my mom was pregnant with my sister, and the guest room had become a nursery. It was a Friday and she unexpectedly picked me up early from school. We suddenly needed to go visit Sonny’s mom a few hours away in the mountains, but she didn’t say why. We’d need to stay a couple nights to make the trip worth it but, unlike previous trips, we couldn’t afford to pay someone to watch Kentucky. With a new child on the way, my mother was worried about money, so instead of boarding him or hiring someone to watch him, she put Kentucky on a chain behind the house. She filled bowls with food and water. I cried and begged her not to. The chain wasn’t very long and I was worried. Other neighbors let their dogs roam around and they weren’t very nice. What if they picked on him and he couldn’t get away? She laughed off my concern and promised that he would be fine.While my parents packed, I walked door to door begging neighbors, tearfully, to keep Kentucky while we were gone. I had a terrible feeling that something bad would happen while he was out there by himself and even asked people I’d never met before. I was desperate. But they all said no. I insisted my mom let me stay home alone with him that weekend, but I was eight and that wasn’t allowed. I refused to pack a bag, so my mom did it for me. She forced me into the car and promised to punish me for being insolent when we returned home from the trip. I didn’t care. I was devastated. I couldn’t stand the thought of ‘Tucky thinking I’d left him. My mom put the car in reverse and began backing away from the house. Everything around me went in slow motion, while everything inside me raced. My stomach churned, my heart beat out of my chest, and big, hot, tears flowed down my cheeks. I watched from the back window as we drove away and strained to see ‘Tucky from the road, but I couldn’t.When we returned home from the weekend, I ran out of the car as fast as I could. I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. Bowls of food knocked over. A chain lying limp in the grass. Kentucky, nowhere to be seen. I made the same neighborhood loop, knocking on every door, asking all the neighbors if they’d seen him, but nobody had. I walked home slowly, then stood outside in the backyard until long after the sky had turned black and the lone street light had turned on. I looked toward the tree line and called, “Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy! Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy!” But he didn’t come.
***
I made flyers on the computer. I didn’t know how to get ‘Tucky’s photo on them, though, so I used clip art to search for a dog that looked something like him, then described him in detail. I added our phone number and said, “PLEASE CALL!” in really big, bold letters. I didn’t have any reward money to offer, so instead, I promised to do chores for anybody who could point to his whereabouts. I printed them out and put them in all the mailboxes around the neighborhood. When nobody was looking, I peered into windows and fenced-in backyards, hoping to see that Kentucky was stolen rather than lost. After getting the fliers, one of the neighborhood kids called to tell me they’d seen him floating in the pond across from my house. Another called to say her father had shot him while hunting in the woods. I was afraid to go into the woods after that. And afraid to look at the pond. I tried not to fall asleep because I had started having a nightmare.In this recurring dream, I’d be lying in the bathtub with my eyes closed and the water would feel, suddenly, full of fur. I’d open my eyes and ‘Tucky’s skin would be on top of me in the tub, empty and flat as a bearskin rug. I’d try to scream, but when I opened my mouth, the fur pushed inside me and no sound came out. I had insomnia at night and was riddled with anxiety during the day. I was a wreck and eventually, had to move on. I stopped looking, but sometimes I’d still go into the yard late at night and call his name, just in case–“Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy! Ken-tuck-yyyyyyyyyy!”–but he didn’t come. And he never came again.
***
Time wore on. My sister was born, we moved again, and I, eventually, moved out. Then, in my early twenties, my mom and Sonny got divorced. Nobody told me at first, but I had stopped hearing from him and his family and I started to wonder. My little sister eventually broke the news, right before Christmas. I guess everybody just thought I wouldn’t notice and they could avoid the subject altogether. My sister–his biological daughter–still got presents from Sonny’s parents that year. I did not. And, just like that, I heard Sonny had a new girlfriend with two boys, and I got this sinking feeling that he had decided not to be my father anymore.
***
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I hadn’t spoken to Mark, my biological father, in over twenty years. My sister was a teenaged heroin addict, I was an alcoholic, and I had dropped out of school. I was estranged from my mother and hadn’t heard from Sonny for the better part of a year. I wanted to preserve the relationship with him–I needed to preserve the relationship–so I called him, crying, drunk, and begged him to keep being my dad. “You’re the only dad I’ll ever have!” I argued, “You are my one shot at this! I don’t get another chance to be a daughter! Can’t you just pretend that I come to mind, even if I don’t? Can’t you just lie to me?” I bargained, “All you have to do is put a monthly repeating call reminder in your calendar and then you don’t even have to remember! Just pretend, for like ten minutes once a month to care about what’s happening in my life.”He said he would.But I didn’t hear from him. Another year passed and Christmas, once again, was just a couple months away. I reached out and reminded him that if he couldn’t manage a monthly call, not to bother sending me an obligatory holiday text. He said OK, but nothing changed, and then my phone pinged on Christmas. “Merry Christmas to the best daughter!” the text read.The words were like stones in my stomach. I took a swig of wine and wrote back, “I told you what the deal was. You don’t get to reach out to me at the holidays if you don’t talk to me the rest of the year. It’s just too painful a reminder of what’s missing from my life.” He didn’t respond, and I didn’t hear from him again.But I did hear that he’d decided to marry the woman with the two boys. I wondered if he would promise anything to his new sons at the altar, and wondered if he would mean it.I erased Sonny’s number from my phone, Googled How to get parents removed from my birth certificate, and drank down the last of a bottle of wine. I thought about enrolling in cosmetology school, but decided to go to AA instead. I wanted to tell somebody, to ask for help, to cry, but didn’t know who to call. I was nobody’s daughter now.
Is there something up with modern dread? Derek Fisher’s enigmatic collection Container (With an X Books, 2024) strokes the lid of contemporary malaise, and teases the release on stories that simmer like a broiling pressure cooker. This is writing cast adrift on strange currents, Fisher’s domain that of diseased architecture, where dark impulses meet bad vibes. I talked to Derek about this unsettling and dynamic collection.Rebecca Gransden: When did you write your first short story? Has your approach to the short story form evolved over time?Derek Fisher: Yooo. Hi Rebecca, my fellow Lizard Brain!My first short story, like ever? Uhhhh, I think I was in high school. I remember submitting little weird things to my high school’s annual short story publication. A couple of them got in. Then I was supposed to join everyone that got tapped and do a reading at a nearby bookstore and I most definitely did not show up. No way I was reading in front of people back then.For a while I wrote stories based on what I thought readers might want, based on what kind of style and voice trends you’d see in literature. Don’t do this. It’s the ultimate bad move. Over time I think I stopped caring about what the work would look like to others, and just wrote the stories I wanted to write. I found myself writing in a handful of approaches to voice and style that started to feel like my own. There are a few stories in here where the paragraphs are all blocks of text, no indentation. I write with this format more and more, as I find it tends to drive this ominous tone that I’m usually gunning for. Something about the fragmentation helps conjure the spooky vibe. I also think nowadays my stories are getting shorter. Soon they’ll just be two sentences long. “Jim went to the store to buy a bag of Milk. The severed fist was still in his ass. The end.”RG: The collection shares its title with one of the stories included in the book. What led you to select Container as the title for the collection as a whole?DF: For the longest time I wanted to name the collection I’ll Only be Happy Once Everything is Gone, and had submitted previous versions of it with that title to other presses. But I hadn’t written the story “Container” at that point. Then one day that story spewed out and it was obvious that it would be the title track. I love that goddamn story. The way it grips tight like having your whole body wrapped violently in duct tape. That’s the feeling I get when I think of that story, so it seemed like alright why not just call the book that and hope the whole collection feels that way? Try to convince the reader that the whole thing carries that same tightness through the title, haha. Gotcha. That story deals with desire on the verge of rupture. It takes place in constricted spaces. Cars, elevators, storage rooms. And maybe more than anywhere else, inside the obsessed brains of these two characters. Their thing threatens to rip open at the seams. I think the story itself feels that way, like it’s just barely contained. I really like this story. I think it constricts us into these spaces. Confronts us with the lust or obsession or self-erasure or whatever flood these characters find themselves in.RG: How old is the oldest story you’ve included in Container, and how new is the newest?DF: The oldest is “Scorch Earth.” I probably wrote that in late 2019, early 2020. The newest is “Rhino.” I wrote that like two seconds before I sent the collection to Jon at With an X. It came out in La Piccioletta Barca after the collection had been accepted.RG: The stories featured in the collection have appeared at a wide variety of literary venues. How did you go about selecting which pieces to include?DF: I went back and forth forever on what to include and where to stick ’em. The stories “David Lunch” and “Rhino” were last minute additions. The title story came fairly late in the game too. “Scorch Earth” and “Bird Eating Glass” and “I’ll Only be Happy…” had been around in the hard drive’s basement for a little while but I always knew those stories would be part of the deal. Whether or not they had been previously published didn’t factor in too much. It took me a while to figure out the order. That’s a fun exercise. Rearranging the pieces until they feel right, or as right as they’re gonna feel. I wasn’t sure about including the flash pieces at first. But then I figured who doesn’t love a one-pager? Easy work. Throw them in! I’m always interested in how writers arrange a story collection. Feels similar to how the tracks come together on an album. Or a set list at a show. Sometimes you read a collection and you just know why the final track was picked to close the show. Two of my favorite collections in recent years are Maggie Siebert’s Bonding and Sara Lippmann’s Jerks. Two entirely different gems. In both cases, you get excellent collections all the way through. But then they both end on such strong notes that it changes the complexion of the whole thing. In both cases, these final stories (Siebert’s “Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” and Lippmann’s “The Polish Girl”) imprinted the joyous experience of reading the collection with a perfect, final sledgehammer to my ribs. You don’t forget a thing like that. Good curation can sew the feeling of a story collection to your skin. That’s what I want to feel when I’m done reading a book. That, or a feeling of “What the fuck did I just read?”RG: In “Bird Eating Glass” you present a character named Mantle, who is a musician swept up in the modern fame game. For them, sound brings renown, brings the noise, brings powerful recollections and associations. Are there particular sounds that flood you with memory?DF: I constantly hear the sounds of trains in my head; that braking screech, of the train pulling into a station, or possibly derailing. I don’t know what that’s about. Like I have a subway stop full of dead people living in my skull or maybe in my house behind the wall like in that Robert Munsch book Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then he Heard a Sound.At all times I feel like I am hearing dead static, or electric feedback. Should probably get that checked out, right? Like someone is holding a microphone to an amp. I don’t know if I literally hear this, but it’s there in my head. Probably just been to too many shows. I enjoy it. It tunes out the world for me, which I don’t mind at all. I have what I think is a problematic compulsion to repeat songs in my head all day long. But not necessarily because they are catchy. Lesser Care’s “Finally Bare” has been on constant repeat in my brain for three or four weeks. I’m totally haunted by this song and I am losing my mind. It’s a good song! I enjoy it very much. But sounds and music often turn compulsive as they repeat for me. Every song I’ve ever heard just gets added to the jumble of infinite repetition. When I stop to think about all this constant music in my head I think I must have a tumor or a serious neurological problem. It hasn’t killed me yet so I guess it’s probably fine but who knows.I always write with music on. Silence drives me crazy. Unless I’m beside someone I love. Then I can be ok with quiet. Their breathing is enough. Otherwise, I need sound. Mantle, in “Bird Eating Glass,” is the manifestation of this part of me. I’ve never played music, but I can’t live without it. Sound informs my ability to make stories. Mantle is what a character would look like if they were stripped of everything but sound-driven compulsions. An expression of pure noise, otherwise locked into the body and mind of a human. I think people can relate to the idea that our internalized noise not only has value to us, but is a reflection of all the sensory mania we absorb, and can be filtered into something quite lovely. The world is a fucked up place, right? Mantle’s noise is the meeting point between the world, and total sonic isolation forced outward. The conceit of the story is that harsh noise can become the world’s most popular art form. I am 100% confident that this is true. It’ll just take the right artist to deliver us.RG: The story “Scorch Earth” makes repeated reference to a purpose-driven life. What does a purpose-driven life look like to you, and how does that manifest in your writing life?DF: If you asked me this question four years ago I would have had a whole spiel about how writing is my purpose and how my life is driven by it and as long as I have writing goals I’ll be fulfilled or some blah blah blah like that. But I’ve calmed down a lot with that shit. I don’t know if life (mine or anyone else’s) is purpose driven. I just do things I guess. Write, eat, work. I really like eating. Sometimes I watch these competitive eater YouTubers and think I should do that. That can be my purpose. To eat. Consuuuuume. Lily in “Scorch Earth” is a smart cookie but at the start of that story she’s still too young to understand what life means as something separate from her parents. She believes in a “purpose-driven life” but doesn’t fully appreciate the fact that this idea has been dictated to her from birth. I think there’s an undercurrent of spirituality in that story, where her parents probably believe that by killing, by devoting their lives to the pursuit of taking life, they are somehow closer to god, or the devil, or whatever nasty thing they worship. We don’t see this translate into Lily. She does not show signs of spiritual belief in pursuing her victim. She lives this purpose-driven life because that’s what she’s been taught to do. Sometimes this is how I feel about the rhetoric around this idea of purpose, that we are being fed a pseudo-spiritual concept and that if we live with purpose, we will be complete. But the more I think about this as something dictated to me, in YouTube videos or podcasts or whatever, the more it feels like snake oil, and just fodder for boot-strap narratives that exist only to feed the machine of capital. My true belief is that people just do things. We just do things. We will always do those things. Whether we like it or not. They are coded into us, and/or the influences around us lead us to do things. Eat, drink, lie, steal, kill, love, donate, write, play, serve, worship, make annoying sounds for no reason, travel, do drugs, smash our teeth out with a hammer, whatever. RG: I found many of your stories to be governed by strong undercurrents, as if the crux is brimming beneath the surface. This gives the pieces an enigmatic quality. Is this element one of conscious intent?DF: Oh, thank you! I like hearing this. It is conscious yes, but I never know if I’m doing it well. I am a giant fan of subtext in fiction, and so I prefer to try to work with undercurrents as opposed to surfaces, but I also like to write stories that are more vibe-driven than plot-driven, so I think these undercurrents you identify are part of my attempt to encourage certain vibes more than anything else. I’m a big fan of dread. Apocalyptic nothingness and the haunted memory of a dead place. Memory is the motif I’m obsessed with most. Almost all my stories are about memory. Humans are made of memory. I think these undercurrents are all attempts to explore the memory of a place, relationship, moment, etc. Often memories are haunted and uncanny. I like to try to get at these feelings in the subtext.I think about how this applies in the story “Progress.” The meat of the story is the dialogue between TurtlePhone and Positively Pete! It seems like such goofy shit. A smart-ass talking toy turtle with the mind of an up-his-own-ass PhD student and who also believes he’s a special ops super-killer. It’s probably obvious that I had a lot of fun writing this. But the part of the story I’m most drawn to is the abandoned, scorched shell of the town of Baker, California at the end. What happened here? Why this apocalyptic graffiti? What haunted hell is this? In some ways I see all the dialogue and silliness of the story as a colorful vehicle to get us to this apocalyptic end, this haunted memory of a place that existed until recently. As a reader I just love seeing and thinking about undercurrents. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of my absolute favorite books, because of how it tells a rich story entirely in the subtext. Laura Van Den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves us (I just typed that whole thing without Googling it) is a goddamn masterclass on subtext. Both of these books deal with subject matter that isn’t of high interest to me; both are books I stumbled on, but quickly came to love because of how strikingly they channel what’s below the surface. I don’t care so much about craft. Sure I like to see talented writers throwing down some nice moves, like watching elite athletes do their thing, but that’s relatively low on the list of things I look for in writing. But with subtext, different story. When I see a writer do subtext well, I get the full body shiver. I think Hemingway said a good writer doesn’t say what’s happening on the surface, but they have to know those details, and like, by knowing, the reader will get some kind of a sense of truth, a conveyance, even if they aren’t made explicitly aware of the details. I say, fuck off Hemingway. Don’t tell me what I have to know. I don’t know what TurtlePhone is up to when he’s sitting on the can. That’s his business. RG: “Does Anyone Care How the Vegetable Oil Feels?” describes a technique you call method writing. Any examples of this in your own writing life?DF: Haha, no way. I used to think this idea was attractive as hell. To live the shit hard, as the narrator in the story says. But that sounds like a goddamn nightmare to me to be honest. I guess some nightmares produce some good writing. But it’s never been that way for me. I just have ideas and write them down and hope they work well enough. I think the idea of the artist living their art as authentically as possible is sexy to us, but it has problems. If we exoticize and romanticize all the violence, addiction, desperation, and evil that we see in our literary heroes, that forces us into a confrontation with our own values that I don’t think we particularly want to have. As someone who loves wretched characters, it’s a place I hesitate to go. I think of Al Swearingen in Deadwood, a magnificent TV character. To come up with a character like that I might have to become a murdering, deceiving, totally self-interested pimp? Well, shit. That sounds like a lot of work. I remember reading Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, about a literal starving artist, a favorite book of mine, thinking God damn! this poor bastard. Someone shoot his ass and put him out of his misery. Hamsun really lived off fumes, nearly starving to death in his early days. I guess Norway wasn’t so rich back then. Then he got big and famous and won a Nobel Prize and eventually became a Nazi sympathizing maniac. A bunch of them went this way. Celine. Eliot. I just want to write stories.I will say, I do gush at some examples I hear about of writers doing insane shit in order to conjure their art. Like Gary Shipley watching Begotten on repeat in a dark room for two straight weeks to write You With Your Memory Are Dead. That is the most batshit thing I’ve ever heard. Or, sticking with Inside the Castle books, their Castle Freak projects, where the writer has five days to write 100,000 words. These feel like experiments in what we might call method writing, putting our minds and bodies through extreme ordeals in order to test our creative limits and access the most unhinged, terrifying depths we got. I wish I had the discipline to attempt maniac stuff like this. I’d probably produce 75 words about stoned beavers wandering around the forest looking for wood. RG:The office building is the tallest, thinnest in the city’s history. A man plummets to his death on the first day it is occupied, the day after completion. The sounds of children screaming are heard in the elevators, in the stairwells. On several of the floors. Throughout meetings. It’s much worse when the wind hits the building. A feeling of nonstop vertigo defines daily office life.The above quote from “Rhino” is a prime example of the ominous quality you can inject into environments. How do you use location when it comes to building atmosphere?DF: I think I’m obsessed with the haunted potential of a space, interior or exterior. I want to feel the imprint of a place, I want others to feel it. We might not know what happened in an empty room. Maybe nothing. Maybe somebody was tortured. Maybe a plot to commit a mass atrocity was concocted in that space, in a basement, over tuna sandwiches and old moldy coffee. Maybe all kinds of unthinkable things happened in this little desert town that used to function well enough, but is now burnt to the ground. I like trying to think about what a place feels like to someone stepping into it, and they know bad things have happened there, but they don’t necessarily know what or how or why. I think “Rhino” is about the design of haunted places, as if their hauntedness was intentional, built into the space, rather than the space becoming haunted after the fact. The story seems to connect this spooky business to Lorna, the architect who designs them, as if she is the haunted one, and everything she touches turns to death. But we don’t know why. Is she plagued by this herself, or is she some kind of a demonic figure sewing chaos, getting off on diabolic design? I enjoy trading in uncertainty with these kinds of questions, and letting the reader decide.My first job outta undergrad I worked in a big ad agency. Way up on the 32nd floor. Could see the whole city. I had a meeting with one of my bosses and I can’t remember why but I started spouting off the heights of all the tallest buildings in Toronto. She said, “Uh, Are you… into buildings?” I said no, all embarrassed. But the truth was hell yes, I am. I am into buildings. All their vertical pathways and tunnels, elevator shafts, unseen dark corners, crawl spaces. I’m afraid of heights. But I lived on the 25th floor for years. All tall buildings are haunted spaces to me. The wind sounds like a screaming animal up there. All day, life accented by constant screaming. RG: Your exploration of unconventional romance, featured in “Container” and “For Whom I Bare My Teeth”, presents an intense and, I found, cinematic take on sensuality. What is your approach to erotism in your work?DF: Hmmm, I don’t think I have an approach exactly. These stories are about desire. I think desire is dark, by its nature. I wanted to find ways to show that, but without being too on the nose. “For Whom I Bare My Teeth” is a bit more straightforward about it, but I do find that story to be funny, and maybe less serious about the darkness of desire. At least that’s how I felt writing it. I suppose cannibalism stories will always be funny to me. I really enjoyed writing both these stories, but they came from very different places. “Container” feels more serious, like it’s reflecting on something where for the characters the stakes are sky high. I don’t know if in other stories dealing with erotism I would use similar approaches. I just recently finished writing something about a couple so obsessed with each other that they begin to literally eat each other. There I go with the cannibals again. But the approach there is different from these other ones. I guess I just try to channel a question about what these characters’ desires look like, and what would happen if they took those desires to extreme, unreasonable places. I’m interested in making the unreasonable feel real, necessary. Unreasonable but necessary. Unavoidable. Impossible for them to avoid going there. Maybe that’s the approach. RG: I remember when the terminally ill artist Anastasia Pelon brought her whole family to Neon for one last dinner together. We had been expecting a room full of eccentricity, full of chaos, full of the infusions that such a prominent artist would have inevitably left on her closest family members, especially in the shadow of her imminent death. But what we got was something much different; a room full of working-class, down-to-earth, polite people, who all happened to be this woman’s family. There was never an unsmiling face around the room. These parents, siblings, and cousins were so happy to be together. Anastasia’s sister helped her whenever she needed to use the bathroom or stretch her legs. Her sister would carry her oxygen tank as they walked together, holding each other’s arm. I remember the expectation that the whimsical and ferocious aesthetic that imbued her art would reveal itself in the room, but no. The bloody, bodily, confrontational, qualities of her work had no role here.The above quote is lifted from your story “Neon”. What has surprised you about the collection, either in the writing of it or in the process of releasing it to the world?DF: The fact that I have ever published one word of writing surprises me every day, let alone a whole collection. RG: The elevator appears as a recurring motif in the collection, frequently as an uncanny space. Do you have any insights into why the elevator is attractive to you?DF: You caught that eh? I hadn’t anticipated a question about elevators, but I am happy to see this. I do think about them a lot. These steel boxes in which we spend a significant amount of cumulative time, those of us that live or work in tall buildings. The elevator is removed from the rest of the world. Such uncomfortable little moments can happen there. Yet such significant moments too. They test our humanity. Small talk. Claustrophobia. Fantasizing about the terror of being stuck in one. I’ve met people in elevators that became significant in my life. I’ve watched dogs piss and shit in them. In the height of the pandemic, the elevator became this place of mania, paranoia, and uncertainty. And total crushing awkwardness. Infection. All of these things factor into how I think about the floating steel box that hides us from the world for a couple minutes.I think elevators are crazy places. Intense, crazy places. Have you ever ridden in an elevator and had someone you don’t know stare at you the whole time? I picture the cables being cut, and the box plummeting. Everyone crushed inside. Impaled with shards of splintered steel the size of swords. I don’t think about this kind of thing when I’m in cars or trains. Something about this closed box brings these thoughts. No windows. Closed off from the world. I picture people in the elevator unable to control themselves. Strangers so attracted to each other at first sight that they tear each other apart. They know they are on camera but they don’t care. They know they only have a minute. That others might enter. But they don’t care. Elevators are crazy places. We can think these thoughts, for a minute or two, and then we get off on our floor and it’s over. The thoughts are gone. RG: An undertow of dread and unease permeates your fiction. What attracts you to exploring this area with your writing? What do you dread?DF: I always think back on that Clive Barker story “Dread”, from Books of Blood. The character Quaid is obsessed with dread and experiments on people, forcing them to confront their worst fears. Great story. He leaves that poor vegetarian girl starving in a room with only rotten beef until she’s forced to eat it.There are some great vibes to be mined from dread. The well of dread is endless. The world is a dreadful place. We all are forced to confront dread in our own ways. I don’t always plan to write with dread in mind, but some stories just take on this tone. The undercurrents we spoke of earlier, the feeling of spaces being haunted with memory, this can be a dreadful feeling. Sometimes I do dread by accident because I write a character that is too flat or one-dimensional and in their flat silences there can appear to be things dreadful about them. Whoops, haha. I think the dread in my work tends to come from feelings of insularity, containment. Some of these characters are so locked in their own heads. We only see what they think. The rest is a mystery. I think this can be dread-inducing. They are containers; all we know of them is how they perceive a dying world, experience a violent sexual relationship, look down at the gun in their hand. Sometimes I think of dread as a feeling elicited by the knowledge that the world is filled with monsters that we don’t see. We know they’re there, but they live in the shadows. It’s the knowledge that they exist that breeds dread in us. We know terrible things happen. Murder, torture, human trafficking, genocide. And sure, we see these things on the news. But most of us don’t confront them for real. Most of us. This is of course a good thing, not to have to know these horrible realities first hand. The dread lives in the space between us and the shadow. I sometimes try to write as if considering the monstrous, even if I’m not describing it or writing about it directly. The writing is the empty space between us and the horrible thing. What’s uncanny about it is that we all recognize the smell, the sound of the empty space. We see a recognizable horror in it despite it being empty. That’s why that “Backrooms” picture is so scary. I think this is the driving force behind stories like “Bird Eating Glass.” A character who is plagued by the unfathomable knowledge of the world. This character is a mystery to us. We don’t know what they’ve seen. We just see some whisp of it reflected in their intolerable music, in the scars on their face, in their severed voice. The fact that their music happens to be popular in spite of itself is the signal that we all recognize the terror in this empty space. You ever read Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps? I think that is the best book ever written about dread. RG: “Reasons to Stay” addresses the vagaries and vacillating tensions of a relationship forced to factor terminal illness. How did you decide upon the approach to structure for this story?DF: This story is pretty much entirely based on a true story. I don’t love to admit this, because doing so interferes with the pretense of fiction from which I feel we must always approach books billed as such, but in this case I make an exception. I’d been trying for a couple years to find a way to write about the person that “Reasons” is about and I kept coming up flat. I tried much longer works that were more formally conventional, but hated all of them. Then one day I sat down and wrote this and it just felt true. I like to think of this story as being pretty good at expressing what memory feels like – all broken up and fragmentary and mixed up between the good and the painful. I didn’t exactly set out to write the story in this fractured way, it just came out like this, and I knew that it was the real story as it was coming out. It ended up being much shorter than any of the previous versions, which also felt correct. My memory of this relationship feels compressed and frenetic, hard to pin down yet clear as day in some parts. My memory is engraved with ambivalence and longing, but as time goes by, those elements are further compressed and reordered, slotted into this larger chaos that is the sum of all memories. I wasn’t thinking any of this as I wrote it, I just wrote. And then after the fact, it just made sense that my mind was processing these feelings and memories through this fragmented ambivalence. I don’t know if any of that shit makes any sense but I think it makes sense to me.RG:Container is released by With an X Books. Why have you chosen to work with them for this collection? In a wider sense, how do you view the small press scene?DF: It has been a total pleasure to work with Jon and Traci at With an X. They are so diligent, generous, and professional, I could not have asked for a better experience. I had an intuitive sense that With an X might be a good fit for a couple reasons. I felt that the vibe of some of their books of photography connected with the tone of the title story “Container,” in an abstract but not insignificant way. As it happened Jon had read that story previously when it was first published in Maudlin House, and said he was taken by it, so I think there was already a seed planted there, unbeknownst to me at first. I also felt that a previous collection they’d published, Drew Buxton’s So Much Heart, had some similar sensibilities to my work, the mixing of the real and the hyperreal, some darker stuff but not lacking in heart, that the vibe felt right. Far as I’m concerned, small presses drive literature. A few weeks ago I drove to Portland from Vancouver just to go to Powell’s. I spent like three hours in the small press section, examining every single book. Anyone watching me woulda thought I was a lunatic. Dennis Cooper always says that all the best writing in the world comes from small presses and he’s ten thousand percent right. I love the small press scene. I couldn’t live without it. I do have favorite books that were published by big publishers, we all do. But the vast majority of the work that interests me as I grow as a reader is from small presses. I get an explosion of joy every time I think about some small presses, just knowing they exist. It’s like, I know that the true, raw, unfiltered voices will find their place in the world. The most uncompromising writing is available to us because some of these small presses exist. I am eternally grateful.RG: “Do I fear for the future? Hell fucking no I don’t. Hell no. You know why? Because fear is dumb wasted pussy shit that serves no purpose. That’s why. We’ll figure this out like we figure everything.”Do you think about the future? If so, what does the future look like to you, with regard to your writing, or anything else?DF: Oh ya, I think about the future. I think about it all the time. I think about burnt buildings penetrated by hollow winds. I think about cities washed away by floods. I think about vast landscapes marked by emptiness, with little fossilized remnants buried beneath the surface, hidden signs that we were once here. I love thinking about the time beyond the end of us. It gives me a blissful chill. I don’t care if that’s a cliché. I don’t like being told not to be cynical. I embrace feelings of cynicism and nihilism. I don’t care if they absolve me of having to work for a better future or not. I don’t care if it is a privileged position to think like this. It’s just the way it is for me. I get creative fuel from thinking about what the world looks like when we’re gone. I also think about all kinds of nice things, future-wise. But I keep that shit to myself.
