The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0

by Dave Slusher

  DS: Let's talk about Drawing Blood. This is the one that was Birdland the last time we talked.

  PZB: Yeah, I changed the title when I was almost through with it. I still like Birdland as a title, but I think that Drawing Blood has more applications to the story. It has more meanings within the context of the plot, and the publisher liked it a lot better. They felt that Birdland would make people think the book was about jazz, and that was too boring. It kind of is about jazz, but it's about a lot of other things as well. I didn't want to limit my audience by scaring them off with something like that.

  DS: Tell us a little about the plot of the book and the setup of it.

  PZB: Drawing Blood is a haunted house love story, also involving underground comics and computer hackers. It starts out in 1972 where we meet the McGee family. Bobby McGee is an underground comics artist, very famous and popular, somewhere around the level of R. Crumb at that same time. He is on the road with his wife and his family—two young sons. He has experienced an artist's block within the past year, and hasn't drawn anything for over a year. He has gone creatively dry. He's drinking a lot and things are not good within the family. They end up in Missing Mile, North Carolina—which is my fictional town that Lost Souls was partly set in. They rent an old farmhouse and are staying out there while Bobby is trying to draw something and still drinking way too much. He ends up murdering most of the family and committing suicide one night. He leaves only his five year old son Trevor alive. The action of the story opens 20 years later with Trevor returning to Missing Mile to try and figure out what happened and why he was left alive. He's now an artist himself and he stays in the house and tries to figure this out. We also have the converging story of Zach who is a 19 year old computer hacker from New Orleans who has just been warned that the Secret Service is on his tail. He has to leave town in a hurry, and he also ends up in Missing Mile.

  DS: Again Missing Mile is the fulcrum of the book, like in Lost Souls. Various plot lines start and they all sort of careen into town.

  PZB: It's not as convergent a story as Lost Souls because we don't have all these different groups of characters converging on town, just the two guys that end up there. Most of the story is set there. There are only a few chapters set in New Orleans. These are my two usual locales. The book that I'm working on now will be set almost entirely in New Orleans, in the French Quarter. I hope for the next book I can go somewhere else entirely.

  DS: It's not a sequel to Lost Souls, other than just sharing the town and a few of the characters.

  PZB: Exactly. The plot has nothing to do with it, there are no vampires in it—I'm done with vampires. Everyone keeps asking me when the sequel to Lost Souls is coming out, and the answer is never. I'm not Anne Rice, I'm not doing a trilogy on them. It's great that she revolutionized the vampire genre, but she basically built a career around one type of monster. I'm not interested in doing that. I've said all I have to say about bloodsucking vampires. I may write further about the type of psychic soulsuckers that also appear in the story. I'm still more interested in that.

  PZB: But, to answer your question, it does share some of the minor characters from Lost Souls, such as Mackenzie Hummingbird who owns the Sacred Yew nightclub and Terry who runs the record store in the town. These are just figures of the counterculture that we are going to meet again and again, as long as I write about the town. The major characters are all new.

  DS: You were a first novelist with Lost Souls, and you really hit it big. It was a courageous step to do something different. It would have been fairly easy to do the same sort of book. Did you specifically not want to get into a pattern like that?

  PZB: It wouldn't have been easy at all, because I have no interest and I can't write about stuff that I'm not interested in, no matter how commercially successful it might be. I've tried, back before I was making a living as a writer, to do things like writing for Penthouse Forum. Freelance writers always hear they can make money doing things like that. I tried to write a letter for the Forum, and then I'd get interested in it. I'd try to make the characters interesting and then try to make it have a little plot and I'd end up putting so much energy into it that I would want to make it something I could publish under my own name. I had plumbed the depths of everything I have to say about vampires, and there was no way I could have written about those characters anymore. I've said everything about them that I had to. I'm glad that people like them enough that they would want to read a sequel, but I can't write one.

  DS: Along with these other books, you've been up for quite a few awards now. You were up for the Lambda award, you've got the Bram Stoker...

  PZB: I didn't get the Bram Stoker, I was nominated for it. Beth Massie won it.

  DS: And “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” is nominated for something.

  PZB: That's nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I'll find out about that at WFC this coming weekend, but I have to compete with all kinds of great writers including Peter Straub so I really won't be too disappointed if I don't get it. Awards are very flattering but they don't mean a whole lot to me. I can't pretend that I'm disappointed when I don't get them. It would be nice if I did, but they don't seem like that big of a deal. It's certainly an honor to be nominated, as everyone always says, and it would be nice to get it, but—whatever.

  DS: To have come out with a first novel that was so successful, you're happy and making a living, the awards are gravy on top of this, aren't they?

  PZB: Not that I've actually gotten any of them, but it's nice to have gravy offered to you.

  DS: [laughs] Just to smell it, even if you don't taste it. You spent five years as a struggling writer on the periphery of earning a living at it.

  PZB: Well, I made my first sale when I was 18. I started making a living at it when I was 24 so it was more like six years.

  DS: Is your life changing much now that you're not as close to starving as you used to be?

  PZB: I'm working a lot harder. I'm working on the last book in my three book contract with Delacorte. Writing full-time in a lot of ways is much harder than any of the diverse jobs that I did to pay the rent before I was making a living at it. It's much nicer, much more fun, and there are more fringe benefits. I can justify doing things like taking trips to Asia and writing it off on my taxes as research. That's great. When I was doing all of the other jobs, I was writing all the time as well. A crap job, a job you do to pay the rent, you'll leave it behind when you go home and not care about it. As a full-time writer, I find that I'm always kicking myself in the butt and I always feel guilty about having any free time. I feel like I'm slacking off. I should always be in there sitting at the computer. I consider myself incredibly lazy, although people laugh at me when I say that. My friends laugh at me because they know the way I live and that I'm always staying up until 5 AM working on a story. The truth is that I am lazy. If I let myself, I would sit around all the time and read books and read comics and just do anything to amuse myself except what I should be doing.

  DS: While you are talking comics, one of the main characters is an underground comics artist, you've got the rock and roll in the Sacred Yew, and you've got computer hackers. Basically, I'm the demographic for this book. You have all the things I think are cool in it.

  PZB: [laughs] Publishers Weekly said something about the “Twenty-something zeitgeist of the book". I got a pretty nice review from them for Lost Souls but they lamented the fact that the book didn't have a moral center. Now the lack of a moral center has turned a twenty-something zeitgeist, so it's OK.

  DS: That's what we can claim as are unifying point. None of us have a moral center.

  PZB: Well, it's true.

  DS: Which of the comics creators do you most enjoy?

  PZB: Mary Fleener, Chester Brown, Julie Doucett. I've gotten away from my comics habit, unfortunately, since I moved to New Orleans. I had great comics shops in Athens, and now there aren't the great shops in New Orleans. The best one I've found has Yummy Fur sometimes, and that's abou
t the extent of the alternative section. I'm going to have to actually subscribe to all of these things I want. I'm not finding as much new stuff as I used to, because now I have no one to recommend new things to me.

  DS: Was Mark Bode an inspiration for the character of Trevor?

  PZB: No. I've been told his story many times since I wrote the book, but I knew nothing about that when I wrote it. I was familiar with the work of Vaughn Bode, but I didn't know anything about how he had died or his kid or anything. It's just a coincidence, and rather an interesting one.

  DS: There's a lot of the rock and roll sort of attitude. You use the Sacred Yew as the eye of the hurricane.

  PZB: It is kind of the eye of the hurricane of Missing Mile. It's where all the lost kids end up sooner or later.

  DS: Steve and Ghost were out of town the whole time.

  PZB: That was not so much a plot device as just what's going on with them. They are continuing characters of mine, and I always know what's up with them. That's where they happen to be. It's a good thing, because I didn't need to try to write them into this story. It would have been kind of a pain in the butt. They were in Flagstaff, Arizona and they seemed to like it a lot there. I don't know when they're coming back to Missing Mile. These characters haunt me after I finish these books. I have a lifetime commitment to them. I know what happens to the characters in Drawing Blood after the end of the book. I won't say it here, because that would give too much away. If anyone wants to know, they can ask me. I'll tell them all about it. It's a good story. I might write it someday.

  DS: I thought we would have a new Tom Waits album to talk about, but we missed it.

  PZB: Apparently he just starred in this new Robert Altman movie, which I haven't seen yet, but it sounds great. Short Cuts.

  DS: You also acknowledge Nine Inch Nails, and several other bands in the book.

  PZB: Nine Inch Nails and Charlie Parker. There were several other single CDs that I listened to during the writing of Drawing Blood. It had a very specific soundtrack, or series of soundtracks. If I narrowed it down to one, it would have to be Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails. It somehow become the soundtrack of the book and of their relationship. I listen to it 50 or 60% of the time while I was working on the story. For the sex scenes, they always insisted on Julee Cruse Into the Night. They wouldn't do it to anything else but that, and it seemed to work.

  DS: Would you have a suggested soundtrack for reading it? I remember in the review for Lost Souls, Ed Bryant suggested Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde.

  PZB: I'm not that familiar with Concrete Blonde, although I've seen them in Athens. All of the music that is mentioned in the story is the soundtrack for Lost Souls. That's the stuff I was listening to while I was writing it, and what the characters were listening to. It kind of ties into why I wrote my first novel about vampires. I liked them OK, but I had never been all that fascinated by them before then and haven't been since then. What I wanted to write about was the Gothic subculture, the death rock subculture and vampires are such an essential icon of that they just naturally turned up in there. The music of that culture is equally important, and that's all in the story too. I think the soundtrack to Lost Souls is self evident, because all of the songs are listed.

  DS: Would it be safe to say that music is the underpinning of your writing?

  PZB: I always listen to music while I'm writing. It's not as important to my work as it used to be. That's not to say that it's not important. It used to be the underpinning more so than now. At that time I was writing Lost Souls and my earliest short stories, I was getting most of my inspiration from music in one way or another. Now I'm taking it from more different sources. I've always read a lot and that's been very important, but as often as not my characters were as much amalgamations of certain musicians I might like as much as they were of people that I knew or people that just turned up in my head, or people that I'd read about. I'm not doing that so much anymore. There's not as many little Robert Smiths running through my stories as there used to be.

  DS: Is the 5-8 in the acknowledgement the Athens band?

  PZB: My best friend in Athens is David Ferguson, the lead singer of the Go Figures. His twin brother plays drums with 5-8. The book is half dedicated to David.

  DS: I noticed the only female viewpoint character is Eddie. You're more comfortable writing from the male perspective than the female perspective. Do you find that staying a constant of your work?

  PZB: I've always been more fascinated by men, gay men in particular, but all kinds of men. There are a lot of women that I'm very close to, that I like and admire and love, but overall, they don't fascinate me as a group that men do. I think that a writer needs to challenge themself, so at some point I will have to write stories about stronger female characters. That will be a challenge, because I have a hard time with them. At this point, it's just a challenge to write the stories that I already have in my head. Most of those involve men. I do think Eddie is a pretty cool character. She's a lot better than Ann in Lost Souls, you have to admit.

  DS: Eddie is a dancer at a strip club, which you've been...

  PZB: At Tattletales here in Atlanta, in fact.

  DS: And the first time you introduce her, you mention the fact that guys in the strip club believe that, although these women see one thousand guys a day, they're the special one.

  PZB: That was directly taken from my own experiences and the experiences of other dancers that I knew at the time. I thought that would be a way to make Eddie interesting right from the start, and that people would be interesting in knowing what actually goes on in a dancer's mind while she is on stage. I introduced her in that way. Up until then, you'd seen Zach thinking about Eddie and mentioning Eddie, but you hadn't been introduced to her. You wouldn't even know she is a girl. She is introduced in the scene as “Miss Lee” and then she turns out to be the same Eddie that he's been thinking about.

  DS: The computer hacking aspect is all new to you. You're not much of a hacker yourself.

  PZB: I don't know any programming, and that's pretty important to hacking. I'd be scared to learn any, because then I would be tempted to do bad things. I might be good enough to do it, but I wouldn't be good enough to avoid getting caught. I had certain research angels like Bruce Sterling who helped me out with that stuff. I could basically call with any question and if they didn't know, they would be able to come up with it. I really enjoyed researching it. There is a hacking element in the new book, not so much because there needed to be, but that I was so interested in it that I wanted an excuse to keep reading about it. This is more of a pure cyberpunk type of thing. It has to do with neural interfacing and brain jacking.

  DS: I've never read a horror book with these elements in it. Are you breaking new ground here?

  PZB: There is one paperback original by a writer named Chet Day, who I've never heard anything of, before or since, called The Hacker. I bought it on a whim because I saw it while I was working on Drawing Blood. I thought it would be some piece of trash, but it turned out to be really good. I enjoyed reading it, and I don't know why no one else has ever heard of it. Other than that, yes, I think this is new. Hacking stories have mostly been confined to science fiction, which I also enjoy reading, but I like the idea of combining the two.

  DS: The rock culture is not so dissimilar from the hacking culture.

  PZB: There is a lot of overlap. It all has to do with that “Twentysomething zeitgeist.”

  DS: [laughs] You are about the youngest writer at your level of success in this genre.

  PZB: I've read a few stories in the genre by people my age or younger, but no one that had already published two books. There is a young writer that I recently collaborated with on a story, Christa Faust, who I think is now 24. She has just finished her first novel, and I think she is going to hit it big. She's very good. We collaborated on a story “Saved” for Mike Baker's anthology Young Blood of horror writers under 30. There may be some other interesting names in there that we
don't know about yet.

  DS: They've started calling our generation Generation X. I would have thought we were too young to be Generation X.

  PZB: I don't know about all that.

  DS: You don't think about this?

  PZB: I think a lot about it. For one thing, I would like to reach that group. I would like for that particular demographic to read my books. One, because it's huge and two because I think they would really like my work. I'd like to be marketed in the same ways that Douglas Copland has been. I think that Abyss is doing a lot of the right stuff to do that. They took out an ad in SPIN and sent me on this tour. A phenomonon that scares me is becoming a big fish in a small pond. Horror is a small pond—a wonderful pond and I love it very much, but I don't want to be limited to it. I want to be a whale in the ocean.

  DS: [laughs] I saw the the ad [for Lost Souls] in SPIN, and it seemed like a canny move. Did they do it originally for the hardback, or just recently?

  PZB: Just for the paperback. I hope the book will be reviewed in Details, which I think would be extremely helpful. I'd also like to reach a more mainstream gay audience. I have an underground gay audience, but I'd like to be reviewed an mentioned in publications like Out and The Advocate. I need to reach that group as well. I think I would be appreciated there, if they only knew I existed.

  DS: What about ads on rock and roll radio stations?

  PZB: I've heard a few book ads on radio, but it's always someone like Dean Koontz. If they wanted to, I'd certainly be willing to help in any way that I could. Obviously, I do radio interviews and stuff like that.

  DS: When we were talking about Birdland originally, I forgot to ask you about the comic of the same name. Have you seen it?

  PZB: I've just glanced at it. I really like the Hernandez Brothers, but I don't go for all that heterosexual sex. It doesn't do much for me. I love Love and Rockets, and it seems to have a lot more sexual diversity as well.