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Part One of: Sex, Serial Killers, and Pathetic Old Wanker Music: An Interview With Bradley Denton Conducted by Lawrence Person and Dwight Brown |
| Bradley Denton: | (recording picks up in mid-sentence as Dwight tests the recorder) -all I have is "pathetic old wanker music." |
| Lawrence Person: | Well, we're going to get to that. |
| (Tape shuts off...) | |
| LP: | Are we ready, master of the tapes? |
| Dwight Brown: | They're rolling. |
| LP: | I understand you're working on a novella for a new short story collection. What's it about? |
| BD: | I just finished it this morning, in fact. I don't know whether St. Martin's will want to use it for the collection or not. I wrote it with that in mind. But it's a new Blackburn story. |
| LP: | Probably not a direct sequel, given that your protagonist dies at the end of the novel. |
| BD: | No, he's still dead. He's well and truly deceased. |
| LP: | Will the short story collection include everything from the two Wildside Press collections? |
| BD: | No. It's going to include three stories from each of those books, plus the new story, plus one story that was in F&SF that came out after the Wildside collections-for a total of eight, two of which are completely uncollected stories. |
| LP: | Is Gordon van Gelder still your editor at St. Martin's? |
| BD: | As long as he can be and wants to be, yeah. |
| LP: | Since he was your editor at St. Martin's, and since you're a regular in Fantasy & Science Fiction, what do you think about him being named editor of F&SF? |
| BD: | I think he's going to be great! I love Gordon's taste in fiction, at least in novel length. Pretty much everybody he publishes is somebody I want to read, so I expect there will be more along those lines in short fiction. |
| LP: | After the St. Martin's collection, are you already laying plans for the next novel? |
| BD: | Yes, the next novel is already outlined, and I've written the first chapter. As soon as I get the collection out of the way, I'm going to work on the novel. |
| LP: | Any hints as to what it's about? |
| BD: | I can give you a few hints. I'm one of these superstitious writers; I don't like to talk about things before they're finished because I think that's bad juju. I think you jinx things if you give the story away before it's fully formed. But in general it's about the pervasiveness of mass media and how it alters our perceptions of reality. |
| LP: | So, very [Marshall] McLuhanean? |
| BD: | Maybe. We'll see. One other thing I'll say is that, I just noticed, after Lunatics came out (which is only my fourth novel, so I'm not very prolific), so far it's mainly gone "dark book, light book, dark book, light book." Which is not to say that there aren't light things in the dark books, and vice versa, but in general, Wrack & Roll was a dark book, Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well on Ganymede was a light book, Blackburn was fairly dark, and Lunatics was, by comparison, light. Which means it's time for a dark book. |
| LP: | Do you have a working title for it? |
| BD: | Yeah. In fact, one of the things that made me balk at working on the book was that I discovered the title I wanted to use had been used on another novel. Which legally is no problem, since you can't copyright titles. . . |
| LP: | "Gone With the Wind by Bradley Denton!" |
| BD: | (Laughs) No, not quite that well known a book. But I did discover another novel which had been published in 1915 that had actually garnered quite a bit of attention and praise at the time. And although that book had nothing to do with what I'm going to be writing about, it gave me a little bit of pause. But after trying several other titles, I realized this was the one I really wanted to use. So when I get started writing it, I'm going to be working on a novel called Laughing Boy. |
| LP: | Some critics have labeled your work slipstream. Do you think that's a fair description? |
| BD: | (Pause. Laughs.) I'm sorry, I have no idea. When I first started writing when I was 15, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I sent stories to Galaxy and F&SF and so forth. And that's probably how I became part of the genre in the first place, because that's what I loved as a teenager and what I initially wanted to write. But now when I sit down to write a story, I have to confess, I don't think about what genre the story is going to be in or not going to be in. I just think about what the story itself is going to be, regardless of whether it's going to be science fiction or fantasy or dark fantasy or slipstream or whatever. If I were to guess, I would guess that's one reason why some of my stuff is labeled slipstream, since I don't think about genre considerations anymore when I sit down to write a story, and whatever weird stuff creeps in is strictly germane to that story and that story only, and may not have anything to do with science fiction and fantasy. |
| LP: | You've written a few alternate histories, including Wrack & Roll. What is it that attracts you to the alternate history form? |
| BD: | In the case of Wrack & Roll, it was a time of my life, my mid-20s, when I was listening to a lot of rock music, I mean a lot of rock music, all the time, including The Who. And I got to wondering about the influence that pop culture had on the politics of sixties, and vice versa. There was sort of a reciprocal influence going on there, where the movements influenced the music and the music influenced the movements and so forth. And I just started wondering what might have happened if music had become that violent, that angry, and that politicized a couple decades earlier. And that's what Wrack & Roll came out of. What if Rock & Roll had gotten started during World War II rather than Korea?
The only other alternate history story I've written is "The Territory," and I wrote that because I had always wanted to write a story about Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas. That was an event that had always fascinated me ever since I was a kid, because it was such a bizarre event. Even for the Civil War it was a bizarre event, involving bizarre people. And I was reading some Twain one night, which I am wont to do, and read an essay of Twain's called "A Private History of a Campaign That Failed," which details Sam Clemens' actual experiences for two weeks in 1861 when he joined a guerrilla band in eastern Missouri, and quit after they killed somebody. It occurred to me that if things had happened a little differently, Clemens could have wound up in western Missouri with another guerrilla band, and wound up as he does in this story. So that alternate history story was the result of two fascinations of mine coming together in happy coincidence, Quantrill's Raid and Mark Twain. |
| LP: | How did growing up in a small Kansas town affect your fiction? |
| BD: | (Pause) Well, I don't think you can escape where you grow up. . . |
| LP: | As much as you might try. |
| BD: | As much as you might try. So my theory is that since you cannot escape where you grew up and who you grew up with, you might as well wallow in it. So as a result a fair number of my stories are set in Kansas and deal with people living on the plains, and in the cities of the plains, and with the sorts of things that happen in those places. |
| LP: | How different is living in Austin than in Kansas? |
| BD: | Well, Austin is the first actual city I've lived in. I was born in Wichita, which even then technically was a city, but we didn't live in Wichita proper. We lived on the outskirts, then moved out to the country when I was 13. Wichita even now is quite a bit smaller city than Austin. So Austin is the first real city I've lived in. And I realize that it's not really a big city, but it's big to me. So that's one difference, not so much that it's Austin or Texas as opposed to Kansas, but just a city as opposed to a rural environment. There's also, of course, this wonderful confluence of cultures that occurs in Austin, which I experienced to a slighter degree when I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, but it's much more pronounced here. Austin is the capital of a largely conservative state, and yet is the state's single bastion of, for want of a better word, liberalism. So there's this constant clash between Austin's conservative and liberal sides. And of course there's the music scene, which I love and which fascinates me and provides lots of material. It's not so much that its different from where I lived in Kansas, it's just that there's a lot more of it going on all the time. Lawrence is a college town, so you had the same kind of, of, liberal enclave, for want of a better word "liberal"- |
| LP: | Bohemian? |
| BD: | Yeah, yeah, sort of a bohemian, funky atmosphere, in what is essentially a very conservative state. But Lawrence was so much smaller than Austin, so all the things that went on there are just magnified here. Plus there are a whole lot more writers here. There were quite a few in Lawrence, being a college town, but I could walk down the street there without seeing one. But in Austin I can't spit out my window without hitting a published author. And believe me, I've tried. |
| LP: | You mentioned the Austin music scene. Have you attended South By Southwest [SXSW]? |
| BD: | Yeah, I did attend SXSW, the first three or four years I lived here, and then it started getting too big. Too big, and too crowded, and too many venues, and too many bands, and too much money for the wristbands. And I suddenly realized that most of the bands I wanted to see at SXSW I could see most of the nights of the week at a club in Austin for a whole lot less money with a whole lot fewer people crowding me. So I don't go to SXSW anymore, but I do try to go out and see bands. |
| LP: | Do you think you would have written Lunatics if you had lived anywhere else but Austin? |
| BD: | (whistles) I probably would have written a book about the same kinds of things, about the same kinds of life crises. I think I still would have had friends of about the same age going through the same kinds of things. It certainly wouldn't have been the same book. It would have had the same theme and the same concerns, but it might not have dealt with a moon goddess. Austin's moon towers were an inspiration in that regard when I was thinking about this book. When I was trying to think of a central unifying image, I thought of Lilith, the Goddess of the moon, being attracted by the moon towers of Austin, which I couldn't have thought of anywhere else. Certainly Austin also influenced the form, and the plot, and the characters of the book-although I probably would have done something along similar lines wherever I lived. |
| LP: | You mentioned several friends going through similar life crises. Much of Lunatics concerns marital problems, lust, and adultery. |
| BD: | Yeah. |
| LP: | Is this a big problem among your friends? |
| BD: | Well, not among my friends specifically, but I've been around long enough and lived long enough that I've seen it happen. When people get to a certain age, things start happening along those lines. And sometimes they pull through, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. (Pause) And the other friends have to deal with it. |
| LP: | A number of the novel's viewpoint characters are women. Did you find those sections more challenging to write, and did you have any women read the novel in manuscript? |
| BD: | Yes to both questions. I was very concerned about getting the female viewpoints right. Of course, there's no way of knowing whether I did or not, but so far the women who are willing to talk to me about it have responded to those sections as well as I would have hoped. Barb, of course, read the manuscript for me and made a few comments, and in general seemed to think that I had gotten most of those parts right. I also had another Austin writer, Caroline Spector, read each chapter as I wrote it, and she had some very helpful comments for me. |
| LP: | Why did it take so long to get Buddy Holly is Alive and Well in Ganymede published? |
| BD: | Um . . . it was . . .(breaks down laughing) Barb is looking out of the kitchen grinning, wondering how much of the story I'm going to tell. |
| LP: | We got time! |
| BD: | I finished the novel a few months after I moved to Austin in 1988. I sent it off to my then-agent, and got a response that she had received it. Then I didn't hear anything for a while, and I assumed that the book had gone out, and that we were just waiting to hear. But a year went by, and I then discovered that the book had not left her office. So we talked about it, and the book then did go out, and found an editor who wanted to buy it, and it took another year for him to get approval to buy it, and then another year to get it published. Anyway, that's the short version. |
| LP: | Do you think your work has been better received inside or outside the genre? |
| BD: | (Pause) I think I'm much better known within the genre than out, so in that regard I would have to say better received in the genre than out, simply because people can't respond to it if they don't read it. And I don't think a whole lot of people outside the genre have read my work. Probably some have. Probably some have read Blackburn in particular, outside the genre. And I have gotten some good mainstream reviews for Blackburn. But I also got a lot more good reviews for Blackburn within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. So far it looks like people inside the genre read me and tend to appreciate me more than that big, cold mainstream world does. |
| LP: | Where you somewhat surprised when Blackburn was nominated for a Stoker? |
| BD: | Sure! I'm always surprised when anyone nominates anything I've written for any kind of award. I assume, though, you're asking about- |
| LP: | From the standpoint, did you think it would appeal specifically as a horror novel? |
| BD: | As a horror novel. That's what I thought you were asking. Certainly I personally thought it was a horror novel for me, because it scared me to death to have to write about that character and that attitude and that life. I did not think it was a horror novel in the sense that one usually thinks of a horror novel. But, then again, as I said, I never think about those things. I was actually very pleased that there were other people out there who also thought it was horrifying. |
| LP: | What was it that first inspired you to write about a serial killer? |
| BD: | The novel actually grew out of a short story I wrote when I was 22, a story called "The Violent Life and Death of James L. Krantz," which I wrote in a fiction writing class at the University of Kansas. It was an episodic story with very little plot, just scenes of this person growing up, committing more and more heinous acts the older he got. When I got it back from the course instructor, the only thing she had written on it was she thought it was really a novel. And I put it away in a file cabinet for eight years, but didn't stop thinking about it. I pulled it out eight years later, and decided I was ready to start writing that book, but I was still really scared of it. The reason I had put it away in the first place was, number one, I didn't think I was ready to write a novel at 22 (which I wasn't), and number two, I was very leery of the subject matter. But eight years later I pulled it out and decided I wanted to go ahead and write the novel, but wasn't confident of my ability to do so. So I decided I would write the middle chapter first. So I wrote what became Chapter 6, which is smack in the middle of the book, and wrote it as a short story called "The Murderer Chooses Sterility," which Barb read in our kitchen in Baldwin City, Kansas, in the Spring of 1988, and had exactly the reaction I was hoping for. She was appalled. (Laughs) |
| LP: | "I want a divorce, you sick bastard!" |
| BD: | (laughs again) No, she was appalled, but in good way. She was veryŠshe handed it back to me and said "This is a story about a weird guy," and she had this funny look on her face for the next hour or so, and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finally, she said, "What bothers me so much about that story, is his attitudes and opinions are just like mine, but he's horrible!" And I went "Yeah, that's it!" I then sent that story out, sent it a few places, and finally sold it to Kris Rusch at Pulphouse. And in the meantime I started working on other pieces of the book. And Gordon van Gelder, while all this was happening, published The Best of Pulphouse at St. Martin's, and Kris included "The Murderer Chooses Sterility" in that collection. And Gordon got wind that I was doing the novel, and that's how it wound up at St. Martin's. |
| LP: | The use or rejection of violence seems a reoccurring theme in your work, both in Blackburn, also in "Skidmore," and to a certain extent in "Rerun Roy, Donna, and the Freak." Do all those stories stem from the same impulse? |
| BD: | (pause, then in a very low voice) What impulse are you suggesting? |
| LP: | Is there a particular reason that topic fascinates you? |
| BD: | (sighs) I grew up around violence. I grew up in the country, and I think that a lot of people who grew up in urban environments have this idea that living out in a rural area is a pastoral existence, but as a matter of fact there's just as much violence out in the country as there is in the city. It's just that dirt soaks up blood better than concrete does so you're not as aware of it. (pause) It's always been a concern of mine. It's like, is this how people really solve problems? And so I've done a lot of reading, and it turns out that a lot of times yes, this is how people solve problems, and of course create more. So I think it's a violent world, and as animals we're violent and do stupid things. |
| LP: | "Violent Stupidity"-That's what we'll call the interview! |
| BD: | Violence and stupidity! Yeah. . . |
| LP: | "An Interview With Bradley Denton." |
| BD: | Great! That'll look good! (general laughter) |
| Barb Denton: | Leave my name out of it. I don't want anyone asking which one am I. |
| LP: | Oh, like one of you has to be "Violence" and the other one has to be "Stupidity"? |
| BD: | "We crawled out to the curb, Denton hacking away at our shoulder blades. . ." No, it's one of the things that I see in the world and in human behavior, pervasively, over and over again. And the stories you mention aren't the only ones where it comes up. |
| LP: | Have you had any odd reactions from other people about writing about a serial killer? I heard Don Webb talk in particular about one radio interview you did. |
| BD: | Oh yeah! Yeah. The lady at the radio station kept looking at me, and started describing me over the air to her listeners. She said I looked like a softball dad. She said "He looks like such a nice young man. How can you write about things like that? You look like such a nice man. You don't look weird." And I finally said "Well, neither do you." So yeah, I've gotten that reaction a few times. My mother keeps asking me why I can't write about nice people. |
| LP: | What was it that made you decide to become a writer? |
| BD: | Boy, I don't know that I ever decided to become a writer, I just always was. I was writing little stories to amuse myself when I was five years old, and I just always did it. I originally thought I was going to be a scientist, that I was going to get a Ph.D. in Astronomy and be an astronomer and write stories for fun on the side. And along about my sophomore year in college I realized that while I could do science and do the math, I was much more fascinated with what the people around me were doing in their lives, and wanted to write about that. So I shifted my emphasis from the sciences to what I guess you could say was the humanities. I wound up getting a double major instead of a bachelor of science, getting a bachelor of arts in astronomy and English, so that I could do more writing and get credit hours for it. |
| LP: | So why astronomy? Was that another emanation of science fiction? |
| BD: | I don't know which begot the other. I was always fascinated with astronomy from my earliest recollection. Always wanted to get a telescope and see what was out there. And so of course I was interested in science fiction. One probably fed the other. |
| LP: | Who were some of the writers you read while growing up, either inside or outside the genre? |
| BD: | Inside the genre, I read a lot of Asimov. Asimov was my favorite writer as a pre-adolescent. I also read most of the Heinlein juveniles when I was that age. The Star Beast was my favorite Heinlein juvenile. Then as I got a little older I started reading Bester, and some Bradbury, and then when I was a teenager I discovered people like Ed Bryant and Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock. . . |
| LP: | The whole New Wave? |
| BD: | Yeah, the New Wave. I don't know whether the New Wave influenced me stylistically or not, but I know that I thought a lot of those guys were great when I was a teenager and started to write seriously, so there was some kind of influence there. Outside the genre, when I was very young I read a lot of Conan Doyle, loved the Sherlock Holmes stories. Read a lot of Mark Twain, still do. He bears rereading, because there are things you don't get in Twain when you're 12 that you do when you're 38. I remember reading Donald Wollheim when I was a kid. Wollheim wrote a series of juvenile science fiction novels called Mike Mars, Astronaut, and I read most of those. |
| LP: | Which writers do you read now? |
| BD: | Well, I try to read a lot of different writers. There are some writers I'll read anything they do. Michael Bishop, I'll read anything he does; John Kessel, who has a new novel out I need to get. . . |
| LP: | Corrupting Dr. Nice? |
| BD: | Yeah, Corrupting Dr. Nice, I really want to read that. I'll still read anything Ed Bryant does. Right now I just started reading Karen Joy Fowler's new novel, I'm about a third of the way through it, The Sweetheart Season. Boy, that's real good so far. In fact, I'm deliberately reading it slowly, I'm enjoying the prose so much. She can really make you see things. I just discovered a writer that Doug Lewis of The Little Bookshop of Horrors turned me on to, a writer named Dan Woodrell who's a mainstream writer, and his most recent novel is Give Us A Kiss, which I just read and liked a lot. It turns out this guy and I had a class together at KU in graduate school. Other writers I'll read: Neal Barrett, Bill Spencer. . .man, I'll be leaving a lot of people out. Bruce, of course, I'll read Bruce Sterling. . . |
| LP: | Old Home Week. |
| BD: | Yeah, it is! This is what I was saying earlier, you can't spit out your window here without hitting someone great. |
| LP: | Several years ago you left GEnie (and this was even before The Great Exodus following Genie's sale to a bunch of incompetent dorks in 1995 and 1996) because you felt it was a huge time sink. |
| BD: | Yeah. |
| LP: | Do you find your current online services eating up a lot of time, or is that temptation there? |
| BD: | I've learned to manage it better. Mainly I just get online for e-mail now. Once in a while, once in a great while, I'll go back and get on Barb's computer because she's got the fast modem, and I'll browse around on the net just for a little bit. My own machine only has a 2400 baud modem, so pretty much all I can stand to do is e-mail. Try to surf the net at 2400 baud sometime, I dare you! |
| LP: | Is this a deliberate control mechanism on your part? |
| BD: | No, it's not deliberate, but it works out fine. The problem with GEnie was that you would get into these mass conversations, where people would get into this long discussion on the boards, and one felt obligated to respond to something someone said in response to something you had said. So you wound up getting into intricate discussions and arguments about this, that, and the other, and it really did eat up a whole lot of time. So now it's restricted to e-mail for me. |
| LP: | How heavily has Rock and Roll influenced your work? |
| BD: | It's difficult to say. I have no idea, but it's got to be considerable. I believe that popular culture is an important thing to write about, because for better or worse it shapes who we are and who we are going to become. Music is perhaps the most pervasive of all popular media, since it's difficult to live in the modern world, without being a complete hermit, and not have heard certain bands and certain songs. You can avoid having seen an episode of Cheers if you just refuse to turn on your TV, but find me one person in this country who hasn't heard a Beatles song, even if only in a muzak version on an elevator. So I find it pervasive and important as a result, again for good or ill. Certainly the next novel will be concerned with the changes popular culture wreaks on society in general. |
| LP: | Some of your earlier short stories deal with the transformative power of music, or the potential transformative power, but you haven't really dealt with it recently. Do you think that's a common "young writer" idea? |
| BD: | Probably, but I think it's also a function of the time I grew up in. It was a function both of my youth and of the youth of rock and roll. In the late 1960s, it was possible to believe that that music would change the world, and would transform you personally and politically. It was possible to believe that when you saw Woodstock, and you saw 400,000 people gathered together in one place. Nobody had ever done that before! Nobody had ever gathered that many people in one place before just to hear some bands, or in most cases not hear some bands because they were so damn far away! Now, there are so many bands, and music festivals every weekend, and it's just something you do. It's more difficult to believe that this is an experience that can transform you. Back then, it wasn't quite so naive. |
| LP: | For readers who may not have heard, how did Los Blues Guys get together? |
| BD: | I was actually a middle-period addition to Los Blues Guys. Los Blues Guys was founded by Steve Gould and Rory Harper at an Aggiecon in the deep mists of memory. It was Steve and Rory and a couple of other people. Rory played guitar and Steve played keyboards and harmonica, and they had somebody on saxophone and somebody else on acoustic guitar, and didn't have a drummer. At some convention they asked me to sit in because I played harmonica and Steve wanted to devote more time to keyboards, so I joined. I had always wanted to learn to play drums, so I learned to play drums and became Los Blues Guys' drummer. We lasted another year or two after that before we disintegrated because everyone lived in a different city. |
| LP: | Were there any other writers in Los Blues Guys? |
| BD: | There were guest musicians all the time. Steve Brust played with us one time, Emma Bull sang with us one time. Tom Maddox played with us once. The rhythm guitarist, Scott McCullar, was a published cartoonist. Martha Wells was a backup singer. That was before she was published, but she sold The Element of Fire before the band disintegrated. |
| LP: | What sort of music do you listen to now? |
| BD: | Pretty much the same kind I've always listened to. Rock and Roll, Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and variations thereof. I still listen to The Who a lot, I still listen to Buddy Guy a lot. Among more recent Blues musicians, I really like Sue Foley's guitar playing a lot, she's local. I love John Hiatt's songwriting. Freedy Johnston, he's a homeboy, a Kansas boy. I go to Antone's four or five times a year, I go to other clubs. I went to La Zona Rosa last night to hear a woman [Andra Mitrovich] who used to play with my current band, Ax Nelson [Efraim Armendariz, Ben Armendariz, Cameron Gordon, and BD]. After her new band played for a while, she called us up on stage and we played for about 45 minutes. I still go out when I can, but I prefer to be playing. But I don't much like to play at clubs anymore. We got burned out playing clubs, because you end up playing for tips, and nobody tips you, and nobody pays attention. So it's a lot more fun to play at private parties and wedding receptions where everyone gets drunk and dances. |
| DB: | "The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians"-what prompted you to write that? |
| BD: | Reading Lenny Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, which I read while I was working on Wrack and Roll in the summer of 85. I had written eight or nine chapters of Wrack and Roll, and after finishing his autobiography, it occurred to me that as much trouble as Lenny Bruce had given people, and as much grief as he had gotten from those same people during his life, if there were an afterlife, it would have been more of the same. So that's where the story came from. I stopped working on the novel, and pretty much wrote that story in a white heat. It was one of the fastest things I ever wrote - about 25,000 words, and I wrote it in four days. After some editing I sold it to Ed Ferman that same year. I will make one more comment about "The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians." I feel a little bit like Isaac Asimov did about "Nightfall." "Calvin Coolidge" was a story written in 1985, published in 1988, which to me was the early stage of my career. . . and I still get more questions, and more comments at conventions, and occasional letters and e-mail, about that story than about any other piece of short fiction I've ever written. |
| DB: | Do you find yourself following stand-up comedy much? |
| BD: | Not every comic, but there have been some that have really caught my attention. The most recent in living memory was, God rest him, Bill Hicks. What a brilliant man! If there was ever anybody who inherited the spirit of Lenny Bruce and took it to a whole new level it was Bill Hicks. Barb and I (along with a bunch of our friends) caught the last show he did in Austin at The Laff Stop. For the finale of that show, he did this bit about Barbara Bush and Rush Limbaugh that was the filthiest, most obscene, most offensive thing I had ever heard in my life, and it had us all rolling on the floor. Even as we were appalled, we were apoplectic with hilarity. He could do that. He could take something that was both political, and offensive, and scatological, and make it socially relevant and funny. He was great. |
| LP: | He was a funny guy. He was doing stand-up comedy at the same time I was in Houston. |
| BD: | Yeah, you mentioned that! Him and Brett Butler. |
| LP: | Yeah, back in 1983. They were the two that broke out of that scene nationally. I think Sam Kinison was a little earlier. |
| BD: | There's actually a genre connection here, besides the fact you knew these guys when you were doing stand-up. The first time I ever heard him or saw him was while I was at the Sycamore Hill writer's workshop in Raleigh. One night, to relieve the tension after a day of critiquing, we all went to a comedy club. The bill there that night was "The Texas Outlaws," which was four guys, the only one of which I remember was Bill Hicks. I remember seeing him that night in 87, and then the last night in 93, and he had grown by leaps and bounds. He had taken that germ that he had back in the 80s and had developed it into this incredible stage persona that was two parts Will Rogers and 98 parts Lenny Bruce! I don't know how to describe Bill Hicks, but he was phenomenal. . . |
| LP: | Bile on a Stick, perhaps? |
| BD: | It was Bile on a Stick, but it was Bile on a Stick you wanted to buy! |
| DB: | From looking at your shelves, it seems like you read a fair amount of detective fiction. |
| BD: | Some, yeah, some. I mentioned Dan Woodrell, who I've just now gotten into, and Give Us a Kiss isn't exactly a detective novel. He calls it a country noir. It's like a hardboiled crime novel set in the wilds of Arkansas. I read Walter Mosley, although I really like RL's Dream more than the Easy Rawlins stuff, which makes me an exception to the rule. |
| DB: | Robert Crais? |
| BD: | Yeah! I read Voodoo River. I have Sunset Express and I'm going to read it right after Karen Fowler's book. I actually got into Robert Crais because he wrote me a very kind note about Blackburn, and serendipitously I had read a review of one of Bob Crais's novels the day before I got this letter from him. So here's a guy who got a great review for a book that's piquing my interest, and he liked one of my books, so what am I waiting for? |
| LP: | Obviously a man of surpassing taste and excellence. |
| BD: | Or at least somebody with a sympathetic soul. So I went and read Voodoo River, which I really liked. |
| LP: | What's your personal favorite of your own work? |
| BD: | Among the short fiction, right now my favorite story is "The Territory," simply because it's set in a place that means a lot to me and deals with topics that mean a lot to me. It deals with violence, again, and the causes and results of violence. It also features a protagonist who was a very flawed man, but yet I admire the hell out of him. Of the novels, I can't pick a favorite. There are only four so far, so there aren't that many to choose from. But I hope they seem very different from each other, since they sure do to me, and all four were sure different experiences to work on. And for that reason it's tough for me to pick one over the others, since at the time I was putting my heart and soul into each one. I will say that I think Wrack and Roll is certainly the most flawed. I think that's part of the first novel curse. And there are things I did in that novel, and didn't do in that novel, that I wouldn't do now. Then again, I wouldn't be writing that novel now, since I'm not 26 years old. |
| LP: | Would you still have your protagonist piss on a member of the faculty? |
| BD: | (Long pause) Is that tape still running? I suppose it depends on the faculty member. |
| LP: | Well, we can always edit this out later. Or at least we'll tell you we'll edit it out later, then we'll use it as a pull quote. (laughs) |
| BD: | I've read your interviews! I know what you leave in! I don't know if I would do that or not. I've certainly had protagonists do worse things to people in other books. |
| LP: | How was your house designated the Howard Waldrop Shrine? |
| BD: | Well, I don't know that it was ever actually designated a Shrine. Note to the tape recorder: We're all looking at the bust of Howard on my mantle at this point, wearing a Bolero hat. |
| LP: | Plus Howard's Nebula, plus Howard's Howard [the World Fantasy Award, cast in the likeness of H. P. Lovecraft], right next to Brad's Howard. |
| BD: | Doug Potter cast the plaster bust of Howard, I guess it was 92, right after we moved into this house. At the charity auction at Armadillocon, a bust of Howard Waldrop with a clock in his chest was the last item to be auctioned, and it was obviously the coolest item in the auction. We'd had the pre-convention party at our house, and had the bust on display our mantle, and everybody had commented on how cool it looked on our mantle. I think that Ken Houghton started it at the auction, but before we knew it people were kicking in $5 or $10 towards putting it on our mantle. I didn't realize it at first, but at one point I looked up and realized that everyone in the room was kicking in money to put something in my house. It was for charity, so what could I do? And the awards are in safekeeping for Howard, since he moved up to Washington in a small car. We have the awards and a few boxes of books and few other things stored for him here. And if we can't talk him into moving back to Austin, we'll eventually ship the stuff back up to him. |
| LP: | How do you hope your work will be remembered a hundred years from now? |
| BD: | Well, how does anyone hope their work will be remembered a hundred years from now? First of all, you just hope it will be remembered. (pause) Man, I'll be dead by then, so what will I care? |
| LP: | There's a nice uplifting quote to end with! |
| BD: | Let's pick a date in my lifetime. Assuming I'll be alive 25 years from now, I hope people will still be reading the books that are out there now. I hope people will still be reading Blackburn and Lunatics, and enjoying them and getting some value out of them. And I sure hope that I'm still around and still writing something they want to read. |