Reading Nick Mamatas, I feel like I'm having a crazy late-night conversation with somebody who loves all the same books that I love. Granted, we love some strange things. Just check out this quote from Mamatas' novel, Move Under Ground, mixing the beat generation with the lurking horror of a pulp novel:
"Neal drank too deeply of the well at first, making girls left and right as usual, talking a few too many shots to the face, and eating out on the story of our travels maybe one too many times. Those boozy late-night dinners with crazy soulless characters whose jaws clacked like mandibles when they laughed are what got him in the end, I'm sure."
I will spend the rest of the week discussing writing and publishing with this budding novelist. Welcome to my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
Your first novel mashed-up horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft and Beatnik Jack Kerouac, an idea so good it makes my head spin. How did you develop your crazy take on horror fiction? How did you find readers interested in your crazy take on horror fiction? Who are some other writers writing innovative horror novels?
Nick Mamatas:
Once you pull him and his peculiar mix of supernaturalist soap opera and thriller out of horror, you have a lot of underdeveloped strands to play with: Lovecraft, satirical horror a la Ira Levin, Fitz Leiber's uncanny urbanism, Aickman's "strange stories", Shirley Jackson's domestic viciousness, etc. Most of my reading isn't horror fiction or even genre fiction, so I guess that helped.
Finding readers ain't easy, actually. The one handy thing has been the concepts I write about, which excite reviewers. Not too many first horror novels published by an independent press get reviewed in the Village Voice, The Believer, and the American Book Review, for example, but the Hollywood style logline: "Lovecraftian Beat road novel" got reviewers and book page editors hooked.
There aren't too many other people writing innovative horror novels, which is a shame since it is so easy to do — a tiny push in any direction would be amazing these days. There is just a hell of a lot of sameness. Even publishers and writers who specialize in expensive limited editions brag about offering up "good old-fashioned horror."
Why would I pay $50 for a good old-fashioned horror novel when I can go to Goodwill and buy used good old-fashioned horror paperbacks for fifty cents? Having said that, I'll name Brian Evenson, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Jeff VanderMeer.
» Spooky Writers from ThePublishingSpot
As we begin our week with genre-shattering novelist Nick Mamatas, I've got a couple spooky writing sites for you to explore, each with the Mamatas Seal of Approval... Check out Brian Evenson, a professional librarian with six books under... [Read More]
Tracked on: May 8, 2006 12:06 PM | Permalink to Trackback