Jesse Lawrence: Thus far, you’ve written a novel in the Aliens series and one, forthcoming, in the Dead Space world. How did these projects come your way? Does your process differ, and how so, when writing a story in a previously mapped out world versus one of your own creation?
Brian Evenson: It’s a very different process in many ways. With both those series novels I did a long and carefully plotted outline first (20 pages or so), something that I usually don’t do with my other novels. I also wrote both of them pretty quickly, much quicker than my other novels, partly because that was the easiest way for me to keep the plot and characters consistent. Having already-created worlds that I was working in definitely changed the process as well—there were certain things I had to take as given, certain restrictions about what I could or couldn’t do. But both Aliens and Dead Space created worlds I genuinely liked and felt could accommodate me: I wouldn’t have done the novels if I hadn’t felt that way.
JL: If you could write a novel in any series or world which would you choose?
BE: I’d love to enter Richard Stark’s world (or maybe Donald Westlake’s world since Stark was one of his pseudonyms) and write a Parker novel. I’ve read nearly all of those. There’s something about the world view and the attitudes that I find really appealing: the quiet, controlled brutality of the main character and the careful planning of the heists, the way he reacts when things go wrong, etc. I think it would be a very interesting space to move around in.
JL: At this year’s AWP conference, you’re on a panel entitled Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy…Seriously. What are your thoughts on genre, how it is perceived, and on the genre versus literary ideology?
BE: I’ve written about this pretty extensively elsewhere. I’m convinced that too often genre is wrongly used as a dismissive category and that glorifying something by declaring it literary can sometimes gloss over a series of problems. There are a lot of bad books on both sides of the genre/literature divide, and a lot of good books as well. I’ve found my own reading, and my own writing crossing that divide more and more often.
There is another funny thing about genre divisions: they’re not parallel. The mystery genre is defined by, well, there being a mystery that has to be solved. That’s essential and so a kind of basic plot idea is worked into the definition. With SF, that’s not the case: it’s defined more by setting and props that appear within the book. With Horror, it’s different still: it seems, as Peter Straub has suggested, defined more by a mood. When we call something literary, what defines that genre? Use of language? Consciousness of style? There’s a certain vagueness there that results in the term “literary fiction” being applied to very different kinds of work for very different reasons, which makes it a very tricky genre, but a genre nonetheless.
JL: One could say that everything is genre. Most of the book that are dubbed literary are simply dramas. How is it, you think, that genre has come to mean, well, crime, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy?
BE: One thing that’s interesting is that we’ve started using the adjective “literary” to justify other genres. So my work often gets called “Literary Horror,” which to me means that there’s an acknowledgement of a connection to genre but also an insistence that it’s literary. It’s interesting that when you reverse the two terms and say “Horror Literature” it doesn’t have the same effect: it just means the same thing that people mean when they say simply “Horror.” The problem with genre, I remain convinced, is a problem with words and how we apply them.
I’d say this is true with genre in the broader sense as well. If you think of subgenres of fiction like “novel” and “short story”, there’s two very different things going on with both words. “Novel” comes from the word for new, and we still use the term that way (“a novel idea”); short story, focuses on length. There’s a reason that we valorize the idea of newness and innovation in regard to novels; it’s worked into the term itself.
There’s the further problem of confusion of the meaning of genre. Genre could mean the difference between fiction, poetry and drama. It is also used for subcategories within that: the novel genre, for instance. It is also used, usually derogatorially, to describe different sorts of writing, but as I’ve suggested above, the term is not used the same way to define each genre. Genre is a messed up term, and really problematic. And yes, in a way everything is genre, but that’s also to say the term is meaningless.
I think what’s starting to happen—and what I and a number of writers are actively trying to make happen—is that the firm distinctions between genres are starting to collapse. There’s a lot of cross pollination that’s going on at all levels: novels and poems interacting to create hybrid forms, literary and genre fiction (horror, sf, etc.) informing one another, and different genres (horror, sf, mystery, etc.) blurring and learning from one another. There are historical and other reasons for this, but I think it’s very healthy for literature as a whole.
JL: Do you prefer one genre over another? And what is it about such stories that grabs you?
BE: I think each genre, including the literary, has something to offer. What I’m most interested in are pieces that challenge my sense of what fiction can do, that make me see things in new ways, that cast new light on both the fictive and the real. Those books exist in all genres and all places: it may be Peter Straub’s The Dark Matter or John Ashbery’s Flow Chart or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. It may be something by Ken Bruen or Selah Saterstrom or John Yau or Brian Conn or John Crowley or Stendahl. If genre definitions and restrictions are keeping me from discovering those books, they need to be reconsidered.
Brian Evenson’s novel Last Days, published by Underland Press in 2009, won the American Library Association’s Best Horror Novel of the Year award. Also published in 2009 is a collection of stories, Fugue State.
For more on the genre side of things, and more from Brian Evenson, check out this panel at AWP Denver:
S115. Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy… Seriously. (Anthony Smith, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Tod Goldberg, Mark Smith, Seth Harwood) Six writers of genre fiction who also teach and/or have graduated from university creative writing programs dicuss how they approach genre fiction as a serious literary pursuit rather than as a lesser form of fiction. In addition, they discuss attitudes towards genre fiction in the university and how those attitudes have changed over the years.
