Jesse Lawrence: Part of the on-going debate regarding genre and literary fictions is that genre stories aren’t, well, literary. What do the two terms mean to you, and do you think that may have ever been the case with genre stories, but is now no longer the case? That is, has genre fiction evolved in any way?
Stephen Graham Jones: All ‘genre’ means to me, really, is ‘built-in audience.’ But that entails a set of agreed-upon conventions, too. Maybe even a formula. Formulas aren’t in the least inherently bad, though. Or, they don’t have to be. And — surely I’ve said this somewhere in print by now — I take the conventions and formulas to be the baffles, the constraints, the ridiculous stuff you have to focus the critical part of your mind on, such that something real and true and magic can maybe slip through while you’re not looking. To say nothing of how much harder you’ve got to push yourself as a writer, if you hope to be original within these certain boundaries. You really learn what you can do, I mean, when what you’ve given yourself to tell the story with’s a barbarian, an archer, an elf, and this elaborate catacomb system, say. But I’m saying all this from the writing side of things. I’m just as much a reader. And, when I’m strolling the shelves, thumbing books out, most of the time it’s genre titles I’ll be carrying around. Because, I mean, you go into a book, you have no guarantee of quality. No real suspicion, even, unless you know this writer already. When you don’t, though, and, on the front of one there’s this product-of-realism boring suburban house, and on the other cover there’s a gargoyle hand coming down on some poor guy’s head, then, yeah, it’s the gargoyle for me, just because, even if the writing sucks and story self-destructs, still, it’s more than likely I’m going to have gotten to see a gargoyle, yeah? And, coming out of the boring-house story, I’m going to have seen somebody dealing with the doldrums of life, maybe. Which, I can see that on any sidewalk. All of which is to say, I suppose, that books are less mirrors for me, more an escape hatch. I want to be taken somewhere other than here, not deeper into where I already am.
And, as for the terms themselves, they’re all polluted up. The market’s come to call ‘literary’ that which is not ‘genre,’ which is to say that which doesn’t have swords or ghosts or zombies or any of that fun stuff. But that’s way screwed up. What ‘literary’ should indicate is the strength of the writing, the caliber, the depth. And none of that’s isolated to non-zombie books. And neither are all non-zombie books inherently ‘literary.’ There’s quality writing on each set of shelves, and there’s a lot of trash, too. For my money, there’s a lot more trash on the literary shelves, a lot more high-craft / nothing-to-say books, few of which seem to be written in blood like I prefer — as if they mattered, as if the writer was living through this book, was gambling his or her life on it — but, I mean, I haven’t given up, either. There’s still stuff like Await Your Reply or Atonement happening from time to time, and, I mean, Oscar Wao’s from that shelf, and Blood Meridian, and Alice Fulton. But there’s also Kelly Link and Stephen King and Charlie Huston and Max Brooks and Joe Hill and CJ Box and Elizabeth Hand and Max Brooks and Joe Lansdale happening, and usually at a steadier rate. And more and more often on an endcap in-between, a Chabon and Evenson kind of place.
And, why this divide, yeah? Can’t quality writing just be quality writing? I don’t want to say the marketplace is the source of corruption — really, the market’s vital; without it, there’d be no feedback loop, and who knows what ridiculous-indulgent stuff might start showing up — but it’s maybe the river between the two camps, anyway. One side plays in it, the other insulates itself up some tower, pretends that water’s not even down there. Who knows how to fix this. Maybe a flood’ll come, give us a sea instead, a raft made from lashed-together books, I don’t know.
JL: You’ve mentioned before that horror is probably your favorite genre. What draws you to horror? Do you prefer any one subgenre over another? Do you think it has or will make a comeback–horror fiction–the way it did cinematically with the release of Scream?
SGJ: I love the horror, yeah, but kind of doubt we’re in pre-renaissance mode with it. Which, that’s good, I think. I mean, a glut of it like we had in the eighties, and, bam, the next decade’ll be dry, right? I’m happy with it kind of coasting along respectably, really. And, yeah, just all over Scream 4, especially now that Campbell’s signed on. So happy to see Williamson behind the pen again, too. Will always hate Dawson’s Creek for keeping Scream 2 and 3 from maybe being even better than they were. As for why I’m so into horror, though, I think it’s just that it’s basically people with all the trappings stripped away. You know your characters best in extreme situations, and horror’s got plenty of extreme situations. Also, I think horror’s the absolute oldest, most honest genre. Thousands of years ago, you’d walk away from the campfire, hear something pacing you, and run back, try your best to explain what’s out there. That’s what horror is, to me: trying to explain what’s out there. What’s in each of us. Some people say every story’s a mystery story, yeah, and I’ll agree, in that the form of the western novel tends to be always shaped that way. But underneath that, I think, there’s blood and guts and teeth, screams out in the darkness that you don’t know what’s happening. But you can’t look away either.
JL: Is there anything you’d like to see more of? Say, more Conan-esque protagonists or more monsters with lasers kind of stuff. Anything you feel is sorely lacking?
SGJ: Was just re-hitting some of the early Conan the other day. So miss it. And yeah, if somebody can do that still, then, please, put it on a shelf for me. As for anything missing, though, I don’t know. Okay, yeah: werewolves. Vampires were hot, zombies are the new black, all that, but nobody ever gives werewolves any real respect, I don’t think. And I’m not talking change-at-the-full-moon werewolves either, I’m talking the wolves you’d get had Near Dark been about lycanthropy. The way Strieber, say, does them in The Wolfen. But I so loved how McCammon did them as well. Anyway, as nobody’s doing it well enough right now, I’ve got plans, yeah. A perfect title. Just need 1100 pages worth of time to get it all down, I think.
JL: Do you ever juggle stories in your head or have to make a concious decision to ignore one in order to pursue another?
SGJ: I juggle opening lines, anyway, which is where the story lives. But then I just write one down instead of the other, and take off running. However, at the end of novels I’ll always get nervous about ten pages shy and spit out a few short stories, just as practice, or for confidence, that I can still do this thing called writing. At least enough to fake my way another few thousand words.
JL: Later this year, you have a new short story collection coming out from Prime Books, The Ones That Got Away. And another novel, It Came from Del Rio, has recently been anounced. What can you tell us about these, and what’s next beyond that? Perhaps monsters with lasers?
SGJ: Lasers are always problematic for me, because I can’t ask for one at a gun counter as cool as the Terminator could in 84, and I can’t seem to not hear Dr. Evil wanting them mounted on shark’s heads. An impulse I can completely understand. But I’m so in love with lasers, too. That big wave motion gun that would always, just in the nick of time, blast out from the front of the good ship Yamato in Star Blazers? For some people, that Farrah Fawcett poster’s the thing that ruined them for the rest of their lives. For me it was the Yamato.
But, no, no lasers in either of these two books, I don’t think. The Ones That Got Away is seventy- or eighty-thousand words of short horror fiction. Of mine, yeah. From Cemetery Dance and Doorways and Brutarian and New Genre and all around (Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best Horror of the Year v.2). Some unpublished, probably; surely. Have so much more, but tried to limit it to the bloody, the disturbing, the fun. So cool to get to be getting this collection real, too. A dream. No, no: a nightmare. The best kind.
And, the other, It Came from Del Rio, man. Just re-read it, to straighten out any tics, and I’m so in love with this novel, this story, this daughter trying to make amends with her father, that dad doing everything he can for his daughter, which seems to involve walking around even though he’s dead, and maybe (probably) (okay: definitely) kind of using his own head up enough that he has to take the head from this giant rabbit, go slouching across the scrublands of southern Texas, into Austin, his only retinue a loyal pack of chupacabras. Kind of thrilled-in-advance at the cover and marketing that’s going to happen here. Or, thrilled to be sending a zombie shuffling out in the world. The first of many, I hope.
You can find Stephen Graham Jones online at demontheory.net, and at this year’s AWP conference at these two panels:
R187. Byronic Vampires and Melancholy Green Men: Harnessing Genre for Literary Use. (J.W. Wang, Mark Winegardner, Stephen Graham Jones, Tom Franklin, Leah Stewart, Julianna Baggott) Perhaps no word can be more anathema to literature than genre. Yet, in the postmodern world the dividing line is often blurry, or even nonexistent, and we see more and more authors making use of familiar genre elements for their literary pursuits: vampires, the mafia, romance, etc. This panel explores the notion of genre versus literature: what the dividing lines are, how one informs the other, how one goes about bringing the two together, successes and failures.
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.
