Paul Tremblay

Tremblay’s new novel, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine, 2012) is a dystopian satire set in the City/Pier world that he began developing in some of his earlier short fiction. The novel sets its sights on contemporary American society and finds an abundance of targets, from the corporatization of agriculture to the dehumanization of the poor to the flattening of political discourse. At the same time, the narrative grounds itself in its protagonist’s search for his missing mother through this absurd world, which keeps the book from sliding into abstraction.

Recently, John Langan interviewed Tremblay on behalf of Weirdfictionreview.com to talk at length about Donkey’s Eye, Tremblay’s approach to writing, and the intersection of his own aesthetic with the Weird, among other things.

John Langan:  Okay, so let’s begin with the obvious question:  the book’s title.  Where did you get Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye?

Paul Tremblay:  When I was a child I had a stuffed donkey named Herman, and I plucked out his button eye and…

Actually, sometime back in 2005 I was listening to Neutral Milk Hotel’s On Avery Island and its instrumental, “Pree Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye.” As a writing prompt/challenge I decided to try and write a short story with the donkey title. The short story eventually grew into an odd duck novel. So many farm animals!

Langan:  Do you see any more extensive connection between the song or the album it came from and your novel?

Tremblay:  Not explicitly. NMH uses off-beat instrumentation and Jeff Mangum’s lyrics are built with dreamlike images and metaphors, so perhaps the general oddness to the proceedings in SaDE is in the spirit of NMH. My short story, “The Two-Headed Girl,” and within it the appearance of Anne Frank is more obviously inspired by NMH and their song, “Two-Headed Boy.”

Langan:  In general, do you draw inspiration/ideas from the music you listen to?

Tremblay:  Definitely. Music was my first love/obsession, and in middle school/high school, it was my escape and sanctuary. I picked up the guitar in college and I am, at heart, a frustrated or wannabe musician. I’m drawn to the primal immediacy of music, and the visceral emotional impact it has on me. My favorite music makes me feel and makes me want to feel. I like to think that my best stories/novels have or can have a similar effect on the reader.

I’ve written many short stories inspired by lyric snippets (“There’s No Light Between Floors” for one). Of my three novels and two short story collections, four have titles that are riffs on song titles: Compositions for the Young and Old is also a song by Bob Mould; No Sleep Till Wonderland is a riff on the famous Beastie Boys tune; In the Mean Time is a song by Helmet; and now we have NMH and Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye.

Langan:  Beyond its immediacy and emotional impact, do you connect with music on a more theoretical level?  What I mean is, there’s a kind of punk or neo-punk aesthetic at work in Bob Mould and the Beastie Boys, while I guess you could call Helmet alternative metal, and NMH might fall under the (admittedly vague) indie rock label.  As a writer, do you find yourself embracing any of these artistic stances–say, the diversity of styles that characterizes NMH’s work?

Tremblay:  Ever since I first heard Hüsker Dü and The Ramones I wanted to be in a punk band. I eventually figured out I was a much better writer than musician. I’d love to say, “Hell yeah, I’m a punk writer,” but I’d feel a little too self-conscious and fraudulent doing so.  But, yeah, the punk/indie ethos of working outside or at the edges of the mainstream certainly appeals to me. I still crave that adolescent rebellious thrill associated with the cultural weirdness of being somewhere outside of the mainstream. Basically, I want to hang with the cool kids. The really cool kids.

On the most basic of levels, and perhaps this is stating the obvious, I write about what reflects my interests as a reader and consumer of art first and foremost. The pollination and cross-pollination of influence is unavoidable in all artistic endeavors, and what else would any sensible writer do besides embrace it? As a writer, I’ve always wanted to explore different styles and genres, to mix and match like my kids do with Legos from different sets. I think I’ve done so to varying degrees of success. And I have to admit, I get a big kick out of having been introduced at various readings/conventions as “the horror writer, Paul Tremblay” or “the crime writer, Paul Tremblay” and most recently “the science fiction writer, Paul Tremblay.” Maybe one day I’ll just be introduced as “writer.” Isn’t that so punk rock?

Langan:  Do you see, then, any overlap between punk and notions of the Weird?

Tremblay:  Sure, why not? Beyond the idea of an aesthetic working outside of what’s considered mainstream or commenting upon the mainstream, if we look at punk and the varied artistic/political/philosophical movements that influenced it, which at its safety-pinned heart rejects the establishment, we can see more than a passing similarity within this notion of the Weird whose practitioners (Kafka, Lovecraft, Jackson, Miéville, Cisco, Slatter and so many more) ultimately question or reject reality.

Man, how’s that for a knotted, gnarly sentence? Maybe I should’ve stuck with, “Sure, why not?”

Langan:  That idea of challenging, if not outright rejecting, the establishment, seems to go to the heart of SaDE’s narrative.

Tremblay:  Yeah, SaDE is a dystopian satire that takes shots at western politics, culture, and consumerism. All of which are, frankly, easy targets. I tried to balance the exaggeration necessary for satire with credulous incredulity when the reader compares the fictional ridiculousness with real ridiculousness. For example, having my giant conglom Farm engineer its animals to have no vocal cords while telling the consumers that Farm only raises all natural stock, while also having to then pump in fake animal noises when giving Farm Tours is both bat-shit insane and totally (and unfortunately) believable.

Langan:  One of the things I find fascinating about the book is the use of those almost generic nouns to label places and individuals:  Farm, City, Pier, the Mayor.  It’s a technique that has a satiric effect, obviously, and it seems to express a vision of a world in which individual names have lost their meaning.

Tremblay:  Yes, definitely. And with one of the themes in the book being bureaucratic fantasy versus reality, those generic, almost Platonic noun names hopefully help with the blurring of the fantasy/reality lines. I also wanted the setting to be non-specific, out-of-place, and out-of-time, though still somewhere in 21st century North America, and let the readers fill in some of their own details/expectations regarding the settings of Farm, City, and Pier.

Langan:  In this regard, the name/place that strikes me most is Pier.  City–the place where the populace resides, check.  Farm–the place where the food for that populace is produced, check.  But Pier…Granted, you have to have something for City to be built onto, but why choose a Pier?

Tremblay:  SaDE is set in the world I first introduced in the cycle of four interconnected City/Pier stories I wrote in the early 2000s. Farm didn’t make an appearance in any of those early stories, which instead focused on the dichotomy between the technologically advanced City mysteriously built upon the decidedly low-tech giant wooden posts of Pier. With the homeless being shipped below City to the Pier, I figured the relationship between the two places could represent all kinds of fun stuff: a fractured, class-based society that thinks nothing of its discarded poor; our now increasingly shaky reliance upon depleted natural resources; a secularized heaven/hell. That, and I thought having a city built above a giant wooden pier looked cool!

Langan:  Do you see your creation of City/Pier as connected to the other fantastic cities that were popping up in the fiction of the time (i.e. Miéville’s New Crobuzon, Vandermeer’s Ambergris)?

Tremblay:  I’m a big fan of both Miéville’s and Vandermeer’s fiction, and in particular their works set in the aforementioned cities. However, my City/Pier world was at its inception more directly influenced by Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown universe. His first Punktown collection (published by the Ministry of Whimsy Press) is a too often overlooked gem. I loved how Jeffrey used his otherworldly setting for a myriad of gritty Lovecraftian horror, SF, fantasy hybrids.

Langan:  How about your protagonist?  One of the things that strikes me about SaDE is the way that the larger satire keeps intersecting a narrative that’s much more personal, namely, his quest to find his mother.

Tremblay:  I wanted to ground the over the top wackiness of the dystopia in a personal story, one that hopefully by the end of the novel resonates emotionally. The juxtaposition of the larger dystopian world with the smaller (in scope) personal story was something I found thematically compelling.

So if my setting grew out of Punktown and other aforementioned fantastical cities, my protagonist grew out of my love for Billy Pilgrim, Kilgore Trout, and a slew of other Vonnegut characters. His genius is not just the humor, but the melancholy and genuine sense of humanity that Vonnegut brought to his best works. As wonderfully weird as those books are, my favorite ones read to me like a biography, or an autobiography. I tried like hell to do the same with SaDE. While I’m certainly not the narrator and this book isn’t a factual autobiography, it is the most personal story I’ve ever written.

Langan:  Could you expand on that?

Tremblay:  You’re trying to get me in trouble, aren’t you?

I started the first rough draft of this novel seven years ago. I went into the novel without a clear road map of where the story would go. With my other novels I wrote ten page plot summaries before sitting down to write them. With this one, I went with a more free-flowing approach, throwing in as many ideas as I could. Keeping some, cutting most. I ended up going to a lot of weird, dark places but I decided to trust my subconscious with a lot of it, trusting that even if I didn’t know what a particular scene or idea meant, that I’d figure it out by the end of the novel. It took a long time and many rewrites to build the book this way, but I’m pretty damned happy with the final result. Or pretty damned relieved with the result. Not sure if there’s a difference.

As far as story specifics go, I really don’t want to get too spoilery, so I’ll just say that much of what happens in this book are exaggerated or refracted real life experiences. Some of the experiences are mine, some belong to others. I tried my best to treat all those experiences with dignity. I have, however, never worn or a chicken or duck suit.

Langan:  How do you see what you’ve done in SaDE, then, in relation to your other novels?

Tremblay:  The SaDE universe is clearly a totally different beast than the South Boston setting of The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. The Sleep novels are quirky crime novels (featuring narcoleptic private detective Mark Genevich) and are a bit more plot-driven then SaDE.  That all said, SaDE explores similar themes, and the emotional hearts of all three novels are very much rooted in their protagonists. Mark Genevich’s hallucinatory dream states give the Sleep novels a surrealistic, almost spec-fic edge. SaDE’s narrator is just as lost in his fantastical world as Genevich is in Southie. Yeah, Genevich and SaDE’s narrator are both working out some pretty heavy family stuff, but what binds them together is that their unsettled situations/circumstances shape their malleable sense of identity, purpose, and reality.

Langan:  So what’s next on the publication front, and can you say a few words about it and/or whatever you’re working on, currently?

Tremblay:  In Spring of 2014 CZP is launching their YA line (ChiTeen) with a novel that I co-wrote with Stephen Graham Jones. The book is SF or contemporary fantasy, depending upon how shoddy you think our science is. We’re still tweaking the title, but most of our title choices involve “floating boy” and “anxiety girl.” Working with Stephen was great fun. I thank him for tolerating me.

Right now I’m working, ever so slowly, on a new novel. I’m about 15K words into it. It’ll be a satire of publishing, education, and our obsession with apocalypse. Sounds like a keeper, doesn’t it?

Langan:  And is there anything else you’d like to say about SaDE?

Tremblay:  The novel is chock full of antioxidants and is high in fiber. As a result, reading Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye will keep you regularly weird for three months and four days. Some results may vary.

The post A Stuffed Donkey Named Herman, A Safety-Pinned Heart: An Interview with Paul Tremblay appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

2.  “One of these days,” I said, “I’d love to do an anthology of monster stories.  I even have the title:  Creature!  With an exclamation point.  It would cover the last three decades of monster fiction; from where King stops in Danse Macabre.”  I laughed.  “One of these days.”

“I really think you should do it,” Paul said.

“Nah,” I said.  “You should.  In fact, go ahead, it’s yours.  If you want, I’ll help.”

“Why don’t you do it, and I’ll help?”

“You should do it.”

“It’s your idea.”

“I’m giving it to you.  It’s fine.”

“We should do it.  I’ll do all the work.”

Like Fred and Ginger, people, or Bogey and the French guy at the end of Casablanca.

3.  Ask my students:  I’m a big fan not just of definitions, but of etymology.  Go to the online Oxford Dictionaries, and you’ll find that the word monster derives from “late Middle English: from Old French monstre, from Latin monstrum ‘portent or monster’, from monere ‘warn’” (Oxford).  The monster is a sign, a warning.  Of what, right?  Check Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness and you’ll learn that the monster historically was taken as a sign of the divine, an instance of God or the gods intervening in the world, exercising their prerogative to mold creation as they saw fit.  The arbitrary nature of such a thing fundamentally goes against Modernity-writ-large’s trend towards systemization, predictability, towards a universe in which even the gods obey the laws of science.  It’s not merely that we discover that the world works in ways we hadn’t understood; traumatic as that might be, there’s the possibility of adjusting to those new ways, of adapting.  With the appearance of the monster, we realize that the world is to some degree permanently beyond our understanding.

4.  Does the monster always have to be a single creature in order to remain a (true) monster?  If you move to a group of a particular monster, then you have a species, which is to say, something that’s susceptible to taxonomy, to being systematized and thus understood as a type.  Dracula is a vampire, defined and thus bound by certain rules which allow us to comprehend and respond to him.  Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, is his own thing.  (Though what would have happened had he succeeded in forcing Victor to create his mate?  Would he have moved from monster to progenitor of a new line of beings?)  There have been successive Godzillas, but never, as far as I know, two alive in the same film.  (Think King Kong, the Rhedosaurus, Ymir, the original Alien, the Thing.  Think the Beast in the fairy tale, in the Disney musical, for God’s sake.)  Is the true monster always singular, and is that why the response to its threat is usually some kind of magic weapon, something equally singular (so to speak)?

(I know, I know:  what is a vampire if not a monster?  How are you using this word, Langan?  Maybe I should replace it with “The Thing Without a Name,” Stephen King’s term for the fourth card in his tarot set of horror archetypes.  [The vampire, the werewolf, and the ghost constitute the others—go read Danse Macabre if you want to know more.]  Except, most of these things have a name—to some degree, they’re indistinguishable from their name.  So I guess I’m going to stick with monster, but I hear your concerns.)

5.  In the background, Godzilla’s Revenge (1969—Japanese title Godzilla, Minilla, Gabara:  All Monsters on Parade [thanks, Wikipedia!]) is playing on the TV.  Minilla is not doing very well against Gabara, whose roar is a kind of barking laugh.  “Remember this summer,” I’m saying to my younger son, “when we had our Ray Harryhausen fest.”

“Uh-huh,” he says.

“We watched—what?  The Black Scorpion—well, that was Willis O’ Brien.  So was King Kong and Son of Kong.  Harryhausen was Jason and the Argonauts.  The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.”

“That one with the dinosaurs,” David says.  “The weird one, with the cowboys.”

“The Valley of Gwangi.”

“Yeah, that was weird.”

“And 20 Million Miles to Earth.  With the monster from Venus, that attacks Rome.”

“How did they kill that one?” David asks.

“I think they shot it off the top of the Coliseum or something.  Kind of like King Kong.”

“Yeah.”

On the TV, Godzilla is treating Gabara to a blast of his atomic breath.  “I love these movies,” I say to David.  “When I was your age, these were my favorite films.”  I pause, momentarily unsure of my assertion.  We’ve been on a Star Wars kick, lately, and I’ve been reminded of what a profound part of my childhood those movies were.  No, it’s true.  “Yeah, I loved these movies more than any others,” I say.  It is among the most honest things I’ve said to my son.

6.  Although it’s become a, if not the, go-to piece for discussing subjects such as monsters (and horror narratives in general), Freud’s 1919 essay, “Das Unheimlich,” is not really that useful.  A good part of the reason for this is his staking his theory of how the supernatural functions in literature to the German word “unheimlich,” which everyone translates “uncanny” but which really means “unhomely.”  I submit that there’s a broad gulf between those two words.  The German encourages Freud to develop a model of supernatural literature in which something we used to know but then rejected comes back to us, trailing our old affection behind it.  It’s another version of the return of the repressed.

Focus on the English term, though, and you find yourself heading in different directions.  The online Oxford Dictionaries lists related definitions of the “un” prefix:  when “added to adjectives, participles, and their derivatives,” it may either “(denote) the absence of a quality or state,” mean “not,” or indicate “the reverse of” what it precedes, “(usually with an implication of approval or disapproval, or with another special connotation)” (Oxford).  As for canny, it hails from Northern England and Scotland, where its original derivation from the infinitive “to can,” or to know (think “to ken”), is present in its meaning “having or showing shrewdness and good judgment, especially in money or business matters” and, somewhat more obscurely, in its sense of “pleasant; nice” (Oxford).  To be canny is not just to know the world, but to know how to move through it effectively.  Put the Oxford definitions together, and you have that which does not fit our ways of knowing, that which does not move through the world smoothly, a sticking point, not just a stone in our passway, but a boulder.  The monster is not that which we used to know and/or love and have grown estranged from; it’s the recalcitrance of the world, the obdurateness of existence, that skunk in Lowell’s poem that will not scare.

7.  Monsters are full of energy.  The second time Victor Frankenstein sees the monster he abandoned shortly after its awakening, it is racing across a glacier towards him.  In fact, it pursues him relentlessly, and at the end of the narrative, after his death, it’s off running, again.  (Suck it, Branagh adaptation.)  Whatever you throw at Godzilla, which is to say, pretty much the entire modern military arsenal (including, in Eric Powell’s recent comic, the nuclear weapon we always knew they’d have to try against the Big G, eventually), as well as a number of science fictional devices, he keeps coming.  So does Mama Gorgo, right through the heart of London.  Barker’s Rawhead Rex tears up the English countryside.  These are creatures of excess, bursting with so much vitality it’s really no trouble believing they’ll be back for any number of subsequent adventures.  It’s much harder to accept that they might die and remain dead, might cease their movement.

8.  It’s a critical commonplace to read the monster as the Other, especially if we’re in possession of some biographical information about the monster’s creator that allows us to transform monster into metaphor, to read the beast as symptom of a psychopathology.  It’s also been commonplace for certain horror writers to declare themselves less interested in made up monsters than the human monster (you know who you are).  They’re flip sides of the same coin, the monster as mirror/the mirror as monster.  What about the monster that can’t be bought with such a coin?  What about the thing that is neither the Other or the Self, but Other?  The thing that menaces the Fellowship of the Ring at the entrance to the Mines of Moria—what about that?

9.  The epigraph to my next collection, Technicolor and Other Revelations, due out from Hippocampus Press later this year, is from King’s Salem’s Lot:  “Understand death?  Sure.  That was when the monsters got you.”  Amen, brother, amen.  (There are a lot of monsters in the book’s stories.)

10.  The sadness, the outright pathos, of some monsters.  The fierce joy of others.  The ambivalence that attaches to them.  Frankenstein’s monster, murdering Elizabeth as revenge for Frankenstein’s refusal to finish creating his companion.  King Kong, raging against the biplanes that shot him off the top of the Empire State.  The xenomorph toy my parents bought for my younger brother—it must have been Christmas of 1979.  It stood about two feet high.  At the rear of its long head, there was a lever you could squeeze that caused its jaws to part and its second jaws to extend.  The top of its head was covered with a tinted plastic shield that could be removed in order to saturate the glow in the dark stickers set along its length.  Replace the shield, turn out the lights, and you would see the faint, green glow seeming to come from someplace deep inside the toy.  What were my parents thinking, buying that thing for my brother, who would have been seven?  I used to lie in the top bunk of our bunk bed, watching the toy where my brother had left it on the floor, next to the closet, or on his desk.  It was by far the worst, the most frightening figure either of us had.  I could not stop looking at it.

A few years ago, my mother found the toy in her basement.  She wiped the dust off it, put it in the bag, and brought it over for my younger son.  He loves it.

For Fiona

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