Screem (Germany) Interview, September 1998
SCREEM: John, your latest book is the short fiction collection Black Butterflies published in May of this year by Mark V. Ziesing. After Heatseeker, New Noir, and The Exploded Heart, Black Butterflies is the fourth volume of your short stories. Unlike Heatseeker and The Exploded Heart, Black Butterfliescontains comparatively current stories that have been written in the last decade (including two brand ones). As far as focus, I would say Black Butterflies is a horror collection with a strong tendency to modern mainstream fiction, especially in the first half. Does this collection somehow mark a literary change for you from being a genre writer to being a more mainstream orientedd author or is it just a summary of your work in the last ten years?
SHIRLEY: It's both things. But what is mainstream, really? Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird was "mainstream," but I found it quite horrifying, scarier than Stephen King. I find Sartre to be scarier than Clive Barker though perhaps not so entertainingly -- if all there is to life is what an existentialist asserts, then life is frighteningly hollow. Fortunately I don't really believe it. My stories set in the "real" world in which only 'real' things can happen are influenced by fantasy -- or may appear to be -- in the sense that I try to describe aspects of the real world that people hadn't seen before, that show it as stranger than we'd realized. And that skewing of the world to illuminate its dark corners is something that's more in line with Golding's Lord of the Flies -- something horrific that reveals us, that gives us self knowledge. And self knowledge, the collective and individual sort, is what I'm really after. Some corner of the truth.
SCREEM: When one compares your older stuff to the new, it becomes obvious that your style of writing has changed. Today your language is not as bombastic and baroque as it used to be. A lot of the stories in BB are even written in a certain nihilistic slang-tone. Are you sick of being "drunken on words," as you once called it, or is your new literary style topic-related, because your fiction has become more sociocritical, more "real?"
SHIRLEY: I think there's truth in its being topic related. Also, though I enjoy experimenting with wordplay, wordflow, poetic imagery, from time to time, I have lost faith in the capacity of such things to move people, to communicate. I am a reactionary where postmodern theory is concerned -- I believe fervently that writers can and do consciously communicate, and I'm always looking for more lucid, more expedient ways to put the reader in another reality: either the reality of someone they would normally not identify with, normally not experience, as in the real world
stories in the first half of the book, or the "surreality" of
supernatural-surrealism as in the second half. Bombastic or hyperintense writing has its communicative effects and I'm not above using it -- there's something like that in a story I just wrote for Paula Guran's New Blood anthology -- but it's often not the most expedient way to bring the reader along on the ride. Also I'm interested in creating cinematic imagery in the reader's mind, at least some of the time, and crisp writing is often more cinematic: that is, more vivid, more photographically clear, sharp.
SCREEM: Your next big project is another story collection, one with a very interesting and unique concept. Can you please explain this concept to the readers?
SHIRLEY: It has the somewhat humorous and self indulgent title Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories. I don't know how well that translates into German. I've written some of the strangest stories published in the latter part of the twentieth century -- not all my stories fall into that category but some of them do. So I've gathered my weirdest, my strangest, my most bizarre stories (except for some that will be in print in other recent collections or anthologies), and arranged them in this book in order of weirdness. The book will be divided into four sections. The first section is "Really Weird Stories," the second is "Really. Really Weird Stories," the third is "Really, Really, Really Weird Stories," and the fourth is "Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories"--I'm arranging the stories so that, in my estimation at least, they get weirder as the book goes on. Now, this is a pretty gimmicky, novelty-based thing to do -- it's not high art to do this. But it's fun, and it's also a bit of a challenge to the reader to see if they agree with me, and I feel the artistic qualities that I hope are found in the stories will emerge along the way.
SCREEM: Are you working on a novel at the moment?
SHIRLEY: I'm working on a novel called Spider Moon that has some autobiographical elements but that is mostly a crime story (the crime part is mostly NOT autobiographical), a long story in the tradition of the stories in the first half of Black Butterflies...
SCREEM: Next to your work as an author, you are also a singer
in a rock band, a script writer (I think your most popular script
was for the movie The Crow together with David J. Show) and you
have written most of the song lyrics for the new Blue Oyster Cult
("Don't Fear the Reaper") album Heaven Forbid. How did you come to collaberate with one of the most famous rock bands in history?
SHIRLEY: I'm a fan of the band. My first novel Transmaniacon
was dedicated to the band and to Patti Smith (who also wrote lyrics
for the band, as did Jim Carroll), and the title is taken
from a Blue Oyster Cult song. They are difficult to categorize
like most of the best bands (another band I like, a very different
one, is Cracker, which is also impossible to categorize...like
me!), as they do beautifully textured rocking ballads, like, of
course, "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "Burning for You" (and there are
several of those on the new album, including one called "Live for
Me" that I think is just as good as Don't Fear the Reaper") and metal.
They created speed-metal on their albums Tyranny and Mutation
and On Your Feet or On Your Knees. Metallica and Megadeth would
not exist if the BOC hadn't blazed the trail first. I met them
through mutual friends who knew they were looking for lyrics.
They'd heard of me, too, so it worked out. We're good friends
now. They're a great band to see in concert, especially since
Buck Dharma, their lead guitarist is one of the best rock guitarists
anywhere, anytime.
SCREEM: Let's go back to your activity as a writer. You have
a reputation as an author who goes to extremes -- especially
in the matter of violence. But, on the other hand, a lot of your
stories contain a deep morality. Does this contradiction bother
you is your use of violence -- like the showdown in your novel In Darkness Waiting or certain passages from Wetbones --
meant to underline the morality? Some kind of antithesis?
Or do you just enjoy it to shock the readers?
SHIRLEY: I don't write only violent fiction. There are John Shirley
novels and stories without much, if any. But when I use it, I
do not regard it as contradicting morality, amoral; it's just
a depiction of a certain side of the world. I speculate that some
of it emerges from my somewhat damaged inner person, perhaps,
and is an expression of rage and frustration -- if I were to 'deconstruct'
myself, anyway, I might come to this conclusion. But artistically
it's probably there because, well, I came of age when the hippest
most fearless artists were indicting the world's violence in film, and in music. The Stooges, sometimes the Rolling Stones, the
Velvet Underground -- they all used that imagery. Then the punk
scene came and it got to be even more prevalent, more intense. Some of it is just a way to turn up the volume and use the "fuzz box," in a sense,
in my writing -- that is, it's going for punk intensity. I was lead singer of various punk bands after all. If there are hyperviolent grand-guignol type scenes in my writing from time to time, especially in climactic scenes, all the reasons I've given apply but there is something more: I have in the past
tried to compose some scenes with a kind of almost symphonic orchestration of extreme and emotionally-charged imagery, so that it came at the reader in a way that was both explosive and, paradoxically, carefully constructed in imagistic layers, in order to get an
effect with words and pictures that was, to me, equivalent to
the explosive, thunderous moments in Stravinski or Beethoven or
Jimi Hendrix.
SCREEM: Do you censor yourself?
SHIRLEY: If I do sometimes it's for artistic reasons rather than
for social reasons -- at least in my prose. But when writing a
script I must work "by committee" in a sense, because that's what
movies and television are usually like, and I'm am constrained
by the constraints on the medium, especially television.
SCREEM: Your prose is often compared to modern rock music. What
do you think of comparison? And how conscious is your use of
a certain musical language in your fiction?
SHIRLEY: I used to use it a little bit consciously but mostly
it was something that issued from me like sparks of electricity
from a Van der Graff generator: generated from within. I hear
music in prose; I hear prose in music. Storytelling was all originally
chanted, millenia ago, and that bardic presence is still there
in it. It's possible -- for my taste at least - to go too far in
infusing poetry and musicality in storytelling, as then one loses
lucidity. Lucidity penetrates to the inner being of the reader, and that's where an artist aims to go.
SCREEM: Is genre writing dead? Or do you think that there are
any new impulses in modern horror literature?
SHIRLEY: Commercially it will never be dead. Artistically a lot
of it is getting old and zombielike -- the walking dead! I don't
read a lot of modern horror literature, almost none, so I can't
judge. I'm interested in horror or supernatural fiction that has
spiritual content and I'd like to see more of that.
SCREEM: If you were an absolutely unknown author and you had
to convince someone of your talent, which of your stories/novels
would you give to this person and why?
SHIRLEY: Such considerations depend partly on what they are looking
for. The Brigade
maybe (which I think was published in Germany, but I can't recall
for sure), which is a suspense novel. Or, no, probably Black Butterflies.
I think it contains the full range of my dark fiction, anyway.
Eclipse Penumbra is probably my best science fiction novel to
my taste. I like A Splendid Chaos, but it's too surrealistic and
bizarre for many readers. The truth is, though, that I'm never
satisfied with past books and can't re-read them because I see
only the mistakes in them.
SCREEM: The last question, John! Will there be any German translations
of your recent works?
SHIRLEY: I have heard that there is interest in Black Butterflies
in some quarter -- and
would love to see it translated. Also I'd love to see Silicon
Embrace translated and I think that particular book would do very
well in Germany, with its Fortean mythology, its imagery that
veers between grittily grim and "cosmically ethereal" as one reviewer
described it. But I have heard nothing definite about it. Germany will have to open its arms to me so that I can leap
into them and sink my teeth in the first soft spot I can find...
SCREEM: Thank you very much for this interview, John.
(© 1998 Jan Dominik Kucharzewski)
Original interview and English translation by Jan Dominik Kucharzewski
