Barnesandnoble.com Interview: August
1998
barnesandnoble.com: Let's talk about your new collection,
BLACK BUTTERFLIES. One of the first things that jumps out is the
labeling of the two halves, "This World," and "That World," with "This
World" being nonsupernatural stories and "That World" having some
supernatural, otherworldly element. Do you have a preference for
writing in one of the two worlds?
bn: Many people associate the term "horror" with
supernatural horror, and consider nonsupernatural dark fiction to be
in the "suspense" or "thriller" category. Yet some of the scariest
work in the collection is certainly in "This World." Do you think most
people try to categorize and pigeonhole horror too often?
JS: You bet I do. I'm more scared by two small children
beating a little girl to death for a bicycle than I am of ghosts and
vampires. And I have had books rejected for the mass market by the
marketing people after the editor had accepted the book, because it
was "too difficult to categorize." Truth is beyond category, energy
chooses its own category, thunder rings where it will, and
pigeonholers can kiss my...pigeonhole.
bn: You're certainly a rarity in your openness about your
past drug use -- and it's refreshing that you don't glamorize it. How
would you say your narcotic use affected your work? Did you find being
clean affected your style one way or the other?
JS: Very little. I never wrote on drugs. Some writers were
heavily influenced by drugs, like Burroughs, and still wrote good
stuff, but they're exceptions. And if they do write well on, for
example, speed, they cannot sustain it long. Drugs are like loan
sharks -- they give a fat, generous-seeming loan and then come all too
soon for payback and break your legs for it. Experiences with the drug
scene informed subject matter and texture in my writing, in some
instances. But as for "weirdness," when I am weird in my writing, I
was always like that, way before drugs. It used to be called
originality.
bn: Out of your stories in the collection, do you have any
personal favorites, or ones that hit a particular chord with you?
JS: "Barbara," "War and Peace," "You Hear What Buddy and Ray
Did?," "The Footlite," and "What Would You Do for Love." I cannot talk
about that particular chord too far, without being indiscreet. "The
Footlite," maybe, since those people and that bar (under a different
name) actually exist, and it especially affects me because of a
tragedy associated with that scene that I should have done something
about preventing and didn't have the presence of mind, and now she's
dead. At least, I think he killed her. I never found out for sure, and
it haunts me. I didn't even know her real name.
bn: I remember that when the story "You Hear What Buddy and
Ray Did?" made its initial appearance in print, it generated quite a
bit of press and fuss. Have you ever been accused of going over the
line in your fiction, becoming too dark or too extreme? Has anyone,
editor, publicist, etc., ever tried encouraging you to tone it down --
not that that's what we want!
JS:JS: Yes, once in a while I've been asked to tone things
down, especially in the '80s. I didn't do it. But I'm not into
"extremes" for the sake of it. I don't "turn up the amplifier up to
11." I play it loud, so to speak, when the moment calls for it. Pete
Townshend played screamingly loud, extreme, but he was a grand writer
of sensitive lyrics and ballads. As for "Buddy and Ray...," except for
the "head iron" (which is rumored to exist, but I never saw one), it
could all have happened, in my opinion, but the importance is not, is
this too wild to happen, or ain't it crazy -- it's how dreadfully far
our suffering can take us, how lost can we get, how abandoned. And
what extremes can we still come back from. Does hope ever extinguish
completely? No, not even with death.
bn: With your stories ranging so greatly in tone and genre,
I'm curious to know whom you would consider to be your influences, or
even among your favorite current authors.
JS: I mentioned two I like above [Leonard and McCarthy]. I
read a lot of J. G. Ballard as a young fellow and think it influenced
me. Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Baudelaire. Lou Reed -- another kind of
author. Also people like Dashiell Hammett, John MacDonald, and Richard
Stark. And I'm influenced by painters of many kinds. I try to make
images in the reader's mind, accompanied by the music of prose: the
score. I try, anyway.
(© 1998 barnesandnoble.com. Inc.
John Shirley: At this time in my development I prefer
to write "this world," as the "real" world is strange enough in
itself, horrifying enough if one is looking for horrifying, and also
carries its own innate freight of symbolism. Supernatural stories are
generally symbolic of something -- DRACULA of suppressed sexuality,
Victorian frustrations, class issues, for example. Mystics see
symbolism in every moment of real life, as if each given moment of
choice and encounter is framed in its own ad hoc Tarot card. I am not
a postmodernist, in the sense of those intellectuals who challenge the
ability of writing to convey truth; I like writing that rings true,
like Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy. But it may indeed resonate on
levels below the surface "realism." I like to call the stories in the
second half of the book supernatural surrealism, but it may give the
impression that the stories are not coherent, which isn't true at all.
