Your narrator is a WWI veteran subject to bouts of shell shock. His aunt left him her house in rural Georgia but warned, "Don't come back, whatever you do"; he disregards her orders. What inspired you to take Frank's dual attitudes of "I've seen the worst already" and "I have nothing left to lose," and plant him in Whitbrow, Ga., during the Great Depression?
It's always good to put your protagonists in jeopardy. We call our characters our "children," but authors, particularly thriller/horror authors, are terrible parents. Look what I do to this poor bastard--I send him to the trenches as a teenager, destroy his career, kill his aunt, send him to a creepy little town... and then it gets bad. Why does he go to Whitbrow? I think most of us would under the same circumstances. Funny how bright starlight is when you haven't seen the sun in a while.
In addition to vivid detail of life in a Southern town during the Depression and the pervasive sense of foreboding there, you create an unforgettable portrait of Frank and his wife Dora and their relationship. How soon in your drafts did you realize that their intense connection and threats to it would be central to the plot's suspense?
Their relationship was the starting point. The Greek myth I loosely structured the narrative on is a love story, and I wanted to remain faithful to its emotional content: happiness, loss, beauty-in-loss. I wanted to paint a picture of a love most of us would give anything to have, so we believe it in our bones when the lovers give everything to keep it. I hope those who have been deeply and sexually in love recognize where Frank and Dora are. It's a fragile paradise. But is there any other kind?
Frank Nichols is a historian who comes to Whitbrow intent on writing about his great-grandfather who was killed in a slave uprising. To what extent do you think that Frank's idea that his tools as a historian could help resolve his conflicted feelings of family reflects Audre Lord's haunting statement, "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Wow. I have never read Audre Lord, but now I want to. I think that statement is quite apt. This novel is not a metaphor for colonialism, though perhaps it contains fair comment on it; once we accept the possibility of supernatural malevolence, is it a stretch to imagine it might be attracted to places of human malevolence? I like Frank because, despite his worldliness, he has a very human (and American) naïveté. It simply doesn't occur to him that he could be making things worse by trying to set things right, or that his identity could be a problem in and of itself. Or even the catalyst that unleashes hell.
You are a poet, playwright, performer and comedian. How did you come to write a novel?
I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember; as a teenager, I wanted to write horror novels, though I only produced a few juvenile short stories I wouldn't show you now even for a big, fat diamond. In my 20s it was poetry and insults--anything I could finish in three-hour sessions while drinking too much whisky and preparing to get into trouble. In my 30s, I discovered playwriting, and found that writing comedic insult material had been a great apprenticeship for full-length stage comedies. Now I see how all of these disciplines have contributed to the discipline of the novel: poetry teaches economy and imagery, playwriting teaches character development through dialogue. Sometimes I wish I'd done an MFA program, but other times I'm glad I took this odd, organic road. Even though I'm a bit balder in my debut author photo than I might have been.
What kinds of research did you do to make your characters so credible as people from those earlier eras of the Civil War and the Depression?
For one thing, I immersed myself in period literature as well as history; I watched old movies. I listened to classic radio shows. It was just as important for me to have the speech patterns reflect the period as to have the things they held or rode in or shot ring true to 1935. Luckily, there is quite a lot of documentation about the social history of the Depression, and even the Civil War. The book I'm working on now takes place in the Middle Ages, so a great deal more invention is necessary when imagining daily life. There's a lot we just don't know. The important thing is not to contradict what we believe we do know.
As for where these people come from, of course they come from me. But if you look, you can find some piece of yourself in everyone; it's just a question of reverse engineering. That self-in-other is what makes art compelling--I see what that painter saw 200 years ago, I feel what those characters feel, so I know the playwright and I perceive the human condition in some of the same ways. Good art moves us because it makes us feel deathless and connected to everything. Wow, that got deep fast. Is it too late to say I modeled the characters after superheroes?
In capturing the variety of these complex characters, did you find your playwriting experience helpful?
I love plays for their immediacy, and the same is true for dialogue in novels. Dialogue can show backstory rather than tell it, and backstory is a necessary evil I think all writers struggle with; too little, and the characters can appear flimsy or poorly motivated; reading excessive or wrongly placed backstory can feel like wading in mud.
But, my God, do I love writing dialogue. It's hard sometimes to leave off the speech and re-immerse my reader in the physical place, but I have to; they don't, after all, have the benefit of seeing a set, costumes or gestures; but I know that when an author strikes the tight-wire balance between dialogue and narration well, the prose really sings.
As a writer preparing for a tour in support of Those Across the River, are you tuning up the performance skills you developed during your days on the Renaissance Festival circuit as Christophe the Insultor? Will you be morphing into a kinder, gentler version of the beloved Christophe?
Ha! You know, I compartmentalize my writing and performance personas to such a degree that I think Christopher Buehlman the reader of his novel will be almost unrecognizable as Christophe the Insultor, verbal mercenary. But I'm not sure I would be the best guy to heckle.... --John McFarland
Here's Christopher Buehlman discussing Those Across the River.