Richard Godwin's Blog, page 24

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Julia Madeleine

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Julia Madeleine writes real, tough Noir with great style and menace. Check out 'Skin And Bones' on Pulp Metal Magazine for an introduction to her work.

Her novel 'No One To Hear You Scream' is coming out in June 2011. It is inspired by her experience of buying a country house in foreclosure and being stalked by the previous owner. The antagonist is a former Irish gang member in exile who gets busted in a drug raid on his house and loses his property when he doesn't make bail. He gets out and goes on a drug-induced rampage to get even with everyone who wronged him, including the family who bought his new house.

Julia is also a tattoo artist. She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about murder and tattooing.

Do you think it is possible to commit the perfect murder?

What a great question. Of course as a thriller writer I've often thought of this; getting away with murder. I definitely think it's possible and I'm sure many people have committed the perfect murder. There was a recent case here in Ontario where two teenaged sisters, dubbed the "bathtub girls", drown their alcoholic mother in the bathtub and it was ruled an accident. Unfortunatly for them, the "perfect" in their crime ended when they started bragging to friends how they'd gotten away with it. They were later convicted of first degree murder. I actually based a short story on this case called "Stick A Needle In My Eye" which was nominated for a Derringer award this year.

I think it's a rare person who would be able to devise the perfect murder and then if they did get away with it, be able to keep it to themselves for the rest of their lives. You would think the fear of prison would be enough motivation to keep ones mouth shut. I guess it's either guilt or stupidity that gets them in the end. Killers are not always the smartest people, certainly not the ones ruled by their emotions. Maybe the psychopaths have an easier time of it.

Do you think murder has a primarily sexual motivation?

You ask the most fascinating questions, Richard. I don't necessarily think the act of killing and sex are related, at least not in all cases. For instance, I can't see how poisoning Grannie with Drano for the inheritance money could have sexual undertones. I guess if Junior got excited and ejaculated in his knickers, watching her flop around on the kitchen floor, then that's sexual isn't it?

They say murder committed with a knife is sexual in nature. I suppose because of the penetration aspect. Perhaps the dominance aspect as well. But just the same way rape is not about sex as much as it is about somebody's need to feel powerful through domination, I suspect the motivation for killing has more to do with power and control, or lack there of. The motivation for such crimes is probably as varied as the people who commit them.

Do you think tattooing is tribal and are some people addicted to it?

Tattooing is traditionally tribal within certain groups of people. These days with the huge growth in popularity it's become more mainstream, even fashionable. We go through entire families; parents, kids, grandkids. When I was a teenager, kids would skip school and sneak down to the tattoo shop as an act of rebellion. Now the parents are bringing them in and paying for it.

It is most definitely addictive, thanks to the narcotics we put in the ink (that's a joke).

A lot of people assume they're coming in for just one tattoo and then later they start looking at everything thinking how it would make a great tattoo. Pretty soon they're working on a sleeve. We like to tell people that when they start phoning us just to hear the sound of the tattoo machine in the back ground, that's when they'll know they're addicted.

Tell us about 'No One To Hear You Scream'.

The best way I can describe my novel is like Stuart Neville's The Ghosts Of Belfast meeting the classic noir thriller Cape Fear. The bad guy in the story, Rory Madden, is a former Belfast Loyalist gang member living in exile in America. Rory gets busted in a drug raid at his house–a custom home he build himself on a 20 acre wooded property. When he doesn't make bail and can't make his mortgage payments, the bank forecloses and sells his property. After the charges against him are dropped, Rory gets out, buys some guns and goes on a drug induced rampage to get even with everyone who wronged him, including the nice family who's bought his house.

Do you think that women kill in different ways to men and what do the differences say about their psychology?

Women tend to think differently then men generally speaking, so it would make sense women kill in different ways to men. The victims of women tend to be more intimately known to them. Whereas men, especially serial killers, don't always know their victim. I believe women killers are more cunning then men, plotting the details of their murders in advance and historically their weapon of choice has been poison. In fact in the mid 1800s in the UK arsenic poisoning by women was so prevalent the government tried to implement "The Sale of Arsenic Act" which would ban women from purchasing arsenic. It was rumoured there was a secret society of women who exchanged recipes for poisoning their inconvenient relatives. So what does this say about our psychology? We are better long range planners perhaps. I'm not sure.

I did read a fascinating book on the subject of women killers and it explores the psychology behind it. Peter Vronsky's "Female Serial Killers, How and Why Women Become Monsters".

Do you think that the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

I suspect some have a similar mentality, or develop it, after years of working in that field. I've heard people who are drawn to study psychology do so because they're trying to unravel their own psychiatric issues. So maybe it's like that for some people in law enforcement. But I imagine the best detectives are that way because of a combination of years of experience, a passion, even obsession, for solving crimes, and their ability to get inside the minds of the perps they are after. In a way they have to become their job, not just shake off that role at the end of the day. At least that's how they're portrayed in the movies.

Who are your literary influences?

My influences are quite varied and probably not whom you would expect for a thriller writer. In the past I never sought out books specifically in the genre that I write in. It's only recently that I'm reading more thrillers/crime fiction and I've since found some fantastic writers. I've just discovered Andrew Vachss and I absolutely love his style. Chuck Hogan is another author whose books I'm particularly enjoying. As a teenage my influences, like a lot of us, were Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Edgar Allan Poe. I also loved Charles Dickens, James M. Cain.

More than a good story or a particular genre, I enjoy good writing above everything. Writing that moves me, that gets deep inside me and stays there, characters that I think about long after I've met them inside the pages of a book. My greatest influences are probably more on the literary side of the writing realm: Margaret Laurence, Mary Gaitskill, Evelyn Lau, Janet Fitch, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Do you think that paranoia is at the root of extreme power complexes?

Ahh, you ask the craziest questions, Richard. Actually, they're really very thought provoking. I do think paranoia constitutes a sense of powerlessness and inferiority in those who suffer from it. So it would make sense that to compensate for this, a person would seek a sense of power, or really the illusion of power, through control of their environment or other people. But I don't believe domination of others is true power, it's a misuse of power and the one perpetrating that misuse is often a prisoner of their own erroneous thinking. People who feel empowered within their own being don't seek to have power over others, they often seek to help others feel empowerd as they do themselves. It's like bullies when you were a kid is school. They're only as big as their victims fear. And bullies are always little wimps on the inside who don't feel empowered. It's pretty basic when you break it down to the school yard. And isn't life just like one big school yard sometimes?

Have you ever thought of writing a novel about a tattooist killer and if so how would they commit their killings?

I've got a novel in the works about a female tattoo artist whose client ends up murdered and all the evidence points to directly to her. Then when more people around her start dropping dead and the police are closing in on her, she has to go after the real killer to prove her innocence.

I wouldn't want to make the tattooist the villian just because, in spite of tattooing becoming more mainstream and reality shows allowing the public to see that we are just regular people like everyone else, not deviants or criminals (and neither are the customers), there is still a stigma, to a certain degree, attached to this profession. I think that attitude is primarily with the baby-boomer and older generations simply because when they grew up tattooing was more under ground and was associated with bikers, criminals and sailors. And with people being slow to change their long held judgements, that attitude is maintained even though it's completely false.

I can understand it though, we instinctively judge a book by it's cover. I'm guilty of it too. But I think when we don't challenge our attitudes and hold on to illusions out of fear of being wrong, then we become stagnant…crotchety and decrepit too. Just like technology, tattooing has evolved light years in the last twenty-odd years. What was unheard of two decades ago is now common. For anyone who's interested in seeing just how far tattooing has come, Google these names: Guy Aitchsion, Nick Baxter, Jeff Gogue, Victor Portugal. These are only some of the artists who are changing the industry.

So in defense of my profession, portraying a tattooist in a less than flattering light by making them a killer is not something I could do and feel good about. I'd be more inclined to make them the hero and all those judgemental pretentious, small-minded people out there can be the villains.

Do people you know show up as characters in your writing, or have you ever made a real person you didn't like a victim and kill them off in your books?

Yes! I think it's true with most writers that we take traits of family members and friends and use them in our characters. I have one relative in fact that is an endless source of material for me. She's such a unique person, I think she should have her own TV show.

As for killing off a real person in my writing, I've done that. In my first novel there's a scene where the main character, Scarlet Rose, (a real hateful, murderous bitch) kills another woman with a straight razor. It's a gruesome scene in a bathroom. The victim was a character I created based on someone who intentionally did something really cruel to me so I indulged my anger and murderous fantasies about them in my writing. It was cathartic.

However,  I do think anger is a force that can be powerfully destructive and you've got to be careful when indulging in it. Allowing it to stay with you for extended periods of time is unhealthy. You've got to make peace with it inside yourself and then let it go. Channeling that emotion does make for some good writing though.

Thank you Julia for a brilliant and engaging interview.

More links:

Julia Madeleine's website

Malefic Tattoos website

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Nerine Dorman

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[image error]The brilliant and informed Nerine Dorman is a versatile and talented South African horror and fantasy writer.

She is a sub-editor at a newspaper and runs a guild for science fiction, fantasy and horror writers in Cape Town.

She's also modelled for photographers and is a musician.

Her novel 'Khepera Rising' is about black magician James Edward Guillaume. It deals with drug abuse, religious intolerance, violence, magic, alternative cultures and sexuality.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about horror writing and the modelling industry.

Do you think horror writing is a literature of subversion?

To me the horror genre has always been about transgression of some sort. When I was a kid, I found myself repelled by and attracted to the genre in equal measure, perhaps mainly because there was something magnetic about the awfulness. People can't help but seek it out, the same way we are almost incapable of looking away when passing the scene of a terrible road accident. My attraction to dark literature could also partially be ascribed to my strict Calvinist upbringing, where certain damnation awaited those who consistently dismayed a higher power.

And it is this twisting of that which is wholesome that caught my imagination. I mean, really, what sort of person would knowingly plunge him or herself into the kind of situation that would take them far from safety into uncharted waters? Here be leviathan, and all that.

To a degree it's also the act of rebellion, of being unnatural. I knowingly seek out the tales of ghosts, demons and madness, perhaps because the sunlight seems that much sweeter if I've tasted bleak horror.

Do you think that horror writers are inherently Promethean?

If you're considering the term Promethean to mean that an author is a bit of a maverick, then yes, I'd say that the spirit of creativity in horror needs to be bold lest it slips into cliche-ridden theme. But the thing is, horror plays with that which is familiar to us. Take a look at Rosemary's Baby, for instance. Motherhood is something that is central to the human condition. To give birth to and nurture the anti-Christ is the epitome of transgressions, according to some. And therein lies horror for a parent, who is forced to place themselves in that situation and ask, "What would I do if this were me?"

True horror holds up a dark mirror for viewers, leading them to uncomfortable places within the self.

A savvy horror author will deliver social commentary relevant to the time in which he or she creates a written work. What scared people during the 1960s, when creature features had their heyday may not necessarily frighten us now. These days the creatures have become defanged

and collared, while the fiction that frightens us right now focuses on apocalyptic settings.

Hence the current incredible popularity of zombie-pocalypses and the like.

Do you believe that we inhabit a predatory universe?

I must admit I'm quite partial to Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It's eat or be eaten, in my mind. If it weren't a dog-eat-dog kind of world, we'd probably not possess the collective oomph to go about our business and get things done. A little fear of failure is a great motivator.

Do you think that the modelling industry is controlled by patriarchal perceptions of female beauty?

It's a two-way street that one. So long as women pander to the hyper-reality portrayed in contemporary media, they reinforce the gender stereotypes. This question was actually posed to me last night, ironically. And it's not an easy one to answer. Throughout the years we've had women who've challenged these perceptions, who end up standing almost outside of society, and definitely not as fashion models. Diamanda Galas springs to mind, as does Lydia Lunch and Nina Hagen.

It's my feeling that for every one woman who rejects the norms established by contemporary standards, there are a dozen who will starve themselves to conform. We know in our heart of hearts that we should see beauty in every expression of human form but it's been drummed into us that only certain characteristics–some very unhealthy–are considered to be "true" beauty.

To a degree, even though we don't readily admit it, we want men to find us beautiful. And therefore conform.

I know for a fact that I'm at my happiest when I don't wear a stitch of make-up and sloth around in a pair of old tights and a baggy T-shirt, but I'm sure as hell not going to go out for a night on the town unless I'm wearing something that accentuates what nature has given me.

At what point do you think erotic writing turns into pornography?

Pornography is in the eye of the beholder. I used to take a dim view on erotica until I encountered authors such as Storm Constantine and Jacqueline Carey, who write plot-driven novels featuring highly charged sexual encounters within the story arcs. I believe each reader has his or her measure for what they consider pornography. For me when a novel devolves into gratuitous sex that does not progress a plot, or it has a coat-hanger of a plot and is little more than a boink-fest, it is porn.

But porn is not bad, in my opinion. It has its place to titilate readers who are into that genre, but I'm the kind of reader who requires a strong sense of narrative to back up the sex. I feel I don't connect with the characters unless I've been part of their struggles. Sexuality is part of who we are. I believe it's important to include the depth and breadth of the human experience within a story. A well-plotted novel makes the characters' eventual release within a sexual context all the more effective. Sex for sex' sake just doesn't blow my hair back.

William Burroughs posited the theory that a curse is a word virus what do you make of his view?

If you consider words as being carriers of ideas, yes, I totally agree with him. I think day-to-day people aren't aware how they allow themselves to be programmed by words, which bring across highly subjective meanings. I think it's always important to have a consensus about what words define.

In contemporary society there are certain phrases that we use, that we don't think about. Buzzwords, like "lifestyle" or "sexy" … just page through a magazine or newspaper to see which words or phrases jump out. I work with a lot of advertorial. I can weave a whole lot of spin.

Likewise, if you listen to a street preacher, he'll tend to overuse certain religious phrases that, when you analyse them and break them down into their constituents, they don't really mean a whole lot. Yet they bring about a certain state of mind in people who are prone to using them.

We can curse ourselves with the language we use or we can use it to bring about a desired state of being. For instance, I am bilingual, and I can say with honesty that when I speak Afrikaans I think differently than when I'm in English mode. I have a world of respect for mathematicians. the language they speak is so arcane I can only begin to wonder how their minds work. Ditto for musicians, though I do number among these. It's a language of tones, words in themselves though not in a verbal sense.

Writers are, in my mind, magicians. They know which words to use to bring about changes in people's mental states.

Tell us about your novel 'Khepera Rising'.

Khepera Rising is an urban fantasy romp following the misdeeds of a bad boy black magician who attracts the attention of a pack of Christo-militants while trying to solve the mystery of a demonic entity he has accidentally unleashed. It was incredibly fun to write as the entire novel is set in Cape Town, where I grew up. I'm a great fan of "write what you know". While some would point fingers and say the novel isn't recognisably African, this is the Africa I know. People often don't realise that South Africa's larger cities are a fusion of global cultures where first and third world mix.

The novel is peppered with pop culture references in a setting where the lines between reality and fantasy overlap. The initial concept of the novel had been about subverting readers' concepts of what is traditionally considered good and evil. I wrote the story from the point of view of someone who'd traditionally be considered evil. I know I've done a good job because I've had so many readers write to me to tell me they ended up cheering for Jamie though at times they'd have liked nothing more than to throttle him.

What do you make of JM Coetzee's portrayal of South Africa in his novels?

I read one of JM Coetzee's books and vowed to never touch his writing again. He's a great writer but Disgrace portrayed such a hopeless, horrible vision of the New South Africa, and his main character was such a victim I've been totally put off. Granted, I'll dip into Andre P Brink or Max du Preez from time to time if the mood fits for socio-political commentary. They have much more to offer readers, in my opinion.

Perhaps Coetzee's story is a bit too close to the bone but while I acknowledge there's a lot that is dismal about our country, I try to maintain an attitude that things can improve, that there is some way forward offering reconciliation. Maybe it's because I'm part of the generation that grew into adulthood during the time of transition, I just don't dig focusing on the dross.

What role does music play in your life?

Music has always been my dark twin. I was raised on music from a young age, my mom starting me on the likes of Beethoven's symphonies and Bizet's Carmen. At school level I studied music all the way through until matric. I played piano and classical guitar and sang in a chamber choir. But best of all I loved alternative music, influenced by bands like Nine Inch Nails, Type O Negative, White Zombie and others, and played bass in an assortment of grunge, black metal and goth bands.

For a long time I was convinced I was going to be a professional musician but in South Africa back then the music industry was only recovering after years of socio-economic sanctions, so I studied something sensible and embarked on a career in the media industry.

But I can only live without music for so long and still play my bass almost daily. It's not so much now about being famous and on stage as it is about nourishing some vital part of myself. By equal measure, I have my soundtracks I listen to when I write, and the spirit of the music infuses the stories I weave.

Do you think the supernatural is palpable in South Africa?

I think there's a lot of superstition doing the rounds here in South Africa. Granted, we have a very rich cultural heritage with all manner of supernatural elements, but it becomes a bit frightening considering that a large percentage of our population is still living in the dark ages. People regularly get accused of witchcraft and burnt or stoned to death in our rural areas.

The Satanic panic that gripped the US and the UK during the 1980s is still alive and kicking among religious fundamentalists, so if one has any interest in esoteric matters, one has to tread very carefully.

But all things considered, and while I don't believe in anything that goes bump in the night, I've seen hints at things existing at the edge of my awareness that suggest there's more to the waking world than we think. I never quite know what to expect and I'm comfortable admitting that I don't know enough about my world. It makes life far more exciting.

Thank you Nerine for giving an informative and stimulating interview.

Links:

'This Is My World' blog

Nerine Dorman books:

On amazon.co.uk

On amazon.com

Goodreads

Twitter:  @nerinedorman

Facebook

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Cara Faith Donovan

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Cara Faith Donovan writes highly evocative descriptive prose that straddles the paranormal and romantic traditions. 'Tears Of Crimson' is set in New Orleans and brings the French Quarter to life as the backdrop to her vampire story. It is a strange and compelling book and Cara dramatises her characters with detail and finesse. There is something haunted about her prose and she has an individual style. She is also one of the most active and effective role players on the internet.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about Romance and mortality.

If vampires visit you in your dreams how do you view dreams?

I guess I see dreams as the escape from everyday life and the only time when I, personally, have the ability to truly unleash my creative thoughts.  During my waking hours I feel that I have a certain face I have to put on for the rest of the world; Mother, wife, etc.  When I dream all the restraints are taken away and that's when I allow myself to create all the wonderful worlds and creatures in my mind.

What does Rafael represent to you and considering the Ancient Greeks thought that daimons were "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes" do you think the world you inhabit is alien?

I've always thought that Rafe was more real than not to be honest.  I don't believe we see everything around us.  For as long as I can remember I've had dreams about this other world that he inhabited, that being said it's made me question the possibility of other life forms existing.  To me there is not enough information available to make a conclusive decision on whether or not life exists outside of our planet, but I definitely would not rule that out.  One theory that I have contemplated was that our time spent in dreams was actually a form of astral travel to other destinations.  Another theory that seems to feel right to me is the possibility that Rafe is a guardian sent from another realm to watch over me.  He appeared in my dreams during a time when I needed a distraction from the pain I was suffering in real life, so in that aspect one could also assume that he was a figment of my imagination that my mind created to overcome the problems I was having during those times.  Whether he is a creation of my own thoughts, a guardian angel sent to protect me, or my own personal demon there has not been a day in my life that I have regretted the thoughts of him.

Tell us how you came to write 'Tears Of Crimson' and how the novel has evolved.

Believe it or not it all started with a dream.  During my dream, which reoccurred until I started putting the words down, Rafe was standing in his home land and holding out his hand to me.  I won't give away much about his home because it's actually in the book.  I will tell you that I can still see this place vividly in my mind and he told me it was time to share our story with the world. I still find it hard to sit down for long  periods of time and do one steady task so it took a few nights of this same exact dream to finally get me motivated enough to start.  I had completed half of the story when I got distracted with the things going on in my life and actually didn't pick it back up until six months later.  The dreams were still going on during this time so when I got the motivation to start writing again it only took me a short time to pick up where I had left off.  One thing I can say for certain is that I will never allow my writing to go untapped for so long again.  During this time I couldn't stop writing the ideas were flowing so quickly.

How has your career as a singer songwriter influenced you?

Song writing has many of the same elements as writing for a novel, at least for myself.  The main difference being that you need to tell a story in a very short amount of time with lyrics.  As far as my singing I always felt the emotions of the lyrics so deeply that I would lose myself in the song I was singing.  When I write I find that I use this same skill and try to put myself in the characters shoes, so to speak.

Who are your literary influences?

There is actually an amusing story behind this answer.  As a young girl my grandmother received Harlequin romances, the subscription that sent you four small romance books a month.  Of course I was not supposed to read these since I was only 8 or 9 at the time.  I would sneak these little romance books into my play tent and read every line.  I can't remember the author's names but I read every single one that came in the mail and wanted to be just like them when I grew up.  Needless to say they left a huge impression on my young mind and I always expected prince charming to ride up on his white horse and sweep me off my feet one day.  As for authors that I enjoy today, I would have to say my two favourites are Charlaine Harris and JR Ward.

Do you believe that vampires are symbolic or real?

Well I definitely believe that psychic vamps are real.  Actually something I have put a little study time toward. I won't go into the details but I felt attacked by someone who studied this type of mental manipulation once.  As for the immortal vampires, I can only wish it were so.  I think living forever, never aging, and controlling all the thoughts around me might be interesting.  But hey I'm a pretty open-minded person and if I'm wrong I will be glad to be called on it.

Would you describe yourself as a romantic and what do you think the ingredients are for good romantic literature?

Absolutely I would classify myself as a romantic.  To me a great romance can be many things but what I enjoy seeing is that first meeting.  True romance, for me, begins with a shiver of awareness the first time you look in someone's eyes. Your heart racing for no logical reason, that's always a great second step.  In keeping with a good plot I enjoy seeing characters overcome differences of opinions or huge moral struggles.  Romance is about feeling pure emotion, and good romantic literature demands that the author can pull the readers into those feelings and keep them wanting more.

You are extremely active on the internet, how effective do you think online networking is and do you think it helps the promotion of a book?

I think promotion on the internet is vitally important these days.  We live in a society where everything is so visual and fast-paced that I seriously believe if you aren't out there promoting with social media you're going to have a very hard time getting your book noticed.  If you write books that aim toward the young adult crowd I think it's even more important to have all the electronic promotion you can.  That being said having traditional face to face contact as with book signings is just as important.

Do you think power and control are linked?

A difficult question to answer!  Power can mean many things so I'm just going to put it in a context of power in the sense of being the dominant person concerning business relations.  Power in that instance would definitely be linked to control.  When you are in a leadership position you maintain control over the people who work for you.  In that aspect the two are almost synonymous with each other.    As I ponder this question more deeply I cannot find a situation where the two are not linked in some form.

What difficulties have you encountered writing paranormal romance in the small suburb you reside in?

I reside in a small southern town in Alabama where the major emphasis is on conservative values and religion.  Vampires are not a very good topic for conversation for the most part in my town.  I write under a pen name for that reason and keep my writing out of my everyday life.  There are many wonderful qualities about the place I live but tolerance for the most part is still something that they have not awakened too.

Thank you Cara for giving an engaging and insightful interview.

Cara Faith Donovan

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Lori Titus

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Lori Titus is an accomplished horror writer who knows how to set you on edge.

Her use of prose is both psychological and challenging in its use of imagery. She is adept at using the trivial everyday incident to bring out the uncanny. She writes with a tight assured narrative voice.

She is also an editor for Wicked Nights Publishing and she runs her own radio show.

Lori has had a novella Lazarus and an anthology Green Water Lullaby published. And she has two more novellas set for release in September, 2011: The Moon Goddess and the long awaited Hailey's Shadow.

It is evident she puts a lot of thought into her writing and delivers great prose.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about transformation and pathology.

Scroll down for more links to Lori's work.

Are uncles important to you in your life?

I would usually say no, but on second thought, the answer may be yes!  My pet cat, Maxie, is named after a great-great uncle who passed away when he was ninety-eight. And another, not so nice uncle made his way into one of my stories as a wishy-washy sibling.

Do you think narratives are a form of power and sibling rivalry is a form of identity sculpture and is Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' a great novel?

Beloved is one of the few books out there that is frightening to read because of the bare truths it reveals about humanity. Sibling rivalry is always an interesting topic- there is that saying about the hatred of things familiar. As we grow into adulthood I think that we often define ourselves by how we are similar (or not) to our siblings.

A well told narrative is always powerful. It allows us to feel things for others, to understand the world through someone else's eyes, and experience discomfort in another person's skin.

Do you think emancipation and equality are achievable within the political arena we inhabit and that they are as equal for the black American female as they are for the black American male?

Finding equality is always a struggle.

There have been many advances for African Americans, both male and female, particularly over the last ten years. That said, there is still unequal footing when it comes to access to decent primary and secondary education for black youth, much less higher education.

Black men don't bear more discrimination than their female counterparts, but  the stereotypical roles that they are placed in are more destructive. Males are often categorized as offenders, criminals, a danger to society. Females are often seen as the jobless unwed mothers, welfare supporters.

These kinds of labels are destructive on a psychological level. No one should have to feel that they must defend their validity as a human being.

Who are your literary influences?

So many to name! Poe was my first literary influence. My sister used to read his stories to me when I was about seven years old, along with Grimm's Fairy Tales and poetry by Edna St. Vincent Milay.

I remember reading Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. It was the first short story I ever read, and it stuck with me. The story was so brutal and spare, visual and beautiful. I thought it was amazing that she could cram so much into such a little space. I remember thinking a good short story was like an effective magic spell.

Of course, I love King and Koontz, though I lean heavier towards the latter than the former. I love Alice Hoffman. She has a way with a turn of phrase that's just lyrical. I love Tananarive Due for her ability to weave a story using common beliefs and turning them into something extraordinary.

Ovid in his 'Metamorphoses' describes chaos changed into harmony, animals turned into stone, men and women who become trees or stars. How do you think this is relevant to horror writing and the history of literature in general?

Not only is it relevant to horror fiction, but to our deepest fears.

Change lies at the root of many of our fears. Change into something that feels no emotion. Change into something that can no longer think or feel the way that a "normal" human being does.

The paralysis of humans or animals turned into inanimate objects is a projection of the fear of death.

At the core of all our favorite monsters lies the theme of metamorphosis. Every shambling zombie, greedy blood drinker, or vicious werewolf started off as something human, or at least, close to it.

The same can be said about tales of serial killers or delusional lunatics. We fear what we don't understand. We also fear that line between being one of us, and becoming one of "them".

Paul De Man in 'Blindness And Insight' said that 'Literary "form" is the result of the dialectic interplay between the prefigurative structure of foreknowledge and the intent at totality of the interpretive process'. What do you make of his statement?

I take it to mean that as writers, we depend upon images and forms that are familiar to the reader in order to create the image that we want the reader to perceive.

For instance, I can describe to a reader a rose. Everyone knows what the flower looks like, is familiar with how a rose smells. The reader can visualize it easily in their mind. I am depending on the reader's ability to conceptualize this simple thing.

Add to that, the scene where the roses are placed. Does a man bring them home to his wife after an argument? Does she take the roses without speaking? Does she prick her fingers on them as she holds the roses in her arms? All these subtle cues between the man and woman, and even the presence of the flowers, play into certain cultural meanings that are both implied and specific.

If we do our jobs as writers, the reader will experience the depth of a story on many levels. Symbolism, irony, paradox, and descriptive storytelling are all part of the tapestry that we work on. Each holds a significant part within a story, coexisting to make the whole that much stronger and richer an experience. Because of this,  true criticism recognizes all the parts that make up the whole.

Do you feel that your predilection for writing horror was formed by psychological tension from your family or something else?

This is something that I often wonder about myself. People ask me this a lot. Why horror? There are other things to write about.

A friend once asked me why I don't write romance. Something "uplifting". I frowned at her and gave her the simplest answer, despite all the words I have at the ready. No.

When I was a child, my mother encouraged me to write as a way to rid myself of nightmares. She'd used the same tactic with my sister and found it successful.

Now, here is the thing. I had the occasional nightmare, but I wasn't plagued with them. So if I'd written in a journal for only those dreams, there wouldn't be that many "stories" on paper.

I think the answer lies somewhere in the reaction that I received from my scary stories. I can remember writing all kinds of things, but it seemed the stories that got the best grades (as I started turning them in for extra credit) were the ones that had some sort of fear involved. Those early stories were often sci-fi or fantasy, traditional good vs. evil. When I started writing origin stories for monsters, that's when I received the most encouragement.

Why do I continue to write stories with a creep factor? I don't really know, but I can tell you that I'm always drawn to the darker side of things. I can start off with a romance about lovers on vacation, or a man bumping into his ex-girlfriend at a bookstore, but it doesn't make my heart race until someone turns up dead or some sort of paranormal nasty makes its appearance.

Have you ever been haunted?

I have been haunted, but I think most people are.

We're all subject to things from the past. Memories. Questions. There are always what-ifs. There are things that you wished you knew sooner, and some things that you wished never happened at all. People say they have no regrets, but I don't believe them. People that have no regrets or questions about the trajectory of their life, or about humanity in general, aren't very deep thinkers.

Now, if we are to talk about the other kind of haunting: the kind that involves an actual ghost, I'm of two minds about this. I don't believe in things flying across rooms without explanation, evil entities doing their level best to kill you. Boo.

But, if you're talking about being in an empty room and sensing a presence – or smelling a scent of perfume there that shouldn't be there…if you're talking about feeling like a loved one who isn't here anymore might be near me at certain times? It wouldn't be too hard for me to believe that.

Do you think going against nature is part of the creative process or a pathology and if so why?

An interesting question! I think that the creative process has its own pathology. Most creative people will tell you that their love for their work – art, writing, movies, photography, however their talent manifests – is like a disease, an addiction. Every disease has its own way of spreading, mutating, gathering resources and using them in their defense.

The creative mind is no different.

Sometimes it's necessary to go against "nature" for an artist to achieve something through their art, regardless of the medium.

If you think about your favorite books or movies, usually there is something about them that you found different, or striking. Rarely do you find any lasting impression made by things that can be described as "ordinary" or "mainstream".

If we look at "nature" as the  expected, the measured "norm", then, any attempt at something special has to break that barrier.

When talking about "nature" as one's own personal comfort zone, it's necessary to challenge that frequently as well. It's important to try new things and  stretch your boundaries. In writing, whatever passion you can bring to the world of your stories is passed on to the reader.

Horror writing has traditionally relied on monsters. Do you think mankind is the biggest monster of all and what do you find most horrifying about it?

Man's capacity to be a monster is the scariest thing.

You don't have to look beyond the morning news to see it, either, let alone discuss history. I am a firm believer that the creatures we use in horror are just a way to take a look at the human capacity for evil.

Zombies and ghosts embody our fear of death. Will we become a rotting, mindless thing, or a wandering spirit, tethered to earth by the baggage of our past?

Vampires? Your traditional vamp was all about greed and bloodlust. Vampires ala Rice were about sexuality and power. Meyers version are about denying the old lusts that other vampires usually enjoy.

Werewolves? Unbridled fury and homicidal intent.

Science fiction uses alien cultures and alternate realities to discuss the faults in our own society with an impartial eye. Conversely, horror is often the vehicle to explore our inner space, the ugly parts of human nature that we like to turn away from.

What makes man more frightening than any of these things? A human has a mind that allows for thought, a soul that should allow for empathy. And we manage to do horrible things to each other anyway.

Thank you Lori for giving an insightful and great interview.

Lori's links:

'The Darkest of Lore' blog

The Marradith Ryder series, a weekly web-serial on 'Flashes in the Dark'

Flashes in the Dark Internet Radio Show

Flashes in the Dark Ezine

The anthology 'Green Water Lullaby' is available at Smashwords

Lori's novella 'Lazarus' is available at Amazon.com

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Joely Black

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Joely Black is an astute highly talented author who has created a complex world in her Amnar series of novels. She holds a Phd that covers 19th century history and a lot of geography. Her concerns as a writer involve the way ordinary people get caught up in huge political shifts. She uses Amnar to explore consciousness, the power of religion, political end economic systems and hierarchies. The themes of dictatorship and ideology pervade the books. I highly recommend reading one of her novels. Start with 'The Inheritor' then read 'The Execution'.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about authoritarianism and pathology.

Do you think it is possible to delineate an antithesis between matriarchal and patriarchal hierarchies and what does the difference say about power as it relates to gender?

It would appear from studies of matriarchal societies that still exist that the difference is not simply one of which gender rules and which way equality is imbalanced between them. A matriarchal society isn't simply an antithesis of a patriarchal one, and in fact it seems they're difficult to define, as it requires more than simply identifying the gender of "rulers" or perceived "leaders". It would be inaccurate to say that the UK during the Thatcher years was a matriarchal society, just because the Prime Minister and monarch were both female.

I'm not an expert on matriarchal societies themselves, but I am aware that they are generally thought of as organising along kinship lines, tend to be agricultural in their economic basis, have different concepts of holiness and what is deemed to be sacred, as well as seeing marriage and family in much wider terms. As far as this relates to power and gender, I have always felt that while there are of course differences between genders at a fundamental level, everybody operates on a spectrum and that some women are just as capable of tyranny as are men.

I have to say here, one of the difficulties of researching and understanding these societies is that it's easy to approach with an agenda to demonstrate men as evil and women as good, and their societies as correspondingly corrupt or pure. Neither society is going to be perfect; a matrilineal one that emphasises clan and community over individual is necessarily going to sacrifice the rights of the one to appease the many, whereas a patriarchal one with a strong ideology of domination, control and power is always going to create inequality.

What we do know about matriarchal societies suggest that when women have control (i.e. over goods and the supply of food and provisions in society) they operate very differently to patriarchal ones, with power spread horizontally between representatives of clans and families, all of whom have a say in decision-making. It would be hard to acquire a large amount of obvious political power in such a situation, but doesn't necessarily mean that individuals could not exert a more subtle influence or sway over others.

Hannah Arendt said in 'The Origins Of Totalitarianism' that  bureaucracy and racism were the main traits of colonialist imperialism, itself characterised by unlimited expansion. How does the world you have created in your Amnar fictions illustrate the nature of despotism and in what ways do you see Hannah Arendt's observation as relevant to the social models you are dramatising?

Within the world of Amnar, we have one city state – Amin Duum – that has, in the transition to democracy, voted in a despot. In coming to power, the leader Tiom had to make absolute enemies out of the traditional Amnari civilisation through the use of violent purges, but also built up an ideology for his own people of eventual expansion, planning to conquer and "save" the Amnari people outside the state from the apparent tyranny of their own society. Whereas regimes like Hitler's focused on the inherent superiority of one set of people, Tiom can't really escape the fact that once upon a time, his people were Amnari too, so he uses the idea of rescue and protection as a justification for expansion. The "Tiomke" of Duum have been raised above their peers by the discovery of his personal ideology and the dream of a "better world", and their attitude toward Amnari is one of both hatred and pity.

By the time the book opens, we see that Amin Duum is now a world dominated by a combination of fear and overwhelming bureaucracy – it's more visible in Commander Vasha's life, as he spends much of his time followed around by a ledger-wielding assistant who manages his time and takes messages. Every office Vasha enters, even that of Tiom, is full of clerks filling in forms of one kind or another. Getting from one place to another is almost impossible without filling in endless paperwork, something that's even slower in the Amnari world because of the lack of technology like typewriters to make the process quicker.

The power of racism to create a united people is a powerful one in despotic regimes, and it can be broken down in many different ways. Aside from the presence of a small, "inferior" race called the Taija, who are constantly victimised by Tiom's guards, everybody in Duum is aware of where they sit in a complex social hierarchy, with hatreds aimed at various different groups that prevent them from united against the oppressive regime. Therefore, inhabitants of the three cities hate each other, especially residents of the larger, poorer South City, which is regarded as a waste pit for the dregs of humanity.

I found Hannah Arendt's work incredibly useful for creating and building the state of Duum under Tiom. Her observations on the Eichmann trial were particularly useful for me, because they helped me understand how bureaucracy can be used to dampen down the human emotional response to horrific events. I did not – and could not – reproduce the industrialised killing of the Nazi regime, but many of its features as expressed by Arendt's study appear in Duum. It was also useful to look at the psychologically destructive techniques employed during Mao's Cultural Revolution, and the approach of the Khmer Rouge who used the idea of people becoming infected with an illness to explain those who refused to join their own campaigns. It was really important for me to understand and then explain how people could go from a relatively good, socially wealthy situation to one of poverty and suffering and yet still support the leader who created it. Although none of the regimes mentioned did quite the same thing, they did help me understand how it's possible for leaders to inspire people to live in desperation and fear but for the majority not to challenge it.

In 'Obedience To Authority' Stanley Milgram showed clearly that when confronted with a figure of authority people will engage in acts of cruelty towards strangers, deferring their moral responsibility to those seen as in control. Thinking of the Nazi regime and that of Amnar do you agree with the philosopher Edmund Burke's comment that 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing'  and to what extent do you think Milgram was right?

I think this is where writing Amnar became really interesting. I've actually seen live taping of people repeating the Milgram experiments, which adds a new layer to our understanding of what was going on. Participants often repeatedly question what they're doing, but around a third to a half will go on to give fatal electric shocks during the tests. It's possible to see that they don't just willingly give shocks to people but protest frequently. In one case that I saw, an individual stated that he conveyed responsibility to the white coated researcher, but he still carried on.

To a great extent I do agree with Burke. The Nazi regime in particular has been the source of a lot of fascinating material on how "good" people can come to commit acts of evil, fictionalised accounts like "Good", demonstrating how a liberal man could end up a member of the SS because he made a series of very small decisions, none of which were, by themselves, responsible for his transition into somebody who could commit or condone acts of pure evil. This is what makes the regime so fascinating to study and on which to base tyrannical regimes.

You start to understand that people rationalise what's going on around them all the time, possibly because they're looking out for themselves and it's easier to do nothing than to stand up and fight. It's easier to shrug at a book burning, for example, than to lose your job, career and home. These choices, which make the political and moral stand so difficult to take, are what gradually change people. Of course, you have examples like Adolf Eichmann (to return to Hannah Arendt), as well. He claimed that he believed he was doing good precisely because he was doing what he was told. The influence of authority is often so subtle that you don't know until you're right in front of the worst possible evil, that you've been led there by a small series of choices that seemed trivial at the time.

He was also at a remove from the cruelty for which he was responsible. Going back to the second question of bureaucracy in totalitarianism, this is what makes it so pernicious. Every individual is such a small cog in a big system that it's often impossible to see how your own acts could possibly be wrong. You can rationalise yourself out of making your own life painful by saying that what you're doing isn't the actual act of killing. Understanding all of this, I had to really think about how to work with a character like Vasha, who is not necessarily a bad man, being shunted into a position where he is exposed to the violence inherent in the regime, and to develop Io's character as she quietly and persistently challenges authority by being the "Queen of the Awkward Question", as she terms it.

It's important to remember that not everybody will persistently follow authority. Part of looking at the Milgram experiments was understanding how people coped if they disagreed with a regime, what sort of people did, and how they squared it with their own ethical values. The Nazi regime was one that went out of its way to transfer moral consciousness from the killers, to prevent the breakdowns that took place amongst killing squads early on in the conflict. People have to do a good deal of mental work, but it's perfectly possible to perform a mental switch so that the moral act becomes the act of murder. When the victim is face to face, that appears to be harder (judging by the experience of the squads). One of the things I've wanted to show in the Amnar series is that not everybody is swayed by authority, but that it is also incredibly hard to resist the pull of the majority.

Milgram's work has actually made me wonder about myself, and whether I would be capable of withstanding that kind of pressure from authority. We are so socially conditioned to agree with authority, and with the majority that I would probably query anybody who felt certain that they'd be the one to stand up for good in a despotic regime. It is much, much harder than it looks.

In 'The Authoritarian Personality' Theodor Adorno tried to postulate a set of criteria by which to define personality traits and their intensity in a person on what he called the Fascist scale. Adorno came up with nine traits that were believed to cluster together as a result of childhood conditioning. They include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity and exaggerated concerns over sex. To what extent do you think these are relevant to the personality of a despot and how do they relate to the despotic characters in Amnar?

One of the biggest difficulties doing extensive studies on the personalities of dictators is that they aren't all that common, so you can't do large-scale work, which makes it hard to identify personality traits that might "diagnose a despot", if you like, in the same way that you can diagnose egomania or schizoid personality types.

However, when you look across the various most famous figures who stand out in history for their tyranny, even just those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you see common threads, and even though Adorno refers to the scale as "Fascist" it could apply equally to extreme left-wing dictatorships as well, although the qualities shift and often take different forms. The essential question is "How did this person become who he is? Why does he believe what he believes?" and I think Adorno's work goes some way toward offering a framework on which to build an understanding of how an imaginary dictator emerges from the crowd and goes on to control it.

When I started working closely on Tiom himself, and the people who surround him, it was vital to know how they maintained their authority and how their personalities worked. I understood from histories of both Hitler's and Stalin's governments, that they both kept a constant fear and distrust amongst their ministers and officials as a means of ensuring people couldn't possibly gang up and overthrow them. All of these personality traits appear somewhere in the Tiomke leadership, although the interesting part of it has been how differently they are expressed.

So far, I haven't explored Tiom's background and childhood in the books themselves, but I did have to answer questions about where his views on the world came from. As a writer, when you're not just commenting on research but producing fiction, there's a point where you have to start looking at how they interact as people with other people, and that was the hardest part. In Traudl Jung's diaries, for example, Hitler appears as charming and often kind and erudite, which is a far cry from the monster people want to imagine. It became a matter of looking at how these traits are expressed in language, behaviour, and dialogue.

One of the features not mentioned is charisma, and I found that to be the key that makes so many people fall for despots. Curiously, though, it was also an opportunity to demonstrate that it's a wily trait, expressed in one of the "good guys" just as much Tiom himself.

Gunter Grass revealed in 'Peeling The Onion' that the way Fascist control worked was through the carefully engineered dissemination of information at various hierarchical levels. How does this relate to the world of Amnar and do you believe that Chomsky's notion of Manufacturing Consent is relevant?

The use of information and indoctrination is absolutely crucial to Amnar, and it was a core feature that I knew I had to have in creating the regime in Amin Duum. The two are very different but related concepts in understanding totalitarian systems. Obviously, in the former case we have the strict control of information, that access to information for some groups is not just better than others, but that there is a degree of privilege that comes with knowing you have insight into secret plans and details, while others do not.

In the case we have the concept of manufacturing consent, whereby people are indoctrinated into an ideology that will of course lead to them supporting actions taken by the leadership without question, because they believe they are right and proper. Tiom created, very much like Hitler, an historical discourse that was published as a book, which gave everybody a standard, accepted history of the city. Dissent from this text was completely banned and books that disagreed with this history were burned.

Teaching children everything they would learn from this book created early indoctrination, and a devotion to Tiom as a saviour figure. Like many dictatorships on the left and right, control not just of what people can do but their time is important. The creation of youth groups, where the young spend most of their time away from their families in situations where they are constantly fed certain types of information and are taught that questioning this is a sign of weakness or ill-health or poverty of mind, is another vital feature of these systems, which explains the appearance of the Junior Youth Movement and the Youth Movement in Amin Duum, both acting to control what children and young adults learn, but also making them tools of dissemination of a particular ideology.

There is actually very little mass media in Amnar, which makes the control of media bodies as explored by Chomsky slightly less relevant than it would be in a modern society. Newspapers are a relatively new development and appeared in other states before Amin Duum. Tiom takes advantage of the lack of media to spread a message solely through the use of the Youth Movement, making constant "proclamations" not unlike the slogans and announcements that appeared in Maoist China. There are also no big corporations in Amnar; in this sense the Tiomke regime is much more like communist dictatorships than Nazi Germany in that it did away with the idea of elitism creating massive inequality.

On a personal level, for characters, it was important to show that questioning what's going on is very difficult given the level of indoctrination involved. After travelling in China for a while I was amazed by the extent to which people are capable there of not seeing things they are not supposed to see (rather reminiscent of China Mieville's The City and The City). Studies of the psychology of belief show that people filter reality according to what they already believe, so of course to be raised in an environment where you're constantly exposed to certain propaganda will make it harder to make that leap into outright dissent. I raised this with Io, this is what makes her so uncertain at first. Something tells her what she sees around her is wrong, but because of the way she's been raised, it is very hard for her to make the jump to say with authority that "this is wrong." It would mean challenging everything she's been raised to believe about the world.

You cite Dostoyevsky as an influence. In 'Crime and Punishment' Raskolnikov attempts to place himself above the law through his interpretation of the Nietzschean position of the Ubermensch and he fails. Why do you think he lacked the ability to turn himself into a psychopath and do you think he was ultimately seeking the reassurance of guilt?

I think this relates back to your question regarding the psychological makeup of dictators, but not just that. One of the arguments that I've faced as an atheist is one that suggests that without a supreme being dictating order to humans, we have no sense of right and wrong. When I think of Raskolnikov's attempt to commit murder, his failure to detach himself from what he had done and to truly see himself as above the law (rather than just attempt to convince himself of the idea), I'm reminded of that argument.

This goes back to everything we've discussed here from question two onwards, whether you consider the Milgram experiments or Theodor Adorno's Fascist scale. How do we understand what is good and what is bad? How do we develop a sense of right and wrong? And why is it that some people will do outrageously awful things to other people or participate at a bureaucratic level in industrialised killing, but others will face death because they refuse?

I'm not sure if this is the answer you're looking for, but it seems appropriate to consider Raskolnikov's actions in light of all of this, and consider the nature of whether or not people are born good or bad, in some way made good or bad, and whether it's possible to jump that barrier, either way. Raskolnikov might be rather like the members of SS squads who could not cope with the mass murder they were forced to carry out at superior's orders, in the sense that it goes against something fundamental in us as a species. His crime was intimate, and as I said earlier, it is hard and emotionally damaging for people to cause that kind of harm to other human beings, if they have to look that person in the face as they're doing it. There are people, though, who are perfectly capable of that kind of killing, the people we think of in society as psychopaths.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Adolf Eichmann situation, of being a cog in the machine who never really sees the slaughter directly and can more easily rationalise it. That said, we haven't touched on Zimbardo's controversial Stanford prison experiment, which shows that people can commit horrific crimes against each other if placed in the right environment. I'm not sure if we could consider Eichmann a psychopath since he was removed from the actual act of killing in a way that made rationalisation of his actions easier. Based on what I've learned, it seems harder to do this if the human effect of the crime is more immediate.

At this point, I'm tempted to suggest that Raskolnikov failed because without the right mental setup there from the start, and that regardless of motivation, there are certain things that we as humans struggle to be capable of doing without suffering some form of psychological trauma. We've discussed here what compels people to commit or to persuade others to commit horrific acts against others, but the consequences are equally fascinating. Much of this rather relates to later books in the Amnar series, although I will hint at a breakdown in one of the characters facing the reality of the regime after a lifetime of devoted support. Privately, I wonder if guilt is one of those mechanisms we have for defining what is right from what is wrong, and that rather than seeking reassurance from guilt, perhaps Raskolnikov is demonstrating that he has one of those mechanisms and that it overpowers his philosophical reasoning for committing the crime in the first place.

Do you think killing and fucking are related?

Definitely. Perhaps not so much the bureaucratic killing where all the emotion is stripped from the act, but there is a passion in both acts, as we use a powerful physical force on another human being. Killing is just as intimate an act, even if the emotion behind it is completely opposite to the one we experience when we fuck. Whenever I write either, I'm aware of the visceral sense of both – as though we drop that higher-brain connection just for a moment and function from the lizard brain. All that sweat and movement and force and energy are propelled into an act intended to physically impress onto another person exactly how you feel, one way or the other.

Franz Kafka in his story 'In The Penal Settlement' shows the absolute control over the human body by a dictatorship. He describes the use of a torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in a script before letting him die. Deleuze and Guatarri in 'Anti-Oedipus' developed their theory of the body without organs and postulated that the schizophrenic is reacting against the pathologies of capitalism, while RD Laing theorised that mental illness is sometimes a symptom of pathology elsewhere and that the patient is actually being coerced by mainstream psychiatry to cooperate with something that is diseased.

How does the concept of the social control over the body within a therapeutic or punishment structure relate to the fictional world of Amnar and what are your views on these positions?

It isn't overtly stated until later in the book, but there are several uses of the body, and what is written on the body, as a means of social control or delineation of status. Although public execution and more private torture are used in the Tiomke regime, there are those left alive, scarred by burning, who are kept alive as symbols of what happens to people who have fallen victim to the "sickness" of supporting the Amnari. Nenja in particular is left with burns over her face, and the use of the face as a location for physically visible symbols of punishment is common in Tiomke Duum.

On the other side, the use of tattooing in Amnari culture on graduation or the achievement of a position, especially amongst the Servants, symbolises that these go deeper than simply being titles or jobs in the conventional sense. I was interested in the way that a Servant (one of ten senior warriors and watchers, very highly respected) takes on a role for life, under an indenture which is carved as a tattoo into the flesh. One character, Cosai, while being tortured by the Tiomke, uses the fact that she has this tattoo as something to cling on to; although to us that loss of freedom might seem awful, to her it becomes the thing that keeps her fighting, because she realises that whatever the Tiomke do, she has something that gives her value that they cannot touch.

I've been fascinated with Laing's work, despite the fact that he is largely regarded as an outsider and most psychotherapists would probably look askance at his work. I have experience with mental illness, and the way that it causes you to step outside the conventions of society. My interest arose because it can feel as though you're being asked to join in a kind of collective madness, that in order to function as a human being you have to spend a lot of your time in denial about the fact that very little in our lives makes much sense. I have my doubts that schizophrenia is a reaction to capitalism, but certainly extreme forms of depression and anxiety could be seen as a sudden realisation that much of what we do in life is madness. When I say that, I'm thinking specifically of the way we as a society cycle between boom and bust, buying into ideas about house ownership and capital that only lead to bust when the markets collapse.

To relate it specifically to Amnar, one of the means used of separating the faithful Tiomke from those who question the regime is the idea of mental sickness. It was used by the Khmer Rouge as a way of explaining people who said that life before their reign was better. A "memory sickness" was used; similar uses appear in China as well. In the same way, I made use of Kafka's creative legal nightmare from The Trial, that at any moment people could be accused of a crime but cannot know what that crime is. Tyrannical control seeks to undermine the individual's faith in their own sense of what is real, and this struck me as crucial to creating a realistic sense of torture and suffering in the Tiomke regime. It isn't so much pure physical pain that breaks people, but the endless assault on their sense of who they are as people.

Robert A Heinlein in 'Stranger In A Strange Land' tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians who returns to Earth and starts a religion. It inspired Charles Manson. Science Fiction authors often create a complex mythology to illustrate aspects of the human condition. To what extent do you think religion is a power structure that is different from those discussed and how easy do you think it is to start a cult?

Heinlein isn't the only author who's inspired people to start cults, although I won't go about naming names as that tends to lead to people like me getting sued. There seems to be something about a really well-built fantasy world that inspires a sort of devotion, probably because there is something about taking a story right outside the boundaries of our normal lives and into an entirely imaginary one that allows the reader to make connections about their own lives. It also gives a sense of meaning and certainty in an otherwise uncertain and frightening real world.

I've never gone about starting a cult, so I'm not sure how easy it is, but I do see a great many connections between the power structures and methods of control used in religions and those used in either cults or totalitarian regimes. After all, the latter are given the name "totalitarian" because they require a level of fealty and devotion that other political systems don't.

It's common amongst the more staunch atheist thinkers, such as Christopher Hitchens, for example, to describe religions as a dictatorship, with the dictator in the sky, rather than in a government office. I can see clear parallels in the call upon believers to have faith, no matter how strange or unpleasant the demands of the invisible dictator. I suspect, although I'm not sure that there are many studies on the subject, that the psychology behind it is very similar. We are wired to believe what we're told, rather than to question – especially authority figures – and the same underlying principles swing into operation whether you're talking about a religion or a dictator.

As we've seen in the last ten years or so, religion is also a tool used in regimes in order to inspire a greater level of devotion and adherence to whatever law they have instituted. The idea that a god is behind it, enforcing it, and that the punishment for transgression is eternal, puts extra force for many people living in dictatorial regimes. Others, such as Communist ones, react the opposite way. In both fascist and communist regimes leaders have felt that religion is a distraction and that people cannot be devoted to both leader and church.

Not all religions are the same, however. It is entirely possible to move in and out of some safely, to question without putting your own life at risk. Much of that depends where you live, the specific denomination you belong to, and the people around you. Religions also profess to have something that political systems simply can't, and that is the offer of eternal life, a solution to the fear of death. There was something of a death cult within the Nazi regime, that there was a nobility in dying for the sake of their beliefs and the country, but as a rule unless the system is specifically religious, they don't offer any consistent message of redemption or of a specific sense of what happens after death.

There is a strong tradition in literature to take political messages and commentary out of the present time and place them in fantastical contexts. From George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 to Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, authors choose not to place their stories within the specific world on which they are commenting. What made you choose to create a fantastic world rather than, say, set a story within Maoist China or Nazi Germany?

I had a few reasons for doing it. The first was that the fantasy world came first. When I was young and still learning, I wrote to have fun and the world was where I went to play. As the world grew and I grew up, I felt very strongly that if I was going to create a world that involved a despotic regime that it should be done right, and avoid clichés of traditional fantasy villains. Dictatorships operate in certain ways and because I was writing something deep and very involved, I wanted to make sure it felt very real.

The second major reason was that I think there is a power in taking things out of original context because it gives them more impact. I think stories about China, Russia or Nazi Germany have to be very specific to their time, and you need to be very involved in that world, but you're also constrained by the rules that operate in that world. It's difficult to step back if you write about Nazi Germany and say that this is not unlike the way dictatorships at the opposite end of the spectrum work. Placing something in a purely fantastical context often gives a story more punch. I'm inclined to say that unless the story is original and brilliant to the standard of, say, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, that we're better off with the real human stories that survive about those times.

I also wanted people to be able to have fun with it. I know that some people reading this interview might feel a bit overwhelmed, but Amnar is intended to be an enjoyable ride, even if it is a very dark one at times. I didn't want it to feel as though the message was everything, and that people couldn't sit back and read Amnar without any knowledge of the deeper work that went into it. One of the things I love as an author is the way people interact with characters, telling me they hate so-and-so or love so-and-so. That kind of personal connection is a very powerful thing, and I didn't want the background to be so overpowering that any sense that the people were real and their experiences genuine was lost.

I have to admit to being nervous about the idea of somebody of my generation being able to effectively reproduce the experience of living through those times. I have mined the archive for real stories of experiences in order to make the world as accurate as possible, without having to worry about pettier details that don't matter but can destroy a story set in historical context. A few years ago I toured China and was lucky enough to encounter one guide who went shockingly off-message when she described growing up during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, a party worker, had been denounced and imprisoned. As a very young girl, our guide had gone to visit her mother and found her in the compound, beating her fists on the floor in the snow. She committed suicide three days later. As an adult, she still felt a great deal of pain about the way people behaved during those times. These are the kinds of stories that bring all the research to life, and I don't want to ignore them at all, but write in a way that allows me to bring them out rather than absolute historical accuracy.

Thank you Joely for giving a brilliant and unforgettable interview.

Black links:

Joely's website is here.

Her Amnar series e-books are available online at Amazon.uk.com and Smashwords.

Download 'Amnar: The Inheritor' kindle edition.

View samples and download kindle and other versions of 'Amnar: The Inheritor' and 'Amnar: The Execution'.

Joely's take on this interview featured at Zen In Heels.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview with Chad Rohrbacher

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Chad Rohrbacher writes tight hard crime fiction that smacks you in the jaw.

He writes easily within the genre you know him for.

He also writes about alienation.

He writes poetry and is accomplished within the genre.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about alienation and politics.

And he slam dunked.

Who are you main literary influences?

Most recently I would have to say Murakami is the biggest influence on my writing. I just can't get enough. The biggest problem is it takes years for his books to get translated, which is a major pain in the ass. I read all of these reviews and fan sites that tell me how great his latest piece is and we here in America are two books behind.

Another guy I'll wait in line for is William Gibson. I'm completely hooked.

Of course Stephen King is right up there. Any prolific writer who can draw tight characters and engaging plots like he does I have always been attracted to.

George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Asimov, Joseph Heller, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Vollman, and poets like Carolyn Forche and Larry Levis, are all amazing.

I've recently (last year) been reading more folks like Ray Banks, Hillary Davidson, Victor Gischler, lee child, Lehane, oh, and Max Brooks 'cause I love me some zombies.

Murakami is known for his portraits of alienation and loneliness.

Do you think alienation is a key issue to authors and do you think we alienate ourselves?

That's an interesting question. My initial response is "of course" to both parts, but it's not that simple.

I know some writers who can start a story, write 3 lines at breakfast, get a paragraph written between phone calls at work, write another paragraph at their kid's ballet recital, do some more at home with the TV on in the background, and they never miss a beat. Those jerks amaze me. It's not fair they can do that and do that well.

I read a quote by Lawrence Kasdan when I first started wiring and it still seems true for me as a writer. He said being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. For me to do this work I have to physically remove myself. I have to go someplace where I will be uninterrupted. I sign out of gmail, twitters, facebook, and put my phone somewhere where I won't see it. Sometimes my hiatus from my electronic life is an extended period of time and my friends start emailing me — "hey where you been?" That's not so bad; it's when the wife and kids start saying it too that I know I need to come back to "real life".

Is writing alienating? Yes. Sometimes it does cut me off from family and friends. Sometimes I do stay in instead of going to that bar after work. Sometimes I do find myself overwhelmed with writing new projects, revising others, while sending out completed ones and I wish was a "normal" person with a "normal" life and hobbies that didn't put me in front of the computer staring at a blank screen seeing made up people come to life in front of me. 

Then again, writing is one of the most community driven professions out there. We read each other's work and talk about authors and help each other improve our crafts and discuss ideas and explore philosophy and argue. And there is a real connection with people in ways that other professions just don't experience. And luckily it's not just in the profession, but in the family as well. My wife shares my reading interests so we can discuss and explore and argue about books too.  

I do want to mention one thing that draws me to Murakami. I love his sparse, descriptive, surreal moments that his characters experience. For example, in THE WIND UP BIRD CHRONICLES one of the main characters meets a girl and gets a job counting bald guys for a company that makes wigs. Or he finds a well and goes down into it and he thinks of many things. He remembers a story of this Mongol soldier who skins a Japanese soldier alive. He thinks about this zoo where an order was given to kill the animals because the army couldn't feed them. These images stuck with the character. They stuck with me. It's like a dream that you just can't shake. I think about what was meant by this image, that one, etc. He touches on a truth(s) for me (not sure what yet), and I felt / feel less alienated because of it.

Yukio Mishima, whose avant-garde work displayed a blending of modern and traditional aesthetics that broke cultural boundaries, with a focus on sexuality, death, and political change,  became disillusioned with modern Japan. Historically Japan is a military hierarchical system. Japanese society was shocked by his well planned suicide. Do you think alienation may be a product of an individual conflict with cultural conditioning?

To be honest, as far as Japanese culture is concerned, I'd have to do some reading and thinking; however, as far as our culture I'd have to say yes.

When I was in college I was reading a lot of surrealist poets, especially the French surrealists. Rimbaud and the DRUNKEN BOAT, Mallarme, Breton, and at that time I thought the guys were just dandy. That didn't last long; there was this side alley that grabbed my attention that I think may get at the heart of your question.

We see simple "rebellion" in everyday life where alienation is clearly portrayed. Teenagers sitting in their rooms smoking pot thinking no one understands, kids shifting foot to foot at a middle school dance while watching others have fun, or even an individual questioning his/her life and wondering if they are raising his/her kids "right". We have these images produced by the culture running through our heads and when we don't see those images in our own lives, perhaps it does lead to a feeling of alienation.

Artists, I think, are a unique case to this idea. There are at least two ideas being acted out here. First, I think society likes the idea of the crazy artist. Oftentimes we look at artists as hurt, crazy, drug addicted, mentally unstable caricatures who are on society's periphery, looking in from the hard edges that gives them the ability to "see" truths that others might not be able to grasp. While this may be true for some (it's not hard to name many from every artistic field — Jim Morrison to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath to Edvard Munch, that guy from the grunge band from Seattle that I highly dislike to Michael Foster Wallace) — it's not true for most.

The other ide is that there are a lot of artists who are, in fact, touched by the mentally unstable stick. This was the side alley I mentioned earlier. I was amazed at how many artists were, or were thought to be, depressed or bipolar. Now we understand that there may be chemical/hormonal imbalances that affect these disorders, but I wonder how much was just that the artist has always been looked at as different precisely because she has been on the periphery.

The cynical part of me thinks there are some people who grow up with this romantic notion of the tortured or crazy artist and they purposefully develop that persona to further their careers. Perhaps they are great actors and their careers will take off. Or perhaps they really are screwy. Perhaps I have no idea what I'm talking about, which is most likely.

Ultimately, I suppose, if we dug into anyone's life we would see signs of "craziness" and we could attribute it to their feelings of alienation.

Do you think that peak moments of inspiration for artists may be brain chemistry that when it reaches a certain peak crosses the line to diagnosable mental disorders?

I'm not sure if inspiration is brain chemistry or emotional intensity or spiritual awakening (though the last sounds the coolest).

I absolutely think there is the "zone" we get in. Is it diagnosable? I wish, because then they might make a med for it and I could get in the zone every time I write.

When I playing basketball I had one particular game that I could nothing wrong. I was hitting everything, handling the ball well, everything. If I could've played like that all the time, I would been in the NBA. It was like I was watching from the outside.

The Greeks had their Muses and maybe they had it right. All I know is once I'm in that writing space and I get hit with the zone, I  go with it until I pass out.

Do you think it is possible to write a great story with a political agenda?

The short answer: Absolutely.

I would argue all writing is inherently political. In this I completely agree with George Orwell. He basically said that all writing goes in a particular direction and that direction, whether explicitly "political" or not makes a political argument. Personally, I believe that writing is an extension of what shaped the writer's experience and values. These values, beliefs, etc. can not be dissected from the author and the author's writing. It would make the writing  the  completely devoid of any kind of heart.

I understand some say "I'm just telling a story" or "I'm not being political" and they truly might believe what they are saying, but if they create characters and put those characters in certain situations they are saying something politically. Raymond Chandler examines class quite a bit in his novels. Most of our popular books and films are great political stories. Some like BLINDNESS are allegorical while others like 1984 are more explicit.

Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Margaret Atwood,James Baldwin,  Flannery O'Connor, Alexie Sherman (one of the wittiest writers I've ever read), all say something about society and thus say something politically. And they are accompanied by every other writer out there.

Now the qualifier "great" is the issue. Many, especially many beginning writers, start off with their message. I'm going to write a story about how awful war is or I'm going to write about women's rights, and generally I have found those stories usually fall flat. The writer forgets the first rule, the character. Without the character there is no reason for dramatic situation. Without the dramatic situation there is no conflict. Without conflict, there is no story.

Rather the great stories that advance a "political agenda" are those that just let us experience life through their character.

Like many, I have been watching the protests in the Middle East and I have been excited about what I see. Closer to home I have been following the fight for worker's rights in WI and other states. My own family background is rooted in the blue collar traditions in Ohio. My great grandfather was a carpenter and the other worked on the railroad. My grandfather worked on the docks while the other was a truck driver. My father is a painter by trade. So when I write, there are working class themes that come out. I don't sit down and say I will write about those themes, but I'm proud of what these men in my family, and so many other people have done and continue to do, that I find these characters popping up all over the place in my writing (poetry, fiction, and even my non-fiction). Is it a political agenda? I don't think so, but I could see how one might say it is.

At one point in the novel I just completed, KARMA BACKLASH, a middle-aged gangster considers the changing world around him. He recognizes the city growing old, he sees more people wearing "suits" instead of what he thinks as really "working' for a living, he sees power being abused. While this is not the crux of the novel, it does add depth to him as a character and it does, I suppose, bear some political ideology/agenda.

I guess since I believe all stories are political, the tougher question is what makes them great.

What do you make of WB Yeats's observation in his poem 'The Second Coming' that

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity?'

I think this is a good example of a "political" poem. I think he is basically saying that the "best" people are not interested or not fully engaged in politics (politics meaning any ideology that one might subscribe), while the "worst" are zealots for their issue(s).

I suppose it depends on you're values and beliefs to define who you would consider as "best" or "worst". 

What do you think the greatest crime films are?

There may be some spoilers here – 

Double Indemnity is at the top of the list. It's a classic for a reason.

Momento, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Man Bites Dog, and Natural Born Killers all do something with story structure really works without being gimmicky. Also I think each added something new to the crime genre.

I think Momento with its layers of mystery explored through the main character's psychological issues was strong in its own right. It kept the audience engaged and hoping that he would figure out the who killed his wife. The twist at the end was even more significant.

Tarantino's use of breaking the movie up like chapters in a novel is now his signature. Pulp Fiction and Res. Dogs both do it very well. Each chapter following a character(s) in their experience and each illuminating the story to a tightly knit climax is fantastic.

China Town is a classic. Nicholson does a wonderful job as Gittes. This working class detective stumbles into a broader crime and there once again, there is no happy ending. At the very beginning when Gittes shares pictures of some guy's wife having an affair, the guy says he is going to kill her. Gittes responds, and I'm paraphrasing here, you're not rich enough to get away with murder. To me that one line sets up the entire plot. The cutting of the nose scene is also pretty gruesome. You don't need a lot of gore to make the audience share the pain.

For my money, the Cohen brothers are contemporary masters of the genre. Raising Arizona was one of the first movies I saw that not only made me laugh, but also made me want to watch every movie they ever made/would make. Millers Crossing, No Country for Old Men Fargo… to a single one they have unique characters, great dialogue and complex plots that are engaging.

Blue Velvet. That movie speaks for itself. From the ear that starts the film to the tormented Loren, it's a disturbing crime film from top to bottom.

I also enjoyed the Boondock Saints quite a bit. The original, not that awful part 2. The larger than life father (similar to Raising Arizona) that the boys must face is one that worked here. Plus a good vigilante story is hard to come by.

History of Violence, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Suicide Kings are all films that I found extremely well written and very entertaining.

The Usual Suspects is probably my all-time favorite crime film. The unravelling story from Verbal Kint's point of view was absolutely astounding. The attention to detail and complexity that was interwoven throughout the film was one of the best I have ever seen. It made the movie one of the few that I have watched numerous times and have seen more every time I watch it.

Do you think we are motivated by the fear of death?

I don't know. Perhaps on some subconscious level, but I'm not sure very many people think about it all that much. It seems most of us live in ambition and focus on a very small circle of people in our lives so much so that death doesn't enter our consciousness unless we are forced to recognize it. When my grandfather was sick and needed extensive assistance, it was the first time I thought about death in any serious way. This was in 1991 I believe and I was just entering college. Perhaps I am odd in this way, I don't know, but after I made peace with him dying, I never considered it again. Luckily I have not had to either.

My grandmother, 82 years old, has started talking about her death. She is very open about the funeral, her will, which great-grand daughter should get what. It's very odd, but at the same time comforting. Even though I don't even want to imagine her not in our lives, through her discussion of end of life, I believe we as a family are more aware and better able to take advantage of whatever time we have with her. Camus wrote about this idea quite a bit, recognizing the mortality to take advantage of the life, but it never held any "reality' for me until recently. She's an amazing woman who has taught me so much without even realizing it.

Carlos Castaneda quotes the Yaqui Indian Don Juan as saying 'In a world where death is the hunter my friend there is no time for regrets or doubts'. Do you believe that crime fiction is motivated by a desire to control death?

That's an interesting question. I think it's much baser than the desire to control death, much more primal. I think we have a fascination with death, of violence, of what people can do to one another, of how people can be complete brutes or intellectual thugs. We want to know how simple people can sometimes be drawn into situations and do the unimaginable. It's like when we slow down to see an accident, especially if there are emergency vehicles there. We aren't trying to control death in those seconds we crane our necks, we are trying to catch a glimpse of the macabre. And if it is gruesome, what is the first thing we do? We tell our co-workers "Oh, you should have seen this accident; it was awful."

A few months ago they found a body dumped in some high weeds in our neighborhood. The body lay there a long time before it was discovered. Now we live in a typical suburb with families and a walking trail and a nice park. It was, as you can imagine, on the lips of everyone here. Who was that guy? Was he a part of the neighborhood? What happened? Come to find out it was a drug deal gone bad and someone killed him someplace else and just dumped him in our neighborhood. We wanted answers. Did we want answers because we were worried about safety? I don't think so because I saw the same amount of people walking the trails, the same number of kids at the park. It was a sad story, but it ultimately just became another anecdote people told.

Crime fiction seems to be similar. By vicariously living through crime fiction characters — these vigilantes and mobsters, these private eyes and victims turned predators — we can do all the things we ever dreamed and find satisfaction when the bad, or in some cases, the "badder" (think DEXTER or Gischler's GUN MONKEYS or Bank's SATURDAY'S CHILD) guy gets his/her due. When we read crime fiction, I feel like we're in on it, that we have information that no one else has, and then afterward we can say, "Have you heard? Did you see? Wasn't it gruesome? I can't believe."

So many authors like Nancy Bartholomew, Chuck Palahnuik, Raymond Chandler, Scott McFetridge have a wonderful dry wit and dark humor, it is hard not to be drawn into their stories. So, perhaps the bottom line is we like the twists and turns and surprises of the stories. We like to be entertained.

I understand you have written in other genres and writing forms, how has your experience in other areas helped you in writing crime fiction?

I started off studying and writing poetry, and then moved to screenplays because of my love for film. I think both share some specific techniques, but also taught me different skills that I have been able to apply to my crime fiction.

Both forms do share a love for concise language and using striking images. Anyone can write a long piece, using extemporaneous verbiage to take up space – what school-aged child didn't "fluff up" an essay just to reach the word count? But in poetry, like a screenplay, an author must search for the exact right word or phrase, they must write to get the most punch in the least space. Indeed, screenplays you generally can not go over 120 pages or risk never being read by an agent, producer, or contest judge. So the challenge in both forms becomes getting readers in quick, developing ideas fast, and making the reader not want to stop reading.

After my brief surrealist stint, I moved to narrative poetry. Poets like Larry Levis, James Wright, Dave Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carolyn Forche, Norman Dubie, David Bottoms, Scott Cairns, Edward Hirsch, and so many others, taught me a lot about how to create a character, establish voice, follow images and story to "say something" about the world in a (hopefully) meaningful way.

Richard Hugo has always spoken to me as well. His focus on place also creating meaning had a huge impact on my writing. Because of him I started seeing places as characters, not just backdrops that people wade through. Toledo, Ohio, where I grew up is a significant character in my novel because we see it as a dying city, one that has struggled for years to remain significant in the face of suburban sprawl and loss of key industries. Just like my main character, Derby Ballard, is a middle-aged gangster trying to remain relevant in the changing world and his crime family.

Place also plays a significant role in many of my poems.  "Over A Bowl Of Potato And Corn Soup, Mr. Marvin Tells Me How He Castrated Baby Goats" depicts the farm in Louisiana where I worked to pay for grad school. The place is as harsh as the act of the narrator castrating goats. The place becomes a living thing that has a personality and acts on its own accord.

I have 5 screenplays under my belt, 3 straight crime / noir pieces and 2 science fiction in the vein of Blade Runner (so crime is central to the script). While I've had some success with my screenwriting, a couple of awards, placed in some contests, worked with Mike Farrell for awhile, I just couldn't quite make it over that hump. Even so, I learned a great deal, especially concerning dialogue and plotting. Mike in particular taught me a lot and I owe him a ton of gratitude.

Eszterhas and Tarantino are two of the greats in both areas of dialogue and plotting. For both the dialogue is real, it flows, it's tight, it drives the plot while developing character; in short, it does everything good dialogue should do.

Plotting the screenplay was also a good lesson. Having an idea of what the end was going to look like was really important. At first I thought the process should be "organic", just let things go where they may and that's one reason no one will ever see that first script. Now I look at it like driving across country: you don't just get in the car and go. The highways, side streets, rural roads, and detours will derail you so bad that you'll never get somewhere no matter how fun it was. However, if you have a destination in mind, but find a neat little town off your route, then continue on and find a park you want to stay at, and that affects your final destination some, usually it's not so significant as to completely ruin the entire trip – you were still able to get where you needed to be.

The plot points in a script applied well when I was writing my novel. The way I could look at each chapter, examine the main plot, the subplots, and how the characters grew as the story went on was integral in finishing it.

As far as writing in different genres, I've come to the conclusion that Steven King had it right: tell a good story. When I first started writing, I wanted to write "literature' with a capital "L". I mistakenly assumed pulp could not do what literature did, even though that's what I enjoyed reading, and even if written well. I was miserable. When I started writing crime fiction and noir, I fell in love with writing all over again. To me, that's what it's all about – loving what you do, hoping readers get something out of it, and entertaining people along the way.

Thank you Chad for giving a great and unforgettable interview.

 

Chad Rohrbacher has published in places like Needle Magazine, Crime Factory, Powder Burn Flash, Twist of Noir, and others. Currently he is shopping his crime novel KARMA BACKLASH. He lives in Greensboro, NC, with his wife, 3 kids, dog, and crazy kitten. You can find his work at http://rohrbacher.wordpress.com/.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Aaron Philip Clark

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You want real? I'll give you real. Come here. He's here. Aaron Philip Clarke has written a brilliant crime novel with 'The Science of Paul'. It is not about forensic detail it's about the psychology of crime. While it is stylistically rooted in the Chandler and Hammett classics Paul is as Aaron says an ex-con with a conscience and the author delves into the moral complexity of what we like to dismiss too easily. He mentions Dostoyevsky's 'Crime And Punishment' as an influence and that is not surprising. When a man or woman gives themselves licence as Raskolnikov did they have had it.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about offender profiling and Ralph Ellison.

How effective do you think offender profiling is?  

Well, I don't profess to be an expert on the subject; I will say that I've found criminal profiling to be effective in the apprehension of criminals who operate with a tenable pathology. Much of profiling today is based on typing but in many cases we've seen how that typing or generalizing can be problematic, as seen in the case of the 'D.C./Beltway Sniper.' The profile of the suspect that was proposed stated the 'sniper' would most likely be a white male in his thirties. But the true culprits, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were both of African decent; Lee being a 17-year-old, Jamaican born immigrant. In some cases, relying on a psychological profile and various personality configurations could lead law enforcement investigators astray, but I'd venture to say, more likely than not the profiles aid investigators and provide a good point to work from. 

 Tell us about 'The Science Of Paul'. 

The Science of Paul: A Novel of Crime is my first novel. In many ways it was an experiment and became a kind of amalgamation. I wanted to combine my love of traditional crime novels, like the ones written by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Walter Mosley, with existentialism. The influence of novels like The Stranger, Crime and Punishment, The Prone Gunman, and the works of the Georges Simenon and Fred Vargas added to the melting pot as well. I suppose I wanted to write a novel that paid tribute to the classic crime novels I grew up reading, while taking some chances within the genre. I knew I didn't want the character to be a cop or private detective, so I opted for an ex-con. But Paul really is an ex-con with a conscience, and it's his conscience and intellect that sets him apart from some common street thug. I wanted Paul to defy stereotypes; I wanted his intelligence to be his weapon of choice, so to speak. He doesn't carry a gun or any weapon, when things become critical he relies on his fists and wits. But first and foremost he's human, so he does make mistakes that have dire consequences.

I set the novel in Philadelphia , PA , because Philly provided opportunities for Paul to come in contact with many different types of people in a small, intimate setting. Philly is a relatively small city compared to New York or Los Angeles, and it's really made up of various neighborhoods that are ethnically polarized. Paul moves through the various neighborhoods while making astute assessments about the things he sees.

I see Paul in a tragic, Shakespearean way. He has so much potential to be something really great, to be a kind of hero. Although, I'm not sure I believe in heroes, as much as I believe in everyday human beings having heroic moments where they show their true characters. But Paul can be a positive force, if he can simply get out of his own way, and forgive himself for his past crimes. He's not beyond redemption, and in this novel Paul is really just coming to grips with what ails him—his issues and the things that haunt him. He hasn't figured out the remedy, he only knows he has to make a change. 

Do you think that the best detectives have strong criminal shadows and do you think that certain sections of society are criminalised?  

I do think that detectives who can understand the criminal mindset are the most effective. Yet, it's their ability to compartmentalize the darkness and not bring it home to their families and loved ones that makes their job even more difficult. It isn't easy to erase the images of the dead and abused from one's mind, which is one reason why there are high cases of alcoholism amongst police officers–the alcohol is a coping mechanism. Detectives on average are forced to contend with the ugliest aspects of human nature, they come face to face with horrific atrocities; murders, rapes, child abductions. In order to stay sane, they have to detoxify such things. Being a detective is by no means an easy job, and being a good detective means being able to dip into the psyche of the criminal. In many cases, such as detectives who work sex crimes, they are unable to work within the unit for more than a few years because of the affects the terrible crimes they encounter have on them—often crimes that are carried out against children act as a litmus test that lets a detective know whether or not they can cut it in the unit. I think the sign of a good detective is if the detective fantasizes about eliminating a criminal for good. Some may see it as controversial but I see it as healthy. It shows that the urge for justice, for retribution is so strong that a rational detective ponders enacting justice in the rawest form possible. Now the detective that actually goes beyond it being a fantasy is a whole other issue, but fantasizing about ending the life of a child rapist or serial killer seems normal. Sure it may sound a bit primal but if one were to study ancient cultures and civilizations they would find many cases where a village came together to banish or eliminate a threat to the whole; it was done for the greater good. The reality is, there are some profoundly evil people walking the streets freely and I believe they are simply beyond repair and should spend their lives locked away in prison cells, and I'd venture to say those ex-convicts who have spent time behind bars with these types of offenders would probably agree with me.

There are segments in most American cities that have been overrun with crime, and these segments are policed differently—more aggressively, simply because many murder investigations lead back to these neighborhoods. But I think the entertainment industry and Hollywood specifically has painted some of these neighborhoods as uncivilized slums. For example, some crime dramas set in Los Angeles often mention The Jungle—a cul-de-sac of housing units in South Central that are safe havens for The Bloods street gang—and they depict The Jungle as being a hopeless and helpless hell hole. But that's not the case; there are many good people, working-class people, and retirees whose only disadvantage is that they're poor and can't afford to move. So it's not accurate to portray a neighborhood monolithically, and profess that everyone living there is a drug dealer, a gang member or even related to one for that matter. It's not so much a war on gangs or drugs; it's really just a war on poor people. But just because people are living in these gang infested communities doesn't mean they're at home with the killers, gang members and drug dealers. Many people live like prisoners in their own homes—afraid to go out for fear of being the victims of  a random drive-by shooting. Everyone needs protection, even the poor. But the same crime element that exists in poverty-stricken neighborhoods exists in middle and upper-class neighborhoods. In my experience, I've encountered more drug dealers who have upper-class pedigrees than those who sell dime bags of marijuana on street corners. I examine this idea in the novel. Paul goes to University City , home of The University of Pennsylvania, where he's tasked with collecting a debt from a drug dealing college student. While there the student gives Paul a lesson in racial profiling and contests the reason so many African-American men are in jail is because their crimes aren't committed in concealment but rather they are done as brazen spectacle—this is just one of the ideas concerning race and class that Paul has to wrestle with. But crime is everywhere, it's part of society and it transcends race and class, it has truly been democratized. Criminals come in many different packages, it's just that the news media and stereotypes tell us a criminal must look a certain way. It's one reason why people were so surprised by the swindler, Bernie Madoff; he didn't fit the preconceived notion.

Ralph Ellison wrote a great novel with 'Invisible Man' in which he exposed the conditions of institutionalised racism inherent in the US. Do you think things have changed since he wrote it or has political correctness merely allowed the liberal middle classes to hide their prejudice beneath an acceptable veneer?

I remember listening to the radio one night back in 2008, it was one of those underground political stations common in Los Angeles, and the commentators were talking about how if then Senator Barack Obama was elected president it would be the end of political radicalism amongst African-Americans. They saw his election as the end to black revolution because with the institutionalization of a black president, racism would somehow become passé and an outdated subject—the idea being since there is a black man in the White House, the U.S. can't possibly be racist. But the truth is in the past twenty years, black radicalism and political awareness has only existed within a certain segment of the black community, mainly older and educated. On average, the youth is no longer aware or even concerned for that matter about the issues Ralph Ellison was examining in his novel The Invisible Man. But racism hasn't disappeared, it's just that it no longer overtly permeates society as it once did—it's been transfigured.

I'm a hopeful person but I don't have any delusions about how I'm perceived at times, especially in public. I've walked into department stores only to be followed or questioned; it's just how things are. I've always grown up with a kind of innate fear that my life could be taken away from me; that I could end up behind bars simply because I matched a description of a suspect. I used to joke that I was happy I was born short; since it's rare a description goes out over an APB to be on the lookout for a short, black male. But when you're black it's a packaged deal; it makes you tough. As far as the liberal middle-class and the overwhelming pressure for people to be politically and socially correct, I find it to be somewhat problematic. I've witnessed people stutter and stumble over their words, trying to find the best terminology so that they don't offend someone, and it always comes out forced and unauthentic. I've always said I rather people be upfront, if you don't like me for something as trivial as my skin color then let me know and we can leave it at that. Or if you aren't comfortable being around a person of color, why not let your being uniformed inspire a teaching moment. But in these modern times, racism has gone underground. Instead of it being overt, a person has to maneuver through passive aggressiveness and back-handed comments. I say let the rebel flags fly, don't take Nigger out of Tom Sawyer because if we liberalize America to the point that all kids know about the Civil Rights Movement are a few of Dr. King's speeches, they are only seeing a portion of the truth. But if they know about the gruesome murder of Emmett Till, the assassination of Medger Evers, and the four little girls murdered in a church explosion in Birmingham , Alabama , then that's the only way to insure such atrocities won't happen again. The only real hope of getting rid of racism is education, and not just what is taught in the public school system but I'm talking about an education that reveals the true decadence of American society—the type of education that can only come from parents and community leaders that care. As people become more educated, they will hopefully relinquish many of the ideas their parents or grandparents set forth, since racism is really learned at home and then reconstituted in society. But I choose to believe, or I have to believe that things are getting better because it's important for me to live in a world where my future child won't come home crying after being called a racial slur. I have to have that kind of faith, that kind of hope that people and society are changing for the better.

Do you think the police are racist and motivated to solve crimes that can win them promotion on the political bandwagon they serve?

Well, police departments are made up of people and people come equipped with all types of views and ideologies. I have law enforcement professionals in my family and I see police overall in a positive light, but I've spent enough time around police and in cop bars to have heard some unsavory color commentary. I think being a police officer is such a high stress job that it brings out the true nature of a person, there isn't much room for political correctness on the streets. Although some police departments have created a culture of silence and do not address rampant cases of racism within their departments. In the case of the Los Angeles Police Department, the department has come a long way. People have to keep in mind, at its inception the LAPD was made up of discharged Rebel soldiers that came from down south and particularly the deep south after the Civil War. Most were out of work and uneducated. So when analyzing police departments and their level of cultural sensitivity, a person has to take history into account. But we are also living in modern times and police departments and their officers must evolve with a society that is forever changing and moving forward.

I'm sure some police are motivated by career advancement to go after prize collars. But the streets and the job can be unforgiving. A detective that gets tunnel vision and manipulates the evidence to work in their favor, just to make a case and end up on the front page of the newspaper normally makes enemies along the way. That type of ambition, the type that affects how well they do their job—whether they thoroughly investigate and follow procedure—has a way of coming back and burning a cop when they least expect it. No good deed goes unpunished.

Do you think it's possible to merge existentialism with crime fiction?

Yes, most definitely it's possible. I'd like to think I was able to successfully accomplish merging the two together with The Science of Paul. I was attracted to the characters and pacing of many existential novels I read, and I thought why not take those elements and introduce them into a noir plot. Doing so allowed me to strike a balance between Paul's internal musings and the driving plot of the novel. In many ways it was an experiment—rather a controlled experiment and it allowed me to do something different within the genre.

Has anything ever truly terrified you?

As a kid many things terrified me. I used to have a great fear of nuclear attack, so much so I would have the most horrible nightmares. I dreamt of a horrific explosion and then the ensuing fallout, and not being able to reach safety in time—everything reduced to ash. It's safe to say, I had a rather overactive imagination. I still have vivid dreams but they no longer involve nuclear attacks. These days I'm more afraid of time, or the lack of time. I have a lot of stories bouncing around in my head, a lot of ideas, and I'm afraid I may not be able to write them all. I often think about Georges Simenon, and how he was so prolific, and I'd love to be able to write with that kind of fervor but things always seem to get in the way. I'd also like to go back to documentary filmmaking. I found it to be very rewarding. I suppose that's what terrifies me the most, not being able to accomplish all my goals before the end.

Tell us about your documentary film making.

I'm probably best known for co-producing the "Death of a Preacher" documentary series. The films centered on Jerry Grimes, who undergoes a religious conversion, leaving behind the fast life of the Hollywood film industry to become a preacher in rural North Carolina. The films were seen as rather controversial in the south, mainly due to their bold and unabashed approach to analyzing the relationship between the sacred and the secular. The films were used in an attempt to discredit Rev. Grimes this past year when he ran for U.S. Congress in North Carolina's District 1. That part of the tale will be told in the third and final installment of the series.

I've also directed documentaries for The University of Pennsylvania and I've done a considerable amount of freelance work. In my opinion, documentary filmmaking is much like writing. The story is really constructed in the editing process, that's when things really come alive.

Do you think we romanticise the past and is history a form of politicised fiction?

I think romanticizing the past is America's favorite past time. If you tune into these political entertainers on cable news or on the radio, after hearing enough of their jargon you would think that 40 years ago the country was an idyllic paradise. I liken it to when a family member dies and all the family wants to do is talk about how great that person was, and the story they paint is of some saint-like individual void of all folly. It's the same case with Pres. Ronald Reagan–there's been so many myths when it comes to his beliefs and how he lead the country. But in the case of the past, as a whole, rational people, sane people know the past wasn't a paradise. It's just that now we know more about the condition the world is in because we're exposed to a constant media stream—a plethora of information that streams 24/7 via cell phones and other digital devices. Just because hamburgers were 15 cents and coffee a nickel, doesn't mean things were somehow better than they are now. In most cases, we've just traded in one potential crisis for another. Instead of Communism, we have terrorism and instead of the fear of nuclear attack, we have the fear of a dirty bomb—a biological or chemical attack. I think the world is just as dangerous as it was in the so-called good ole days. Only now the riffraff and predators don't have to hide in the shadows, they have the Internet.

By all means, yes, history is a form of politicized fiction. It's never been more apparent than in the last 20 years. According to Dr. Cornel West, "about 72% of Americans disapproved of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. right before he was assassinated, and 55% of Blacks disapproved as well." Today, you'd be hard- pressed to find someone who is willing to say something negative about Dr. King. Overall, the fiction has been in Dr. King's favor. In fact, his legacy has been used like a chess piece on both sides of the political firing wall. One moment he's portrayed as a stanch conservative, the next as a revolting liberal, meanwhile his silhouette is being used to sell iPods. That's the problem with history, only a small segment of the population is interested in getting it right, while the other segment will take the ramblings of someone on the radio as being the gospel truth—ramblings that aren't even fact-checked.

I was told by a writing professor once, that all stories are a lie. His belief was that the moment you begin to tell a story, whether it's considered fictional or fact, it must be considered a lie. The only way the story can be considered the truth, is if the person telling it is witnessing it at the same time, in a play-by-play fashion. The novelist, the biographer, the orator; all of them suffer from the same condition, the burden of imagination. And imagination is at the heart of story, whether it's completely invented or based on factual information, the writer can't help but infuse it with their own imagination, therefore rendering it a lie. But the greatest lies contain some truth and as a novelist, it's always been my goal to make sure the truth is in the work.

Do you find distinctions between genre fiction and literary works and where do you see The Science of Paul fitting?

No, I don't see distinctions at all. I think that has a lot to do with my writing. I think these distinctions are intended for publishing houses and booksellers, but as a writer and consumer I don't pay much attention to what someone considers to be high literary or not. But don't get me wrong, I think there all successful books and less successful books, in terms of what they attempt. When I wrote The Science of Paul, I wasn't consciously concerned with what genre it would be considered. I was focused on telling the story. Now that the novel is finished and out for the public to purchase, it's become much more apparent that readership is very segregated. Sometimes if I'm around crime fiction fans and I get to talking about how I was inspired by existential fiction or the works that came out of the Harlem Renaissance, I get these baffled looks. Or if I'm with the high lit crowd and I start going on about Dashiell Hammett, people disperse and I find myself by the wine table alone with a glass of Pinot and cookie. But if I'm the oddball, I'm okay with that. I guess that's something Paul Little and I have in common. Some reviews have said, in not so many words, that Paul Little is too smart to be an ex-con—that essentially he's odd or other, and unrealistic. I agree that Paul is other but he's not too smart. I don't even know how to qualify such a statement. Sure, Paul Little was in prison but how does that have anything to do with his intelligence? There are many people sitting in prison cells today that are bright individuals that could have been teachers, scientists, and politicians. When creating Paul, I wanted him to defy stereotypes and I wanted him to be complicated. His life is a science experiment, he makes mistakes. He's a man who hasn't been apart of street culture for six years and the streets have changed a lot. In Paul's case his intellect is his greatest weapon but sometimes, like with any weapon or tool, it fails him. He's no Sam Spade. Paul is an average man, educated behind bars, and he sets out on a journey to free himself of his emotional burdens. People can put him and the novel in whatever categories they see fit, but good fiction is free, unrestrained by what is common or stereotypical. If they're looking for a confident, hard drinking, cigarette smoking cop or private-eye, they won't find that in Paul Little, but perhaps they'll find something else that's just as satisfying.

Thank you Aaron for giving a brilliant and incisive interview.

 Everything Aaron Philip Clark—his bio, his book 'The Science of Paul', his jazz/spoken word band 'Soul Phuziomati', news & events—can be found on his website here.

Press Release – Richard Godwin Releases 'Apostle Rising'

CNN featured 'Apostle Rising' here.

Politicians crucified by a serial killer. In light of today's headlines, the idea of politicians being crucified may not be such a stretch of the imagination. For Richard Godwin, author of 'Apostle Rising', the idea of politicians being crucified by a serial killer provides the basis for a powerful tale that may set a new standard for works of fiction  

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Politicians Crucified By Serial Killer – Award Winning Author Richard Godwin Releases 'Apostle Rising'
In light of today's headlines, the idea of politicians being crucified may not be such a stretch of the imagination. For Richard Godwin, author of 'Apostle Rising', the idea of politicians being crucified by a serial killer provides the basis for a powerful tale that may set a new standard for works of fiction

[London UK, New York NY, March 10 2011] Author and playwright Richard Godwin has announced the release of his new dark fiction novel 'Apostle Rising'. The book is a compelling psychological thriller about a psychopathic serial killer who crucifies politicians. Godwin's writing style has been compared to Ken Bruen and John Connolly.

Detective Chief Inspector Frank Castle never caught the Woodlands Killer and it almost destroyed him. Now many years later and still suffering from nightmares, he is faced with a copycat killer with detailed inside knowledge of the original case. Someone is crucifying politicians, and Castle and his partner DI Jacki Stone enter a labyrinth. At its centre is the man Castle believes was responsible for the first killings. He's running a sinister cult and playing

mind games with the police. And the ritualistic killer keeps raising the stakes and slipping through their hands. The body count is rising. Castle employs a brilliant psychologist to help him solve the case, and he begins to dig into the killer's psyche. But some psychopaths are cleverer than others.

"I wrote Apostle Rising," stated Godwin, "for every reader of crime and horror fiction out there. I wrote it for anyone who likes a guessing game. I wrote it for anyone who is interested in why crimes occur, and for anyone who likes a good novel, strong characters, a dramatic story and is interested in psychology."

Vincent Zandri, author of 'As Catch Can' and 'The Remains' stated that 'Apostle Rising' is a "noir tour-de-force that will leave you breathless and teary-eyed". Scott Phillips, bestselling author of 'The Ice Harvest' said, "Richard Godwin's 'Apostle Rising' is a police procedural and psychological thriller of the first order. If you love Ken Bruen and John Connolly, Godwin's the man you'll be following next."

Mr. Godwin is available for media interview and can be reached using the information below or by email at stanzazone@gmail.com. A recent radio interview on The Authors Show is available at his website. The book trailer for Apostle Rising can be viewed at YouTube.com. More information is available at the site at www.RichardGodwin.net.

APOSTLE RISING

Richard Godwin

MARCH 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9567113-0-4

Black Jackal Books

143 Kingston Road

London SW19 1LJ

Distributed by: Book Masters/Atlas Books

Profile:

Richard Godwin is a crime and horror writer as well as a produced playwright.  He was born in London and obtained a BA and MA in English and American Literature from King's College London.  He has travelled extensively and lectured, and worked in property.  Many of his stories have appeared in magazines.  His works in print include 'Chemical', published in the Anthology Back in 5 Minutes (Little Episodes Publishing 2010), 'Doll', published in Howl: Tales of the Feral And Infernal (Lame Goat Press 2010), 'Face off' in CrimeFactory Issue #5 (CreateSpace 2010), 'Pike N Flytrap' in Needle Magazine (Lulu 2010) and 'Mother' in Tainted Tea (Lulu 2011). His Chin Wags At the Slaughterhouse are interviews he has conducted with writers and can be found at his blog on his website where you can also find a full list of his works and a video ad for his new book.  He divides his time between London and the US.

Contact:

Richard Godwin

Email: stanzazone@gmail.com

Web: www.RichardGodwin.net

Black Jackal Books: sales@blackjackalbooks.com

910-842-9248

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Richard Jay Parker

Richard Jay Parker author of the chilling and brilliant 'Stop Me' has been a professional TV writer for twenty-two years. He has been head writer and script editor of the BBC. He has also produced a number of TV shows before deciding that he preferred drinking with writers to listening to the incessant demands of whingeing performers.

Having read 'Stop Me' I can tell you it is a brilliant piece of tightly controlled crime writing. It is also unusual in that it is told from the victim's perspective. Richard Jay Parker writes with the experience of a scriptwriter and that means the story tells itself with ease. It has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award 2010. I hope it wins.

If you want to know what it's about click the play button.

Richard met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about psychopathology and kidnapping.

To what extent do you think that extreme killing is related to the psychopathology of sexuality?

This question is very relevant to discussions I've had on various panels re violence written by women.  There are a lot of best-selling crime and thriller books out there written by women and a great deal of them contain extreme violence.  So extreme, in some cases, that critics and readers are speculating whether women write more potent and explicit scenes of violence than men.  Whether this is a product of women's innate potential for creative violence or simply a desire to up the ante to get their work noticed is eminently debatable.  Writers of both sexes certainly use extreme violence to generate controversy and sales. Every author handles violence within the context of their plot in different ways but there does seem to be one significant difference between male and female fictional violence - the aftermath.  In male writing the violence is often (though not always) prurient with little of its consequences – emotional or physical - registering beyond the bare minimum required for the plot.  In a large proportion of books written by female writers the aftermath of a violent event has more implications.  So sex and extreme violence in literature coincide - wham bam for men and a desire to hold onto its significance afterward for women.

How do you think thriller writing distinguishes itself from crime writing?

This is another subject that I've debated publicly with other writers.  Thriller used to mean Alistair MacLean but I think the term evokes different fiction now.  There's certainly authors that you associate with each genre.  Colin Dexter – crime.  Harlan Coben – thriller. There's a lot of crossover.  Both can feature crimes and both can be thrilling.  I wonder how librarians categorise them when there's a section for each.  Where do I display SILENCE OF THE LAMBS? There are always exceptions to the rule but the best distinction that we've come up with is that crime begins with a significant event and a thriller leads to one.  Of course, there's always plenty of events throughout each type of plot but a crime novel usually opens with a murder and the rest of the story revolves around working out who perpetrated it (and maybe the others that follow) and bringing them to justice.  A story also seems to become categorised as a thriller when it's international.  Does that make crime parochial?  Maybe.  A lot of thrillers are a race against time – an attempt to stop an event or meet a deadline.  That's certainly true of a large proportion of contemporary thrillers.  Zoe Sharp came up with that answer and I think it's the nearest to a definition we've ever got.  Now how about the cosy crime thriller mystery category?

If the race against time has become part of the thriller genre to what extent is that race tied into economic factors in real life and how many of those factors can the thriller genre expose?

I think people's lives are generally lived at a much faster pace now.  We have higher - and sometimes unrealistic- expectations of how much we can fit into a day and I think this is reflected in the material we read.  Like movies successful contemporary thriller novels cut to the chase.  I can't imagine a book like ROGUE MALE being published now.  It's a great book but I think its pace would now be considered too leisurely.  The majority of thriller readers need excitement from page one.  I think it's a product of having so much available – with downloadable books I think some readers have less patience and itch to access something else if their current book doesn't hook them immediately.  It's certainly a challenge for writers.

While comments are made about crime writing being formulaic, much of the best fiction in the world is coming out of the genre. Do you think that The Booker Prize has its own formula?

I guess a lot of literary awards – like movie awards - traditionally shy away from what's popular.  Booker Prize novels don't seem to be widely read until they've won.  That seems to be their formula.  It's always struck me as a strange attitude to issuing awards.  If something is popular it doesn't automatically mean it has literary merit but it shouldn't guarantee its exclusion.  This often seems to be the case.  There's a reason that everyone is reading Larsson although I think that will more or less assure his trilogy won't make it onto a lot of literary short lists.  There are some fantastic and intelligent thriller writers out there whose work deserves equal consideration to Booker prize winners.  As writers within one of the most popular genres, however, they can at least console themselves with healthy sales and recognition within crime and thriller circles.  The Dagger Awards seem to be getting higher profile each year.

Tell us about 'Stop Me'.

Nobody was more surprised than me that STOP ME was short listed for a CWA Dagger Award in 2010.  As a debut novelist it was great to have the profile of the book given such a significant boost through this and an earlier promo with WH Smith.  I'm hearing from more and more readers as they hunt it out.

There's something sinister about email chain letters – their provenance and their next destination.  STOP ME begins with an email chain letter from the Vacation Killer.  It describes a girl and must be forwarded.  If it ends up back in the killer's inbox he won't slit her throat.  Nobody takes it seriously until the jawbone of a prostitute is sent to the police.  The missing prostitute fits the description in the email.  But the real story of STOP ME is about Leo Sharpe and his journey to find his missing wife, Laura, the tenebrous world of Internet celebrity and his relationship with a man who claims to be her captor.

John R Bookwalter claims to be the Vacation Killer and runs a website based around this alleged delusion.  He's never left the state of Louisiana and the Vacation Killer has killed around the globe.  He's dismissed by the police as a crank but claims to have Laura.  She disappeared in London and the Vacation Killer was suspected.  However, her remains were never sent to the police and Leo wonders why – did the email get back to the Vacation Killer's inbox? 

But as everyone around Leo gives up on Laura ever being found Bookwalter is the only person talking about her in terms of her still being alive.  A bizarre relationship ensues and Bookwalter comes up with the most plausible theory of how she was kidnapped.

Leo has to decide whether he should accept Bookwalter's invitation to fly to New Orleans to find out if there's any truth in what he's saying.  That's what the title STOP ME refers to – more than the emails.  It's about being drawn submissively into something you know you shouldn't.  It's a story with a major twist and Leo is led down a lot of dark alleys before he finds out what really happened to Laura.

Graham Greene said writers need to have a piece of ice in their hearts. What do you make of his observation?

I've never heard this quote before.  Sound advice and not just for the creative process.  Maybe it's more applicable to a writer's capacity for endurance – that it eases the process of rejection and an ability to kill your (creative) babies.  A chamber of ice in your heart would certainly help during the whole agent/publisher quest.  Writers have to care though – otherwise they wouldn't create anything worthwhile.

Do you think abduction and kidnapping, especially where the victim is tortured and killed, throws light on the pathology of power and ownership not only in terms of the killer but also the victim and the victim's relatives?

It's probably the ultimate example of a person becoming a commodity.  Calculating the value of someone's life and the price of their safe return is fascinating territory.  What value would you put on your own life?  If you were related to a politician or wealthy family that would obviously make you worth a whole lot more – even if you were an unsuccessful human being on every level.

Incarceration removes not only your physical ability but your relevance as a person.  You're entirely at the mercy of your captor and the people who may be able to secure your release.  It's incredible how being tied to a chair can alter a person's status in the world so instantly and obviously the captor's attainment of power in such an easy way can lead to them wanting to explore that power through torment and physical torture.

In real life and in fiction we don't often see the incarcerated instigate their own escape.  They're either murdered or rescued.  Being kidnapped renders you and your family utterly powerless and very often this is the only agenda for the person who has taken you.

Do you think your time working as a script writer for TV has influenced the way you write novels?

Without a doubt.  Writing novels is a very different discipline but I visualise much of what I write in the same way I would a script.  I don't deliberately set out to create something that would make a good TV show or movie but I'm still composing shots when I'm writing the action.  It's just the way my mind works.  STOP ME is like a three act screenplay.  It wasn't deliberate, it just happened.  But there are elements within it that certainly wouldn't translate to the screen.  I'd obviously love to dovetail my two passions and write a screenplay of one of my books (even a first draft before a studio drops me in favour of another writer) but I think every novelist knows how unlikely it is that, even with an option, they'll ever see their work adapted.

Do you think that paranoia is at the root of extreme crime?

I think paranoia has always played an enormous part in creating gripping stories from Cold War era thrillers to contemporary novels that take new technology and twist it to generate a believable plot.  Human paranoia feeds on the threat of the unknown from the activities of a new neighbour to global conspiracies.  Paranoia is the engine that drives Leo Sharpe in STOP ME.  Are the police still watching?  Is his wife alive and imprisoned?  Is the threat from the website he's found a real one?  So many people we meet every day are concealing something – whether it be a part of their past or a more significant secret. Stripping away the facade always makes for a good story.

So where's the next book?

Have spent a good while getting book two right.  I'm just finishing the rewrite process and hope to have something out there soon.  As a new author I'm eager to build on what I did right in STOP ME without being repetitive.  The new book is a bigger story and there's that twist on a piece of technology that we're all familiar with but has been perverted for evil.  I'm exploring some new themes behind the story though and that's an element that I want to perfect before anybody reads it.

Thank you Richard for giving a brilliant interview that should make everyone want to go out and buy 'Stop Me'.

Additional Parker links:

Richard's website.

'Stop Me' on Amazon where it's 30% off with free delivery in the UK.

The Book Depository where overseas readers can get free worldwide shipping and 30% off.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Callan

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Callan writes raw prose that is existentialist in its outlook and wide ranging in its themes.

There is honesty and surrealism in her stories as well as humour. She is adept at using detail and displacing it to create a sense of the uncanny that forces you into the heart of her stories. She is dark and transgressive. If you look at a story like 'Visiting Dad' on 6S you see clearly her ability to portray a world quickly and deliver a great ending. She is also a lover of Franz Kafka with whom she shares a profound rapport.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about Kafka and cults.

Why do you love Franz Kafka?

I love him because his writing proved that anything, anything, is possible when you write some one can say that to you but you have to read something that proves to you. Once I began to investigate him more it was and is love I feel for him. Writing isn't easy and being a writer isn't easy I am not at all taking about fame I mean the act of writing itself of pushing yourself for reasons you don't understand his commitment to his work and his struggle to express himself was profound and he had no real interest in the fame of it, even of being published, but he was consumed by the compulsion to write it affected his life in almost every facet, the kind of work he did, his inter-personal relationships it was his identity. I would read about the lives of other writers and could never relate to them, but Kafka I could he was always seeking to achieve a satisfaction that was impossible to define and the fulfilment of it lay only within himself, he never thought he reached it, indeed, his novels were published posthumously. But what he did accomplish turned the literary world on its ear, his personal struggles and the pain and self sacrifice I think is the most important part writing contributed something so much greater than the total collection of his works. He is like the patron saint of weirdness his life's obsession made him immortal.

It's not about how much you write but how intense the experience of writing is.

Do you think drugs enhance our perception of life?

Sometimes, but I think it has a tendency to backfire. You start out wanting to enhance your perception of life next they become your life. For good reason sobriety can't really compare, its mundane and often disappointing, there are so many pills to help you if you can get your hands on them. Doctors are always the portal to the best sort of highs, in my opinion.

But everyone is different. I wish it was as easy to score great pills as crappy dirt weed and boring coke. I think the kind of drugs I like the most enhance nodding off watching movies from the 1930′s and forties and ignoring people living like a recluse, it's difficult for me to argue that that kind of behavior is enhancing life. It helps if you want to avoid life, avoid living, it helps you to numb out and not feel, but can you really call that living? It most certainly is not enhancing life. One time I watched fireworks on acid and it was definitely enhanced by the acid so yes and no it depends on the kind of drugs you are taking and what your goal is before you get high, I have written fucked up before and it doesn't pan out for me, this is a really difficult question, weed makes going to the movie theater pretty great so its enhancing the experience but I love movies sober, and if I wasn't sober I could not edit my stories, I really think it depends on what life stage you are in and like I said before what your goal is in getting high. If you snort oxy you are not going to really feel anything at all and that is a great thing but it is dulling life's perceptions not enhancing them, drinking enhances things a lot of things or sometimes it just gets you through things, like family dinners.

I think drugs are an unavoidable part of who we are as a species, people get high, and we always have. There is so much hypocrisy about drugs in America, there is a pill for everything, they sell the sickness and the cure, and I don't really think that anyone living in America even has the distance to gauge our current relationship to drugs. Rehab is a racket, a lot of people would stop making money if sobriety suddenly shot up, if people stopped becoming dependent on drugs, but these days its prescriptions pills were all hooked on. There is a song by a band called atmosphere called "panic attack" it's a really great song and I think they sum it up when they say " whether you call yourself a patient or a junky the only thing that separates is who takes your money." I think that is probably the most accurate assessment of the situation, I mean I was having psych doctors write me prescriptions for anti-depressants when I was just a teen-ager. Have you ever taken Ritalin? Its speed, better than speed better than coke and even as an adult I was able to get a script for that, I didn't try for it they just wrote me the script and I filled it. I think it's a sickness an exploitive dark horrible relationship because we want it, we want those pills and it's cheaper than therapy. I really feel I am too close to the problem, am too much a product of the problem to give a pure answer any answer I give will be rotten from the inside out, I can't know how other people live. Do I think drugs have enhanced my perception of life, no I don't, I know that drugs have destroyed my life, that's the best place to leave this question. Next question then.

Why do you love black and white films?

I am not exactly sure when I first became aware of the fact I loved older films, I have a dim and confusing memory of watching an old black and white movie I think it was Gilda probably with my mother and asking when thing were going to look like that, I really thought there was a place where people still dressed like that and that when I got older I would live like that.

Now I think what I love about them is the escapist factor there so far removed from me in time and so much is revealed about people's attitudes towards things, what I mean is that there is a type of accidental history so much more revealing than anything anybody could contrive. The other night I was watching something I can't even recall what it was an extremely silly movie plot wise and a young man says to an attractive girl as he puts his arm around her as long as you pass your math classes and don't spread, I will marry you. It's too obvious to point out how sexist that is, what's more interesting is that it wasn't meant to be humorous, that gem of dialog was considered acceptable to filler against the backdrop of a an already flimsy plot, and it accidentally reveals a great deal about the people who went to the movies the audience and in the deeper sense about the culture of the time. The 1930′s are the most fascinating, coming right out of the silent era the entire approach to storytelling was much nearer to the stage both innocent in some respects but also a heartless commentary on uncomfortable commonly held stereo-types. There is an unimportant film so old that there is almost no information about it if you look it up called Child of Manhattan. The story centers around a dance hall girl, and a millionaire who owns the property that the dance hall she works in is on his mother doesn't like the establishment and for some ill defined reason that leads him to go into the dance hall and pretend to be poor, of course they fall in love but I don't really care about all that, I loved it for its accident history factor. The dance hall girl is Irish and throughout the film her lack of education and ignorance is portrayed as charming, however there is one scene that has always stuck with me where the young woman goes home her mother a huge woman slaps her around when she doesn't have her earnings from the previous evening, its plays as a funny scene. But think about what this unconsciously reveals about society's changing attitudes towards slapping your children around, that would be considered an awful act of child abuse, it gets even better than she goes into the next room and begins to argue with her brother about what else but money it is implied that he spends his days getting drunk and not looking for work, everything about the scene is a reflection of negative stereo-types of the Irish in New York in the 1920′s, it's so great and sad and wonderful, and unintentional, I guess that's a big part of why I love them so much they bare unflinching testimony to what was considered acceptable behavior.

Who are you influences?

Franz Kafka obviously, my earliest influence was Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. he is so great just recently I reread slaughter house five and it was even better than I remembered, I wanted to be just like him as a adolescent he is so funny and sad at exactly the same moment and he jumps around so much when he died I wanted the sun to fall out of the sky, I wanted clocks to stop, I was devastated. I really love Margret Atwood, Alias Grace is one of my favorite books. I think as writer anything you read that moves you in even the smallest way is an influence anything that gets you thinking analyzing the way words are used to express ideas, feelings, moods, driving instructions. Once I read the back of a bottle of body wash from bath and body works, these are the scents of night, and proceeded to list the scents of night, what a bold project for a sentence and a list of ingredients. Something about the rhythm of the language just blew me away! THESE ARE THE SCENTS OF NIGHT!!! I wanted to get a job writing the description of lotions, but knew I could never live up to that sentence for a few days as far as I was concerned that sentence rivaled Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy all the greats had nothing on it. I still think I would really enjoy naming lipsticks and perfumes and such, Sensual fire light, or, Autumn Remembrance, frigid desire, that's a really good one. I digress, other influences of mine include Phillip K. Dick he is a real inspiration to me because if you get real nitpicky his writing isn't always the best, but who the fuck cares, through sheer creativity he tells amazing stories though provoking and fun, so absorbing you forget yourself or how you are defining yourself in the moment, isn't that the single best thing, the single most wonderful thing a writer can do.? To allow someone to escape this lousy ride for a moment or two, especially when it's crazy sci-fi like dick wrote ,escape, to escape into something that has never been cause someone to forget themselves for a moment an hour whatever. I always loved We Can Build you, I know other fans of his won't agree with me but it's such an offbeat weird story, why would you build Lincolns secretary before you build Abe Lincoln himself? Than when they build an Abe Lincoln the other robot gets depressed, it's wonderful fantastic stuff. I see him as a really edgy writer and I admire that a great deal, when the guy has sex with Pris the robot and she is telling him not to think about the fact she is a machine, I'm paraphrasing here, in Do Androids Dream of electric sheep, I mean I love that scene, I love it and love it even more when the guy wants to kill her and she tells him about the others and the fact that none of them could kill her either after they fucked her, yet they all wanted to because they felt weird about themselves, I mean bravo, there is so many layers of bizarre there each more neurotic than the next. I love Dostoevsky a bunch a whole bunch, I reread crime and punishment once a year and it is one of the best stories ever told, it's amazing how easy it is to relate to Rasknolnikov, a kid in Russia roughly a hundred years ago. It it's an extreme coming of age story, the murder after all this time still packs a punch, its brutal. The kid could not keep it together, not at all- he was no Napoleon. The characters are so real Sonya's step-mom forcing the kids to dance around on the street while she coughs and coughs, so sad it moves me so deeply the way the poverty is portrayed in that novel the indignity and pettiness of poverty. It gets better and better every time I read it, and some how much sadder. It breaks my heart again and again and I can't get enough.

I love to read so much, it's the only thing that ever set me apart, and it was the first addiction. I have such complicated needs when I read, I can't understand myself, I never know what will hold my attention, what wont, when something doesn't I find it very difficult to force myself to continue reading it, I just never know where I will find it, like I mentioned sometimes it's in the shower on the label of body wash. I wish it was something I could rely on, that feeling of escape a book can give me I would most likely be more balanced, than again if I was more balanced I doubt I would read the way I do.

Do you think addiction is a pre-requisite for an author?

Yes, I do, but in saying that I cannot overstate that, that is my opinion I recognize that it is not a constant. It was my pre-requisite for writing, writing is very much like a drug habit or a painful love affair, sometimes there is a moment when you can see yourself without the drug, but you know it controls you not the other way around. Severe addiction makes you feel worthless, you're so low, a drudge on society you don't expect people to take you seriously and you don't expect much relief from your condition other than more drugs, and that is writing, I am miserable after I have written. But that's nothing to the misery I experience when I have writers block, when I am not writing everything is pointless, after I have written something new I feel ashamed, like a "who the fuck do you think you are ." feeling, or that was just awful. The only relief is getting lost in the act of writing, somewhere in there when you have just lost yourself in your work even if it never sees the light of day, which is for me pretty much everything I have ever written that I am able to find peace, peace between the two extremes of the not being able to write and the ugly feeling when you wake up the next day and look what you have written and can only see its faults.

Are you an existentialist?

No I really don't think so, mainly because I don't understand what it means, I suppose if it possible to be one without knowing it I could be one, but my limited understanding of that is that man is if nothing else a plan waiting to be planned or something, I read existentialism and human emotions, a really long time ago but I don't think I ever really understood it, and the little I do understand I am not so sure I agree with, it seems to be connected to human beings having free will, I don't believe that we do have free will. I think people would be really terrified if they saw how pointless and chaotic things are I mean can you say we have free will when you deconstruct how we got here in the first place? It's so disturbing, in my case I know who he was but that really doesn't make it much better, so anyway this guy ejaculated in my mom and now this, now I am sitting at a computer typing with a sprained pinky and a jaded sole, no one controls how we get here, but let's face it it's all existentially the same, you just as easily been ill-conceived jerk off fluid, but no your mom's womb was the right temperature she was in a certain phase of her menstrual cycle and someone shot sperm into her at the exact right moment and now your here. WELCOME TO EARTH! This question is like the essay question you don't study for on essay exam.

Philip K Dick thought 70′s California was a hologram of a Roman Empire created by a malevolent being. You come from Catalina Island, what is your take on that?

I think it is the only reasonable explanation for what goes on there, especially the malevolent part, it's not all bad though the weather is remarkably pleasant it really balances out the evil Its a great place to swim, I wonder how much Dick swam, something tells me it wasn't enough. It's a place where things are definitely not what they seem I will agree with that, there is always the illusion there, maintaining the illusion is far far far more important that the truth, so maybe that's what he was commenting on when he said that. It's strange but I get homesick for the surface answers and the superficiality of home, charming evasiveness is a secret art form, when an entire culture is dedicated to distracting itself by its own reflection, I love it, did I mention the weather, if a malevolent being is controlling Orange County than he really knows how to distract people ask anyone about that corner of the world and they will almost always lead off with how great the weather is. The weather is fine and the brain washing is magnificent!!!! There is a lot of great sushi and Thai food restaurants, so it's easy to ignore evil. When I think back on my time there I think of it as an incredibly great deal with the devil, there are so many good Thai food restaurants, there is little I won't look past or ignore if I am getting great Asian cuisine on the regular. I think the devil lives in Mission Viejo, he has a great plastic surgeon.

Tell us about 'Purgatory Sex Twins'.

Purgatory sex twins is a strange story, a lot of times when I write I get a clear picture of something in my mind's eye and I don't know what's going to happen. I just have this repetitive image I can't shake. I start to write and I try to clear that image away. The time I sat down to write that story I had the idea of a staircase as a metaphor for indecision, and I sat down to write, it was late very late and I was living in this spooky little house in the middle of nowhere, I don't think I had seen another person in at least week, the first part of the story I was thinking the twins would be two girls lesbian twins, I thought that would fun., But it didn't pan out that way and I kept writing and writing and the next thing I knew I was all done, and it felt done. In fact I have tried to work on it several times after I wrote it and I can't its exhausting for me to even think about.

Prior to going to live in that spooky little house in the woods I had been in a series of destructive situations, I think that story is a reflection of how exhausting I found other people. I would not even say I was depressed just profoundly exhausted. I felt like as far as love and sex went I was through, there was no such thing as love only co-dependency and sex was booby-trapped there was a lot of personal psychological stuff going on in a subconscious way when I wrote that I didn't set out to write something that was a perverted exaggerated interpretation of human relationships but in hindsight when I think about it that is without a doubt what it was an extreme cold verdict on the nature of all inter-personal relationships everything was unhealthy if it concerned you and someone else, I mean I was living alone in the woods by myself watching adult swim at night and sleeping all day, and as far as I was concerned that was as just great, I don't think I will ever be able to re-write that story I just don't think I can recreate that mind set.

Do you think identity is ephemeral?

Yes I do, I think it is it's hard to define yourself for yourself and even harder to define what identify is, I think of myself as a writer but what about when I am not writing than what am I? Nothing. I play a game with myself quit frequently that I think demonstrates just how fluid definitions of the self are, what I mean is the labels the words we use, it seems impossible that we can be so many things at once, a student, a lover, a pedestrian, a consumer, a motorist, a neighbor, a cousin, a sister, a writer, a reader, take being a pedestrian for example when you are walking that's what you are and the second you start the engine of your car you're a motorist that's it no bones about it walking to your car you were one thing now you are almost the opposite thing in such a brief amount of time according to the words we use you have transformed! So yes absolutely how we define ourselves is not a constant, this troubles me I think about it quite a bit if I were to suffer severe head trauma and could not recall who I was, had amnesia, would I know what I liked? Would I respond to stimuli, one swift quick to the head and everything about me could change! That is a mind blowing concept, they say you are only what you can remember, you are only your memories but it's been proved that memory is faulty so that means everything is perception its enough to make you want amnesia maybe if I develop amnesia I won't be trouble with the slippery concept of self.

Do you think cults use mind control effectively?

I think if it's a persuasive cult is really good at brain washing. Mind control is fastening, it relates to the identity question, anybody can be brainwashed and most people already are, and brainwashing isn't always a bad thing. When I drive I stop auto manically (most of the time) at a red light, or a stop sign. I know that if I do not do this I could get a ticket or cause an accident, I know that but I don't think about it when I stop. Every time I stop at a sign or a light I don't have a complicated introspective internal crisis, I just do it, because I was conditioned to do so. There was a broken street light in my old neighborhood, at night there wasn't much traffic early one morning I was returning from a night shift and I stopped at the light, and sat there for roughly five minutes maybe more before I realized that there was no one around. It would not have mattered if I had blown right through it, but I stopped and it took a while for me to realize that the light was broken and that there was no traffic that early in the morning; I have been so thoroughly socialized to stop when I see red. So that's a form of brain washing isn't it? So I guess with cults they have to recondition you and it's obvious that people can be brain washed what's the difference between mind control and socialization how can we fully understand ourselves? There is no way to know what ideas are a product of our environment or our which ideas are organic, maybe there is no such thing as an organic idea, where is the line how can a person differentiate? Anybody who goes to any church is brainwashed, thoroughly brainwashed, I mean you would have to be to buy into that crap. Christianity is a socially acceptable cult, where I am currently living I am surrounded by really extreme Christians and there view on things seems really out there to me, I mean it's not as if I didn't know Christians before but there is nothing like a rural, republican, Christian to give all three of those things a bad name. .I had to take a class on the reformation for my degree and I was really surprised at how little people know about their own religion, one evening I was standing in line at the grocery store and I happened to be carrying my text for the class and someone asked me what the reformation was, and I said it's when there was a split from Rome, I didn't want to get into it, I wasn't a very good student. The person said, "Split from Rome" in an angry and super intense way, and I said "yeah, the split from the Catholic Church." The person said to me, yelled "I am a Christian!" Even now when I think of that conversation I cannot make sense out of it. why a total stranger in line at Albetrsons(grocery store) yelled " I am a Christian!" it was funny actually, I just sort of looked the other direction, I didn't know what to do , we had to stand in line together I did my best to avoid eye contact.

Whatever, I am getting off track, short answer is ,yes, I think a good cult uses knows how to use mind control techniques, I think all religion uses mind control techniques, some are just more extreme than others.

What is most intriguing to me is that the mind can be controlled, that mind control can change a person, alter their personality, change their values, like when people develop Stockholm syndrome that is a mental state that really fascinates me falling in love, or thinking you are in love, with your capture. Really sexy. Who is to say what the difference between love and mind control? At the time Stockholm victims feel love for their capturer how can you tell if it's for real, if you were holding some one hostage is that a question you would ask yourself? Do they really love me or is it just Stockholm syndrome….I wrote part of a story called Stockholm syndrome, it's up on my blog, I think under the right circumstances Stockholm syndrome could be beautiful, but the circumstances have to be right….I should work on that story some more I forgot how enchanted I was with the idea.

Callan thank you for giving an honest and passionate interview.

Callan blogs here.