When I found out that Mike Marano’s
Stories From the Plague Years was
picked up for reprint by
ChiZine press, and just in time for Halloween, I threw him into the interrogation room.
(According to
Publisher’s Weekly,
the small Canadian publisher “continues to hit the mark… [Canada is] turning
out some great writers, and CZP is finding and publishing them with amazing
alacrity.”)
Marano is best known as the
author of the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild winning
Dawn Song.
He also works as a film critic for the Public
Radio Satellite Network show
Movie
Magazine International and is a teacher at Grub Street, emergent trapeze
artist, and longtime PSB devotee.
What was the inspiration
for Dean, the serial killer narrator in "Displacement"? [the opening novella
of Stories from the Plague Years]
Dean was a collage designed to articulate a very particular kind
of frustration that I was witnessing throughout the 80’s and the early 90’s.
With the economic landscape under Reagan, especially with all
the factories closing because Reagan was giving tax breaks to people so they
could move their factories overseas, there was this sense that kids couldn’t do
as well as their parents, this anxiety haunting, in particular, the male
children of what we now call the Greatest Generation. And there was another layer to this, one
puzzled out by a bunch of sociologists whose work I read in The New Yorker and The New York Times—and I’ve been trying to track down a lot of
these articles that I read back then and have only found a couple. But there would be these explosions of
violence, particularly among Italian-Americans (and I’m Italian American)
against African Americans. There was an
incident in a place called Howard Beach outside of New York where a group of
African Americans went into an Italian American neighborhood and were
killed. This and several other
explosions of violence happened around the same time, and the sociologists said
that one of the contributing factors was that the sons of Italian Americans, if
not first generation immigrants then second generation immigrants, knew that
they couldn’t do as well as their parents had done and that this might have
caused a sort of displaced anger. And I
saw a lot of this growing up in Buffalo.
So I was trying to articulate that particular fragrance of rage and
apply it in a creative way.
Dean is a little bit
of a Humbert type in that he is a product of the Western cultural machine,
internalizing its ideologies and warping them in these interesting ways. Can you talk about your use of pop culture
in the story?
Well, I make my living in pop culture; it’s my day job. I infused a lot of pop culture commentary
into my second draft of “Displacement” because I originally wrote it in 1992. (And at the time I got a lot of good notices
for it, I got really good and encouraging rejections for it, too, which I
actually still have on file.)
And selling novellas is like climbing Everest, anyway, but
then Seven came out and I was like,
“That’s it, I’m going to put this story away and that’s it, it’s done, I can’t
use this premise,” because Seven and "Displacement"
share a lot of themes, if not premises. And then when I saw the ways in which Seven had been ripped off and had really
infiltrated the culture I said, “Ok, I can salvage this, and repurpose
it.” "Displacement" became a
commentary on the ways in which Seven and
things like it have permeated our consciousness. And I was riffing on something that I find
really despicable in a lot of mysteries and crime dramas on TV: the offense of
murder isn’t depicted as the offense against the taking of another human life,
it’s against people’s assumptions of what a home or a neighborhood should
be. What’s repulsive in a lot of those
pop crime novels is that the offense isn’t the murder, it’s—like I say in the story—the
bloody footprint on the nice carpet.
That smug voyeurism in all the Law
and Order type shows: “Oh look at
those bad people killing each other!
That offends my sensibilities, and those nice officers are going to set
that straight!” It’s the same with CSI, Cold Case, which kindof riffs on Profiler, and all those shows which tidy
up the actual murders, which is kindof sickening.
Given your feelings
about popular crime and horror fiction, do you consider your writing genre
fiction?
I consider it literary genre.
Walter Benjamin from the Frankfurt school wrote something in
One Way Street about how the bourgeois
anxieties of the 19th century, as articulated through murder mysteries
and horror stories, actually brought the 19th century living room
into existence, wrote it into
existence. Just like Miami became Miami Vice after the show became a hit,
and the Bull and Finch downtown, Cheers.
Cheers was a neighborhood bar, but then when the show came out it became
a tourist trap, and then a fake bar that tried to be Cheers became the real Cheers
because all the regular patrons there couldn’t stand being around the
tourists. So I’ve seen this kind of
thing happen and wanted to articulate Benjamin’s stuff by doing it within genre
fiction.
Can you tell me about
the second story in the collection, “Little Round Head”? It seems like a pretty straightforward story
up to a point, and then, suddenly, it’s not.
“Little Round Head” refers to a very, very specific world of
magic, which I go way out of my way
not to address directly. And I feel like
if I actually talk about to which world of magic it belongs, I’m going to
completely ruin all the mystery. Only
one person has come up to me and said “Oh, I know what that is!”
And that seems to be
part of the idea, that there is a crucial detail the reader is missing.
Which is what happens when you’re a kid [like the narrator]. You don’t know all the angles. And also, the whole mythological notion of a
changeling, a non-human agency raising a human child is so primordial that I
wanted to go out of my way to let it speak for itself.
Did you study
mythology at any point?
I was a history major with a minor in Medieval Studies, and
from there I studied Kabbalah and alchemy and various traditions of magic. I was studying that because, like every
teenager, I really wanted to write a big fat sprawling fantasy novel. But I wanted the magic to feel right. The two great creators of my imagination are
Lovecraft and Tolkien, and both of their worlds are so deeply rooted in a
history, it feels like you’ll find some truth if you dig deep enough. And even though I didn’t really think it
intellectually, emotionally it feels like Tolkien must have found a manuscript
in a monastery somewhere.
That’s actually his
take on it. Middle Earth is not supposed
to be another dimension.
If you change the level of the oceans, withdrawing them and
draining the Mediterranean a bit, Middle-earth is Europe. People have done it.
I recently read a
book review claiming that people read to identify with the protagonists of a
story. I’m interested in how you address
that, given your proclivity for very strange and sometimes terrifying characters.
Ok… so I hate overly
sympathetic protagonists. And my mission
statement as a writer in this capacity is, in the words of Andy Warhol’s
Frankenstein…um, actually that might not be a good thing to say out loud... But
anyway, I was raised on 70s movies: Bonnie
and Clyde and The Godfather, Electra Glide in Blue, and all these
anti-hero epics, Easy Rider, all
these movies in which it was a moral obligation to address, as a culture, as
Americans, our own not very sympathetic tendencies. And it really felt like, seeing those downer films,
none of which had a happy ending (you don’t walk out of Straw Dogs feeling good about yourself) it felt like you were taking
responsibility for something moral, or at least respecting that reality isn’t
always tidy.
And then in the 80s… well, the original ending of Risky Business was that Tom Cruise
fails. But that didn’t test well, so this monster of a spoiled suburban brat gets
away with it and becomes a success by being a pimp. Isn’t that cute? The original ending of Pretty Woman was that Julia Roberts dies of an overdose. But the audiences didn’t want that, so she
goes with the corporate raider and lives a Cinderella existence even though he
got his money in not very nice ways. There
were all these despicable happy endings which felt to me like an abdication of
moral responsibility. So I feel it’s
moral to present anti-heroes.
And call me a kook, but I think it makes for good stories. In Dawn
Song, the protagonist is a fiend from hell.
You brought up Humbert Humbert. And
is Stephen Dedalus a particularly sympathetic character? He’s not sympathetic, he just is.
And I think a lack of complexity in narratives—also in books, not just
Hollywood and TV—this mollycoddling of bourgeois sensibilities without any moral
or aesthetic responsibility being applied reduces writers to being court
jesters for people who just want to be entertained. (And that’s not an entirely accurate
description of what court jesters did, but you get the idea.)
The review that
brought this up was actually about JK Rowling’s new book. The reviewer found the characters vile.
And yet people love Snape!
By the way, can I just say, the real hero of Harry Potter is
totally Neville Longbottom. He’s the
more stand-up guy, he goes up to bat. I’m
a big Neville fan. One of the online
rumors leading up to the final book was that Neville was the chosen one and
Harry Potter was a carefully orchestrated diversionary tactic, and I like that
a lot.
Do you have a
favorite story in Plague Years?
Some have a lot more of me in them, and as an avowed
narcissist I would obviously like those better.
“Shibboleth” was extremely painful to write … I mean, it’s a
post-apocalyptic dystopian story based on watching my hometown fall
to ruin. I remember being a teenager sitting on a slag heap behind a bowling
alley on the railroad tracks breaking bottles with friends. Now if that was the opening of a William
Gibson story everyone would say “Oh, that’s so evocative,” or if it began a
Bruce Sterling story everyone would say “Wow, that’s gritty science
fiction.” But for me that’s just what it
was to be 14. A lot of that terror of
watching a city die made its way into “Shibboleth,” which is actually just a
chapter of a larger science fiction novel.
I’m not big on this whole zombie apocalypse thing because being in the
ruins of a city being menaced by chemically and/or biologically altered bipedal
threats—dealing with pill fiends and junkies when you’re just walking around
minding your own business—that’s real.
Why would I find that to be fun in a first-person shooter, Resident Evil kind of game?
Why do you think
that’s so big right now? Vampires are
beginning to die off, but zombies are still managing to hold out.
I think it’s a reiteration of many of the anxieties that I
find myself writing about, and I actually wrote an essay about this with regard
to The Hunger Games. I think a lot of younger people who are
fixated on zombie apocalypse have been to college and have minimum wage jobs
and really don’t see a future, and there might be a little bit of wish
fulfillment, too. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it all were wiped away and we could
just blast our way out of it?” So, I
think that’s part of it. What’s it, like
55% of college graduates are still living at home? I mean, that’s a world of suck.
When I got out of college there was a demographic bubble of
baby boomers right ahead of me and they weren’t going anywhere. There were no jobs. It was bleak and dystopian in its own
way. And I think that was colored by fear
about impending nuclear apocalypse, and that’s where we got all those Terminator anxieties.
So you think that
current trends in fiction are directly related to the current political state?
Maybe. But I also think
marketing people have found one thing that works and are now flogging it to
death. There are now small presses
dedicated only to zombie apocalypse stories.
You know, it sells, and I think that’s an outgrowth of our blessed
corporate masters telling us what to buy.
They have found something that works for the time being and are just
going with it. For example, why does almost
everyone in genre fiction series need to have magic powers? Buffy
was good, Buffy wannabes, not as
much.
Where have the Buffys
and Xenas gone?
Katniss. She’s a
stand-up character. She does what’s
right, and she’s other-directed. But I
wasn’t crazy about the last book. I
don’t think many people were.
You write dark
stories, but they’re also humorous.
I honestly think that comes out of a particular psychosis of
mine: the fact that I am the youngest son in a large family. I would watch scary movies with my older
sisters, who definitely put me through my paces by picking on me constantly. It’s in the job description of an older
sister, of course. My sisters, while we
watched scary movies, would be really upset when I would say that the character
that they really liked was probably going to die. I’d feel like I just got
a little bit of power. A little bit of psychological leverage. I relate to traditional
and mythic tricksters like Loki, because the only way you can really hold your
own when you’re that low on the proverbial food chain as a youngest son is to
use your wits.
What do you teach at
Grub Street?
I teach classes on how to write literary popular fiction, in
the form of three "Smart Page-Turner" classes called "Writing
the Smart Page-Turner" and "The Smart Page-Turner Strikes Back!"
and "Revenge of the Smart Page-Turner!", and I also teach something
called "Screen and Stage…to the Page!" which is a class specifically
geared toward teaching prose writers how to steal from film writers and
playwrights. When I read current
fiction, I feel like a lot of prose writers don’t know how to construct a
scene, and then when I read a play, I’ll see something so dynamic and
emotionally effective. “Displacement”
was written using dramatic structures. My
approach with Dean and the Doctor was to create a compelling narrative with two
people talking in a room talking and make it scary. The template for that was William Peter
Blatty’s Exorcist III, which is a
really underrated movie with absolutely terrifying scenes where it’s just Brad
C. Scott and Brad Dourif talking in a room.
Do you comment mainly
on horror films?
Primarily, because that’s my niche. Wes Craven really didn’t want to be known as
a horror director, but he found his niche, and hey, the checks clear.
Is there anything
you’re looking forward to seeing?
Skyfall. I did deal with Sony to cover the movie for a
magazine, but I asked for it because I’m actually really psyched to see
it. So I feel like I can say that.
What are you working
on now?
I am working on the sequel to Dawn Song. It’s called The Diaspora, and it expands upon Dawn Song but is a stand-alone novel,
one of three books using the same mythological background, not a series per se,
but with one or two of the same characters.
Kim Prosise
