About a month ago Anderson asked if I'd read Charlie Huston's books. I contacted Huston's publicist who kindly sent me both Huston's Henry Thompson trilogy and his new novel, The Shotgun Rule. Anderson's review of Huston's new book came out about two weeks ago and it picked up on some good points about the book, Huston's first stand-alone thriller. More on Anderson's review in a minute.
The Shotgun Rule is set back in the summer of 1983 in a California suburb and, having grown up in that state during that time period (I'd be 15 then if you want to do the math), I can tell you it's pretty authentic. The book is about four teenagers who are always getting into trouble. The trouble reaches a new level, though, when they come across a crank lab and steal a sample with plans to sell it. Then mayhem ensues but it's far from fun – it's intense and dark. If you are looking for light or happy material look elsewhere. But if you want something dark and pure check out this book.
If an endorsement by Patrick Anderson or me is not good enough, Stephen King also has a blurb on the cover: "Anyone not acquainted with Charles Huston's blistering, unputdownable novels will want to tie their sneakers nice and tight before starting The Shotgun Rules, or they are apt to be blasted clean out of them."
Scott Butki: How would you describe what this book is about to someone unfamiliar with your work?
Charlie Huston: The short answer is that it's a book about four juvenile delinquents who break into the wrong house and steal the wrong thing and @!$%# gets all @!$%#ed up. Implicit (and explicit for that matter)in that answer are the ideas that the book is both violent and vulgar. The violence in all my books tends to be graphic. I try not to write it for entertainment value. I know that's how it's often read, but that's not the point. And more than my past books, the violence here isn't padded by a large number of genre conventions. It's not a caper. It's not old school noir. It has some of the tone of hardboiled crime, but put in a mundane setting. There's humor, black and otherwise, but it's incidental. The vulgarity is part of my nature, but particularly relevant here as the protagonists are four teenage boys. There's simply no way to wrote that dialogue without using "@!$%#" just about every other word.
How does this book compare to your other books?
It breaks from the first person present tense narrative I used in the previous five books. The POV moves from character to character, giving me a chance to tell a story with an altered voice. My bag of tricks is still on display, but I got to dig a little deeper into it and come up with some new stuff. While the body count is down in this book, I think it's a bit darker. The fact that the world between the covers is closer to our own than in previous books makes the deaths that do take place harder to balance. Or that's what I hope for.
What did you hope to accomplish with this book? Did you succeed?
I wanted to tell a good story. Beyond that, I wanted to deal with violence in a manner less varnished than in my other books. I like the story, and some other people do as well, so I think I did my job there. The violence issue I'm still unsettled on. It's not quite as bare as I initially set out to make it.
What question do you wish you would be asked more in interviews?
More questions about sports.
What questions are you tired of answering?
I can't say I'm tired of answering questions about how I became a writer, but I feel boring when I try to answer it at this point.
Which of the book's characters is most like you now?
Either none or all of them. I was on a panel with Max Allen Collins where we were being asked about how much of ourselves is in our characters. Max answered, as I recall, "It's all just us with guns." All a fiction writer can do is write about what they know, whether that's from first, second, or third hand experience, and then embellish with imagination. There are bits of me in all my characters, and bits of them in me.
What did you think of Patrick Anderson's review of your book?
A review like that is a lovely thing. It's both a commercial boon and an ego boost. And it's particularly gratifying to have your work taken seriously and addressed and that manner. I always like to see where the readers' eyes are drawn when they read my stuff. Mr. Anderson's eye seems to have been drawn to the aspects of desperation in the lives of some of the characters. But to me, there's nothing special about that desperation. I'm a pretty upbeat guy, but I see a lot of that kind of thing everywhere. To me it's more incidental to both life and the book, and not central. But I'm ultimately just trying to write stories that I want to tell, in the hope that people will want to read them. And I love when readers see what I do not see in my own stories. It happens all the time.
Anderson noted in his review something I noticed too - regarding your book dedication. Why did you write it like that? Specifically, the book's dedication page says:
The book is dedicated to:
Jeff Kaskey.
Role Model.
Though he'll be horrified to hear it.
And
To the kids who don't know any better.
The ones with the attitude problems.
What the hell are they thinking?
Man, believe me, they aren't.
That's the point.
We never do.
The use of the word "we" that Mr. Anderson mentions was conscious. I was often told I had an attitude problem and asked, "What were you thinking" when I was a teenager. But most of my trouble-making and getting-into, outside of drug use, was only mildly criminal. I got away with @!$%# I was lucky to get away with, and had friends who were far less lucky. Having a front row seat for some sad and seriously stupid crap had a lot to do with making me both the person and the writer I am. I wanted to acknowledge the kind of kids I was writing about. With luck, they grow up to be the kind of adults I enjoy spending time with.
Last weekend I finished The Shotgun Rule which is as gritty and dark a novel as I've read in several years. It explores violence and life in a fictional Northern California town. Is it good? Let's put it this way, Stephen King was right when he called it "Stand By Me on Dexedrine."
I emailed author Charles Huston questions for this half of the interview and he sent his responses quickly.
What's it like to have Stephen King describe your novel as "Stand By Me on Dexedrine"?
Beyond flattering.
It seemed like the town itself became a character in the novel, sort of like George Pelecanos does with his books about Washington D.C. Was that intentional?
I try and give the locations in all my books a certain amount of texture. That can be a relatively easy task when you're writing about New York City or L.A.
In the case of the unnamed town in The Shotgun Rule, the actual geography, physical locations, and the social structure, are all based on a town I lived in. Some things get altered by faulty memory, or simply because I need to take a house on one side of town and relocate it, but I try to play as close to reality as I remember it.
As much as it is about anything, Shotgun is about the town itself. I can't say I was trying to make it a character, but I was trying to describe what I consider a pretty typical place that some people grow up in.
I really liked the character of Geezer especially how he was always searching for just the right word. Can you tell me how you came up with that character and that particular character trait?
I started with the name. It's actually an homage, if you can call it that, to Black Sabbath's bassist Geezer Butler. I always thought that was a tremendous name. It seemed a great fit for a scumbag (which Mr. Butler is not). I built a physical description around the name, but beyond that, it's hard to describe how a character generates. I didn't go looking for his verbal tick, but when it popped up it fit and I ran with it.
Andy seemed like he had aspergers or autism since he was so smart and so focused. Did he?
I hadn't thought of him in those terms. I pictured him more as just a kid whose intelligence sets him apart. He sees the world through a different filter, and that makes it hard for him to interact the way other people do.
My experience with some hyper-intelligent friends I've had is that they don't really understand why so many things they find utterly banal can be so important to so many people. Their intelligence puts them in an outsider's role at a young age, which means they get treated differently.
That just provokes greater alienation. I don't set out to ask any big questions when I write my books, but in retrospect the question Andy asks me is: Where does his violence come from? Is it that alienation? Heredity? Or is it innate? Honestly, I don't know.
Now in addition to your novels you also write a comic book? Can you talk about that? How does writing for comics differ from writing novels?
Comics are a visual medium, so the trick for a novelist is to learn how to let the pictures carry most of the story. I lay out what I want the pictures to look like, but an artist still has to interpret that. So you need to be flexible that way. For someone like me who uses a great deal of dialogue, you need to try and reign in that tendency. Dialogue in a comic book takes up physical space on the page. The more dialogue, the less room you have for pictures. It's a real technical challenge, not just the exercise in imagination and craziness that it maybe looks like from the outside. A lot of fun, but definitely work.
Some novelists are opposed to having their stories optioned for movies. What's your take on this?
My take is that a movie version, in the off chance that an option actually ever gets exercised and a movie manifests, doesn't change the fact of the novel. To me, a movie option is a great way to make a little extra money on work I've already done and been paid for. At that point, I don't much care what happens. In an ideal world you'd like any movies made from your work to be good movies. The reason for that is that you want your name and your work associated with things that are not crappy. But a movie is not the final step in the life cycle of a novel. A novel is a novel. Good movie, bad movie — that doesn't change the work I've already done.
What are you working on next?
The next book to publish will be the third in my Joe Pitt series: Half The Blood of Brooklyn (Dec. 26, 2007). A terribly bloody vampire book written in hardboiled noir style. Just perfect for the holidays.
I've got a crime book set in Los Angeles that's all wrapped up. It'll be the first in a proposed open-ended series about a former elementary school teacher who gets involved in trauma scene cleaning. Despite his profession, the book is actually quite a bit lighter and less violent than my other books. That should be out in early 2009.
And I'm completing the fourth Joe Pitt book so it will be ready for Fall 2008.
I'm going to take a brief pause from novels and do some comic book work before starting another stand-alone in about a month.
Thanks again to Mr. Huston for the interview.
-------------------------------------------------------------------harlie Huston is one of the most intriguing and creative fiction writers around right now. He is so good that I broke a promise for him: When I left journalism as a career I vowed I would never again do a telephone interview because those are much more work for a writer than an email interview. Usually when I tell a publicist I will only do an email interview they come around but Huston (or his publicist) would not.
While I had interviewed Charlie before for the Shotgun Rule I was so fascinated by his two latest novels I decided to make an exception just for him.
I spoke to him by phone about two weeks ago. The following is the result of that conversation.
I asked him to explain how he came up with the concept and story lines for his two most recent books.
He said the idea for Sleepless, a work of speculative fiction, came partly from reading The Family That Couldn't Sleep. He took this real life problem and exaggerated and played with it and the result is this bizarre but fascinating work. While the medical ailment that caused that family was true he made up a worse form of sleeplessness for the book.
Publisher's Weekly describes the book this way :"In Huston's impressive, challenging thriller set in a postapocalyptic Los Angeles, a devastating illness renders the afflicted unable to sleep. In about a year, those with SLP (as the sleepless illness is known) deteriorate and die. Amid the city's rampant violence and lawlessness, LAPD cop Parker Park Haas tries to persuade himself that a future exists for his newborn daughter. As the outside world becomes increasingly dangerous, Park pursues an undercover investigation that takes him deep into the milieu of an online game called Chasm Tide, into which many people have retreated. As in the author's Joe Pitt vampire series (My Dead Body, etc.), this book has at its heart a love story: Park's wife is dying from SLP, and Park begins to fear he may be getting it, too."
As with the protagonist Huston is a proud papa. I asked which came first: Making the protagonist a father or becoming a "real life" father. Also, the book is dedicating to "my darling Clementine." He confirmed that Clementine is his daughter's name. He had decided the book's main character, Park, would be a father before he himself found out he would become a father.
Why did he want the protagonist to be a father?
"I wanted him to everything to lose. I wanted him to be invested wtih a child, and the world continuing, someone for whom the end of civilization" - something possible in the book - just could not occur, Huston said.
He prefers to call the book speculative fiction rather than science fiction. Either way he admitted it was sometimes weird to be driving around Los Angeles, where he lives, and see sites that are in the book but in radically different.
Whether you call it science fiction or speculative fiction is a vast - but intriguing - departure from his prior books. He decided for his prior book to try for something more comic. He was thinking it'd be a funny cop drama along the lines of the great Rockford Files television series. And he succeeded - it IT damn funny - but boy is it dark at times.
Huston said he was thinking the protagonist would be a funny private eye but then he learned about the people who clean up crime scenes and the result was this amazing novel.
Stephen King praised this book in a review you can read here.
Mystic Arts is described this way by Publisher's Weekly: Noir master Huston (The Shotgun Rule) should win himself a whole new audience with this bizarre and utterly grotesque stand-alone, told mostly through dialogue that highlights the author's uncanny ear for the spoken word. Former Los Angeles grade school teacher Web Goodhue, now a full-time slacker suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, falls into a job on a crime scene cleanup crew, scrubbing up the remains of the recently deceased. After the crew has finished cleaning up a messy suicide scene in Malibu, Web gets a phone call from the dead man's daughter, Soledad. She and her thug half-brother have another big mess on their hands that needs cleaning, on the QT. Unable to resist the beautiful Soledad, Web soon finds himself in way over his head. Huston, one of his generation's finest and hippest talents, shows in grisly detail what cleaning up after the dead entails. This one should appeal to Chuck Palahniuk fans as well as hard-boiled crime readers
The book is being adapted into a HBO series with Alan Ball of Six Feet Under executive producing. What's that like? Is it hard to imagine your books as tv shows and movies?
He said it is great "writing under his tutelage." He is able to use Ball's contacts and helps as he is "godfathering the project" and providing lots of helpful feedback. There is no timetable or timeline for the project.
We talked about some of Huston's other projects which include writing the graphic novels Moon Knight. He enjoys the different writing style and regimen for graphic novels compared with that of "regular" novels.
We talked about what it is like to see books you have written turned in to television series or movies. His book, Already Dead, was optioned but not turned into a movie. I mentioned that another L.A.-based crime writer I like, Robert Crais, told me he takes steps to ensure his books are not made into movies.
Crais told me:
Scott: Is it true you have taken steps to prevent Elvis Cole or Joe Pike from being portrayed in movies? How? Why?Huston has a different attitude.
No fancy steps here—studios, producers, actors, whoever, they make offers to buy Elvis and Joe, I say, no thanks. It would take me six pages to write out why, so here's the short version: I want to save the characters for me and my readers.
"I wrote the book and nothing anyone does after that will change it," he said. He would prefer, of course, that the book is not made by someone incompetent.
Since he has what he described as "modest readership" he is "lessy fussy" about the possibility of turning one of his books into a movie. He figures he has less at stake, he said.
I usually close my interviews by asking authors what they are working on next. In Huston's case, since he has his hands full, including writing the pilot for a television series about which he was not allowed to provide details, I decided on a different approach. When I interviewed him for the Shotgun Rule I asked him a question I think writers like to be asked, namely, "What question do you wish you would get asked more often." He said he wished he was asking more sports questions. Since he has moved from New York To L.A. (where I grew up, incidentally, well, in Riverside) I asked if he roots for New York or L.A. teams.
He said he cheers for the same teams he always did, the San Francisco Giants, the Golden State Warriors and the Miami Dolphins.
"I hate Los Angeles teams," he said. This from a guy who lives close to Dodger Stadium might seem odd but then the L.A. he describes in Sleepless is so disturbing that maybe the Dodgers should be glad he's not a fan.
No comments:
Post a Comment