"Whether it took an hour or three hours for the dramas to finish, it would be hard to say. I only know that I lay fascinated and did not move while the stars wheeled in the sky."
Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
"They dance like a great greasepaint ghost on the wind."
Bruce Springsteen, Wild Billy's Circus Story
Playing the comparative
lit game might encourage me to suggest that The Troupe (Orbit, 2012) is some unholy alliance between Paul Auster's Moon Palace, Ray
Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and Neil Gaiman's American Gods. But
that would do the book a disservice, for it is with this, his third novel, that
Robert Jackson Bennett truly channels all his influences into one unique
voice. It is a voice which displays the ease of an ancient storyteller,
weatherbeaten, but still thrilled with the tale. The
voice's relationship to the world is not an easy one however,
being both horrorstruck and beauty-smitten by what it witnesses.
None of that is to say
that his previous books have lacked worth. Far from it. As debuts go, Mr.
Shivers is of the blistering,
'how-the-HELL-is-this-a-first-novel?' sort. It's a gnarled, Gothic
tale of revenge that punishes and satisfies in queasy measure. His follow-up The Company Man is perhaps best viewed as an interesting experiment rather than full-blooded success, but it is a book that certainly had to be written. It allowed Bennett to further develop as an author, avoiding the type of situation where an author's brilliant first novel remains the cornerstone of their career. Mr. Shivers scared itself a Shirley Jackson award and The Company Man won an Edgar for its hardboiled trouble; incredibly good going for a first two outings. The Troupe, however, is something else again.
Bennett's latest is a coming of age tale that sees sixteen year old vaudevillian George Carole join the troupe of the mysterious Heironomo Silenus, whom he suspects to be his father. The land is a pre-modern America, but one that recasts Lud-in-the-Mist as a Bruce Springsteen song. There is dangerous music at play, the world is peeled back to reveal its awesome machinery and the Men in Gray are truly terrifying creations. Yet at core, the story takes us on an emotional journey that has real weight. Magic is for nothing if you do not care about the characters and The Troupe makes us care a hell of a lot about its group of outsiders. Something about dry eyes and houses springs to mind.
SG: You’re
an incredibly prolific writer, soon to be crowned the Woody Allen of genre
fiction, by me at least. I believe you have a day job and a young family. So
what’s your writing schedule like and where does it fit with the rest of
your life?
RJB: I write chiefly around the holidays. That’s when I’m at my most writingest, anyway – something about the wet and the cold makes me introspective. It also drives me indoors, with a hot drink of some kind. Which is a very writingly atmosphere.
I expected having a dayjob. Chiefly I had romantic dreams of slummy sort of jobs, like being a fry cook or a bartender, the whole Bukowski kind of thing. But the thing about those jobs is that they are completely terrible, and they’re definitely no fun if you’ve got a family and can’t get piss-ass drunk at 6 PM as soon as you get off work. So I eventually cleaned myself up and fell back-asswards into a pretty good job. It’s just part of being an adult. And it keeps me occupied. I get bored very, very, very easily. Jobs are good. They keep writers grounded. Whenever I hear writers say, “This is so HARD,” I’m just boggled. This? This is fun, and easy. Real life is hard.
What’s it like being compared to the likes of Stephen King, China Mieville, Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury?
I’m not sure. I think those guys are kind of big touchstones, sort of like how we compare other planets to Earth, because that’s what we know best. So it’s nice to hear, but I’m never convinced it means “as good as” or “the next.” I’m never even sure it means anything at all. You hear those things enough, and they sort of become white noise.
Who are the authors that have had the greatest impact on you as a writer?
Oh, God. Bazillions. There are bazillions of these. Too many to list and have it be interesting.
What have you been reading recently?
Right now I’m reading “White Noise,” by Don DeLillo. It’s entertaining, but I do think it’s part of a conversation that’s becoming increasingly less interesting (I can tell I’m coming in late on the “let’s critique middle America” train). I think for my next big reading foray, I’m going to go abroad, and try some writing that has absolutely nothing to do with America.
You refer to yourself as an accidental horror writer. What in the name of the Old Ones happened?
I still am not quite sure. I wrote what I thought was a book that had fantasy elements but was not necessarily fantasy, and while I was wondering whether it’d be fantasy or not, it wound up being horror.
Mr. Shivers is the kind of debut novel that any starting out novelist would kill – brutally, with rusty knives – to have written. Did it turn out as you intended?
I think so. I haven’t read about it or thought about it in depth in a while. I believe it’s what twenty-two-year-old-me intended, since I wrote it very, very young. I’m sure there are things I’d do differently now. I think of it kind of like a picture of yourself taken a long time ago: there are, inevitably, things you’d like to change in the picture, and things you’d like to keep, but the past is the past, and you need to get over it.
Were you taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive response to Mr. Shivers?
Well, not to be gloomy, it wasn’t 100% positive. I will say that the response was most enthusiastic in places where I never expected it: I’d thought that, as a fantasy writer, the book would be a hit with the genre crowd, and less so with the literary establishment. And yet the precise opposite happened, where the genre crowd had a lukewarm response, but I wound up getting a good review in Texas Monthly, which is a big fucking deal around here. They never review fantasy. Then I started having serious, mainstream authors telling me they liked it. None of them had anything to do with fantasy. So my whole experience has been pretty lopsided. It’s been fun and interesting, though.
With The Company Man, I felt that it was maybe a book you had to write rather than one you loved. The writing is itself more accomplished than Mr. Shivers, but it seems to me that the narrative is in the process of shaking off a number of influences. Science fictionally sound, the hardboiled noir elements do not sit as easily. Perhaps it's more about you developing as an author than anything else. I just didn’t care for it as much as your others, although I appreciate what you were doing. How do you feel about the book?
I think that’s a good way of putting it. It was very much an experimental book, one where I tried a lot of things, sometimes because I felt obliged to try them rather than because I really wanted to. That book taught me more about writing than any other book I’ve ever written. But people do seem to really, really like it.
The Troupe is, for me, easily your finest novel to date. It’s a wonderful novel by a writer in full command of his abilities. Do you feel it was a leap forward for you?
Yes. I would say so. I felt extremely comfortable writing that book. It was, in a way, the book I’d wanted to write since I first started writing, way back when I was a kid. And writing has felt a lot more comfortable for me ever since writing The Troupe.
The emotional core of The Troupe really struck a chord with me. The otherworldly elements are always in service to the characters and there is heart-wrenching beauty in there. You have a real understanding of what should really make a novel, genre or otherwise, tick and you’re using the knowledge to make us weep. I’m a big Joss Whedon fan, so bring it on. Discuss.
I would say that genre concepts should primarily function as tools – like, say, telescopes, or pickaxes – used to dissect and examine both ourselves and the world around us. As such, genre concepts should be in tune with either the world or the characters, preferably functioning in a flow between the two. When a genre concept exists solely to justify itself, it’s chiefly spectacle, which, to me, is pretty forgettable.
American Elsewhere, your next novel, is due out next year. Great title, fantastic artwork – can you tease it for us?
When I was in college, I was briefly obsessed with Los Alamos. It felt sort of like the birth point of the New America, since it was followed by expansion into the west, the suburbs, the car culture, space age architecture, the golden age of science fiction, everything. All of it felt, to me, tied to that manufactured town in the desert around a secret laboratory. So I wanted to write a book about that, the origin point of modern America, about people who try and recreate it without ever having experienced it or really even knowing what it is. Which is something we do every day – we don’t know history, but we know what we’d like it to be, so we just assume it was like that.
I suppose it’s a book about nostalgia, really, and how I both understand and sympathize with nostalgia, and yet I also have utter disgust for it. Because nostalgia is censorship, essentially, except you’re censoring reality.
What should readers expect from a Robert Jackson Bennett story? Will they get out with their souls intact?
I would say that I write chiefly about people trying to approach a truth. This is something I guess I’m a little obsessed with: objective reality, and the amount our own perspectives, vantage points, and vanity interfere with how we experience the world and each other.
Paperbacks are great, but I’d like to see a Robert Jackson Bennett hardcover on my shelves too. Are there any shiny hardcovers in the pipeline?
Nope. Sorry.
The irreverence of your twitter feed is hilarious and refreshingly unselfconscious. How much is the social media for Robert Jackson Bennett the human being and how much is for Robert Jackson Bennett the author with books to promote?
I think it’s actually neither. My twitter feed fails at both promoting my books and telling people about myself. I chiefly tweet from the perspective of an exaggeration of myself. I do it because it’s fun. It’s sort of an art in and of itself.
When can we hope for a Robert Jackson Bennett book tour of the UK? Hint: make it as soon as humanly possible.
Soon, I hope. I had a fun summer in the UK. I’d like to go back.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
RJB: I write chiefly around the holidays. That’s when I’m at my most writingest, anyway – something about the wet and the cold makes me introspective. It also drives me indoors, with a hot drink of some kind. Which is a very writingly atmosphere.
The critical praise and awards mean that your profile is constantly growing. Will there be a time when the day job goes and you can write full time?
Maybe. Probably not. I like my dayjob: it takes
care of me and my family. What I’d like is to get to a place where my wife can
“retire,” since I am pretty okay at 1. Writing, 2. My dayjob, and 3. Zero other
things. She’s very much the Responsible Adult in our relationship. I don’t
think it’s quite fair that she has to work twice, in essence.
I expected having a dayjob. Chiefly I had romantic dreams of slummy sort of jobs, like being a fry cook or a bartender, the whole Bukowski kind of thing. But the thing about those jobs is that they are completely terrible, and they’re definitely no fun if you’ve got a family and can’t get piss-ass drunk at 6 PM as soon as you get off work. So I eventually cleaned myself up and fell back-asswards into a pretty good job. It’s just part of being an adult. And it keeps me occupied. I get bored very, very, very easily. Jobs are good. They keep writers grounded. Whenever I hear writers say, “This is so HARD,” I’m just boggled. This? This is fun, and easy. Real life is hard.
What’s it like being compared to the likes of Stephen King, China Mieville, Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury?
I’m not sure. I think those guys are kind of big touchstones, sort of like how we compare other planets to Earth, because that’s what we know best. So it’s nice to hear, but I’m never convinced it means “as good as” or “the next.” I’m never even sure it means anything at all. You hear those things enough, and they sort of become white noise.
Who are the authors that have had the greatest impact on you as a writer?
Oh, God. Bazillions. There are bazillions of these. Too many to list and have it be interesting.
What have you been reading recently?
Right now I’m reading “White Noise,” by Don DeLillo. It’s entertaining, but I do think it’s part of a conversation that’s becoming increasingly less interesting (I can tell I’m coming in late on the “let’s critique middle America” train). I think for my next big reading foray, I’m going to go abroad, and try some writing that has absolutely nothing to do with America.
You refer to yourself as an accidental horror writer. What in the name of the Old Ones happened?
I still am not quite sure. I wrote what I thought was a book that had fantasy elements but was not necessarily fantasy, and while I was wondering whether it’d be fantasy or not, it wound up being horror.
Mr. Shivers is the kind of debut novel that any starting out novelist would kill – brutally, with rusty knives – to have written. Did it turn out as you intended?
I think so. I haven’t read about it or thought about it in depth in a while. I believe it’s what twenty-two-year-old-me intended, since I wrote it very, very young. I’m sure there are things I’d do differently now. I think of it kind of like a picture of yourself taken a long time ago: there are, inevitably, things you’d like to change in the picture, and things you’d like to keep, but the past is the past, and you need to get over it.
Were you taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive response to Mr. Shivers?
Well, not to be gloomy, it wasn’t 100% positive. I will say that the response was most enthusiastic in places where I never expected it: I’d thought that, as a fantasy writer, the book would be a hit with the genre crowd, and less so with the literary establishment. And yet the precise opposite happened, where the genre crowd had a lukewarm response, but I wound up getting a good review in Texas Monthly, which is a big fucking deal around here. They never review fantasy. Then I started having serious, mainstream authors telling me they liked it. None of them had anything to do with fantasy. So my whole experience has been pretty lopsided. It’s been fun and interesting, though.
With The Company Man, I felt that it was maybe a book you had to write rather than one you loved. The writing is itself more accomplished than Mr. Shivers, but it seems to me that the narrative is in the process of shaking off a number of influences. Science fictionally sound, the hardboiled noir elements do not sit as easily. Perhaps it's more about you developing as an author than anything else. I just didn’t care for it as much as your others, although I appreciate what you were doing. How do you feel about the book?
I think that’s a good way of putting it. It was very much an experimental book, one where I tried a lot of things, sometimes because I felt obliged to try them rather than because I really wanted to. That book taught me more about writing than any other book I’ve ever written. But people do seem to really, really like it.
The Troupe is, for me, easily your finest novel to date. It’s a wonderful novel by a writer in full command of his abilities. Do you feel it was a leap forward for you?
Yes. I would say so. I felt extremely comfortable writing that book. It was, in a way, the book I’d wanted to write since I first started writing, way back when I was a kid. And writing has felt a lot more comfortable for me ever since writing The Troupe.
The emotional core of The Troupe really struck a chord with me. The otherworldly elements are always in service to the characters and there is heart-wrenching beauty in there. You have a real understanding of what should really make a novel, genre or otherwise, tick and you’re using the knowledge to make us weep. I’m a big Joss Whedon fan, so bring it on. Discuss.
I would say that genre concepts should primarily function as tools – like, say, telescopes, or pickaxes – used to dissect and examine both ourselves and the world around us. As such, genre concepts should be in tune with either the world or the characters, preferably functioning in a flow between the two. When a genre concept exists solely to justify itself, it’s chiefly spectacle, which, to me, is pretty forgettable.
American Elsewhere, your next novel, is due out next year. Great title, fantastic artwork – can you tease it for us?
When I was in college, I was briefly obsessed with Los Alamos. It felt sort of like the birth point of the New America, since it was followed by expansion into the west, the suburbs, the car culture, space age architecture, the golden age of science fiction, everything. All of it felt, to me, tied to that manufactured town in the desert around a secret laboratory. So I wanted to write a book about that, the origin point of modern America, about people who try and recreate it without ever having experienced it or really even knowing what it is. Which is something we do every day – we don’t know history, but we know what we’d like it to be, so we just assume it was like that.
I suppose it’s a book about nostalgia, really, and how I both understand and sympathize with nostalgia, and yet I also have utter disgust for it. Because nostalgia is censorship, essentially, except you’re censoring reality.
What should readers expect from a Robert Jackson Bennett story? Will they get out with their souls intact?
I would say that I write chiefly about people trying to approach a truth. This is something I guess I’m a little obsessed with: objective reality, and the amount our own perspectives, vantage points, and vanity interfere with how we experience the world and each other.
Paperbacks are great, but I’d like to see a Robert Jackson Bennett hardcover on my shelves too. Are there any shiny hardcovers in the pipeline?
Nope. Sorry.
The irreverence of your twitter feed is hilarious and refreshingly unselfconscious. How much is the social media for Robert Jackson Bennett the human being and how much is for Robert Jackson Bennett the author with books to promote?
I think it’s actually neither. My twitter feed fails at both promoting my books and telling people about myself. I chiefly tweet from the perspective of an exaggeration of myself. I do it because it’s fun. It’s sort of an art in and of itself.
When can we hope for a Robert Jackson Bennett book tour of the UK? Hint: make it as soon as humanly possible.
Soon, I hope. I had a fun summer in the UK. I’d like to go back.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
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