MM: How would you describe your first novel, Silk?

CRK: I try not to. Seriously, I'm lousy at coming up with adequate synopses. Part of that is a resistance to the idea that a novel, or any fairly lengthy story, can be reduced to a sentence or two. But. Let's see. A friend of mine once described it as a Gothic Charlotte's Web, but that doesn't really work because there isn't a pig named Wilbur. Silk is a book about the weight of the past and its ability to deform the present, and it's about insanity and disintegration, both personal and social. It's about survival, and the construction of alternative families as traditional family structures decay, but it keeps in mind that those alternative families are inherently unstable. It's about what it's really like to be in a rock band. And it's about our basic perceptions of reality and how we react when things begin to happen that we can't incorporate into our view of the world, things that some people would call supernatural.

MM: Silk was nominated for a Bram Stoker and won the International Horror Guild Award and the Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Award. Does that put a lot of pressure on you for your second novel? And what is your second book going to be about?

CRK: Absolutely. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on me. I have to be better than me now. When I was writing Silk I was able to work without worries over anyone's expectations, because no one really had much in the way of expectations regarding my abilities as a novelist. Now they do. So I've had several false starts on the second novel. What is it going to be about? I can't even synopsize a finished novel and now you're asking me to give you a synopsis for an unwritten one. It will probably be called Trilobite, it's also set in Birmingham, Alabama, and it's about the nature of history. I honestly can't say more than that.

MM: Can you tell us about your new short story collection, Tales of Pain and Wonder? How many short stories are going to be in it? Who is illustrating it? What are some of your favorite stories that are going to be included?

CRK: It's a huge book. When I finally sat down and compiled the manuscript this past August I was amazed that it was so long. There are twenty-one stories in Tales of Pain and Wonder, going back to 1994, and three poems. The poems and one of the short stories are previously unpublished. Tales of Pain and Wonder is not a random selection of my work, but a story cycle that I've been consciously working on since sometime in '95. A lot of characters reappear again and again and there's a very, very faint sort of narrative. Really more a narrative of theme than plot. I guess it's a very strange sort of pseudo-novel, in that regard. It will be released as a limited edition hardback by Gauntlet Publishing in February or March, with another publisher releasing a trade paperback edition in 2001. It has an introduction by Douglas E. Winter and an afterword by Peter Straub. There's a front and back cover and ten interior illustrations, all black and white, by Richard Kirk, an enormously-talented Canadian illustrator that I met at the World Horror Convention this past year. As for my favorite stories, that's a very difficult question. Perhaps "Tears Seven Times Salt," "Estate," and "Rats Live On No Evil Star." Also, I should mention that Sideshow Books will release a second collection of my short fiction later in 2000, a book called From Weird And Distant Shores, which will be somewhat shorter than Tales of Pain and Wonder; it's basically all the stories that were left over, plus one unpublished one.

MM: Who was more influential in your writing: Ray Bradbury or Kurt Cobain? William Faulkner or Peter Murphy?

CRK: Questions of influence are always hard for me, because there's the sort of literary influence that one is conscious of and the sort that one isn't. And both are probably equally important. But, Bradbury or Cobain? I'd have to say Bradbury. He's one of those writers that I studied, the same way that I studied James Joyce and Harlan Ellison and William Yeats and Angela Carter, a very conscious influence. That's not to say that Cobain wasn't influential. I know that his songs have been quite influential to my work, but in a much less direct, though perhaps no less vital, way. And the same is probably true with William Faulkner versus Peter Murphy. Certainly Peter Murphy has had a profound influence, because the mood of his music, both from Bauhaus and his solo work, has crept into my work. But I haven't studied the structure of his lyrics the way that I have the structure of Faulkner's writing.

MM: What was the first horror or sci-fi story you remembering reading as a child, that really had an impact on you?

CRK: I read so much as a child, and from such an early age, that I can't be sure which was the very first, and I guess this partly depends on how you define "horror" and "science fiction." Dr. Seuss had a very significant effect on me. I still think some of his stuff is a lot creepier than most people realize. Also, my mother read a lot of mystery and supernatural fiction, a lot of Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, and those were some of the first books I read. She read Dracula aloud to me when I was very young and it was absolutely terrifying. She hates when I tell people that, but I know it was one of the things that made such an impression early on.

MM: What sort of reactions do you get from people when you tell them what you do for a living?

CRK: I think that the first reaction that most writers get from strangers who ask this question is a sort of, "Ahhhhh, okay, but what is your real job?" I think it's hard for a lot of people to imagine that someone can spend all day, every day, making up stories and get paid for doing it. After all, this is the sort of thing I was discouraged from doing as a child. I lie for a living. And it seems so insubstantial from the outside. Of course, as I've actually begun to make a living at my writing, I've had to learn to deal with all sorts of business and legal and financial problems and it really does start to feel like a job. But, no, I get the feeling a lot of people don't think of it as a job-type job.

MM: There seems to be a lot of horror writers coming out of the South these days like Joe R. Lansdale, Sidney William, Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice and Charlee Jacob. Do you find there's any difference in approach or themes between Northern and Southern writers?

CRK: That's a fairly complicated issue. I don't think there are more Southern writers writing what might be called "horror" than in the past. There's a very strong tradition of the Gothic in Southern literature, especially in the twentieth century, with authors like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, the grotesqueries of their fiction. Also Anne Rice published Interview With The Vampire twenty-five years ago, and I tend to think of Joe Lansdale as a Western humorist, more in the vein of Mark Twain, than as a "horror writer." So, I guess I'm saying that I really don't think that there's been a recent swell in the numbers of Southern writers producing dark fiction. But there are certainly very important distinctions between Southern fiction and literature from other parts of the country. At least until fairly recently, the South had a unifying trauma that molded many of its writers, the aftermath of the Civil War, which continued to play a role in the everyday life of the South at least into the early 1970's. This is beginning to break down, as the South is absorbed into the rest of the nation, as the "New South" emerges with its new Southern literature which really isn't very Southern at all.

MM: In your published bios, you mention you write in the “Gothnoir” genre. Is that your invention, or are there other gothnoir writers?

CRK: I invented the word "gothnoir" in a biography for an Ellen Datlow anthology back in 1995. I was trying to think of a word that would describe a particular short story, "Anamorphosis," and that seemed to come closer than anything else I could think of. Now I've seen others using the word, which is kind of cool, I suppose. I think that label fits a lot of what I've written, certainly better than "horror" does. A blending of the basic elements of the Gothic novel and film noir. I did it very consciously in "Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun" and "Bela's Plot," for example.
Are there other writers I see doing this particular thing? Maybe, though I can't think of any right off. I think the films of Alex Proyas have come pretty close, especially Dark City, though it also melds science fiction with the Gothic and the noir.

MM: You've worked with a variety of publishers like ROC (a division of Putnam Books), Gauntlet, Vertigo and DC comics. Is there a difference in working with the bigger publications and the small press?

CRK: With the major publishers, like Roc and Vertigo, you sacrifice control for good distribution and advertising, for  decent advances and page rates. With small press, it's the other way round, lots and lots of control, but very little money or promotion. I love working with small press, because there's still a strong sense among small press publishers that something matters besides corporate interests and demographics and market reports, because small presses don't do idiotic things like pulp their inventory or allow bookstores to return copies that don't sell in a few weeks.
But you can't make a living from small press, and you reach a much smaller audience. It's a sort of balancing act, working with both.

MM: Talking about comics, you've done The Dreaming and The Girl Who Would Be Death. Is it easier or harder to write than short stories and novels? Any plans to do more?

CRK: I'm not sure if it's easier or harder or just different, writing prose versus writing comics. I know that I enjoy writing prose more and think of myself primarily as a prose writer. But there are some nice rewards of working in a visual medium like comics, and being able to develop a story sequentially, over a long period of time. As for the future, I'll continue to write The Dreaming and have a few other projects in development with Vertigo. And The Girl Who Would Be Death is being reissued as a trade paperback early in 2000.

MM: Authors are often told to "take chances" in their writing. What do you feel "taking chances" means?

CRK: It means having a willingness to fail. At least that's one thing that it means to me. A willingness to trust your own instincts and the things you've learned from other writers. Writing something because you believe it, and not because you think it will sell or because it's the way someone in a writing workshop told you to write. Writing what feels right to you. One of the few things that writers have, and something that we have to protect ferociously, is our honesty. If we lose that, we're useless, to ourselves and to anyone else.

MM: You've often written about the misfits of society as characters in your works. What is it about the outsider that you are attracted to?

CRK: I don't know. I write about the kinds of people that I've lived around, that I've lived with, that I've cared about. A lot of those people have been "misfits" or "outcasts" or whatever you want to call them. People who have been placed at odds with society by the circumstances of their lives. I think that's how I tend to think of many of my characters. I'm always looking for the heroic in those people who seem the most unlikely choices for heroes. Characters who are faced with genuine and daunting hurdles on a day to day basis, whether it's insanity or drug addiction or homelessness, obsession or freakishness, whatever, instead of the bland, responsible men and women who populate so much of the literature of the last three or four decades.

MM: How are your band projects coming along? What would you consider some of your best songs?

CRK: For the moment, everything's been shelved, at least until Trilobite is finished. I hope that there will still be a Crimson Stain Mystery CD at some future date. I am working on a short film that will be distributed by Gauntlet Publishing shortly, which is being scored by Sam Rosenthal and black tape for a blue girl. That's about as close as I am to working with music at the moment, which is unfortunate, because Death's Little Sister was such a great experience. Well, most of the time.

MM: You were a paleontologist. Was that a hard field to leave to venture into something as speculative as writing fiction for a living?

CRK: Actually, no. Vertebrate paleontology is one of the least lucrative and most tenuous careers that anyone could ever embark on, especially these days. Sort of like fiction writing. Making the switch was really just jumping from one frying pan to another. Nothing's ever certain. I got into paleontology because I think it's about the most wonderful thing anyone could do with their life, not because I thought it would be a stable career. And the same's true with writing. I'm doing something that matters to me and that I believe matters to other people. That means that ultimately the thing I'm doing, whether it's paleontology or writing, has to be its own reward, because there's no promise, no guarantee, of its ever being anything else.