Prime Time Replay:
Peter Straub
on The Hellfire Club
MsgId: *omni_visions(19)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:02:39 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Good evening everyone and welcome to another edition of Omni Visions. We're especially honored tonight with the presence of one of the modern era's pre-eminent writers of the Gothic tradition, Peter Straub. He's a marvelous poet and novelist, whose work many of you encountered with 1979's *Ghost Story*. More about the individual works later. I'll skip to the present. Last year saw the publication of *The Hellfire Club*, a major novel of contemporary life with serial killer. That novel was just reprinted in paperback by Ballantine. Good evening, Peter, and welcome to the unstable ether.
MsgId: *omni_visions(20)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:03:48 EDT 1997
From: PeterStraub At: 207.116.47.60
Well, Ed, here we are! And a pleasure to be here, too.
MsgId: *omni_visions(23)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:07:47 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Here's the way this will work tonight. For the next 120 minutes or so, I'll be chatting with Peter. My producer Ellen Datlow has been accumulating questions from interested parties and will pass those along. Thomas Tessier, no novelistic slouch himself, said: "Along with the novels and stories of Shirley Jackson, which also reveal great depths of terror and great compassion, Peter's work stands as the very best gothic literature in the post-World War II era." That's not even hyperbolic. My question, Peter, is this: what are the gothic roots in your own interests that first led to works such as *Julia* and *If You Could See Me Now*, both of which predated *Ghost Story*?
MsgId: *omni_visions(24)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:09:32 EDT 1997
From: PeterStraub At: 207.116.47.60
I should immediately add that while I sort of thought I was or might be a poet a long time ago, now I am am a humble member of the working class or prose writer, one of those beasts of burden who transport novels up to the surface from wherever it is they come from.I think these "roots" began with my reading the great Modern Library "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural" when I was about 12 or 13. I really loved a lot of the stories in the book, especially Machen's "The Great God Pan," and the MR James, the Lovecraft, and others. Later on, Thom Tessier turned me on to a lot of horror writers in the course of our endless gabs during the early 70s, Matheson and Bloch among them, but also Lovecraft again.
MsgId: *omni_visions(29)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:20:19 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
I suspect quite a lot of us read that some anthology, and some, as well, read the accompanying edition of *Adventures in Time & Space*. That second volume led me astray for a dozen years or so. Were those first three novels of the supernatural of yours published in the order they were written? And I've got to ask, since *See Me* is an especial favorite of mine, can you shed light on the genesis there? I don't know about you, but I was probably immersed at just right time in an obsessive relationship to find the novel particularly meaningful.
MsgId: *omni_visions(32)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:22:38 EDT 1997
From: PeterStraub At: 207.116.47.60
I wanted to write about the part of Wisconsin where my mother was born and where my family went on vacation every year, the farmland far west in the state. I had many cousins still living on the family farm, all of them delightful. This was a wonderful period. I often met a cousin from Seattle at the family farm, and she was quite clearly my soul-mate, the only person in the entire family, also the world beyond the family, who understood what I was about. So If You Could see Me Now more or less took our attachment and ran with it.
MsgId: *omni_visions(44)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:35:37 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
I'm curious if you, Peter, ever have checked out Michael Lesy's *Wisconsin Death Trip*, that intriguingly grisly historical nonfiction take on the midwest. Speaking of the idyllic Wisconsin and its deeply gothic roots...
MsgId: *omni_visions(52)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:51:02 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
I read Wisconsin Death Trip when it first came out and found it just about right -- there was the weirdness, right up front.
MsgId: *omni_visions(55)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:54:49 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
I'll just mention for those who haven't seen it that Michael Lesy's *Wisconsin Death Trip* is a cool, oversized historical survey, lavishly illustrated with facsimiles of period news clips and such, or the genuine horror embedded in everyday life around the turn of the century in Wisconsin and the midwest in general. Some of it's stomach-churning. All is affecting.
MsgId: *omni_visions(57)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:57:27 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
Of course every one of my cousins, aunts and uncles and brothers who read the book knew who I was talking about, but the farm people also saw themselves in the ridiculous farmers in the book - oddly, they didn't really seem to mind, yet another proof of their goodness.One of the best reviews of the book was in an English magazine called The Spectator, in the course of which the reviewer made capital of the local town being called Arden, and related everything to As You Like It, only with eall the characters drunk and twisted.
In Lesey's book, you can often look at a studio portait of a farming family and suddenly observe that one of those sturdy people is completely bats, around the bend, out of his or her gourd. Imagine life back in the farmhouse!
I hasten to add that my family was nothing like that. It stilll isn't, for that matter. But a lot of bizarre things happen in those little towns. When I was a kid, I used to hear the old ladies - ahem, old ladies of maybe 50 - whisper in tones of gloating horror about the offenses committed by some of the neighboring folks. And later on, of course, Ed Gein happened along to demonstrate that imagination was still alive and well in the heartland.
MsgId: *omni_visions(58)
Date: Thu Jun 5 22:57:28 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Thanks, Peter. Change of topic. Can you address the notion of Magic in life and writing (I guess I'm thinking especially of the use in *Shadowland*).
MsgId: *omni_visions(60)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:02:36 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
Magic always appealed to me, and when I was writing Shadowland, it seemed to me that it was like writing in that depended on an effective use of illusion, deception, the ability to convince people that invented things were real. Apart from that, both Magic and writing draw upon a sense, however suppressed of the Sacred, that notion that larger, more mysterious amd powerful realms lie beyond or within this one. I had been thinking for some time about how to incorporate it into a novel, never with much luck. At last I thought of combining a school story, one very much about my old school, with a story about the succession of one great magician by another. All along, it seemed to me to be really about writing, about art.
MsgId: *omni_visions(62)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:06:54 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
My feeling about your more realistic novels, especially the massively ambitious Blue Rose books, *Koko*, *Mystery*, *The Throat*, are only slightly less obvious in their magical qualities. Do you think you'll ever return to the more clearly supernatural realm of subject matter?
MsgId: *omni_visions(66)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:14:54 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
You know, I did not think I would, but I just have. The book I'm writing now, called Mr. X, has a supernatural element right at its core. I guess I felt that I could go back to that without repeating anything I'd done before. And thanks for remarking that the Blue Rose books have "magical" qualities, because I believe that's right - the sort of magic hich hovers just out of sight, penetrating everything, confusing the characters and forbidding easy resolutions.The supernatural element in Mr. X, to spill my guts here, has to do with that old bugaboo, the Doppleganger. Anyone who utters the words "evil twin" shall be taken into the alley and dealt with in a summary and merciless fashion. Your Doppleganger is not your soap-opera-style evil twin. They are bad news, but the Doppelganger is a lot worse. For one thing, he has a lot more fun than you do. And then one comes to a pause in the busy day and wonders: hmmm, where did that fellow come from, anyhow?
MsgId: *omni_visions(67)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:18:11 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Have you an estimate on when all can read *Mr X*? And speaking of magical books... In *The Hellfire Club*, there's that addition to the long literary tradition of apocryphal works with Hugo Driver's *Night Journey*. Has any specialty press approached you about fulfilling Mr. Driver's potential? Or has it been any sort of temptation for you?
MsgId: *omni_visions(68)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:21:32 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
Oh moan, oh groan, I have to finish Mr. X by next January, which means, if I pull this off, that it would be published either that Fall or in maybe Spring of '99. After that I intend to have fun and write a kind of novella which should be published as a book, so the gap won't be so long.I always enjoyed and was intrigued by the notion of invented books, and Night Journey was delightful to consider, as long as I didn't have either to read it or write it. Anyhow, The Talisman is about as close as I want to come to writing a fantasy novel. One of the many things I love about Neil Gaiman's Sandman books is the library filled with imaginary books. I'm pleased to think that I have contributed a number of items to that library. I seem to have had this tendency toward metafiction, a term I learned from reading articles about myself, a charming if sometimes puzzling occupation, from early on in my writing life.
MsgId: *omni_visions(73)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:32:47 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Ah, speaking of *The Talisman*, I think that was one of your rare embarkings on collaboration. As a writer, how do you feel about that process of trying to find a good literary fit with another writer? Is it comfortable? Does the process bring forth the best from each participant? Or does it end up with that great sardonic twin t-shirt slogan: 50% of the money; 80% of the work?
MsgId: *omni_visions(75)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:33:59 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
The slogan isn't at all applicable, at least in my case, because if Superman hooked up with S. King he would find himself out-performed. Collaborations are a funny business, one not tempermentally congenial to most novelists, I'd think, and of course I was extraordinarily lucky in my choice of partner. It is also true that I would never have considered collaborating with anyone else. We decided to do it as a kind of lark, as a version of playtime. It was perfectly dandy most of the time, and King was a hero. I don't think either one of us would ever do it gain. Too many compromises. But I have to say that writing that last 100 pages at his house in Maine was one of the richest experiences of my life.
MsgId: *omni_visions(77)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:43:34 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Another unusual writing event for you, I suspect, was being the editor of record for the HWA *Ghosts* original anthology. I know you're wary of "teaching" other writers. But how was the editing experience? And did a significant number of readers seem not to "get it" when you contributed a short story under the rubric of the introduction?
MsgId: *omni_visions(78)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:45:15 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
Oh, what a delightful question. Editing is nothing like teaching, and a good thing, too, because we would have had many and many a lousy report card. I did not edit what came to me in any sense other than accepting or rejecting the stories as they came in. Even this simple process was an amazing education. I learned that a vast number of people who see themselves as writers have no idea that the end of a story is supposed to have at least some tangential kind of relationship to the beginning. However, by the time I had read everything, I found a good number of enjoyable stories and, I thought, anyhow, figured out a way to assemble them into an interesting and entertaining book, one with a lot of different tones and atmospheres in it.I read the submissions at night and wrote my "Introduction" during the day. I liked the idea of writing an Introduction in the form of a story, one like all the other stories in the book. Most Introductions wind up being so dopey and flat-footed that they seem embarrasing, and a fiction seemed like a good way to avoid the usual nonsense. Yes, boy, many did not get it, including some who really should have understood. Baffling.
MsgId: *omni_visions(81)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:47:46 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
Actually I could pose an alternative question. Right now, as the century winds down, in a publishing world where 51% of the books are still fiction titles, what do you perceive too many writers are forgetting (if anything)?
MsgId: *omni_visions(85)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:57:29 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
What are too many writers forgetting? Where they parked the car the night before. If they fed the cat. The location of that cool shirt purchased about six months ago and never seen since. The name of the charming individual who happens to standing before them and has apparently been encountered many times before. If that charming person is a former in-law or one's next-door neighbor but one.Also, there are some writers who actually seem to have forgotten that the point of this particular, impossible, demanding exercise is to speak in one's own voice and use it to say what can be said in no other voice. A fair number of people keep marching dutifully around the same old millstone, turning a wheel which already has someone else's name on it. Then the same people complain that they have trouble selling their work. They seek redress for this monstrous unfairness, usually by griping to HWA, MWA or PEN.
MsgId: *omni_visions(86)
Date: Thu Jun 5 23:58:32 EDT 1997
From: ed_bryant_mod At: 204.133.96.2
We're approaching the witching hour, Eastern time, which means the server may well turn even nastier. So before anything precipitous happens, I want to thank my guest tonight, Peter Straub, for his time and extraordinary patience, as well as producer Ellen Datlow for serving as a medium. I urge all of you to immerse yourselves in the strange and fascination relationship between complex and resourceful Nora Chancel, and complex and profoundly crazed killer Dick Dart, by picking up and reading *The Hellfire Club*, now in paperback from Ballantine. Thanks very, very much for the evening, Peter!
MsgId: *omni_visions(88)
Date: Fri Jun 6 00:00:16 EDT 1997
From: Peter Straub At: 38.26.21.66
Thank you, Ed, for your kind words about The Hellfire Club. That was the most difficult book, the most frustrating, I ever did, and I am grateful it finally found its true course.
MsgId: *omni_visions(99)
Date: Fri Jun 6 00:18:06 EDT 1997
From: EllenDatlow At: 38.26.21.66
Good night to all from Peter Straub and me. See you next week.
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