“Ashley Crawford talks with Jeremy Robert Johnson about Bizarro, David Cronenberg, parasites and, inevitably, the end of the world.”
JRJ has been interviewed for 21C Magazine, whose prior subjects have included folks like Burroughs, Gibson, Shirley, Ballard, Acker, Brian Evenson, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Jonathan Lethem. You can click on the logo above to jump to the sprawling Q&A.
November 6, 2012 | Categories: Angel Dust Apocalypse, Bizarro authors, Bizarro Books, Bizarro Fiction, Cameron Pierce, Cody Goodfellow, David Foster Wallace, Eraserhead Press, Jack Ketchum, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Joe R Lansdale, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, We Live Inside You | Leave A Comment »
On the seventh day, the Flying Spaghetti Monster said, “Read me, for I am good.”
In Amazing Stories, the Flying Spaghetti Monster goes on trial to earn his godhood among a council of deities that includes Jehovah, the Buddha, Ganesh, Cthulhu, and Charlie Sheen. He is interviewed for an exclusive episode of the celebrity talk show In the Monster’s Studio to discuss his relationship with Godzilla and other famous monsters. He rears his head at an archeological dig in a desert wasteland and dines with a horde of food demons in Hell. He rescues pirates, authors, and prisoners from the cold hand of death while banishing children to suffering and starvation. He is a just god, but only if you compliment his vodka sauce.
Like an all-spaghetti evening of Adult Swim, Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will show you the many realms of His Noodly Appendage. Learn of those who worship him and the lives he touches in distant, mysterious ways.
Enjoy with Italian food and a side of Darwinism.
Featuring stories by John Skipp, Stephen Graham Jones, Kate Bernheimer, S.G. Browne, Mykle Hansen, Cody Goodfellow, Kevin L. Donihe, Bradley Sands, Kelli Owen, Jeffrey Thomas, Andersen Prunty, Bruce Taylor, David W. Barbee, Marc Levinthal, J. David Osborne, Poncho Peligroso, Kirk Jones, Steve Lowe, Kirsten Alene, Jess Gulbranson, Len Kuntz, Edmund Colell, and Adam Bolivar. Also featuring an illustration by Gwar lead singer Dave Brockie.
Click here to order Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Published by Eraserhead Press.
October 11, 2011 | Categories: Bizarro authors, Bizarro Books, Bizarro Fiction, Cameron Pierce, Cody Goodfellow, Eraserhead Press, New Release, Stephen Graham Jones, Weird News | Tags: anthology, Dave Brockie, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Gwar, John Skipp, Kate Bernheimer, Mykle Hansen, S.G. Browne | Leave A Comment »
by Bradley Sands
Film is a visual medium. Action works great in movies with the exception of when they are poorly edited, such as in the finale in the first live action Transformers movie, which seemed to have gone on for about half an hour, was super fast, and did not give me the ability to distinguish one giant robot from another.
As far as prose fiction, it is a lot more difficult for authors to write effective action scenes because authors depend entirely on text rather than images. And the intention for this text is to conjure images into the reader’s mind. Many readers may have no trouble making this transition, but there are certain readers such as myself who think in words rather than pictures. It takes a lot more than a general description of the visuals for me to enjoy an action scene in a book. If I am not engaged, action does not excite me. And I should be excited. I should be worried about the protagonist’s well-being. But usually I just don’t care and assume they will end up being perfectly fine considering it is rare for a protagonist to not survive until the end of the book, particularly if they are the narrator.
When I watch action scenes in movies, I am usually excited. I worry about the protagonist’s welfare. Even if I know before the scene begins that they will probably be alright in the long run, good action scenes cause me to forget this when they are in progress. Authors of prose fiction have their work cut out for them if they want their action scenes to have the same effect on me.
So why am I writing this?
Because bizarro fiction novels frequently have action scenes. Sometimes they really work for me, but the majority of them don’t. And it’s not as if I can claim I don’t write action myself. Action scenes often appear in my writing.
I taught an online class for bizarro writers a couple of years ago. One of the assignments was to write a fight scene. The instructions for the assignment were something like, “Fight scenes bore me. I want you to write a fight scene that excites me rather than bores me.” And I used one of my own fight scenes as an example of a scene that I did not find boring (although perhaps I should have used someone else’s considering our own writing rarely bores us).
I thought that was a pretty unique assignment for a writing class. I couldn’t imagine a creative writing teacher asking their students to write a fight scene. But I found out I was wrong when I was talking to a friend who was in a few creative writing classes that Stephen Graham Jones taught and he told me they did the same thing in one of them. So I can’t exactly say my idea for the assignment was unique anymore considering I went to graduate school at a college that was right next to the college where Stephen teaches (plus he taught at MY college’s summer writing program for a week during the past two summers).
So I guess I just want to mention the elements of an action scene that cause me to like them. Perhaps it would be helpful for some writers:
Writing style: Focus more on your style when writing action scenes than other scenes (although ignore this advice if you always focus strongly on your prose style). If your writing is fantastic, then I will be extremely engaged, regardless of the content.
Uniqueness: I don’t really care about action scenes that are the type scene in conventional movies: fist fights, knife fights, shooting, chases on foot and in cars. If your writing is wonderfully stylistic, I’m fine with this. But writing must compensate for an action scene’s conventionality. And if you’re writing bizarro fiction, why are you even writing convention fight scenes? Perhaps write a scene where one fighter has god-like reality bending powers while his opponent is just a normal dude. But the god-like character is an emotional wreck and the normal dude is able to hold his own against him by saying really mean things. If a god-like character has the ability to do anything and there is no limitation to your imagination, his “attacks” could be extremely entertaining to the reader. But he needs to have a weakness because characters without weaknesses are just boring, particularly protagonists.
Terseness: If the writing in your action scene is not highly stylistic and its uniqueness doesn’t entertain me, I won’t be bored if it’s short. If it’s mundane and long and drawn out then I’m going to get really bored.
Anyway, I wanted to end this with a recommendation for a book that I love with tons of actions scenes. And it’s not the most stylistic or unique book either. Plus there’s this incredibly long fight scene at the end that’s straight out of a kung-fu movie. And despite this, I still loved the book. The incredibly long fight scene at the end made me feel excited. I don’t know how. It’s not as if I analyzed it. So this book is:
It is one of the most violent books that I have ever read. It’s considered a Young Adult book, but I’m not entirely sure why besides all the characters being high school students. It is really awesome. And I think this quotation from a review was on the back of the book.
“Once upon a time, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho set the standard for insane violence, gruesome detail and plain upsetting excess. But Ellis is about to be eclipsed by another young American, Ryan Gattis. In Kung Fu High School the practise of total bodily destruction has never been more thorough, or more moving.” – Time Out
Check it out or wait for the movie (although you may be waiting quite a while).
Bradley Sands is the author of Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You, Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, and My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! He edits Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens.
August 21, 2011 | Categories: Bizarro Books, Bizarro Fiction, Stephen Graham Jones, writing advice | Tags: Action, American Psycho, Bradley Sands, Bret Easton Ellis, Fights, Kung Fu High School, Ryan Gattis, Young Adult | 10 Comments »
Fall 2011 will see the release of Jeremy Robert Johnson’s WE LIVE INSIDE YOU, the highly anticipated follow-up to breakthrough cult hit and Bizarro touchstone ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE. Per Johnson “the collection is a very intense genre-hopping batch of stories about love, crime, parasites, and the end of the world. Same obsessions, but I think (or at least hope) there’s a noticeable step up in the craft of the stories themselves. I’m incredibly excited for readers who don’t cop every hardbound anthology or magazine to be able to check out the new stuff.”
With JRJ’s new batch of shorts about to drop, Bizarro Central asked him to compile a list of the stories that influenced his work. He sent us this:
10 Short Stories I Love to Death and Will Vouch for 100%*
1. In the Hills, the Cities- Clive Barker: I could probably do a separate Top 10 Barker shorts list and still not feel like I’ve presented a comprehensive picture of how much I love The Books of Blood (and the shorts tacked on to Cabal). I’m a fan of his sprawling horror/fantasy novels, too, but those early stories were such a perfect mix of imagination and elegance and gut level dread. And “In the Hills, the Cities” was the crown gem, its imagery indelible, its ideas gigantic but exquisitely reined in by Barker’s prose. I read this story and “Son of Celluloid” every year. They help to recharge the weirdness batteries and challenge me to hone my craft.
2. Father, Son, Holy Rabbit- Stephen Graham Jones: Rare is the story that instantly forces you to read it again. Rarer still is the story that grows richer with each run through. I hesitate to say too much about “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit” because of the way it functions, but I will say that its portrayal of a father and son’s quest to survive in a winter storm feels true and profound and when it decides to break your heart, you have no choice but to acquiesce. I’m tempted to read this story again, now that I have a son, but in all honesty I’m a little scared to go back.
3. The Rifle- Jack Ketchum: Another story about parenting, though Ketchum’s lean, anxiety-inducing writing takes you to an even darker place. A brilliant singular effect story that poses a terrible question (What would you do if you discovered your child was an irredeemable psychopath?) and then answers that question with a scene that still sends me reeling.
4. Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back- Joe R Lansdale: First, any Bizarro reader who hasn’t read their Lansdales (or, really, their Barkers) is missing out on a treasure trove, hell, a tidal wave of genre-jumping weirdness. Case in point- “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” a post-apocalyptic memoir of lighthouse living, mutant brain-eating rose vines, desert-wandering sharks, a cannibal tribe known as the Shit Faces, and mushroom cloud/daughter-face tattoos with bleeding eyes. As with most really great weird stories, to list its odder elements undercuts how much emotional truth is present. This is a story of regret rendered in deep strangeness.
5. Losers, Weepers- Cody Goodfellow: A man whose terrible tragedies have given him the ability to see the energy imbued in items loved and lost. Two landfill employees on a scavenger mission in a secret dump so toxic that alien meat trees have sprouted from the ground. These are the basic elements for one of Goodfellow’s finest stories, a wild, surprising, and ultimately poignant story of loss. How Goodfellow manages to insert a very lengthy character back story right into the middle of the narrative without losing any inertia, I still don’t understand. I’ve studied the thing, from a technical perspective, and it shouldn’t work. But it not only works, it makes the return to the climax all the more devastating and powerful.
6. Rust and Bone- Craig Davidson: As I type this up I’m beginning to spot a pattern. I am a sucker for very dark short stories about familial loss, regret, and attempted redemption or catharsis. “Rust and Bone” opens with a dissertation on broken bones and ends as a study of a broken (maybe vaporized) heart. But it’s nowhere near as corny as that pitch. Davidson’s style shares the clean, visceral “telegraph” style of Ellroy, but he throws in these short, shimmering descriptions that captivate you amidst the bloodshed. And as rough as the violence gets here, it feels right and true, and for a few graceful moments shared with the narrator, like an escape.
7. Incarnations of Burned Children- David Foster Wallace: As with the other writers on this list, there’s no shortage of knockout stories in their bibliography. But this is another singular effect story, like Ketchum’s “The Rifle,” and as in that story parenting becomes an outright nightmare. “If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.” DFW didn’t have to pull any maximalist tricks on this one to totally fuck up your day. No indents, very few total sentences. Just three pages of stream-of-consciousness panic and pain and even the lyricism of the closing doesn’t let you suffer any less.
8. The Lottery- Shirley Jackson: Well, yeah. C’mon. “The children had stones already.” Holy shit.
9. Any Road, Any Time- Kris Saknussemm: A spiritual successor to “The Lottery” as directed by Todd Solondz. It’s clear from the kick-off that something bad is going to happen. The feel is ominous horror. Late night call. Dutiful tow truck operator headed to the scene. But a sudden shift to bizarre and extended eroticism changes the tone just long enough to keep you from noticing the trap door, and then Saknussemm pulls the switch.
10. The Last Rung on the Ladder- Stephen King: “But Jeremy, you seem like more of a ‘Survivor Type’ guy, and when I say that I mean: It seems like that’s the story structure that you most frequently steal write in homage to…” Touché, imaginary critic that lives in my brain. But when it comes down to it, “The Last Rung on the Ladder” is probably the story that sparked my love of the just-recognized “familial pain” theme in short stories. Most of the other stories in Night Shift had thrills and scares, but man, none of them hurt the same way.
So there’s my wildly subjective list. Regarding all the obvious omissions I will say that some of my favorite writers—like Ellroy and Mailer and Selby and McCammon and Welsh—do their most affecting work in long form. Palahniuk’s “Hot Potting” comes really, really close, as does Gary Braunbeck’s “Need.” Could I list individual sections of A Choir of Ill Children or Naked Lunch? Or HST articles? And if I included comic shorts you’d easily see Gaiman (“24 Hours” from Sandman) and Moore (every American Gothic issue of Swampy) and Ennis (for the Preacher issues with Jesse Custer’s Grandma) and Miller (“Hard Boiled” was pretty short, right?). And I feel weird leaving Ellison and Bradbury and Poe and Carver and Matheson and Oates off, as that’s probably some kind of technical literary crime, but done is done.
Best wishes,
JRJ
* Your mileage, of course, may vary, but trust me; this is a really solid list.
August 17, 2011 | Categories: Angel Dust Apocalypse, Bizarro authors, Bizarro Books, Bizarro Fiction, Clive Barker, Cody Goodfellow, Craig Davidson, David Foster Wallace, Eraserhead Press, Jack Ketchum, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Joe R Lansdale, Kris Saknussemm, Shirley Jackson, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, We Live Inside You | 9 Comments »
On the seventh day, the Flying Spaghetti Monster said, “Read me, for I am good.”
