John Hornor Jacobs: The Monday Interview

At the rate things are going, I won’t be able to add many qualifiers when people ask me what I like to read. At one time, when asked what I read, I’d say something like, “pretty much anything… except science fiction, horror and Westerns.”

But the more I read, the more I find those exceptions are not needed. I do read science fiction, particularly when it comes from the like of Jonathan Lethem or David Mitchell. David Cranmer, writing as Edward A. Grainger, just showed me with his Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories, that I do like Westerns. And, with Southern Gods, John Hornor Jacobs has shown me that I like well-written horror as well.

The key to all of those expansions to my list of likes is that all came from talented writers. With Southern Gods, Jacobs has crafted a tale that reads like the best historical fiction, with a twist. Bull Ingram, a WWII vet who lives up to his nickname, is hired to find a missing record label promoter, and is asked to track down the mysterious bluesman Ramblin’ John Hastur. He is brought into contact with Sarah Rheinhart, a well-off woman who heads back to the family estate with her daughter after a failed marriage.

With Bull’s brawn and Sarah’s wits, they figure out the evil force that has been plaguing them both. It’s a mystifying journey, and one that I’m loath to share more about for fear of saying too much.

This trip through mid-20th century Arkansas, interspersed with vivid depictions of the era where country blues was about to birth rock ‘n’ roll, is fascinating.  I felt like I was learning something at the same time I was being endlessly entertained.

Jacobs is also a talented designer, having done several book and ebook covers, and is the creative designer behind Needle magazine.

TIRBD: This is a long-gestating project for you. How does your view of the book differ now from the way you saw things when you completed that first draft?

JHJ: That’s a great question, actually. I began writing Southern Gods in November 2007 during the National Novel Writing Month and completed the manuscript in early 2008. I spent a few months rewriting and revising the book, but at a certain point, I figured it was as good as it was going to get without a total overhaul and rewrite and I had other things I wanted to write. This might sound bad, but perfectionists don’t make very good novelists. In my experience, you have to be willing to let your book out into the world, flaws and all.

Of course, the book has run the gauntlet of editing – I gave it seven passes, taking in feedback from all the pre-readers (including a stint at the Borderlands Press Boot Camp where I workshopped the novel), then a thorough and professional edit from my agent with a corresponding rewrite. And then another pass with my editor at Night Shade Press, with a few small spot rewrites. Then a line edit. So the book’s been through the wringer. In the end, it’s cleaner, clearer, decidedly shorter and less gory of a book. My first manuscript was 95,000 words, which is a good sized, if not long, novel. When editing was through, it was 84,000 words. That’s quite an edit, but every cut made the final product stronger, I believe.

Since writing Southern Gods, I’ve written three additional novels and I’m wading into the fourth. In each of them, I’ve tried different things within the narrative, and I feel like my writing has become fuller, and it is near to capturing an individual style and voice, though I realize that’s a long, long journey. It is interesting to note, I’ve moved away from horror. Though I’ve stayed within the speculative genres.

You now have a lot of things in the pipeline, with your next novel due next summer and your young adult trilogy due in the years after that. Clearly you didn’t sit around waiting for Southern Gods to be published before jumping into something else.  How do you think what you’ve written in the interim is different that it might have been had you waited to see the reception to Southern Gods before jumping into the next thing?

Well, I touched on that in the last answer, but I’ve been thinking a long time about writing, and how it affects a writer when they have some sort of acceptance or success. When you’re starting out as a writer, the crushing weight of being unpublished is almost unbearable. Even though you might read a novel and see the poor characterization and plotting and you absolutely know you could do better, you’re still just some schmuck who hasn’t published anything and no one in the industry (including the industry hangers-on and wannabes) will give you the respect you might feel you deserve because you’re not published.

But with that first acceptance – be it a novel or a short story from a professional market – you’ve gained a true validation of your skill, talent, and imagination. With that first sale comes confidence. It’s weird, but after Southern Gods sold, I feel like I became a better writer because I then knew I was doing something right. So, scratch that one thing of the list of things I’m riddled with self-doubt over.

It is true, for the past four years, I’ve taken writing very, very seriously. After I finish a project, I start another and let the previous one sit. So, by the time I had an acceptance from an agent for representation, I already had three novels in the can. That’s important. We are what we do. I am a novelist. I write novels.

And with each novel, I became a stronger writer. In the editing process, you see what works, what doesn’t. I couldn’t write Southern Gods, now. The man who wrote that is gone, separated by time and experience.

In part because of your association with Needle, you move easily in crime fiction circles. While there certainly are crime elements to the book, it is as much horror as anything else. How would you characterize the fans of those two genres? Similarities, differences, etc.? Do you see yourself as a conduit to bring fans of one over to the other?

Horror and crime are kissing cousins. Someone should do Venn diagram for you.

Many crime novels could be considered horror and vice versa. They share a predilection towards violence and gore, they deal with the basest of human behavior. It’s the presence of the supernatural that really separates horror from crime, honestly. Both crime and horror are considered “pulp” entertainment and so, I think a lot of the audience moves fluidly between the two genres. I can think of many authors that straddle the genres, most notably Stephen King, who’s recently released a book on Ardai’s Hard Case Crime label. But other examples could be Joe Lansdale, Victor Gischler and Dan Simmons who all move with great fluency between the two genres.

Actually, the perfect example is Edgar Allen Poe himself. Everyone remembers his tales of the macabre – landing him firmly in the forefather of horror role – but few people remember his detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who paved the way for Sherlock, Nero, and even the gumshoes that followed in the post-WWII boom.

Crime and horror aren’t cousins, they’re siblings.

Setting is very important in Southern Gods. Could you have conjured this story if you were living somewhere else?

I’m sure I could’ve come up with something similar if I lived anywhere in the south. I can’t ascribe my home state THAT much influence on me.

But, on the other hand, I do always write from an Arkansas-centric viewpoint because of many reasons. First and foremost, it’s what I know, I’ve lived here all my life, so writing about it is natural and I feel like I can describe it, make people aware of it, in ways that you really couldn’t with, say, a place like New York, because people know New York. But Arkansas is, if not a mystery, an unknown.

And I think this is the reason why rural noir is burgeoning. People have read and seen every mob story ever set in New York or Chicago, but to see organized crime in action in the Missouri Ozarks like we do in Winter’s Bone — which is as horrific of a crime story as you could want to read — that is a new experience.

Was the story of Robert Johnson an impetus for this? Have you ever heard music that comes close to that of Ramblin’ John Hastur?

Well, I’ve been to a Grateful Dead concert and that music made me think I was going insane.

Joking aside, Robert Johnson had a definite influence on Ramblin’ John Hastur. How could he not have? However, I tried to keep away from drawing direct parallels between the two because I knew from the start that this novel wasn’t going to rely upon the Christian dialecticism of God vs. Devil. I was always too worried it would come across as Ralph Macchio’s movie, “Crossroads.” I needed to keep Robert Johnson at arm’s length. He could color and inform the story, but not be a direct example. At a certain point in Southern Gods, the focus on music falls away and we’re left with the antagonism of malevolent forces, regardless of delivery mechanism.

Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories and novels were a huge influence. Silver John deals with a plurality of gods.

If I had to liken the music of Ramblin’ John Hastur to something, it would be to slave field hollers. But sung by the minion of an evil god. You can check out some field hollers collected from Arkansas and Mississippi and other Southern locales here:

As anyone who has seen the book covers you have designed can attest, you are extremely creative in the world of visual arts. Do you think that talent and the eye for detail it must entail have an affect on the way you write, the way you set a scene?

Thank you very much for the compliment and that’s another good question that I’ve never thought about before. Hmm. I don’t think I write particularly visually. Actually, I try, in my style, to address sound and smell far more than the visual because sound and smell are more tied into human sense-memory.  In the end, writers simply want to manipulate your emotions to give you a pleasurable experience, and while reading is a visual activity, when you describe something using solely visual descriptors, there’s a friction between the reader’s awareness of reading and what he or she is reading about. Not focusing so much on visual descriptions is a way to avoid that friction. So, saying a woman’s voice was as husky as a rasp and she smelled like cinnamon and a burning peach-grove in the height of summer evokes more for me than saying, she had blond hair, pink lipstick, carmine fingernail polish, and was wearing a blue dress. But that’s just a stylistic choice.

You use different parts of your brain designing and writing. I will say, writing successfully is more like music. There’s a grammar to music – musical theory – and once you have that sublimated through rehearsal it’s very much like possessing a solid grounding in English grammar, you’re free then to extemporize and experiment, riffing on certain things, coming back to phrases, expanding and exploring themes. Once you have the theory, you can start focusing on character, style, theme, plot, pathos and, well, artistry.

It’s up for debate if I’ve ever achieved artistry, but I’m working on it.

I have become familiar with several writers represented by Stacia Decker, and none of you are shy about letting the world know about that. Even though I’m an avid reader (and aspiring writer myself), I can’t say that I’m overly familiar with who represents other authors. What is it about her and her work that engenders such allegiance and celebration?

Well, Stacia has branded her stable of authors Team Decker. In some ways, this cadre of authors is a great mutual support group – we all help out the others in promoting blog posts, book releases, reviews, and all the other aspects of social networking that modern-day authors have to deal with. Stacia is young and vibrant and a lot of fun. That’s the fluff.

The serious bit is that she is my agent and that means that we’re business partners. This is her way of maximizing her unique position as a nexus between many, many artists who normally would not play very nicely together. At least I wouldn’t. I have a hard time now, just because I’m a crotchety septuagenarian trapped in a 28 year old body.

Okay, 33 year old body.

Okay. 40 year old body. Shut up.