Nick Mamatas Interview
Nicholas Kaufmann: “Joey Ramone Saves the World,” an alternate future story where Brazil invades the U.S. and Joey Ramone leads the resistance, is an obvious love letter to the fallen punk rocker. How big an influence would you say the Ramones, and Joey in particular, had on your life?
Nick Mamatas: Immense. All of punk, really. In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where I grew up, you were a coke-addled, Camaro-driving, muscle shirt-wearing illiterate, or you were nothing. Punk was an alternative culture. The Ramones, being New Yorkers, being funny, and doing what they felt like doing in that crude, primitive, but very powerful way, were like a minaret—they called to the freaks every Friday. Songs without guitar solos, that used words like “cerebellum,” and referenced Zippy The Pinhead and sniffing glue at the same time, that was the mirror of my life. I saw a documentary about the group recently, and one of the folks interviewed was amazed, saying, “I couldn’t believe that these songs were based on actual events.” Well, I can.
Joey, of course, was the best Ramone. Johnny is an idiot Republican, and Dee-Dee a horrible rapper and scenester. The drummers (Marky, Tommy, Richie) were unremarkable. But Joey was a guy who could walk down the street, be recognized by everyone, and not be mobbed by fans because everyone already knew him. They didn’t have to meet him, he was their ol’ pal already.
Nicholas Kaufmann: Next year, Night Shade Books will be publishing your novel Move Under Ground, in which Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs fight a Cthulhu cult. What influenced you to fuse H.P. Lovecraft with the 1950s/60s Beat movement?
Nick Mamatas: Well, I was struck by the similarities between the two authors. Both had a circle of fellow writers they worked with. Both had oddly co-dependent relationships with older relatives. Both were compulsive correspondents. Both had a very bizarre relationship with the sentence. Both had intriguing artistic and filthy political opinions one would not normally expect from non-traditional individuals (Kerouac later in life). I would actually posit that Lovecraft was a pseudo-Beat. There is a connection between the Lovecraft circle and the Beats, with Burroughs having been a student of Barlow.
In writing the book itself, I wanted to appropriate the Beat style for horror. Kerouac did a bit of fantasy, and many of his descriptions were phantasmagoric, for example, the glowing red eyes of Chicago in On the Road. We won’t know if the experiment is a success till next year when people actually read it, but I’m happy with the preliminary result.
Nicholas Kaufmann: This winter, Prime Books will be publishing an anthology you edited, The Urban Bizarre. Tell us about it. I understand it had a bit of a rocky road to publication.
Nick Mamatas: The Urban Bizarre was an idea I had while procrastinating with Move Under Ground. I like SF, I like zines, and I like transgressive pornographic fiction, so I wanted to have an anthology with all those styles together. I approached Eraserhead Press and got an informal acceptance in a day. Then heard nothing for months. I solicited stories and held on to them for months, and heard nothing from EP.
