Fantastic Metropolis

Neddal Ayad: Has any of your short fiction been published?

Jack O’Connell: I’ve published a few things in the last couple of years. A story called “The Procurer” was actually the opening chapter of a trunk novel. “That Sense of Impending Doom” was a fictional introduction to the noir issue of Paradoxa. “Legerdemain” and “The Swag from Doc Hawthorne’s” appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction. “Legerdemain” was written in memory of Robert Cormier, a wonderful man who wrote some great books, like The Chocolate War and Fade. That turned out to be one of those good luck stories—it was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and Robert Silverberg anthologized it. Which was a thrill because Silverberg was one of my first writing idols. His novel, Time of the Great Freeze, just kidnapped me when I was about nine years old. And then the icing on the cake was that the anthology was recorded as a book on tape and my story was read by the great William Windom (Commodore Decker to some, but forever James Thurber to me).

Neddal Ayad: Do you feel that aspiring writers need a mentor?

Jack O’Connell: It’s not a requirement and, with some personalities, I can imagine such a relationship doing more harm than good in the long run. That said, it was essential for me. I had a teacher, who became a mentor, who became a friend: Bob Cording read every miserable poem and story that I gave him and brought me along, step by step, with a degree of patience and generosity that, in retrospect, is humbling. To say it as simply as I can: I wouldn’t have become a writer without Bob’s help. I sometimes wonder what might have happened to me if I hadn’t found him. Bob’s level of interest and instruction was extraordinary. But I’d say, at very least and in most cases, a mentor can save you time. They can key you in to things about the craft that would otherwise take you years to realize.

Neddal Ayad: What are you working on at the moment? Is there any chance that Wireless or Skin Palace will be reprinted in N. America?

Jack O’Connell: The hope is that they’ll be brought back in conjunction with a new Quinsigamond book. I’m working on the second draft of a new one right now. It was conceived in Paris a few years ago as a straight-up noir thriller. A stripped down, rock-hard bullet of a book. But as always, at some point in the composition, it went renegade. Turned out to be a strange and rabid mutant.

Neddal Ayad: Can you give us a hint as to what it’s about?

Jack O’Connell: It’s about entombment, bikers, consciousness, circus freaks, stem cells, parasites and pharmacists.

Neddal Ayad: Do other forms of media influence your work?

Jack O’Connell: Yes, and maybe more than I want them to. I’m married to books, but I have flirted shamelessly with film and even, I admit it, with television. I’m interested in any platform for launching stories into the world. And what’s really intriguing me (sometimes haunting me) of late are thoughts about the new platforms that are rushing down at us from the future. I’ve got a strong hunch that we’re on the cusp of an evolutionary leap in story-manufacturing and story-consumption.

I’m speaking, I suppose, of the nexus between TV and the PC and the Web producing a platform that delivers an incredibly sophisticated pool of interactive world-creation myths. I think this platform will be significantly different from film and TV in the way it tells stories and in the way readers receive and handle those stories. Unlike books, film and TV are mediums that require a passive audience. The reader plays no part in what takes place on the big or small screen. But I’ve got a feeling that in the not-so-distant future, things are going to get aggressively interactive.

Now, to be honest, I’m reluctant to embrace this new platform. Because I was built to work with words, to make narrative out of words, not images. Or, rather, to make images out of words, not out of pixels. I’m an old dog who is not at all sure that he can learn any flashy new tricks. That said, there is something about the New Media on the horizon that excites me. And the alternative is to stand on the sidelines with the other grumpy old men, wringing my hands and shaking a palsied finger at the kids, who are having all the fun.

Neddal Ayad: What was the impetus behind Dark Alleys of Noir?

Dark Alleys of Noir is an issue of the journal, Paradoxa. This goes back about seven, eight years ago, I guess. I’d gotten a letter from critic Steffen Hantke, who, at that time, was teaching in Colorado. Steffen explained that he’d written a piece about my books and would like to come to town and interview me. This was a new experience for me. You have to realize that I often feel that I’m operating in a vacuum, mailing my books out into the void. So I wrote a note back to Steffen that read, in effect, Who are you really? Is this a joke? Who put you up to this? But he persisted and convinced me that he was genuinely interested and wanted to meet. So we arrange to get together at a local diner on a freezing December night, in the middle of a blizzard. And we hit it off and drank gallons of coffee and fell into a discussion about pop culture and American imperialism, while a half-dozen overtired truck drivers glared at us.