Fantastic Metropolis

Over the last 15 to 20 years, Steve Rasnic Tem has consistently been one of the most accomplished prose stylists to work in the field of “dark fantasy.” His work contains a resonance that stays with you long after reading it, and a depth that rewards repeated readings. For a time, in part because he worked solely in the short form, it appeared that Tem’s consistent high level of quality would be taken for granted, even though his work clearly trumped that of better-known writers. In recent years, however, Tem has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the World Fantasy Award, among others. Recent work of note includes the novella “The Man on the Ceiling” (co-written with his wife, the novelist Melanie Tem) and The Book of Days, a novel. He has also branched out into a range of multi-media and film projects. He continues to appear in year’s best anthologies with frightening regularity. This interview was conducted via email in early March, 2003.

—Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer: What is your relationship to the Surreal? Your work is often described as “horror” or “dark fantasy” but this doesn’t seem to fully explain your range.

Steve Rasnic Tem: I didn’t think much about issues of genre until after college—before that I was just busy finding things I liked to read. In our small high school library (there was no public library in the county until late in my teen years) there was a great deal of folklore, fairytales, ghost stories, that sort of thing. And the classics. So I read my way through most of the school’s collection. When we finally did get a public library the initial collection included a large amount of science fiction, and I simply devoured it. The other major source of reading material was several large wooden crates in my grandfather’s house. One of my cousins—a preacher’s daughter—kept them there, and they appeared to be her secret stash of reading material. It was a large collection of Gold Medal and other “trashy” paperbacks, and it was where I first encountered noir writing. I was especially impressed that Jim Thompson was able to publish his work. These were supposed to be heroes? It was some of the most disturbing writing I’d ever read. I also read comics when I could get them—you had to travel a while to find a place that sold them. I most enjoyed the ACGs and Atlas Horror (one of my adult self-indulgences is that I have acquired near-complete collections of both). But I was still totally unaware of horror as a genre. I certainly didn’t associate my beloved ghost stories with it. I didn’t even think of these comics as “horror.” Because of my earlier reading habits I tended to view this work in the context of folklore, fables, and fairy tales. It was all fiction of the imagination.

I started writing seriously as a junior in high school—I never sold anything, but I received some encouraging notes from Ted White at Amazing. I gave a few pieces away to distant comic fanzines, appearing alongside other young fan writers such as A. Attanasio and Howard Waldrop. I didn’t think I wanted to be a writer, however—I saw the writing as a process that was a means to an end, that end being able to better understand “the invisible world” that I knew was there, but which was discounted by almost everyone I knew. I felt about the imagination what many people feel about God.

This is not to say I believed in ghosts or magic or vampires or any of that. Early on I felt there was no exact correspondence between anything we might imagine and an unseen world. The very best a writer could do, I felt, was to create imaginative materials of a kind of evocative inexactness, that created just the right corresponding vibration, if you will, in the reader. You captured that world, in effect, by thinking about something else.

A few of the editors I’ve had over the years (most recently Christopher Roden at Ash-Tree) have told me they thought my fiction leaned more toward the mystical than the horrific. And looking at the overall arc of my work, I think that’s a pretty perceptive observation. I’ve never talked about it that much, just as I’m reluctant to talk about religion or spirituality in any guise. It’s a very private thing, and talking about it has always seemed to me to make it less than it is. Suffice to say that at many periods during my life writing has been my personal mode of prayer.

In college, surrealism was a revelation to me. Apollinaire, Reverdy, Desnos, Prevert. Imaginatively, it seemed in keeping with and a logical progression from the folklore, fairytales, science fiction, and ghost stories I’d always read, but here was an attempt to bend the language to more closely reflect those realities, and perhaps in its collision of language, its leaps from one mode of the imagination to another, it might even bring those realities about, or at least open a door, generate a wormhole. I didn’t have much interest in the philosophies or the politics behind surrealism—they seemed silly and dated. Now it appears to be largely discredited as a movement, and calling yourself a surrealist makes you sound old-fashioned to some people, and doesn’t win you any points with the critics. And certainly it’s important to understand that in the wrong hands those techniques produce pure garbage. Anyone can make a leap between two seemingly unrelated images, but it requires intelligence and skill to create a leap that’s meaningful. But that playful attitude of the surrealists, and that confidence in your own process that what you produce while taking these imaginative risks is going to be meaningful, those things have remained with me, and have largely informed my own process. I’ve been known to pull unrelated nouns from a box at random and generate stories from the results, and in the middle of a story I’ve gone for a walk, vowing that the first couple I see will be the inspiration for the next scene. Sometimes if a sentence or a paragraph doesn’t say all that I want it to say I’ll purposely break it, drop in random words, spoil its grammar, see if anything warps in to bring about some larger sense. I’ll try most anything that will break the pattern, stir the pot, corrupt expectation. And I always have faith that it will work more times than not, that it will help me break through to the things which are most important. That process is something I owe to the surrealists.