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

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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.

I’ve wandered a bit far from your question, haven’t I? But, at heart, we’re talking about genre here, I think. My reading never led me to think in terms of genre—I was more interested in figuring out the best way to deal with my own materials, the things I cared about, how to go about creating the Steve Tem genre. When horror or fantasy or whatever fits into the mix, that’s fine, but they’re not essential ingredients for me.

Jeff VanderMeer: What does collaboration with Melanie Tem, your wife, entail? And what do you get from that collaboration that you don’t get from writing solo?

Steve Rasnic Tem: Leo and Diane Dillon used to talk about there being a “third artist” when they collaborated, and I think that’s the way it is with us. We imagine this third writer, and that’s the person who creates these stories, at least when they work the best. It’s not my internal voice speaking the words on the page, and it’s not Melanie’s—it’s someone else’s voice. And that seems to be true whether Melanie starts the story, or I start the story, whether she writes the female character or I do, whether we go back and forth scene to scene, or build it incrementally, each of us writing a bit, and then rewriting the other’s work until our personal voices sink into the language, and that third voice works its way out, and by the time it’s finished we have no idea who wrote what.

Jeff VanderMeer: How has your fiction changed over the years?

Steve Rasnic Tem: In the early days I think many of the stories were like dark little fables, twisted little fairytales, with lone, paranoid characters. The Kafka influence was pretty heavy. With a bit of Calvino and Borges thrown in. And structurally, I’d say a lot of them were on the conservative side. Their concerns were the concerns of a young man in his twenties, early thirties: dealing with women, finding a life partner, creating a place for himself in the world. And a good many stories were about a disturbing childhood recollected, being a powerless child in a world full of not-so-trustworthy adults.

Then there came the time the concerns in the stories shifted to those of a young parent, trying to understand your kids, learning what it takes to be a good father, dealing with all the fears of parenthood, including the fears and passions that go so far past reason, but which almost every parent recognizes. I think some of those stories are among the most nightmarish of my work, and their structure reflects the strong interest I had at the time in dreams and in lucid dreaming.

The last few years my process has gotten looser—I write far more improvisationally than ever before. I’m more willing to take risks with structure and expectation—because, after all, what do you really have to lose? And the subject matter of the stories often has to do with the concerns of a man past fifty, thinking about what has and has not worked in his life, reaffirming for himself how much he loves his family, brooding over the future, the limitations of the body, trying to pull together threads of meaning.

Jeff VanderMeer: Your experimental novel from Subterranean has been in the works for some time. What sparked the idea for the novel and in what way is it experimental?

Steve Rasnic Tem: The Book of Days is experimental in terms of the way it was written—whether that make it experimental as a novel I’m not so sure. It’s structured as a diary. A very strange diary, a diary of the imagination, but a diary all the same.

A number of years back, Bruce Holland Rogers started a Steve Rasnic Tem discussion board on the old Genie online service. I didn’t feel comfortable writing endless little tidbits about my daily doings, or using it to promote the hell out of my work. So with those two out of the way what was I supposed to do with a message board? Then I had this idea that I could use this as a creative vehicle. I’d always admired writers like Harlan Ellison who could get up in a store window and create extemporaneously, but I was too shy for something like that. But to write something daily, hidden away from prying eyes, then post it immediately without editing to maintain that spontaneity—well, I thought that might work. The basic idea came to me immediately: a character writing these entries every evening. But I knew I’d need a daily trigger, or I’d never work myself up to writing these pieces. What could I access as a consistent, daily inspiration? The back of the local newspapers gave me my answer: On This Day In History. I supplemented that with a couple of well-annotated calendars and an Almanac. But I thought just having one event to improvise on would be too simple in many cases, so I decided wherever possible I would take two or more disparate events or anniversaries each day, crash them together like a good surrealist, and create a narrative piece from that. And I’d try a variety of forms, genres, approaches, styles. Like a storyteller’s sampler quilt. Of course! My main character would be some kind of storyteller, compelled to make these stories up, or recount other people’s stories, like some kind of Scheherazade. Why? To heal himself, of course.

So I improvised an entry each evening based on two or more inspirations crashing together, using a variety of forms and styles (abstract art, sculpture, surrealism, there’s a boy’s adventure story, a poem in the style of cummings, an O’Henryesque story, etc.) and after several months it came to a natural conclusion. And now 10 years later it’s being published by Subterranean.

Jeff VanderMeer: What writers excite you these days?

Steve Rasnic Tem: Almost too many to mention, actually. Edward Carey (thanks to you), Carol Emshwiller, Richard Calder. Kelly Link’s a rising star, as is Tim Lebbon. China Miéville. Then there are the old standbys—Cormac McCarthy is someone I read and reread. When writers complain about the difficulty involved in just moving their characters about a room, I point them to McCarthy, who does those little things better than anyone. Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon, Toni Morrison, Bradford Morrow, Rick Moody. There are so many. In the horror genre, Ramsey Campbell. No one packs so much menace and paranoia into a line of prose.

Jeff VanderMeer: If you had to choose another profession other than writer, what would you be?

Steve Rasnic Tem: I would have loved to have been an animator, or an actor, or a painter, a cartoonist, a film director, maybe a musician. We don’t have enough lives, do we?

Jeff VanderMeer: During your career, what is the most important thing you’ve learned about the business or the craft of writing?

Steve Rasnic Tem: That most writers get better at it simply by doing enough of it. That you shouldn’t wait to write the stories that mean the most to you, that stir your heart—none of us knows how much time we have to speak our minds. That it gets really hard to keep at it year after year if you can’t find a way to make it fun. And if you don’t tell your stories, who will?

Jeff VanderMeer: What are you currently working on?

Steve Rasnic Tem: I have several special small press projects in progress: a novella and a couple of short story cycles. I’m putting together another two short fiction collections and a collection of the poetry. There are at least two novels in the works, some comic scripts, possibly a play. Wormhole Books will be publishing a very odd, improvisational story of mine The World Recalled, a spiritual cousin to my earlier Celestial Inventory. And in a terrible career move, as useful to my career as the Charge of the Light Brigade was to the British military, I’ve been playing around with short animated films. One, “The Swimmer,” appears on our Imagination Box CD and made it into a couple of small film festivals. But I’m strictly an amateur at this—I should be working on my prose, solidifying my position in the genre—whatever that means. And not playing amateur hour. But it’s the most fun I’ve had, creatively, in years, so I’m not likely to stop.