"RAY ATTEMPTS 'NIGHTLIGHT' THROUGH SPECIAL SUNGLASSES" or "THESE GUYS ARE JUST A BUNCH OF SQUATTERS" - RAY REXER, BRIAN HODGE, & LEONARD NORMAN AT WORLD FANTASY CON '90, CHICAGO.

Brian Hodge has strange things growing in his refrigerator. He told me this. Bizarre green things sprouting like frosted worms from between the inside freezer coils, looping down and around great stalactites of ancient freezer ice, down further into the fridge itself, down into that cool and damp culinary graveyard of crusted Tupperware bowls and twelve-year-old Cajun chili. Down smack dab into his lunch.

Well you are what you eat, aren't you? Yup. And that may explain a lot about Brian Hodge. The interview that follows explains more. But I don't think we'll ever know it all. Not really. And maybe that's for the best.

Ray Rexer: Brian, your latest book, Nightlife (see review in this issue), is without a doubt one unique package of words, a horror story and a whole lot more. Fascinating, frightening and fierce, as Robert B. Parker has said. Not to mention fun.

Brian Hodge: Uh oh...I feel a blush coming on.

RR: Nightlife involves this crazily potent drug obtained from a primitive Venezuelan tribe by a dope dealer who wants to powder Florida's collective nose with the stuff. And, oooh, what that drug can do! What was the inspiration for this book?

BH: Wishful thinking, I guess... Naah, I don't want to be too long or redundant here, because I covered how I came to write the book in a piece for Mystery Scene and a piece Dave had me write for the catalog. But in a nutshell, I just got intrigued by the idea of doing something in the drug trade, a Florida crime story kind of thing...but with a distinct twist away from Miami Vice-type scenarios. Instead, something that nobody'd ever done before. The drug itself is an offshoot of a hallucinogen that really does exist in South America rain forest cultures. It seemed like a cool way to bridge the timeless primeval with the modern urban, juxtapose them.

RR: It's obvious from the detail in the book that you know a lot about the tribes of South America. Research? or were you at one time a "Yanomamo" yourself?

BH: Maybe in spirit. But research, yeah. I had an anthropology class in college that introduced me to the Yanomamo, and got me fascinated in general with primitive cultures still existing in these little pockets of the world which time has mostly overlooked.

RR: Kerebawa--the Yanomamo tribesman whose mission is to retrieve the drug--is probably my favorite character in Nightlife. He's great fun to follow. Where did be come from? He reminded me a bit of the lead character from the movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy."

BH: Hmm, I hadn't thought of that, but it's a valid comparison. In cinematic terms, I had in the back of my mind, instead, The Emerald Forest, John Boorman's film a few years back. I love that movie. It's beautiful and tragic and hopeful, all at once. Kerebawa himself, though? Part of him, anyway, came out of anthropological texts, a few things lifted from real tribesmen I got to know through reading about them. The rest of him just evolved naturally, the way any character individuates himself or herself. I did have to take some liberties in order to make him accessible to the reader, like give him a valid reason for being reasonably fluent in English and Spanish, and so on. Without a bit of common ground like that, the difference in cultures is such a huge gap, he probably would have been incomprehensible...

RR: Instead you made him unique and quite memorable. I'd like to see a Brian Hodge short story starring Kerebawa, maybe "Kere Does Dallas" or some such thing. He's too good of a character to just let go.

BH: What, like he cuts a swath of a different sort through another southern state?

RR: Sure! He slays all the bad guys, lays all the bad girls and learns to do the peppermint twist!

BH: We'll see. Personally, I'd rather flesh out that other title in Nightlife...remember? Debbie Does Godzilla.

RR: A scene I'll NEVER forget! Bizarre fish sex, yow! Who could forget that? anyway, to continue...Justin Gray, Nightlife's protagonist, is not without his faults, some rather outstanding. This seems to be a Hodge trait in leading men, both Jason Hart from Dark Advent and Chris Anderson from Oasis were also...shall we say, less than perfect. Is this a conscious effort on your part or just the way the characters developed as the story evolved?

BH: It's just the way I approach characters. Kind of reached an extreme in Nightlife, because there are absolutely no innocents there, not really. Everybody is either a badass or a screwup of one sort or another. To me, it just makes for more interesting characters, makes them more human. There's nothing more boring than a white knight on a white horse, with his armor all polished and shiny. Hell with that, I want to see people get down and dirty.

RR: Justin, while pondering leaving Florida, hurls a mental dart at a map and comes up with Boulder, Colorado, as a possible destination. Hmmm... Hasn't that happened somewhere in real life?

BH: Inside joke. Homage. Coincidence. Plagiarism. you be the judge.

RR: Are the Yanomamos a real tribe and if so does "Beshi" really mean anything in the Yanomama language?

BH: Absolutely real. They really do live in the rain forests of Venezuela and Brazil. But jeez, twentieth century progress keeps tearing apart their homeland...laying down roads, polluting the water table. The deforestation was one concern I wanted to touch on in the novel, what a heinous crime that is. Because every time we lose another primitive culture like that, make them extinct, we lose another piece of ourselves. Not in a racial sense, or religious, but just fundamentally human. Our origins. I hate it that they're preyed on this way. It's like, hmmm, since they don't provide a base of economic consumption, they don't matter, so just toss them on the scrap heap. Well. Anyway. Off the soapbox. All the Yanomamo language in the book is legitimate. "Besbi" means just what it says: horny.

RR: On a somewhat related note, a character in Nightlife at one point asks the rhetorical question, "Don't we do a lot of bizarre things out of love?" What bizarre things has Brian Hodge done out of love...or out of beshi-ness?

BH: I suppose you mean beyond the usual endless miles driven on treacherous roads, or pulled muscle groups, and the like?

RR: Absolutely.

BH: Jeez, I don't know. Okay. Once, there was a total stranger I saw in a lecture hall, and I wanted to meet her, so I looked over her shoulder and got her name off a notebook or something, and sent her roses the next day. Another time, I was in this hilarious bogus beauty contest, for charity, where the contestants were actually guys in drag. During the talent portion, for laughs, I did this self-choreographed dance routine called "Aerobics for the Self-Masochist." It really made, shall we say, quite a profound impression on my girlfriend. We were just getting better acquainted at that point. Anything more bizarre than that, I don't think I want in print. Heeeeyy! What does this have to do with writing, anyway?

RR: Background, Brian. It'll all come out in the insanity hearing, anyway. So...what's a nice guy like you doing in a profession like this? How did you get started writing? And are there any other Wordsmiths in the Hodge family?

BH: I've always maintained it was a birth defect. It was always there. Nope, no other writers in the family. Loads of teachers though. Three generations at the very least, both sides. I've done some teaching myself. It's a very academic family.

RR: I know you once said, "Schedules...we don't need no stinking schedules," but I'm gonna ask anyway: What kind of writing schedule do you keep--if any.

BH: None, really. At all. It's very random. Like a car wreck. It can happen anytime.

RR: I don't know if that's reassuring or scary. Do you use a word processor (of the Gods) or a #2 Berol Black Beauty pencil for those Hodge masterpieces?

BH: Neither. Typewriter, currently. I did the first books and stories on this Smith-Corona I got in college, and eventually just drove it into collapse. Retiring that felt like shooting a favorite horse because it broke a leg. I'll never throw it out, though, there'll always be a space in my closet for it. I've had a Swintec electronic for nearly three years, but in the next few weeks I'll finally be joining the computer age. The last big tax deduction of 1990.

RR: What's the first thing you remember writing?

BR: I started in second grade, so that's kind of fuzzy. I do remember this story I did then about these guys who got shipwrecked in the ocean, and swam to this island, and one by one, these monsters tore them up. I illustrated it, too. Probably went through a whole red crayon in one afternoon.

RR: How about the first piece you ever published?

BH: The first piece ever published--and this is discounting high school and college lit magazines and school paper columns--was with The Horror Show, the short story "Oasis" that grew into the novel.

RR: What advice would you give to someone looking to get published? Would you recommend testing the waters with short stories like you did, or jumping headfirst into the novel pool?

BH: I'd tell them to run screaming toward a legitimate career. See, I want to minimize competition. But if they didn't listen to that, I'd say do whatever feels most natural. Gut instinct. Ultimately, these days your career will stand or fall based on the strength of your novels, unless you're Harlan Ellison. There just aren't enough really good-paying markets for short fiction to sustain a living. But good short stories are an excellent way to get noticed early on. And if your name is butted up against the names of established pros in an anthology, it adds legitimacy.

RR: Your books never seem to end the way I thought they would while reading them--which is part of their appeal. Do they end the way you thought they would while writing them?

BR: Yeah, I know the end, in general terms, before I ever start. How else could I get there? Writers who don't know where they're going to end run the risk of turning out something that sort of lurches to a stop, instead of something that feels crafted, orchestrated to give a sense of completion and closure. But, I rarely go with the first alternative to pop in mind, whether it's a novel or short story. I figure, if it's the first thing in my head, it's likely to be the first thing to occur to a lot of readers. So I try to duck around that and surprise us all.

RR: You once said that there's a little piece of yourself in everything you write (although for the sake of decency you declined to name what pieces). Aren't you afraid that you'll run out of pieces someday and just disappear while writing?

BH: Nah. I'm like a pork barrel politics government project. Always getting renewed.

RR: What do you do when you're not writing; what's a typical Brian Hodge day - if there is such a thing?

BH: Typical day, there's really no such animal. But...I like running and working out. Reading. Mainlining video and cable and theatrical movies. Cooking, especially Italian, Mexican, and Cajun. Target shooting my Baretta 9mm. I have a keyboard stack that I bang around on, piano and synthesizers. And there's the ever-popular bar hopping, misadventures near and far in quest of beers and ales that are better than the typical American mass-produced mediocre beers. All of which is played out to a near-constant soundtrack of Jane's Addiction, Peter Gabriel, Clannad, Kate Bush, Hawkwind, Tangerine Dream, and lots of other good music.

RR: Do you still belong to a record club (sorry, inside joke).

BH: No! No! That wasn't me! That was my female mail-order alias. She died. She moved out of state. Moved away and fell in with a degenerate crowd and was never seen again. That scam pretty well milked for all it could be. Jeez. You sleazy journalists, you're all the same. Meet us at conventions and buy us drinks and just wait for us to reveal sordid secrets. Does your mother know you operate this way?

RR: Touchy, touchy, touchy. Let's go on. A couple of times in your writing, "advertising" as a profession has come up. Justin Gray in Nightlife worked for an advertising firm (with a clever name, by the way). I believe your novel-in-progress has something to do with advertising, does it not? Is this part of your background or just another fetish?

BH: Well, the novel underway is a sort-of sequel to Nightlife, and it picks up with Justin, fourteen months later, so it's very natural to bring advertising in again. This time, it's central to getting him sucked into this really horrible mess. It's not a rehash of any plot elements from Nightlife, but a brand new story that happens to feature the same character. And yeah, I do know of which I speak with advertising. It was my major in college. A B.S. in Advertising...you couldn't invent a degree more appropriately named than that. After college I did five years of ad account work.

RR: How would Dick York (or Justin Gray, for that matter) promote Brian Hodge...what kind of slogan would he use? Maybe something like, "America's dyin' for Brian."

BH: I'm kind of partial to: "There's a new kid in the graveyard..."

RR: Name a few writers, if you would; who've had an influence on you...and a few books you've really loved over the years.

BH: At various stages, and in no particular order, Joseph Wambaugh, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Glendon
Swarthout, James W. Hall, Elmore Leonard, Clive Barker, John Irving, Poe, Jay McInerney, Charles Grant, and--no escaping this one--Stephen Ring. And I'm starting to get into Charles Bukowski, the alcoholic novelist and poet of skid row, whose life inspired his mostly autobiographical screenplay for Barfly, with Mickey Rourke playing him. Bukowski's like the prose equivalent of a Tom Waits album. Oh, Carlos Castaneda, too.

Beloved books: The World According to Garp, total magic. Barker's Books of Blood. Koontz's Watchers. Lost, by Gary Devon. Cold in July. The Jim Morrison biography, No One Gets Out Alive. The Scream. Under Cover of Daylight, by James Hall. Fevre Dream, from George R.R. Martin. A Clockwork Orange. Most everything from syndicated columnist Dave Barry. And most recently Carl Hiaasen's Skin Tight, the funniest, meanest thing I've read since Catch-22.

RR: How about some newcomers, some less-than-well-known writers you would recommend reading?

BR: I've talked them up before, but Poppy Z. Bright, Beth Massie, and Wayne Allen Sallee. They're tremendous, with distinct voices, and very special friends. And if they don't kick major literary ass in the nineties, something is cosmically wrong. Also, Phil Nutman. I really like what bits of short fiction he's done so far, can't wait to see his first novel coming up sometime in '91. I met him at the World Fantasy Convention in Chicago, and he's a really cool guy.

RR: At that convention you mentioned during a panel discussion that if the "horror" were yanked out of your stuff, there'd still be a good story left. That's true, but it wouldn't be as much fun, would it? I mean, just as an example, you really have a flare for creatively killing people in your books. The "blood eagle" death in Oasis comes to mind or Escobar's demise in Nightlife. The horror, if nothing else, sure adds spice, does it not?

BH: I think what I said was that's what I shoot for: putting enough into the characters and their lives that, if the horror elements were pulled out, there'd still be the basis for an interesting story. Whether or not I always succeed, that's not for me to judge. But yeah, the horror does tend to push it over the top, adds this entire other weird dimension.

RR: Also at the convention you emotionally proclaimed that "Horror writers MUST have a love and respect for the genre and what it can do." Not a dry eye in the house when you said that. In other words, if you do it for the money, you're a monkey, right? But what exactly is it that the horror genre can do?

BH: You mean besides skid marks in the underwear? I think it can cut through vast tonnages of red tape and mundane bullshit to make precisely the points you want to make. Be they about psychology, humankind, contemporary politics, history, social mores, family relationships, pop culture, or whatever. You don't have to worry about being nice, or polite, or prettying things up...just entertaining. Horror can hammer a point home like nothing else. I think of it as reality run through an amplifier. And there's nothing wrong with doing it for money. I mean, I get paid, it's a great feeling. But if that's the only motive, if all someone hopes to accomplish is a paycheck, okay, then it's primate time. We've all read novels and stories that come off like the written equivalent of painting by numbers. Something is missing, and it's heart, and seriousness of intent.

RR: What scares Brian Hodge?

BH: Mostly internal things. The fact that minds and bodies can disintegrate completely independent of one another. Speculative questions, like, What if I were to end up utterly alone? What if I never become a father? What if I were to lose everyone I love? What if I were to lose the ability to love, and feel? Unmmm...the capacity for violence within myself, that scares me. I've only lost control once, years ago, but it's there, it doesn't go away, it just takes me forever to get mad, really furious. And I have constructive outlets for it. To branch out...the current repressive right-wing climate regarding morality and art scares me. And racial intolerance. The idea that one lone madman perched atop a dictatorship can still order genocide, as easily as he can breakfast. All these things play havoc with my world-view.

RR: If I were to say to you...old Carolboys never die, what would you say back to me? Just wondering.

BH: Hey, we were young, we were vital, we were seething with hormones. And nobody got killed. All in all, a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. No problem.

RR: Okay, so what's coming up on the Hodge front?

BH: Quite a bit, happily. Nightlife, of course. It's also sold in a British edition that'll be out over there in late spring from Pan Books. Got a two-book deal in the works with Dell. Next out will be Deathgrip, early in '92, which is about a rock DJ's odyssey to the beginning of human myth, via faith healing and some really horrid manipulation and exploitation. After that will come The Darker Saints, the Nightlife pseudo-sequel. It's about organized crime, industrial sabotage, the 1986 Haitian revolution, and voodoo, set mostly in New Orleans. Also, in the coming year, I'll have pieces out in six anthologies for sure, maybe more. Short stories in Cold Blood, Borderlands 2, Final Shadow, and Shock Rock, and novelettes in Under the Fang, and Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy's Seven Sweetest Dreams. Plus magazine appearances, like New Blood, Midnight Graffiti, and Iniquities, including a couple stories Bill Relling and I wrote together. So it's shaping up to be a decent year. I'd also love to get one of the specialty houses interested in doing a short story collection, but that's just a stray thought.

RR: One last question, but rather important: If I were to bury a Brian Hodge book in the Micmac burial ground, what would it come back as?

BH: Hmmm, that's a tough one. Maybe...some sort of bookshelf vigilante, turning Harlequin Romances into landfill fodder. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot.

And on that note we leave Brian Hodge as he heads back to his refrigerator, the brave soul. It's lunchtime. A good time for us to take a break and grab a bit. So go ahead and fix yourself something. I suggest you gobble up a couple of Brian Hodge books. They're tasty and full of horrific flavor.

Brian don't forget, you are what you eat. So chew carefully and have fun.

THE END

"NIGHTLIFE" IN HARDCOVER!!!

Brian's first hardcover edition will be out from Britain late this spring. If you'd like to reserve a copy please let us know and we'll notify you when copies have arrived!!

The Overlook Connection Spring 1991 #14, pp. 36-40