feature:
Interview: Joey Comeau
A BP online exclusive
"The literary world, especially regarding headless monstrosities with incomprehensible messages from beyond the grave, needs a breath of headless fresh air."
Author Joey Comeau is back with another novel and another serialized online story. His new novel, One Bloody Thing After Another (ECW Press) will be launched May 11, 2010 as part of This is Not a Reading Series and his new online book We All Got it Coming is in its third chapter. Comeau’s bittersweet and wry humour is taking its usual shape in We All Got it Coming, with his brisk, super-realist and easy prose that creates portraitures of characters so familiar while at the same time, so full of surprises.
Speaking of surprises, Broken Pencil will be doing a series of online interviews and here's the first one.
BP: What can readers expect from your new book, One Bloody Thing After Another?
Joey Comeau: This is a book that I've been working on for a long time. I love horror. I love zombies and unexplained creatures and blood and gore and I think all of these things work so much better if you actually care about the characters, if you find them funny and likeable and if you feel for them. So that's the book I set out to write.
I like the idea of horror that makes you sad sometimes instead of scared. And I like the idea of horror books full of jokes, so that when you're expecting another joke you get something unsettling instead.
BP: Where did the idea spark for this book?
JC: I've always wanted to write a book about a gay teen that was - you know - about a gay teen, not about a teen being gay. Jackie's a lesbian, and she's got a couple crushes in the book, but this isn't a book about the plight of coming out or about the angst of being gay in a straight world. When Jackie is haunted by her mother's ghost in a police station bathroom, it's not meant to be a metaphor for intolerance or whatever. Queers are haunted by weird vomiting ghosts too, that's all. Why not?
And I wanted to write a monster book where the monster was a part of the character's family, where you were torn between the lives of strangers and your ever more monstrous loved ones. Ann's mother needs to be fed.
Oh, and it's a book about an old man and his dog and they're haunted by a crazy headless ghost. I really feel that this was a story that needed telling. We see all sorts of depictions of old men, and even old men and their dogs. And certainly we see enough headless ghosts in fiction, but my thinking was - WHAT IF I COMBINED THOSE TWO? The literary world, especially regarding headless monstrosities with incomprehensible messages from beyond the grave, needs a breath of headless fresh air.
BP: What's been influencing your writing lately? Or are there always a series of things?
JC: The movie Sympathy for Mr Vengeance blew my mind. I saw it last year for the first time. It was violent and crazy and unexpectedly touching and upsetting in ways that weren't just gore, and it was complex and wonderful. I thought, "man, that's the kind of book I want to write!" Other movies which have made me think, "man, that's the kind of book I want to write!": Harvey. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Planes Trains and Automobiles. LA Story. The Muppet Movie!
Movies are a much bigger influence on my writing than novels. I love to go to the movies. They're so wonderful. I think movies are the most important art form in my life, which is maybe weird for someone who writes comics and novels, but there you go!
BP: As you did with Lockpick Pornography, you're serializing another book online called We All Got it Coming, now in its third chapter. The chapters of We All Got it Coming are very compelling and your writing creates, so easily, a portrayal of Arthur and Clay and Arthur's world. Will this result in a printed book as well?
JC: I haven't sold it to anyone yet, which I guess is the next step after I finish serializing it, but obviously that's the hope. Lockpick Pornography just went out of print, too, so I'll be treating the two of them as a sort of package, along with a third that's yet to be written. My idea is to do a trilogy of books, with Lockpick being the first. Each of them deals with the same things in very different ways.
BP: For you, what is it about putting the writing online chapter-by-chapter first? In a way, it feels like a comic book series, which I'm sure has something to do with it, given the Softer World project. Besides the advantage that it's free and gets people reading your work, which is a great idea in and of itself, what kind of relationship do you see forming between you as a writer and your online readership?
JC: I like putting things online for free partly because I like reading things online for free. It's just how things make sense to me. I don't wanna go online and pay to see anything. Not comics, not fiction, not video. I want to pay my Internet bill, and get the Internet. If I love something, I'll buy the book. I'll easily drop money on Penny Arcade books, or when there's a Nedroid book, I will be buying that in an instant. Putting the books I write online for free lets people see if they like it. If someone doesn't like it, then they don't waste their money on the book. If they do like it, they'll buy the book usually. It sure doesn't hurt sales. Sometimes they don't have the money to buy a book, and my feeling on that is this: A person should be able to read a book even if they don't have the money to buy it. I'm not ever gonna get rich writing books anyway, and I'd rather a book reach everyone who would appreciate it. Especially with a book like Lockpick, or We All Got it Coming.
Order a copy of One Bloody Thing After Another from the ECW Press site, or pick up it up at the launch May 11, 2010 at the Gladstone Hotel, 7.30pm.
Joey Comeau will also be reading at the Toronto Literary Salon Tuesday April 27 at The Spoke Club, 7.00pm.
Also, check out Comeau in BP's Can'tLit anthology!
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