Jesse Bullington, inimitable scribe of the excellent The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and the superlative The Enterprise of Death, reviewed here, is a hard man to track down. My agents eventually found him dozing after a lunch of questionable origins outside a cemetery. Idly picking something stringy from between his teeth, Jesse was kind enough to answer a few questions.
My lord, may I approach?
*Jesse waves me forth languidly.*
Ask your questions and begone, for I grow snoozy.
Thankyou, master. The Enterprise of Death is not a novel that’s going to be suited to everyone. Who did you have in mind when you wrote it?
Myself, first and foremost—as in life, so in art. In all seriousness, though, I think you have to please yourself with what you do before you go about trying to make anybody else happy with it or it’ll ring false. Or at least it does for me.
Beyond that, with this project I had several friends and family in mind when I wrote it, people who went through the sorts of hells I can only imagine and came out stronger for it. It’s a deeply personal work in the result, and I shouldn’t like to go into more detail than to say that I wrote it for certain persons whom I love and respect a great deal. It’s my hope that readers who enjoy stories a few steps removed from their comfort zones will like this one, which is a wee bit more sincere and a wee bit less cynical than the Brothers Grossbart.
The band of characters we get to meet in EoD are not the most savoury of folks. For that matter, neither were the Brothers Grossbart. Are you this sick and twisted in real life?
We’re having this talk outside a frakkin’ graveyard, and you had to ask? Seriously?
How do these people get into your head?
The business of getting such characters out of my head tends to be the more pressing question for me. As for how they get in, it’s a sort of alchemical process—put a number of divers elements (such as a setting and personality I’d like to explore) into a vessel (my nut), apply heat, cold, time, etc, and see what solidifies, what oozes out.
Characters are so informed by their time and place that I try to keep everything vague beyond a general personality until I know the setting where the character is going to be living; it’s a symbiotic process, with world-building informing character generation and then the evolution and development of the characters impacting the rough plot.
As for my characters not being savoury, I suppose that’s been my experience with real people—we’re a profoundly flawed, warty sort of ape, and I’ve never cared for the stories that pretend people are more than, well, people, that there are objective absolutes of good and evil. What could be more boring than someone doing the right thing because they’re a predestined hero, or someone doing the wrong thing because, uh, they’re a baddie and stuff? No, I’ve found that saints and devils are few and far between, with most of us falling somewhere in between, and I try to reflect that in my fiction.
I’m most interested in exploring marginalized characters, folk who’ve often been overlooked in works I’ve read—that could be people of color or non-heteronormative sexuality, as in Enterprise, or it could just be a more human look at the baddies, as in Brothers Grossbart.
No comment on how sick and twisted I am in my private life—what happens in Fortress of Filth stays in the Fortress of Filth, except on laundry day.
The Guardian likened your work to Tarantino, which I agreed with in my review. There’s also this element of almost delightful grade-two-dirty-words humour strewn through the book, in entirely unexpected places. Where are these influences coming from?
I certainly aspire to mingle the highbrow with the low, though I suspect I hit the mark with the latter more often than I do the former. A childhood full of British comedy has something to do with it, I suspect—you look at better examples of British comedy television and cinema from my childhood and I think you find a much smarter, sharper edge beneath the obligatory lowest-common-denominator gags than what was popular in the states around that time. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house without cable television, so the programs I encountered were the ones friends recorded on betamax and gave to my parents, and many of these were via satellite, straight off the Beeb—Python was king, of course, but there was also plenty of Black Adder, the Young Ones, that sort of thing.
Obviously britcoms were only a small part of my education, but I do think that awareness that dumb jokes are even more funny if they’re incorporated with intelligent ones can be traced pretty neatly back to such shows, and of course the literature as well—Douglas Adams and Roald Dahl were both adroit jugglers of the silly and the sublime, and I discovered the two of them long before I even encountered old uncle Monty.
One thing I’ve never bought into is the idea that everything you enjoy, entertainment-wise, ought to conform to and even support your personal politics and intellectual standards. I can’t imagine such a mental diet can be healthy, and I don’t think people always need to justify liking the things that they do—sometimes you just want to watch a trashy movie because you like trashy movies, and apologizing for that, or even worse, attempting to justify it through a lens of your personal politics, takes a lot of the fun out of what should be simple pleasures.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be critical of entertainment or that nobody’s entitled to view Pink Flamingos as a biting indictment of post-Baby Boom suburban America and Americana, because it is…But to deny it’s one goddamn trashy, problematic satire is to miss the beautiful, gaudy forest for the tree that bears a remarkable resemblance to an ivory tower.
Look upon my tangent, ye mighty, and despair at having told yourself you only enjoy Russ Meyer films for the cinematography! Love the gutter and love the heavens alike, and, whenever possible, elevate and drag down in equal measure.
Having a narratorial, storytelling tone to EoD keeps the story moving but sprinkles it with wonderful asides and a human warmth. Did you have anyone’s voice in your head while you were doing these parts? Who would you like to read the audiobook?
To my inner ear, John Goodman reads everything. My books, my RSS feed, the newspaper I skim while waiting on the barista to finish my coffee, everything. John Goodman, squatting down in my brain and whispering sweetly any text I encounter.
Failing Goodman, for the audiobook I think Mark Gatiss would nail it—he’s got a lovely voice that would be perfect for the overall tone of the book, especially the asides. In terms of specific characters, I actually imagined Niklaus sounding a bit like Matt Berry, who I adore, and Paracelsus as sounding rather Paul Giamatti-ish. Naomie Harris or Angela Bassett would do a nice Awa, I think.
What’s with the constant mention of ferrets in the writing I can find about you?
In the states there’s a big problem with people buying ferrets from pet stores—who in turn buy them from a single repugnant corporation that also raises beagles for medical experiments—and then realizing that the animal they’ve taken into their home is a bit higher maintenance than a dog or cat, and so they dump the weasel at the nearest shelter or, even worse, just put it out on the street.
Over they years my wife and I have taken in quite a few rescued ferrets, and encourage other potential ferret-owners to do the same instead of continuing to support the rather gross company who breeds them by purchasing the animals from a shop. There are ferret rescue programs virtually everywhere, even if your local shelter doesn’t have a carpetshark on hand, so I strongly encourage any and all interested persons to look to adopting an abandoned pet rather than buying a “new” one—living animals are just that, not toys that loose their luster from use.
As for my constant mentioning them, it’s called slactivism—by drumming up interests in the beasties I’m able to occasionally dust off the soapbox and issue the above rant, or some variant on it. I love the little mini-badgers, finding they make excellent pets for those of a suitable temperament, and hope that in my tiny fashion I can get the word out on the importance of rescuing them. Blame it on a romantic fondness for our species’ historic co-dependence, with medieval poachers working with the creatures to hunt rabbits and small birds…or blame it on too many childhood viewings of the Beastmaster.
So, are you more or less evil than we all think you are?
Good God, man, I just issue a heartfelt plea for helpless, fuzzy little animals and you ask me if I’m evil? It’s a cold world we live in, sir, a cold, cold world. Frankly, I think I’m rather boring, which negates the possibility for evil—at least, evil of the interesting kind.
Have you always been a storyteller?
I’ve always tried to be, puppet shoes for the other kids and such, but my success in that regard was as debatable then as it is now. To this day, the stories I write down start off as stories I tell myself when I can’t sleep, when I’m stuck in traffic, when I’ve got a spare moment—I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have found people willing to listen to what I come up with.
How many of your own experiences have you woven into the story? Are there paralells that people who’ve heard you hold forth at the pub, for example, waving a stein of ale around authoritatively (I’m imagining this in quite vivid detail), would go, ‘Ah, yes, that’s just like the story about the goat and the dwarf he tells when he’s hammered’…?
Oh, absolutely—every writer does, I think. Since my stories are primarily removed from a contemporary setting, however, quite a bit gets tweaked and altered. All that stuff about kissing on corpses, for example, originally went down quite a bit differently, due to the formaldehyde and…you know what? Never mind—better to preserve the mystery about what came from where. Ah, and outside of True Things That Happened To Me Or People I Know, there’s also two decades worth of roleplaying that I draw on—my
old dicemates have definitely recognized bits and pieces from games I’ve run or characters I’ve played, albeit in a radically different application.
Are you an architect or a gardener, to borrow the parlance from the fine gentlemen at Writing Excuses?
Maybe a rock gardener? Which is to say, there are solid bits of structure that I scatter about before embarking on a project, but mostly I do prefer to see things develop in their own time and on their own terms.
You’ve mentioned you’re a fan of Roald Dahl. If you had the chance to meet him, would you ask him to read your book? Do you think he’d like it?
He was by all accounts a salty old bastard, so I wouldn’t feel bad asking him to read something that I suspect he might hate. Well, that’s not quite true—I think he’d be a bit bored by it, to be frank, but who the hell knows what some cranky ghost might make my scribblings? I hope he’d see his mark on the pages and not be too disappointed by it, in any event.
Who’s your bet to survive the remainder of the Game of Thrones novels and why?
I’m a glacially slow reader, and as a result I’ve developed an aversion to the novel series in general, and the novel series that has not yet been completed by its mortal author in particular. I’ve heard great things about the series and the tv adaptation, having a pair of ears and all, but I balk, still I balk.
The last time I went more than a trilogy deep (First Law for the win!) without getting the all-clear from trustworthy sorts who’d finished the run was with Stephen King’s Dark Tower books. King jumped the shark in such blandly awful fashion with the fifth entry that I never finished the damn thing, and so I’m waiting to hear what people say after Martin’s good and finished before picking the first one up. I will say that as a huge Peter Dinklage fan, I hope whatever character he plays lasts the for the duration…which of course means I’ve just doomed his role to an early grave. Sorry Peter!
Finally, what can we expect from you in the future?
THE MOTHERFUCKING UNEXPECTED… Should have expected that, shouldn’t you? Specifically, I’ve got stories coming out in several magazines and anthologies, and have a few top secret projects in the works that I’m hoping to announce soon. Hoping to have a third novel out in 2012, but time will learn us on that score, as she does on all matters.
You are as wise as you are handsome.
Now get out, before I rend the flesh from your bones, grind your bones to dust, mix the dust into a paste, and use the paste clumsily sculpt a homunculus of you which I will then smash with a hammer.
A thousand thanks, O Great One.
Jesse Bullington’s website can be found here, and my review of The Enterprise Of Death can be found here for your enjoyment.
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