The past isn't past for a group of Wisconsin-born 60-somethings in A Dark Matter, the new novel from horror maestro Peter Straub. An encounter with a vagrant in a corner bakery touches off the quest of the narrator a successful writer and former 1960s kid to reconnect with a group of friends from his college days, each of them now far flung and living different lives, and get some overdue answers about their brief association with a charismatic campus guru named Spencer Mallon. What really occurred that day, long ago, when Spencer marched everyone into a field for a private ceremony? What did the narrator miss by opting out of the group (or ka-tet, perhaps) at the last minute, and why does his wife, a globe-trotting renaissance woman nicknamed The Eel refuse to discuss her involvement? The celebrated author of Julia, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, In the Night Room and other classics of supernatural terror recently spoke with SuicideGirls about his latest tome.
Ryan Stewart: Can you summarize how A Dark Matter relates to both The Skylark and A Special Place, which are two other new works by you that seem to be versions of the same story, or at least parts of the same story?
Peter Straub: It began with one long, rather extreme and hairy, novel. Extensive editing cut it way down, but I wanted some actual record of what I had written originally -- the novel that I had submitted. What I wished was for the Ur-novel to be published in a small limited edition that could not in any way impede the sales or progress of the finished product. To a great extent, however, it was a different book, one they -- my editor -- had not liked, and I wanted those who really cared to be able to see it. That was The Skylark. A Special Place is a seventy-five page novella cut from The Skylark when it was on its way to slimming down into the sleeker, more elegant A Dark Matter: it was very nasty, but crucial to the novel, and I wanted it to be available to the same rabid and much-loved fans. It was published in a nice little edition of one hundred and fifty. Two months after A Dark Matter appears, a trade publisher, Pegasus, will bring out a paperback of the novella, so more of the completists will have a change to get it. Also, although it is truly nasty, it is also alive and vibrant, and I like it a lot.
RS: One thing A Dark Matter touches on, and seems to draw some inspiration from, is the life and works of the sixteenth century mystic Cornelius Agrippa. Were his surviving writings an actual inspiration to you? Did you have an opportunity to read some of them?
PS: I bought and read through, at a good clip, Agrippa's four books of magic, and found what I needed in the fourth one. Its history is as recounted in A Dark Matter. His life, which was ragged, wildly uneven, and extremely risky, interests me more than his work.
RS: One of the novel's key characters is the guru, who has a persona that's quite benign. Would you say that encounters with hapless, couch-surfing occultists like Spencer Mallon were as common to the experience of a 60s kid as the novel suggests? If so, that phenomenon must have died out over the years.
PS: Two of these characters floated into my life while I was at Madison, so they could not have been very uncommon. The first was a true Mallon -- I really based the character Spencer Mallon on him. One evening, I sat for hours in a student apartment listening to this good-looking, thirty-ish guy ramble on and on about India, violence, and the occult. He had seen a man cut off another man's hand in a Tibetan bar, and he thought this was full of magical significance. The girls around me, I noticed, had fallen for the guru one and all, they bought his act completely. The second of these mages talked his way into my apartment and lived there for a month, eating and drinking at no cost to himself, until my roommate and I threw him out.
RS: My overall take on A Dark Matter is that the relationship between the volatile teenager Keith Hayward and his murderous uncle forms the book's heart. It's an exploration of how evil can be created and then introduced into the world.
PS: Yes, I wanted the book to be at least in part an examination of, an exploration into, evil, and Keith and uncle Till were meant to be evidence of the existence of evil as an autonomous force in the universe -- I wanted the reader really to see that though Hayward met a terrible death, he was no actual loss to the world. In a larger sense, though, I think evil is a matter of absence of meaning -- the translation of experience into a wire hanger, a merely gestural and empty form. That is the true dark matter in the book, and the subject of [the character named] Boats's odd tale.
RS: Keith almost seems to be a young Jeffrey Dahmer in the making, with his animal mutilation and so forth, and you've created Dahmer-esque figures before in your fiction -- have you ever toyed with the notion of actually doing a long-form, non-fiction exploration of Milwaukee's favorite son?
PS: I am sort of crazy about poor Dahmer, but I wrote everything I could about him in The Throat, and since then there have been too many nonfiction books about Dahmer to make another project like that interesting to anyone.
RS: I really liked the notion of your detective character having everything about the Till case figured out, but then being unexpectedly thwarted by his inability to write well enough to be published. Did that twist come from someone you knew having that problem?
PS: I'm sure such people exist, but I don't know any of them. However, I do know a number of writers who could do a great deal more if only they could write a little better, a little more passionately, more interestingly.
RS: Unless I missed it, the novel contains no early indication of the Eel being blind until its simply stated further along, after she's been discussed several times. As a writer do you like the idea of establishing a character's personality before imparting what could be considered a more noticeable-but-superficial trait, like a handicap?
PS: You got it right. Her blindness is supposed to sort of come out of the blue well after we have already formed a good impression of her, so that the fact of her blindness would not too greatly affect the reader's conception of her. We should understand what she is like as a person before we start to pity her, or to feel superior to her, or to see her in any way as essentially, at her center, determined by her handicap.
RS: There's a line very near the end that struck me, in which the narrator and his wife suddenly voice the idea of breaking off contact with a lifelong friend with whom they've been through a lot. It seems like you were suggesting that relationships can be sustained in suspended animation for decades by unresolved issues, and once that melts away, all you have left is your natural inclination toward that person?
PS: Well, yes, and we understand that one's feelings about someone can change as life moves us all along. Old friends can reveal themselves in ways of no particular interest to oneself. They can become boring -- and you suddenly grasp the sad fact that they were boring all along, only you failed to notice. At that point, you begin to see rather less of them than you had earlier.
RS: There's another interesting aside in the book where, in a somewhat objective voice -- or at least, this isn't disputed -- there's a discussion of how skid row bums aren't really a feature of society anymore, and what that implies. Where did they all go?
PS: To Vermont, maybe, or San Francisco, I don't know, but they are not to be seen very much around New York any more. I think our society became harder and less forgiving, and the indigent bums had to straighten up or die.
RS: It's been a while since I read Black House or the Dark Towerseries, but I think there's a resemblance to the universe of those books here that's unmistakable. Do you agree?
PS: It never occurred to me that A Dark Matter might evoke memories of Black House or the Dark Tower novels. This must be a result of the chaotic, uncontrollable and entirely amoral magic world that is briefly glimpsed by most of the characters. I guess I assume that everything I write takes place in the universe defined by my name.
RS: What's going on these days with The Talisman's movie rights? Steven Spielberg had them for years and apparently couldn't figure out an economically viable way to produce his miniseries?
PS: This matter is a real mystery to me. It's on, it's off, it's definitely on this time, oops, sorry, it's off again. After a while, I stopped thinking about it. No one involved ever communicated with me directly, anyhow.
RS: Why do you think it is that, as an author who found mainstream popularity long ago and has retained it, you remain more or less virgin territory for Hollywood? Do you simply hang up on them when they call?
PS: Hang up, are you kidding? I burn incense, I cross my fingers, I do all I can, but either film people just keep on optioning the same old things over and over, or they shrug and walk away, baffled or annoyed by my unwillingness to tell a story in a straightforward manner. It may be that my books are basically not very promising material for movies. I can live with that, but it would be nice to see someone have another go at it.
A Dark Matter is available in bookstores as of February 9, 2010.
Ryan Stewart: Can you summarize how A Dark Matter relates to both The Skylark and A Special Place, which are two other new works by you that seem to be versions of the same story, or at least parts of the same story?
Peter Straub: It began with one long, rather extreme and hairy, novel. Extensive editing cut it way down, but I wanted some actual record of what I had written originally -- the novel that I had submitted. What I wished was for the Ur-novel to be published in a small limited edition that could not in any way impede the sales or progress of the finished product. To a great extent, however, it was a different book, one they -- my editor -- had not liked, and I wanted those who really cared to be able to see it. That was The Skylark. A Special Place is a seventy-five page novella cut from The Skylark when it was on its way to slimming down into the sleeker, more elegant A Dark Matter: it was very nasty, but crucial to the novel, and I wanted it to be available to the same rabid and much-loved fans. It was published in a nice little edition of one hundred and fifty. Two months after A Dark Matter appears, a trade publisher, Pegasus, will bring out a paperback of the novella, so more of the completists will have a change to get it. Also, although it is truly nasty, it is also alive and vibrant, and I like it a lot.
RS: One thing A Dark Matter touches on, and seems to draw some inspiration from, is the life and works of the sixteenth century mystic Cornelius Agrippa. Were his surviving writings an actual inspiration to you? Did you have an opportunity to read some of them?
PS: I bought and read through, at a good clip, Agrippa's four books of magic, and found what I needed in the fourth one. Its history is as recounted in A Dark Matter. His life, which was ragged, wildly uneven, and extremely risky, interests me more than his work.
RS: One of the novel's key characters is the guru, who has a persona that's quite benign. Would you say that encounters with hapless, couch-surfing occultists like Spencer Mallon were as common to the experience of a 60s kid as the novel suggests? If so, that phenomenon must have died out over the years.
PS: Two of these characters floated into my life while I was at Madison, so they could not have been very uncommon. The first was a true Mallon -- I really based the character Spencer Mallon on him. One evening, I sat for hours in a student apartment listening to this good-looking, thirty-ish guy ramble on and on about India, violence, and the occult. He had seen a man cut off another man's hand in a Tibetan bar, and he thought this was full of magical significance. The girls around me, I noticed, had fallen for the guru one and all, they bought his act completely. The second of these mages talked his way into my apartment and lived there for a month, eating and drinking at no cost to himself, until my roommate and I threw him out.
RS: My overall take on A Dark Matter is that the relationship between the volatile teenager Keith Hayward and his murderous uncle forms the book's heart. It's an exploration of how evil can be created and then introduced into the world.
PS: Yes, I wanted the book to be at least in part an examination of, an exploration into, evil, and Keith and uncle Till were meant to be evidence of the existence of evil as an autonomous force in the universe -- I wanted the reader really to see that though Hayward met a terrible death, he was no actual loss to the world. In a larger sense, though, I think evil is a matter of absence of meaning -- the translation of experience into a wire hanger, a merely gestural and empty form. That is the true dark matter in the book, and the subject of [the character named] Boats's odd tale.
RS: Keith almost seems to be a young Jeffrey Dahmer in the making, with his animal mutilation and so forth, and you've created Dahmer-esque figures before in your fiction -- have you ever toyed with the notion of actually doing a long-form, non-fiction exploration of Milwaukee's favorite son?
PS: I am sort of crazy about poor Dahmer, but I wrote everything I could about him in The Throat, and since then there have been too many nonfiction books about Dahmer to make another project like that interesting to anyone.
RS: I really liked the notion of your detective character having everything about the Till case figured out, but then being unexpectedly thwarted by his inability to write well enough to be published. Did that twist come from someone you knew having that problem?
PS: I'm sure such people exist, but I don't know any of them. However, I do know a number of writers who could do a great deal more if only they could write a little better, a little more passionately, more interestingly.
RS: Unless I missed it, the novel contains no early indication of the Eel being blind until its simply stated further along, after she's been discussed several times. As a writer do you like the idea of establishing a character's personality before imparting what could be considered a more noticeable-but-superficial trait, like a handicap?
PS: You got it right. Her blindness is supposed to sort of come out of the blue well after we have already formed a good impression of her, so that the fact of her blindness would not too greatly affect the reader's conception of her. We should understand what she is like as a person before we start to pity her, or to feel superior to her, or to see her in any way as essentially, at her center, determined by her handicap.
RS: There's a line very near the end that struck me, in which the narrator and his wife suddenly voice the idea of breaking off contact with a lifelong friend with whom they've been through a lot. It seems like you were suggesting that relationships can be sustained in suspended animation for decades by unresolved issues, and once that melts away, all you have left is your natural inclination toward that person?
PS: Well, yes, and we understand that one's feelings about someone can change as life moves us all along. Old friends can reveal themselves in ways of no particular interest to oneself. They can become boring -- and you suddenly grasp the sad fact that they were boring all along, only you failed to notice. At that point, you begin to see rather less of them than you had earlier.
RS: There's another interesting aside in the book where, in a somewhat objective voice -- or at least, this isn't disputed -- there's a discussion of how skid row bums aren't really a feature of society anymore, and what that implies. Where did they all go?
PS: To Vermont, maybe, or San Francisco, I don't know, but they are not to be seen very much around New York any more. I think our society became harder and less forgiving, and the indigent bums had to straighten up or die.
RS: It's been a while since I read Black House or the Dark Towerseries, but I think there's a resemblance to the universe of those books here that's unmistakable. Do you agree?
PS: It never occurred to me that A Dark Matter might evoke memories of Black House or the Dark Tower novels. This must be a result of the chaotic, uncontrollable and entirely amoral magic world that is briefly glimpsed by most of the characters. I guess I assume that everything I write takes place in the universe defined by my name.
RS: What's going on these days with The Talisman's movie rights? Steven Spielberg had them for years and apparently couldn't figure out an economically viable way to produce his miniseries?
PS: This matter is a real mystery to me. It's on, it's off, it's definitely on this time, oops, sorry, it's off again. After a while, I stopped thinking about it. No one involved ever communicated with me directly, anyhow.
RS: Why do you think it is that, as an author who found mainstream popularity long ago and has retained it, you remain more or less virgin territory for Hollywood? Do you simply hang up on them when they call?
PS: Hang up, are you kidding? I burn incense, I cross my fingers, I do all I can, but either film people just keep on optioning the same old things over and over, or they shrug and walk away, baffled or annoyed by my unwillingness to tell a story in a straightforward manner. It may be that my books are basically not very promising material for movies. I can live with that, but it would be nice to see someone have another go at it.
A Dark Matter is available in bookstores as of February 9, 2010.