Out of the Broom Closet: An Interview with Ed Bryant
By Nikki M. Pill
You may know Ed Bryant as the author of such books as Among the Dead, Fetish, Flirting With Death, or The Baku. Maybe as the sharp, witty reviewer from Locus magazine. Perhaps as the guy who keeps you chuckling when you go to see panels at cons. You may even know him as the bus driver from the film The Laughing Dead. Ed Bryant’s diverse background and incisive wit make him the perfect interviewee to launch Twilight Tales’s new “Trends in Publishing” column. Nikki M. Pill has the vast pleasure of interviewing him for this edition.
NP: Where can readers find your reviews?
EB: Well, there are reviews and then there are reviews. I’m going to play obtuse for just a moment and ignore books, which is what I suspect you’re most interested in. My longest tenure as a reviewer has been for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series from St. Martin ’s Press; 18 annual volumes like clockwork. I’m tagged as the media reviewer, which means I cover the year’s achievement (or lack of same) in horror, fantasy and science fiction film and television, and occasionally in live theatre, music, action toys, what have you. It’s much akin to the extended monologue you’ll hear at a party when you ask some boring guy if he’s seen any good movies lately–and he tells you ad nauseum . For Locus , the field’s major news magazine, I generally review each year’s World Horror and World Fantasy conventions. I try to keep those articles entertaining and steer away from most of the hard information.Now it’s true that I reviewed books for Locus for many years until about two years ago when I took a sabbatical while I got multiple bypass cardiac surgery. It’s been hard getting back into the saddle, but of late I’ve realized I’m getting more and more serious about resuming my reviews. Thing is, it’s usually exhausting for me to review regularly because I look at reviews the same way I approach fiction. I want the finished product to be involving, informed, and entertaining. Probably my biggest ambition with reviewing is either to turn readers on to someone new they might not otherwise discover soon, or to note something new and provocative about work from the established writers.
Until I get my Locus column revived, probably the best venue to find any book reviews from me is in “Mathoms,” a column I write for that exemplary northwest magazine from the Swenson clan, Talebones .
NP: What is the major difference you notice between what gets published now and when you first started reviewing?
EB: Back in the olden times (that’s the seventies, friends), I seem to recall the proliferation of original anthologies provided a more welcoming climate than now for what I’d call cutting-edge fiction, stories that pushed the envelope of popular fiction and occasionally ripped the flap off that envelope. Whether at short or novel length, there’s still plenty of good stuff being published, but often it’s harder to find because it’s marketed outside of a familiar genre.
At the same time, I’d opine that there’s a lot more crap being published now, once you count in the Internet. Thanks to be web, self-published material and bad fiction disseminated by relatively boneheaded on-line editors can be uploaded to the masses with the touch of a key. Of course not all the fiction on the Internet is awful, but the tempting exploitation of cyberspace makes it even harder to filter out the noise to find the intriguing signal.
NP: Has the climate for short stories changed the same way it has for novels?
EB: Partly because of the sheer dross of volume, partly because of the proliferation of media, electronic and otherwise, it’s just harder to find the good stuff. Good stuff? The stories that surprise, delight, and provoke me as a reader.
NP: What types of stories (i.e. serial killer, zombie, etc) would you say are in vogue right now? What’s passé?
EB: Well, zombie futures are still high. And while vampires and serial killers have tried to flood their respective markets, running a risk of serious devaluation, there seems still to be a healthy investor market of dedicated readers. Take vampire fiction as an example. For a decade and a half now, vampire romances, vampire mysteries, vampire female empowerment fantasies, historical vampire tales, all have been doing fine. Still, readers eventually begin to cultivate more of a discriminatory taste. They develop standards. And they start to realize that some of their favorite novelists are beginning to sound completely and boringly the same with every new book. Carbon-copy writers attempting to extend their cloned work indefinitely really do run out of steam. What keeps the sub-genre going are the occasional fresh new voices who add new angles of approach to the tired mythology. In the past I’d suggest looking at the boosts from Nancy Collins and S.P. Somtow. Right now I’d put forward Andrew Fox. But while archetypes can be overly abused to the point of coma, that doesn’t destroy the underlying cultural truths that can always be mined anew by a good, fresh-voiced writer.
Then there are werewolves. You’d think that shape shifters would be a hot commodity ever since Jack Williamson’s seminal Darker Than You Think came out more than half a century ago. But lycanthropes have been a hard sell. True, there have been a clutch of werewolf romances and there was the determined effort by Anne Rice’s sis, Alice Borchardt to put lycanthropes on the best-seller lists, but American culture has never really clasped furry-faced lovers to its collective bosom. Most recently, new novelist Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty at the Midnight Hour has pumped some oxygen into the werewolf world, in part by addressing coming of age and coming to terms in a young woman’s life. The eponymous protagonist is a modern woman who must reconcile humanity with her werewolf role as–literally–the bitch of the pack. Now that’s meaty subject matter.
The upshot is that any apparent overused trope, any cliché, can be revivified by talent and a fresh angle of approach. Naturally that’s not as easy as some will think.
NP: I’ve observed an interesting trend in horror. Some horror writers claim that monsters are old news, and the real horror is in what one human can do to another. This starts to blur the line between horror and mystery/suspense, and many from each camp insist that they are still completely different. Any thoughts on this?
EB: Writers who duke it out over whether supernatural monsters or human monsters are superior are brain-dead. They’re fighting a battle that might as well be waged in a darkened broom closet.
Literary monsters–the good, effective ones–are always a variety of metaphor. They always tap powerfully into our dreads and outright fears. Not so much the facile simple things like rats and snakes and spiders, but the basic stock in trade of classic visceral horror: separation, isolation, loss of control, death, and sexual dysfunction.
NP. The most frequent criticism of sword-and-sorcery stories is, “That’s just another rehash of Tolkein.” Have you been particularly impressed with any recent works of high fantasy?
EB: Two remarkably adept and fresh new voices in epic fantasy are George R.R.
Martin’s increasingly gigantic fantasy series [ A Song of Fire and Ice ] for Bantam, and Steve Erickson’s [ Malazan Book of the Fallen ] series for Tor.
NP: Many new writers hear dire warnings about genre-bending work. It’s hell to market, publishers can’t figure out how to sell it, etc. However, most publishers’ blurbs in, say, Writers Market-type stuff says they want something fresh and new. Is genre-bending work more difficult to sell than a piece that fits smoothly into one genre? What are your thoughts on this?
EB: Sure, genre-bending work, slipstream fiction, whatever you want to term it, can indeed be hell to market. But so? It’s a matter of playing it safe and going for a smaller reward, or, when things all work out, taking a major chance and gaining major goodies. Trouble is, you can have talent and the ability to work hard and persistence and all the other writerly virtues, and your extraordinary work still won’t click with either editor or readers. Sometimes you need things you can’t control, timing and lightning from a clear sky. Sometimes those don’t happen. Ain’t life a bitch? But what you can do is to write something that’s fresh and wonderful, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a marketing pigeon-hole, and then put your fresh and wonderful talent into the crucial task of educating agents, editors, marketing and promotional people as to who’s your true audience and how your work can be imaginatively marketed to reach them. That’s why people started using terms like “dark fantasy,” “speculative fiction,” “dark suspense,” “the new gothic,” and the like.
Any time horror writers grouse about being too confined by genre restrictions, I remind them of Elizabeth Kostovo and The Historian , or even better, of John Connolly. Connolly’s an Irish writer who’s a thoroughgoing horror novelist who’s a best seller, but is relatively unknown to most in the American horror field. He gets marketed as a mystery/suspense writer because his publishers think that’s a more open-ended category. But every one of his novels has crimes and a detective, and also depends on an open acknowledgement of the supernatural as a plot and character element. If you want, you could also call him a magic realist. The author has admitted to writing mysteries–but more precisely the Medieval mysteries, the issues dealing with faith and fate, the metaphysical and the dark forces that attempt to win us over. All that then gets melded seamlessly into a contemporary American setting. I admire Connolly tremendously, both for his work itself, and for his accomplishment at using talent and imagination to beat a restrictive system.
NP: Would you recommend any magazines or presses as receptive to work that pushes the boundaries of genre?
EB: Though it sometimes seems to depend on the alignment of the planets or
perhaps the proximity of the solstice, Asimov’s , Fantasy and Science Fiction , and Talebones all seem receptive to the occasional genre-stretcher. On line, of course, the ultimate goal is Ellen Datlow’s fiction acquisitions for SciFi.com. Among the small presses, I particularly admire the eclecticism of Ministry of Whimsy, Earthling Books, Night Shade, Wheatland Press, and Small Beer Press, though I know I’m accidentally omitting many other worthies.
NP: Have you read any wonderful, recent books or stories lately? What, and why would you characterize them as “wonderful”?
EB: My last favorite piece of wonderfully nasty horror at book-length was Thomas
Tessier’s Father Panic’s Opera Macabre . It’s a piece of bravura writing that punched most of my buttons. I also like John Connolly’s new novel, The Black Angel , because once again the writer taps into mythic archetypes even as he tells a terrific story with convincing characters. Ditto a nod to Don Tumasonis’s story “The Pospect Cards.” I admire anyone who can use a highly artificial literary gimmick to trigger a compelling piece of fiction. The same goes for Steve Rasnic Tem’s new chapbook The World Recalled. Fine writers can do just about any damned thing they want, so long as their talent and energy make it come alive and dig into both your gut and your mind.
NP: What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten about writing? About getting published?
EB: Along with the standard stuff about hard work and persistence and not losing faith in yourself, the best advice was a) don’t save your best ideas for some ephemeral later time; good ideas are always forthcoming from the twisted under-layers of your brain; make each new project your best effort to date, and b) always draw upon your passion; writing without passion is DOA.
NP: Do you have any predictions for trends in publishing in the next 2-5 years?
EB: Gosh, Nikki, if any of us could figure out what’s going to be popular and engage the literate public interest in two to five years, we’d all be richer than the dreams of Croesus! But if you insist… First, I think one form of big success will come to writers who can adopt a multi-media approach–that is, combine good writing with music and visuals, creating digital works of surpassing brilliance. Nice work if you can get is. I’d also buy stock in a writer who can capture the zeitgeist of the 21st century in the same poetic, accurate, and edgy way as Bob Dylan did in the sixties.
NP: What are you working on, fiction-wise?
EB: Although it’s one of the reasons I’ve become the laughing-stock of the horror field, I’m still expecting to finish up my big collection of new and reprinted horror and suspense, Flirting With Death , for Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance. I’m only about a decade over deadline. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it’s still been a matter of years since the long-suffering guys at Deadline Press suggested the project before finally passing it on to Rich. Dan Simmons provided an introduction. Most recently, I’ve been editing the story notes and fumbling around trying to decide whether to add one more original. In short, I’m not following my own advice to other writers: call it good and move on.
Otherwise I’ve been writing a series of short-short stories this year and grinding away at one novella about middle-school vampires and another about the US/USSR race to the moon as replayed in a high fantasy landscape.
