Enter the Octopus

Author Jeffrey Thomas is best know for his creation Punktown, an offworld colony ruled by shadowy corporate interests and inhabited by myriad intelligent races, of which humanity is only one. In addition to his Punktown novels and short stories, Thomas has written many other works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, including a Nightmare on Elm Street original novel called The Dream Dealers. Learn more about Thomas’ work at http://www.jeffreyethomas.com

ETO: Would you mind introducing yourself to my readers?

JT: I’m Jeffrey Thomas, a writer of lies meant to postulate false futures and disrupt one’s healthy sleep. I am also or have been an artist, a publisher, a husband (repeat offender), a father, a company drone, an inhabitant of Massachusetts, a confused soul adrift on the sea of life’s heaving bosom.

ETO: When did you start writing?

JT: When I was very young. It started mostly with creating my own comic books. I remember being hospitalized with a hernia at six, and being frustrated because I wanted to name the comic book I was working on WAR but I wasn’t sure how to spell it. (Now that I think of it, maybe that was the genesis of my novel BLUE WAR. Hmm.) As I like to relate, the word balloons and commentary in my comic books began to crowd the pictures out until they no longer remained. I completed my first novel (called SIX TO SIX) at 14, a story of Earth colonists on another planet (a genesis of PUNKTOWN?) mixing cultures with a simian-like native race, spawning interspecies gangs of discounted youth. It was sort of PLANET OF THE APES meets A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

ETO: How would you describe your work?

JT: I’m as comfortable writing science fiction as I am horror, and I very often combine those genres, and others as well; crime fiction, for example. I like to think my body of work is pretty diverse, as I like to experiment, take on challenges. Even when setting my stories within the same milieu, as in my world of Punktown, I try to keep them dissimilar. I’ve written Victorian ghost stories, such as my novella GODHEAD DYING DOWNWARDS, a collection of erotic horror stories (HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD), a collection of Lovecraftian horror stories (UNHOLY DIMENSIONS), a bunch of stories set in Hell (many of these gathered in my collection VOICES FROM HADES), and so on. I was even approached to write an original novel based on the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films, called THE DREAM DEALERS.

ETO: What are some of your best-known works?

JT: DEADSTOCK and BLUE WAR have been my first two mass market books (aside from THE DREAM DEALERS), so they’ve probably reached the most readers, but I still think I’m best known for creating the world of Punktown, as first seen in my 2000 short story collection PUNKTOWN. There’s my Bram Stoker- nominated novel MONSTROCITY, also set in the city of Punktown, and my novel LETTERS FROM HADES, set in Hell. These latter three books are also among my best known for having been translated into other languages – several German editions of PUNKTOWN, with differing contents, a Russian PUNKTOWN, MONSTROCITY in German and Greek, and LETTERS FROM HADES translated into Chinese for Taiwanese publisher Fantasy Foundation. The German outfit Lausch has even released audio adaptations of six of my Punktown stories, presented in two boxed sets of three CDs each. Translated into German, of course, but they sure sound cool, special effects and all.

ETO: Out of all that you’ve written, what are you most proud of?

JT: The cliched, but accurate answer to that is that’s like asking a parent to choose their favorite child. Can I mention a few favorite children amongst my brood? They all have their different attributes, you know; this one his freckles, that one her dimples. There’s the aforementioned original PUNKTOWN collection, containing some of my strongest short stories, which taken together “create a whole even greater than the sum of their parts,” as Michael Marshall Smith said in his introduction to an expanded edition. Then there’s my novel LETTERS FROM HADES, a kind of travelogue of my own vision of Hell (and as I said, I’ve set a number of short stories and novellas there since). There’s my novel BONELAND, a surreal, alternate history of 20^th Century America under the influence of unseen, voyeuristic aliens that thrive on human suffering. And my Punktown-based novel DEADSTOCK. Its sequel BLUE WAR is a little more literate, maybe, with more sharply defined themes, but DEADSTOCK is a bit more pulpy fun. Oh, and then there’s HEALTH AGENT (more on that one below). But one child only? Okay, okay…PUNKTOWN.

ETO: Have you ever written something you regretted?

JT: There’s no one story or novel, that’s seen print anyway, that I would take back, though some of the older short stories are minor things, just a little bit of fun, not every one a literary gem. There is one book I have sometimes regretted, that being my collection AAAIIIEEE!!!, which I self-published through iUniverse in 2002. Actually I think it’s a very strong collection and I prefer it over some of my others, and it’s probably sold better than some of my others, but of course you lose a lot of credibility when you self-publish. It wasn’t that no one else wanted AAAIIIEEE!!! – no one else saw it, since I put it together especially to make use of this new POD technology. I kind of did it on impulse, and at the time it was fun, very inexpensive, and I had total control. I wouldn’t want to do it again, though, unless I absolutely had no other option. I felt AAAIIIEEE!!! did receive some legitimacy when Delirium Books reprinted it as a limited edition hardcover, containing one bonus story, in their Dark Essentials series no less.

ETO: Who are your biggest influences?

JT: My love of H. P. Lovecraft is well apparent to those who know my work, since his influence is very strong in novels like DEADSTOCK, MONSTROCITY and EVERYBODY SCREAM!, and my collection UNHOLY DIMENSIONS consists entirely of Lovecraftian work. But I’ve also been very inspired by other favorite writers like Thomas Hardy and Yukio Mishima, and more recently Martin Cruz Smith. Smith’s Arkady Renko formula of investigator-in-a-fascinating-foreign-land (which has also no doubt inspired John Burdett’s Bangkok novels) was on my mind as I wrote my exotic cyber-dick thriller BLUE WAR.

ETO: What do you NOT want to write like? What are your anti-influences?

JT: Ha! Oh man, are you trying to get me in trouble, here? If only I could answer you frankly and name names. I won’t, but I will say I love the written word, and while I can surely appreciate lean prose, I don’t care for fiction that reads like a synopsis, either because the writer is condescending to his readers or can’t really write in the first place. Writing with no flourish, no finesse, no flavor! I recently sampled the prologue of a new mass market horror novel by a writer whose success mystifies me, and its bite-sized, colorless little sentences were giving me fits. It was so amateurish, so cliched; truly, like something a teenager might write (no offense to anyone; I mean a barely talented teenager). But maybe that’s the whole point, and the reason why I haven’t achieved the same level of notoriety. But I’m creeping up on it, despite the handicap of being able to write a sentence longer than ten words!

ETO: What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about you based solely on your work?

JT: That I’m crazy and dangerous, maybe.

ETO: What are some of the biggest misconceptions people may have about your work based solely on knowing you?

JT: That it’s going to be polite and benign.

ETO: What did you want to be when you grew up?

JT: A paleontologist, for a while, because I loved dinosaurs, and for a while a primatologist because I was fascinated by apes and monkeys following the PLANET OF THE APES films, but honestly I didn’t think too much of a future career, even in high school. Work was and remains a totally uninteresting concept for me, unless it is in the pursuit of creativity. (The act of creating is something I savor, like eating, whereas work is an unpleasant necessity, like going to the toilet. Well, at least I can read a good book at work or in the toilet.) In my late teens and early twenties, as I wrote more and more, I had the ambition to turn my creativity into a viable work form and actually make my living from it. Oh, ha ha, such is the naivete of the young.

ETO: How does your life differ now from it did – say – ten years ago?

JT: Oh wow, I could barely begin to encompass that. Let’s just say that in 1998 I had sold plenty of short stories to the small press and the occasional story to professional markets, too, but I hadn’t as yet had a book published. From 2000 to the present I’ve had at least 36 books published, if you include foreign translations and both softcover and hardcover editions (but that’s not including lettered editions with very small print runs and very fancy, very expensive presentations). Also, during this time period I divorced my first wife Rose (though we remain great friends), became deliriously and sometimes disastrously involved with a succession of women, culminating in my 2005 marriage to my wife Hong. Also, since 2004 I’ve traveled six times to my wife’s home country of Vietnam, where prior to that I’d never crossed this country’s borders. Oh, and in 2000 I bought a house, and in 2008 it looks like that house is going to be foreclosed upon. So, yeah, the time span you indicate has been rather eventful, in extremes of good and bad.

ETO: Tell us about your most recent work:

JT: My newest novel is HEALTH AGENT, from Raw Dog Screaming Press, a SF detective-type thriller set in my world of Punktown. New, but old at the same time, as the novel was written by hand between February of 1987 and February of 1989. I actually type with one finger, and thus I hate to retype my old hand-written manuscripts, so my sister-in-law Nancy typed this one up for me (previously Raw Dog themselves typeset my Punktown novel EVERYBODY SCREAM!, and Dark Regions Press has typeset my forthcoming horror novel THOUGHT FORMS – bless their fingers!). Despite its vintage, HEALTH AGENT may be my favorite of my Punktown novels to date; I think it has a lot of energy, a very twisty plot, a dark noir tone. Like the Punktown crime thrillers DEADSTOCK and BLUE WAR (though it doesn’t share those novels’ main character, private eye Jeremy Stake), HEALTH AGENT concerns the misuse of biotechnology, and as in most my Punktown fiction its pre-New Weird weirdness can border on the horrific. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been blending genres a long time and that’s no doubt why I’m often placed in the New Weird camp.

ETO: How did you get the idea?

JT: I think I was with a few friends in Boston, taking the Red Line train to somewhere or other (a museum?), and I believe I saw a religious pamphlet someone had left on the end of a red-tiled escalator bank, and the pamphlet was printed all in bright blue ink. At least that’s an image that lingers with me; maybe it’s blurred with the fanciful idea that follows. My idea was, what if some evil person could contaminate a bunch of business-size cards with a deadly disease, and he left these enigmatic-looking cards – printed in a luminous blue ink – all over the city for innocent victims to find? I never used that particular image in the novel, as it turns out, but it definitely was the genesis of HEALTH AGENT’s antagonist, Toll Loveland, a brilliant but sociopathic artist who uses disease and other biotechnological horrors as instruments of his art. Of course many different ideas, moods and impressions come together to form a novel, but if I had to say there was a particular seed, then I guess it would be that concept of a madman reaching out to the public from behind a veil like the Tylenol poisoner, the Unabomber, or the Anthrax killer of 2001, but doing it all as an artistic statement. By the way, I had a bunch of business cards printed up to advertize HEALTH AGENT, which I’ve been slipping into other people’s books in stores, and maybe I’ll even leave them in subway stations on occasion…heh. On the card, it says, “If you have touched this card, then you are INFECTED. For the antidote, read HEALTH AGENT by Jeffrey Thomas,” and so on. So does Toll Loveland spring from me, or am I now springing from him? The mind reels.

ETO: How long did it take to write the book?

JT: Well, as I say it was written between 1987 and 1989, but I actually halted right at its mid-point so as to write the novel EVERYBODY SCREAM!, which screamed for my attention just then, inspired as it was by an annual country fair I had just attended (and have only missed once since). I returned to HEALTH AGENT after that, and somehow managed to pick up all those complex plot threads and start my weaving again. I really doubt this gap would be apparent to anybody, not even after this admission.

ETO: When are you most productive? Are there some kinds of environments that are more productive for you than others?

JT: I guess I used to have certain favorable times (like Sunday nights, as I recall), but that all seems so long ago now. Now I’ll take whatever stray hour or two I can steal for myself. I prefer to be alone in my apartment when I write, ideally, but I can write with noise all around me if I have no alternative. I used to work in a boot factory, and when it was slow I’d write my stories by hand, right there at my work station with the sound of machines and blaring radios all around me. In 1980 I wrote nearly all of my first Punktown story (an as yet unpublished novel) in that factory.

ETO: What about other projects? Do you have anything else out there right now you might like to talk about? What’s your next project?

JT: My third collection of Punktown short stories has just been released (following 2000’s PUNKTOWN and 2005’s PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY, half the contents of the latter consisting of my brother Scott’s take on Punktown). This one is called VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN, from Dark Regions Press. Most of the stories are reprinted from a variety of publications and anthologies, though there are also some original pieces. The stories in VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN tend to be very dark in tone, the horror element in my Punktown fiction that I alluded to earlier very prevalent here – especially in the last four stories, which are tributes to Poe, Robert Chambers, and Lovecraft (the last two tales). And earlier I made mention that my novel THOUGHT FORMS had been accepted by Dark Regions Press as well. THOUGHT FORMS is more outright supernatural horror, without my usual science fiction setting. I think it may be the single scariest thing I’ve ever written. It’s two alternating stories, really (sort of like DEADSTOCK, which was written much later) that relate to each other. One plot-line follows a man living in a secluded house, haunted by personal demons and tormented by a romantic relationship, who comes under siege by a horde of mysterious robed figures. The other plot-line concerns this man’s cousin, trapped in a plastic factory at night with his coworkers by an elusive monster. The original title of the book was TULPAS, but I changed that after I discovered a horror novel called THE TULPA by the late J. N. Williamson. In Tibet, a tulpa is a being brought into existence through the act of visualization and force of will.

ETO: Are there any other writers out there you’d like to bring to our attention?

JT: I always like to pimp my younger brother Scott, because he’s good, damn it (two of his stories – two – were reprinted in volume #15 of THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR). Whereas my stories often focus on the future, his tend to delve into the past, usually the 18^th and 19^th Centuries of either England or New England, but he’s also written a lot of wonderful dark fantasy stories such as those collected in his book WESTERMEAD. Westermead is sort of Scott’s Punktown. His most recent collections, all of which are just superb – truly creepy in the classical vein of M. R. James, and highly poetic in tone – are MIDNIGHT IN NEW ENGLAND from Down East Books, and . OVER THE DARKENING FIELDS and THE GARDEN OF GHOSTS, from Dark Regions Press. I’d also recommend Scott’s short story “Lt. Privet’s Love Song” in THE SOLARIS BOOK OF NEW FANTASY. He’s got such a great, unique style.

ETO: Where can we learn more about you?

JT: Well, my blog can get very personal. It’s over at www.jeffreyethomas.com (don’t forget that middle initial “e”). I have a message board there, too. Please visit me…please.

ETO: Where can we buy your stuff?

JT: My mass market books DEADSTOCK and BLUE WAR have been pretty widespread through the major bookstore chains and all, but my indie press books are best ordered online from the publishers directly, or from Amazon, or cool online bookstores like Horror Mall. You can find my author’s page (here).