Pirate's Delight: An Interview with Hal Duncan by Eric Arvin

Eric Arvin: Let’s start out the philosophical way: What’s your personal definition of beauty?

Hal Duncan: Beauty is a matter of something being well-formed, and for me form follows function, so a lot of it is about simplicity of structure, an elegance and ergonomics. Like where mathematicians talk about a solution being aesthetically pleasing, or where coders will appreciate a well-designed algorithm. It's an absence of frills and fussiness, of clumsy clunky bits and bobs bolted on where they're not necessary. On a base level, in terms of flesh, it's an athletic physique rather than your beefcake look, a body that's honed, toned but not bulked-up beyond what it needs to be, sleek like a greyhound or a racehorse. I don't think aesthetics is entirely about beauty. As well as the elegance you want intricacy, to create not just a sense of beauty but of intrigue, a sense that's intellectual in the same way that beauty is sensual. So for me beauty is one side of a coin, the other side of which is... I don't know... interest, intrigue, intricacy.

Arvin: I recently read your short story “The Island of the Pirate Gods” from Lethe Press’ Wilde Stories 2008. Your playfulness with words is infectious. You have a lyrical prose, verging on musical at times with your use of alliteration. Why do you think readers of speculative fiction or magical realism are more keen to this more poetic style of writing?

Duncan: I don't know if they are. I think it's fair to make that connection for magical realism and for some areas of speculative fiction, but there's a huge part of the market for fantastic fiction that's looking for a very commercial type of genre fiction, largely defined by transparent prose. You still hear a lot of voices within the sf community grumbling about writers who're—as they see it—more concerned with surface style than with telling a good story. I think that whole style versus content argument is bogus—the words, the phrases, the clauses, the sentences, they are the sodding content—but you do get a lot of readers who just want to immerse themselves in the narrative. That's why Dan Brown sells shitloads despite his prose being appalling.

But where there is an attraction to more lyrical prose within the sf readership—and it is there—I suspect it's because all of that fiction is powered by strangeness. Naturalist fiction can be defined by the fact that it never bucks the basic level of suspension-of-disbelief. What I'd call strange fiction—which includes not just speculative fiction and magical realism, but a whole host of modernist and postmodernist, literary experimentalist and commercial genre fictions—can be defined by the exact ways that it does fuck with suspension-of-disbelief. And readers who're looking for the sort of quirks that create the thrill of the incredible might well be, I think, more open to other types of linguistic quirk that for many would point up the artifice of the text, throw them out of the story.

In some ways even, maybe it's the logical extension of that desire for novelty that's a core part of strange fiction. It seems logical to me that a mode of fiction continually looking for new ways to be weird, new quirks that will excite the jaded reader, should end up taking that weirdness right down into the text itself, trying to imbue the prose with a sense of the weird, the fantastic, the magical.

Arvin: I love how you made the pirate genre your own with this tale. You would think pirates would be a given for gay storytellers (lots of sweaty men on a boat), but I’m hard-pressed to think of many other writers who delve into that area. Why is that?

Duncan: Well, you're dealing with a pulp form that had gone out of fashion until the first Pirates of the Carribean movie reminded people of just how fucking cool pirates are. Even now, you're only looking at a few anthologies and special issues of magazines, largely coming from the sf scene, which have devoted themselves to pirate stories. And unless you were bitten by the genre bug as a young writer, unless you're happy to write fiction that's not going to earn you much kudos outside the genre community, well, I suspect a large proportion of gay writers, like a large proportion of straight writers, will tend to buy into the idea that to be taken seriously you've got to write naturalistic slice-of-life fiction about moments of apotheosis found within the quotidian minutiae of everyday life. I imagine a lot of gay writers take that "write what you know" advice to heart and end up writing contemporary realist works based on their personal experiences. Which is all very nice, but kinda bourgeois; contemporary realism is largely by and for the middle classes, even if it's not about them.

From the genre side, my guess is you don't get so many gay pirate stories simply because pirate stories are part of a Romantic tradition, like westerns, space opera, Hollywood action movies, and so on. All those stories so deeply focused on heroes and villains, they're largely aimed at a big-ass market of male adolescents who're predominantly straight. Those boys might want to read about, or watch, a strapping young man kick the arse of an evil tyrant, save the kingdom, and win the beautiful princess, but they don't generally want to see him get down and dirty with the handsome prince. Times do change. The commercial fantasy market is now actually a lot more open to gay characters than you might think, but you're dealing with a genre tradition that's all about archetypal (if not formulaic) heroes and rogues, and one that isn't always too interested in the subtext which is sometimes, to be honest, dripping out of the work.

I think that's a damn shame because even leaving aside the half-naked men, the swordplay, and the long periods at sea, the classic swashbuckling rogue pretty much sets the bar in terms of flamboyance. Christ, Jack Sparrow is a total flamer.

Arvin: What started your interest in pirates?

Duncan: Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Buccaneer. At weekends when I was a kid, one of the channels on British TV used to do a Sunday matinee movie—Biblical epics and swashbucklers, all those old classics starring Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Errol Flynn, Stewart Granger. I love that sort of stuff. And The Crimson Buccaneer was hands-down my favourite. Flynn was hotter, but Lancaster just romps through that movie. When he slaps his thigh with a gleaming grin and bellows, "Gather round, lads and lassies! Gather round!" he just captures the sheer fucking gusto of everything that the fantasy of piracy is about, the free spirit of the rogue, the absolute commitment to having a Fucking Good Time. If teenagers want to be rock stars, rock stars want to be pirates.

Arvin: Why the Shakespeare allusion? I love it. It’s absolutely charming. I’m interested to know how the idea came about?

Duncan: The Tempest is pretty much my favourite Shakespeare play. Apart from some great writing and really interesting thematics, it's got all the cool fantastic stuff -- the exotic island, the magician Prospero, the spritely Ariel, the demonic Caliban. It's just plain neat. And at the end of it Prospero goes off home to Milan, leaving Ariel freed and Caliban's fate unspecified. So for a long time I'd fancied doing something that played with the idea of Ariel and Caliban on the island afterwards, left to their own devices. There's a great story by a Carribean writer, Nalo Hopkinson, which is written from the point of view of Caliban's sister. It's a totally different take, but it's done so well, it's the sort of thing that sort of reminds you of the potential this idea you've been kicking around for a while might have.

Also being a total Lost addict, I have to admit, made me even more keen. There's so many hints of The Tempest in there, it's so easy to read that magic island as a variant of Shakespeare's. But they don't seem to be doing anything so straightforward as to say, "OK, the black smoke is Ariel/Caliban, and the people controlling it, or trying to, are wannabe Prosperos," so if that's not the direction they're going... well... someone has to use the idea, right? And it fits perfectly with the pirate background. Shakespeare is clearly drawing on tales of the New World, the Carribean islands; and in the story of Caliban and his African mother there's a huge scope for tying it all into the slave trade; so you can have this rollicking fun tale, by throwing pirates up and against sprites, but at the same time you can make a serious point about aspects of the historical reality that are generally glossed over. How could I resist that?

Arvin: I’m an absolute symbolism whore. The story of Matelotage and Mutiny struck me as particularly parallel to today in regards to gay people. Was that intentional, or am I just literary-slutting?

Duncan: There's definitely some pointed comments on gay marriage to be read into it there. The story was coming together before the US election made the gay marriage issue in America quite so noticeable on this side of the Atlantic, but it's been bubbling away for years; it was definitely on my radar. So while it wasn't written as a particularly "topical" story, there's no doubt that the debate had a part to play in shaping it. Actually, that whole story-within-the-story is laid out in more detail in a 43-verse sea shanty (the song that Flash Jack sings a few lines of in one scene, published on a website called Farrago's Wainscot) which is even more in-yer-face. It's kind of a queer/pirate myth, a fable for outsiders and outlaws in general, a story of repression and revenge, and it ends with a rallying cry which is tongue-in-cheek but which is basically a rebel yell, defiant queerness couched in metaphor:

Ye scurvy bums, ye foul scum,
Ye sodomites, to me!
Ye godless beasts of buggery,
Arise with Mutiny!
We'll plunder from the Spanish Main
To the coast of Barbary,
For the pirate gods of Matelotage
And his lover, Mutiny!

I'm not really into tub-thumping polemics, but that whole section, the tale of the Pirate Gods of Love and Death, is definitely a sort of bawdy, balls-out fuck-you to the moral majority. It's my way of saying, don't think we'll surrender quietly. Cross us and we'll take you on. Remember Achilles: had his boyfriend slain by Hector, killed the fucker and fragged the body ten times round the walls of Troy. Now that's what I call a hissy fit.

Arvin: Do you think “matelotage” was frowned upon on the open seas? Men are men, and a booty is a booty, right?

Duncan: This is my favourite thing about the story, actually, because matelotage wasn't just invented for the fiction. There was this weird arty-crafty knotwork made from spare bits and bobs of rope. And there was this tradition, named after it, where two men would proclaim their union, "tie the knot" and become matelotaged. Their property became shared. If one died the other inherited it. It was, to all intents and purpose, a civil union or a secular marriage. I don't know how extensive this custom was; the references are fairly sketchy. I don't think anybody knows to what extent those partnerships were sexual; again, the details are vague. But it's hard to imagine you didn't have just as much institutional homosexuality in those circumstances as you see in modern prisons, for example. It's hard to imagine you didn't have gays running away to sea to escape all the wife-and-kids expectations, being drawn to an all-male environment that, you have to remember, also opened the way to far-flung cultures with entirely different mores. It's hard to imagine, I think, that those matelotaged sailors weren't binding themselves together as something way more than just good friends.

Actually, part of me really likes the idea that we have our own tradition. Fuck civil unions; I don't want scraps thrown from the table. Fuck marriage; I don't even want to sit at the table, play all nicey-nice with the straights. I want to get matelotaged to the man I love.

Arvin: I picture your sprites as so much sexier than, say, Tinkerbell. In fact, what came to mind, aside from the obvious Puck-ish Shakespearean allusion, were these sexy boys here in the States who get all donned up in glitter and wings for the Faerie Folk festivals. From where did your idea for the look of the sprites come?

Duncan: Heh, yeah, I think my faeries are more Peter Pan than Tinkerbell, and more Pan the Greek god than Pan the Barrie character. I don't know if you can really say the idea was mine though, because that image just seems to be there, in the culture. It's an image that goes with an archetype of behaviour—the gay fairy or the folkloric fairy as this flighty, fluttery, playful, pouty girly-boy. So, yes, you've got those sexy boys at Faerie Folk festivals in the US, or Mardi Gras, or Halloween, or Pride, or most any costumed parade you care to mention. You've got Shakespeare's Puck, Ariel and all the rest of those sprites who would, back in the day, have been played by the same sexy boys that were pretty enough to play Juliet, in a theatrical culture that's kind of notoriously flouncy at the best of times. You've got Robert Sean Leonard playing Puck in Dead Poet's Society, queered by the whole doomed sensitivity vibe. You've got Orlando Bloom playing Legolas in The Lord of the Rings—all the elves of contemporary fantasy, in fact. You've got Kyros Christian and Dillon Samuels who wear the attitude if not the glitter and wings (or anything at all, in fact). It's a sort of elven ephebe look—slender, smooth-skinned, fine-featured, boyish. It's the classic twink. That's just what a fairy is.

To take it from another angle, the image of fairies as we have it was pretty much set by the Victorians—that gracile figure with multicoloured wings, pointy ears, big eyes. What I'm doing, like a lot of modern fantasy, is riffing off that but throwing in other aspects that hark back to Shakespeare's fairies, the elves of Mediaeval folklore or even older, earthier pagan woodland spirits—more impish creatures with horns and tails. The sexiness comes in largely because I think infantilising that archetype, turning the ithyphallic Pan into the eternally prepubescent Peter Pan, so to speak, is kinda dodgy. That archetype of the fairy, the sprite, the imp, is an archetype of life lived in the moment. Part of that life for any adult is sexual, so if you're letting that spirit out in your writing either you admit the sexuality or you deny it, repress it, lock the archetype in a non-sexual form. I don't think that works and I don't think it's healthy. That way lies yaoi, Harry/Draco slash fiction, and all the subtext of repressed sexuality in Barrie's Peter Pan that makes Michael Jackson's Neverland so disturbing.

Arvin: Do you believe in fairies?

Duncan: I am a fairy. We all are. Or at least a part of us is, inside.

Arvin: The genre of speculative fiction has a very devoted following, and some great writers have helped carve out an impressive alcove in that particular section of the world library. Who are some of the writers who inspired you? (I know this is one of those questions that gets ho-hum after a while. But I would really like to know {smiles adoringly}.)

Duncan: I'm going to cheat here and throw in quite a few writers outside the genre as well because although the lead-up implies it, the question doesn't actually specify that they have to be genre, heh. So, to reel off a few names:

Peter Ackroyd, Alfred Bester, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Italo Calvino, Guy Davenport, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, John Gardner, William Gibson, Robert A. Heinlein, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, George Orwell, Harold Pinter, Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, Neal Stephenson, Wallace Stevens, Edward Whittemore, W.B. Yeats, Roger Zelazny

It's not a complete A-Z, but it's off the top of my head. I could go into some of the reasoning behind the choices, but to be honest, with any one of them I'd end up going on for pages, because all of them have blown me away in one respect or another, opened my eyes up to the potentials of literature. That's the real problem with this sort of question. Even if you can figure out where to begin, the harder part is being able to stop.

Arvin: I’m going to throw some speculative fiction writers’ names at you. What do you think of each? If you’ve not read them just throw them right back: James Purdy (magical realism meets Southern Gothic).

Duncan: Don't know his work.

Arvin: China Mieville.

Duncan: Intimidates me with his muscles.

Arvin: Isabelle Allende.

Duncan: Keep meaning to get round to her.

Arvin: Geoff Ryman.

Duncan: Wears a tiara with great panache.

Arvin: Jeanette Winterson.

Duncan: The TV adaptation of Oranges... was a bit bleak. To be serious, Mieville is the only one I've read enough of to say anything sensible about (for shame). I really like the baroque prose and general richness of his New Crobuzon fiction, but I absolutely fucking loved Un Lun Dun; it was a total pleasure to read from start to end. It's inventive as fuck, full of all these wonderful ideas based on word-play. The basic idea is that major cities all have un-cities where all the garbage and junk ends up and takes on a life of its own. So you have things like the “unbrellas”, where broken umbrellas from this world end up coming alive in this otherworld. It's so much fun.

Arvin: In reviews of your books Vellum and Ink you have been compared to James Joyce in your style. Jamie O’Neill is another writer who has been compared to Joyce. How do you feel about being in that tradition? Is there pressure or do you just have to flap your wings and let it go?

Duncan: I take all such comparisons with a huge pinch of salt, partly because I've read a whole bunch of reviews comparing me to writers I've never read, or hadn't read when I was writing the books, and partly because I sometimes suspect reviewers are picking up on interviews where I've blathered on about how much I love the writer they're comparing me to. I've seen comparisons to Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Chuck Palahnuik and all sorts, none of whom I'd read a lot of at the time—or at least not the particular works that were being cited. Hell, some of the comparisons seem to be based on the most superficial features, like the idea of an ancient tome with a history shrouded in legend leading one reviewer to use The Da Vinci Code as a benchmark. A lot of the time, what you have is reviewers reaching for a sort of neat X-meets-Y summation which is more like a pitch than a review—Ulysses meets Neuromancer, The Name of the Rose meets Snow Crash, Prometheus Bound meets The X-Men. Sometimes they do encapsulate certain facets of the books, where they're coming from, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the books are like the works of Joyce or Gibson, Eco or Stephenson, Aeschylus or Marvel Comics at anything but the most abstract level. If you look at it in that context, the comparison isn't about quality. It's not about whether they measure up to Joyce or whoever. So I don't stress about it too much.

The only annoyance of it is that those sort of thumbnail comparisons do tend to get picked-up and propagated, and morphed along the way, which leads to hype and its backlash. I mean, I'm happy to place myself in relationship to Joyce. It's just that my view of that relationship is pretty much with me on my hands and knees, saying, "We're not worthy!" Sure, there's the use of stream-of-consciousness prose with a distinctly Irish voice, ancient myths as a structural layer beneath the text, even a historical setting in parts that's clearly going to suggest links with the early 20th century Ireland Joyce was coming from. And, fuck yeah, I'd love to think my work had the depth, the import, that would put it into the same league; I'm kind of ambitious in that crazy-eyed, damn-the-torpedoes, full-steam-ahead sorta way. But it's hubris of the most laughable variety to think you've actually succeeded in doing something that's really on that level.

The thing is, ultimately I'm coming as much from a pulp tradition as from that modernist tradition. You don't find a lot of nanotechnology and exploding airships in Joyce. So, fuck knows, a reader coming to Vellum and Ink with an expectation of something in the tradition of Joyce might well think any comparison was utterly absurd. Or they might get exactly what I'm doing and love it. At the end of the day, you just fire it out there and hope for the best.

Arvin: What books have you read this year that knocked you on your butt? What about music? Movies?

Duncan: I haven't read that much this year. Actually, I'm way behind on my reading, with two bookcases worth of books sitting waiting to be picked up, and many of them works that have been out for years and that I'm only just getting round to. Or not getting round to, as the case may be. But one book that I can pick out is a non-fiction work by Farah Mendlesohn, The Rhetorics of Fantasy, which is an amazingly insightful study of the genre. Obviously it's not a book I'd recommend to someone who doesn't read fantasy, but if you do, even if you wouldn't normally think of reading a work of critique, it's absolutely fascinating. In a lot of respects, I think she's spot-on in her analysis, and her approach isn't at all reductive. Where she identifies four key "rhetorics" of fantasy, her model doesn't partition everything in the genre into these pigeonholes; it's flexible, extensible, offers a lot of scope for development.

In terms of music, actually, I caught two incredible gigs within the space of a week, the first being Rob K and Uncle Butcher (aka The Jam Messengers) and the second being Amanda Palmer from The Dresden Dolls on her solo tour, supported by Jason Webley. Both were amazing. Amanda Palmer I don't need to say much about, because her awesomeness is fairly well established. If you haven't heard The Dresden Dolls, you should have; they're easy enough to track down. And her solo album is just fucking superb. Jason Webley though—he was a real discovery. My glib thumbnail description would be: imagine a younger (and way better-looking) Tom Waits with an accordion instead of a piano and absinthe instead of whisky. Songs like “Dance While the Sky Crashes Down”. I came away from the gig with all three of the CDs of his they had for sale.

As for Rob K and Uncle Butcher, they're these mad bastards, one from Hawaii, the other from Sao Paolo, who met over Myspace and started collaborating on this incredible blues rock with a sleazy edge to it, songs with lyrics like “My baby so hard she broke my diamond ring”. The live show was amazing. Rob K's in his fifties or so, but he comes on like Iggy Pop, doing headstands on stage, climbing the walls, clambering up onto the bar to sing from there. And testifying between songs. I mean, he's a full-on rock-and-roll preacher, bringing love to the people. Awesome act, and the guys themselves are totally sound. I ended up talking to them afterwards and we got on like a fucking house on fire.

Movies? It has to be No Country For Old Men. I like the Coens anyway, but that movie was just something else. Far and away the best thing I saw all year. And high profile enough that I reckon I don't have to explain why. Just go watch it.

Arvin: How much hot ass has your writing brought your way?

Duncan: None, annoyingly. Absolutely zero. Well, I've got together with one guy through the web of connections that is the sf community, but that doesn't really count because the writing had sod all to do with it; he hadn't read my stuff, and we would have hit it off however we met. So if by "hot ass" we mean cute, slim, pert-buttocked groupies in their late teens or early twenties (preferably with that emo/indie thing going on), and by "brought your way" we mean offering themselves up for my lascivious (and possibly inventive) enjoyment because they're wowed by my writerly abilities... well, I'm still waiting. And single. And pretty easy actually.

And on gaydar.

Just so you know.

Arvin: Do you think dating another writer would be a good thing or a bad thing?

Duncan: It could go either way, I imagine, if not both. I tend to be attracted more to creative types, guys with some sort of artistic impulse, that spark of passion that pushes you into mucking around with words, paint, music, whatever. I find the whole boho waster vibe immensely appealing, along with a capacity for alcohol and nicotine consumption and a tendency towards mental instability. It's possibly not the most sensible taste in men, but it's the way God made me, as they say. And another writer would probably fit that profile nicely, unless they're all disciplined and shit. I understand there are some writers that manage to get up before three in the afternoon.

Also, some of my most irritating quirks and foibles are, I think, to do with being a writer. The weird hours, alternating between periods of laziness and periods of being completely caught up in your work, not being able to listen when someone's talking to you, no matter how hard you try, because an idea has just sparked in your head, turning into Jack Nicholson in The Shining when you're blocked on something, a tendency to work through stuff in your writing rather than turn to other people—that sort of stuff can be hard to take, I'm sure. It's possible that another writer would be more likely to understand, get where I'm coming from. On the other hand, it's entirely possible we'd just drive each other nuts with that shit. Rimbaud and Verlaine didn't exactly have the most stable relationship.

Arvin: You seem to draw quite a bit on history in your work. How important has the study of history been to you in your life?

Duncan: Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it. It seems a bit fraudulent to describe my jackdaw approach to research as studying, but I do think it's fucking essential to have a bit of historical perspective, not just as a writer but as a human being. I think a lot of my attitude comes from having a dad who was a history and modern studies teacher, growing up in a house full of books on those subjects. If you have access to that, it sort of becomes horrifying how much is neglected in the culture at large, how things like the Red Clyde movement, the Armenian Massacre, even the Spanish Civil War can be completely unknown to people you meet. There's a scene in Vellum set around Bloody Friday—January 31st, 1919, when a whole load of Glaswegian workers marched on George Square and had the police set on them. Actually, the government sent tanks in the next day, afraid there was going to be a socialist uprising. But this is barely even in the history books. So I've had people who assumed that scene was an invention, an alternate history based on Ireland's Bloody Sunday. It's an understandable mistake—I don't blame them—but it scares me how easily we forget things like that. When Hitler was justifying the Final Solution, he asked the question, “Who now remembers the Armenians?” That was his way of saying, it doesn't matter. We can commit the most vile atrocity imaginable and people will forget about it. It'll get washed away by the waves of ignorance and disinterest, because at the end of the day people are more concerned about the petty little problems of their everyday existence. We mouth the sentiment, “Never forget,” but how many people actually mean it? And as long as we forget the mistakes of the past, we don't learn from them, and that means the fuckers can do it again and again and again and again.

I guess that's where the study of history becomes important in my life – in the sense that, as a writer, maybe I'm in a good position to... I don't know... pay witness. I'm not an authority or an expert in any way, shape or form; I feel deeply ignorant, actually, in a lot of respects. I don't study this period or that systematically. I don't know any one area of history really well. What I'm trying to do, I think, is find the little details, the personal stories of some member of the International Brigades, say, that don't really tell you much about the battles, the strategies, the general course of events, but that do, hopefully, make it real to the reader, make them realise that the past is not another country, or if it is then it's right next door, just a step away, and they don't do things that differently there at all.

Arvin: What’s the “big picture”?

Duncan: People die.

Arvin: Give me an example of the most boring question you’ve ever been asked (Please avoid hurting the interviewer’s tender feelings when answering)

Duncan: I honestly can't think of it. It must have been so boring I've scrubbed it from my memory. The nearest I can think of—sorry—are the two that only get boring if you've been doing a lot of interviews, because they're almost always there: What are your influences? What are you working on next? Even those are not boring in and of themselves, because hey, they're about the two things a writer finds most exciting surely—the stuff that excites them enough to want to write, the inspirations and ideas. It's just that when you end up saying the same things over and over, you get bored with the sound of your own voice on those subjects. And those are the last things you want that to happen with.

Arvin: If your books were ever adapted for film, who would you like to see helming them and/or starring in them?

Duncan: Vellum and Ink are pretty much unfilmable, I think. The fractured narrative and multiplicity of styles—from historical realism to comic-book action-adventure—makes them such a chimera, I can't see them working on-screen at all. Maybe Guillermo del Toro could give it a good go, though. It's not the stunning visuals he brings to his work though, so much as the ability to play the fantasy off against reality—like in Pan's Labyrinth. I mean, Hellboy 1 and 2 show that he could do the Jack Flash sequences wonderfully, I think, but from the real-world scenes in Pan's Labyrinth I reckon he could also capture the more naturalistic stuff really nicely.

As for the actors, that's a bit easier. Jonathon Rhyss Meyer would make an awesome Jack Carter. I think Colin “Potty Mouth” Farrell could do a good Seamus Finnan; he could certainly pull off the swearing. I can see Rupert Everett as Reynard, Christian Bale as Joey, maybe, and Eliza Dushku for Phreedom. And maybe Edward Furlong for Thomas/Puck. I don't know, though. It would be nice to have actors who were actually gay playing the Jack and Puck roles. Hell, if they could only act their way out of a paper bag, I'd go for Dillon Samuels and Kyros Christian there just to be mischievous.

Arvin: The worst film adaptation of a favorite book?

Duncan: Johnny Mnemonic, surely. It doesn't matter of it's only one short story out of the whole collection, it still makes all other bad adaptations pale into insignificance against its awfulness.

Arvin: How’s your head doing? I saw in an older interview that you had a bit of an accident.

Duncan: It feels fine these days, but I have a permanent lump on my right forehead, just below the hairline, from being dropped on my fricking head by Jason from Night Shade Books. It may well be my own fault admittedly. See, we were at the bar at the World Fantasy Convention a couple of years back, and someone suggested we head up to a room party. Being drunk and lazy, I make like a spoiled brat and say to them, “Carry me!”, not expecting to be taken seriously. Jason, being an ex-Marine, just grabs me and throws me over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. This was all well and good as we walked through the nicely carpeted bar, out into the marble-floored foyer, whereupon – according to Jason – I wriggled. Now, I don't remember wriggling, but it is just possible that... well, I have a vague recollection of seeing my cigarette lighter fall out of my pocket, and thinking that if I just reached down far enough... I mean, the lighter is a fucking essential, right? Anyway, he loses balance and we go down, with me hitting the marble floor head-first.

This, of course, causes much consternation among everyone around. As Chris Roberson of Monkeybrain Books describes it, I'm on my knees, blood streaming down my forehead, arms out to the side, like Willem fucking Dafoe at the end of Platoon. Everyone is asking how I am, but they can't really tell if my incoherent mumbling is because I'm concussed, drunk, Scottish or all of the above. They eventually settle on me being OK, in the end, because after cleaning off the blood and putting a band-aid on it, Allison Baker holds a cold beer can to the lump to bring down the swelling. I mumble something incomprehensible, and they assume I'm saying that it's OK, I can hold it myself. So Allison gives me the can... which I immediately crack open and take a swig from. That seems like a fair enough sign that everything's peachy. So I got dropped on my fricking head. Yeah, whatever. Pass me another beer.

Only now I have this huge-ass lump that would look like a fucking baby lamb's horn or something if it was any bigger. I'm going to have to get Jason to drop me again, but on the other side, just to even it up.

Of course, now at least I can say that I've been dropped by an editor, literally.

Arvin: What’s next for you? Are there any massive projects on the horizon?

Duncan: The next book, Escape from Hell! is out at the end of this month, beginning of next, actually. That's a short, fast-paced plot-driven story that might seem like a bit of a departure after Vellum and Ink. It's the story of a hitman, a hooker, a hobo and a homo in the ultimate prison break... escape from Hell itself! If any of my stuff would make a good movie, it's that; hell, it was kind of imagined as something that Sam Raimi could direct, with Samuel L. Jackson and Laurence Fishburn starring. Cause they've never been together in a movie, to the best of my knowledge, and how fucking cool would that be?

What I'm working on at the moment is the next novel, a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I want to do something similar to the fragmented approach in Vellum and Ink, the story taking place across different realities—historical, mythical and futuristic—but this will be more linear. I don't want to go into too much detail, because as I was saying above, talking too much about a project can sort of dissipate some of the excitement you want to be harnessing in order to actually get it written. But for those who don't know the Gilgamesh story, it's the earliest written work of fiction we have, and it's got the love between two men right at the centre of it, which I think is kinda cool.

Arvin: I thank you for your time. I find your writing truly inspired. My jealousy doth turn me green-ish.

Duncan: Thanks. It's been a pleasure.

 

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Eric Arvin resides in the same sleepy Indiana river town where he grew up. He graduated from Hanover College with a Bachelors in History. He has lived, for brief periods, in Italy and Australia. He has survived brain surgery and his own loud-mouthed personal demons. He is the author of The Rest is Illusion, SubSurdity: Vignettes from Jasper Lane, and the anthology Slight Details & Random Events. Catch him online at www.ericarvin.net and www.myspace.com/erivthearvin.