Charlie Huston Interview

Coinciding with the release on September 30 of the latest Joe Pitt novel"Every Last Drop", I had an opportunity to interview author Charlie Huston about the mayhem that is the Joe Pitt universe as well as his upcoming book "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death". Enjoy!

The first three novels in the Joe Pitt series "Already Dead", "No Dominion", and "Half the Blood of Brooklyn" were all amazing examples of gritty urban fantasy noir. The fourth Joe Pitt novel, "Every Last Drop" comes out on September 30, 2008. For all the fans of the Joe Pitt series, could you describe the latest novel, and for those who haven't read the series could you give a brief overview of the Joe Pitt universe? What aspect of the series do you think would appeal to the average reader who isn't familiar with your work?

Charlie Huston: Joe is a fixer for a contemporary vampire demimonde in New York City. He works the cracks between rival clans of vampires that vie for power. ELD is the fourth in the series. Ostensibly it should stand alone, but as the second to last Pitt book, it’s pretty deep into the mythology of the series. But the basic setup doesn’t change much from book to book. Something gets fucked up in the vampire underworld, Joe is used as a pawn to deal with it, he gets all fucked up, he turns the table and other people get all fucked up, then things get really fucked up, then Joe generally disembowels someone or bites their eye out. And he’s got a non-vampire girlfriend. Because you have to have one of those.

Is there any plot choice you made earlier in the series that you now wish you could change? Has the series evolved differently than you had originally imagined it?

Charlie Huston: Yes, there are things I wish I could change, but I can’t share them. After the series is done I’ll be able to write about some parts I screwed up.

And, yes, it has evolved in manners far different from what I expected. When I started Already Dead I intended a world that was populated with a wider variety of the supernatural. I had, for instance, Joe referring to having recently tussled with something that might or might not have been a werewolf. Joe was going to be a vampire skeptic. I can’t really remember why I veered away from that concept.

One of the interesting things about Joe Pitt is that even though he is a vampire, he isn't completely immoral, or even ammoral as evidenced by his struggle with a serious moral dilemma involving his girlfriend in the first three books. However, he is also quite far from being good. How do you keep the reader sympathizing with Joe and not turned off by some of his more horrific actions?

Charlie Huston: Honestly, I make no effort at all to make Joe sympathetic. He’s motivated almost entirely by self interest. The struggle he has with himself over whether or not to infect his girlfriend has more to do with his fear of losing her company than it does any regard for her well being. But even the most selfish individual has involuntary emotional responses to stress and danger. Joe does horrible things, commits cold blooded murder on a regular basis, and would do it more often if he didn’t think the trail of blood-drained bodies would expose him to danger. He’s a sociopath. The fact that he loves his girlfriend and has a soft spot for kids doesn’t redeem him in any way. To the extent that Joe is sympathetic, I think it’s purely a byproduct of the fact that nearly everyone else in the books are such obvious dicks.

The Joe Pitt series is usually lumped into the urban fantasy genre since it deals mostly with vampires. Urban fantasy is a hot genre currently, but there seems to be a lack of overall quality to many of the novels in the genre. Many of the books are essentially romance novels with supernatural elements to the stories which appear to be directed towards a female audience. Do you think the Joe Pitt series belongs to the urban fantasy genre, or would you classify it as something else? To you is there a book that is a definitive example of what an urban fantasy should be?

Charlie Huston: I really didn’t know that there was an urban fantasy genre until very recently. I haven’t read any of the books classified in that manner, but a general lack of quality wouldn’t surprise me. Not because I think the genre would attract less talented writers, but because the simple fact is that most books, genre or otherwise, aren’t very good. Quality in anything, art, science, politics, food, design, you name it, is hard to come by. That’s why it carries a premium. When I think of the Pitt books in terms of genre, I usually go first to noir. The language, style, plotting, characters, all the structural elements and the words themselves, are very consciously hardboiled noir. Fit over that structure is a surface derived from horror: a vampire underworld.

As for a classic example of the genre, I have no idea.

You have another book, "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death", that will be coming out soon. Could you briefly describe what the book is about? Any word about the release date?

Charlie Huston: It's about a slacking ex elementary school teacher who stumbles into the world of professional trauma cleaning. There's a femme fatale, a highway hijacker, the angel of death, and a pipe bomb suicide. I like it. Comes out in January of 2009.

You've been involved with writing comic books for a while, particularly Moon Knight. How has that experience affected the way you write novels? Did you take anything from the medium that you've been able to successfully apply to your books?

Charlie Huston: I don't know that it's had an explicit influence, but comic book writing does demand, suprisingly, more structure than writing a novel. Mind you, that's just because I use very little advance structure when I write prose. Some novelists would laugh at the idea. But there is a very scematic side to writing comic books scripts.

Continuing along the comics theme, the Joe Pitt series would make a great comic book series. Any chance we could see a comic adaptation of the series in the future?

Charlie Huston: I've considered the idea of a Pitt graphic novel, but never made a move. I'm pretty busy these days, so I doubt I'd ever move on the idea until I have more time to breathe. And I expect an adaptation is more likely than an original Pitt comic.

You recently posted on your website pulpnoir.com that you had finished reading all of Charles Bukowski's prose. You also wrote that you were influenced by Bukowski's work. How has Bukowski's prose influenced the way you write? You seem to have the same keen ear for dialogue that he did. Is Bukowski's sparse realism something you try to achieve in your own work?

Charlie Huston: I never made a conscious attempt to write in a Bukowskian style, but I think it's there in several aspects. The prose tends to be stripped down, bare essentials storytelling. There's the vulgarity, the lowlife settings and characters. the drinking and drug use. Far less screwing in my books. Fewer mentions of big asses and tits.

You recently changed the focus of your website to be more content-based by publishing new, original fiction like "Necrotic Culver" and "Shadding Lyttle" under the auspices of The Book of All Future Names. Could you explain why it's important for you to publish The Book of All Future Names and where the inspiration for the stories came from? Will we be seeing you write more short fiction for traditional publication in the future?

Charlie Huston: Well, strictly speaking, it's not important to me to publish the Book of All Future Names. Not in a traditional sense anyway. For that matter, it's not that important to me that people read it, although I'm delighted it is being read. What's at issue is the actual writing of the thing. I've been struggling lately with what to do with my site. I haven't had a great deal of time to post regularly, and have found it stressful trying to generate essays about writing and publishing that don't feel redundant. The future Names chapters have felt quite natural, flowing with a certain amount of ease, and fun. I was also inspire by something Warren Ellis was musing about on his site regarding the opportunities to move blogs toward original content. The bulk of my site has always been devoted to new writings, but little of it has been fiction. I just want to find out what kind of story I can write in that venue. Episodically, tumbled, no retroactive editing, stream of conscious.

You've stated that The Book of All Future Names will be written in stream of consciousness with no advance plotting. How much plotting do you normally do for your novels? Do you find writing in stream of consciousness more liberating?

Charlie Huston: Honestly, it would be a bigger change for me to announce I was going to outline and pre-plot a novel in detail than to announce a stream of consciousness web novel. I already have a pretty loose approach to structure and plotting. But, yes, diving in without regard to the depth of the water or the consequences if you run out of air is a great feeling. Knowing I don’t have or need a plan is fun and good exercise.

Continuing on this theme, it seems that writers like Scott Sigler and John Scalzi who have built up a loyal group of web readers have carried their internet success over to more traditional publishing realms. Do you anticipate more writers in the future using the internet as a way to market themselves by publishing their work either on a website or through podcasts? Does this "giving away" of original content make writing as a profession more viable or less?

Charlie Huston: I think it will probably be the exception rather than the rule. The Internet gives writers who are interested in traditional publishing another venue in which to showcase their work, but the competition for attention from print publishers is still intense. That competition is likely to get more intense as the market for print books continues to shrink. I’m inclined to think that that shrinkage probably has an end point that is above zero (I believe there will always be at least a boutique market for books), but it’s still going to sharply reduce the number of writers who find themselves in print on paper. Far more likely is that e-readers of one form or another will make digital self-publishing very easy. It’s quite possible that over the next ten years writers that sell in the mid-list or below, such as myself, could find themselves without a venue for print publication and turning to digital distribution for their work. But the real market leader on that is less likely to be online fiction than it is the text book industry going digital. Once text books are distributed digitally, and e-readers of some kind are in the hands of a generation of high school and college students, the rest of the print world will probably have to follow along.

Mind, this is all off the cuff, and I’m hardly an expert in any of these areas.

After "Every Last Drop" and "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death" are released, what future projects can we expect from you that you can talk about?

Charlie Huston: I’m currently working on a stand alone crime novel with a speculative, very near future, setting that will publish in early 2010. After I finish that I’ll start on the final Joe Pitt book. I have a bunch of loose ends to tie up.

Can you recommend a book you feel has been criminally underappreciated?

Charlie Huston: A current release that I can’t recommend enough is SHARP TEETH by Toby Barlow. Two books that I don’t think have received the love they deserve are COMPLICITY by Iain Banks, and THE GUN SELLER by Hugh Laurie.

Is there anything that you wish to add?

Charlie Huston: Um…nah.

Thank you, Charlie.