N O W   A V A I L A B L E :

HORROR HOUSE DETECTIVE
a novel in stories
by Michael Gold
Publisher: Silverthought Press
272 pages
paperback: $11.99 + S/H
[click for details]

 

I N T E R V I E W :

Editor's Note: This interview may contain spoilers.

 

Mark R. Brand: Today I’m interviewing the newest member of the Silverthought Press family, Michael Gold. His new book, Horror House Detective, is the story of one Harold Schreiber, whose brushes with the strange, weird, and occasionally supernatural side of life seem positively mundane when compared to the lively chaos of his spiraling, chaotic family. The book’s tone is unapologetically gruff, a la Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, but its best moments come when Harold contrasts the relatively-mild fear factor of confronting murderous undead with the smoldering hellish fury of his own overbearing mother. Thanks for taking some time to chat with us, Michael.

One of my favorite lines of the book was a descriptive sentence of the sorts of crime that happened during the period when the narrator is searching for clues regarding his brother. He peruses the newspapers and is treated to a classic menagerie of police-blotter blurbs that culminates in “And the topper? ‘Headless body found in topless bar.’ —New York Post.” This sentence, full of the same sorts of noir-ish wordplays that evoke both nostalgia and the feel of classic detective novels, feels very precisely executed to achieve a certain tone. Little cues like the mention of “parquet flooring” suggest a story firmly rooted by the smallest detail in the lingering culture of the 1950s. Would you care to comment about how you constructed this tone and what types of literature influenced this narrative voice?

Michael Gold: It starts with my grandfather. My grandfather started life in pretty tough circumstances. He was one of 10 or 11 kids in a family that had struggled to survive in Russia. They somehow made it out of that hellish place. But when the family got to New York, it was still pretty rough. They lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side. My grandfather had to drop out of school in the eighth grade and work in a slaughterhouse to help support his family. He fought his way out of the ghetto. He started his own business and with all his drive became pretty successful. So he started to enjoy his life by buying a Thunderbird and Lincoln Continental and a big house on the water. He had a little craziness to succeed and buy what he wanted when he succeeded. After he died, I had a dream that my grandfather came back, driving in a Cadillac convertible from about 1955. He stopped the car, got out, and smiled at me, the sun shining behind him. He looked as strong as a bull, in his prime. That was my grandfather.

Then, there was my father and his sense of justice. He was very clear on right and wrong. I'll never forget his finger waving in the air and pointing at me when I was a little kid—I got lots of lectures. It started with the Nazis and ended with Frank Sinatra—a tough guy who also had a sense of romance about bars and women and also radiated a sense of vulnerability in his songs, but who also spoke to my father in a way that conveyed that he was a responsible man.

After that, you get my brothers and me. We were little wild animals. I once threw a rock at a van driving down our street and cracked its front window. My father was less than pleased. When I was older, my friends and I had a boxing tournament in a buddy's backyard. This guy and I beat the crap out of each other and I went home in a concussive-like daze. Another time I didn't do my school work for about a month and got away with it, too, until the teacher finally figured out what I was doing, and my father busted me down to nothing with just five words—"Do you want to be a bum?"

When my parents weren't around, my brothers and I used to play football on our knees in the living room with the family dog, using dog biscuits as goal lines. That was one of the most gentle things we did to each other. One of our favorite hobbies was to grab our brothers' own hands to hit them in the face over and over again, all the time, shouting, "Why are you hitting yourself?"

In terms of books, I was somewhat influenced by Jim Thompson. Thompson started one book, The Trangsgressors, with a cop riding in a convertible through West Texas with a prostitute, who was his girlfriend. Thompson had an in-your-face edge to his personality. His characters were loaded up with hell. They were openly tortured in their minds and their actions and I could really relate to that.

MRB: What role did pacing play in your conceptual construction of this story? Horror House Detective is a pleasure to read on many levels, but not the least is the fact that the story moves effortlessly along at times and grinds to a dramatic halt whenever necessary. Weeks flash by in the narrative sometimes, and then at other times a long, silent moment of family tension (some of the best moments in the book), can make the reader feel almost as if the world has stopped rotating.

MG: Much of the time I carry my childhood around and I remember way too much of it. So, when you're a kid, your sense of time is really warped. When you're in school, time drags on, and on. When you're out of school, in the street with your friends, time whips by like one of those teacup saucers at the amusement park. So I tried to capture that sense of time changing back and forth. Also, I put the book in my father's head and tried to run the film projector of the life of our family from his point of view.

MRB: The proverbial “life” of New York City is written all over Horror House Detective. While this is not all that uncommon in detective-style stories or noir fiction in general, your book doesn’t easily fit into either of those genres. Could you tell us a little bit about your decision to set the book there and to what extent it guided the structure of the plot?

MG: I have lived in New York City for almost 25 years and it's a very dramatic place—there aren't a lot of gentle, peaceful moments. You see people at their most raw.

MRB: Like much of the best fiction, Horror House Detective deftly avoids the stereotypical tropes of detective fiction by focusing much of the plot on secondary subplots that turn out at times more engaging and interesting than the nominal plotline. The nebulous relationship between Harold and Derek and in particular the family dynamics at play between Harold’s parents make for moments of brilliance in the narrative. Was it a conscious choice on your part to color this smoldering secondary story within the familiar lines of detective fiction, or did the family subplots come later?

MG: I grew up with three brothers, just like the family in the book. For me, the family drama was the first part of it. This family has a lot of sickness and all-out violence. The dad tries to keep the peace among these fighting-crazy boys. He's the sheriff of the house. Then, if you look at the exterior part of it—I took my father's sense of justice as a starting point. He's a lunch bucket man—packs his own lunch, gets up at 4 in the morning, works like hell, has an obsessive-compulsive drive to be perfect in his job. He resents the power of rich people, and is somewhat envious. There are people out there, rich and poor, dead and undead, doing bad stuff. And it really bugs the hell out of the father in the story. He can't just let it ride. The craziness out there bites into his sense of how the world should be.

MRB: One of the most interesting recurring motifs in the book is a cork board full of Boy Scout merit badges. Where did this come from?

MG: I was curious about somebody who matured too quickly, like becoming an Eagle Scout, which requires an incredible drive. What do you do after you become an Eagle Scout at the age of 13? You can get a little nuts, like a famous child actor, who gets no roles after he becomes an adult.

MRB: Many of the characters in the book operate quite cleverly on a metaphorical level that’s sometimes as “present” as their literal one. Without giving away too much of the story, could you give us some insight into how this developed? Specifically, Rupert and Drew seem to beg us to look deeper into the meaning of things like headline hype and the distortions that real-world history provides under the guise of rationality. There is even a moment of self-reflective meta-glee in a moment when Harold silently assigns Drew the name “Pulp man.”

“The Weirdness” is one of those concepts that is uniquely yours, but it does have a quality that’s universal. From the first time I read it on the page, I almost didn’t need an explanation. We’ve all met people who clearly have a touch of “The Weirdness” themselves, and sometimes these people are even self-aware of it, and ascribe characteristics such as heredity to it. A concept so fresh and yet so completely self-evident is something I rarely come across in fiction these days. Tell us about how you developed “The Weirdness”.

MG: I often feel this Twilight Zone sense of life and have since about the age of 6. It used to go away when I played any kind of game—basketball, baseball, football. Now that I don't play ball anymore, the Weirdness travels with me quite a bit. You feel like reality is bent and there's nothing you can do about it. It's like walking around with Griffin Dunne's character in American Werewolf in London—he's been torn to pieces by a werewolf—you know he's dead, he knows he's dead—but you just can't get rid of him.

Concerning the specific characters, I usually start with people or things that bug me. For instance, there is generally an appalling lack of niceness here in Queens, to say the least. Women fight in lines at the store over who was first. Kids try to bully check-out girls to sell them cigarettes. Queens Boulevard is a roller derby for cars. I hate Queens Boulevard—it's six lanes of aggressive drivers fighting to go faster. A lot of people have been killed by cars on this road, which is two blocks from my family's apartment. There are random shootings of teenagers, often by teenagers. Or the pulp man—I thought a lot about the decline of newspapers and what you would do with someone who loved them so much that he collected them to the point of absurdity. He's so absorbed by newspapers that he becomes one.

MRB: Thanks again for your time, Michael. I did very much enjoy the book and I look forward to reading more from you. Anything else on the horizon for you that you’d like to talk about?

MG: I wrote a speculative fiction book about suicide bombers in an alternative version of New York City. The suicide bombers come from two competing religions I made up—the Zans and the Quidtods. Silverthought may consider it for publication next year. After two books about violence in New York, I want to write about something as far away as possible from Queens.