Jeff VanderMeer

Taking over Jeff’s blog for just a minute now.  In honor of Issue #348 just being released, here is a guest blog post!

Writer: Nick Mamatas
Weird Tales Story: Mainevermontnewhampshiremass (Issue #350, May/June)
Writer Bio: Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels, Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, and nearly forty short stories which have appeared everywhere from Mississippi Review to Brutarian Quarterly. He’s also written everything from ad copy to Lovecraftian senryu. Nick lives near, but not in, Boston MA.

***

Weird Tales, with a reputation and tradition over eighty years old, is all about influence. Poe, Howard, Lovecraft, the general concept of “weird fiction” – which actually means something fairly precise (at least according to S.T. Joshi) – that’s what the Weird Tales brand is about. I used to joke that the previous regime at the magazine felt that the American short story had reached its apex in 1928, and thus couldn’t understand anything else that came after.

So, who am I influenced by? Vonnegut is a name that has come up recently. The cover blurb of my book Under My Roof reads “[G]onzo suburban satire that the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might have appreciated” (that’s a quote from The San Francisco Chronicle). Mickey Z., who did the first Q/A about the book with me, brought Vonnegut right up. And sure, Vonnegut was probably one of the first “adult” authors I read as a little kid. Sometimes I’ll say to myself, while writing a story, “Ooh, even though the last two pages are all in the third person, why don’t I drop in a first-person narrator right now, like Vonnegut does?” and then I’ll do it, and only rarely to the great effect that trick had in novels such as Galapagos.

However, I don’t consider my work particularly influenced by Vonnegut. I’m less cynical, or at least differently cynical, or at the very very least don’t feel the need to cut my cynicism with whimsy. I don’t find “Harvey Crankcase” style-naming regimes to be very funny. Actively enraging is more like it. And I like all the wrong things about Vonnegut: the swirling universal message of “Greetings!” in Sires of Titans made my eyes roll. Rabo Karabekian Bluebeard coming up with a plan to make his sons reclaim their Armenian surname got me wherever the “right here” in “it got me right here” is. Sorry.

Partially it’s because Vonnegut “lived his gimmick” a bit too much for anyone else to really have a place in his territory. Lots of writers in broad-strokes SF live their gimmicks (it makes up for sub-par characterization in their books). Stephen King’s writer-narrators are all Stephen King (but good-looking), Philip K. Dick’s novels all feature Philip K. Dick, and the collected work of H.P. Lovecraft is definitely The H.P. Lovecraft Show featuring Howard Phillips Lovecraft as everybody. And Vonnegut is all-Vonnegut-all-the-time. Unless you can be all-Vonnegut-all-the-time yourself, how can you be influenced by Vonnegut, even if you write gonzo satires and use the delayed-entry narrator over and over and say “Yeah, sure, that would be great!” if a publisher recommends putting the name “Vonnegut” on your book.

If I had to name a major influence, I’d say John Fante. John Fante didn’t write SF or fantasy or even Italian-American magical realism, and he sure as hell lived his own gimmick: the Arturo Bandini series, if published today, would be marketed as memoir, and his novel Full of Life features a character named “John Fante” – but he’s my major influence. Though I primarily write SF, most of my reading is non-SF. Life’s too short to read shit; when I’m in the mood for shit, I’ll turn on the TV and watch whatever is on HBO. I’ve been reading Fante for nearly as long as I’ve been reading Vonnegut, though there is much less of the former author to read. He’s one of the few writers whose stuff I’ll reread, who even got me reading the secondary material (the book of his correspondence, his biography, his kid Dan Fante’s books, etc.).

Fante’s gimmick is an “open” one, or at least open to me. Young guy, son of boisterous immigrants, wants to be a writer and wants love from inaccessible women. He starves and struggles and begs the universe for something, anything at all, to keep the dual tortures of hunger and loneliness from overwhelming him. I fit right in. The agony of it all keeps me writing, just as it did him.

Fante also wrote short, and I tend to write in a genre where novel bloat, interminable series, and other loathsome size-queenery (often demanded by corporate types who’d be better off using their algorithms to sell Pop-Tarts, not literature) predominates. I like slim novels. I like authors who publish a book and then publish another seven or eleven or thirty years later. (Fante kept himself fed writing shitty movies, but movies are supposed to be shitty, and at least they pay well. He didn’t crank out bullshit for tiny advances.) I decided that I would write the books I wanted to write, when I wanted to write them, and at the lengths they needed to be, because of Fante.

Most of all, Fante took the idea of a writer being something important seriously, but rarely took anything else all that seriously. When asked who his favorite writer is, and this after having only sold his first or second short story, he answered, “What, are you kidding? ME – John Fante!” Well, I agree. Who is your favorite writer, Nick? ME – Nick Mamatas! Coming in second: John Fante. (Vonnegut is in the top ten though.)