A Horror World interview with Brian Hodge
By Steven E. Wedel

If you’re a happy person, Brian Hodge probably can’t find your house to join you for dinner. Don’t be offended, though. Stanley Wiater said of Brian, “This writer knows where the sad people, the bad people, and the mad people live.”

Brian broke onto the scene during the waning days of the horror boom in 1988 with his novel DARK ADVENT. He followed that up with several mass market paperback releases until 1999, when William Morrow & Co. released WILD HORSES in hardback. After that, finding a new Brian Hodge novel became a rare occurrence.

Today we’re going to poke Brian to let him know we want to see more books from him. We’ll also try to find out what drives him to create some music you won’t hear on Casey Kasem’s Top 40 list, and get his thoughts on some genre topics.

Horror World: Not to put you on the defensive right off, but … What’s up? It was six years between WILD HORSES and the 2005 release of HELLBOY: ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HELL. Granted there was a small press short story collection (LIES & UGLINESS) in there, but no novels. What gives?

Brian Hodge: No worries — it’s a very valid question. At the root of it all is that after WILD HORSES, my next crime novel, MAD DOGS, didn’t get picked up in New York. It took the better part of two years to write, and by the time it was done and my agent sent it to Morrow, they’d been taken over, and everybody had been fired, with an entire new crew brought in that I had no history with. Morrow had also made an investment in Tim Dorsey as their whacked-out crime guy, and there wasn’t any interest in continuing with me. I just wasn’t established in hardcover yet, because I’d only had the one. The half-dozen paperbacks didn’t really count.

After that, we couldn’t find another taker. The novel was too long, or too complex, or too weird, or had too many characters, or should’ve had a woman as the central character, like WILD HORSES did, or would’ve been too hard to market because of its mood swings.

So I went from a six-figure book to nothing. I could not have engineered anything more demoralizing. I’m a big boxing fan, and a couple years ago ran across a comment by George Foreman, saying that after he lost the heavyweight championship to Ali in Zaire, he went through a two-year depression. I thought, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” Not that I was heavyweight champion of the world, of course, but after the auction for WILD HORSES, and the reviews and other reactions it got, I felt like it.

I had to come up with another source of income, so I started doing ongoing work for a magazine publisher on various computer and consumer electronics titles. That took a lot of self-education along with the work itself.

Even though I was still doing short stories and novelettes, it was a slog to get to the point of feeling ready for something longer, because I had to get past this lingering sense of futility. The Hellboy offer came along at pretty much the perfect time in that regard, and was the springboard back into active novel duty. Then came WORLD OF HURT, and getting MAD DOGS set up with Cemetery Dance, and so on.

So, a lot of factors played into this hiatus, and some were beyond my control, but I’m ultimately responsible for how I react to something, and I reacted to this situation poorly, let it become very debilitating. But then, nothing’s ever wasted, or shouldn’t be, so from this vantage point the best thing I can do is draw all the lessons out of the experience that I can, to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

HW: Usually the what-are-you-working-on question comes at the end. But this time let’s get right to it. What are you working on now? And when will we see it?

BH: The most immediate thing you’ll see should is MAD DOGS, coming out soon from Cemetery Dance, but it’s been awhile since I’ve finished the last of the post-production work on that. Right now I’m meeting some anthology obligations, and gearing up to finish my next collection, also for CD. As for the biggest project, though, the next novel, I’m going to have to demur on that with the standard too-soon-to-talk-about-it dodge. I’ll give you this much, though: The title contains the word “leaves.”

HW: Delirium Books re-released some of your earlier work over the past few years. How did that come about? Are the Delirium editions different than the original published books?

BH: Shane Ryan Staley, Delirium’s founder and publisher, contacted me about some hardcover reissues.

The first one we did, DEATHGRIP, wasn’t appreciably different from the original Dell/Abyss edition. When I was going through the galleys, occasionally I’d take a whack at some annoying little thing with my red pen, and one time thought, “Well, THAT scene went on about 10 lines too long,” and they were gone.

With PROTOTYPE, which is coming out late this summer, I ended up giving it a full polish. No changes to the story, it just reads better, and periodically the emotional clarity is sharper. For DEATHGRIP, Shane had to capture the text by scanning the original paperback edition, so that’s what I got back in galley form, and even though I was finding all sorts of things I would do differently now, almost all of them I let go. The galleys would’ve been a road map, otherwise, which wouldn’t have been fair to Shane. Plus that book seems to have a special place in a lot of people’s hearts, despite the warts that I now see in it, and I didn’t want to tamper with that.

The PROTOTYPE situation was different. I was able to salvage the original Microsoft Works files off an old floppy disk that was starting to fail, and convert them over. I had to make sure nothing got scrambled in translation, so I started reading it, and probably as early as page one ran into something that made me think, “OK, this isn’t how I’d shape that sentence today,” and couldn’t resist polishing it, and within a couple more pages realized I wasn’t just proofreading anymore.

HW: How do you feel about the small press in the horror genre?

BH: Very favorably disposed. It’s a great complement to the New York houses … an adjunct for some projects, a viable alternative for others. A book like WORLD OF HURT, the small press is the only place for something like that, both in terms of its oddball length — 50,000 words — and its subject matter.

HW: You were there when the horror bubble burst after the boom of the 1980s. Hollywood seems high on horror again today, even if most of the output is crappy remakes. Do you think we could see more major publishers taking on horror novels in the wake of the film success? Why or why not?

BH: I’ve yet to see anyone make a valid case for any kind of correlation between film box office and books. It seems more of an aberration, when something like THE EXORCIST comes along, with a widespread cultural impact, and even then it was a novel first. What horror literature needs to thrive is A-list vision. Most current horror movies top out at B-grade quality, and a lot of them don’t even come close to that.

HW: How has horror literature changed today compared to 1988?

BH: Ya got me. I mean, human memory has a tendency to screen, so we don’t even remember last month, last year, without a high degree of subjectivity. But, for what it’s worth, it seems that there’s more of an inclination to subcategorize now. Nineteen years ago, the main distinction was quiet-versus-loud, typified by Charlie Grant on one side and Skipp & Spector on the other. It was a non-issue to me. I loved them both, sold a couple of my earliest stories to both. That debate has long since subsided, but now you’ll see more fine distinctions: Psychological horror. Extreme horror. Dark fantasy. Serial killer fiction. Bizarro. Supernatural romance. Others I’m forgetting, probably. Labels are necessary for marketing, but narrowcasting can impose limitations, too.

HW: That’s enough lofty genre talk for the moment. Let’s get personal again. What inspires you to write horror?

BH: That’s just part of what shows up and wants to be written. As do other things, like crime novels, and what I’m working on now, which doesn’t fit into either of those categories. I’ve never been inclined to filter ideas out, and reject them out of hand: “Idea A fits this preconceived idea of what my work should be, and Idea B doesn’t, so forget about B.” I don’t look at things that way. It’s more about when it feels right to turn in a particular direction.

But obviously horror is something I’m predisposed to. It’s not like I’ve been stockpiling ideas for military science fiction or geopolitical thrillers. So why that predisposition? I don’t know, really. I’ve always liked horror’s freedom of subject matter — it can involve anything you want. It’s certainly impolite, or can be, and that grants another level of freedom, from conventional mores and so on. Its rawness makes it well suited for exploring the fullest possible gamut of being human, or inhuman. But at the same time there’s room for an endless range of metaphysical and Jungian dimensions.

I’ve often used horror as a vehicle for sorting out personal struggles, and to explore ways of looking at existence. And it can also be a very valid response to a lot of what goes on in the world. But rationales evolve, too. That happened during WORLD OF HURT. It’s a very dark book, progressively so as it goes along, and initially I’d thought — without dropping spoilers here — that what I envisioned happening would happen, and the book would end on this absolutely pitch black note. But the closer I got to the end, the more I realized I couldn’t do that. It would’ve been the cheap, easy way out. I wanted the book to have more meaning than that. Now, even though the exact same things happen, in a surface sense, they’re totally reframed compared to how I initially viewed them. The character involved finds a way to instill the events with his own meaning, both on his own and with a little help from someone else, and it becomes a kind of triumph. It felt important to do that, and I think that’s what has ultimately made the book so resonant and moving to most of the people who’ve read it, judging by the reactions I’m aware of.

HW: Do Doli and Fionn worry about your fascination with the dark? Is it true you have to scoop your office manager’s poop for him?

BH: At least he thoughtfully consolidates it in one location. Nah, no worries under our roof. It’s not like I do dress rehearsals.

HW: In your bio you joke about making many award finalist lists before winning the International Horror Guild Award for outstanding short fiction in 2004 with your story “With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu.” What did it mean to finally win an award?

BH: Yeah, it was the Susan Lucci Syndrome. At least four different awards, both here and in the U.K., and in some cases several finalist slots over the years. It was nice, I really appreciated it … but the work is what lasts and remains alive, you hope. Awards are by their nature relegated to history. Can you name the last five people who’ve won anything? Now, can you name five people who’ve touched your life for the better, through their work or interpersonally? That’s not to say a person can’t manage both, obviously, but one’s a perk, and one’s a priority.

HW: Many people often complain that award processes are really nothing more than popularity contests, that awards are unnecessary because good sales figures and reviews are all the reward an author needs, etc. What are your feelings on awards like the IHG and the Horror Writers Association’s Stokers?

BH: If it’s an untainted recognition from one’s peers, or a panel of judges, great. If it’s something that a writer has campaigned for, then my feeling is that it’s pretty much worthless. Whenever it’s come up for me, I’m not hoping to lose, but I tend to keep my mouth shut about it.

HW: Visitors to your Web site (www.brianhodge.net) might be surprised to find a music page there. I love this quote from that page: “Axis Mundi is a musical project born of the belief that achieving some measure of success in one creative field should fund the ongoing abuse of another.” When did Axis Mundi come about, and what, exactly, is it?

BH: You might like a line from my Storytellers Unplugged bio, too: “He also fires up a variety of instruments to perpetrate various dissonant crimes against melody and structure.”

It’s an alter-ego thing, this vehicle for rendering sonically some of the same things I’m doing in print. Not long ago I was comparing notes with Matt Cardin, who’s been sharing with me some really interesting and accomplished musical work of his own, and I told him, “Sometimes they’ll be offshoots of my own fiction. Not soundtracks per se, but another way of tapping into and evoking the same energies.” And other pieces tap into completely different energies and fascinations.

Hence the name Axis Mundi. That’s a reference to Yggdrasil, the mythical world tree whose roots reach down into the underworld and branches reach up to the heavens. That has a mythic and spiritual significance to me, but it also encompasses the desire to convey the mysterious, the ineffable … the transcending heights and harrowing depths. So all kinds of influences creep in: ambient, industrial, classical and early music, tribal and world music and archaic sonorities, field recordings, and cinematic esthetics are probably the primary ones. A lot of the time I think of it as painting with sound.

As for when it came about, I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer. I started taking piano lessons in gradeschool, took more in college. I got interested in electronic music in college, too, and bought my first synthesizer then, an old Moog. In the mid-‘90s I took up the didgeridoo, which struck me as a primordial synthesizer. Got interested in sound design. If a DVD’s special features have anything on the film’s sound design, that’s the first thing I go to. So the groundwork was being laid for a long time.

But I suppose what really kicked it off was after WILD HORSES sold at auction. Around that time, there were rapid advances in digital audio and recording technologies, so that it was really becoming viable to experiment and learn on your own, at your leisure. I got the pieces of gear that comprised the foundation of the studio I’ve been accumulating ever since. I just had this deep longing to do it. The things we regret most are the things we never try. I’d rather mine be a short list by the time I’m toes up and tagged.

HW: Is there a long-term goal for Axis Mundi?

BH: Absolutely — to get to the point of releasing CDs through one or more indie labels that specialize in these kind of dark, atmospheric sonics. They’d need to be more focused than the random tracks I’ve been rotating through on my site. Those are all over the map, or half the map at least. But I’m working on a more unified grouping of stuff right now, thinking of it collectively under the title ATAVISM. Plus, if the opportunity were ever to arise, it would also be appealing to do ambiences, atmosphere, and effects design for games, small films, multimedia projects, things like that.

HW: Besides writing, creating music, and taking photographs of green things and decaying things, what do you like to do in your spare time?

BH: I have a biological weapons lab. Nothing serious, just for fun.

Well, beyond the standard headlong plunges into books and movies…? I’m seriously into working out … weights, running, yoga. Plus we live in a great hiking and climbing area. I like to cook; made a superb pot of cullen skink the other night (look it up!). And I always like to learn, and make a concerted effort to pick up new skills, study new areas. Right now I’m studying up on investing, and organic gardening in self-watering containers. I’m going to start off with an herb garden and go from there. Those pink rocks you get in the produce section … they have the nerve to call them tomatoes.

HW: This interview has probably gone on too long already, but there’s probably something I should have asked and didn’t. Or, maybe you’ve got a special project to talk about. What message would you leave Horror World readers with?

BH: I think your first impulse was right: This has gone on quite long enough!

HW: Thanks for your time, Brian. We all look forward to more books, stories and music from you.

BH: Thanks to you as well. And I look forward to delivering.