Volume 2, Issue 3 – June 1999

William Browning Spencer: Whose Reality Is It Anyway?

It takes guts to be a writer, and if you’re a writer whose books don’t fit into any particular genre it can be even more disconcerting. You can’t help wondering where the next paycheck will come from.  

Writer William Browning Spencer survives on humor and sheer determination. It takes a lot of both to create powerful books about man-eating toilets and corporations run by Lovecraftian monsters. It takes even more to imbue those books with an innate sense of reality. But like H. P. Lovecraft (with whom he’s often compared) Spencer has experienced a lot of the powerfully strange sides of reality.

Crescent Blues: You started your career as a graphic artist/typesetter. How did you get into that field? 

Spencer: I have no formal training as a graphic artist. I was — like many another doomed dreamer and potential homeless person back in the Sixties — an English major in college. I dropped out of college my senior year, went to Munich on impulse, got drafted when I returned to the States, got court martialed twice for sundry acts of insubordination and spent five months in an Army stockade. Some of this is actually in my first published novel, Maybe I’ll Call Anna. 

When I returned to the civilized world, I held a number of jobs that appear in some of my fiction (emergency room orderly, clerk typist, photographer, graphic artist). I became a graphic artist when a friend of mine contracted to produce a magazine and, not knowing any better, hired me to handle the graphic chores. I learned stuff on the job. Typesetting was different then, and years from now, when I wind up in the home for retired typesetters, I will bore any available young nurse’s aide with stories of the punch tape that was fed into huge computers to produce small columns of type. You kids today don’t know how good you have it, etc. 

Would you tell us about some of the newspapers and magazines you worked for? Was there a project you particularly enjoyed? 

No. Well, that’s the short answer. Anyone who has read my novel, Résumé With Monsters, can probably guess how I feel about most forms of employment. I have worked at huge corporations and hated being there. I have worked at small, family-run businesses and hated being there, too. I have never been good at pretending enthusiasm for other people’s projects, and that seems to be the nature of employment. Someone with sufficient money enlists you for his endeavors; if his venture is a success, he makes considerable money, buys that house on the hill, and, if you are lucky, you have enough money to repair your ancient car when it breaks down — and still pay your rent. When employers speak self-righteously about how much risk they are taking, they seem unaware that the employee, while not risking funds that he doesn’t have, is, quite literally, risking his life. 

That’s only my experience, of course. We Americans have become a spoiled, feckless lot. I once worked for this big corporation that kept swallowing up (or being swallowed up by) other corporations. These mergers would always result in redundant staff, so we had to hope our heads wouldn’t roll each time the corporate gods enlarged their domain. I worked with a sweet-tempered, serious Vietnamese woman who said, “I have to re-interview for my job. I will tell them that it will be an honor and privilege to perform whatever duties my new position requires.” The rest of us groaned, disgusted. What an appalling attitude. How un-American. 

When I quit that corporation, this same woman said to me, “Perhaps you will be happy somewhere else?” 

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid I will always be a malcontent.” 

Her puzzled expression told me I had to explain this malcontent business, and I did, to the best of my ability, but I suspect it was a concept she just couldn’t grasp.  

I think that my wishing the world were different goes a long way toward explaining why I write fiction. 

Some jobs are better than others. This is a statement that is true even in prisons, but I have never had a job that I wouldn’t quit instantly if sufficient funds came my way. 

I did work for a couple of trade magazines, Radio World and TV Technology, and my fellow office workers were delightful humans. I actually looked forward to seeing them. Still, I always felt it was unfortunate that we had to meet under such onerous circumstances, distracted by the mundane press of deadlines.  

When did you begin to focus on being a writer? 

I always wanted to be a writer. I was a voracious and eclectic reader, and I was attracted to what I thought was the writer’s life. A lifestyle that allowed sleeping in late seemed designed for me. I have never been a morning person. It can’t be good for a person to be smacked out of a sound sleep by an alarm clock. It is better to wake up when the natural desire to do so asserts itself. 

I suppose wanting to sleep in late is not an exalted reason for becoming a writer, but it was up there on the top of my list. I also liked words. 

I wrote five novels before I got a novel published. I wrote my first novel in college, and half of it was in free verse. I’m sure it was awful. I wrote another novel called The Endless Laundry, about a psychiatrist who quits his New York practice to run a laundromat in a small Florida town where he encounters an alien egg with strange corrupting properties. My first ex-wife may still have that novel (and another novel, Last Words, about a post-apocalypse world where a janitor in a ruined university accidentally programs a murderous Christ robot). One of the few good things about not being famous is that people will never see those early efforts. 

What was your first published work? 

Maybe I’ll Call Anna was my first published work, if you don’t count some essays and newspaper pieces which I would just as soon not count. Before Anna, I was writing a novel at the request of a successful book packager. I was about halfway through the book when he called and said, “As long as this book is set in Washington, D.C., why don’t we have the President in it?”

“Huh?” I said. He explained the law of bestsellers, which went like this: For a book to become a best seller, the people in it needed to be very big, very famous. If you had a fashion designer in your book, be sure she was the world’s greatest designer, same with a rock star, lawyer, billionaire, whatever. 

Hence, the President. 

I gave it a shot. The book never got published, and I went off and started writing Maybe I’ll Call Anna with a sense of immense relief. 

Maybe I’ll Call Anna concerns a crazy romantic obsession between three characters that lasts for over twenty years. What was your inspiration for that book? 

Maybe I’ll Call Anna is about obsession, various sorts of obsession–and the way time can create a dangerous, idealized past. I have known a few very unstable young women who were forces of nature, and Anna Shockley is a combination of several. Often these women, who seem so fragile, so self-destructive, are possessed of incredible inner strength, and I wanted to write about that, too. But I don’t write autobiographical fiction. I’ve always felt fiction should be fiction. The book that is the closest to the truth of my own life is Résumé With Monsters, and that book has Lovecraftian monsters from outer space running huge corporations. The truth is always an emotional one. 

You’ve worked on many different kinds of fiction from psychological thrillers to surrealistic, dark fantasy and Lovecraftian horror. Could you give Crescent Blues readers who might be unfamiliar with your work an idea of what you’ve done in these fields? 

Maybe I’ll Call Anna was my first published book, and it was my most straightforward one. It’s weird enough, but you can call it psychological suspense, and that’s pretty accurate. The books start getting weird after that, harder to categorize. 

The short story collection that followed Anna was called The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories, and the title story was about a guy who was delighted to discover that his father might be a legendary serial killer — so our hero goes blithely off, seeking confirmation. The collection also had a story about a writer who thinks his wife is sleeping with Stephen King, and a story about two entomologists battling it out in the South American rain forest. That story got written when I had the thought, “What if your endangered species threatens my endangered species?” That story is presently optioned for a film.  

My favorite story in the collection is a novella entitled “Looking Out for Eleanor,” a sort of road novella about a social worker and a Vietnam vet trying, in their separate ways, to save a beautiful but not very bright girl from the evil that inhabits the world. Publishers Weekly compared the novella to Charles Willeford’s novels, which I took as high praise. And Roger Zelazny wrote a wonderful blurb for Count Electric and introduced me to the SF community. Gardner Dozois chose one of the stories, “A Child’s Christmas in Florida,” for his Year’s Best Science Fiction — even though the story had no SF or fantasy elements. 

I then wrote Résumé With Monsters, a novel that is surrealistic and contains lots of Lovecraft lore. It’s a book about poor Philip Kenan’s attempts to come to terms with a series of bad jobs and the monsters (bent on enslaving the world) that have destroyed his relationship with his girlfriend. It is also about the writer in a world that sees any form of artistic endeavor as a manifestation of insanity.  

You will usually find that book in the horror section of bookstores, but it is primarily a satire of the workplace. I didn’t think, when I was writing it, that the Lovecraftian parody would generate the interest that it did. There are more Lovecraft fanatics out there than I supposed. 

I should pause here, and say something about that word “surreal” that is so often attached to my work. I’m not saying it’s a misnomer, but there is a kind of surrealism that is divorced from emotion, that is weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and I’ve never been drawn to it. The narration of strange dreams or bizarre events can be tedious if nothing is at stake. I try to do the traditional fiction thing — I try to evoke emotional responses in the reader. I want the reader to care about the characters — not to feel that the ride is just an exercise in strangeness, something arbitrary, something driven solely by irony and an overwrought imagination. I am always delighted to learn that one of my books has made a reviewer or reader laugh and — even better — cry. 

Young writers often dodge any sort of sentiment, fearing that they will slip into sentimentality, look foolish, gullible, gawky. A self-aware irony is the tone of a lot of surreal novels, and that’s not at all what I’m shooting for.

After Résumé With Monsters, I wrote Zod Wallop. The New York Times review began: “Imagine dropping acid with Dr. Seuss.” That did capture the tone of the book. It’s a comic novel, but dark. It’s about an author of children’s books who has lost his daughter, so the premise is not a hoot, but it is about redemption, about not turning the world into stone in the wake of personal tragedy. 

Zod Wallop garnered dozens of great reviews. The Japanese bought the book, for about four times what St. Martin’s paid, and their edition looks lovely. It’s been out in Japan since last December, but I just saw a copy recently.

After Zod Wallop, I wrote Irrational Fears, a — here comes that word again — surreal take on alcoholism, AA, and New Age recovery. It’s been getting great reviews too, which is a relief. I thought it might be too arcane for a general readership. 

Which novels or short stories do you think were your best?  

Like parents who have more than one child, I’m fond of the lot of them, but I do think Zod Wallop is my most artful book. Everything came together in that one. Of my short stories, I’m particularly pleased with “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” which Ellen Datlow chose for one of her Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections. She said that the story was Lovecraftian, and I honestly hadn’t thought about any Lovecraft element, but — egad! — I gave it another look and, sure enough, there was that Lovecraft guy. 

What was it like creating your own covers for your first two novels? 

I was terrified of getting a cover I hated, so I decided to do it myself. Fortunately, I had a small press publisher who was willing to let me do that. Lots of times, authors don’t have much say about cover art and design.

I would rather write books than create book covers, however, and there are graphic artists and illustrators out there who are a lot better than I am, so I have, with mixed feelings, turned that enterprise over to others. I’m still a little obsessed with control, so I got my friend Denis Tiani to do the cover illustration for the hardback of Zod Wallop, and I got my friend Larry Perlman to do the illustration for the cover of Irrational Fears. If you have a friend doing the cover, you can say, “Hey, wait, could this be changed?” 

I suspect most novelists are control freaks, which is why they often grow disheartened when writing for Hollywood where everyone meddles with your art. 

Where do you get the ideas for your stories? 

Every writer has certain obsessions. Paul Di Filippo, in his review of Zod Wallop in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, listed some of mine: “…psychotic murderous women; weddings; old photographs; the commingled innocence, vulnerability, and amoral hungers of children.” Those are some. I used to think that I should never repeat a theme, but then I realized that the reading public has more books than mine from which to choose, so I stopped worrying about that.  

I am not one for outlining, although I will do it when I am forced to in order to sell a book before it is finished. But the best ideas come when I get into the story and the stew of character, situation and scene conjures up new possibilities. Outlines tend to be external, mechanical things for me. The writing process generates the best ideas. I have often set out to write one sort of story and discovered that a different story was being written, and so turned all my effort to writing that one. I have to listen to the Muse, or she will leave in a huff. “All right,” she’ll say, “you do it your way. I’m out of here.” 

So the specific idea I come up with in order to begin is often irrelevant to what I discover once I have some excuse to begin.  

In answer to the above question: I don’t know where the idea comes from, exactly, it just bubbles out of the process. This is the reason authors can rave about something they have written and not necessarily be exercising their egos. They just don’t know where the hell a certain sentence came from, and they are very pleased with that sentence. I often feel as though I am admiring someone else’s work when I reread mine. 

What do you feel is the difference between writing short stories and novels?

Novels are looser and more forgiving, I think. I like reading novels more than short stories, and I suspect this is because I can settle in with a cast of characters and elude the real world with less effort than is required when reading a story collection, where I have to shift gears every twenty pages or so.  

Writing short stories is gratifying. You get applause sooner than with a novel. And you can explore an idea that isn’t worth an entire novel. But, on a crass pragmatic note, no writer is going to earn a living writing short stories. With novels there is the hope, however tentative, of one day making enough money to chuck the day job. There is certainly more effort involved in writing twenty short stories than in writing one novel. And any editor will tell you that single-author short story collections, even by well-known authors, do not, generally, sell. 

There was a three year break between Maybe I’ll Call Anna and Zod Wallop. Do you feel your writing has matured during this period? 

I think that many writers — and certainly this was true for me -feel more confident after selling their first novel. I wrote the stories in the short story collection between Anna and Zod Wallop, and I got a lot more comfortable with my particular brand of craziness. If a writer is having fun when he is writing, that joy is communicated (even if the resulting novel is as grim as Celine). I don’t know if the work is more mature, but it is more relaxed, more self-assured, and that improves it. 

Have you ever modeled your characters around people you know? 

Every now and then I will use a detail from someone I know. Fiction is about character, so it is inevitable that the author’s sense of people winds up in his fiction. But whenever I have tried to stick a whole person from “real life” into a book, that person refuses to do things the fictional work would have him do. His realness keeps getting in the way. I keep thinking, He wouldn’t do that, so I have to ask him to leave. 

Have you ever modeled a character on yourself? 

Always and never. It is impossible not to be there on some level, since the story is coming from my head, but I don’t believe all the things my heroes espouse. My characters tend to be a more ardent, more feverish group. My friends might disagree. 

The portrayal of mental illness in your work is very accurate. How do you obtain this realism? 

A lot of my friends are nuts. And, in my wilder youth, I was in a mental ward or two. I am more alert these days, so it is harder to get me into a nuthouse by simply saying, “Come on, Bill, let’s just go talk to this guy.” It’s a cliche that there is a thin line between insanity and creativity. Money is in there somewhere too. A lot of mental illness seems to be the direct result of poverty. 

Can you tell our readers a bit about the turtle collection you used to have when you were a child? 

When I was a kid, I had a friend, Greg Fisk, and we both collected turtles. There was this guy in Tampa, Fla., I think his name was Ray Singleton, and he would sell you almost any sort of turtle or other exotic creature. You could buy a gaboon viper if you signed a letter saying you were twenty-one. I always imagine some kid, running toward his mother as she greets the postman, shouting, “Mom! I’ll get it. It’s for me!” You wouldn’t want your mother to open the package containing your gaboon viper — not if you had my mother, anyway. 

Turtles are wonderful, fabulous creatures. My favorites were two small spiny softshell turtles. These creatures swooped around the aquarium like otters and were hell on crayfish and tadpoles. 

I finally gave my collection to a local aquarium and went off to college where women, as exotic as any reptile, captured my attention. 

Has your interest in reptiles influenced the style of monster/fantastical creatures that you create for your novels? 

I don’t know if reptiles have influenced the style of my monsters, but I know that writers on reptiles have influenced me. I’ve often thought of writing a novel about some fictional naturalist heading off into the wilderness in search of some rare, perhaps legendary beast. I loved those books when I was a kid. I still think Gerald Durrell is a more entertaining writer than his much-respected older brother Lawrence. 

My father, who taught biology before going off to work for the government, had a book called Animal Wonder World by Frank W. Lane. I loved that book. It had chapters on things like animal accidents (birds colliding with golf balls, sharks stuck in tires, a flock of pigeons killed by eating dried peas and then drinking water) and strange uses for animals (ants used to close wounds, fish used as candles, bees used to smuggle honey). I can attribute a lot of the strangeness in my writing to the strangeness communicated by naturalists whose books were my first love. 

Your last book, Irrational Fears is based around alcoholism and how Lovecraftian monsters are spreading rumors of alcoholism as an ancient curse. How did you first develop this idea? 

I wanted to write an AA/alcoholism novel, but I didn’t want to write another one of those novels that is a didactic presentation. Those novels always go like this: plucky hero/heroine just can’t stop drinking and doing drugs, so he/she goes to AA, meets lots of zany folks, tells, in passing, all about AA. There are enough of those novels out there, with more to come.

AA has been around long enough to create an industry of recovery gurus and twelve step spinoffs, and I wanted to satirize that New Age aspect. I decided that one way to do that would be by creating a violent, anti-AA contingent, hallucinations that bite; a cheesy, carnival Whole Addiction Expo and a goofy love story in which our hero has to save his girl from an evil cult. Elizabeth Hand, writing in The Washington Post, said the book was “so funny that when visitors to this reviewer’s house saw it and opened it at random, they began to laugh out loud.” So I accomplished what I set out to do. And most reviewers understood that the book was pro-AA, and that its main target was the opportunistic gurus and self-help industry AA had inadvertently spawned. 

Can you tell our readers about your current projects? 

I’m writing a novel called The Never After. It’s a suspense thriller, and it doesn’t contain any surrealism or alternate worlds. It has some SF stuff and some mental illness stuff (a girl with genetic memory, a young man with a curious dissociative disorder). Since my novels are hard to categorize, they are sometimes hard to market, and I’m hoping that won’t be the case with the new one.  

Your last three books have finished with a kind of did-it-really-happen-but-it-must-have-happened type ending. Did you intend this when you first started writing? 

Oh, that old ambiguity issue. I have a SF/fantasy/horror background, and I read the entire manuscript of Résumé With Monsters in a writing group (The Slugtribe) that I used to attend here in Austin. No one asked, “Did it really happen?” They all knew that it had; they were used to reading literally. I’ve found that mainstream reviewers often assume that the protagonist in my work is having a psychotic break (“Harry has a psychotic break at the funeral and…”), but genre readers understand that a person can slip into a time warp or alter the world by psycho-kinetic means.  

So, the simple answer: The events in my books do indeed happen; they are not hallucinations or the fabrications of a delusional mental state. 

I have never approved of the sort of ending that suggests it was all a dream. There have to be rules; there have to be consequences. Without this, there would be no dramatic tension, no reason to care or root for the hero, no reason to fear the villain. 

The test comes in what finally matters to the reader. I think it is very clear that, had Harry acted differently in the last few pages of Zod Wallop, the world would have been different. There are real forces in motion. In this case, the world itself is at stake. And yes, I mean that literally. 

What did you find was the hardest part in writing your novels? Were there parts that you felt were difficult to complete? 

I often get stuck while writing a novel. I remember, in writing Zod Wallop, ending a chapter with the hero and his companions having come to the end of a road. There they were, in a car, stopped at the end of a road that has turned into weeds, a forest in front of them. That was it. I didn’t know anymore about the story myself, and I just stopped for awhile, drifted around for weeks doing nothing. Then, disgusted with myself, I decided just to write something, anything, and keep going. And once I was going, momentum returned. But that’s not an unusual thing with me. Self-doubt and dread are my constant companions. 

Which work did you find the most exciting to produce? 

I think I enjoyed writing Résumé With Monsters the most. I was rereading Lovecraft as I wrote it, so the book bounced along on a course parallel to my reading. I wrote it in four months, having a great time with the employment rants. Like many of my friends, I have had my share of menial, dreadful jobs, and that material just came naturally (for instance, the motivational pamphlets that Philip gets with his paycheck are outrageous but, in several cases, actual pamphlets I got with my paycheck). 

What are your plans for the future? Any particular short- and long-term goals? 

I don’t know about other writers, but I’m in trouble if I look into the future. The future says, rather sternly, “You have no one to blame but yourself for living on the streets. You had plenty of time to repent and learn a trade.” 

Stephen Smith