2020-05-17 - The Author Interviews

The storm has passed on, east and inland, leaving the evening sky clear enough in the west that the scarlet and gold bands of sunset are visible. But the air still has that washed-clean purity, that sharpness that isn't quite a scent in its own right. There's the spicy sweetness of clove smoke there, too, courtesy of the sailor who's sitting lazily at one of the picnic tables, watching the sun set. Joe's got new ink on his hands, the phrase HOLD FAST distributed over his knuckles, bright and vivid in black and ocean blue.

He's still faded, but it's coming back, a few shades brighter than it was when Megan found him. There's a tired contentment to his posture, a working man at the end of a long day. There's a bottle of beer on the table, but he seems to be ignoring it.

There's a jogging figure on the horizon that grows larger. As Dante approaches, he becomes a little more recognizable, but not immediately given he's obviously not jogging in a three-piece. He is in fact, wearing higher end performance workout gear, including a crompression tee and slim fit pants.

He seems to be reaching the end of his run, as evidenced by the change in gait to a slowdown pace as he gets closer to Joe's picnic table. There's a sheen of sweat on him and his usually straight hair has sprung back to its natural curly state between the workout and the thunderstorm that hovers in the air. He stops by one of the other picnic tables and proceeds to stretch, his breath still laboured but calming. It takes him a second to ping to the fact that he knows the other man. "Evening."

"Evening," Joe says, companionably. The contrast between their situations - Dante in the healthiest of pursuits, Joe with drink and smoke, lounging indolently, makes him smile. It's not mocking, though. Almost fond. "Nice day out, innit, now that the rain's passed on." A glance to the east where the thunderstorm can be seen in the distance, a retreating tower of cloud, flashing with lightning, though it's far enough away that it no longer results in audible thunder."How're things treatin' you?"

Dante was pushing himself given the soft contortions of his face as he continues to stretch out. "Well immediately at this moment, I'm trying not to cramp up." He chuckles, stretches, winces, shakes out a leg. "Trying to get out of my head, and out of that restaurant. Jogging is only good for one of those. And you?" His eyes go to the tattooed knuckles, but he doesn't comment.

"Depends on how hard and fast you run, I find. I used to run, myself, back before I got into a wreck," he says, taking a lazy drag off his cigarette. "Endurance stuff, it can be kinna meditative. Now I get it swimming or sailing. Restaurant?" Joe wonders. And then he catches the direction of that gaze, spreads his fingers to display the ink, like a woman showing off a new ring. "Yeah, it's new," he confirms, preempting the question.

"Ah, yes. I imagined the rumour mill had already spun it all over the town. I bought a bloody restaurant." Dante straightens, hand pressing to a knot in his side. He unhooks his water bottle from his belt and takes a swig. He looks at Joe's knuckles, then up to him. "Don't quite understand them, m'self. Or rather, I can't imagine that any word or image would have enough meaning for me to have it with me permanently and painfully. But also," a twitch of a grin, "Cris pointed it it doesn't quite fit my aesthetic. Though of course he didn't say it in those words."

Up go those dark blond brows. "I hadn't heard." His tone is not particularly shocked. "What'd you do that for?" he wonders. A little tilt of his head. "For me....mnemonics. Commemorations of achievement or things I want to defend against loss or forgetting. Ever see that movie Memento?" He holds out the hand, fisted. HOLD. "It's the scars we choose, rather than the ones life gives us, I guess. Got plenty of those, too." Witness the ones from wrist to elbow - someone tried a Roman Bath, apparently. And the cigarette burn on the left hand, near the base of the thumb.

"Christ, I don't know," says Dante with a breath of laughter. He takes another pull from his water bottle. "This town makes you do mad things. I just wanted somewhere I could have a proper cocktail and play the piano so I decided to build it m'self." He presses fingers into the muscles of his neck. "I haven't any scars. But then, I've always just been a writer. Not a soldier, or a sailor or a cop or any of that."

Joseph concedes, lazily, "Fair enough." The suggestion of a smile in the lines around his eyes. "Sounds a little drastic, but from what I understand, someone tryin'a raise the tone around here some couldn't hurt any." He flicks ash to the side, a practiced gesture. "Yeah," he allows. "Straight out of university?"

"Trying, yes. Though I'm fighting with profit margins to make sure people in this town can actually afford to go. It would be easy to price myself out of the market." Dante shifts to lean on the edge of the table. He rotates his ankles one at a time. "Well, after being a wastrel around Europe for a bit out of school. Sowing my wild oats and such."

Now he smiles in earnest, the lines deepening. It's got that warmth to it, though. Almost conspiratorial. "That's true. Hard to find a balance on that front." Another drag off the cigarette, and smoke expelled out of the corner of his mouth, like a gangster in an old movie. He nods. "What's your favorite part of Europe? What's the best place you been?"

"Ahh, that's a difficult question. I saw quite a lot of it when I was drunk and young. Who doesn't love Paris? Florence? Prague is lovely." He stretches arms overhead and then lets them drop. "You've traveled quite a bit yourself, haven't you? Have you a favourite?"

"Been all over the world," Joe admits. "Lived in Russia for more'n two years, Japan for one. Stationed in lots of places, includin' the middle east. Favorite...." His expression turns musing. "I'm real fond of St. Petersburg and Osaka, and I spent a couple summers in London." Then that fond little smile. "Paris is pretty great, too."

"Should have guessed you'd favour the road less traveled. But Paris is the most visited city in the world for a reason." Dante shrugs. "London I can't see objectively because it's home, really. Even if it's not my family home. I was there quite young, and then, well, there was Eton." Which isn't in London proper, but it's close enough.

Joseph finally stubs out the cigarette on the table, drops the butt into a little tin he's pressed into service as an ashtray. "Well, for the most part, I just went where I was sent," he says, more quietly. "I volunteered for Russia and Japan because I'd trained in those languages and I wasn't married with kids. It's a lot easier for a bachelor to live abroad 'n it is a guy with a wife an' three kids, you know?" He bobs his head. "Windsor, right? I visited it a time or two when I was in London. Yeah, I know what you mean. You live somewhere, that's a very different view from the tourists'. What do you miss most about the UK?"

Dante quirks a grin, cants his head, and lifts his brows at Joe. "You ever thought of being an interviewer? Are you being polite or do you genuinely want to know that I miss bloody Pret a Manger quick serve sandwiches and high street fashion shops?" He says this with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes and no insult intended.

His grin is sheepish. "I've done many interviews," he admits. "More accurately, I been the one interviewed a lot. I'm always curious, though, as to what someone abroad misses from their home. Homesickness takes many forms, and it's amazing what details stick in people's memories....and what they don't miss until it's gone."

"You're very good at it. I only notice because I've done it m'self. When I've been gathering interviews for my nonfiction titles." Dante seems recovered from his jog now, and folds his hands loosely across his chest as he leans against the table. "I find people miss mundane things. Little things they never realized would be different. Brands of favourite sauces. The way the street smells after the rain. Not being the one with the funny accent in the room."

Joseph lays a hand on his chest, offers the suggestion of a bow - as much as one can, seated as he is. "Thanks," he says, gently. "And I agree. It's amazing how many things leap out of the background when they're different. Things like....traffic signals. What you find in the shops. Stuff like that. Scents in the air, what's blooming at a given time." Something almost wistful. "It's strange how it changes your focus. Makes you appreciate it more when you return...."

"Homesickness isn't a longing for a place, it's a longing for a collection of sensations." Then Dante smiles sharkily, "Oooh, I should write that one down. That's a good one isn't it?"

A moment of something....a connection that has no need of Glimmer. "Exactly," he agrees,and there's a peculiar gentleness to it. "Which is why there's that shock, sometimes, when you return to a place you once lived, once knew, and it's different. Like a childhood home when you haven't been there a long time."

"That is precisely why I don't go back to my childhood home. Besides, I've written so many twisted versions of that part of England that I've muddied up the waters rather a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if I've forgotten what was real and what I made up." Dante half-shrugs. "A side effect of being a horror writer, I suppose."

"I used to go there a lot. I lived there for a while after I got out of the Navy. I needed....I needed care and they could provide it." Without the cigarette, he's reduced to picking at the label of the beer bottle - Pipeline Porter, it says. "But I'd visited very often over the years, so there was never a long period of time to get used to. I.....that's an interesting question. How fiction superimposes itself over the reality of a thing."

"Fiction superimposes itself over the whole of Gray Harbor, so there's another layer to being here, isn't there?" Dante waves vaguely at their surroundings. "I mean, bloody hell, what is reality, even? And I don't ask that with hyperbole. It's genuinely hard to tell sometimes."

The blue eyes widen. "I know, right?" he commiserates. "It's so strange to find that the truth here is even weirder than the fiction we could create. And yet....we live here. We make a life. It's amazing how a human mind can adapt. I mean, I know....I could make and walk through a door into another world, just for the asking. Somewhere impossibly strange. That I was kept there for more than half a year. That many of the people I know are also privy to these secrets, these things...

"I have a nasty habit of peering into any abyss I come across. So it's rather not surprising that I've ended up here, and seem to be settling in." Hence Dante...buying a restaurant when a few months ago, he was on a month-to-month lease in a furnished apartment because this was all supposed to be temporary. To say nothing of the attachments he's formed. "Not sure if that's because I write horror or why I do."

Joseph looks thoughtful for a moment. "I know it's a lot of why I have. New worlds to conquer, new things to explore and learn about. Even if I'll never publish a paper or even draft a memo to colleagues, explaining what I've found," he says, softly, gaze dropping to the toes of his boots.

Then he glances up. "I imagine that's why. What you can catalogue and understand, you have less reason to fear. Wasn't it Lovecraft who said that the unknown is always the most terrifying thing there is?"

"My money's on Lovecraft Glimmering like a motherfucker," says Dante, the crude word somehow charming in his elevanted accent. Or at least, less edgy. "Perhaps even strong enough that he was able to escape the Veil's self-preservation to allow him to write anything down at all. Or perhaps he was ill enough that the Veil didn't see a need to shut him up." A head-bob. "Which doesn't explain the racism, but then, few things do."

"Fear. Fear of anything remotely different....which in his case was apparently anything that wasn't a male WASP," Joe's voice is dry. "He didn't limit it to color, but threw creed and background and sex in there, too. I wouldn't take that bet - I'm sure he did. Or they believed it sufficiently obscure to let him. It's become something of a game with me, lately. Rereading old stuff like that, and guessing who. Chambers and Machen, Poe and Eliot, Yeats for sure."

"Mary Shelley, though she has the air to me of someone who saw something, perhaps that night in Lake Geneva, but then forgot it and the Veil papered over the worst of it. Perhaps they all did." Dante cracks a smile. "Somehow I feel like the Romantics would go chasing the thin points like suicidal moths." Says he, a moth, setting up shop next to the flame.

"Shelley, yeah," Real enthusiasm in his voice. "What're the titles of your books? I haven't looked 'em up, I admit. I don't read a whole awful lot of modern fiction, but it seems unfriendly not to, when I read as much as I do," He still hasn't owned his own literary career, even to Cristobal. "I think you're right, though. A lot of the late 19th century stuff feels very Veilish to me. I wonder where the other great thin spots are - I know there's one at Chernobyl, that's all."

"Do we want to know? Or would we go hunting for them if we did?" Dante hedges a bit at the question of his books. He pushes off the picnic table. "You can Google me. There are several, of varying quality. A warning though, I do write for the mass market. So don't expect Shelley." Which is really selling himself short. Yes, he works with formula, but he also plays with it and subverts it. And the writing is thematically layered and the characters well-developed. Even if some of his more experimental work was pulled off with varying degrees of success. "My publisher's favourite review line to trot out was the one time an arts reporter called me Agatha Christie's dark cousin. For whatever you make of that."

"I do," Joe's voice is mild. "Like, if I'm in for this, I want to know what there is to know. Even if it won't stick," A tap of a fingertip for his temple. "I like learning, even if it's something frightening." Then he grins, crookedly. "It's okay, my tastes generally aren't real highbrow. You're not E.L James, 's where I'd have to draw the line. That's a hell of a tagline. Do you agree?"

"It is, but if you look at the marketing material, those words are quite big while the journalist's name is quite small. That's because it was a review in a regional paper in Cornwall. So, what is it they say? Your mileage may vary?" Dante says those words with a bit of awkward stiffness. "Anyway. I should be off. I'm starting to smell myself, and that's never a good sign." As for EL James? He looks mischevious and says, offhand, in a way that's very hard to tell if he's being serious, especially with dry English wit. "Well, I do write smut for extra cash."

That earns him that low, throaty laugh. "Under your own name?" he wonders, with the air of a man casting out a dare. "Never have written any myself. Well, not for the consumption of strangers, anyhow," Joe notes. Then he sniffs theatrically. "Can't smell you from here, so you're not beyond the pale, not yet. But you have a good evenin'....and I wish you luck with your restaurant."

"God, no," says Dante with a glimmer in his eyes. Still hard to tell if he's joking about all of it. "And thank you. I'm going to bloody need it. There's far more to it than I knew." He rolls his shoulders back, lifts a hand to Joe. "Have a good evening. Don't punch anyone while your knuckles are healing. That's a writer's advice, so you know it's solid." Then he moves off at a brisk walk to shake out a bit of stiffness that's crept in.