TOD 042 J.S. Breukelaar: Like Blade Runner but the Rain is Spit

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is a unique immersive one-day event featuring more than 40 program participants and approximately 16 hours of panels, readings, signings and social activities centered around contemporary Weird and speculative fiction. The third annual event will be held March 22-23, 2019 at Silver Scream FX Lab and Hotel Indigo-College Park in Atlanta, GA. Limited to 75 attendees. Buy your memberships here or support the Indiegogo campaign here.

Show Notes

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews J.S. Breukelaar, author of the recently released collection Collision: Stories (Meerkat Press, Feb. 2019) and the novels, Aletheia: A Supernatural Thriller and American Monster. The discussion kicks off with revisiting characters and the haunted nature of the narrator, unexpected narratives, working with editor/publisher Cameron Pierce and Kirsten Alene Pierce on her first novel American Monster and its Weird organic genesis, Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner as a ‘bit of encouragement’, and Don DeLillo as influence. Discussion then turns to the dead/not dead stuff, her interest in noir and the ‘detective inhabiting a liminal space’ in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and its many film versions, as well as Nightmare Town, plus a Gothic/Godwin/Shelley/Poe/Hoffman interlude and an ‘ambivalence about place’ which she shares with Faulkner’s ‘experiments in narration’. Next up an in-depth behind-the-pages conversation about the stories in Collision, which span works published in the early 2000s to four new pieces including a new novella, comparisons to Kelly Link, finding a home in constant Weirdness via Tin House and their Fantastic Women (2011) anthology, gila monster venom, researching memory and reading Borges, Weirding Clint Eastwood, picking up stories with her groceries, the Weirdness of living with big spiders in Sydney, working with Meerkat Press (recently relocated from Atlanta to Asheville, NC), Keith Rosson‘s Expressionist illustrations for Collision, the ‘visceral terror’ of ‘what if’ writing after the universe split/collided in 2016, allowing character arc and setting to drive her narrative, ripples of dripping slimy liquid physicality, that Blade Runner California, living between two worlds, ‘long drunken discussions’ about how to write like an outsider with Seb Doubinsky, and a quote from Herman Melville. (1:18:00) The episode concludes with a reading of ‘Ripples on a Blank Shore’, her unsettling new novella from Collision, her doubt as to whether ‘the Judge is the Whale’, Jeffrey Ford’s Ahab’s Return, and her author reading recommendations including Seb Doubinsky, Kaaron Warren, Angela Slatter, Nathan Balingrud, Jeffrey Ford, Stephen Graham Jones, Aaron Dries, and Anna Tambour, as well as a tease about her just-completed new short novel.