PowellsBooks.Blog

Describe your latest book.
My latest book is a short story collection called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Many of the stories are about monstrous metamorphoses — teenaged bullies in New Jersey, captive Japanese women converted into factory machinery, vampires in recovery. Human subjects converted into objects by violence.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I'd like to date Bone from Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone. Provided that I, too, were 14 years old — it would be a little Mary Kay Letourneau to date him now, at age 31. Maybe Russell Banks will write a sequel where Bone is an adult man on a Jamaican schooner and suitable as an imaginary love interest? Because I love that character. His put-on swagger and his anger and his complete vulnerability.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
For several years I worked as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic in New York City, a job I really loved and repeatedly failed at. At first I'd considered training as a vet tech, before it was revealed to me that none of my love ...

As a kid I lived in the closet of my mind. I spent most of my early life in there, trying on costumes. Later I'd go to college and read these textbooks where academics tried to shove the Universe into various corsets, but as a kid I wasn't reading for that kind of knowledge, that sort of adult girdle or belt. I just wanted to wear new skins, man. I wanted scales and wings. I'd figured out that you could do these really bizarre tricks in the library, right behind those hard burgundy chairs that smelled like paste and grandfathers, in full view of everybody — you could, for example, metamorphose. You could suture a character's wings to your own eight-year old body. You could drop Time like a skirt and step right outside its wrinkled orbit. You could live a lifetime in one hour on a rainy Wednesday, commune with the dead, you could duel and kill and die yourself without remorse in the Western Territories, run off with traveling carnivals, fall in and out of love, fall through a hole in your backyard into another galaxy ...