“You know, we’re really like the coffee-and-cigarettes generation, when you think about it. You know what I mean? In the ‘40s it was the pie-and-coffee generation.”
Tom Waits

It was a dry and unseasonably warm February morning - though this is Canada, so unseasonable is a relative term - when I met Toronto author David Nickle in a café called the Tango Palace Coffee Company on Queen Street East. When thinking of how to describe said café, the word “cozy” comes to mind and sticks there hard and fast. Apparently they also do good business, as we learned competing over the buzz and clatter of a packed house and the music playing out of the café stereo system.

Though I’ve never been on a blind date, I suspect meeting for the first time someone you’re about to interview functions within a similar social dynamic. Or perhaps like the awkward meetings depicted in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. S.B.’s photographer, Matt, made what is perhaps the most apt comparison. An interview is, perhaps, like a one-night-stand, of which I also have no first-hand experience, but let’s go with it. You meet someone you don’t know and then, when it’s over, it’s over, and you each go your separate ways after some brief morning-after awkwardness.

When David walked in, he was at once exactly what I had expected and not quite what I had expected at all. I suppose such verisimilitude is appropriate for the author of the bizarre and unsettling fictions found in the short story collection Monstrous Affections published in 2009 by ChiZine Publications. David cuts an imposing figure, with the dark and brooding appearance one might expect of a “horror writer,” maintaining a somewhat gothic bearing, with his tousled dark hair and a tall, bear-like frame draped in a long, black leather coat. His massive coffee mug, which would have looked ridiculously comical in my hands, simply seemed to fit the man as he sat down across from me. But as soon as he greeted me with a warm smile, it was obvious that the qualifier “teddy” would, with the stubbornness of water splitting stone, seep into the “bear." David Nickle is a classic gentle giant.

A little bit about David Nickle: as Michael Rowe writes in the introduction to Monstrous Affections, David is a practitioner of what some have called Canadian gothic literature. And his stories are often, though not always, evocative of the horrific. Notable of David’s work is that it is, yes, unapologetically Canadian, his stories often set in or making reference to Canada, at times proving that even Ontario can be a scary place. His stories are at once playful and disturbing, and perhaps all the more disturbing for their playfulness. The world of David Nickle is populated by witches, ghosts, vampires (not the dull, angst-ridden romantic vampires of Twilight), and the occasional Cyclops (turned into a homoerotic sex-symbol, which is awesome), as well as creatures and forces you won’t find anywhere else, and examples of just plain old human nastiness. For spare change, David “commits journalism,” writing for the Toronto Community News group of newspapers. He has been a recipient of a Bram Stoker award as well as an Aurora Award for short form work in English. For more information about David and his work, I urge you to visit his website. It was also recently announced that Monstrous Affections won the Reader’s Choice Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Fiction Collection. Buy it at a store near you! For Torontonians, Bakka-Phoenix may still have a few signed copies in stock.

I guess we’ll start with the obvious. How did you get into genre fiction and into writing it?

Genre fiction’s sort of always been my game. When I was in elementary school and high school I read Edgar Alan Poe, and finding that incomprehensible I went onto Stephen King, and H.P. Lovecraft, and finding that incomprehensible... went onto Stephen King.  So it’s always been a fascination with me. When I was very young, my parents worried about this and thought that it might be a sign of mental illness, and the jury’s still out on that, but like I said, it’s been a fascination with me. I find myself bored with imagining completely realistic scenarios that don’t sort of... transcend reality a bit more. And you have to have a pretty good story to keep me going. If a zombie doesn’t show up it’s, uh... yeah.

And what spurred the actual writing?

You probably have to go back to preschool. My mum has always been very supportive, and both of my parents are artists, so the idea of creating art that you would then make a living from and distribute to people was never foreign to me. So my mom would take dictations of little stories that I would tell at the age of three, and they weren’t that good. None of them have been published, but it got me onto the idea of stringing out a line of crap in a way that amuses people. And from there, I couldn’t say based on my early elementary school period that I had a real knack for it, but I realized that I had a hunger for narrative, for telling stories. And being a voracious reader sort of helped with that as well. I mean, realistically, when I decided to get into fiction writing as a career choice, I was probably in junior high school. And starting to write seriously, that came probably in my mid-twenties. I started to realize that when I was in high school and in college, I just didn’t have enough experience to do this seriously, so I committed journalism for a while, and still do.

Committed journalism. An interesting turn of phrase there.

Yeah, I’m a journalist. A lot of people accuse me of that, so it sort of sticks.

I noticed on your website that you refer to your stories as lies. That’s interesting because I know a lot of writers who do the same. They refer to themselves as professional liars. But of course, they’re not alone. There are a lot of professional liars like politicians, and journalists I suppose.

We’re probably abusing the term as liars, because the lie in fiction is a consensual lie. It’s a winking thing. The reader expects to be lied to, enjoys being lied to, as opposed to... we don’t really misrepresent, but...

I guess one expects to be lied to by lawyers, too, but what do you feel is the difference between, I guess, a storyteller as a liar and other kinds of professional liars, and I guess stories as lies?

The reason that lying works so well is... everybody fundamentally wants to believe. And they want to believe something far-fetched and beyond. It’s the reason that people still go to church as well. You want to be credulous about things, and I think that what fiction is... it’s a game of -- well, willing suspension of disbelief is one of the things that people talk about. That’s what you try to get people to do when you give them genre fiction. You get them to say, all right, I know that vampires don’t sparkle when they’re hit by sunlight, but I’m just going to believe for a minute that that’s what happens. What really happens is that they burst into shrieking flames, that doesn’t happen here. And I think that that’s... People want to be comforted, and to be discomforted, and fiction is a safe way to play that game. Would that all lying was consensual fiction. If I could put it another way, I guess we are at the moral top of the heap when it comes to liars.

The noble liars.

We’re the noble liars, yeah, that’s good.

I did a workshop, actually, with a horror writer, a guy named Mike Arnzen, down near Pittsburgh, and he talked about how there’s a fine line between horror and comedy.

That’s very true.

I guess that’s why a lot of bad horror comes off as comedic, because of that fine line. Is it difficult to... for you to tread that line?

In the words of Spinal Tap, it’s a fine line, and I cross it often, between clever and stupid. But no, I think that horror is fundamentally... well, it works best when it’s a bit comic. I find that the kind of horror that turns me off is that dirge-like misery where characters just discover the real discomfort in having one’s fingernails peeled off. That’s not what horror’s about.

Like the Hostel style stuff.

Yeah, like the Hostel type thing. That stuff can be unintentionally funny, but intentionally comic horror is another thing. I’m thinking of something like Stephen King’s story “Gramma” about this kid who as it turns out is the grandson of a Lovecraftian witch who’s about to die, and she’s looking to transfer her soul into a younger body. And she’s picked the grandson. So she organizes things in such a way that her daughter and all the family are away, and it’s just her and the grandson, and she’s dying. And the whole punch line comes when she gasps, “Come give Granny a hug.” Or, “Give Granny a kiss.” Because that’s how the soul transfers. That’s funny. It’s just funny. Because we all know how comically uncomfortable kissing the extraordinarily elderly can be. And this puts some almost absurd stakes on it. But at the same time, King in that story does a really good job of building up the horror and the real discomfort of kissing a horrifically old person. But it wouldn’t work without the humour. In fact, without the humour, it would be out and out creepy in the wrong way.

That’s true. And of course, you write horror, but in addition you write stuff that I guess would be more along the lines of fantasy and science fiction-ish stuff, like “Swamp Witch and the Tea-Drinking Man,” which was probably one of my favourites in the anthology. And I was wondering if... do you approach writing different genres differently?

Yeah. I guess. I mean... In fact, absolutely. I find when I’m writing fantasy or science fiction -- I’ve done a few science fiction stories as well, none in here, but -- yeah, you think about the language differently, the language works differently, the expectations of the reader work differently. When you’re writing science fiction, a lot of the things that might be seen as metaphorical in a horror story are concrete. The space alien is actually a space alien. And with realistic fiction you can play at different punch lines. With horror I find that there’s a need to draw things to a really sharp emotional and horrific point, and that’s not always the case in other genres.

With that said, I think that the one thing to remember about horror is that horror isn’t necessarily a genre. There’s a critic and anthologist by the name of Douglas Winter who said that what horror is, is emotion. Which means that all sorts of stories can function as horror stories. Alien is a science fiction film, but it is also a horror film. It is a horror film because you are scared out of your mind. And there are stories in Monstrous Affections like “The Delilah Party,” which is a realistic story, but it also functions as a horror story. So when I write horror it’s almost like you’re not writing in a genre. You’re going after a particular emotional effect. And I think with other sorts of fiction, you can broaden that to other effects and other emotions.

Also along the line of how you approach writing, do you have a particular process when you write a story? Is there a particular way you go about it, in terms of planning, drafting, stuff like that?

It is different for each one. I can say in common that blind panic and self doubt are the two approaches that I take the most consistently. You never know if you’re going to pull these things off. And...

Sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. If I could bottle the things that I did in what I think are the best stories that I’ve written, I’d write a bunch of stories just like the best stories that I’ve written.

And so there’s a whole bunch in a box somewhere.

Yeah, and you have a whole bunch in a box somewhere. And none of them would be good stories in themselves. In general, what I do is, I find that I think of an image and then build on that, often by drawing from experience. There are some checklists you can go through. You can think about, “Alright, I need me a protagonist. Who’s got the most to lose in this situation? What could they want?” In short fiction, the basic rule that I guess you follow is that you find somebody who has an aching need that can be fulfilled or not fulfilled through the course of the story. Until then it’s just an idea. And if I could remind myself of that more often, I would have far fewer false starts.

Yes, those false starts. They are killer. Where should we go next...? I guess with the theme of the anthology. The anthology itself, Monstrous Affections... the main theme of the anthology, even though they were all published separately is... well, love. Do you find that there are certain themes that you gravitate towards when you write?

I think again it comes to getting at fundamental needs in people, and I think that the need to connect and the need for real love... the understanding about what’s important in one’s life... I couldn’t say that there’s a consistent theme in all of my work. I mean, with the collection, I have to admit that the title Monstrous Affections came late in the game. I had these stories, and I literally went through them and thought, “O.K. What is a line that goes through this?” Which sounds like really shameless backpedalling, but it’s actually how I... it’s how a writer works. You know, when you finish a story, I find when you get to the point of revising it and actually making it work, you take a look at what you’ve written down and you say, “O.K. What did I just write? What’s this thing about?”

So teasing out those themes that are already there.

And, yeah, you tease them out in the revisions so that it becomes more solidified and all those red herrings and dead ends that you wrote down in the wee hours when you were sure that you were doomed... you take those out. And then it doesn’t look as uncertain.

Do you write to deadlines or anything like that?

It depends. It depends. Most of the stories, or at least, a lot of the stories that I’ve published have come from requests from editors, who say “I’d like to get a story for this anthology that I’m putting together.” And in that case there is a deadline. I try not to let a story linger around too long. With that said, sometimes that can be valuable. I remember with “The Sloan Men,” the older story, I started a couple of years before I finished it. I wrote the first few paragraphs... or the first few pages and thought, “Well, this is an interesting set-up. I have no idea what the next word is. I’ll put it away for a while.” And then I nailed it together later on. And I think that was necessary.

So, I should probably mention the cover of the anthology.

Oh yes, everybody does.

Yeah, I was on the TTC one day and there was this woman who sat down next to me. And I was reading this, and she glanced over briefly, she was looking around, and she did a double-take on the cover. And then she promptly stood up and moved to another seat on the TTC. Sat down somewhere else.

That’s great.

I’ve never actually had that happen before with a cover. What was your reaction to it?

Oh, I loved it! When I saw that... It’s funny, because ChiZine is a new press, and many of us are friends, and when it came time to do the cover, we had a meeting over drinks with the cover artist Erik Mohr, who’s fantastic, and he came with some sketches for the cover, and he wasn’t really sure what to do. He had one that would have been a really great mainstream cover. It would go well on a Chuck Palahniuk novel. So we were looking over this and everybody was a little bit... not sure if this was going to work. And I sort of said, in terms of tweaking it, why don’t you see if you can make that image look a little bit more like one of the things from “The Sloan Men.” Just for fun. And see how that works. So he wound up doing this completely different cover, emailed it around to us, and we had this furious email conversation. One of the people at ChiZine thought that it might be a bit too upsetting. And I just looked at it, and I thought “Well, there are certain people who are never going to buy this book because of this cover, but that’s not the people who would enjoy the stories, so that’s O.K.” Yeah, the cover has been fantastic. Almost all of the reviews that have come in that have been good on the book have mentioned the cover first. For example, there was January Magazine, they picked it as one of the best of 2009, and the reviewer said he had to read it after seeing the cover. I think it’s brilliant. I think that it’s up there with the initial cover of Stephen King’s Nightshift, a really classic horror collection that became iconic, so I’m really blessed with this hideous, hideous atrocity.

It really jumps out at you, even in the bookstore and you have all these covers around you, and you don’t know what to pick necessarily, until you see that cover.

Yeah, “Pick me,” it says.

Buy me!

[In a growling bear voice.] Hey Lady, come here!

So, uh, this issue of steelbananas is going to be coming out the day after Valentine’s Day, which is unfortunate in some ways because I was going to ask you if you would recommend purchasing this book as a Valentine’s Day gift? Perhaps for next year?

Perhaps next year. Well, we were actually thinking, and I’m not sure if we’re going to get this together, of doing downloadable pdf Valentine’s Day cards to put this on them. So yes. Well, it’s actually a good Valentine’s Day gift for those who are miserable about Valentine’s Day, because it’s about love, but it’s not so romantic.

I actually only have one more formal question. In the back of Monstrous Affections, you mention that you have a tragic affection for Tom Waits.

Oh, I do.

Which is your favourite Tom Waits album and why? And answer very carefully. Very carefully.

[David thinks... very carefully.]

Umm... I would say that it is... Raindogs.

Raindogs.

Raindogs. And that is for a particular nostalgic reason. I came to Tom Waits by a mix tape that one of my colleagues at a paper I used to work at played in her car. And the first song that I heard was nothing from Raindogs. It was the, um, the Waltzing Matilda song with a name I can’t recall [“Tom Traubert’s Blues”], which I’m embarrassed about... but I picked up Raindogs on vinyl, because that’s what the kids did in those days, and then when “Singapore” came on, I was hooked. Tom Waits is a funny guy. For the longest time I think that I was... I think that a lot of people listened to Tom Waits and loved the early stuff and find some of the later stuff hard to get. And I, too, found the later stuff hard to get, but all that it takes is really listening to it over and over again, also while you sleep, and you understand what he’s about. I would have room for more music on my mp3 player if I didn’t have every single album that Tom Waits has, even the ones I don’t like that much.

Good answer, David. Good answer.

And now, dear reader, the morning after is upon us. Let us awkwardly part. And don’t forget your under-things.