A New Interview About the New Novel
Interview by Chris Morey. Reprinted from the Dark Regions Newsletter, October 13, 2011.
How would you describe your new novel “Lullaby for the Rain Girl”?
That’s a tougher question than you might imagine! Again and again in my writing life reviewers have called my work “unclassifiable,” and I guess it is, at least in terms of narrow genre definitions. Mort Castle calls “Lullaby for the Rain Girl” both a “contemporary metaphysical mystery” and a “modern fantasy,” but then rejects both definitions as too limiting. I would say that it’s a story of a man’s relationships with three women, one of whom is alive, one of whom is dead, and one of whom is…well, I’ll leave that for the reader to find out. The novel has a supernatural component-a first for me-but at its core it’s an emotional story about an aging man’s attempts to come to terms with his life and the people in his life, past and present.
How did the novel come about? What spawned the ideas?
Again, that’s not easy to answer. “Rain Girl” is by far my longest and most ambitious novel-at over 120,000 words it’s as long as my first two novels combined-and takes place in two different eras, the early 1980s and the end of the ’90s. What I’d been considering for a long time is what I think of as one of the great literary themes-the way the past imposes itself on the present. You see it everywhere, from “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles right up to Peter Straub’s wonderful novel “A Dark Matter.” No matter how hard we try to avoid them, the birds-our birds, the birds of our past-invariably come home to roost. My book is very much about that, about how a man’s actions two decades before play out and resonate in unexpected ways later.
I was also thinking about ghost stories, the nature of ghosts, the way that, to me, most ghost stories tend to be in some way unsatisfactory. Usually I just don’t buy that the reason the ghost is haunting the characters in the story is really all that important, you know? I mean, you’re a ghost, you have an entire spirit-world to explore…infinity is laid out at your ghostly feet…and the best you can think of to do is to hang around your old house jumping out at people? What kind of an afterlife is that? Why would ghosts even care about the living at all? So I wanted to write a story in which the haunting would be fully justified, completely believable. But in doing so I discovered that the conventional type of ghost simply didn’t work. I had to create an entirely new kind of creature and, really, an entirely different kind of ghost story. “Lullaby for the Rain Girl” is the result.
If you could describe your writing style in three words, what words would they be?
Let’s see, the words I notice reviewers using most often are “elegant” and “literary,” which are probably pretty good. “Emotional,” too. I don’t write pulp fiction. I don’t write commercial fiction. I don’t write for “markets.” I write what’s inside me, and it often comes from very deep, uncomfortable places. After the piece is finished I have a look around to see if someone might like to publish whatever it is I’ve come up with. Mine is a completely different approach from what a lot of writers in this field do. That’s not a value judgment, just a different attitude.
What authors have inspired you most throughout your life?
Oh man, how much time do you have? Let’s start with Poe, my first favorite writer, whose stories and poems absolutely changed my life when I first discovered them around age eleven. Move to Rod Serling and the Southern California Group in general, particularly the “Twilight Zone” writers-Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson. The early Bradbury. And then, a little later, a variety of literary writers who work the darker side of the street-Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Styron, Carson McCullers. And, though he wasn’t exactly an “author,” I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Alfred Hitchcock. No storyteller has meant more to me throughout my life than Hitchcock.
To those unsure about ordering “Lullaby for the Rain Girl,” what would you tell them?
I’d say that if graphic horror and gore are your bag, I am not your writer. My stories are always emotional at their core-human stories about human beings with very human flaws and foibles. They’re about style, mood, atmosphere. The horror writers I love are not part of the blood ’n’ guts crowd. To me there is more worthwhile reading in a single page of Poe or Stoker or Mary Shelley or Lovecraft than in reams of pages by any number of so-called “splatter” writers. If horror doesn’t have a core of humanity, then to me it’s worthless--any kind of writing without that human core is worthless, really. But if human stories are your bag, emotional stories, then you might like “Lullaby for the Rain Girl.” I hope a few adventurous readers will give it a try.
For information on how to pre-order "Lullaby for the Rain Girl," please visit http://www.darkregions.com/lullaby-for-the-rain-girl-by-christopher-conlon/.
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