Suite101 gets author Nick Mamatas' point of view on three pressing questions.
If you had to write a new spin on a classical text, what would you pick and what creative direction would you take?
By a strange coincidence, I just did this with a story I wrote this week. One of my interests is the supernatural work of Robert W. Chambers and recently I took the idea of The King In Yellow—a play that when performed or even read has substantial psychological effects on its audience and massive sociological impact on the society that dares publish it—and transported it to the modern-day hipster milieu of Brooklyn. It's also a crime story of sorts, with two amateur sleuths/lowlifes I've written about before, starring.
("The Bloodied Woman," featuring the two characters, appeared in Mississippi Review and is available here They also appeared in my novella "Eliminate the Improbable", which was published in the anthology New Dark Voices 2.)
What can genre fiction do better than its more literary orientated counterpart?
My genre work is fairly "literary orientated", as is most of the genre material I read. Most of these distinctions have more to do with how popular magazines were marketed a century ago (middle-class realism on slick paper, genre material for the working classes on pulp) and have little do with with the actual essence of fiction, whether fantastic, "realist", or something else.
Outside of the question of essence, I can say that actually existing genre fiction—especially science fiction, fantasy, or horror—is somewhat more likely to have a mind-blowing, life-changing effect on younger readers than its literary counterparts. Literary fiction for young people is often fairly obsessed with cancer-ridden mamas, abusive papas, and dying canines. Nothing mind-blowing there.
Pick one novel/series you'd like to see made into a film or television series.
I would like to see an English-language big-budget film version of Koushun Takami's Battle Royale. Anything to see Hannah Montana with an arrow in her head, really.
Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels, Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, and over sixty short stories many of which were recently collected in You Might Sleep... A native New Yorker, Nick now lives full time on the Internet.
"YOU MIGHT SLEEP... is a dare. It poses an uncomfortable question: How many of the people from Nick's all-too-real, darkly funny, unblinkingly intelligent stories will you recognize as family, friends, enemies (those who you think of as simply 'them'), or yourself? The answer is easy, if you have the guts to be honest: all of them. And that's scary as hell." -- Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep
Lynne Jamneck - Lynne Jamneck lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Short listed for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards, she has published short fiction in ...
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