An Interview with Paul G. Tremblay
Paul G. Tremblay’s fiction has appeared in a great many magazines including Razor Magazine, CHIZINE, and Weird Tales. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy and Bandersnatch anthologies. His first novel, The Little Sleep, is forthcoming (February 2009) from Henry Holt. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and He is represented by Stephen Barbara of the Donald Maass agency.
Q: You recently sold your first novel “The Little Sleep” to Henry Holt. Tell us a little bit about the book, and how it relates to Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” if at all.
A: The protag is Mark Genevich; a Lithuanian, narcoleptic private detective eeking out an existence in South Boston. The novel’s plot and voice is very much inspired by Chandler’s The Big Sleep and many post-Chandler noir novels as well. While there is humor to be had (I hope!) in The Little Sleep, the book has fun with the usual PI conventions while poking around in the nature of reality; what’s real, what’s a construct? And I take and treat Mark’s character very seriously. He’s isn’t a joke. He’s someone who suffers a great deal.
I’m proud, excited, amazingly nervous for the book, and I hope people like it.
Q: You teach calculus for a living. My favorite word from calculus would be scatterplot. What is your favorite word from calculus?
A: I don’t have a favorite word. I have favorite symbols, like this: a double legged Z for the set of all integers. Or more obscure ones like : reversed capital E, with means “there exists (existential qualifier!) or upside down capital A, which means “for all.” One might say the knowledge and use of such symbols reaffirms my exultant standing within civilized society. Or one might not.
Q: Have you ever read Stephen King’s book Rage? I read it while I was in high school. If I remember correctly the calculus teacher in that book was shot and her last words were something about an equation. What would you want your last words to be if you were a character in a Stephen King novel?
A: I did read Rage; a long time ago. I didn’t remember that a calculus teacher was shot or her last words. Now I’m depressed.
Aren’t we all characters in a Stephen King novel? I received my contract, finally, last week, and I’m supposed to do something terrible with my protractor to a local gas station attendant who doesn’t deserve it.
Okay, fine, last words: “If it matters, if you care about such things, I didn’t try to hurt anyone on purpose.”
Sort of on topic…I invite everyone to read Jim Shepard’s PROJECT X, which is a short novel about a school shooting. Short and powerful. Read any of Jim Shepard’s brilliant work for that matter.
Q: As a writer what person do you prefer?
A: I prefer myself! Hahahaha…haha…ha…um, yeah.
When writing I use first-person, present tense a majority of time. I like the immediacy of the voice and tense, the challenge of creating characters through a singular viewpoint, the inherent unreliability of a story coming from only one point of view because all stories, while certainly informed and molded by collective experience and culture, ultimately come from one point of view.
Q: Do you consider yourself a Horror writer? What’s the most scary thing you’ve read about in the last month? In the last week?
A: No, I don’t consider myself a horror writer. And I do feel, at least personally, that this distinction, what I call myself, is important. I am a writer who sometimes writes horror. When I first started, I proudly wore “horror writer” as a badge. The result, I tried to shoehorn every idea, story kernel, or character into a horror story framework, and I think much of my early work suffered because of that. Now, to the best of my ability, I serve the needs of the story first and foremost and worry about what kind of story it ends up being later.
It sounds trite, but the newspaper is the most scary thing I read every day. I really don’t like to think about it, or talk about it. Fiction-wise, reading The Watchmen recently was a terrifying and exhilarating experience.
Q: Have you ever written a story that reads the same backwards as it does forwards?
A: If you mean, you can hold it up to the mirror and read it backwards, no. If you mean literally flip the order of the words, no. That nonsense aside, I would claim that my short story “The Blog at the End of the World” (due to appear at Chizine—www.chizine.com—in October) is a story than can be read backwards. It’s in blog form, with comments and posts presented in a certain order, but could be read in whatever order the reader chooses, I hope.
Q: How many words?
A: 4 G’s, baby.