Interview: Alden Bell

"Alden Bell" is the pseudonym of Joshua Gaylord, author of the 2009 mainstream novel Hummingbirds.  He lives in New York City, where he teaches high school English at an Upper East Side prep school, and (as an adjunct professor) courses in literature and cultural studies at the New School.  In 2000, he earned his Ph.D. from New York University (the subject of his dissertation: the great Southern novelist William Faulkner).  For more news and info, check out the author's website at http://www.joshuagaylord.com/.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Bell to discuss the just-released The Reapers Are the Angels, his distinctively Gothic novel depicting a zombie-haunted, post-apocalyptic America.

Macabre Republic: Let's begin with some juxtaposition.  The Reapers Are the Angels and your first novel Hummingbirds both feature teen female characters, but these are otherwise starkly different books.  What led you to turn from the modern-day comedy of manners to Southern Gothic horror?  Also how would you compare the experience of writing these two books?

Alden Bell: I suspect the real question behind the question here is, "Why do you keep writing about teenage girls?  What's your problem anyway?"--which is fair.  One of the reasons I'm drawn to teenage girls as characters is that they are ripe for melodrama.  When I'm writing, I like emotional landscapes of epic sentimental proportion, and there's no degree of drama that feels too massive for the fevered brain of a teenage girl.  Also, teenage girls are as performative as actors, so you can have them playing different roles in almost every scene, and it'll still feel somewhat right.

That said, Hummingbirds is a very different book from Reapers.  The girls in Hummingbirds, while they can be as ferocious as the zombie-slaughtering Temple in Reapers, are more cosmopolitan in there ferocity.  Their violence is of a particularly psychological and verbal sort.  What Temple does with a gurkha knife New York City prep school girls accomplish with haughty insults.  But they do have one thing in common: all of them are ultimately more dangerous to themselves than to others.

As far as the writing, the books are also very different stylistically.  They're grown from very different literary seedlings.  I see Hummingbirds as my Muriel Spark book: her voice is everywhere throughout that novel.  What is Reapers?  Maybe my William Faulkner book.  The whole time I was writing it, I felt like I was swimming in the Southern Gothic.

MR: If I could channel my inner Seinfeld for a moment: so what's the deal with zombies these days?  Their popularity seems to be at an all-time high.  My theory: whereas vampires are romantic figures in and of themselves, zombies appeal to us (somewhat paradoxically) for the apocalypse they precipitate.  The romance of a re-opened frontier, of a drastic fix for problems of urban sprawl and overpopulation (when we're stuck in miles-long traffic, or packed into a subway car like two-legged cattle, a sudden thinning of the herd doesn't sound like such a terrible idea).  But I'm curious about your take on all this--why do you think zombies have become such a pop-culture phenomenon?

AB: To me, zombies, no matter what their particular symbolism in any given story, always seem to represent the horde.  You never see a movie about one zombie: zombies are always a plague if they're anything.  That suggests a fear of the mob--or a feeling of alienation from the common course of life: being an outsider.  I always feel this fear when I find myself attending a sporting event without knowing anything about sports--a horde of people around me who are responding in similar ways to stimuli that I can't understand at all.  Who knows what could happen?  Maybe something will flash on one of the scoreboards that tells everyone, in coded language, to turn on those in the crowd who can't understand the message.  And then I would be the first one consumed.

You'll notice this, too, in zombie movies: there is always an undertone of relief whenever any of the protagonists get bitten and turned.  It's almost as if everyone agrees: "Well, it's sad that he's dead, but at least now he's one of the many rather than one of the few--and so he has less to worry about."

Ultimately, I think the zombie myth is there to remind us of all the ways in which we don't belong, all the margins in which we live.

MR: Tell us a little about your take on the undead in The Reapers Are the Angels.  These figures certainly aren't the stereotypical horde of soulless cannibals.

AB: I like a relatively traditional zombie--slow-moving, inarticulate, falling to pieces.  From an objective perspective, I think my zombies are of fairly common stock.  What may be different about them is the way they are perceived by our inspired protagonist Temple.  She doesn't see them as an abomination or even as a plague.  According to her, they are just doing what they are meant to do.  Like rattlesnakes or black widow spiders: you may not like them, you may want to avoid them or even kill them, but you can't really blame them for being the animals that they are.  That's how Temple sees the undead.  She has no anger toward them, and that lack of anger rubs off on the book itself.  They aren't beasts from hell sent to ravage the earth; they're just a situation you learn to deal with.

MR: On a similar note to the last question: one of the most striking aspects of the novel is its combination of the grotesque and the beautiful.  the notion that there's wonder to be spied even in a devastated landscape.  How important was it for you to depict a future that isn't unremittingly bleak?  Do you think this is a perspective that's lacking in many post-apocalyptic narratives?

AB: Temple's ability to appreciate beauty in a blighted world was one of the driving forces behind my writing of the book.  I've seen so many post-apocalyptic movies where I was constantly being reminded of the tragedy of the destruction.  But, really, humankind has a tremendous capacity to adjust and adapt.  they feel tragedy for a little while, then they just get used to their circumstances.

Temple is the ideal example of adaptation.  She has adapted so well to her environment that she's better suited to the wide, dangerous wildernesses than she is to the few bastions of civilization that defend themselves against the zombie horde.  But it's even more than that: it's Temple herself.  Temple is the kind of person I've always admired: she sees beauty everywhere she looks.  And this really has more to do with Temple than the beauty of the landscape itself.  There's an old James Cameron movie, The Abyss, where one of the characters says that if you look at the world with paranoid eyes, you'll see fear and destruction everywhere, but that you "have to look with better eyes than that."  Temple looks at the world with beautiful eyes.

MR: Do you have a personal favorite zombie movie or book?

AB: For me, zombie stories begin (and maybe even end) with George Romero's Dawn of the Dead.  It's hard for me to imagine a more perfect representation of the zombie mythology.  It doesn't bother with an explanation of where the zombies came from, and it ends without any solution in sight.  It seems more fascinated by the logistics of survival in a post-apocalyptic landscape than it does in showdowns between zombies and humans.  It features a group of people who learn how to live fairly well in the midst of world-wide chaos, and it celebrates them for it.  Some of the best scenes from that movie have nothing to do with zombies at all.

There's a moment that's been carved into my imagination since the first time I saw that movie years ago: the female lead sitting in front of a mirror giving herself a makeover.  She uses too much make-up, it's almost clownish, and she has a gun sitting on her vanity table.  But it's also terribly sweet: she still buys into the traditional notions of cosmeticized female beauty--despite the fact that the zombie apocalypse has made such notions all but useless.

There's another scene where the two male leads steal armfuls of cash from a bank--even though paper money has been rendered useless as well.  In the scene, they take the time to walk through the long, winding, roped-off line to get to the teller booths rather than just walking around it.  I find that moment touching as well.  They are finding moments of playfulness (and even a kind of faith) in the midst of the scourge.

MR: I'll just put this out there: you may have written the Great American Zombie Novel.  But I also wonder if such a label is ultimately too restrictive.  Do you even consider this a "zombie novel" (incidentally, by my count the word "zombie" appears only once in the text, versus the more prevalent--and wonderfully evocative--terms "meatskins" and "slugs")?

AB: Actually, now that you mention it, I do see Reapers as less of a zombie novel and more of a Southern Gothic novel.  It certainly has some of its roots in George Romero films, but its greater influences have been the books of the Southern tradition: William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor.  Even moreso, the character of Temple is inspired by two other extremely strong female characters from more recent Southern Gothic novels: the character of Ree from Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone, and the character of Evavangeline from Tom Franklin's Smonk.  Both of these books played a huge role in the tenor of Reapers, along with other books by Cormac McCarthy, William Gay, and Charles Portis.

The Southern Gothic is by far my favorite genre.  It seems to be the genre that follows the Faulkner tradition of the American novel rather than the Hemingway tradition.  It functions on an epic scope; it deals with grand fundamentals like good and evil and the nature of humanity; it luxuriates in the grotesque; it is fascinated more by the artificial than the realistic.  So when I set out to write Reapers, I was truly determined to write a Southern Gothic novel.  The addition of zombies was more of a spice than anything else.

MR: Someone once told me that there's a certain question authors secretly wish to be asked, yet rarely are.  So I'll pose it to you: looking back now, is there anything you would change about your book?

AB: I'm glad you asked that.  It's always interesting to me to see how a book changes in my perspective as I get more distance on it.  While I'm very happy with the way it turned out, of course there are always things that you wish you could go back and change.

Looking back on it now, my favorite parts of the book are the ones where not much is happening.  About three-quarters of the way through, there's a train ride where the action of the novel gets put on hold while we get descriptions of the landscape, the weather, the inky black night.  I think if I had the book to do over again, I would include more of this kind of material throughout.  I didn't put much in originally, because I thought it might slow down the action (indeed, it is antithetical to action).  It seemed important, since this was going to be a novel involving zombies, to keep the tension up, to keep things happening, to keep the plot advancing.  But if I had my druthers, the book would be 20% action and 80% descriptions of the landscape.

Perhaps it's for the best that I don't have my druthers after all.

MR: The Reapers Are the Angels seems to be one of those books begging to be filmed.  Any developments on that front to report?  Also, who would you consider your dream casting for the lead characters?

AB: There are always little murmurs about "movie interest" in your book--but I've learned to manage my expectations when it comes to things like that.  Of course, I would love to see a movie version, but whether or not such things happen seems determined by forces I simply cannot fathom.

When I allow myself to dream a little, I imagine actresses like Mia Wasikowska or Jennifer Lawrence (or even Miley Cyrus!) in the role of Temple.  But more recently I've been watching episodes of the show Dead Like Me, and I keep thinking what a great Temple Ellen Muth would make.  All of these actresses have something in common: while they are all lovely, there's a hardness to them.  They are convincing in roles where they have been ravaged or used up.

And, truth be told, I've imagined Kristen Stewart in the role as well.  I haven't actually seen any of the Twilight movies, but I thought her performance in The Runaways was stunning.  And I do see Temple as a kind of tough little Joan Jett.

MR: Finally, what can we expect next from Alden Bell/Joshua Gaylord?

AB: The next book will be called Frontierland, and it'll be, like Hummingbirds, a Joshua Gaylord novel.  It takes place in southern Orange County, California, in 1975.  At that time, the place was like a frontier town.  It was mostly orange groves and cattle ranches.  It was on the verge of being something big, but it wasn't quite there yet.  So you had developers building the shells of strip malls, but they would remain empty, and in the hills over those potential strip malls there was nothing but dirt and scrub.

I've always been fascinated by frontiers of various kinds.  Reapers offers a frontier of the zombie post-apocalypse sort, and Frontierland will offer a more suburban contemporary sort.  It'll follow two characters--one a twelve-year-old tomboy and the other an aging beauty queen--as their efforts to escape this desolate frontier landscape bring their paths together.

As for my next Alden Bell book, I think it might be about ghosts--New York-type ghosts who, far from wanting to spend their time haunting the living, go about their own business and form a kind of subculture within the city.

MR: Thank you, Mr. Bell, for taking part in the first author interview here at Macabre Republic.

AB: It's been my pleasure.  Congratulations on the site--and I'll definitely be back!