What Can You Do (with a Drunken Sailor)?
Bad Religion, Paul Tremblay & Ottessa Moshfegh
There are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes leading up to the publication of a book. I come from the world of indie publishing, where you have to do a lot of that work yourself. Writing ad copy, sending out galleys, hustling for reviews, etc. When my novel Forest of Fortune came out, I even cold-called tribal casinos to see if they’d be interested in carrying it. (They weren’t.)
In the world of creative collaboration, it’s a completely different experience. I have been fortunate enough to have my name on three books I collaborated on, but the responsibility for promoting the book falls to the client. In the past, I’ve helped set up interviews and events for my clients and had some fun times. I went on TV with Scott Campbell, Jr. and did some spirited events with Keith Morris.
But this is different. Everything Bad Religion does is reported on in the punk press, the music media, and entertainment news. For instance, the Bad Religion song “You” has been selected for the new release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and I can’t tell you how many media outlets have written about it. Ten? Twenty? A hundred? It seems like I get a news alert every day.
This is a long way of saying that Bad Religion doesn’t need my help to promote Do What You Want. They got this. But the band goes out of the way to make sure I’m involved when they don’t have to, and that’s really cool. So without further ado, here’s a sneak peak at some of the stuff in the works:
Do What You Want flexi in New Noise: Remember when Bad Religion teased the flexi a few months? Well they’re out and you can get yours by subscribing to New Noise. What’s a flexi? It’s a flexible record that you can insert in an envelope or magazine and then play on your turntable. The Do What You Want flexi features the song (drumroll) “Do What You Want” from the album Suffer. They look (and sound) really cool. How do I know? Because I have a few copies here at Casa Sirena reserved for a future giveaway. (That, my friends, is a clue.)
Do What You Want Audiobook: This week I heard the first clip from the Do What You Want audiobook. It’s not a famous actor or punk rock musician. We went with a total pro who is not going to mispronounce Fugazi. (Like the voice actor who read My Damage.) Each chapter in the book is introduced with a short clip from a song that represents the era being discussed. It’s a little thing, but one that will elevate the audiobook to the next level. I can’t wait to hear the whole thing!
Zoom What You Want: I can’t tell you the details because I don’t know them, but the band will be getting together on Zoom to discuss Do What You Want in the near future, and I’ll be moderating the discussion. In fact, we’re going to have a practice session soon. If you could ask the band anything, what would you want to know?
Pre-order, pre-order, pre-order: I can’t emphasize enough how important pre-orders are—especially now. Here’s an illustrative example: The recent push to support black authors writing about racism has led to lengthy backorders. Why is that? Because the publishers had to print more books, resulting in delays in the supply chain and more stress and strain on local booksellers. By pre-ordering your copy of Do What You Want, you are helping to ensure that the publisher prints enough of the first edition, the booksellers have enough copies, etc. Obviously, pre-orders help the author and the publisher—that goes without saying—but they also help consumers, especially at a time when corporate dickholes at Amazon are making the delivery of books a low priority.
1000 Memories with Paul Tremblay
If you’re a fan of contemporary horror, you know Paul Tremblay. His most recent novel, Survivor Song, comes out next week, but the title novel that put him on the path he’s on now, A Head Full of Ghosts, will be instantly recognizable to Bad Religion fans, so I asked him about it and his answer is truly inspiring.
Jim Ruland: What’s your favorite Bad Religion song and/or album?
Paul Tremblay: I’ve been a Bad Religion fan since 1993, the year Recipe for Hate was released. In the near thirty years since their music has been part of the soundtrack of my life, there have been many highlights, including bringing my then fourteen-year-old son Cole to see BR at the Paradise in Boston in 2015. His favorite BR record was his first, True North. I can’t say that is my favorite record (I mean, come on, it’d be like choosing between my children, and to continue this parental parenthetical, my now fifteen-year-old daughter and I had tickets for an April 2020 BR show that we hope to see rescheduled someday…) but True North helped change the course of my writing career.
A wee bit of my writing background: A frustrated, wannabe musician at heart, I discovered I was a much better writer than guitar player in the early 2000s. My early work was almost exclusively horror short fiction. In 2007, I stumbled upon a sort of oddball crime novel idea, so I wrote it and oddly enough I sold it. Big Publisher X published my two crime novels in 2009 and 2010 and for a variety of reasons (none of them my fault, I assure you) they totally tanked sales-wise and Big Publisher X didn’t want to work with me anymore. I spent the next three years not writing very much and licking my psychic wounds (with a metaphorical tongue? Work with me, people).
Fast forward to January 22, 2013, the day True North was released. It sounded and felt like one of their older “classic” records yet at the same time it sounded so of the moment, representing an accumulation of all those years and songs that came before. The title track itself is a vital restatement or renewal of purpose. And man, did I need a renewal of purpose in early 2013.
It had taken me the previous year to eek out 100 pages of a novel and I was totally, completely stuck, and I was despairing, frankly. Then a serendipitous confluence. With True North and the track “My Head Is Full of Ghosts” ringing in my head I happened to read a book of essays about the movie The Exorcist. And I asked myself a long overdue question. What was and is my true north as a writer? I loved and always felt most comfortable (i.e. most myself) writing horror stories. For me, the appeal of horror is very similar to punk music’s appeal. Both are often built on revealing terrible truths, and I found and continue to find hope in that shared recognition of the truth and the response: “Yeah, we’re fucked, but we’re going to fight/go on anyway.” So here I was, this lifelong horror fan and I’d never written a horror novel. How would I write one? How about a skeptical/secular exorcism novel one that celebrated horror but also criticized its reactionary elements? Could I do that? Deciding to ditch those 100 pages of the stalled novel (and not telling my agent) to start some postmodern possession novel didn’t seem like the most prudent idea I’d ever had. But I was excited about writing for the first time in years.
The working title of the novel was “My Head Is Full of Ghosts,” a title that got tweaked to A Head Full of Ghosts when it was sold to my current publisher William Morrow a year later in February 2014. The band graciously gave me permission to quote from the lyrics in the novel’s epigraph.
Do you want to know a secret
Will you hold it close and dear
This will not be made apparent
But you and I are not alone in here
The only thing that would’ve been cooler is if you could open the book cover and have an audio epigraph play the first three seconds of the song, the drums pounding an impossibly fast beat, and then Greg Graffin shout-signing-declaring, “My head is full of ghosts.”
Subscribe to Razorcake
Razorcake is having it’s annual subscription drive and they’re very close to meeting their goal. Let’s get them across the finish line! A 10-issue subscription costs $17. That’s like 17 cents an issue. (Sorry, not good at math.) In addition to interviews, reviews, and comics, you can read my column in every issue. These columns are only available in print and are only put online in special circumstances like this one.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands
I love Ottessa Moshfegh’s writing.
I don’t always love her books, but Death in Her Hands, which was scheduled to come out in the spring but was pushed back to the summer, might by my favorite after her first book, McGlue.
I have a complicated relationship with Moshfegh’s work, but my feelings about McGlue are unequivocal: it’s brilliant.
McGlue has everything I want from a novel: Premise, character, execution, and style.
McGlue concerns a drunken sailor who wakes up in the hold of a ship. He may have killed a man. He isn’t sure because he’s a drunken sailor. (Duh.)
Here’s the blurb: “Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard, a knife-sharp voyage through the fog of recollection.”
If you know me even a little, you know this is right up my alley.
I wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times back when David Ulin was the books editor and he gave me the green light on all kinds of weird indie books.
Eileen, Moshfegh’s first novel, was published the following year. Eileen is not a good book, though my Goodreads review is kinder than I remember:
“I love the voice and the atmosphere, particularly in the early going, but Moshfegh paints herself into a corner with respect to where the story can go. While there are some nice surprises and unexpected twists, it feels like she went for a big dramatic pay off that isn't in keeping with the tone of the rest of the book.”
I think my antipathy toward the book grew as more critics began to sing its praises, even after Moshfegh renounced the book at a signing. And then it was shortlisted for the Booker and she admitted she followed a How-To-Write a Bestseller book when writing Eileen.
If I was a petty person, I would have stopped reading Moshfegh, but I really like her writing.
Next came Homesick for Another World, a collection of stories, in 2017. Again, I liked the prose quite a bit, but the stories themselves? Not so much. Three years or so later, I can’t remember a single one.
Here’s what I wrote in Goodreads: “I can't figure out Ottessa Moshfegh. I loved McGlue, loathed Eileen, and I don't know how I feel about Homesick for Another World. The word I keep coming back to describe this book is perverse. I don't mean that the content is overly sexual or depraved (although I suspect some might find it so). I mean there's something deliberately off about these stories, the way they give the appearance to have been crafted so that they work against reader's expectations. Unlikable characters, flat arcs, abrupt endings with tacked-on codas. Yet the worlds Moshfegh creates are strange and vivid and fraught with tension.”
I stand by that review. I may go back and re-read some of these stories some day. Or not. There’s really no need to go back because she keeps putting out more work.
In 2018 Moshfegh published another novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. A Manhattan socialite decides she’s going to sleep for an entire year. That’s the story.
The voice is excellent and 9/11 looms in the background but the ending suffers the same problem as Eileen: the narrative changes tone and stumbles at the finish.
By this time it was apparent to me that this is a feature of Moshfegh’s aesthetic, not a bug. Moshfegh has her own ideas about narrative and things that fall under the category of “satisfying conclusion” aren’t part of it.
This is my theory about Ottessa Moshfegh’s talent: She’s like a basketball player who figures out at an early age that all she wants in life is to play basketball. She believes that if she shoots a million jump shots, a million free throws, a million lay-ups (you get the idea) she will have what it takes to make the pros. But along the way she gets really passionate about jump shots and free throws and lay-ups and loses interest in the game itself—except, of course, the things the game can give you.
This is ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than the things she has said to interviewers.
I’m not interested in Moshfegh’s career. I just really like her writing. She is one of the handful of authors I will read the moment I get my hands on a copy.
This brings us to Death in Her Hands.
Man, what a weird book.
A woman goes for a walk in the woods and finds a strange note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.”
There is no body. No killer. Possibly no Magda. It’s just the woman and her dog and a scrap of paper. By the time our protagonist gets home, she’s cooked up the whole scenario in her mind. How it unfolded, what should be done about it.
She decides to solve the murder. Once an idea becomes fixed in her mind it becomes a fact and she moves on to the next clue. Fans of thrillers, mysteries, crime novels, Law & Order, and Scooby Doo, know that clues aren’t facts, they’re clues. Facts require proof.
Obviously, there’s something not quite right with our narrator.
Her certainty reminds me of Charles Arrowby, the fellow who retires to a haunted house in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea and not-so-quietly goes mad.
The book jacket calls it a blend of “horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy.” It’s none of those things. Nor is it a thriller, mystery, or crime novel. It’s Ottessa Moshfegh doing her thing.
There’s even a section where the narrator looks up a book on how to solve crimes, which seems like a nod to the furor over the composition of Eileen.
Death in Her Hands is flat and occasionally dull yet oddly compelling because being inside the mind that Moshfegh has constructed is always interesting. Either you enjoy the ride or you don’t. (Enjoy might not be the right word here, but you get my drift.)
If you haven’t read Moshfegh and wondering if this is a good place to start, I recommend McGlue. It’s Moshfegh at her baroque best, it’s got style for days, and it’s about a drunken sailor.
What else could you want?