“I’ve long realized that a general puritanism in the US and a fear of difficult subject matter and a deep disrespect for the minds and ideas and emotions of teenagers and so on were going to be a problem my work would always face. It interests me to try to sneak through and around that prejudice.”

Alan Kelly: Ugly Man is a departure from the George Myles Cycle, My Loose Thread and The Sluts. Although there are still traces of those books in there, Ugly Man still has the torture, sexual deviancy and boy annihilation but there is a darkly comic thread running through it. Was that your intention?

Dennis Cooper: My earlier work always had comedy in it, but I tended to bury it in the prose and use it more a device to, say, relax or distract people so I could sneak something disturbing into their thinking. With most of the pieces in Ugly Man, I deliberately set out to write comedic pieces. It’s something I’d always wanted to do. When I was a kid, and before I got serious as a writer, I mostly wrote parodies. I was known at my school for writing these weird comedy stories, and when I was 11, I edited a ‘zine called Flunker that was kind of my imitation of Mad Magazine. So working overtly with comedy was kind of a return to my origins in a certain way.

AK: With Ugly Man you’ve gone mainstream and signed up with Harper Perennial; can you see your work being consumed by a wider readership? Why not, AM Holmes was on the bestseller list for The End of Alice and Bret Easton Ellis for American Psycho?

DC: Well, I’m sure Harper Perennial would like to enlarge my readership, and that would be nice, of course, but I guess I’d be surprised if my work became conventionally successful. I’ve been publishing books for a long time now, and it’s never happened. I want as many people to read my books as possible, but at the same time, I kind of like that my work flies under the radar and doesn’t have to face a big outcry or get caught up in any kind of media-related craziness. The way things are, it keeps my work kind of pure and secret in a way, and I feel fairly comfortable with that. I think the only way I could get bestseller style success would be if a well liked movie was ever made of one of my books. That might make a difference.

AK: Besides The Sluts, Ugly Man is your most, and I hate this word, experimental work so far. Ugly Man is almost flash fiction: ‘Jerk’ combines script-writing with lurid reportage of consensual murder and mutilation while in ‘The Fifteen Worst Russian Gay Porn Web Sites’ you mine seriously bad smut sites. Tell me about the process of writing these short stories, was it trickier than your novel writing?

DC: It wasn’t really trickier. In some ways, it was much easier because, working with comedy, it kind of thins the writing out and makes its point much clearer, and with the shorter length, I don’t get to create all the kinds of complicated substructures and subtexts and things I tend to like to work into my novels. That’s not say I dashed the stories off or anything, because I’m a laborious and very careful writer no matter what I write, but I would say some of the stories in Ugly Man were more fun to write because in a lot of cases I was co-opting other forms rather than trying to invent my own forms like I did in, say, the George Miles Cycle books. Forcing fiction into script form or into lists or into the form of a copy-edited porn story was like solving a puzzle, and that was enjoyable for me.

AK: You’re described as the most dangerous writer in America, are you comfortable with being described like this?

DC: Oh, I understand why publishers and journalists pick up on that quote and use it for marketing purposes, but I think it’s kind of silly. I mean, the most dangerous writer in America would be some zealot on the political far right or some manipulative evangelist or someone like that. I’m just trying to get readers to confront and accept subjects and unusual literary forms that they tend to find disturbing and off-putting in a way that causes them to entertain the thinking and emotions behind violence and certain kinds of sex acts and things like that, and I guess I don’t see trying to do that as a dangerous act.

AK: Like you, Scott Heim recently picked up a Lambda Literary Award. Both of you have similar ideas but come from very different places as writers. Your both writing about “taboo” subjects but your writing is far more aggressive than Heim’s is. Do you still get death threats?

DC: No, I haven’t gotten a death threat in years. When I was first publishing books, people had this crazy fear that people might read my work and be inspired to rape and kill boys or something like that, which was based on this really dumb misunderstanding of my fiction. Of course that never happened, and in fact the most devoted readers of my work tend to be young people who relate to the young, attacked characters and feel strengthened by seeing their confusion and feelings treated with respect. Nowadays, I just tend to get these attacks that angrily complain about how critics claim that I’m a good writer, but that I’m overrated and actually just a vile smut merchant and things like that.

AK: Most of your characters are damaged youths or predatory older men, a subculture that is frighteningly only a mouse click away. Do you research much before you start a new project?

DC: It depends on the project. Often I write about things I’m already fascinated by and have been following closely – whether it’s sex on the internet or certain bands or art or subcultures or video games or whatever – so the research already exists due to my natural exploration. For the George Miles Cycle books, I did all kinds of research for years and years while trying to figure out how to write them. For instance, I was already a damaged youth, so I understood that aspect, but I did a lot experiments and things to try to understand and inhabit the predatory male characters I wanted to include. I did some research on high school shootings for My Loose Thread, and I’m currently researching cannibalism and the culinary arts for the novel I’m writing now, which is about a 22 year old French cannibal. But it’s not the kind of research where you sit in a library or something. It’s more just following my fascinations with more intricacy than usual.

AK: God Jr. was an exploration of the impact and consequences of grief and one or two critics described it a more mature work. Does it annoy you when they don’t take into consideration that the events that happen in My Loose Thread and The Sluts are commonplace and that this particular activity happens everyday?

DC: Yeah, critics declaring God Jr. a more mature work because it excluded explicit sex and violence and the world perspective of the young annoyed me, but it didn’t surprise me. I’ve long realized that a general puritanism in the US and a fear of difficult subject matter and a deep disrespect for the minds and ideas and emotions of teenagers and so on were going to be a problem my work would always face. The generally held idea that the kinds of things I write about aren’t ’serious’ or aren’t what a truly serious literary work would concentrate on is just an insurmountable and boring enemy that I accepted would be there for all eternity a long time ago. It interests me to try to sneak through and around that prejudice. That’s the only way I can think about it.

AK: Do you still do much journalism work?

DC: I haven’t lately because I’ve been concentrating on this blog I do, and it’s such a huge amount of work that I haven’t had the mental space to write much criticism and journalism in the last four years. Most of my impulse towards that kind of writing goes into the blog. I’d like to get back to doing more non-fiction again, and a book of my non-fiction is coming out next year, but I haven’t quite figured out how to fit it into my life because between my blog and my fiction and the theater collaborations I’m doing with a French Director named Gisele Vienne, I just don’t have any time.

AK: Are you writing much poetry; tell me a bit about The Weaklings?

DC: I was writing a lot of poetry for a while just before I put The Weaklings together, and I’m still writing a little because The Weaklings is going to come out in an expanded, non-limited edition version, and so I’ve been writing new poems to fill the book out a bit. Basically, The Weaklings are all the poems of mine I’d written since my selected poems book the Dream Police came out in the mid-90s that I thought were good enough to go in a book, which wasn’t all that many, it turned out. I wrote a lot of poetry when I was in my teens and twenties before I got more interested in writing novels, but, ever since fiction preoccupied me, the poetry has come pretty rarely.

AK: Michael Cunningham said you’re likely to go down in history as a latter day Jean Genet or Flannery O’Connor. Are you a fan of either writer?

DC: Sure, I’m a fan of both of those writers, I suppose of Genet a little more than I am of O’Connor, but of course I think they’re both major. Neither are among my, like, top ten all time favorites, but I’m honored to have my name share a sentence with theirs, and it was very nice of Michael to say that.

AK: Could you tell me a bit about Little House on the Bowery and any new writers to look out for?

DC: Little House on the Bowery is an imprint I edit through Akashic Press. Its concentration is on emerging fiction writers in North America, and I tend to publish two to three books a year. I love doing it because encouraging and helping younger writers is a big passion of mine, and the series seems to have gone pretty well so far. There are so many new writers I’m excited about, way too many to list. I think this is about as exciting a time for new fiction by new writers as I can remember. I’ll just recommend reading the books and authors I publish through Little House on the Bowery as a way to start.

AK: And finally, is there anything you’d like to say to your detractors – Marilyn Manson you have been warned..

DC: Relax? Get a life? What’s your problem? Let’s hash this out? Mind your own business? Peace? I don’t know … One of those, I guess.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alan Kelly is the contributing editor to Dogmatika. He has worked for a number of specialist magazines, Film Ireland, Pretty Scary, Penny Blood, Bookslut et al. He lives in Wicklow and is partial to pulp, noir, hardboiled, brainy erotica and horror fiction.

Tonight I leave New York forever. I’m on Christopher street, the half litre of vodka decanted into my old jogging bottle and the plan is this – History day – I am history – I will stand beneath the triumphal Arch on which Duchamp in 1913 declared the Free Republic of Greenwich Village. I’ll have a double in the bar on 11th where Dylan Thomas had his last. Another double in Café Wa on McDougal where Hendrix played and Ginsberg ranted. Then walk reverently past the Stonewall memorial to 6th and Bleeker where the Weather Underground blew themselves to bits. Up to the 23rd and the Chelsea Hotel and Warhol and the Velvet Underground and Leonard Cohen’s love song for Janis Joplin and have another double. On seventh and 32nd I’ll have a shot in the transvestite bar in homage to Lou Reed then stroll up the banks of the Hudson where Trocchi drifted on his barge high on heroin to 42nd and fifth to sit in the New York public library where Trotsky planned the Russian revolution and Henry Miller came to sleep. I’ll have a final drink then for all the great lost minds in this city that has become more lonely than I can bear. I will let that last drink walk me to the blank wooden planks of the Chelsea piers and throw myself into open arms of the Hudson.

That was the plan but this is the problem. You have some really powerful idea for an ending and then the world throws something utterly banal at you and you lose the plot. I’m standing in the doorway of Cafe Wa and it’s not that there’s no trace of Hendrix or even all that all I can see is trendy 30-somethings with I-macs. That’s not what’s making me mad. What is it even called? A whippet? It’s blocking the doorway, snarling at me like it knows about the vodka. Like it knows I’m just this washed-up burned-out guy that just got fired and always wanted to be an artist or a rock star or a great poet or a great lover, or anything other than this. This forty year old who had no time for relationships who put off being creative ’til tomorrow. There is no tomorrow for me and the dog knows.

So I’m out heading towards the Weather Underground place but c’mon – I try not to notice but the dogs are everywhere. This guy across the street, Nautilus pecs, Californian tan, cut-off denim shorts and a Bull-Mastif. This woman, face – fifty, legs – twenty – a Norwegian Elkhound. I know they say dogs look like their owners, and it’s true everywhere I’ve been apart from here. Here people are mongrels and they aspire to being as pure as their thoroughbreds.

Up 10th just to get away. Trying to get back to the point, but then there’s a guy with dreadlocks and a matted looking Bohemian Shepherd. And how do people working nine ’til nine in apartment blocks manage to keep dogs? Do they have carers? Yes, I’ve seen little Mexican men on fifth walking eight different breeds at a time to make a buck. Schnauzers – Pugs – Arctic Huskys. I have to get off the street. I have to get drunk enough to see this through. Fuck the dogs. Skip the Duchamp and the Beats, get to the Chelsea Hotel, soak up all that pain, all those drugs, do my dance to Sid and Nancy.

But it’s blocks to go and all I see are Bernese Mountain dogs and Chow Chows and Dalmatians jogging beside their owners, and I’m becoming this theorist of dog signification. Each dog seems to know every other and they greet with explicit displays of physical intimacy, while their humans fumble with iPods, consider their appearance and calculate how much energy it would cost to communicate to the other human at the end of the leash. I’m staggering away from dogs and joggers and this drunken vision comes to me as I gaze up at the heights of midtown. It’s a bit like The Matrix. The world is a lie, the real world is too terrifying to face. At three in the morning in Times Square the thoroughbreds meet to discuss their covert plans for global domination. A right wing totalitarian hierarchy, based on breeding, secretly running the greatest economy on Earth. Alpha Males. Bitches. Kappa Beta Kappas. Oh and I have proof. Didn’t I once witness a Weimaraner sticking its head out of a window, the sole passenger of a taxi through Soho, smiling as its ears flapped in the wind?

The vodka is done and the light is failing and the joggers are thinning out and I’m all my plans are shot and I’m staggering towards my chosen pier. It is quiet there. No-one around. A mess of rubble. The hole in the fence where the junkies climb through. Focusing on my feet to get there. No doubts, no fear now. Two more blocks, five minutes and it will be done. A sound ahead. I look up.

The four long legs, the curves of the muscular thighs, balanced precariously on tiny, delicate feet. She walks as if barefoot, he walks as if in stilettos. Both look ahead, strong, directed, not distracted by sights or passing people, their noses lifted, perfectly poised as if focused on the same invisible point in the future. She is a model, six foot tall, size zero – he is a Great Dane.

Drunk or dreaming I don’t know. I’m staring. Fifty yards away and they stop, just by my hole in the fence. He looks up at her as if asking and she nods. He lowers his gaze and squats. She does not look away embarrassed, neither does she try to encourage him to quickly finish the humiliating task. It is me that feels embarrassed, hiding in the doorway of a warehouse, snatching glimpses.

His face as he squats. It is not the usual pain of a passage, no, it is that of knowing that no matter how strong their love, what he must do now is the mark of what he really is. And her face as she goes to her wrist-strap and pulls out the poo-bag from the cleverly designed bracelet, her face of infinite understanding and compassion as the colossal shit descends, and hits the sidewalk, as he raises up and lifts his eyes to her heavens as if to ask for forgiveness; it is her smile then as she inserts her hand into the bag and reaches down for that hot, wet, green-brown mass, the delicate graceful smile she gives him as lingering as a kiss, as her fingers tighten round his mess and she lifts, deftly withdrawing her hand and feeling that good, warm, proud weight, and ties the bag. The look she gives, as they go on their way, her carrying his still-hot shit in her hand. That look that holds me transfixed. And I have never seen a dog so noble or a man as noble as that dog, or a woman more loving of weakness. They pass me and I am drunk I know, staggering I know, following them. For three blocks I watch their hips swaying in perfect unison as they lead me away from the piers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ewan Morrison’s new novel, Ménage is out on July 2nd and is the story of three young artists who document their own ménage a troIs. Ewan is also the author of the novels Swung and Distance and the collection of stories The Last Book You Read.

My music begins with me alone in my bedroom. It’s a square room in a high-ceilinged Victorian house. I work on a computer at a pine desk, programming and arranging until my fingers freeze (there’s no heating). When I’m not at the desk I lie on the floor, or I perch in an old cradle full of stuffed animals. I’ve spent a long time trying to find a way to neatly compact all the books and records I keep for inspiration and, occasionally, distraction. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I will never attain perfect alphabetical order.

For a while I pinned a lot of my own drawings and paintings to the walls, but it started to feel like the inside of a maniac’s washing machine, so I stored them away. I keep one painting at a time out, propped between the window frame and a bookshelf – I rotate them depending on what type of song I’m working on.

One of the posters on the wall is for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which has been special to me since my early teens – though I’ve never been to a midnight screening. The Rocky… is a musical masterpiece, and a very misunderstood film. It’s just about a single gentleman trying to live his life. He’s a transvestite from outer space, but that’s okay.

Nowadays I compose songs directly onto the computer rather than on the piano, so I don’t really depend on an instrument. The most important things in the room are my stacks of crammed old notebooks, and all the images and objects I’ve collected over my life. I can’t pick anything out as particularly influential, but I leach inspiration from a lot of sources. Generally, I fixate on a couple of things at a time and then move on. In a purely pragmatic sense, I suppose the computer is the most important thing in the room, since everything gets drawn together in there. I’d rather say the headphones, though, because they let me keep everything secret.

The backbone of all my work – music, writing, drawing – gets made in the room, so I spend as much time there as I can. Sometimes I like to go out to the woods or to the coastline to gather ideas to bring back. So the room is my headquarters, and I make field trips.

I try to work myself as hard as possible. I can’t really schedule when the good ideas will come – but even if I’m having a dry afternoon, there are always little technical things to sew up. Often spending a day focusing on the technicalities of a song clears the way for more abstract ideas to start coming.

Making the overriding structure of a song alone is what comes most naturally to me. I work on the skeleton for ages and then I collaborate with other people to put some flesh on it. I prefer to record vocals and live instruments in a studio setting, but I try to have a very clear, concise sense of where a song needs to go first, so that I don’t disgrace myself by spouting gibberish when I take in to show others.

A lot of the songs I write are about (not necessarily negative) kinds of isolation, like introversion, reclusion, or imagination, so I thrive on a sense of secrecy. When people visit while I’m working on a song at home I often don’t hear them because I always use headphones. When I realise I’ve been caught I feel like I do when I’ve been talking to myself on the bus and looked up to see two schoolboys pointing at me and mouthing the word “nutcase”.

The way I feel about the room depends on how whatever I’m working on is going. Sometimes it’s a wonderful enchanted hermitage – other times I wish it would all fall in on top of me like the House of Usher. I’m always glad of the twelve-pane window, though. I can just about see the seaside from it. And I’m grateful that there’s enough floor-space to lie down on now. There hasn’t always been.

The Musical Rooms piece was written as a response to a series of interview questions set by journalist Sinead Gleeson.

The Red Elk

The Red Elk came upon me in his secluded grove
And told me he had seen me, seen me crying alone
So he will tell me secrets not for men to know
If I promise I will stay here, in his secluded grove

And oh, what the Red Elk says will surely come to pass
A promise made, I will forsake all human life behind the glass

He told me that my body, made of flesh and bone
Would fall into the thicket, so that I could be shown
How form and flesh will melt away, bodies will decay

If I should venture from the grove, if I should run away

And oh, what the Red Elk says will surely come to pass
A promise made, I will forsake all human life behind the glass

I’ve been tapping at the window pane
Tap-tap-tapping till the break of day
I’m tired of tapping at the window pane
Won’t you take that window pane away?

Nightlights

I’m the brightest star ablaze, but my light don’t reach to you these days
Ev’ry beam and ev’ry ray gets lost someplace along the way
I’m the brightest light in Heaven, shining down 24-7
Thru’ the valley and the glade, somehow you still find the shade

It’s a beautiful night, the stars on top of it all
And you’re a delicate guy to want to be on top of it all

I’m the purple ray, the evening light, I pierce the navy of the night
I/ll be watching all the time, till you look up high and see me shine
I’m the dark of velvet dusk, my baby, shadows cool, shadows shady
Keep the sun from off your back, but still he burns your brown eyes black

It’s a beautiful night, the stars on top of it all
And you’re a delicate guy to want to be on top of it all

On top of it all

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Irish-born musician/artist David Turpin released his debut solo album, The Sweet Used-to-be, to widespread national press acclaim in April 2008. He will release his second album, the supernaturally themed Haunted!, in October 2009. More information may be found at www.myspace.com/DavidTurpin.

[Picture credit: Pauline Rowan]

Such things should be done at night. Let morning come creeping like a grey ghost over the hills. It will not find him – pale, sleepless, unsatisfied. He will have done what was needful. In the moat the willow leaves are floating; they form no set design, but slowly arrange and disarrange themselves into different patterns as the wind ruffles the sluggish water. One might read the future in these patterns, or the past. Little golden fingers glide over black satin in loving caress. The dead leaves are lying in heaps whither the wind has blown them upon the tombs of the house of Ravenswood. A single leaf clings to his clay-cold cheek. He lies on his side upon the ground. The lace of his doublet is stained with blood. There is mud on his stockings, sleeves, on the side of his face that lies nearest the ground. He has not died without a struggle. The hilt of a dagger protrudes from the wound. The blue circlets of his eyes are open, his sweet young mouth is firmly shut. His hat lies yonder where the wind has carried it – a black hat with a wide, upswept brim and a dancing feather. The wind teases the feather, forward and back, in time to its own mournful music. Treachery, murder, madness – such things should be done at night. His clothes are damp with the morning dew, his hair is soaked with it. The plump white skin of his cheek is clammy with dew. A white rose withered by the frost, all the life suddenly gone out. A single yellow leaf.

Around and around the tower at night I hear it screaming – around and around until I too must scream! scream! for I can bear it no longer. In my own screams to drown his reproaches, in the wavering column of sound that rises in the chest and rushes up through the throat into the head whence it rings like the bell in a tower – Aaaah! Suddenly drops his voice and whispers in my ear even as I scream. The black feather dancing in the wind. The rain beats against the tower, louder and louder – how angry it is! I must open the window. I am sure I heard him calling me that time. Oh, the ringing sweetness of that voice! They have barred the window so that I cannot open it. Now there is blood on my hands. I only did what was needful. I had sworn myself to him – Look, here is the ring with the stone like a golden eye that watches me day and night. He fell on his knees before me – how angry he was! He bid me trample on his unloved corpse. But no, Edgardo, I’ll do no such thing, I will take you in my cold white arms and hold you to my heart. Its breath smoked the air. At first I could only smell it, then I turned and met its eyes – ugly glaring staring eyes – It wanted me. To take me away on its back, deep into the forest, far away under the dripping trees where the moss is black and white mushrooms shine like dead men’s fingers in the dark. Might have done to me what it would in that hidden place, none to see or hear the huge, lumbering animal the stink the slaver the bellowing bull… There was a shot. He stood there with the gun in his hand – The bull lay dead. He looked at me – so sweetly! Who would not have loved him who had once seen him look so? He wore a lace doublet, a hat with a black, dancing feather. But the next time it came for me I was alone. He wanted me – he came for me with his ugly eyes glaring and staring, his breath his eyes his stink. I did what was needful. They told him I was dead. They put me in this tower and told him I was in heaven. But the tower is not heaven. His virtue was greater than mine. This I should have known by the whiteness of his brow, by the silver voice, golden stone, blue eyes, black feather. He thought me virtuous where I was merely young. How many years have gone by? I’ve lost count. His young flesh is long since grass. Still he implores me. Night after night, round and around the tower.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Grace Andreacchi is an American-born novelist, poet and playwright, author of the novels Give My Heart Ease (New American Writing Award) and Music for Glass Orchestra (Serpent’s Tail) and the chapbook Elysian Sonnets. Her work appears in Eclectica, Word Riot, Pen Pusher and many other fine places. She lives in London and writes a regular literary blog Amazing Grace.

he stood there brushing
his teeth
as she sat on the
shitter
unable to do anything
due to
the
constipation that befalls
all
junkies.

the cigarette danced
between
her teeth as
she
leaned forward
and
unrolled some toilet paper
and
wiped her unused
ass.

the skeleton figure
with matted
hair
moved past him
with pink
nipples
reflected in the
mirror.

married at 19
high out of his
skull
now three years later
he can’t find a vein
that’s good
nor
even remember what
she looked like
with
all of her teeth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott C. Rogers is American-born novelist and poet, author of the novel Celluloid Cowboy [Black Coffee Press, November 2008]. His work appears in Rambler Magazine and other fine places. You can read more of his work here. He lives in Detroit.

While I watch Luke stare into the parking lot through my bedroom blinds, he tells me he’s convinced Ted will track his ass down. Must be good to know some man wants you bad enough, you feel the thirst thirty miles north. Thank the good and wonderful Jesus I’m so fucking plain. Every weekend at the bar, I watch myself in the wide, dark glass spread behind the liquor bottles. I’m too eager, always searching. My eyes latch onto any asshole headed my way.

At least when some guy takes me home, though, I know he’s after something I got inside me. Can’t be my body, not like when Luke finds a stray dick and wins a night free from his pig mom’s basement. They just want that tight ass, wanna see him peek over his shoulder and smile, his top lip disappearing beneath his bottom one.

Blissing on that smile, Luke’s voice pings though my head. He whispers that name no boy has called me before and none has called me since. Does he remember?

“Ted’s too busy fucking to give a shit where you went,” I tell him after I’ve pulled myself together. I’m too wired to sit down but I keep near the bed so Luke won’t get spooked. He knows I want his ass, and I know he knows, but I pretend I don’t. “I was so fucking scared,” he mutters, not looking back.

“You’ve driven fucked up before.”

“I had a whole half-ounce on me,” he cries and grips the blinds like a baby grabbing a tit.

“How the fuck did you get that?”

“He gave it to me.”

“Who? Ted?”

“He wanted me to go away. The other guys didn’t want me there.”

“You got bounced from a fuck party?” I cluck, confident he won’t turn back and see me smirk. I plop back on my bed, back straight, feet kicking out. “Welcome to my shithole, sweet ass.”

“I knew one of those guys, I think.”

“All you twinks know each other. Goddamn hen party.”

Luke spins around, his sky blue eyes wide like the heroine of a silent movie. His pupils are huge, and it tickles me he’s stuck here at least till evening. His pig mom got wise to the obvious-as-shit side effects of a tweak trip. “He knows I’m here, bubba,” he finally says.

I’m not his brother, of course. But at first, we couldn’t ditch our real names fast enough. Luke was sixteen, and my parents bankrolled my studio apartment while I looked for a job that wasn’t too degrading. It turned him on to pretend we were brothers while we fucked on my couch. He was gorgeous and young and elusive as a father’s praise, so I played along. You like fucking your baby brother? What if Mom catches us? Stupid shit.

“Ted thinks I’m a fucktard,” I tell him. “He hates me more than he wants you. You’re totally safe.”

“I’m not even sure whose truck I drove back.”

“When did you get it?”

“Last night, from some lady.”

“One of Ted’s junkie bitches?”

“No, she had a house with a garage and a burglar alarm.”

I click my teeth and shake my head. “Ted is charming, no doubt.”

“What if she calls the police? They’ll think I stole it.”

“You kinda did.”

“He said that lady was a friend.”

“You don’t know what he said with your head in his lap.”

Luke can’t say shit to that. The poor boy has no wit whatsoever. I wish I wanted him for more than his tight ass and rotten-cheese youth, but I don’t. I think about him calling me brother and instantly get hard.

“You still got any of that half-ounce left?”

“What?”

“What Ted gave you.” Luke tries to lie, but he stinks at it. His only trick is acting dumb as a retard. I wish I knew that trick.

“Some, I guess.”

I pop up from the bed, enthused and pathetic like a children’s show host. “I’ll get the pipe.” I keep it in the living room. I do what I can to discourage these wastes of flesh from crashing my bedroom. This is my room, and I think unkind things when I’m alone.

Luke begged to look out this window cause no other window faced the parking lot. I caved moments after he barged in an hour ago, remembered how it felt to feel a boy that fucking sublime riding me. Tell me all brothers do this. They do it but never say shit.

I come back and find Luke smack against the blinds again, gaping into the pale gray light seeping through. He doesn’t realize I’ve returned so I march up to him, stop beside him. My chin grazes his shoulder, and my knee brushes the side of his thigh. He’s lost weight again. Back when we still fucked, his limbs were like the thick, heavy ropes from gym class you squeezed between your thighs, shimmying toward heaven. I bet Luke climbed a rope like that as a kid, bet he looked down from the top and wanted every last thing he saw. He’ll be bones by August.

I tell him he’ll forget Ted once we’re spun. I grab his crotch and mash it in my fingers. Just you and me this morning, I say. All fucking morning. I lean toward his ear and promise I won’t tell Daddy. I won’t tell a goddamn soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Kearnes is a 32-year-old author from East Texas. His fiction has appeared, or will appear, in Night Train, Pindeldyboz, Temenos, Parting Gifts, Thieves Jargon, The Pedestal, wigleaf, 971 Menu, 3:AM Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and Pequin, among other journals.

Note: “Scars and Salvation” is a four-part work which will encompass the summer editions of Dark Matter. We’ll be uncorking a new section each month for the next four months.

I’m lost in the glow of dying fireflies. My face sticks to cold stone and I’m wearing a suit the color of a summer funeral. Drool sneaks out of my mouth, slithers down my chin and drips onto the concrete floor. Hands seem like miles away, my fingers struggling to toss the soft confines of another hospital breeze. Three men in white rush to me in slow motion, their mouths open but absent of sound and words.

The doctors say it’ll take time to get used to the mind’s momentary escapes. They say that after floating at the edge of death for only a few minutes, my heart needs time to catch up. It beats with uncertainty, blood flowing to the tune of desperate breaths. I feel the strength of a dozen arms greet my jacket, concrete now slipping away from my skin. I’m in the air, bangs hanging over my face like dirty ice. One of the men screams, his voice just a hollow breath, his eyes a tinge of mulberry.

My back soothes with the soft murmur of a white hospital bed. Figures haze with a blurry edge, like I’m underwater. A man with the face of a soldier whispers into my ear, only for a second do I know it’s time to come back down.

“Wake up,” I think he says.

Before I can close my eyes, I hear my brother’s voice. It cuts through the invisible layer of regret hovering over my skin, sharp edge poking into my brain like a broken toothpick. For a second I picture my wedding day, half a sun letting its rays grace the smiles of Claire and my family. I remember my brother’s words, the sentences of a best man.

Thoughts start to drift and a coverlet of black polishes my vision, its eager embrace resting my mind. I can’t hear anything anymore. All I know is that I almost died last week and I haven’t seen my wife in what feels like forever. Here I am again, right on the cliff between purgatory and nothingness, and before long the wind pulls me back into a room filled with white light.

My brother’s tough grip squeezes my fingers and we’re alone, the bloodied angels on his shoulders flying away with quick rush of black static. Their wings are as clear as cellophane. He rubs my dry and cracked knuckles, his lips stuck together with everything he wants to say to me but can’t. He shakes his head, blinking like he’s watching a black-and-white movie.

“Christian,” he says. “Wake up.”

My mouth tastes as stale as old white bread. I try to sit up but he pushes me down, his hands releasing mine. “Just lay there,” he says. “You’re moving, that’s a good sign.”

I nod and open my mouth, half-expecting a falsetto to rip from my vocal cords. My tongue flicks across my bottom lip, the remnants of another dream’s saliva gently wetting tired skin. “Where…”

Jonsi chuckles and sits back in the metal folding chair. “The doctors said that this should be the last of your relapses. Do you remember where you are?”

I know that I almost died. I know that I spent a month somewhere away from home. I know that I miss Claire. Shaking my head, I point to the ceiling.

Jonsi smiles. “We’re going home today, Christian. You were walking out of the lobby when you collapsed. They’re going to take you out in a wheelchair and Dad’s going to meet us outside. Do you understand all of this?”

I nod again.

He stands up, says something to the man behind him. He hands Jonsi a small orange bottle, what looks like little pink pills rattling inside as it falls into his leather jacket pocket. Jonsi leans down and pushes the hair out of my face. The men in the room lift me by my underarms and ease me into a wheelchair. “He’s a sharp dresser,” one of them says to Jonsi.

“That he is.” Jonsi shakes the back of my head, rustles a mass of wet hair. He pushes me out of the room and I look down to see the dust stains on my thighs. My stomach rumbles with either hunger or sickness, its groan growing louder as we pace along the hospital floor. Men and women glide past me, conversations lost in the midst of a dying day. Slices of moonlight peek into each room as we pass by, the frowns of inmates and patients a map to the unknown.

We enter the lobby and I remember its lazy glare. A security guard smiles and presses a large blue button on the wall next to the automatic doors. The glass opens and the night greets me like a lost cousin. Jonsi stops at the end of the sidewalk and I barely recognize the old man leaning against the Jeep, hazard lights blinking with delight. A flop of salt-and-pepper hair doesn’t shift in the wind. He smiles and crosses his arms. When I was a teenager and got arrested for possession of cocaine, he picked me up at the police station with the same grin plastered across his face.

“You okay to walk?” Jonsi leans down and zips up his jacket.

“I think so,” I say, a rush of blood traveling from my chest and into my legs, toes crinkling with feeling. My steps feel like that of a wary child. My sneakers touch the concrete as if it were covered with black ice. My father grabs one arm and Jonsi the other until I’m standing on my own. I take a few steps forward and place one hand against the cold metal of my father’s Jeep. He reaches over to me, a forefinger and thumb clipping the bottom of my chin. His touch reminds me of my childhood.

“Christian,” he says, arms now wrapped around me.

“Dad.”

He turns to Jonsi. “Did the doctors say it would happen again?”

Jonsi’s dimples crunch in mild confusion. “Most likely not. Figures that he’s all dressed up and his mind does that to him one last time.”

I take a gigantic breath of night air, crisp snap of cold coating my lungs. My father opens the passenger side door and motions for me to sit. The leather is cool to the touch, small slit of skin on the small of my back shocked with its touch. Jonsi hops in the backseat and my father starts the engine. The car smells like a library.

We drive without the sounds of the radio, rounds of silence the blanket over our reunion. It’s only when we pass the spot where Claire and I met that a thousand different pictures of her beautiful face start to spin in my mind like an impromptu slideshow. I recall the glowing drops of green in her eyes, low-cut blouse revealing a constellation of freckles. I bought her a coffee with two shots of vanilla and she said that she’d like to have dinner with me sometime.

“Claire,” I say aloud.

My father looks in the rearview mirror, teeth grinding behind sagging cheeks. Olive skin can’t hide the emotion in his face. I hear Jonsi cough twice and shift positions in the backseat. I look at the road ahead, headlights cutting through an autumn fog.

“Christian,” my father says, “we’ll talk when we get home.” He closes his eyes for a moment, tips of his fingers tapping the steering wheel.

“Dad, what’s wrong? Jonsi? What the hell is going on here?”

My father turns the corner and we pull into a convenience store parking lot. The lights are as bright as exploding stars.

“Christian, something happened in the month you were in the hospital. You have to know that you nearly died. You have to know that you put us all through hell, including your wife.”

I can’t look at his face, don’t know if there’s a glimmer of lost hope in the pale brown of his eyes.

“Claire’s dead, Christian.”

My eyelids fall shut and what comes next is the comforting black of reality slipping away.

Jonsi tells me that for a week and a half before my overdose, I slept in an abandoned military bunker off the trails of a Massachusetts state park. An elderly couple found me drinking water from a dirty puddle while walking their golden retriever. After they called the police, I shot up 1600mg of heroin mixed with fetanyl and fell on my back next to a pile of broken branches.

When the ambulance arrived, I was experiencing massive spasms of the intestinal track before I stopped breathing. I flat-lined on the way to the hospital and a nice African-American man pounded my chest until my soul decided to find its way back to the body.

Jonsi sips his beer and scratches underneath the soft red of his beard. “I’m sorry about Claire. And I’m sorry that none of us came to the hospital and told you. The doctors said you weren’t…you. They said you wouldn’t understand what happened.”

I take a deep breath and stare at the shelves and shelves of my father’s expansive book collection. My lips are dry and I want to take a nap. “I still don’t understand what happened, Jonsi.” I can’t remember the color of her eyes, the sound of her voice on a Sunday morning. My eyes start to water and I’m afraid to be alone.

Jonsi frowns and looks away, his cheeks filling with an Irish red glow. He downs the rest of the beer and slides the glass to the side of the coffee table. He turns his head to the open window, silence filling the living room and sending a slight chill into the only parts of my skin that aren’t sore. I can tell that he’s never seen another man cry.

“How’s he feeling?” My father’s brawny arms are crossed, leaning against the entrance to the living room. He’s wearing a black bathrobe and leather slippers.

“Dad, you can talk to me directly.” I stand up and shake my head, wiping the wetness from my eyes. “I’m right fucking here.”

He nods and sits next to Jonsi, falling into the couch like a man tumbling out of a skyscraper window. “Calm down, Christian. You haven’t said a word to me since the car ride home. I figured you weren’t up for talking right now.” He lets his arm drop along the arm of the couch, his fingernails gently scraping the flowery fabric.

I grind my teeth, taste the empty air of a man who doesn’t remember much of his dead wife. “I fainted in the car when you told me, Dad. And I’m not even sure that I’ve woken up yet. Why would she kill herself?”

My father closes his eyes and looks to the carpeted floor, his slippers kicking rogue fabric. He pushes himself off the couch and walks over to a bookcase in the corner of the room. He lets his hands slide across the dust until he stops at large, leather-bound book at the end of the shelf. Picking it off the shelf, he hugs it under his arm and turns to me.

“Take this into the guest room and spend some time with it. Then get some sleep.” He hands me the tome, which almost slips out of my grip. “When you wake up, we’ll have breakfast and the three of us will talk. Your mother’s flying back into town tomorrow night. A reunion is long overdue.” He smiles with the grace of a diplomat.

He taps Jonsi on the shoulder and the two head into the kitchen. I stand for a moment alone, the memories of a lost childhood trying to seep into my brain. Jogging up the stairs, I walk into the guest room and place the book on the bed, aged russet leather resting amidst a grey quilt. I sit next to it, kick off my boots and watch them fly across the room. They land next to a bare dresser with a small thud. I lean back into the bed, an uneasy sigh escaping my lips. I reach over to the book, plop it onto my chest, trying not to drift into slumber.

The cover is as heavy as a fishbowl. I turn to the first page and see a stream of photos glued to yellowing paper. A younger version of myself returns the glare, fuller cheeks and the eyes of a man unafraid of the world. The woman’s lips are pressed into his cheek, her eyelids revealing bits of green mascara. Blonde hair with streaks of red fall around her ears and rests on pale shoulders.

In my dreams, this woman’s hair was black.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher J. Dwyer is Dogmatika’s staff writer. He writes horror and noir. His work has appeared in publications such as Twisted Tongue, Gold Dust magazine, and numerous fiction anthologies. He can be reached through his official website: www.christopherdwyer.com.

Ashy Pet. An Irish phrase originally applied to anyone who back in the peasant days hogged the fireside, refusing to brave the omnipresent rain outside to undertake the necessary spud-hunting, wake-attending, poitin-brewing or whatever it was they did in those days. Gradually, the saying became applied to a particular type of child, the type who didn’t go out with the other children on healthy outdoor pursuits like climbing trees, setting things on fire and tormenting the neighbourhood mentalist, the sort who instead stayed indoors, developed an unhealthy pallor and hung around with their mothers instead of having friends. Being a weakling child of sickly constitution and cowardly disposition, I was one such creature. Confined within the walls of a terraced house in the ironically-named Rosemount area of Derry, entertainment became a precious commodity. One form of blessed relief was an old record player that had longwave radio and impressively could pick up radio broadcasts from thousands of miles away. Obsessed with listening in to foreign channels, I’d spend hours listening to the distant mysterious voices speaking and singing in Flemish, Norwegian, Catalan, all the more enthralling because I had no idea what they were talking about. In hindsight, they were probably discussing gardening, ads for pile cream or debates about interest rates but to this listener they were impossibly poetic ciphers, arabesques and hieroglyphs. Nor did I realise they were intentional. Due to the fact that the radio occasionally picked up passing British Army patrol transmissions, I was under the illusion that the radio was entirely a spying device and I was privy to secret conversations from Bolshevik Vladivostok to Islamic Medina. Even the theremin-esque noises and static in between the channels was some extraterrestrial interference. I’d enthral my parents with tales of what I had heard and they’d have conversations when I left the room of whether or not to have me exorcised as some kind of demon child or put forth arguments in favour of just driving me out into the country and leaving me there (“it’s no good, he’ll find his way back”).

The only English language broadcast that intrigued as much as these was the BBC’s Shipping Forecast which remains to this day a thing of great mystery and beauty. Its influence has permeated down the generations. It’s been adapted in song to varying degrees by Blur, Radiohead, British Sea Power, Gavin Bryars and in verse by Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney. It’s been sampled by Beck and Terence Davies, all seeking to capture some of its curious haunting essence.

What is it that gives what’s essentially a glorified weather report a seeming magic?

Firstly, it’s the tone. Traditionally, it’s been delivered in the formal Received Pronunciation of the BBC (which, far from the correct way to speak it was, and still is, regarded as in some quarters, we took for a charming relic of Victoriana), but read in a slightly languid, near mournful way. Its accompanying theme tune, ‘Sailing By’ by Ronald Binge is often characterised condescendingly as a piece of light music when it is in fact a gloriously evocative and timeless treasure. Then there is the inherent poetry in the place names that inevitably set the mind to wandering with their associations (Viking, German Bight, Fastnet, Cromarty, Forties). Combined with the facts that the entire meaning alludes to all but seasoned sailors and there is a repetition of certain directional and meteorological phrases, the effect is hypnotic, like some strange sacrament or ritual being intoned. To listeners, particularly those living in inner cities, the effect was enchanting (a friend recently told me that as a child, the football results on the same channel had the same effect for him with the names seeming impossibly exotic, Queen of the South, Red Star Belgrade, Dynamo Kiev, Deportivo de La Coruña). If the reality of a maritime warning system regarding gales, fog and sea conditions was not quite as colourful as the visions of Leviathans, Hong Kong junks, Nazi U-boats, sunken Spanish galleons and Barbary Corsairs navigating by the stars, this half-witted Derry child had dreamt up, the locations of the Shipping Forecast are still surprisingly fascinating. There’s the Dogger bank with its dinosaur bones (once the highlands of the now lost Doggerland), Portland and its drowned battleships, the crooked bay of Cromarty, the storms of Biscay, Finisterre (now FitzRoy) perched at the edge of the world, the buried crusaders and pirates of Lundy, the disputed desolate Rockall and the melancholy of Fastnet. And nearest to ourselves; Malin Head.

The most Northerly part of Ireland, Malin Head has exerted a fascination for me since camping there as a teenager, reactivating a hornets nest of memory, imagery and guilt with each mention on the forecast. The brief setting for a misspent youth. Desolate though it is, it’s easy to find; just keep going north until you run out of Ireland. My grandfather, a former fisherman now bedridden, of burly Donegal stock with hands like shovels and a foghorn voice, knew the spot well. He passed on stories about his crew almost drowning in storms so bad some of them wept (none of them had ever saw fit to learn how to swim), about treacherous rocks with names like the Dutchman and about old guys who’d died fifty years before I was born but whom he aggressively believed I should know (“you know Tommy Deaney? Aye, fer fuck’s sake, sure he only died in ‘58, ah well fuck ye then”). Inveterate wimps with no desire to have our bones pulverised against the rocks, my friends and I had stuck to the dry land, enacting a debased coming of age version of Stand By Me. Displaying the full stupidity of youth, we’d set out camping there with a cheap flimsy plastic tent made in the Warsaw Bloc, plentiful drink in place of food and hitched our camp upon the teetering edge of some exposed promontory directly in the firing line of the gales sweeping in from the ocean (being in the process, perhaps the first people in Europe to be battered by these advancing low fronts). To prepare ourselves for a Jim Morrison-esque mystical journey, we’d ingested magic mushrooms on the bus down which led to nothing more transcendental than bowel spasms and gut-wrenching nausea. We chose the location having been chased away from our favoured spots of Swan Park in Buncrana by a criminally insane horse (reputedly someone had wrenched their own finger off on a fence trying to get away during one of its episodes) and having been flooded staying in the Meegees (no relation). We were thus driven to the edge of the world.

“In 1945, members of the Johns Hopkins Physics Laboratory named the four corners of the earth as being in Ireland, south-east of the Cape of Good Hope, west of the Peruvian coast, and between New Guinea and Japan,” according to The Independent. Approaching Malin Head, you get the feeling you drew the short straw in terms of the four. The Romans had the good sense to halt their empire before coming to the island (centuries later, Giraldus Cambrensis warned against visiting these shores as his Ireland was apparently filled with wildmen and werewolves). It’s a landscape Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brian would have recognised, reminiscent of the harsh land of The Great Hunger and The Poor Mouth . Not far from here, as the crow flies, Peadar O’Donnell the writer, poet and professional revolutionary would hide out in the hills between launching bandido style raids against Derry’s courthouse. There is a scattering of houses, hermit ruins, famine dwellings, a cottage filled with curios and a smattering of public houses. Beyond that the wild ragged headlands and beyond that Iceland, North America or the Arctic depending on the angle. Down the coast at the stunning Five Finger Strand, giant ship-wrecking breakers roll in. It’s blindingly cold, even at the brink of summer but the sea seems to boil, frothing against the rocks, goading any kamikaze surfers to take their chances. Exposed to the elements, the wind seems to never cease, one of those places where the trees are deformed by prevailing winds and stoop and you half-expect the natives to be similarly afflicted, their spines bent in a south-easterly direction as they cackle toothlessly at the halfwits who’ve chosen to spend their holidays here by mistake.

In reality, the locals are friendly, with the hardiness that is essential to surviving in such a place and view marauding Northerners with barely concealed but justified suspicion. They display none of the small town madness inherent in much of Donegal and Derry; the embodiment of the old phrase “if god invented the country and man the city then the devil created the country town.” There are places where boredom drives the mind to malevolence and legion are the tales of escaped horses breaking up drug-feud-pitched-battles in village squares and cars ending up in ditches with old men, leaning on spades, silently shaking their heads. Instead, places like Malin Head have a rawness that seems to breed sense and the survival instinct.

At the absolute north, there’s Banba’s Crown, named after the pre-Christian Irish goddess of war and fertility who was supposed to protect the island from invasion (and, given successive waves of Milesians, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Scotsmen and priests, didn’t do a great job). Scattered across the rocky outcrop are hollowed-out concrete naval lookout posts and towers. Below, years of visitors have left messages in the form of collected rocks, with Eire prominently marking the land out, presumably for the ghost of Amelia Earhart. Out at sea, there’s the abandoned island Inis Trá Tholl (translated as “island of the bloody beach”) and in the thrashing sea between its lighthouse and the coast, there laid countless wrecks and oceanic graves.

Three times I suspected I would die here. The first, whilst camping in a storm, our pegs blew loose causing the tent to blow away with us in it and in a vain attempt to save us from the elements, I ventured out in the tempest, like King Lear on the heath, trying to bash them in with a rock, weeping and howling at the heavens while my esteemed colleagues slept on blissfully oblivious. And as I crawled in to the wreckage of our hovel, I spent the rest of the endless night wondering how conductible tent poles were as lightning flashed overhead.

The second when a bunch of jocks escaped from some teenage 1950’s greaser film and drove up, illuminating our tents with their headlights, and proceeded to launch rocks at us, laughing all the while, for the 45 longest minutes of my life as I clung to a sleeping friend in frenzied and silent desperation as he snored bastardly through it all.

The third occasion requires a confession, the unburdening of a wretched guilty soul. One morning, I awoke foggy-headed from the drink, to find strange lumbering shadows gathered ominously around the tent. It was cows. It wasn’t just the fear that they would flock or whatever they do and trample the tent with us lying in it. It was the fact that they had just appeared overnight with no explanation in a previously empty field. As if they had just grown from the soil. Our fates seemed intertwined during that excursion, the cows and I. That night, my friends and I retired to a cave on a nearby beach with a tape player for some festivities. During the session, a friend returned to the camp to pick up some beers and found that the tent door had been left open and a cow had walked inside it and was effectively wearing the tent, dragging its contents around the field. Eventually, by the end of four days of drinking and insomnia, none of my former friends were speaking to one another and would have happily, in that moment, left the scene and never seen each other again but we were trapped in a locale which buses only pass through once a day and we’d already missed it. To relieve the monotony and repressed rage, I found a large rock, the size of a small child, and launched it off the cliff face on the edge of which we had wisely camped. Almost the instant it left my hands, I spotted the cow, an unusual enough sight in itself, scuttling around on the rocks below. The rock took flight, revolving in slow motion, and then plummeted onto the cow’s spine. For the next three days, I could barely piss straight for fear that the farmer would appear and kill us all with his bare hands for murdering his livestock. I’d seen The Wickerman, I knew the way these things worked.

What the fuck does this have to do with the Shipping Forecast, you may well ask? The answer is I’m not sure. Perhaps, the genius of the Shipping Forecast is that, it retains the splendour and mystery of these places but blows away the mundanities, replacing harrowing memories, involuntary bovine slaughter for example, with thoughts of what might be…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darran Anderson once slept through an earthquake.

he was drinking vodka
straight
no chaser

out of his favorite star wars glass
old school style

empire strikes back
from burger king

back when luke skywalker
meant something to him

back when things
were simpler
easier

and evil
showed up
in an all black suit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Michael is a writer, poet and working photographer. He was born, raised and lives in Detroit Rock City. He owns a small publishing company entitled Black Coffee Press with Scott C. Rogers.

“Daniel leaves Ireland because this love and the new Republic of Ireland cannot co-exist. So he flees the island because of something negative, rather than because he is searching for love. I think a huge amount of people were suffocated by this new Ireland.”

Alan Kelly: With your debut novel Nights Beneath the Nation you vividly conjure a place the reader has never been, similar to Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Sarah Water’s The Night Watch. How difficult was it writing about 1950s Ireland from a gay male’s point of view?

Denis Kehoe: That’s funny you should mention The Night Watch, I’m reading it at the moment and really enjoying it. As for writing about the 1950s from a gay male point of view, I didn’t find it particularly difficult. I drew on details, both literary and personal, from both gay and straight people and I suppose I was always thinking of how Daniel in particular saw this world rather than how a gay archetype would see it.

AK: Daniel returns to Ireland an embittered man having spent years in exile. Many gay men and women left here, leaving behind persecution and violence, which was a constant in quite a lot of people’s lives until quite recently. I got the impression while reading Nights Beneath the Nation, what with being Irish and gay, that the possibility of love is something that is elsewhere and many gay people feel the need to escape. Was that something you felt, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

DK: I was certainly interested in the idea of escape, and for Daniel the real escape was from the countryside to the ‘big city’ of Dublin. I suppose he leaves Ireland because this love and the new Republic of Ireland cannot co-exist. So he flees the island because of something negative, rather than because he is searching for love. I think a huge amount of people, including gay men and women, were suffocated by this new Ireland. However, at the same time I was also interested in the idea of a gay man coming to Ireland at this time and living his life here. I met an English man who moved here to be with his partner after World War II, and this idea of moving from London to Dublin seemed extraordinary. This is where Fitzer came in in a way. Other men I spoke to also surprised me by being much less bitter and critical of the period than I expected. So I think there were really contradictory experiences of being gay and Irish at the time.

AK: The narrative flits between two time frames – the 50s and the 90s – Daniel leaves a small parochial Irish town where he meets the mysterious Maeve. You fashioned her on someone you’d met in Bewley’s Oriental Cafe. The character of Gerard, who the older Daniel encounters, struck me as frighteningly familiar too. Was he modeled on anybody you knew?

DK: If I’m honest Gerard is the character most similar to myself in certain ways, though there are, of course, big differences. There was a funny moment, a good while after I’d written a particular scene, when I suddenly remembered I’d had almost the same experience. With Gerard I was interested in looking at a young gay man in a newly ‘liberal’ island ; how young gay men are apparently liberated and carefree but are suffering from their own demons too.

AK: If you look at the canon of gay literature in Ireland, there are very few books I’ve read which has had quite as much an impact as yours, well maybe The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín. What do you think of Irish literature in general?

DK: I’m no expert but there are some writers who have had a big impact on me: Joyce, Sean O’ Casey, Elizabeth Bowen and I’m very interested in the work of Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe and Colm Tóibín. I’m teaching a group at an adult education centre so I’ve also had the chance to read some great Irish poets: Paula Meehan, John Montague, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland. And I think there are some really interesting new writers emerging, including Mia Gallagher and Barry McCrea.

AK: You work as books editor for GCN. Have any of the writers you’ve interviewed informed your work and if not, what does?

DK: I don’t work as books editor for GCN any more but did gain a lot from the experience and still interview writers for the magazine. I don’t know if any of them have directly influenced my own work but I did discover several writers I hadn’t previously read which was fantastic: Neil Bartlett, Stella Duffy, Sarah Waters, Elizabeth Wilson and so on. I interviewed Sarah Waters a week or so ago and I have been intrigued by something she said about using a ghost story to explore other ideas/subjects. My own work is informed by stories from real life but also of course other writers, with Nights Beneath the Nation Lorca became a huge influence and I read a number of accounts about growing up in Ireland at the time, as well as biographies of Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails and so on. My parents were also a fantastic resource for recreating the Dublin of the time.

AK: There are quite a lot of ideas running through the book, mental illness, promiscuity and death are all touched on without the plot becoming ramshackle. Was it difficult tying it all together?

DK: Yes, it was difficult. I think I was balancing a lot and made the story quite complicated, but I probably tend to make things too complicated anyway. Maybe certain aspects suffered because I was trying to put too much in. But will I learn? Probably not!

AK: Anthony has a secret of his own which he keeps from Daniel, a secret that has more of a stigma than even homosexuality does. I think this is something that is largely overlooked within the gay community (perhaps that’s just a generalisation) and I sort of got the idea that perhaps Anthony’s parents where to blame, the environment he had to get away from?

DK: I think you are absolutely right. There is a huge stigma about mental health in Ireland in general, a prejudice that definitely exists in the gay community. I think a lot of older men in Ireland have probably suffered/are suffering because of their sexuality, but there are also a huge amount of young gay men attending counselling here as well. This fact of grappling with one’s own mental health is, of course, a positive step. In the novel though I think Anthony’s sexuality is the primary problem for his family, and he is essentially incarcerated for that and not any mental health issues he may have.

AK: During Daniel’s recollections about the 50s, Maeve’s parties and the solidarity that existed when gay people did gather beneath the nation. I felt envious that he was living in a world that was hidden but where people looked after one another. After all the gay Ireland he returns to in the 90s is cold, cruel and distant. I think you did the job exceptionally well, of creating two worlds which where vastly different. Where the reader, given the opportunity would have chosen the 50s over the 90s any day.

DK: Thanks very much. Again it comes back to some of the things people told me about the time; the camaraderie that existed, the unimportance of class in certain gay spaces etc. I wanted to show the possible dangers of being gay in Ireland back then, but also to celebrate the good times: the parties, the romances, the sweet discovery of this illicit world for a young man from the country. And it was also important to show how everything isn’t hunky dory nowadays just because of decriminalisation, to show up some of the arrogance and superficiality of this mainstream gay world that many gay people are excluded from.

AK: So will you write another slice of historical fiction? And if not, what are you working on now?

DK: I’m working on a novel that moves between present day and the 1960s/1970s. It takes place in Angola, Portugal and Ireland. Another tall order, but I’m enjoying the work and learning a lot.

AK: And finally what are your thoughts on life as a gay man now, in the present. Do you think we are still struggling?

DK: I think where there is life there is struggle, for everybody. As gay men and women though, we are of course still fighting for many of our basic rights and there is still rampant, random homophobia out there. I think on a personal level, Irish people have opened up much more to the idea of homosexuality, but I still believe we are hugely conservative and immature when it comes to sexuality in general.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alan Kelly is the contributing editor to Dogmatika. He has worked for a number of specialist magazines, Film Ireland, Pretty Scary, Penny Blood, Bookslut et al. He lives in Wicklow and is partial to pulp, noir, hardboiled, brainy erotica and horror fiction.