The Brooklyn Rail

Beginning with the early writing of Edgar Allan Poe, whose murderous narrators of questionable sanity animate the long-loved short stories “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale-Heart,” there is a rich literary practice of imbuing crime writing with the phantasmagoric. Be it the earliest form of phantasmagoria, the magic lanterns and mirrors of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century horror entertainment, or the ghosts and the rattling chains of Romanticism and Gothic fiction, the fantastic has always held sway over our literary imaginations.

Terry Castle informs us in his landmark essay “Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie” of the post-Enlightenment literary poetic production:

This association with delirium, loss of control, the terrifying yet sublime overthrow of ordinary experience, made the phantasmagoria a perfect emblem, obviously, of the nineteenth-century poetic imagination. Especially among the later romantic and symbolist writers—Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, the Goncourt brothers, Loti, Lautreamont, Nevarl, and later still, Yeats, Pound, Apollinaire, Eliot, and Artaud —the phantasmagoria was a favorite metaphor for the heightened sensitivities and often-tormented awareness of the romantic visionary.

Craig Clevenger, a West Coast literary darling, notable for his inventive foray into the phantasmagoric with his early novels of neo-noir—The Contortionist’s Handbook, whose narrator, a darkly hypnotic drug addict and brilliant young forger with a traumatic past, must untangle himself from twin perils, the LA underworld and psychiatric institutionalization, and Dermaphoria, whose amnesiac narrator Eric Asworth, holed up in a low-rent motel, tries piecing together a troubled past through the taking of a strange new hallucinogen—has dropped yet again a glimmering, ruminative addition to his literary genre-bending oeuvre.

In prose as striking and sinuous as feverish fingers clacking away on an old-timey mechanical keyboard, it is no wonder Clevenger’s latest crime novel Mother Howl, has earned accolades from some of the finest practitioners of the sensorial weird, the experimental fantastic and literary crime: Amina Akhtar, Steve Erickson, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Rob Hart and Gabino Iglesias to name a plentitude.

In an “era of peak serial killer,” as Julie Miller quipped in August 2023’s Vanity Fair, Clevenger gives the slip to the escapist, desensitizing “copaganda” often associated with this ubiquitous fare: be it serialized streaming television shows, police procedurals, true crime documentaries, biopics, mystery/thrillers too vast and wide to count. With Mother Howl, Clevenger examines the “cost of living” for those whose bloodlines are not blessed but cruelly damned from the start. Lyle Edison, a young man punished by an unforgiving public for being the son of a serial murderer, illegally obtains a new identity only to find himself ensnared by Officer Reid, a sadistic parole officer, determined to break him. Only through the unexpected encounter with a stranger, Icarus, a messenger from the outer reaches with a singular connection to “Mother Howl,” will Lyle become privy to a metaphysical release. Glimmering and shivering with stylistic nuances, Mother Howl is a deeply affecting look at American violence, its traumatic aftermath, and the very real possibility of repair.

Claire Phillips (Rail): I was immediately drawn to the gothic nature of Mother Howl: a son who must grapple with an unthinkable family legacy and curse, and the terror in knowing that we may grow into the monsters that have haunted our childhood or dreams is at the center of your latest narrative. You tend to this so beautifully in Lyle’s flashback to his youth and his father’s reassuring hands on his shoulders as he cares for a sick cat along with a budding awareness of his father’s staggering acts of murder.

You write:

Lyle’s wish to be like his father was a wish to outgrow the small, soft hands of his boyhood. Those hands he had aspired to, those on his arm at the hospital or around his mother’s waist in their family photo, had been the same hands over Nadine’s mouth, or pulling a twist of her hair to make her quiet.

This is such a disquieting passage. How is a boy to contend with the savage and sadistic violence inherent in a figure he associates with paternal love?

Craig Clevenger: We’ve seen time and again how supporters will rally around an accused public figure with little to no evidence for or against their guilt. And teenage victims of abusers are often discredited and ignored by the very people and institutions charged with protecting them. There are a host of reasons for this, but then we also know people will visit loved ones in prison who have been proven guilty, or who otherwise love and support a family member or loved one who’s clearly in the wrong.

So we know it’s possible to love someone who’s guilty of something, even something violent or horrific; that’s what unconditional love is. But there are degrees to this. It’s one thing to love a child who’s been caught shoplifting, but how does a parent grapple with loving a child guilty of murder? And switching the roles makes things even more complex. A young child may be unwavering in their love for a parent, but an adolescent coming into their own might have more complicated and conflicting feelings—love, obligation, complicity, guilt, and so on—to say nothing of experiencing the repercussions of their social world, something that a young child doesn’t have.

Lyle was like most any young boy with a good father in that he wanted to be just like his father when he grew up. But when he finds out his father was not a good person—far from it, in fact—he’s suddenly without any model to aspire to. That’s a tremendous void made all the darker by appearing so suddenly. So while Lyle was a young adult when he left home, he was largely wide-eyed and clueless when first on his own. He was his own blank slate and had no idea how to fill it.

Rail: At the heart of this narrative is the transcendence of “traumatized masculinity,” described by critic Lee Horsley as a key feature of noir stories in her examination of Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. A common feature of this genre, she notes, is “a powerful father figure…equivalent to the gothic villain in his duplicity and in the extent of the damage he inflicts.” A father-son dynamic illuminating the need to confront and end a vicious cycle of violence is not entirely uncommon. Were their specific precursors in noir literature you wanted to revisit or rework?

Clevenger: There were two specific tropes I wanted to address head-on. First, let me be clear that when I say “tropes,” I’m not being dismissive. These ideas reoccur in stories for a reason, and we’ll see them time and again because they’ll continue to resonate.

The first idea I wanted to dismantle was the common claim of antagonists that they’re really no different than the hero. Even Austin Powers took a stab at that when Dr. Evil said something like, “We’re not so different, you and I…”

But what’s often overlooked is that this literary trope is more than just an abstract, philosophical discussion. Anyone who’s experienced abuse in an intimate setting, whether from a parent or partner, knows how abusers will deflect blame back to the victim when confronted with an accusation. And if you read or listen to interviews with violent offenders, you’ll see this rationalization turn up repeatedly. Watching an interview with a serial murderer and hearing this sort of rationalization, I was struck by how childish it sounded. This defense mechanism used by killers, wife beaters, and child abusers is really no different than a child saying, “He started it.”

Second, I wanted to address the notion of “closure” head on. Yes, closure is possible, and it’s a significant aid to healing for those who find it. But in truth, it doesn’t happen that way for a great many victims. Perpetrators maintain their innocence; institutions deny responsibility; the guilty sometimes die (often by their own hand) before being brought to justice… the list goes on. I wanted Lyle to find a way to make himself whole, to take the wheel of his own life, without his father giving him any convenient and tidy closure.

In fact, I made certain that Lyle Sr. didn’t even give his son the satisfaction of a denial. A firm denial has a weight to it; it’s something that can be disproven or at least disputed. While the polar opposite of a confession, a firm denial can bring validation—a very thin validation, no doubt—that deflection and obfuscation cannot.

Think about the difference between a perpetrator being tried in a public court of law versus settling out of court for an undisclosed amount while admitting no guilt. Yes, both outcomes can bring closure for victims, but they are far from the same.

Rail: Mother Howl defies easy categorization and ranks highly for me along with other works that examine the depths and depravity of murder in the phantasmagoric vein. I am thinking of The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson, a dark, kaleidoscopic look at murder and the blood atonement in Mormonism. With this work you also provide a glimpse into the American psyche, possibly the end to the glorified portrayal of mass murderers. How would you categorize the era and subculture under examination?

Clevenger: I don’t know that I have a neat label for this era/subculture, but I did have some specific pop culture/media issues in my crosshairs. I remember when Richard Ramirez was actively killing throughout Los Angeles. I was in college at the time, and I remember he was first referred to as “The Walk-In Killer,” because that was his MO. But “The Night Stalker” was better for headlines and for stoking the coals of the public’s conjoined fear and fascination. I’m hard-pressed to believe anyone who’s experienced real violence is inclined to romanticize people like that, but the media and the public’s christening of killers with catchy nicknames continues.

And of course there’s a clear distinction between the kinds of victims who get media coverage and those who don’t. Lonnie Franklin proved that to all of us. But we’re starting to see a shift away from that, given how coverage of mass shooters (mostly schools, unfortunately) is handled. There’s been a growing trend to not name the shooters, and to keep the victims’ names front and center. That’s not a solution to anything on its own, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Rail: Author Nicolas Lietzau in his article “Phantasmagoria: A Look at Dark Romanticism, Romanticism’s Black Mirror,” reiterates André Vieregge’s idea of the “supernatural as a trial of character.” He imparts of the protagonist’s travail:

With very few exceptions, the dangerous supernatural—vampires, ghosts, monsters—in Dark Romantic novels is never invincible. In fact, its purpose is almost always a test of a protagonist’s inner strength and soul (and often piety), where failure results in insanity and death and victory in a heightened understanding of oneself and the world.

This perfectly addresses Icarus’s appearance, translator of the otherworldly “Mother Howl,” whose path necessarily intertwines with Lyle’s. When did Icarus first introduce himself to you? His patois is convincingly distinctive from the narration of Lyle and his partner Sera. What were some of the constraints or formal choices you made for realizing his voice on the page?

Clevenger: The strangest part of this book for me is just how Icarus appeared out of nowhere, not just in the story but during the writing process. I wrote this book in fits and starts over several rough years when I was living in San Francisco. I’d started with a story about Lyle; it started quite differently than what it came to be, but I can more or less chart the evolution from memory. But Icarus… I have no idea. There may be something in my notes… somewhere… but I can’t be certain. I cannot for the life of me recall exactly when, how, or why I came up with that character; I don’t know that he was the result of a single brainstorm or a solution to some obstacles that emerged early on. He just sort of fell from the sky.

The only thing I do remember was his voice, which I wanted to be the opposite of any constraints or formal choices, as you put it. The idea for his manner of speech was simple from the beginning: Icarus viewed words as a tool, and whatever combination of words suited his needs, then that’s what he’d use. I figured if he were suddenly incarnate, then the language would have been effectively “downloaded” into his brain all at once. From there, he was free to pick and choose among informal, American English, the “Queen’s English” as we say, street slang, and his own made-up grammar and expressions.

After a while, what seems far-fetched and unconventional in his speech is fairly straightforward, I think. It’s a matter of transposing common prefixes and suffixes that carry the same meaning (roughly). Like the way Icarus says “qualicated” for “qualified,” for example. Before long, that playfulness I was enjoying became a loose set of rules on its own, and so it was easy to lapse into “Icarus-speak” when I was writing his dialogue.

Rail: For this novel, you have stepped outside the safe bounds of a gripping, sensorial, hard-boiled first-person narration. What prompted this change? What were the challenges in moving out of your signature style?

Clevenger: I want to be not only a different writer with each novel, but a better one. Ideally, I’d like someone to read all of my books but—barring my name on the cover, of course—not be able to tell that they all came from the same writer. For most of my young adult life and throughout all of my workshops in college, I wrote in the third person because I enjoyed the freedom of that god-like view in narrating a story. But when I tried writing in the first person, I found that I really enjoyed the intimacy of it, and that while it may be limiting in one sense, it was liberating in the other.

So my first two novels were written in the first person, and the reader was with them for every step of the story. I figured it was time for a change, now that I better understood the strengths and variants of third person. Likewise, I had fun braiding two storylines together (technically three, I suppose). The challenge came in shifting to a more visual storytelling style. Instead of knowing a character’s thoughts, I wanted to show their observable actions to the reader. Still, I would lapse into narrative exposition to convey their thoughts, and I had a tough time keeping that to a minimum.

Rail: An absent mother undone by her husband’s unspeakable violence against women makes the appearance of Sera, Lyle’s partner and mother of his child, all the more significant. His father’s killing spree threatens to upend any possibility for familial connection and warmth. What did you consider when you included her perspective toward the end of the novel? Was her viewpoint difficult to embody compared to the male viewpoints? The viewpoint of Icarus?

Clevenger: While it wasn’t Sera’s story, I didn’t want to position her as the blindly supportive spouse, wholly devoted to her husband’s self-discovery. To that end, I started by clustering her scenes together, either toward the beginning of the narrative or the end, as much as I could while still keeping to the chronology of events. This was largely symbolic, but it served to have her bookend Lyle’s narrative… he’s a large part of her world, but he’s oblivious to that.

More significantly (minor spoiler here), there’s a scene in the third act where Lyle realizes his probation officer may discover he left the country without first getting permission. In the original draft, it’s Lyle who urges Sera to take Nadine and go somewhere else for a while, fearing for the custody of their daughter.

For Lyle, this was a bold decision to make, but it wasn’t a difficult one. It was pure reflex, really. I ultimately made this Sera’s decision; that may seem like a trivial distinction since the story that follows is no different… all the events play out the same way. But in Sera’s case, it’s a much more fraught decision. She loves Lyle but has reached her limit after he reveals layer after layer of truth about himself. For Sera to decide to take Nadine and more or less hide until the dust settles with Lyle… that’s a painful call to make, but the right one.

Sera puts the child above herself and everything, something Lyle is only beginning to understand. In the final courtroom scene when Lyle mouths “I love you,” to Sera, I didn’t want her to respond. Of course she loves him, but that doesn’t mean everything’s going to be the same, and Lyle knows that, finally.

As an aside, that particular spelling of Sera is a nod to the late John O’Brien. I love his work, in particular Leaving Las Vegas and Stripper Lessons. Sera (four letters, with an ‘e’) was the female protagonist of Leaving Las Vegas (one the film unfairly but subtly disparaged). Likewise, Lyle’s disdain for alcohol (and the scene where he tries to choke back a slug of whiskey) was a nod to the main character of O’Brien’s Stripper Lessons.

Rail: You have taken on the US prison-industrial complex with striking clarity, leaving the reader to wonder how a gross sprawling apparatus, considered regressive and immoral by much of the world, will protect us from unspeakable violence or invite repair when its primary mode is to humiliate and ensnare. This is the question I’m left asking myself after reading Lyle’s harrowing brush with the system and his father’s dehumanized portrayal in the pivotal scene between son and father: how incumbent upon us is it to combat the contempt swirling in those who feel impotent, unseen by larger social-political forces?

Clevenger: We all have a responsibility to dismantle systems that should never have been handed over to private enterprise. Our healthcare is an international disgrace, but the prison-industrial complex doesn’t get the same attention from most citizens as does our healthcare crisis. A system that makes financial profit contingent on illegal behavior is fundamentally corrupt. And when you consider that some of the players here are publicly held entities—thus they have an obligation to produce steady growth to shareholders—then increased incarceration is inevitable, as is the disparity in rates for marginalized groups. The law (and common sense) holds that people are accountable for their actions; at the same time, we have voluminous evidence that systemic inequality foments crime. The political left and right have always argued (and will continue to argue) which end of that equation should have greater weight. But I don’t see an end to that debate in my lifetime, if ever. Given these two irreconcilable truths, the bare minimum we can do is to put as many resources toward eliminating system inequity as we put toward our criminal justice system.

Rail: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Lyle’s father spits out the Nietzschean adage at his son with no small amount of irony.

Can you tell me how you prepared writing this foreboding but necessary confrontation between father and son? How much research into serial murder and the penal system did you do before settling into writing this work? Was there anything you learned that you found particularly harrowing or noteworthy that did not make its way into this book. The spit hood was especially chilling as a signifier of a suspect penal system.

Clevenger: For the most part, I wrote each narrative—Lyle and Icarus—chronologically, fine-tuning them later on and experimenting with the transition points from one draft to the next. But the chapter where Lyle sits down with his father, that was the only one I wrote out of sequence.

Once the story took shape, it became clear that Lyle’s dread of his father—the memory of him, his association with him, the man’s unseen influence, etc.—was the true antagonist of the story (beyond Lyle himself, being his own worst enemy). So I jumped ahead to write that scene in order to give the man shape and substance in my own head, so as to give me a clear idea of what exactly awaited at the end of Lyle’s self-inflicted collision course.

I didn’t do much formal research, only drawing on the various documentaries I’ve seen over the years that showed interviews with violent offenders. It didn’t take long to see the pattern I referred to earlier, that the deflections and thin rationalizations from many killers aren’t any different than what we hear from pre-adolescents (and later, I suppose) for minor transgressions. As horrifying as their actions may be, their defenses are ultimately quite childish. The only difference is that adults are much better at using those defenses with other adults.

I’ll confess, when I actually got to writing that chapter (I honestly don’t recall how long it took me), it left me in a bad way. It took me the better part of a week to lose the black cloud that resulted.

But there was very little about Lyle Sr. and his crimes that found its way into the book. I made every effort to restrain my portrayal of his actions; aside from Lyle briefly imagining what it must have been like for Nadine (the server from the diner) there are no graphic recollections of the violence, the victims’ reactions, their pain, etc. I wanted to keep the violence oblique, non-specific. When Icarus eventually sees their ghosts (the Untuned), I wanted the reader to see details of their humanity as clearly as possible, to see who they were in spite of not knowing their names.

You mentioned the spit guard Lyle’s father wears when he enters the visiting cell. One of my favorite research methods is looking through supply catalogs (or browsing their web sites) for certain industries. If you’ve got a main character who’s a zookeeper, you’ll get as much (if not more) insights into that profession by browsing online suppliers and seeing the minutiae of their equipment, uniforms, etc.

Okay, I don’t actually know what’s out there for zookeepers, but I’ve got a goodly number of web bookmarks for suppliers to law enforcement, and I learned a lot from that. Those spit hoods were one example and, like everything else, there’s an array of them available. That sort of thing never crosses the mind of most civilians.

Rail: Similarly charged for me is a recent Substack you reposted on the anniversary of your father’s passing. You describe your father as a hardworking, right-wing man from Oklahoma, a “complex/contradictory cipher.” In unadorned, telling prose you speak of a “good but fraught” relationship with a man you loved and depict him as “hands down the most misanthropic person I’ve ever known.” You then end the Substack post with the wry signatory:

“I love you, dad. I just wish I knew you better. Your Not an Axe Murderer Son, Craig”

Your father’s complicated character feels the stuff of great fiction: the colorful, hyperbolic quip signifies your struggle with something ruinous, like Lyle’s struggle to be present in his own life. What parallels did you draw for yourself with Lyle? Memoir writing can be cathartic. Was the writing of Mother Howl cathartic for you as well?

Clevenger: It was certainly cathartic, yes. Most everything I write is, to some degree. There’s very little in any of my stories that comes directly from my own life, at least in terms of actual life events. The combined autobiographical events or images from my work might fill a page or two, at most. But emotionally, they’re all me, yeah.

That essay about my father was as personal as anything I’ve ever made public, and I’m hesitant to go into any detail about those things in my life that sneak into my stories. But I can speak to one parallel in particular: the overall story for Lyle coming to terms with his past and where he came from; more significantly, his understanding that he is not defined by that past. He’s an adult and is free to choose the kind of person he wants to be, but Lyle also needs to consider more than just himself when he makes that choice (or those choices). He needs to think of something beyond himself, bigger than himself. For Lyle, that thing is his family.

Your phrasing “present in his own life” is spot-on. I wanted to show Lyle’s lack of presence not through simple descriptions of his feelings (or lack thereof), but showing visually the disassociation to which he’s prone. At times of stress (which increase for him over time), Lyle’s detachment goes beyond simply “checking out” emotionally, but borders on an out-of-body fugue state.

Throughout the story, Lyle introduces himself by saying, “My name’s Lyle,” or something to that effect. He holds his name, his identity, at arm’s length with that phrasing, “My name is…” as though his name—his identity—is not innately his. The turning point comes when Sera goes into labor with Nadine; it’s at the hospital where Lyle, without even thinking, finally says, “I’m Lyle Edison,” thus fully owning (or beginning to own) who he is and what he’s made of, the good and the bad.

Rail: Regarding the Dark Romantic element of this work, did you intend for the inscrutable, mythic character of Icarus to be read as allegorical or as a reworking of crime through the lens of the fantastic or New Weird? For example, the Untuned creates a powerful sense of the uncanny, of something familiar yet strange, and its accompanying dread, the way non-Euclidean geometry or sound give rise to the interdimensional time travel in an H.P. Lovecraft story. What impact on the reader did you think Icarus might have?

Clevenger: I had no idea how readers would receive Icarus. I had fun writing him, so I hoped his reception would be the same. But people have been divided, so far. Some folks love him, others don’t get him at all. In fact, a number of agents who passed on the novel said they’d consider representing if I nixed the Icarus narrative altogether.

Icarus was intended to be a wrench thrown into the works of a traditional crime novel. More than anything else, I wanted to jettison the trope of a gentle, beatific messenger of the divine. Icarus is rough around the edges to say the least, with slim tolerance for dealing with people. But he’s ultimately a good person. Not just harmless and well-intentioned, but steadfast in his determination to do right.

The more I thought about how Icarus perceives the universe, with everything in existence being variants of the same shared master frequency—the Mother Howl—it made sense to give him a different way of understanding ghosts or spirits. We usually think of ghosts as being trapped between here and the afterlife due to unfinished business; for the Untuned, being trapped means they’ve hopped from one frequency but not arrived at the next.

Rail: Classic noir turns on the knowledge that poor choices coupled with rotten luck can turn an unremarkable life rancid. Often this comes in the form of a woman. In Edgar J. Ulmer’s cult classic Detour, Al is unlucky enough to pick up femme fatale Vera who insists upon making him co-conspirator in her untimely death. In Mother Howl, Lyle’s luck is transformed by Icarus, whose connection inspires an important leap of faith and embrace of life outside the dark fate of his father’s misdeeds. How do you feel about the redemptive power of narrative and its place in the neo-noir tradition?

Clevenger: I have great reverence for storytelling in all its forms. I firmly believe humankind wouldn’t have evolved beyond living in caves were it not for stories. Which is to say that I believe that narrative—all stories—taken as a whole are redemptive. As for its place in the neo-noir tradition… that’s a good question for which I don’t have a ready answer.

True noir isn’t simply about the ugly side of life, a gritty portrayal of the world, or even the “bad guys” winning (or at least the “good guys” losing). I get in some trouble for this, but I’ve said before that Raymond Chandler isn’t noir. That’s not a dig at the man; I’m not trying to take anything away from him. His reputation and legacy is almost untouchable. But if you read “The Simple Art of Murder,” it’s very clear that Chandler presented Philip Marlowe as a moral ideal, someone who does the right thing regardless of the cost to himself and in spite of every reason to do otherwise.

On the other hand, you have writers like Jim Thompson or James M. Cain. They were both hit or miss, but at their best they showed us the dark heart of noir… that good and bad are simply arbitrary lines that we made up to cope with life.

I’m not saying I agree with that, but I’ll repeat what I’ve said elsewhere: as a kid, I read science fiction and fantasy to escape; as a young man, I discovered noir and understood what I was escaping from.

Where does the idea of redemption fit into neo-noir? I suppose writing is my way of attempting to answer that.

Rail: You’ve earned your literary community stripes in numerous ways: As a longtime contributor to cult literary bestseller Chuck Palahniuk’s online magazine and creative writing community LitReactor, alongside bestselling author Lydia Yuknavitch. You’ve edited multiple anthologies including Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (Velvet Press, 2011), along with Pela Via, and just recently Put Out the Lights and Cry: A Diner Noir Anthology (Outcast Press, 2023). Which literary circles have held your attention in recent years? How do these relationships serve your writing?

Clevenger: I actually didn’t edit the Velvet Anthology, so I can’t claim credit there. But yes, I was with the Velvet from the very beginning, when Will Christopher Baer brought Stephen Graham Jones and I together to share a forum for our readers. And then of course, social media pretty much ate everything.

The anthology of diner stories started out as a one-off joke on Twitter, I think from Gabino Iglesias. Sebastian and I started talking and it became real. In truth, I spiraled out last year, for reasons I’ve not been public about (and in spite of coming back into print after so long). So I don’t feel right taking full credit for that… it really goes to Sebastian and Paige at Outcast. I read a lot of submissions and locked down the names that we included, and as a result I have a new and profound respect for editors. Sending out the rejections was honestly gut-wrenching, and I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.

The relationships that serve my writing are more personal than professional, though they’re all writers. While I have the privilege of calling a lot of well-known writers friends, in truth there’s a small handful of writers I’m truly close with—they’re friends of mine, yet I’m still a fan of their work. Sara Gran, for example, along with Will Christopher Baer and Rob Roberge (both dudes I refer to as a “brother from another mother,” as the saying goes).

Aside from the online workshops I’ve run at LitReactor, and the programs I run at the library where I work, I don’t teach in the formal sense. So, I’m not dialed into the network of writers who work in academia. The truth is, I’m terrible at networking.

Rail: With the publication of this book what have been some welcome surprises? Unexpected challenges?

Clevenger: The biggest (and most welcome) surprise was finding a publisher who wanted to release it. There was very little overlap in the reasons for rejection from other publishers. The best way to describe the reception overall was from an agent who passed on it saying, “Everything I like about this book would make it impossible to sell.”

The imprint I’m currently with, Datura, is specifically a crime publisher, though I was quick to call this novel “crime adjacent.” I’m extremely grateful for my agent and editor, who clearly understood this novel doesn’t fit neatly into a category. And not fitting into a category, even an identifiable blend of genres, is a significant obstacle.

Rail: Finally, what is your latest? Which earlier work are you mining? What formal experiments are you toying with? Who are you reading?

Clevenger: An excerpt from my current work-in-progress just appeared in the third issue of Starlite Pulp Review. It’s a love letter to the desert (my home-away-from-home, and eventually my permanent residence) and its protagonist is a younger incarnation (for my loss of a more accurate word) of Maya Cruz, the agent who makes a couple of appearances near the end of Mother Howl.

As for what’s experimental, I can definitely say that it’s likewise “crime adjacent,” though will likely be even more difficult to categorize than my last.

Lately I’ve been re-reading Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows, Rob Roberge’s Drive and The Need by Helen Phillips. That last one was my favorite read of 2020, and I just learned today that her next novel, Hum, is coming in August. I’m counting the days until then.