EDITOR'S NOTE: Michael Arnzen week continues! On Wednesday, we posted an exclusive excerpt from Michael's new novella from Bad Moon Books, The Bitchfight; yesterday, we posted Norman Rubenstein's rave review of the book; and now we present this tantalizing interview conducted by Jeff Strand. Only at Fear Zone do two suck wickedly funny talents get serious about being funny in the business of horror.

For nearly two decades, readers have been exposed to the severely abnormal literary mind of Michael A. Arnzen. Whether he's writing about demented tattoo artists, teenagers with freaky tongues, the most depraved dogfight ever conducted, or the countless other macabre subjects that have squirmed out of his imagination, Arnzen's work manages to simultaneously be "deep" and "twisted beyond belief." The following interview was conducted via e-mail, due to warnings that Arnzen has not had his shots and is prone to biting.

Many have tried to describe the work of Michael A. Arnzen, and clawed their own eyes out from the struggle. How would you describe your own body of work?

Thank goodness most books are made available in Braille or audio format! Hmm...let me think...how about this: "Two scoops of great tasting ocular jelly in every box of Arnzen Brain!" Umm...nah... that's terrible. I can't sum it up easily. If I could, then I probably haven't been doing my job very well.

But you've got me thinking. Mark McLaughlin once described my work in one word -- "sardonic" -- and I really like that, because it reflects my morbidly ironic worldview. Yet to me horror is the genre of the unexpected, so I try to keep myself, as well as my audience, guessing. I want readers to be just a little uncertain about what it is I'm up to, or where it is I'm going, in any given title, and perhaps that goes for my career as well. Any time that horror gets predictable, it fails -- even on the very level of the sentence. The thrill of horror for me is the surprise, and I want to surprise not only my reader, but myself at every turn. So when I compose, I do have a game plan (just as any mystery writer probably knows "whodunit" before they begin to write), but I give myself permission to veer wildly off the map to see what else I might find in the fringes of my imagination, probing the darkness with the machete of language. It can be risky -- even emotionally risky -- to do that, but taking that risk and actually discovering something original is what makes the journey worthwhile.

People do seem to enjoy "going there" with me, and maybe that's what all good horror tries to do: invite a reader to let go of their neurotic grip on the map and to simply go exploring, just like they used to do when they were young and didn't have any maps to begin with. Fiction isn't the ONLY way to do that, however, so I like to play around with other forms. I love all things horror and I think I came into this business as a fan first. It's hard for me to settle on just one modality, because I enjoy them all -- from novels to short stories to poetry...even music. Some people who lean toward only one sort of creative format (like only reading paperback novels or only reading vampire fiction) don't quite understand how to place me. I'm cool with that. I'd rather be unique than predictable. I think it's fair to say, tough, that the people who like one thing I've created, tend to like everything else Arnzenian.

Your first novel, GRAVE MARKINGS, was published in 1994. Your second, PLAY DEAD, was published a decade later. Though you're an extremely prolific writer and have had a constant flow of new releases available for your fans, you've gone against the standard career-building wisdom that says a writer should focus on novels. Is there any behind the scenes dirt you can share, or was this purely a creative decision?

I've always thought of myself as a writer, more than a novelist, and even though I juggle different media and forms I'm continually trying to entertain my audience in the same old Arnzenian ways. Do readers care if Clive Barker decides to do a painting instead of write a book? Or if he hops into YA for a little while before returning to sit down over the lengthy expanse of a novel to tell a good ghost story? I like to think that I'm more in his "do-what-the-hell-I-want-like-Clive-Barker" camp, than the "crank-out-a-book-a-year-like-Dean-Koontz" camp. While I do feel that artists like Barker have a little more integrity when they aren't just doing it for the paycheck, I think it's clear that Koontz isn't just doing it for cash either. It's really all about artistic work habits, and we all have different ones. When writing feels like work, it's dead to me. I have to play. I chose to be a writer because I refuse to have a life driven by economic need alone. Writing is a career that I enjoy too damned much to murder with some factory line notion of work...

Of course, even though I teach writers at a college, I don't hold my own career path as an ideal for others to follow. It is certainly true that writers can make a name brand out of themselves by having a big "marquee" splash on the bookshelves or by getting a big advance that gets agents talking, there's just as many -- if not more -- lucrative career options available than trying to repeat the patterns already cut by others...indeed, following the worn path can lead to failure and frustration. I thrive on independence, I think -- I'm contrarian by nature, and if someone tells me I "have" to do one thing, I'll either do the exact opposite or I'll do it so extreme that they'll regret telling me what to do in the first place. My career path turned me into teaching and graduate school and I found I had just as much fun studying horror and literary theory as I did writing it creatively, and I wound up lucky enough to find the ideal job for a person like me -- teaching horror novel writing while also being rewarded by the college where I teach for publishing horror, no matter what the format. Somehow, being iconoclastic, my career found me rather than the other way around. I doubt I'd be happier any other way. Same goes with my flash fiction book, 100 Jolts. Only a madman would write short-short stories -- even if they pay pro rates, you can't make a living off of them! But I wrote a hundred of them (and many more, of course), always with the faith that I'd find a use for them some day, if only in a book collection. What was worth very little in the conventional market became priceless and lucrative in the many different ways I was able to use those stories, since they're so portable into different venues (online serials, print serials, collections, audio CD, film, etc.).

I have to say, too, that my career is not really "teachable" or "repeatable" because there are just too many random variables involved, and I took -- and continue to take -- risks. But to any nubile writer reading this, I would say there is value in "wagging the long tail": if you keep doing something long enough, the long term benefits will accrue and shake out down the road in ways that you might not see right away. There is no such thing as wasted writing -- anything can be sold later on, or reworked and turned into something salable later on -- and even failed experiments and rookie efforts always teach us something, moving us forward in some small way. The best advice I can have for new writers, then, is to just have faith, and keep cranking it out...even if it isn't a novel all the time. The novels will come. The stories will tell you how long they have to be.


There's a tremendous amount of creativity in your work. Even your flash fiction, where one cool idea per story would be perfectly fine, is constantly inventive within the individual stories. Hell, you even give away great story ideas in your newsletter, with your Twisted Prompts For Sicko Writers. Where does all this come from? (And, yes, I'm aware that I've basically just copped out and asked the traditional "Where do you get your ideas?" question. But I wanna know!)

Of course, drinking gallons upon gallons of coffee every day helps.

But there's no big secret, really. The world is filled with ideas -- our brains are producing them all the time -- but if you don't have a butterfly net at the ready, you'll never catch them. So I just open my eyes. No, I eat with my eyes, as John Shirley once wrote. I really pay attention to things that we all habitually overlook. I take a lot of notes, whether about things I actually see or about ideas that occur to me. And they occur to me often because I'm always pinging the world, seeking the strange. You know that stereotype of the goofy director, constantly framing the world between his fingers with an imaginary camera? That's how I do it. Only my camera is a horror lens and I don't actually use my fingers at all. I'm always on the lookout for things that people take for granted, that people assume about reality and everyday life, things that we see on TV or the news, things that are "normalized" and "habitual" -- and then I try to call attention to the horrors that lurk behind them, or to mess around with them in some disturbing unnatural way. And I just have a lot of fun. Sometimes, though, admittedly, ideas just pop into my head and I write them out and they're magically done and I can't really explain it, other than to suggest that writing is like dreaming.

As for the inventive ideas in the stories themselves, often a lot of it comes out of revision more than planning. The novelette I've got coming out from Bad Moon Books for example, called The Bitchfight. After I first sold it to Roy Robbins, the editor there, he loved the story but asked me if I could double it in size. I don't want to give away too much of that story, but a lot of the wild and cool stuff about the "Furioso Brothers" and the weirdness you get in the second half of that story came out of trying to take something I thought I'd finished, and adding a whole new layer to it. Then I revised accordingly. Truth be told, that's my process for a lot of things: get a weird idea out of my system in one big dump of writing... then revise it later, adding another layer, asking myself, "What ELSE can I do? How much FARTHER can I push this notion?" etc.

Who would win in a fight: Mark Michael Kilpatrick or the Schmear?

You might think that The Incredible Schmear -- that polymorphously perverse puddle of liquid flesh from the underground freakshow in Licker -- might be impossible to best in battle. But Kilpatrick (the psycho biker -- aka "tattoo killer" -- from Grave Markings) would probably figure out that he could load up his hand-made tattoo gun with the Schmear like he was living tattoo ink, injecting him drop by drop into the flesh of any given "canvas" (i.e., dead body) he might be hiding in his apartment. Then it would be easy for him to prop up said body like a rag doll and proceed to quite literally beat the living snot out of the Schmear, who would helplessly be trapped behind the pores of the canvas, without even a mouth to scream. If Kilpatrick was able, that is, to set aside his ego for long enough to actually beat up his own artwork. If he wasn't, Schmear would probably bring that body to life and kick the Mark Michael out of Kilpatrick.


You have three Bram Stoker Awards. Where do you keep them? Do you stroke them lovingly and whisper sweet nothings to them in a way that makes your wife mildly uncomfortable?

I do. And the bed is getting a little crowded, I must say.

Nah...I'd like to report that I use them as freaky hotels in Monopoly games or that I'm building an ornate haunted railroad around them or that I use these big plaster things as paperweights on the contracts that I sign with the devil...but the truth is they just sit on a shelf, taking up space, sometimes inspiring me, sometimes humbling me when I need it...but usually just sitting there waiting for me to use them as really cool murder weapons some day. Hah!

And now for the best part of any interview! Promote away! What new projects do you have that FearZone readers should immediately rush out and purchase?

If folks haven't dropped by The Horror Mall online yet, they should. Horror Mall just set up an Arnzen author category [https://www.horror-mall.com/Michael-Arnzen-p-1-c-359.html] that features all my latest -- from The Bitchfight (about an underground dog fighting ring that uses children), to my short story omnibus, Proverbs for Monsters (a retrospective "best of Arnzen" book that is getting a lot of attention from the awards and reviewers lately)....and Horror Mall now even has a page where you can download my CD, Audiovile. Audiovile is a companion "audiobook" to the just-released expanded hardcover edition of my collection, 100 Jolts, which features 100 flash fiction stories. Audiovile is different than any audiobook, though -- it is a wild performance of some of those stories, adapted to musical structure (and FearZone raved about it in a review a few months ago), and it surprises everyone who listens to it. If you want the real hard plastic CD, and all the cool liner notes and photos, you need to get it at cdbaby.com or from the publisher of 100 Jolts, Raw Dog Screaming Press [http://www.rawdogscreaming.com].

I'm going to be appearing in all sorts of anthologies and things here and there in the year ahead, but that's too much to cover now. Instead, I invite readers to sign up to The Goreletter -- my quarterly newsletter of funky thinkpieces, reviews, and humor. It won a Stoker award for the quirky things I put in there; it isn't just a buncha "buy me" propaganda, but it is still the best way to find out about all the latest Arnzen experiments as they come out.