Read an excerpt from Paul G. Tremblay's novel The Little Sleep here.

If you've been keeping an eye on the literary horror field, you've no doubt seen the name Paul Tremblay before. He was twice nominated -- in the same year, 2007 -- for the Bram Stoker Award, and since 2000 has sold over fifty short stories to venues such as Razor Magazine, ChiZine, Weird Tales, Interzone, Clarkesworld Magazine, Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three , and Horror: The Year's Best 2007. In 2005, Prime Books released Tremblay's first collection, Compositions for the Young and Old, featuring an introduction by award-winning author Stewart O'Nan and original photography by M. Lily Beacon, to nearly unanimous acclaim by critics and readers alike. In 2007, Prime collected Tremblay's horror-noir City Pier stories into a single volume called City Pier: Above and Below. This March, Henry Holt published his first novel, The Little Sleep. Paul Tremblay was kind enough to take a moment out of his busy schedule as a high school AP math teacher to answer a few questions for Fear Zone.


Is it difficult as a math teacher and writer to reconcile the world of numbers, where everything black-and-white with fixed meaning and value, with the world of words, which is much more fluid and reliant on imagination?


In terms of approach, math and writing aren't all that different for me. My approach to writing is analytical in a sense. I'm not able to sit and just write reams of unstructured stuff, and then put it all together later. I write and revise as I go, reworking a chapter or scene and not leaving it until I'm somewhat happy. And, not for nothing, I've been surprised to meet quite a few folks with a math/engineering background who have become writers. Stewart O'Nan for one.

I like to think that math (especially calculus) does require a sense of imagination. At least it does when I teach it!


What brought you into the world of writing, and genre writing in particular?


I grew up watching CREATURE DOUBLE FEATURE on local Boston UHF TV, and always liked horror movies, although they generally terrified me to the point of where I couldn't go into my childhood home's basement by myself and would force my baby brother to come with me... muhahahaha! The movies are ridiculous to watch now, but flicks like THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE and ATTACK OF THE KILLER SHREWS, man, those movies gave me months worth of nightmares.

I didn't start writing until I was in my mid-20s, and post-graduate school. I wasn't even much of a reader until grad school, when I lived in Burlington, VT, with no car, my wife (then girlfriend) hundreds of miles away, and I didn't have much to do, didn't know many people there. So I read. I read all the King, Straub, Barker I could, along with Joyce Carol Oates's horror fiction. I found I enjoyed horror fiction more than the movies. To me, the best horror fiction told their stories better and the characters were more fleshed out.

Initially, I very much identified as a horror fiction fan, almost exclusively reading within the genre. After grad school and during my first year teaching, my aunt gave me a true-crime book on serial killers (isn't that a nice gift?) and I had a really terrible story idea about Death having a conversation with a serial killer. I have no idea why, but I had a real itch to try and write it. After a few set backs (including losing more than half the original manuscript to a Brother word processer meltdown) I did write the story. Man, it was bad. But I got better!


Your collection Compositions for the Young and Old demonstrates how your writing spans a number of genres: horror, fantasy, science fiction. And now you've added detective fiction to the list with The Little Sleep. It's unusual to straddle quite so many genres. Where does this eclecticism come from? Are these all genres you enjoy reading as well?


I figured out early on that the secret to becoming a better writer is to become a better reader, which meant reading as widely and as much as I could. Reading other genres introduced new ideas and viewpoints, which helped refine what I liked best about horror; or helped refine what I thought was successful horror. To me, as a reader, the most exciting fiction is the work that isn't easily classified, that bends and mixes the genres. You know, fresh concepts, old ideas tweaked and made new again, cats and dogs living together kind of fiction, doesn't matter the genre. That's what I want to read. And simply put, I try to satisfy the reader-me with my own work. He's a picky bastard, though. Oh no, I've referred to myself in the third person, haven't I? *slaps hand to forehead*


You're quite an accomplished editor too. I even reviewed your anthology Bandersnatch right here at Fear Zone! Your latest, co-edited with Sean Wallace of Prime Books, is a horror anthology called Phantom, which is due out soon. Can you tell our readers a little about it? It's not filled with the usual authors one might sees in the average horror anthology.


Phantom is a literary horror anthology. What the heck does that mean? I think it means we collected fourteen horror stories that go beyond the simple or safe scare and ask the most difficult questions of its characters (and of the reader): What next? What decisions are you going to make? Do you know the consequences? How does anyone live through this?

I'm very proud of the book and think it's by far the best anthology that Sean and I have put together. I think people are really going to dig it. Should be out at the beginning of the summer. The very talented authors of Phantom: Steve Rasnic Tem, Steve Eller, Becca De La Rosa, Stephen Graham Jones, Karen Heuler, Seth Lindberg, Vylar Kaftan, Steve Berman, Lavie Tidhar, Nick Mamatas, Michael Cisco, Geoffrey H. Goodwin, Carrie Laben, and F. Brett Cox.



Before The Little Sleep, the City Pier cycle of interconnected stories was your magnum opus. Where did the idea of a city built atop a massive pier come from, and what made you keep returning to it?


It's odd that I do remember exactly where I was when I had the City Pier image. Summer of 2001, I was floating on an inner-tube on a quiet lake, way somewhere up in oh-my-god-we're-lost, Maine. You just never know...

The first story was initially called "City Pier" (later reworked and titled "Meat's Story") and was a hard-boiled/noir/SF mash-up about gun runners, and fathers and sons. I went back for three more stories because I found the juxtaposition of a technologically advanced City held above a bay by wooden posts and beams made from giant sequoia trees compelling. While the City Pier stories are heavily influenced by Jeffrey Thomas's Punktown and Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris work, the place is all mine! I hope to go back soon. I do have a novel length work set in and around and below the City that I hope to publish in the near future.


In some ways your new novel The Little Sleep reminds me of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, in that both take place in the authors' hometowns (yours being the Boston area) and both feature PIs with serious mental quirks. Is Lethem a big influence on your work, or am I reading too much into it?


Jonathan Lethem is on my short list of influences for my novel (along with Raymond Chandler and Will Christopher Baer). And while the similarities between our two books you noted are accurate, I think we approach the subject matter in much different ways, particularly with the settings. In Motherless Brooklyn, Lionel Essrog, despite being a misfit among his group of misfits, is very much of Brooklyn. Brooklyn shaped Lionel as much as his Tourette's. In The Little Sleep , Mark Genevich is not Irish-Catholic and while his Lithuanian parents were born and raised in South Boston, Mark grew up on the Cape. South Boston is an uneasy place for Mark. He's a recluse living in the midst of a close-knit community. For me, putting the narcoleptic detective in Southie, for whom reality is constant question mark, afforded me another opportunity to riff on the expectations of the PI novel and further add to Mark's unsure footing. .



Why narcolepsy? It's an interesting choice. Is it something you or someone you know suffers from?



A few years back, I had this image of a woman coming into a PI's office and showing off her hand: she'd had her fingers stolen and replaced with someone else's digits. Initially, I planned on writing a strange, anything-goes, near-future science fiction/horror/noir mix. I wrote the first chapter, but didn't get anywhere with it. I put it away for almost a year until I stumbled upon narcolepsy while doing online research into something completely unrelated. When I read about the horrible affliction that is narcolepsy, that put-away first chapter suddenly made sense to me.

I have no personal experience with narcolepsy, but during the mid-to-late 90s I actually suffered from a sleep disorder: sleep apnea. There was a solid two-to-three year stretch when I never really got a good night's sleep because I would stop breathing, and then would wake up, gasping for breath. Not fun. My daytime symptoms weren't nearly as disruptive or incapacitating as what Mark Genevich experiences, but I do remember the crushing fatigue, and the frightening occasions when I briefly nodded out while driving. Thankfully, I never injured myself or others, but my condition was serious enough that in January of 1998 I had surgery: uvuloplasty, which is the removal of the tonsils and uvula--that's right, I don't have that punching bag in the back of my throat anymore--and I also had my deviated septum fixed as well. While I don't recommend having the surgery a month before getting married, like I did, the surgery was a success.



The plot of The Little Sleep seems pretty surreal for a P.I. novel, which I suppose really shouldn't come as a surprise from an author like yourself whose oeuvre is filled with dark, surreal fiction.


The first chapter (described above) is a hypnogogic hallucination. Mark knows that a woman didn't ask him to find her fingers. But he does have to figure out what it is she wants him to find, before he can, you know, solve the case. Mark (and the reader) has to figure out what's real and what isn't along the way, too. Reality/memory/identity are all very much called into question in TLS.



Most P.I. novels become part of a series. Can readers look forward to further adventures with Mark Genevich? Is that what's coming next for Paul Tremblay?


My second novel featuring Mark Genevich, called No Sleep Till Wonderland, is going to be published February 2010. I just turned it in last week. I'm not going to say much about that as you haven't even read TLS yet! Novel-wise, after that, who knows...

There's the Phantom anthology we already talked about, of course. Due out any day now, there's my horror novella The Harlequin and the Train (from Jeffrey Thomas's Necropolitan Press), which is probably my most recognizably horrific work to date (meaning it's violent and icky!), but also manages to demand that the reader use a yellow highlighter. It makes sense, I promise. My short story "The Two-Headed Girl" was just picked up for Best American Fantasy 3 as well.


Before I let you go, I wanted to mention that you're also one of the founders and current jurors of the Shirley Jackson Awards. Can you tell us a bit about it? How has the experience been, and how did you manage to get Shirley Jackson's estate on board?


The Shirley Jackson Awards were established to recognize outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. Our year-and-a-half run thus far has been incredibly rewarding. The support we've received from the estate, readers, writers, and publishers has been, well, wonderful, really.

We approached the estate with the idea that the award would not only recognize current excellence, but also bring honor to the work of Shirley Jackson. Clearly, the admiration so many people continue to feel for Shirley Jackson's brilliant work is the main reason for the awards' early successes.


Thanks for taking some time out of your busy schedule to talk to Fear Zone, Paul.


Thank you so much, Nick. And thank you, Fear Zone. You're my favorite Zone. Well, okay, maybe I like the Twilight Zone better, but you're number two, all right? Come on, it's okay to be number two!

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Paul Tremblay's Website