Conversations: Steve Hugh Westenra and Daniel Maidman

Steve Hugh Westenra is a trans author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (basically, if it’s weird he writes it). He grew up on the eldritch shores of Newfoundland, Canada, and currently lives and works in (the slightly less eldritch) Montreal. He holds advanced degrees in Russian Literature, Medieval Studies, and Religious Studies. His current academic work focuses on marginalized reclamations of monstrous figures. He teaches the History of Satan and Religion and its Monsters. 

Westenra is the author of The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle and The Wings of Ashtaroth. The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle is a queer horror comedy that follows a washed-up actor turned cryptid-hunting YouTube darling as he traces a (probably) fake video of his presumed-dead mother to an isolated island that was once a gay conversion camp and which may house the monsters he swears aren’t real.

Daniel Maidman is an author and artist living and working in New York, although he too is from Canada. His art is included in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress and a number of American art museums, as well as the private collections of China Miéville, Brooke Shields, and Tom Segura. His drawings, paintings, and writing are archived on the Moon through the Lunar Codex project. His non-fiction has been published in The Huffington Post, Whitehot Magazine, International Artist, and many others. 

Maidman’s debut novel, The Exile of Zanzibar, was a semifinalist in Mark Lawrence’s independent fantasy novel competition SPFBO in 2023. The Exile of Zanzibar is the epic story of a bronze-age civilization upended by the arrival of a woman from their own far future. The novel is an intimate portrait of Claire, the exile desperate to return home, set against a sweeping portrait of a society struggling to emerge from the shadow of war.

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Daniel Maidman: Steve, what was the key theme you wanted to explore in The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle (TETK)?

Steve Hugh Westenra: Theme is always challenging, because I think that so much of what ends up being thematically central, or even simply significant, comes out through the writing process itself.

That said, when I was first articulating the broad strokes and beating heart of this version of TETK to my partner, a major theme I cited as one I wanted to explore was that of yearning and particularly how yearning when taken to an extreme can transform into obsession (we can’t yearn, notably, for something that we possess—or, if we can, it’s only because we believe we lack something that we possess unknowingly).

There’s this specifically queer experience of having these very close homosocial friendships that straddle the line between romantic and platonic, and this was something that came out through both my brainstorming and as I wrote the first few chapters of the novel. Tyler is someone who’s deeply in love with this best friend of his, Josh, and who is wrestling with the ambiguity of what is the most rich and significant relationship he’s had with another person up to now. Other characters in the novel, especially the antagonist (I’m not sure if I should name them here!), also wrestle with yearning, though the focus of that desire or sense of loss/absence may be different. 

In a major way, the antagonist parallels Tyler with respect to this feeling of being unmoored and longing for the one thing they feel (rightly or wrongly) has the power to tether them. In the case of my antagonist, this is taken to an obsessive and violent extreme and is founded in a kind of parasocial self-delusion, but even with Tyler, part of what keeps him in this constant state of anxiety (a feeling he’s not intrinsically susceptible to) is his fear that perhaps he’s obsessive, perhaps he’s delusional.

This sense that maybe things aren’t quite what they seem, along with the recognition that all subjective interpretations of events are automatically going to be distortions on some level, is something that I also tug on to create a general atmosphere of unease—probably what some reviewers have described as the “fever dream-like” quality of the book.

In a major way, this uncanny quality (to invoke one of the major driving forces in horror) is an element I found essential to my experience of your own work in The Exile of Zanzibar (TEOZ). This probably won’t surprise, since an uncanny numinousness is common in both fantasy and horror. In particular, I felt this coming through in the passages related to both religious ritual and metaphysical space. Assuming you agree with this characterization of your work, would you say this was something you consciously drew on, or is it something that entered subconsciously?

DM: That’s a really interesting question. I hadn’t drawn that particular conceptual outline around that material before. Considering it in light of what you’ve said, I think you’re onto something, but I would phrase it a little differently. Let’s grant that the uncanny is indeed related to Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed. If so, part of the experience of uncanniness would be an abrupt recognition of conflict between one’s assumptions about reality, and reality itself—and then, rapidly, a collapse of one’s assumptions in the face of this revealed reality. 

Further, the quality of the suddenly re-asserted reality would be in some sense horrific or disturbing (otherwise why would it have been suppressed?). There would be an abrupt recognition of something one ought not to recognize. Critically, the experience of this recognition destabilizes, to some degree, one’s concept of oneself, because this concept would have been built on the basis of a false model of reality created specifically to suppress intolerable facts pertaining to oneself. The uncannily-recognized object murders the self and takes its place.

This is altogether a terrifying experience, and I think that you capture uncanniness in that sense in TETK, especially for Tyler, whose self-concept has been destabilized just before the beginning of the book by the exposure of his partly suppressed attraction to his best friend, and the consequent collapse of their relationship and their shared employment as co-Youtubers. Tyler’s self-concept is then progressively shattered as hidden aspects of his personal history, his family history, and his inherent nature come to light throughout the narrative.

An important thing to note, in this argument that I’m building, is that the uncanny is a species of subjective experience. It is perhaps the most radically subjective experience, undermining both reality—the objective—and self—the subjective.

All this by way of explaining how I would classify TEOZ in relation to these issues. I was not specifically aiming for the uncanny except, as you note, in some of the religious material: the heroine Claire experiences her meeting with the high priest Reburrus as a chilling recognition, and when she stumbles upon the followers of the low religion, they act as if they already know her, and have already set a place for her among them.

I don’t think the sequence set in the metaphysical space is uncanny, but it’s related to it. What I mean is, the idea of the uncanny that I outlined above can be broken down into a number of components. So if you strip away everything but the revelation of conflict between one’s idea of reality and a sudden, stark encounter with reality itself, you have a larger category of which the uncanny is one species. I was pursuing a different species of that same encounter—one of us, in an earlier conversation, called it the numinous. 

I think that’s a good way to think of it; the numinous would be the most metaphysical form of that sense of wonder which many fantasy readers turn to fantasy to experience.

Both the numinous and the uncanny are types of experience, and share that radically subjective quality. The numinous, as Claire experiences it, does indeed carry a potential of annihilating the self. Certainly an earlier form of the self has to go. The overwhelming experience of reality breaks open the older self and forces it to transform and expand to accommodate this deeper insight into the nature of things. 

In contrast with the uncanny experience, the numinous experience need not be, and for Claire definitely isn’t, a negative and menacing passage. I’m having trouble phrasing this, because she does experience capital-T Terror. But she embraces the transformation. She wants to know more, she wants to have this deeper interface with reality, and in accepting her self-destruction she’s reborn into a more mature and profound subjectivity.

So I guess that’s how I would relate the treatment of the theme as it occurs in both books? They’re not the same, but they’re parallel phenomena, specific forms of a more general category.

I have a couple of questions. First of all, the antagonist in TETK, whom I think we could call Stalker here without giving away the plot—how would you relate them to this sense of the self in confrontation with the intolerable truth? Does Stalker experience the uncanny, or some related phenomenon?

And second, I would say that the theme of yearning does come through clearly in TETK. It’s very moving. The book reads beautifully as a romance. Like any good romance, there are both social obstacles (queer anxiety) and practical obstacles (literal fucking monsters) keeping the lovers apart, and the plot involves overcoming the obstacles. Because it’s a romance, one must feel the emotions attendant on this separation—the yearning, and I think you succeed beautifully with it.

It’s interesting that you identify yearning as the core of your book, because in many ways it’s the core of mine as well. There were several elements which I stitched together to arrive at the yearning I was interested in depicting in TEOZ. 

First of all, there’s its emergence from The Odyssey. TEOZ is a book about the adventures somebody has while trying to get home. Second, there’s something I once read or heard about The Odyssey—that no exile will ever return home; the one who left is not the same as the one who returns. Claire’s awareness of this, her sense of the loss of herself and what she would have become, when she lost her home, was central to my understanding of her. And finally, there is the question of longing for a homeland itself. In grappling with this, I thought specifically in terms of the German romantic concept of heimat—as I understand it, an intense emotional attachment to the land on which one’s ancestors lived, which becomes an unbearable longing in the heart of the exile.

I have to say “as I understand it” here because I do not have an experience of heimat. As a Jew, I do not really come from anywhere. My family has lived in three or four different countries over the course of the last century. We cannot be traced back more than a couple of hundred years. I have spent plenty of time in Israel but I do not experience a mystical connection to it rooted in any personal heritage there. 

Everywhere I have gone in the world, I have rapidly become comfortable and have loved the people I found. But I am at home nowhere. I do not yearn for my lost home, but I yearn to yearn for it. So that’s where I inject my personal fantasy into TEOZ—I find my condition intolerable, and seek to escape it through Claire’s grief for Zanzibar.

OK, that wasn’t really a question. I just got to riffing. There is definitely a lot more uncanniness planned for volume II of TEOZ, and there’s a very specific narrative reason for it. You want to just kind of bounce off what I’m saying here, or do you need me to ask you something? You seem to have a lot of interesting ideas, and TETK is a very thoughtful book—it’s a serious and beautifully observed story hiding inside of a genre page-turner. I love that about it. I actually have some things to ask about that, but I don’t want to cut short your natural response to what I’m describing here.

SHW: I wonder, in Claire’s case (and I think you know the specific “metaphysical space” I’m referring to), if what sets her apart in many ways is her unique reaction to the numinous. That element of fear that you push back against with regard to Claire is baked into Rudolph Otto’s conception of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In fact, the numinous can’t operate without the ambiguity of fear and fascination—true awe in the sense not only of joy-inflected inspiration, but utter and profound terror that’s felt at an existential and embodied level. 

For me, reflecting on this more, it’s essential to how Claire, as a godlike figure herself, is constructed (or reconstituted). Perhaps she is able to traverse [metaphysical space] while others fail not only to survive it, but to enter it in the first place, precisely because the same barriers to accessing the mystical side of experience are always already open to her to some degree. She experiences that capital “T” Terror, as you say, but it’s almost of a muted quality because she herself possesses that same quality for others (and I think Reburrus is one side of the coin in terms of how the supporting cast experiences Claire’s presence). 

Marcus, Ambrosius, and Pindar, for example, experience Claire’s numinous and awe-inspiring aspect and are rendered speechless and to some extent immobile by her presence. Claire is able, through this, to cause both Ambrosius and Pindar to lay down their weapons and end the conflict between their cities. In contrast, Reburrus feels something more akin to revulsion (or perhaps the frisson of the uncanny, the unheimlich that you suggest Claire experiences when it comes to him). 

As holy figures, both characters occupy this space that’s very proximate to the holy in Otto’s conception of it, though Claire is more personally implicated as holy in an almost innate way. Her own fear seems much more located in her concern over how attached she’s becoming to what she initially experiences as a kind of “primitive” (to use a loaded term) world.

Now, as the reader, I am of course frightened for Claire and what that means (is she doomed—or seen another way, blessed—to become trapped among the Florentines and Genovans?). But her relative lack of fear is a remarkable quality that consistently emphasizes her Otherness in relation to the other characters she interacts with. 

This ties in, I think, with your characterization of Claire as exile. Perhaps the site of the uncanny, for her, is not experienced through her numinous encounter with the metaphysical, but rather with the mundane—she expresses numerous times a dis-ease with her comfort in this new realm she’s surrounded by. The tension for her character is generated in part, I can’t help but feel, by this longing to return to her futuristic present, even as she is compelled to imbricate herself with the mythical past that was her subject of study. That Claire seems to herald from a world not only in the future of the novel’s other characters, but in our future (or a future of an alternate version of our reality) only intensifies the sense of her as set apart.

During a previous conversation I had asked if Claire was inspired in part by the Divine Sophia, and I still feel she does occupy some of that role for those around her. What humanizes her beyond this idea of Claire as something superhuman and at least quasi-divine is, as you bring up, the exilic narrative. I find that quotation you bring up with regard to The Odyssey incredibly moving and fully agree. The exile doesn’t ever come home.

For me, speaking personally, I can relate to both heimat and to the feelings you describe of not being from anywhere, and those are two experiences that somehow always make their way into my work. 

I’m always at least a little hesitant to bring up my immigrant background because I’m a white English-speaker whose family emigrated to an English-speaking country, but my childhood was very much marked by a sense of being out-of-place in the community where I grew up. Even though my family are from England originally, and there are many cultural touchstones between England and Newfoundland, my sister and I were the only non-native Newfoundlanders in our school and this was something that was always treated as exotic (and at times worrying) by other children and community members. 

As someone who didn’t fit in (for a number of reasons not exclusive to being an immigrant), I always carried a hyper awareness of those things that set me apart: accent, cultural background, and later transness and neurodivergence. As an adult, informed as I was by my childhood in Newfoundland, I don’t fit in in an English context, but if I go “home” to Newfoundland, I’m still not considered properly “from” there by other Newfoundlanders. 

I’m probably drawn, both as an audience member and a writer, to stories of liminality and social precarity precisely because that sense of in-betweenness is my at-home-ness (in as much as that’s possible). Your experiences come with an extended cultural and ethnographic history that I can’t speak to as a gentile, and I hope I’m not overstepping by responding in the way that I have, but there is, I think, commonality there that I think maybe we’re both reacting to.

Maybe that’s why concepts like the numinous and the uncanny call to me in a profound way—they speak to something that’s there already (and as you say, that’s essentially the foundation of the uncanny in a nutshell).

To bring this around and answer your questions (“First of all, the antagonist in TETK, whom I think we could call Stalker here without giving away the plot—how would you relate them to this sense of the self in confrontation with the intolerable truth? Does Stalker experience the uncanny, or some related phenomenon?”):

Stalker absolutely experiences both of the phenomena you describe. For them, the intolerable truth is the recognition of themself and what they are (which is quite similar to the anxieties Tyler faces throughout the novel and which run parallel with Stalker’s). One of the tensions that exists within Stalker, I would argue, is the push-pull between what are essentially three facets of their character. 

In a superficial sense, there’s the aesthetic Self they’ve constructed (in part for Tyler’s benefit) who occupies the fantasy realm they’ve idealized as this kind of bubblegum pop world that’s denuded of problematic sexual feeling. In the aesthetic register there’s also the illicit necrophilic desire they express in their journals and ultimately attempt to realize through Tyler—a kind of merging of their bodies through a psychosexual cannibalism (and all cannibalism ultimately has psychosexual components when talking symbolically). The intolerable Self, however, is actually neither of these. Stalker lives happily in a state of tension when it comes to these warring aesthetics of desire, but where they experience discomfort is through a subliminal suspicion of their worthlessness. 

Shame, here, is linked not with the specific desires the audience might expect to be shameful, but with the fear of one’s own irrelevance, forgettability, and, to draw on one of the novel’s central motifs, silence. The uncanny as the return of the repressed is something they therefore experience, I think (and please argue if you disagree!) through Tyler, because at a basic level they’re both troubled by similar fears that manifest in one way or another through the yearning I described. Stalker is, on the surface, obsessed with Tyler’s co-host (Josh), rather than Tyler himself, and yet what began as a fixation on Josh that’s born from a kind of naive lust has, by the end of the novel, revealed itself to be centred on Tyler as an object of ruinous desire that must be destroyed and consumed for Stalker to escape both the island and themself. 

I think if Stalker actually “got” Josh and attained what they thought they wanted, they’d ultimately become dissatisfied and bored (and in fact, their conflict with Josh is quite brief compared with the sustained love/hate relationship they experience with Tyler). What Stalker misses, I think, in that equation, is that even were they successful, consumption means the thing is never truly destroyed, but is instead absorbed. Or rather, Stalker can’t choose which aspects of Tyler they absorb and which they excrete (if they usurp his status, his fame, his talent, then they also take on his fears—the same fears they already experience and are attempting to shed). 

The fear that there is something common between Stalker and Tyler haunts both characters (as well, I would argue, a third character).

DM: OK, first let me respond to the ideas you raise. I’m learning a lot about my own book from discussing it with you, and it’s helping to clarify certain categorical distinctions I’ve been struggling with in the future volumes. 

Your attribution of Claire’s lack of real terror in her encounter with one face of the Absolute, to her partially divine status, rings very true to me. I hadn’t thought about it specifically that way, but I had wrestled extensively with the depiction of a god-person. Do you remember that joke about the ugly tower in the communist bloc city? A local says, “My favorite place in the city is the top of that tower.” “Why?” “It’s the only place you can’t see the tower.” 

I have long entertained a scene in some future volume where Claire is sitting with a group of friends, and one of them is calling her out on her apparent atheism, and she says, look, I’ve been able to pop my head above the clouds into the realm of final things, and I turned and turned, and I saw nobody there. And all of her friends are sneaking glances at each other and trying not to laugh…

I’m not sure if that contributes anything, but I really like your suggestion that for somebody in Claire’s position, it is the reach downward to humanity which triggers feelings of the uncanny or the self-breaking revelation. And yes, you’re right about my intention, she is not just from their future, but from ours. To be honest, the whole “from the future” element got more played up in describing the book than I meant for it to be—conceptualizing it as time travel made for an easier pitch. The actual link between Florence and Genova, on the one hand, and Zanzibar on the other, is much more complex and only really becomes clear in the projected final volume of the cycle.

For further vague spoilers—Claire does come upon metaphysical territory that terrifies her, in the second volume. The second volume, as I mentioned, has much more of the uncanny. This is driven by her encounter with the twin of the metaphysical space that she entered in the first volume. But whereas the first version of the space was turned inward, so that it was unlimited but finite, the second version of the space is turned outward, and is unlimited and infinite. This produces a terrifying vertigo in the face of the vastness, and sets off eddies of paradox which yield a number of classically uncanny effects. Alongside all of the drama and adventure of what is supposed to function, first and foremost, as a series of genre novels, Claire’s unfolding relationship with these spaces forms a narrative arc which continues to evolve right up to the end.

As for your experience as an immigrant, I’m sorry you hesitated to raise the topic—of course it’s apropos, and I believe that the emotions and experience of no person are less substantial or valid than those of another. In this light, I can very much see you drawing on your history in constructing TETK. Tyler, abandoned by his mother, goes hunting for her on the island for which she apparently abandoned him. He reaches the island, and he finds her people, but he is persistently alienated, from the location and, even more, from the people. For the sake of the plot, there are allies and enemies among the people, but I would describe his alienation as occurring in relation to all of them together, taken as the-people-in-this-place. And you do very interesting things with their own relation to the place as the story progresses. All of that seems now, clearly, to be animated by your own sense of not belonging.

Regarding Stalker’s outlook, the fear of forgettability which you describe gives the character as written such a pathetic quality. I couldn’t even put my finger on it while I was reading, but the quality was vividly present, and made it impossible to dismiss the character despite their horrendous behavior and Thomas Harris-grade violent fantasies. I love your use of silence in the book, and its juxtaposition with song, and your mining of these motifs for the thematic resonances you’re discussing.

As regards cannibalism and absorption, you come here to a topic you raised in another conversation we were having—the importance of the abject in horror as a genre; and, I would argue, in fantasy, if the author knows what they’re doing. To get side-tracked for a second, consider Sméagol hooking that worm at the beginning of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Return of the King. Three movies of epic events, but that tiny scene is one of the most memorable moments. And I think the abject quality of the worm penetrated by the hook very intentionally serves as a symbol of Sméagol himself, captured by the ring and transformed into Gollum, a repulsively abject character who seems slick and skinless throughout.

Be that as it may, the elements of cannibalism and of butchery in TETK are among the many instances of the abject with which you tell your story. The sexual encounters, described in unflinchingly explicit and often anti-romantic detail, form another axis of the abject. And to some extent the monsters themselves are abject: although they are classified as belonging to a certain familiar category of monster, they are almost comically described as physically resembling this monster in no way at all. Rather, they have an upsetting combination of mass and spindliness. There is, again, a pathetic quality to them—despite their great size and strength, one worries constantly that they’ll break.

I have a rule for myself in storytelling: if I find myself bringing something up more than once, then it has to have its own arc. It must tell a story. And I think you do that with the abject motifs in TETK. They form one channel of Tyler’s story. He has a series of sexual encounters marked by a steady decline in consensuality, even as their traumatic qualities escalate from shame, to illness, to near-death. Similarly, he encounters a series of injuries which escalate from scrapes and bruises to increasingly radical violations of the boundaries of his body. His ability to remain physically separate from his environment decays, with devastating consequences for his sense of self. And there is a similar arc in his interactions with the monsters, which I will not get into because that really would spoil too much.

I think that “body horror” is a category by which horror aficionados describe a set of tropes which draw their power from their invocation of the abject. To what extent did you set out to write a book which used body horror, and the abject, to tell its story? How did they inform your writing, and what are your thoughts about them?

SHW: This question excites me so much, because it’s clear through your framing that so much of what was important to me at a thematic and textural level came through for you. You honestly phrase it so much better and more clearly than I could.

To answer the first part of your question, in many ways TETK was, I think, the first time I intentionally set out to write a long-form piece that employed the abject in a way that pervades the text. I’ve described elsewhere that good horror, for me, evokes this sensation of my teeth aching. Horror isn’t just something I’m passively reading or viewing, but a felt thing in the body. Working off this affective tooth response, I wanted TETK to make the reader feel as though moss was growing on the underside (or maybe the verso is a better way to put it) of their teeth. There ought to be this sense of a layer forming nearly (but not quite) out of reach, which you can’t see and are perhaps at first are unaware of.

 I think in many ways that’s what Tyler experiences himself, and your reading of the text as something in which even imagery has an arc, points, in my view, to that same layering effect. I was very deliberate about the intensification of the novel as it progressed—everything ought to be building to a point or crescendo (even though I’m not musical at all, I often write with an ear to the musicality of a work’s structure or a line’s rhythm)—and I wanted the reader to become only gradually or peripherally aware of that fact, until it was “too late.”

Comparing the uncanny and the abject, what I always say to students is that if the uncanny is the frisson, then the abject is the gag reflex. That said, as Julia Kristeva herself expresses, abjection isn’t simply the feeling of wanting to reject (or eject) something disgusting from our proximity, but the contradictory pull that we experience alongside the desire to reject. 

In a significant way, many of us feel compelled on some level to peek between our pressed-closed fingers at the disgusting thing, despite (or perhaps because of) the knowledge that doing so will be revolting or upsetting. Horror movies, particularly body horror such as what you’d find in David Cronenberg’s work, pivot on this tension. The audience both dreads the coming of the monster, and longs for it. 

The revelation of the abject thing (or the abject self) is thus a kind of catharsis. Once the thing is seen, there’s purgation—a release. The release may not be pleasant (and often shuffles us off into, I would argue, an uncanny space), but the intensity of the experience is what is craved, is demanded. 

In horror that features torture in any capacity, this build, followed by catharsis and finally uncanny lack, is what structures the scene. Severed limbs, punctured body parts, the explosion or protrusion of strange growths—each of these is anticipated, experienced, then replaced with a profound sense of loss or absence. I’m kind of talking around my own book intentionally here, to avoid spoilers, but probably you can apply this to Tyler and Stalker’s experiences. 

To use a popular example in place of TETK: the titular Fly in Cronenberg’s 1986 remake is horrifying in large part because we know what Jeff Goldblum looked like prior to (and throughout) his transformation. It would be less dis/satisfying on some level if he were simply a fly person from the very first shot of the movie. It’s not that the gooey, slippery, protuberant form of the fly isn’t abject in and of itself, but it’s much more so when you witness the process. 

Abjection thus often requires a sense of an actant: it’s either witnessed as a process, or experienced when we come face-to-face with matter out of place (matter that is given a kind of perverse agency by virtue of resting in a location it shouldn’t—fecal matter on a dinner plate, for example). Probably me even typing that elicited a disgust response as you read it (it certainly made me want to wash my mouth out).

The abject comes through, I think (or hope), via the escalation that you bring up. One of its sharpest moments, felt by Tyler, is following the least consensual of those sex scenes you mention. Following the rape, he describes his own body in abjected terms. This works alongside some of the novel’s thematics, but a bigger part of why it’s there is that it draws on genuinely common experiences of abjection felt by victims of sexual assault. There’s a sense that the body is no longer one’s own, that it’s “marked” somehow, that there’s been a dissolution of the self.

There are ways that the abject can also be (and arguably often is) perversely beautiful. The creatures are compared quite frequently to spiders. At the root, I suspect, of the discomfort many people feel toward spiders is that they appear so fragile, that their limbs ought to break (or could easily be broken). There’s a strange kind of identification that happens there—we’re imagining being spindly, being breakable (and alarmingly, we subconsciously come to the conclusion that we are breakable!).

I think one reason the abject works so well in The Return of the King is that it’s used carefully, sparingly, and specifically. Often this is true in horror as well—though that’s hugely subjective. But I’ve always felt that deliberate use of the abject at key moments or in intentional ways is more effective/affective than a kind of scattershot approach. 

Wall-to-wall gore thus doesn’t interest me as much as a reader or writer. That’s not to say that constant emphasis on the abject can’t be impactful: imagine not just Sméagol hooking that worm, but a zoomed-in shot of the interior of a bucket of live worms. We watch as one by one each worm is unceremoniously hooked—not with joy or thrill, but matter-of-factly. Perhaps there’s even audio. Perhaps we can hear the wetness of the worms. Perhaps the wet sound increases in volume as the zoom increases and increases and the whole screen is pink and wet and the slipping sound is accompanied by the slice of a hook we can no longer see but whose violence resounds like thunder. 

That’s maybe a little Lynchian, and thus uncanny, I think, as well. But regardless, it feels (or, I think, would feel) intentional. There seems to be a point to it. It seems to be saying something, or maybe expressing something inexpressible that then lingers.

Returning to TEOZ, I feel like the abject operates on several levels. You use violence very sparingly and it’s more emotionally impactful for that. In particular I’m thinking of a later scene in the book, in which a traitorous character is dragged through the streets. Key to the power of that event (which we don’t see up close, as such—and I think that’s to its credit), is the image of this one uneven cobblestone that we’re told will crack the traitor’s skull or otherwise injure his body. You don’t need to go into detail for the audience to run riot with that image; it’s horrific, and because it’s horrific we experience a profound pathos. 

Similarly, there’s a sequence of scenes in which one character agrees to be poisoned in order to save the reputation and life of their close friend. There’s something of the abject there, too, and it’s actually helped me to understand better Kristeva’s own example of the betrayal of a loved one as something rooted in the abject.

For me, in TEOZ, abjection is often where we see emotion come through. I remember saying, early in my reading, that you’d elicited more of an emotional response in me in twenty pages than most writers manage in one hundred. This remained constant throughout my reading, I think in part because you knew not to make these scenes overly sentimental. The power of the story comes through in those moments, one of which opens the book: Marcus, at war with the Genovans, hacks off the top of an enemy’s head, but the soldier doesn’t die immediately and the horror of this living person who ought to be dead (effectively is dead from a fatalistic perspective), forces both Marcus and the reader to acknowledge the violence for what it is. It’s such a deceptively simple scene (and one which, again, employs the abject through your precise and economical description of the Genovan’s injury), but it packs a wallop.

You’ve described your work as perhaps working for some readers more than others because it focuses on image/idea over voice/character. I can see this in your work, and yet because I’ve always considered myself a character-focused reader (and writer) there was something about the dichotomy that gnawed at me. 

Reflecting on it now, I think it’s that while image/idea are central, character can be revealed through image, and that’s exactly what I felt happening throughout Zanzibar. Each chapter felt nearly like its own story with its own internal symbolism—a node within a larger web. The symbolism always felt so essential to whatever specific character we were learning about (the Tacamo stories are a great example of this, but there are so many others). 

How you achieve this is, I suspect, a result of your background as a visual artist, where character and theme are always expressed through the visual and the symbolic. Not many writers, I think, are able to achieve this, and it’s what sets Zanzibar apart as something startlingly original. So it’s idea/image, but idea/image as it reveals something about character (and not just the specific characters in Zanzibar, but, I think, human character as a whole). 

This is maybe why the book feels so otherworldly to me, and why it was the uncanny that I latched onto in this conversation. Symbols are arguably innately uncanny, since they signify something other than themselves and communicate an often esoteric or hidden meaning (or set of meanings) that disrupts in one way or another our sense of how things are or could be. The narrative voice of TEOZ is, I would argue, symbol, as well as this sense of the otherworldly used to express something worldly and true. Like Claire (or like the Soviet citizen in the joke you bring up), we can’t see it because we’re immersed in it.

In many ways, I see a commonality in our novels through their interest in communicating something true that when you encounter it, you recognize or confront it at your core. For my part, this was something at least that I hoped to achieve and which I found in TEOZ in scenes like that of Marcus with the dying Genovan soldier. It’s when a scene lingers in my mind after I’ve read a book or watched a movie that I get a real sense that what I experienced was particularly skillful or important somehow, and that’s something I experienced many times with TEOZ. The true thing often feels slightly dangerous, even when invigorating or affirming.