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Author: Mary Maddox

Publisher: Cantraip Press

ISBN: 978-0984428106

Click Here To Purchase Talion

Today, Norm Goldman Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest, Mary Maddox, author of Talion.

Good day Mary and thanks for participating in our interview.

Mary:

It’s a pleasure to be here, Norm.

Norm:

Why have you been drawn to the macabre? As a follow up, are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the macabre? Does it even have a form?

Mary:

I’m not quite sure why the macabre draws me. It's probably a combination of temperament, personal history and literary preferences. I see darkness in the world, in people, most of all in myself. But there’s light as well. I hope readers will see the light in Talion as well as the darkness.

In the macabre as a literary form I see two elements - fascination and dread. Edgar Allen Poe's stories have these elements. His neurasthenic characters are obsessed by the things they fear most. The black cat, the beating heart of the murder victim, the horror of being buried alive. And the reader willingly participates. Why? I guess for the same reason that people can’t drive past a car wreck without slowing down to gawk. It's strange, gawkers hoping to witness a gruesome injury that will haunt their dreams. Yet they can’t seem to resist the fascination of the accident scene.Of course some readers will be repelled. More than one person has complained about Talion giving them nightmares. These people are liable to stop reading.

Some years ago I showed an early draft of Talion to a woman I thought was my friend. She was appalled by the description of Rad cutting Whistler’s throat in the first chapter. “How can you write about things like that?” she asked. “I mean, I respect the power of the imagination.”

This reader’s implication was that I had invoked this power in the service of something evil. She was a poet whose poems were erotically charged. In one, the speaker beholds the beauty of a young child and understands why a pederast would desire him. Others chronicled her attraction to her brother. This woman’s imagination covered all kinds of strange sexual territory, but violence was out of bounds, a land of evil where no decent human being ventured.

Afterward she had as little contact with me as possible. I was no longer someone she cared to have coffee with. Or even to email.

Norm:

Was Talion improvisational or did you have a set plan?

Mary:

The story has undergone several incarnations. It began as a novella, “Water Dolls,” about a friendship between teenage girls from very different backgrounds. The story dragged, weighed down by exposition of the characters’ pasts and a present where the conflict arose from their general distrust of one another. Nothing was happening! I came to realize the plot needed a catalyst, a threat that would either bring them together or destroy them.

So Conrad (Rad) Sanders entered the story, stalking them, watching them sunbathe at an old dam in the mountains, waiting his chance. I called the new version Secret Father. When it was completed, I found an agent willing to represent me. He took on the novel because it received a good review from a reader at the William-Morris agency. At that time he was in the process of leaving William-Morris to start his own agency. I went with him. When he began shopping the manuscript around, he found that editors balked because the story did not conform to the genre. They wanted a detective or journalist – an adult, middle-class protagonist like the novel’s intended readership. The main character, Lu Jakes, was neither. So I rewrote, making Lisa’s father, a small-town journalist, the protagonist.

 This version, Rad’s Kiss, was unfocused and too long because in the end I couldn’t abandon Lu. In the middle of the story she took over. After a series of rejections from editors, the agent dropped me.
A couple of years later, I rewrote again, weaving some elements of the rewrite into the original story and adding a new character, Talion, the ambiguous figure only Lu can see and hear. The paranormal element makes it even more difficult to place the novel within a particular genre, but I feel strongly that Talion and his cohorts complete Lu’s character and make her, finally, as compelling as Rad.

Norm:

Where did you get your information or ideas for Talion?

Mary:

I've read a couple of dozen books on serial killers and sexual sadists, ranging from true crime paperbacks to sociological texts.
Serial killers have been popularized in other fiction, most prominently Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and his compelling villain Hannibal Lector, whose powers verge on the supernatural.  It seems Harris and every other creator of fictional serial killers draws material from the work of the FBI agents who have studied these criminals: Robert Ressler, John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood. These men spent years tracking, interviewing, and analyzing serial killers. They’ve written numerous books on the subject, both popular works and criminology texts. After reading these, I moved on to books by police detectives who had worked serial killer cases and books devoted to the crimes of particular notorious criminals: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac killer, etc.

I also read some books that concerned serials killers less directly. The most challenging was Lyall Wilson’s Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil. The author takes a socio-biological perspective on what is generally considered to be evil behavior in humans. He argues that it can be explained in terms of evolutionary principles and meme theory, and that analogies can be found in the behavior of animals and birds. For instance, birds will push a hatchling from the nest if there are too many to feed, sacrificing one to increase the chance that the others will survive. A woman like Susan Smith, who drowned her children so they wouldn't interfere with her romance with a well- to- do boyfriend, may be sacrificing them in the hope of producing offspring with a more desirable mate. These future children would hopefully have a better chance to thrive.

Only one chapter of the book discusses killers like Rad. Wilson provides an evolutionary explanation of them too complicated to summarize here. What the chapter gave me was inspiration for Rad's hypnotic gaze, with which he lays claim to his victims. Wilson observes that "when we look at one another, all we see is death. Dead skin, dead hair, dead nails....The only glimpse of life we get in one another lies in the tinted cells of the iris which show through the transparent corneas of the eye, those 'windows of the soul'" (218). He goes on to relate that he attended part of the trial of two schoolchildren who kidnapped a toddler from a mall and tortured him to death, a notorious crime in Britain in 1993. He describes one of the child killers as having "a blank face...a mask without identity, dead skin over dead eyes" (221), a look that he later recognizes in the faces of other serial killers. These individuals are not crazy; they're just vacant. Their human personalities are gone, if they ever existed.

Norm:

What is your secret in keeping the intensity of the plot throughout Talion?

Mary:

As a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop I was less concerned with plot than character and landscape and prose style. I didn’t think of that as a weakness, but one of my teachers, Gail Godwin, advised me to learn how to plot. She recommended that I study Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to learn how. I read and enjoyed Doyle’s stories, but didn’t take Godwin’s advice to heart for a long time. Eventually I came to realize that most readers want a compelling story. Although discerning readers also want complex and believable characters and elegant prose, the essential element is story.

I began analyzing plots in suspense novels and even TV series. What makes readers turn the page to begin another chapter? What makes viewers tune in for the next episode?  They want to find out what happens. And if the outcome doesn’t follow logically from earlier events – in other words, if the plot doesn’t hold together – readers will feel cheated.

Another crucial element is pacing. In Talion, Rad stalks Lu and Lisa at the mountain resort owned by Lisa’s aunt and uncle.  Interspersed with this narrative are flashbacks showing how the characters ended up there. My challenge was to keep the flashbacks from slowing down the present action unnecessarily. The backstory had to illuminate that action. In the final edit of Talion, I ended up cutting or trimming several scenes. For instance, I took out a passage in which Rad dates and has sex with one of his colleagues. I actually like that part a lot, but it came at a point where the narrative needed to quicken its pace heading into the climax.

Norm:

In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much?

Mary:

It depends what you mean. The boundaries for fiction are quite different from those for nonfiction. My friend and colleague Daiva Markelis has written a memoir of her childhood in Chicago, Black Sheep, White Field: A Lithuanian-American Life. It's coming out this fall, published by the University of Chicago Press. Obviously she could only write what happened. But she couldn’t include everything, and I suppose that in the selection of incident and detail, she takes liberties with her personal history. Others involved in that history might object to her choices. The book's narrative weaves past incidents with a present-day account of her mother's battle with cancer. By changing the context and therefore the meaning of what happened, the structure is another way of taking liberties with the material. Obviously she couldn’t write any memoir without making such choices. It seems to me the writer is free to make them as long as they are not deceptive.

The fiction writer has more latitude. There the problem is whether the choices are true to the story and whether they distract or annoy readers. What is untrue to the story?  A character says or does things that seem disconnected from everything readers know about him.  What is distracting? My decision to write some scenes in Talion in present tense might be.  A few readers have questioned the effectiveness of the tense changes.

Norm:

What do you think makes a good story?

Mary:

A good story is one that the reader wants – or needs – to finish. For me, there must be something crucial at stake. Right now I’m reading The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder. The main character is obsessed by the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking during World War II and needs to find out something in particular about what happened. Hayder maintains the mystery of what that something is, and I’m compelled to keep reading to find out. I also love the main character. Even though she spent much of her adolescence in an insane asylum, she comes across as a reliable narrator.

Norm:

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Mary:

All of my teachers have influenced my writing, beginning with my high-school teacher, Phyllis Gillins, who taught me the importance of structure in fiction and poetry. I've been fortunate in having teachers who are masters of their craft, among them Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Irving, Gail Godwin, Vance Bourjaily, and Mary Lee Settle. I knew Mary Lee after leaving the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but she was nonetheless my teacher.

The stories of Flannery O'Connor have influenced my prose style. Maybe someday I’ll write prose that elegant and poetic. The novels of Patricia Highsmith have shaped my sense of the macabre. Highsmith understands the darkness in human beings.

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook had a great influence on me at the Workshop. Much of the other fiction I was reading then created a rarified and private world. Lessing’s novel encompassed politics, history, psychology, art, feminism – everything. It made me understand that I needed to write about more than myself and my experiences.
I admire Vladimir Nabokov, Gustav Flaubert, Thomas Harris, and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Different as they are, all these writers have created characters of archetypal dimensions. How many people who haven’t read Lolita nonetheless know who Lolita is?  The same is true of Madame Bovary, Hannibal Lector, and Frodo.

Norm:

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?

Mary:

For me, the most difficult thing is shaping the story. Plot was the aspect of writing that I struggled most to learn, and it still gives me the most trouble.
I also wish I could write more quickly. I have a notebook full of planned stories and novels, and at this rate I won’t live long enough to write them all.

Norm:

Do you feel that writers, regardless of genre owe something to readers, if not, why not, if so, why and what would that be?

Mary:

Authenticity.

Obviously, the writer shouldn’t present someone else’s work as his or her own. But the writer also has an obligation to write with authentic imagination and intelligence – not an imitation of another writer or a false construction meant to impress readers.

Norm:

Where can our readers find out more about you and Talion?

Mary:

On my Web site www.marymaddox.com  readers will find the opening passage of Talion as well as one of my short stories that appeared some years ago in the magazine Yellow Silk. The story, “Yubi,” is about a woman who falls in love with a bird.  I also have a blog at http://blog.marymaddox.com.

A video trailer for Talion, “Rad Pays his Respects,” is posted on the blog and can also be watched on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGuebw5XdSE. The trailer highlights a passage from the novel in which Rad visits the grave of one of his victims.

Click Here To Purchase Talion

Norm:

What is next for Mary Maddox and is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?

Mary:

I’m working on another suspense novel, Darkroom, about a woman’s search for her missing friend. The protagonist is adult and middle-class; the antagonist is more sympathetic and psychologically complex than Rad. Hopefully it will be available next year. Then I’ll begin a new project. I’ve been writing a long time and cannot imagine life without it.

Norm:

Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Mary:

Thank you for having me on Bookpleasures.com, Norm.


CLICK HERE TO READ NORM'S REVIEW OF TALION

Click Here To Purchase Talion