because people have this need to know what to expect.
Apparently the sense of adventure and willingness to take risks that started things rolling
in this country fell by the wayside somewhere in the 1950s. It’s why McDonalds
is such a smash hit. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap, it’s familiar crap. Who wants
to eat red beans and rice with alligator sausage or Grenouilles a la Provencal
or Arros con Pollo when you can have a Big Mac that looks like a fat guy sat on
it and fries that smell great while they’re cooking but deteriorate to the
consistency of greasy cardboard ten milliseconds after they’re pulled from the
fryer?
It’s a no-brainer. And that’s the problem. The non-thinking,
fast & easy trend is turning the world into a no-souler.
So you’d think people who read books for entertainment (and
hopefully more) would buck that like crazy. But according to the publishers and
editors and agents, it ain’t so. They want you in a readily identifiable box
for easy marketing and mass consumption. That’s right, folks. We’re fucking
Coneheads. Rejects from the planet Remulak. Mass quantities is where we’re at.
Big steaming piles are in, take a look at the parking lot of the Old Country
Buffet on any night you can manage to pull your head out of the tube.
I don’t want to be branded. Cattle are branded. It’s a stamp
of ownership, and I ain’t fucking livestock. You want a box, hit the
drive-thru.
Of course, those same publishers and editors and agents will
tell me I’m making a mistake by adopting this attitude. Well, I’m not adopting
anything. It’s not an attitude, it’s just me. So that’s what you can expect
when you read something I’ve written. Pick any label you like. You can even try
to apply it. But don’t get all upset when I peel it off.
Still, I’m driven to write about certain themes. My characters
tend to be outside the norm, black sheep, if you will. I do fit a genre, but
it’s a damn broad one. Crime. You probably guessed that if you’ve
read these pages at all. Not the same old formulaic cop books though, I tend to
walk the thin line between what’s lawful and what’s right, because they’re not
always one and the same. And not caper books about criminals pulling off a
heist either. These days I write stories about flawed people in bad situations
that have to make hard choices to survive. My settings tend to be rural,
because I’m a country boy at heart. I was born in the city and lived there
until age fifteen, when I moved to the Arizona high country. There, I lived ten
miles from the nearest pavement, and then it was another ten to the nearest
town. I found magic, and it shaped the man I became. Tracking mountain
lions hoping to catch a glimpse of one, hunting rabbits on a crisp January morning,
or sitting on the edge of a caprock mesa with a pair of owls perched in the top
of a lightning-killed ponderosa looking you in the eye will do that.
Western Montana shaped me too, as did years of roaming all
over Canada, far from the U.S. border. Alaska poured a profound silence into my
cracks that dwells to this day.
Now, after a nine-year fiasco in a small Wisconsin city where the prevailing mentality felt way
too Mall of America for my taste, Victoria and I are back in the country, in
her home range, the southern Missouri Ozarks. We’re only four miles from town,
but town is a general store that doesn’t accept credit cards, a rural fire
department, a tiny community center and library, and a riverside restaurant.
Not even a post office. That’s twelve miles in the other direction. Next door
are millions of acres of ridges and hollows and woods, creeks and
springs, oak and hickory and pine, deer and black bear, and a cougar or two, and
coyotes that sing you to sleep at night.
What the hell does any of this have to do with crime? That’s
easy. There are humans too. And people are people. Go do an online search, and
you’ll discover the area has a rep for meth and racism and whatever else. Some
of it is true. But it’s a big area, and what applies to Franklin County or the
country around Springfield doesn’t necessarily apply elsewhere, at least not to
the same extent. But regardless, you don’t go driving up on folks at night out here, banging on their doors. The same was true in the White Mountains of
Arizona and Catron County New Mexico and Montana's Blackfoot Valley. There’s trouble everywhere, because
people are trouble, and you can’t get away from them.
That’s what drives all good fiction; people and trouble.
Some folks I trust and admire have said I fit a subgenre
called country noir. I’m not certain that’s true. Noir tends to slant toward
the hopelessness of things, regardless of setting, and while my stuff is
plenty dark and gritty enough to be rough on your gears, I can never exclude
hope, or hold it out of reach of my characters. That’s not my place. Hope is an
essential ingredient in us all, so it seems to me that to withhold it is to be
disingenuous. Shit, the act of creating is for me an act of hope, even faith.
So noir might not be quite accurate in its strictly defined form.
But the masses demand that easy to read label, so it’s as
agreeable and acceptable as I’m likely to get and still satisfy the marketers.
Still don’t really like it though. I’m with Bill Hicks when it comes to those
fuckers. But it is what it is. I’m in good company, and more than one of my
heroes defies the branding iron by wielding it himself. Writers like Joe
Lansdale and James Lee Burke and Tom Piccirilli, to name but a few, those guys
brand you with their stories, and I’ll always strive to do the same.
I write from the heart, and that makes me wide open to you,
the reader. You’re getting a glimpse inside me. It’s part of the joy of
storytelling; making a human connection with people I’ll likely never meet,
across miles and years alike. I invite that, which is why there is no comfort
zone or taboo subject or PC bullshit in my stories. I want you to see, hear, and feel
it like it is. Fair warning though, that means I’m not after providing you with
some happy escape. You bang on my door after the sun has slipped behind the
tree line, you’ll find yourself looking down the bore of a shotgun.
If the bears and lions don’t get you first.
SR