Featured Guest: L. Andrew Cooper, an Interview with the Author of Peritoneum!

Today at The Seventh Star we are proud to bring you an interview with horror author L. Andrew Cooper, the author of the short story collections Peritoneum and Leaping at Thorns! We asked him some questions about writing his short story collections, some questions about the horror genre, and a few fun ones. The responses, as we anticipated, were fantastic.

Interview with L. Andrew Cooper conducted by Stephen Zimmer:

1. Tell us a little about Peritoneum? What inspired you to put this collection together? What were your goals with this collection?

Peritoneum is a collection of bizarre, extreme, and psychologically mischievous horror stories. In the opening story, “Prologue: The Family Pet,” as things get really hideous between Steven and his older brother Gordon, Steven looks up toward the sun and drowns in Gordon’s shadow. That moment—a human eclipse, after which Steven never sees the world the same way again—keeps drawing me back. It’s the moment of traumatized perception that changes everything. I play it with more… color… in other stories. In fact, “Patrick’s Luck” and “Door Poison” evoke laboratories as characters get traumatized by colors, while the reptiles of “Lizard Chrome” cause trauma by taking color away. The stories are about traumas, which often result in psychoses. They mimic trauma and psychosis. Do they cause trauma and psychosis? Oh dear, I hope not. I want the book to deliver a range of uncomfortable feelings, some of them in the realm of pure horror, quite a few of them in the realm of twisted humor, many of them in an uncertain WTF in-between. The stories are often so embedded in the perspectives of unstable minds—a few of those minds supernaturally able to read other minds or access over a century’s worth of strange experiences—that inhabiting them is highly disorienting. Readers won’t find many familiar character types or monster mash-ups, either, so some people might experience surroundings so unfamiliar that they feel lost. I’m okay with that. What’s more frightening than feeling lost in a dark place filled with scary images? Pass through the peritoneum and emerge from the other side, changed. Have fun. Then think about it. Maybe you’ll want to go back in….

2. When envisioning a horror collection such as Leaping at Thorns or Peritoneum, what is your process for determining the kinds of stories that will be contained within it? Are there any stories that are written but do not make the final table of contents? Do you have an idea for every story in the collection before starting?

LeapingatThornsCover1200X800 The stories behind Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum are quite different. Leaping collects stories from over twenty years, most of which I wrote on Halloween. When I decided to put together a book, though, I wanted a meaningful collection, and I saw the strands of Complicity, Entrapment, and Conspiracy connecting many of the best stories, so I began the Leaping design. I chose stories from my life’s work that I thought fitting and worthwhile—some fit but weren’t good enough, and some didn’t fit (side note: the first edition was all previously unpublished, but the second edition adds three more stories because they fit so well and are allegedly good). When I first did Leaping, I thought the next short story collection would be a long way off. Peritoneum took me by surprise. I’d planned to focus on nonfiction for awhile and then to write a new novel, but life became a little nasty, and I didn’t have the concentration for sustained projects. I started waking up in the morning with these really brutal horror stories on my computer. Characters from earlier work, including unpublished stuff like “The Family Pet,” were coming back in stories like “TR4B.” People don’t have to read one to follow the other, but Frankie Butterfly from Leaping’s “Heart on a Stick” returns in “Eternal Recurrence of Suburban Abortion.” Readers might also recognize characters in older tales “Jar of Evil” and “Rudy Haskill’s Plan,” both oriented toward mad science, as spiritual cousins to Frankie Butterfly (both of these stories are rather silly, like “Heart on a Stick”; be warned, however, that “Eternal Recurrence” is not silly). I’d like to take conscious credit for everything, but Peritoneum largely assembled itself, with most stories getting written within one year and others hanging on like static cling.

3. What do you, as the author, hope to hear from readers of Peritoneum? Have there been any unexpected kinds of responses so far that you are pleased with?

I want to hear almost everything! The book should make people react in a wide range of ways, so I want to find out what those reactions are. It’s not the kind of book I think many people will embrace easily. Characters who recur through my work and relate through Dr. Allen Fincher have what might seem like depravity contests in “Blood and Feathers” and “Juicy the Liar,” and they’re really quite inhuman… readers may feel more alienated than they usually do when reading genre fiction. Of course I want you to love the book, but I want you to discover that love after a journey through fear, disgust, horror, offense, and—who knows?—maybe even shame. I also want you think about what you feel. Tell me what you think, too. But please don’t confuse me with my characters. I may be a sicko, but I’m not those sickos. If you fall for that kind of confusion, that’s what I don’t want to hear. As for unexpected responses so far, I’m often surprised by the things that “get” people. I expect that crossing a particular taboo in “Prologue: The Family Pet” is going to get people, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by people’s enchantment with the monster in “Year of the Wolf” (he insists he’s not a werewolf), and I’m happy that, in “DNA” and elsewhere, people seem to be getting my sense of humor.

4. What, for you, were the biggest challenges as a writer in creating the stories contained within Peritoneum?

My earlier answer about just waking up with the stories was a convenient exaggeration. I did a lot of drafting late at night—that much is true—but no story ever springs fully-formed from my skull, and these stories in particular required special shaping. With my focus on trauma and perception, some of these stories take the perspectives of very confused people who are having hallucinatory and/or supernatural experiences that may or may not have underlying patterns of sense. Reading these experiences can be quite maddening… the biggest challenge is guessing how maddening I can be without spoiling other effects!

5. Looking back, in what ways do you feel that you have grown as a writer between the collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum?

Neither book is particularly wise. Both volumes contain stories that (1) break cultural taboos with their content, (2) break “genre” taboos with their “literary” structures, and (3) break “audience” taboos with their highly-informed characters. Before I say how I’ve grown, I’ll say I grant 1, but 2 and 3 are myths of publishing. The horror genre was literary before it was mass/popular, and horror readers are WAY better informed that mainstream publishers give them credit for. So yeah, I risk unconventional structures, big words, and savvy characters. I did it before, and I’ve done it again. And I break even more cultural taboos this time around! Horror stories can raise a middle finger to taboos of all kinds, I say, summoning the highest of high spirits while reveling with the lowest of the low. I’ve grown by becoming more sagely unwise and building the courage to show it.

6. What elements about the horror genre do you find to be its strengths in terms of the genre’s contribution to the field of literature?

Fear reveals us without our makeup on. If people a century from now want to know what life was like in America in August of 2016, they can read their history books, but unless things have changed a lot by then, they won’t get very much of the feeling. What they need to do is study our fears—play back recordings of people saying why they’re terrified of the political situation. Faster than anything, those fears will give the future historians a lock not on what we want them to know, but on who we really are. What’s horror’s contribution to literature? Ugly truth about human irrationality—maybe the ugly truth that we’re more irrational than otherwise.

7. Why do you think that genres such as horror have more of an uphill climb than others in terms of attaining respect within the academic world?

Horror says something’s horrible. Something’s wrong with the way things are, with the status quo. Even in its conservative mode, horror has always at least questioned the status quo that sustains positions of privilege. It challenges the very notion of “respect” because “respect” is that which the powerful believe they gain by birth. Academics usually come from the powerful classes—most come from privileged ethnic and economic backgrounds—and have a deep investment in the illusions of rationality and the ultimate goodness of established bourgeois culture. A minority of academics have come around, but generally, snooty people crap on what wasn’t made for them, on what they don’t understand, and horror falls right into that category. Nevermind that almost every major figure in the “canon” of English (British, Irish, American, and other Anglophone) literature has either participated in the Gothic/horror tradition or borrowed from it. Horror is icky, and academics don’t like icky things! They like a clean world to rule from their ivory towers. Their towers keep them safe from the wrong kinds of knowledge.

8. What book character do you identify with most, or would like to be? And why?

Since I read the complete works of J.D. Salinger as a teen, I’ve had a rich imaginary relationship with Buddy Glass (the narrator and/or fictional author of many of Salinger’s stories). Buddy struck me then—I’d have to reread to know if this still holds true—as an obsessively analytical reader and writer who finds and tries to fathom intense spiritual significance in apparently trivial things, but the spirituality he finds draws him either toward enlightenment or destruction, and he doesn’t know which. Even if that’s not Buddy, I guess that’s me. And, um, he really likes Kafka and stuff.

9. If someone is new to the horror genre, could you recommend three books for them to read as their introductory journeys into the genre?

I’ve had a few shots at this in this classroom. Today I’m feeling American. Let’s do Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym because it gives you his claustrophobia and madness as well as a look ahead at the underpinnings of weird fiction. We’ll move on to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, masterpiece of psychological suggestion and suspense, close to Turn of the Screw in the best ghost story category and not as difficult. Let’s end on Stephen King’s Carrie and consider relationships among regionalism, zeitgeist, and legend. And all three books are scary as #%$ and so beautiful they might bring you to tears.

10. In the medium of film, what three movies would you recommend to that same person?

Movies are more difficult to generalize… younger viewers tend to be much harder to interest in older movies, for instance (readers are usually less ageist). But let’s assume this person is open to one older film and watch the Val Lewton Cat People (1942). Psychology, suggestion, sex, monstrosity, gorgeous tones—a crash course without all the baggage of the more familiar monsters of the 30s. From there let’s go to A Nightmare on Elm Street. The person can see what all the slasher fuss is about while also seeing fantasy effects, a more feminist-oriented vision, and investment in psychology that picks up on the Lewton tradition. To end, show the tradition is alive and well with Insidious. Its depiction of a spirit plane is culturally rich and relevant—and if the recent Netflix series Stranger Things is on to something, it may have heralded a wave.

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