By
David Rondinelli
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| Hal Johsnon Drawn Portrait |
I first met Hal Johnson while waiting in line at
Midtown Comics, a large comic book retail store in NYC. It is often the
playground of sacred space for many nerds and pop culture junkies to congregate
for new and old titles. I’ve been familiar with his friendly face while being
greeted by him at the register and his ability to always point me to the
appropriate shelf where I can find the latest comic releases of the week. It
was on one of these weekly excursions that I saw him signing copies of his book
Immortal Lycanthropes at the same
store. Immortal Lycanthropes is a YA
novel that follows Myron Horowitz. Who is a disfigured boy who finds out that
he can shape shift into an animal while discovering a world within a world of
others that share the same ability. Johnson sat down with me to talk about the
book, his writing process, and how he was once bitten by a mountain lion.
Perhaps that bite was what put all the bite in his book as Hal Johnson is
November’s Peculiar Person of the month.
This
Peculiar Life NYC: Your story takes place in PA. Why did you choose this
setting? Are you originally from there?
Hal
Johnson: This may sound crazy, but I’m always a little suspicious of authors
who set all their books in or near their own hometowns. I understand the impulse
— you don’t want to get caught out in an absurd error by the locals, dropping
mountains in Ohio or trees in New Jersey — but at the same time, I tell you:
you can’t let the readers smell your fear. So I try not to set everything, or
anything, in Connecticut,
where I grew up. Pennsylvania
is kind of a cheat; I’ve driven through parts of it, so I assumed I could bluff
it enough to fool any hostile Pennsylvanians. No one’s called me out yet!
TPL
NYC: Myron Horowitz is disfigured. You make a pretty bold choice in choosing a
main character that isn’t considered attractive. I think it is refreshing to
have a character that doesn’t look like a lot of the plastic on t.v. Why did
you choose to make him disfigured?
HJ:
I was doing a presentation at a library last week and a girl raised her hand
and demanded to know why I made Myron ugly.
I
probably did it partially just to be perverse, you know, because I knew
protagonists should be beautiful, for the movie version. And partially because
you want life to be hard for your protagonist, and what could be harder than
being a runty high school freshman with a grotesque pan? I thought I was so
clever.
And
then R.J. Palacio came out, the same year I did, with a book about a kid with
his face all jacked-up. Everyone in the book’s really supportive of him, and he
gets an award at the end. It’s not a bad book, but it’s pretty much the
opposite of any book I could possibly write; it has a protagonist who looks
like Myron —and everyone love Palacio’s book. I’m serious, it's the toast of
the town! Read it, you’ll probably love it too. I almost did.
That
book is my nemesis.
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| Cover |
TPL
NYC: You also take an interesting
approach with the narration and the slow reveal of the other Lycanthropes, was
it hard to write a book through that perspective?
HJ:
I knew I wanted to start things normal — I mean, in a recognizable
“real-world” high school setting — and move slowly into a stranger and more
dangerous world. It’s the classic set up for any kind of fantastic narrative,
and it has the advantage of letting the reader and the protagonist learn things
simultaneously.
The
idea of another world under or around this one has held a great fascination for
me ever since I saw Mary Poppins as a
kid, so it was pretty much a given I was going to write about a journey
from this world to that one. And it’s got to be slow, right? One does not
simply walk between worlds.
TPL
NYC: When it comes to the mechanics of writing, how long does it take you to
find the voice and the perspective to tell the story through?
HJ:
This was probably the hardest part of the whole book — and I hit upon it as a
kind of compromise. I didn’t want to tell the book from a first-person Myron
perspective, first of all because I thought it would make Myron less mysterious
to come at things from his head but also because I think adventure novels in
the first person are kind of lame. I know there are lots of counterexamples,
and I love Treasure Island, Warlord of Mars, and Allan Quatermain, but as
a reader, I don’t like knowing the hero’s going to survive, and I don’t like
him telling me about the dangerous scrapes he gets into — sounds like bragging.
So I didn’t want Myron to tell his own story.
But
at the same time, I’ve always been uncomfortable writing in third person. I picked
a subsidiary character, and let him piece the story together. I figured this’d
solve all my problems, and also allow for some dramatic irony, as the narrator
is a little delusional.
I’ve
been told that the book is just written in my own voice, and that if you know
me, Arthur’s speech sounds exactly like my own. But man, that wasn’t
intentional.
TPL
NYC: How long did it take you to write the book?
HJ:
It was about nine months, which I guess is a fair gestation time for my
species.
TPL
NYC: You also bring in a diverse cast, with the Lycanthropes being so
different, are many of the animal counter parts found in many of those
countries?
HJ:
Yeah, I tried to keep things accurate. Of course, I was trying to match people
and animals with where they would have been found 10,000 years ago. I mean,
there are no longer any moose in Scotland; but there used to be.
TPL
NYC: How did you go about deciding what animal each character was going to turn
into?
HJ:
I started with a list of animals I wanted in the book, and then worked towards
the human. Really I just picked animals I liked. I thought a gorilla would look
funny in an old lady’s robe, which is why the gorilla is an old lady. There
probably isn’t much connection between the animal and the personality their humans
got.
TPL
NYC: Often, when readers get the finished manuscript they don’t always know
what went into crafting the story. Which part of the book represented the most
challenges for you to write?
HJ:
Chapter nine, which is really the heart and soul of the book, is the part I had
to go over and over to get right. It’s the narrator’s summary of his life and
philosophy, and I wanted to let him talk — he’d been offstage for most of the
book, this was his only real chance to get a word in — but at the same time I
didn’t want the book to devolve into the boring old-man ramblings of a crazed
binturong. I’m really happy with how it turned out, but, like a bear cub, it
took a lot of shaping.
TPL
NYC: On the flip side, what part of the book did you have the most fun writing?
HJ:
I really liked writing the con games Gloria ushered Myron through. There used
to be a lot more of these, but they got cut for space, which is too bad. I
could write a whole book about nothing but a self-righteously amoral gorilla
bilking people out of their money and then squandering it on gin. That probably
wouldn’t be a kids’ book, I guess.
TPL
NYC: Your book is in the Young Adult genre. What is it about this genre that
appeals to you?
HJ:
One of the most appealing things about YA is that publishers will publish it,
and readers will read it. It’s a section of the bookstore that’s actually
growing. The only other thing that grows is a bookstore is the despair.
There
was one great thing about writing a YA book. It gave me the freedom to imagine
a reader who wasn’t jaded and weary. I remembered the books I’d read as a kid,
how they were brimming with ideas. It’s because I was young enough to accept
and appreciate something new. I could have my mind blown. I wanted to blow
someone’s mind, and I hope I did just that.
TPL
NYC: Do you like to write in any other mediums?
HJ:
I like to write songs. I think it would be a pretty good job, to be a lyricist,
except it doesn't exist any more. Now they just put a bunch of cliches into a
computer, and it spits out song lyrics.
Comic
books take up a large portion of my life, so I wish I could write them, but I
find it really hard to. I spend all my time trying to imagine how the panels
should go on the page, and it ends up either boring or incoherent.
TPL
NYC: Aside from writing, do you have any other interests or hobbies?
HJ:
I spend more time reading than writing. I’d like to pretend I’m a writer, but
really I’m a reader. I also run some Dungeons and Dragons games that take up a
lot of my time. I used to write a lot for the game, ancient texts the players
would need to dig up and decipher, scrawled confessions and historical
treatises, or codes and riddles. They're getting pretty good at my riddles, but
they still haven’t cracked my code. My players complain that I don’t write as
much for the game any more, but I only have so much time.
I’d
like to meet the man who answers this question “no.” That would be a
single-minded man.
TPL
NYC: What is your writing process like? Do you have any rituals or techniques,
or do you just sit down and write?
HJ:
A schedule is more important for me than a ritual. When I’ve got enough ideas
together that I’m seriously writing a book, and not just daydreaming about it —
I find it useful to assign myself a quota every day. Even if it’s just a
nominal amount, forcing myself to sit and crank out some words is more
productive than slipping back into the daydreaming.
TPL
NYC: Are you a self-taught writer, or did you get formal training to be an
author?
HJ:
Is anyone allowed to be a self-taught writer nowadays? I mean the government
frog-marched me at gunpoint to school, where I ostensibly got a rudimentary
education in composition.
There’s
probably a level of workshopping insidership that would see me as lacking
formal training. Of course, most of my theory and practice of writing texts I
learned from reading, so you see how it’s all connected.
TPL
NYC: What do you do to get a good pacing for something as lengthy as a novel?
HJ:
That’s a great question, because the pace of a novel is one of its most
defining characteristics, but it rarely gets talked about.
We
tend to believe, I think, that plot defines pace, but it’s really the narrative
voice. You can tell a plot-heavy story really quickly, like a pulp, or you can
drag it out over a great many pages, like Alexandre Dumas. So the question you
have to figure out is at what clip does your narration go — and will you have
enough room to tell the whole story if it stays at that clip.
I
like to write ten or twenty pages “free-style,” just winging it to get an idea
of how fast things are moving, before I plot a book out. That way I feel like I
have a handle on the narrative speed, and I can make sure that I don’t cram so
much into a book that it becomes unwieldy.
The
other answer is: if your pacing starts to flag, the editor will just make you
cut things out. The editor’s scissors are always there, like an ax outside the
chicken coop.
TPL
NYC: What do you think is the most effective way to tell a good story and how
did you incorporate that into Immortal Lycanthropes?
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| Some original sketch work by Hal Johnson |
HJ:
There are as many ways to tell good stories as there are good stories. Borges,
always a favorite of mine, invented the method of writing a story by pretending
that someone else had already written the story, and then talking about this
hypothetical preexisting text. I’m not saying every story should be told that
way, but I love “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.”
I
only slightly self-consciously tried to work a bunch of different narrative
modes into the book. Some people tell their own stories and some people tell
other people’s stories, and sometimes the narrator gives a summary of a vast
swath of events, and sometimes he tells you all the dirt. Just to keep it
interesting.
TPL
NYC: You seem to have a special interest in animals. What are some of your
favorite animals?
HJ:
I love animals, but I want to stress that I don’t have a romantic idea of
animals. Nature is red in tooth and claw for a reason, and animals are either
constantly scared or constantly killing things — there’s very little middle
ground. I know that there’s a pretty bleak picture of humanity painted in
chapter 9 of Immortal Lycanthropes,
and I’d hate to have anyone think that animals are better in comparison.
Animals can’t make moral decisions, and I think it’s clear that if they could,
they would, like us, choose evil pretty consistently. A great many insects
can’t even reproduce without doing something horrible and disgusting; I mean
horrible and disgusting even compared to the horrible and disgusting things
humans do. It’s unlikely a girl I fancy is ever going to eat my corpse.
Obviously
I love binturongs, and red pandas. I also love most mollusks, especially
octopuses and snails, and arthropods, especially praying mantises.
TPL
NYC: Do you have any pets?
HJ:
I live in New York,
so it’s part of my lease that I am forbidden to have any vertebrate pets, but I
am apparently obliged to have thousands and thousands of tiny, invertebrate
ones.
TPL
NYC: If you could turn into an animal, which one would you like to be able to turn
into?
HJ:
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. There’s a lot of temptation to be
an elephant or a lion so you can mess with anyone; but it might be smarter to
be something small that can slip away, a weasel or a bat. My answer will change
depending on the day, but today I’ll say a cheetah: you’re big enough to fight,
but you can also sprint away from danger.
Alternately:
as Bart Simpson says, “Nobody suspects the butterfly.”
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| More original sketch work by Hal Johnson |
TPL
NYC: Can we expect a sequel to Immortal
Lycanthropes? Where would you like to see the story go?
HJ:
I think it’s all wrapped up in a neat little package, with nowhere else to go.
I guess if everyone wrote into Houghton Mifflin, inundating them with demands
for more adventures, I could get corralled into turning this book into the
first of a Baby-sitters Club–style
series. “You’ve got to do it, Johnson,” my editor would roar, his cigar flying
out of his mouth as he pounded his desk. “You’ve got to do it for the fans.”
Other scenarios are less likely.
TPL
NYC: How about other projects? What are some of the other things we can expect
to see from you soon?
HJ:
I’ve got several irons in the fire, but I am sworn to secrecy most direly.
Anyway, every time I’ve made a prediction about what was coming up, I’ve been
wrong. But it’ll be something, soon, and then you’ll see. “Deeds, not words,”
as we say in Megaforce.
TPL
NYC: This blog is about peculiar things, so what is the most peculiar thing
that you have ever seen or been a part of while living in NYC?
HJ:
Peculiarity is always a local phenomenon. Any time you leave your comfort zone,
which in my case is made up completely of nerds, things get peculiar. I once
tried to ride my bicycle from Newark Penn Station to Newark Airport in the
middle of the night because my plane was too early for me to catch a bus and I
thought it was ridiculous to pay five bucks to travel four miles; the bicycle
was an ancient, tiny, one-speed with coaster brakes that squeaked and it drove
the feral dogs insane as I got lost in Newark; they chased me. Everyone I asked
for directions was clearly under the influence, but was still nice enough to
warn me that in the direction I was headed, I was certainly going to be
murdered. The point is, Newark
at four in the morning was a surreal experience, but for the people I got
directions from, or for the feral dogs, it must’ve just seemed like business as
usual.
This
is what’s beguiling about New York,
the feeling it gives you that you can slide between worlds by walking one block
in a different direction, or entering a storefront you’ve never gone in; this
feeling that there are hundreds of peculiar worlds all around, and the one you
happen to live in is only one of many possibilities.
TPL
NYC: In the same vein, what is the most peculiar thing that has ever happened to
you?
HJ:
I was once bitten by a mountain lion. I would prefer not to elaborate.
Hal Johnson will be doing a reading and signing at the Enigma Bookstore (3317 Crescent St., Long Island City, NY 11106) on Novemnber 9th at
7 PM. He will also be doing a "teens only" event at the Queens Public
Library, Cambria Heights branch, on November 27th at 3:30 PM.
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