ANGEL ROSE INTERVIEW
You’ve mentioned that The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me is a rewrite of a much different, earlier work. Can you tell us more about how it evolved? I understand Molly Coward evolved a similar way - is this a method for you?
It has become a method. The earliest draft of what would become The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me (GBT) is the oldest material of that period, and it was dogshit. Although I was always a kind of idiot savant with prose fiction as a teenager, I drifted away from it in favour of pursuing music; then I decided to just sort of write a novel. I was shit for years. That said, the rough structure of the first half of the book is essentially intact. I tend to write my first drafts as fast as possible and then redraft and redraft, eventually it finds the form it gets published in..
I think I am getting better at writing first drafts, and also my style is more stable now, so it’s hard to say whether this method will remain or dissolve as I continue to develop as a writer.
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GBT and Molly Coward, your two novels published this year, both have radically distinct voices. How do you decide, and develop, a voice for a particular project? How do you keep your “own” voice out of it - or work it in?
They represent very different points of my life, on one hand. But I do try to aim to create unique voices for each work. My big project right now goes into that a lot more, exploring polyphony and heteroglossia. Both fascinated me before I had words for them.
I retracted Molly Coward, published by Anxiety Press, earlier this year, for a few reasons—nothing to do with AP, who did a great job with the book. It will actually be a part of that longer project I just mentioned. I have become more and more infatuated with writing hopefully radically distinct characters and narrators.
I see writing and creativity to be more of an act of channeling than personal invention. That’s how it feels to me. I’ve always done voices, I have experience running TTRPGs, as well as directing actors. I am also very fractured and frequently dissociated. So I think I’m just predisposed to that kind of variation in literature, letting the characters speak for themselves whilst channeling it through my own particular idiom.
From the level of detail to the structure of narrative tropes, much of the “extreme” content in and topics of GBT have become subject to renewed ethical and political debate. GBT doesn’t offer the comfortable talking points many such “good” representations might - what are your ethical principles around representing the subject matter you do?
I try to write novels that deal with real-life topics regardless of genre or style. This is a horror book, so I focused on portraying things that horrified me in real life. Abuse and trafficking are things that really happen in the world, on a micro and macro scale. People transgress boundaries they shouldn’t and they don’t always pay for it.
The real-life circumstances the novel reflects are both even worse and all too common. When I started writing the novel, it was Savile and Yewtree, and obviously Epstein hangs over things now. I feel a great powerlessness in the face of these horrors which only until very recently went largely unspoken, so the novel was basically an expression of that.
The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me also engages with the non-literary media in which the (para)politics of abuse, psychosis and conspiracy have become enmeshed: voyeuristic online true crime and shock horror culture. What are your thoughts on working with these as a cultural background?
I grew up on the internet in the mid-late 2000s and that definitely shaped my perspective. As a kid I loved The Fortean Times and other weird British things, which were all very tame and wonderful, wondering if Spring-heeled Jack was real, until the sudden exposure to images/videos of atrocities and resulting conspiracy theories turned my world on its head. It can become a psychotic loop because there is literally nothing you can do about it so you shout at people online and/or develop a substance use disorder. Doomerism definitely reeled me in at various points. Where you can’t distinguish what’s real and what isn’t and eventually give into your own psychotic nihilism. I wrote the novel whilst still within that state. My perspective is different now.
How does transness inform The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me? How does Britishness?
The book is specifically a reaction to and product of British culture. The landscape here itself is often very beautiful. There was a serial killer in my neighbourhood who lived on the street I walked to school as a kid, who murdered women and threw their bodies in the rubbish. I really like Wordsworth, especially the Lucy poems.
I am rather guarded about parts of my identity, now, but I did suffer gender dysphoria in the past, and it was at one of its peaks when I wrote the final version of the book.
Who would you consider your major influences? What, if any, contemporary transgressive literature interests you, and what would you like to see more of in this cultural space?
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In the horror realm: Shirley Jackson, Lovecraft, Dennis Cooper, Thomas Ligotti, Steven King (especially IT), Bret Easton Ellis. Garth Ennis’ Crossed can definitely be applied to this book. Edward Lee’s high literature obviously had its impact. .
Chris Morris, especially Jam.
I don’t think most of my influences come through in GBT, though. Beckett, Nabokov and Eliot are foundational to me. I mentioned Wordsworth. Djuna Barnes, David Foster Wallace, Burroughs… plenty of others.
What is the theology of The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me and is it the same as/compatible with your metaphysical/theological/occult framework now?
GBT is a Gnostic work, I’d say. I’m a monist and somewhat of a Catholic myself, but my fictions take place in a universe quite literally created by me, and I am a rather unsavoury figure, so I am effectively the demiurge of my own literary multiverse. Thus my fiction has a Gnostic underpinning. I was a Gnostic for several years and it’s hard to shake the literary impact, and potential, of that. I don’t want to spoil the novel itself too much — for the little it ultimately gives away — but the arch-antagonist within all of my work is the hunger, and GBT was where that originated. It can be seen as a primordial figure, an eldritch entity, or simply as a concept, a ‘living, literal metaphor’.
What is, or could be, a literary rock star?
It is I, Angel Rose. I say that with equal parts irony and sincerity, and with a lot of venom. My primary defense mechanism is self-mythologisation. My choice of name is no mistake, it is a direct reference to W. Axl Rose himself. I developed this form of identity when I became homeless a year ago due to mental health problems exacerbated by drug abuse and addiction. I’m housed now, but I spent a year partially on the streets, partially housed by associates or living in drug dens, partially in hostels and hotels. I was once arrested after trashing a hotel room and fighting with the cops, which is typical rockstar behaviour, right? But I wasn’t engaging in wild hedonism, I was suffering intense psychotic breaks, and unlike the rock stars of yore, I was actually charged and convicted of the crimes. I spent a year like a blackened Jean Genet. I smoked meth, heroin, crack, sniffed coke, speed, ket, dropped acid, pregabs and benzos, and drank copious quantities of liquor, but not for fun, but because I had no other coping mechanism. Okay, maybe partially for fun. I’m not over my drug abuse issues, but since starting Narcotics Anonymous, I did find my way back to God as I interpret and experience him, so that has turned my life around in ways I didn’t believe were possible. Ultimately, I ended up convicted of several crimes, mostly assaulting police officers and drug possession, as well as the wonderfully-named ‘absconding justice’. I’m currently on probation and, God willing, that’s the end of my chaos-times for now. I want to get back to writing full-time, and have already set upon this task. Not that I didn’t write whilst homeless — I wrote an entire novel in that time, because nothing stops this train.
Rock stars were edgy once, then their transgression became mere hedonism propped up by bloated capital and a form of idolatry that resulted in legal immunity. Actually living wild on the margins is different, so I started to imagine myself an arch artistic outsider, the rock star of transgressive lit. A complete unknown! A real rolling stone. But a man must not let his beast be his master. Otherwise you're no better than Bill Wyman.
A rock star smashes his guitar on the stage — a literary rock star smashes their soul on the page.
We already made a playlist for The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me, but what would you put yours?
Oh, let’s go. Well, for a start, anyone who’s familiar with the work of Steve Albini will recognise the title of my novel being snatched from Big Black’s song, ‘Steelworker’. So, jot that down. I obtained the right to quote it directly from the man himself — I interviewed him as part of a university project. RIP. AFAIK I did actually contribute ‘Good Morning, Captain’ by Slint to your own playlist. But I do have a few more choice cuts for my own Great Big Thing playlist:
‘Bone Fragments’ by Dazzling Killmen
‘British Summertime’ by Brighter
‘In The Cellar’ by the Butthole Surfers
‘If Those Walls Could Speak’ by Mütiilation
‘Children of God’ by EyeHateGod
‘Hot On The Heels Of Love’ by Throbbing Gristle
‘Thumbsucker’ by Pig Destroyer
‘Attractive to the Flies’ by Lugubrum
‘Taut’ by PJ Harvey and John Parish
‘I Bleed’ by the Pixies
‘Gore Motel’ by Bohren & Der Club of Gore
‘Fuckmurder’ by Brainbombs
‘I Would Hurt a Fly’ by Built to Spill
‘Take the Child’ by Shudder To Think
‘Reptile’ by Nine Inch Nails
‘Post Mortal Ejaculation’ by Cannibal Corpse
‘Pornography’ by the Cure
‘Heaven in Her Arms’ by Converge
‘Where Dead Angels Lie’ by Dissection
‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher’ by Jackie Wilson
‘Krätze’ by Grausamkeit