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. Since this is where we’re starting, I’ll provide a little background to my development as a writer and author, and then answer the question proper. I’ve been writing seriously for eleven years now, and the earliest draft of what would become The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me (GBT) is the oldest material of that period. Although I was a kind of an idiot savant with prose fiction as a teenager, I drifted away from it in favour of pursuing music; then, in my early twenties I decided to just sort of write a novel after reading several crucial books by authors I now consider among my key influences. I finished the first draft in just about exactly a year. It was okay. It contained none of the ‘extremity’ or ‘transgressive’ elements and had a complete anticlimax of an ending. The rough structure of the first half is essentially intact in GBT. This novel was eventually self-published, many years later, in 2020; and thank God that COVID essentially scuppered any chance of even my close friends reading it—I think like, three people total read it to the end—because I was able to take it off KDP, and at first discarded it as a spirited first attempt, and then later reworked it into the available published version.
The years changed me, as did the work of many authors, poets, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists. I also wrote another novel in this period, which is currently in stasis for when I eventually know what to do with it, how to give it its true form (that novel is a lot better than the first draft of GBT, but is still somewhat amdram, if you get me). Crucially, I focused for years reading and writing poetry and short stories, rather than only novels. I honed my craft. I believe that Nabokov is correct when he says that to be a great writer one must be an even greater reader. Anyway, when I reworked GBT into the thing it is now, I was in the midst of my ‘extreme’ period. I wasn’t trying to be edgy; I was doing it to make myself feel something. And just to see how far I could go and still get work published based on the quality of the writing itself. It was a challenge to myself. I also developed the belief that a truly horrifying work would have to be just as visceral to write as to read. I didn’t go into it at first intending to make it as ‘extreme’ as possible. Often my work is a reflection of what I am reading at the moment of writing it: in that era, I was reading Dennis Cooper, Richard Laymon, Andrea Dworkin, Edward Lee, and a lot of romantic and modernist English verse, as well as it reflecting the peak of my obsession with Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
To answer the actual question: yes, it has become a method: accidentally. Almost all the novels I’ve written since — six completed, along with two I am in the process of writing, have either gone through substantial redrafts or complete rebuilds. I am trying to make them ‘exactly what they are meant to be’—in GBT’s case, it was taking a relatively mild work and turning it into something far darker, more ‘extreme’; but in the case of Molly Coward, it was the opposite: the redraft toned it down considerably, without removing its bite. In general, I have softened considerably since writing GBT’s published form. I found that utilising challenging themes is central to my work, but cranking the ‘transgression’ to maximum constantly just wasn’t necessary to most effectively telling the tales and expressing the themes at the heart of the individual works.
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. But, of my eight completed novels, six of them have either gone through this process of transformation or are slated to before I seek to publish them. GBT is unique as the first work that went through this process and the process resulting in a much more ‘extreme’ work: in general, the rest follow the Molly Coward route of toning down explicit content and transgressive aspects, to create more balanced works.
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?
In a word: heteroglossia. To expound in a roundabout manner: I’m glad that GBT and Molly were my first two published novels, as they are the first novels I got ‘right’, GBT as an overhaul of my first completed full-length but immature work, as well as the herald my return to novels after cutting, perhaps filing, my literary teeth proper on poetry and short fiction; then, Molly Coward was the first original novel I wrote since I really figured out what I wanted to do; it was also the first novel where I finished the first draft in just under a single month, a feat I would repeat three times the same year, 2023. I would say those four (which are, [I will describe briefly them only to illustrate my point] in chronological order post-Molly: Panic, a partial-sequel to GBT, a hypermodernist blend of grounded character drama, dystopian nightmare-satire, and stream-of-consciousness horror); K-Town (a queer Cumbrian councilhouse-gothik literary soap opera); and My War, a psychological horror and serial killer narrative for modern England that I plan on substantially expanding in scope) along with GBT represent a distillation of my authorial voice, which has always been rooted in variation and what I hope to be originality. In all my writing, I aim above all to create works that juxtapose beauty and horror, that reflect the beautiful and horrifying world they were written in.
I see writing and creativity to be more of an act of channeling than personal invention. That’s how it feels to me, anyway! I am but a conduit. Molly Coward herself already existed out in God’s aether, I just leapt into her and started writing her, with only bare bones—her name, a rough idea of what she sounded like, looked like, the situation she was in, and how her mind worked—and then I just let her speak, act and express herself, and allowed her contradictions and complexities to reveal themselves naturally.
I’ve always done Voices. I was sort-of a Richie Tozier amongst my childhood friends, went on to become a singer, and also ran a regular D&D campaign. Something also to note is that Artoria is a particular incarnation of my creative identity—she has her own voice within my own (dare I call it an) oeuvre, whereas now I write as Angel Rose, who somewhat departs from Artoria’s voice. Of my eight complete novels, six are credited to Artoria, two so far by my current incarnation as Angel Rose. Of the two incomplete novels I’m still writing, one is by Angel Rose (An epic-length ensemble character drama/psychosocial horror), one is an Artoria joint (another Cumbrian-set extreme horror, this time a period piece set in the early 18th century). So I suppose to answer your question more directly: I would say that I create my own voice using fragmentation, novelty and variation. I won’t get pretentious and start quoting Bakhtin, but heteroglossia is a key part of how and why I write.
Without expecting you to reveal private information in the way that is often unfairly expected of marginalized artists - you’ve clearly embraced fictionalization over “confession” deliberately - are any parts of The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me reflective of your own fairly unique (at least nowadays) life as a writer?
I would say so, yes. The dynamic between confession and fictionalisation is core to my work, and I like to think of my recent written work as founding a style I have coined as autoslander. But I will stick to GBT here. Yes, the novel is in many ways a reflection of my own life at the point it was first written as well as the point it was overhauled. Sean himself lives a life not dissimilar to that in which I was stuck back in 2014, living in Cumbria, a dull job in a supermarket, burgeoning alcoholism, seeking escapism in increasingly aberrant behaviour. As you touch on the topic of ‘transness’ later, I won’t go into it too much here, but the search for a ‘missing girl’ is persistent in my early fiction, and I essentially see that as my manifest ego-animus seeking the shadow anima. Sean has an evident death drive, which I think reflects my own at that point in time.
As for how the overhaul reflected my life, well, I shall say that GBT contains a great deal of the unpleasant intrusive thoughts, images and feelings that beset me back then. I effectively transplanted all the things that tortured me into the novel. I learned that from Chuck Palahniuk. To be blunt, the novel also reflects my experiences with gender dysphoria and transition itself. But we’ll come back to that.
As I grow as an artist, I find myself writing ‘autofiction’ as much as works of ‘pure imagination’. To the point where I want the reader to question my ethics, my intentions, my personal history. What is real, and what is fantasy? But GBT, as my so-far most explicit genre-fic outing, is largely a totally fictional narrative that was built upon the skeleton of personal truth.
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?
Ultimately, I’m not trying to make any particular statement with GBT. It is a simple fiction. I think that a good novel tends to deal with real-life topics regardless of genre or style. Writing a work of horror, I focused on portraying things that horrify me in real life. And, I tried to portray those things realistically, albeit with an eventual ‘supernatural’ spin. Abuse and trafficking are things that really happen in the world, on a micro and macro scale. People really do engage in mutual destruction due to individual traumas. People cross boundaries they shouldn’t; and they don’t always pay for it in the ways those with traditional ethics desire.
As for my own ethics — I will add that the novel is, in part, a critique of the age of consent in the UK. I don’t have a perfect answer to how it should be handled in terms of “Romeo and Juliet” situations, but I think sixteen is too low, as sixteen and seventeen year olds are legally minors. It’s a thorny subject that also opens me up to criticism of portraying uncomfortable sexual situations. So be it. I think that is necessary to the critique inherent in the literature—if the scenes make you uncomfortable, good, they should, because the real-life circumstances these scenes reflect are both even worse and all too common.
I am a haunted individual. The great big thing crawling all over me is my powerlessness in the face of worldwide horrors that are endemic and seem largely uncontested. People call queer people groomers and then hop on PornHub to watch videos of actual minors being raped. That happens every day. I could get into pornography statistics: about how many videos online are actual CSAM; how women are unable to get porn sites to take down videos of them being raped; how snuff is not a myth but an objective reality. Most people cannot handle this kind of knowledge, so they simply forget about it. It disgusts their sensibilities, so they just don’t think about it. I don’t have that vile luxury: I am in constant awareness of this world’s cruel reality, so I write about it, if just to help myself deal with it.
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’ve always been into that kind of shit, both as observer and psychological participant, depending on the content. I despise pornography and the exploitative forms of true crime. But I’ve also been quite the conspiracy theorist at points, and as a kid I did truly love The Fortean Times and other weird British cultural artefacts. I was an online kid from a fairly early age, and I saw a lot of stuff I certainly shouldn’t have, but it only ended up, ultimately, forming my artistic outlook. I think my work is as critical of the culture and media it utilises as it is sympathetic to it. I like the story structure where the conspiracy theorist ends up being correct, but this is a dangerous thread to carry into real life, so I aim to do that differently in future.
How does transness inform The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me? How does Britishness?
Great question. As I said before, GBT is kind-of a transition narrative. The novel itself transitioned as I did. But this isn’t a neat, tidy or even nice transition narrative. My own experience with gender dysphoria and transition was largely unpleasant and attempting to simply turn into a woman left me just as damaged and deranged as I was before. HRT fucked me up. I experienced abuse, dismissal, social hostility, and ultimately even isolation and alienation from the trans ‘community’ itself. I do not consider myself a woman, nor am I any longer a man, if indeed I ever was. The good news is, I actually seemingly ‘cured’ my gender dysphoria, so I don’t need to fuss about it anymore. But when GBT was written and later reworked, I was deep inside it. I was tired of queer positivity and ‘transition will save you’ narratives. I wanted, in the reworking of the book, to make a queer piece of art that had no queer characters, and defied in absolute ‘rainbow culture’. Since then, the majority of my novels have centred on queer outsiders, and taken more balanced stances, but GBT was a howl of pure pain. To me, GBT is essentially my past gender dysphoria embodied in a novel.
As for Britishness, well, I think one of the roadblocks to GBT gaining any kind of traction is that it is quintessentially British. That goes for most of my work. I won’t mince words: this island is rife with fascism and paedophilia in almost equal measures. Our premier soft-fantasy authors and shit comedians will spend all day on X dot com waging war on trans people whilst upholding a society that is ruled by a monarchy and political parties directly tied to global child trafficking cults. This country is sick. Yet, I am British myself, and again, quintessentially so. I am a writer of English prose and poetry and I hold dear my British influences. So what can I do? Write. All I can do is write and hope that I speak some kind of ‘truth to power’, if that is possible.
But to segue into the next question—there’s a great deal of British culture that holds its mark on GBT, such as video nasties, English gross-out and black comedy, children’s programming such as Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids, social realism, folk legends, paganism, and of course, not to even touch on the canon of British prose and poetry. To pick a single figure as example: Wordsworth. William Wordsworth (particularly his Lucy poems) is as much an influence on GBT as the film Martyrs: the novel ends on a paraphrase of the final lines from “Three years she grew in sun and shower”.
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?
I’ll clear my thoughts on contemporary transgressive lit first: it’s mostly dross. Sorry, I just do not connect with the bulk of it. There are major exceptions: e.g., Damien Ark. Without Ark’s novel Fucked Up, there is no The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me. Ark’s work pushed me to be better, to go as far as I needed to tell the story that needed to be told. Otherwise, I think most of what I’ve read from the contemporary crowd is trash. I read Serious Weakness by Porpentine and as far as I can tell, the ‘serious weakness’ in question is a total lack of skill. I’m also a big fan of Rudy Johnson, who is a friend of mine, but I’m not puffing him up just because he provided a blurb for GBT: I asked him to write it (as well as the pull quote for Molly Coward) because I respect him as an artist. Oh, and Alexandrine Ogundimu — another sharp mind and talent. Yes, there are a few contemporaries I respect, who are truly forging unique and biting identities amongst the refuse, but largely, transgressive lit is rather pathetic these days. “Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs”, as Edwyn Collins sang. Everyone wants to be Dennis Cooper, but nobody’s actually read him. As for the bulk of the indie imprints claiming to be ‘transgressive’ — utter jokes.
Now. My own influences. Let’s focus on GBT’s primary touchstones. Lovecraft, obviously; he’s a thru-line in my work, and even my more realist work is shaded with his style and tone. Ligotti, naturally. Nabokov. McCarthy. I already mentioned Edward Lee. Stephen King himself. Beckett. Cooper, duh. Bret Ellis. GBT can also be perhaps seen as “Hostel as written and directed by Andea Dworkin”. Away from literature, Chris Morris is a very important figure, particularly Jam and Blue Jam. Matthew Holness. Films such as Spoorloos (directly mentioned in GBT), the aforementioned Martyrs, The Wicker Man, Hot Fuzz, the work of Abel Ferrara, not to mention giallo cinema: the title being so unwieldy is a nod to those classic sprawling giallo titles. I’m not perfectly versed in gialli en masse but Argento and Fulci certainly hold their mark on the novel.
Perhaps the one influence one might not expect is Jason Pargin. I adored John Dies at the End and it was the book that inspired me to start writing a novel, which way down the line has become The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me. I think in this light one can see shades of David, Amy and John in Sean, Lydia and Wretch.
As for what I want from the scene personally? Good prose, that’s all. I want to read the work of writers who have actually taken the time to get good. It takes practise. Talent is wasted on the prideful, as pride is the root of all sin. If you can’t take the time to hone your craft, I don’t have time to read your shit.
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