ANGEL ROSE INTERVIEW
“you can’t think about it, really, because if you do then you go crazy, stark gibbering spitting and pissing in your pants crazy, so you don’t think about it. but once in a while you do think about it, and there’s all this weird shit going on and you can’t believe it can all really be like this. you think of all the bad, bad things you do to yourself out of some weird need. you go places, bad places, to fulfill some gnawing need, and you do ugly things to yourself and other people not because of the ugliness–well, sometimes because of the ugliness, i guess–but usually because there’s something else there and you’d do it no matter what. there are people who do. no matter what. they fuck their children, for shit’s sake. like i said, you don’t think about it because you go crazy.”
—Steve Albini, Atomizer liner notes
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.
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?
In terms of influences:
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.
Steve Albini (RIP), who gave me permission to use his lyrics. The title is a quote from ‘Steelworker’. I get a lot of influence from lyricists, but Albini’s approach is one I especially align with, the way he inhabits both victims and perpetrators as narrators and explores the human condition that way.
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. A British deep cut would be Jeff Noon.
I’m also rooted in cinema, so offbeat horror comes in strong: The Driller Killer, Blue Velvet, The Wicker Man, Videodrome, Kids, Martyrs, Gummo, Kill List, Possession. For this novel, anyway. Spoorloos is mentioned in-text with good reason. Hard to Be a God is my favourite film.
I’m not in any cultural spaces right now, but I like the work of Damien Ark, Alexandrine Ogundimu, Rudy Johnson, Grozny and Kat Giordano. Of the older crowd I took a huge deal of inspiration from Noah Cicero.
Gary J. Shipley’s Terminal Park is one of my favourites of recent years. I’ve found the odd story or poem by other writers that have struck me, too, along the way, but I enjoy my privacy now, so I don’t engage with anything contemporary.
Perhaps an influence one might not expect is Jason Pargin. I adored John Dies at the End way back then and it was the book that inspired me to start writing a novel for the first time. Which is wild, to think that style was what I was kind of originally attempting with this book.
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?
I’m not sure. On the surface, it’s pretty vague. Depends on how you interpret the supernatural elements. I was in a weird place at the time of writing, there are Gnostic and pagan undertones, and straight cosmic pessimism. I’m a Catholic and the book was published before my conversion, but I don’t think a work of fiction needs to exist within one’s own faith’s metaphysics, anyway, so I use whatever aspects work for the book. The author is a demiurgic figure, anyway.
What is, or could be, a literary rock star?
I dunno. I’m just a humble writer, musician, director, visual artist, plus actor. I’m housed more stably now, but I spent a year partially on the streets, partially housed by associates or living in weird places, partially in hostels and hotels, sometimes outside churches. God willing, that’s the end of my chaos-times for now. I want to start living a good life. I’ve been doing some writing, and editing. Not that I didn’t write whilst homeless — I wrote an entire novel in that time and read a bunch, too. I need to do more reading. On some Genet atm.
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. By now, I just want to write, work on my life, figure things out. I’m enjoying a simpler life.
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
Thanks for the opportunity to speak. Maran atha.