Thomas Sullivan Redux

Several years ago, I did a review of a novel, DUST OF EDEN, for Cemetery Dance Magazine. In the process of getting that review completed, I met an incredible man, a talented author, and one of the finest friends I’ve known. In the time between my last interview with Sully and now, he’s had several novels come out, and a lot of words have passed through the keys, so I thought it was time for a little update. As an added bonus, I’ve acquired a small number of copies of some of Sully’s books – for those of you interested, they’ll be on sale here. I have three copies of his novel SECOND SOUL and two copies of his hardcover novel THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON for which he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize… Now, without further hesitation or ponficiation, I bring you the updated five question interview with author Thomas Sullivan…

DBJ: Your recent novels, The Water Wolf, Second Soul, and Dust of Eden, flirt with the notion of being traditional horror novels. I say they flirt with it, because, despite definitely horrific moments and downright eerie imagery, their supernatural elements tend more toward a very dark sort of fantasy than horror. Much of what is labeled horror in today’s market is either very brutal twists on themes too close to the reality of our world for comfort, or zombie and vampire blood baths ushering in the apocalypse. Your fiction tends to be internal to the characters involved, and while broad and sweeping in scope, also a bit otherworldly. Another author this brings to mind is Clive Barker, who has recently gone on record saying there is not enough of the supernatural in today’s horror, and that the tendency to glorify horrors of a more “real” sort disturbs him. My question is this. First off, do you agree with Mr. Barker that the supernatural element is vital to this sort of fiction, and secondly – whether you agree or not, do you consciously seek the supernatural elements you use to define your themes, or do they just grow naturally from the creative process?

TS: Would you believe, I’ve never read Clive Barker? This is a measure of how lost in space I am, since I know he is much heralded. My only excuse is that there is a measure of potential originality to be gleaned from being illiterate, since that eliminates the possibility of being derivative. In any event, whether or not there is enough of the supernatural in today’s horror is not an either/or proposition for me. The term Horror is just a label, and if it isn’t big enough to cover the sub-genres, then another term is in order.
For the record, my personal tastes do not incline toward splatter horror. If the visceral details of grisly scenes become gratuitous, scatological or pander to shock for the sake of shock, I am left at the station unchilled and probably bored to tears. There is a place and a proportion for gross minutia, but if it’s unrelenting then it is apt to have the same effect on me as a little boy shouting, “titty, ka-ka, poo-poo” to impress the world with his anger and rebellion. That said, I do not disdain readers who get a dependable adrenaline rush from that every time and require little else in the way of characterization and psychological terror. But for me, fears, forebodings, and dark anticipations are a much bigger rush than graphic certainties that hammer you between the eyes or aim relentlessly at the gag reflex. The supernatural is a way to extend those parameters of psychological terror. This is apparently what Mr. Barker favors. So to answer the second part of your question, it is a natural outgrowth of my creative process to reach into the paranormal. “What if…” simply takes me beyond the borders of rational nature to an outpost of outré possibilities. Shadows and echoes are much scarier to me than organic debris because they suggest occult powers and forces beyond comprehension and control.
My own imagination as a reader yields up its maximum fears when things are implied as much as spelled out. I’d much rather hear the onrushing train, see the blue steel rails vibrating, and contemplate the awful silence in the behemoth’s wake, then to dwell visually on the kid tied to the railroad track – toot-toot, smash, squish-squish, bleed, bleed, bleed. Maybe it’s because I grew up loving old-time radio more than TV. The visual medium seems to have created a passive generation which to some extent has lost the ability to make inferences or fill in the blanks.

DBJ: Nature plays such a part in your life, and your work, that it’s nearly impossible for me to think of you without imagining you paddling around in a river, or skiing, or rollerblading. Is that connection as strong as it appears to be, and how do you channel it into your work?

TS: The connection can scarcely be overstated. Nature works for me on many levels. In a practical sense, it keeps me optimal physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, while philosophically it gives me confirmation of human truths and refutes societal fallacies. And if you’ll allow me to fudge the term a little, the classic definition of art is to hold a mirror up to nature. Now that may include all things human and so why do I need to flee into the woods in order to see into that mirror? The answer is that nature in the raw is a very good model for human behavior. I gain perspective and am able to see the things that are universal for me. A lot of my work celebrates the individual, the struggle for freedom, self-honesty, personal fulfillment, and by contrast seeks to identify the conformity and hypocrisies that poison the former. Escaping into nature removes me from the social stress that tends to inhibit and sometimes imprison us all. I need to reconnect with the timeless truths I find there every day. Feeling confident about those truths is a source of strength to get me through the other 22 hours.

DBJ: A great deal of your life seems to be and have been dedicated to a long string of important relationships with creative people. You’ve been to Glenn Fry’s birthday party, you’ve dropped squirrels in the yard of other not-to-be-named celebrities, you’ve skied and skated with young women from all walks of life, picked up new and complex friendships from something as simple as a day writing in the coffee shop. How do these relationships feed into / influence your work? Do you actively seek them, or are you like a people magnet on high power?

TS: All relationships are important to me. They are important for two reasons. First the altruistic one, which probably doesn’t come naturally to me, but I like to think I learned something from my mother, or to put it another way: don’t just give until it hurts; give until it stops hurting. I need to give. Maybe it’s to counter all my failures, flaws and shortcomings — in short redemption – doesn’t matter, as long as it’s sincere. That’s a critical factor. I struggle with that constantly. What I do in life can’t be just about me. I have to escape that. A woman, who became closer to me than anyone else in my whole life, made me see some distinctions about that recently. She challenged my motives, and in the process and context of our own intense relationship gave me fresh insights. I do get something out of the complex friendships you cite. Collectively they are a substitute for the more sustained single relationships that mark most people’s lives and which I seem naturally to resist. It’s almost a joke really, because I am such a private and solitary individual, and yet my days are marked with a succession of quick but sometimes profound contacts. I never seek them out, and I’ve always preferred but never had a single sanctuary relationship with whom to share everything. In its purest form, I suppose that would be a gender relationship — a soul mate. The romantic idealist in me has been too particular to let that happen, however. Hence, a collective of more superficial relationships to substitute for it. Or, as I like to say, when you don’t belong anywhere, in a sense you belong everywhere. When I was married (23 years), I was virtually isolated, which seems to confirm something of what I’m saying here. Then there is the second reason why relationships are important to me. I feed off human nature intellectually. Yes — hisssss — you’ve exposed the empirical vampire in me. This is the tap root of the writer Thomas Sullivan. I don’t know about a people magnet in general, but anomalies blip on my radar with remarkable regularity. Or maybe it’s the anomaly in everyone that makes the ping. Invaluable to a writer, the fountainhead of characterization.

DBJ: You’ve been part of this business for a long time now. You’ve come at it from a number of different directions, had editors, publishers, agents, and some pretty serious successes. There are always mountains to climb. From your perspective, what stands out as the most important thing to keep in mind when chasing dreams through the paper and publishing jungles, and what do you do to try and maintain your sanity?

TS: “To thine own self be true.” Ultimately, success means satisfaction on that score. The marketplace may make you dance to others’ tunes, or you may loan yourself to what circumstances demand, but if that’s as far as you get, you’ll never find lasting fulfillment. You have to be real. You have to write on your terms sooner or later, else you just went along for the ride. Call it freedom. Call it honesty. But whatever you call it, the closer your inner self matches the one you put out for show, the better you will feel. The happier you will be. You may see some scars when you look in the mirror, but you will also see all that you could be staring back at you. And no shackles. You can live with that — in fact, you can only live with that. Sometimes that’s a tough sell to yourself when you’re in the middle of that journey, and you think you can be whatever you have to be in the eyes of others. You want respect on their terms. You never see the damage that does to you while it’s happening. You tend to think that if you’re okay in the eyes of the world, it won’t matter if you’re not true to yourself. So you simply make a note about the compromise and retreat a little further with your dreams to find a deeper sanctuary. But what you are really doing is amputating part of yourself. I learned that the hard way, and yet I was lucky. The object lesson didn’t come to me from my writing, but from my personal life, and so the writer me knew enough to keep faith with who I am. I maintain my sanity by keeping those priorities straight. I know I cannot live without self-honesty and the freedom to let that show. I define myself and, as difficult as that may be in the short-term, when acceptance comes on your own terms it is emancipating and rewarding.

DBJ: I normally have the pat question for number five, but you answered that last time. I’m going to ask you about Case White. I’m fascinated by this novel, by the parts that are real, and the parts that are not, and the inability of publishers, editors, and some readers to tell the two apart, or to trust your research. I think, personally, that this is a “home run ball” of a novel…and I’d love to see it reach print…can you just do a short rundown on it and tell us about the process, the idea – no spoilers, of course, but…your thoughts on this amazing (and amazingly not published) novel.

TS: Bless you. I was dragged kicking and screaming into this, the most fully researched and developed novel I have ever written. Wasn’t interested in the Nazi shtick and all that sadism that led up to World War II, but I was drawn to the epic turmoil of normal people in abnormal times. I wanted to know how a nation could go insane for 12 years. I saw that there was a great divide between the straight historians who recorded a mountain of eccentricity but found no thread of continuity in it and the sensationalists who took it all downtown with little objectivity. It was as if the mystics discovered an open door to an irrational view of history, while the rational thinkers were struck dumb with disbelief. What kind of man says, as Goering did, “When I hear the word culture, I draw my revolver”? What kind of Fuhrer declares, “I haven’t come to save the world, but to sack it”? Germany’s anti-intellectual Third Reich was chillingly methodical on a certain level of bizarre and mystical undergirding. I became immersed in four years of reading, and eventually the swings of a bigger pendulum having to do with the palpable nature of evil took shape. I saw a way, through twin perspectives, to write a historical novel that put it all together. A young German architect who falls into the employ of the Reich and a leader in the Jewish underground weave the two halves of my novelization across 50 years of riveting human drama and incredible global events. And, as you note, the most believable parts are my modest fictions. The historical facts inevitably challenge editors who are not intimately familiar with the era. Though they become excited about the book and the writing, they are apt to see those facts as encumberments to a genre fiction novel. More than any other work of mine, this one needs to be handled as historical fiction. Early on CASE WHITE did attract a student of the era, a small publisher in fact who knew what I had done and was extremely enthusiastic in his offer and plan to promote the book; but my sad story is that his wife died and he got out of publishing. I began my career as a hardcover novelist in mainstream (THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON, a literary satire, Dutton, 1988). The book still has a cult following. But after a divorce and finishing raising my son by myself, I reentered the market with more commercial thrillers beginning with World Fantasy Award Best Novel finalist THE MARTYRING and four others. CASE WHITE is perhaps a bridge book between those two aspects of my career. I have been badly fragmented, through no one’s fault but my own, making it difficult for fans to find me. Oddly enough, yet another dimension of writing seems to have focused attention in the past year on who I am. My essays, columns and posts have brought in a phenomenal and affirming grassroots response, and sites like Storytellersunplugged.com, Dearreader.com, and my own webpage, have helped define me in a coherent way, judging by an outpouring of fan e-mail and site hits. I think what I need now is an editor/publisher patron who wants to pull it all together with enough comprehensive promotion to capitalize on the several footprints I have in the literary landscape. CASE WHITE may be just that vehicle.

Sully

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/