MysteryPeople welcomes bestselling author John Connolly to BookPeople next Sunday, November 6th, 4p. Scott recently had an opportunity to ask Connolly a few questions about his Charlie Parker novels, his Young Adult fiction, and his notions of good and evil.
MysteryPeople: What made you think it was time to follow up The Gates?
John Connolly: I had just enjoyed writing The Gates so much that it seemed natural to write a second and – hey – maybe a third. It was so completely out of my comfort zone, to some degree, or should have been, but I found it a marvelous release. Also, books like The Gates, The Infernals, Nocturnes and The Book of Lost Things tend to be written out of contract, so there is a certain freedom that comes with working on them. I’m beholden to nobody, which is very liberating.
MP: What brought you into the world of Young Adult fiction?
JC: All writers only have a number of themes that interest them, and to which they return over and over. One of mine is childhood, whether in the ghost stories – where it’s often children in peril – or in the Parker books, or in The Book of Lost Things, which I’ve always described as being a book about childhood for adults. In a way, writing The Gates and The Infernals is just another way of approaching the same subject matter. It’s certainly not the money! There may be an impression that young adult fiction is a potential cash cow for writers – and I think some adult writers have entered the field with a degree of cynicism in that way – but it really isn’t. Also, part of the pleasure for me in writing them has been doing events with kids in schools, but that’s also some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. There’s no point in going into the field of young adult fiction unless you’re doing it for entirely the right reasons. Otherwise, I think you’ll get found out in the end.
MP: You’re one of those writers whose kids’ books have an equally large following with adults. What do you think brings the grown ups over?
JC: I think it’s simply the case that the books made few concessions to their younger readership, so they’re equally accessible to adults and kids, even though they’ve been written with kids in mind. The language and ideas in them are fairly complex, but that’s a hangover from my own youth. When I was growing up there was no such thing as ‘young adult fiction’, not really. At the age of 10 or 11 you simply graduated to adult fiction once you’d exhausted the potential of the kids’ section of the library. I don’t remember struggling too much with the prose in those books, so I approached writing The Gates and The Infernals with that memory. Kids are just much smarter than adults sometimes give them credit for being.
MP: Which character did you have the most fun with in The Infernals?
JC: Mr. Merryweather’s Elves were pretty easy to write for, and their dialog came fairly naturally. While I have a huge fondness for the major characters, especially Samuel, Boswell, and Nurd, there was also a lot of pleasure in giving life to the minor characters: Old Ram, or Crudford, the optimistic gelatinous blob. Crudford will be back, I’m certain. You can’t keep a good blob down.
MP: I believe you said on a Bouchercon panel this year that you set your stories in the US to avoid being labeled an Irish writer. Do you think the Irish sensibility still comes through?
JC: In the Parker novels it probably comes through in the strong streak of anti-rationalism that’s such a part of those books, and probably in the language. In The Gates and The Infernals, it’s probably there in the absurdist humor.
MP: I’m in the middle of Burning Soul. How did you come up with such a questionable client for Charlie?
JC: Actually, I think Randall Haight is probably one of the most intensely human of Charlie’s clients so far, and his background is linked, in some ways, to actual boys who have killed kids their own age. I was fascinated by whether committing such a terrible act in one’s youth would define oneself for the rest of one’s life, and how one might live with that legacy. For The Burning Soul, I consciously kept away from grotesques. Although there are monsters in the book, they’re recognizably human.
MP: On another panel, you said you were skeptical of the idea of evil. The one thing I’ve liked about the Charlie Parker books is how you balance criminal evil with supernatural evil. Does your skepticism have any bearing in those books? Do you see it as a place to examine the concept, particularly with a horror component?
JC: I’m not sure that I’m skeptical about it, exactly, but rarely do we encounter evil in a sense that’s entirely inexplicable, or evil in, say, the Christian notion of an entity that is somehow the source or wellspring for human evil. But, as a Catholic, there is a part of me that wonders whether such a wellspring does exist, and that provides a certain tension in the books. I suppose I’m less interested in notions of evil than in how one might live in a world in which evil exists, and how people are changed when they encounter it. But notions of justice, empathy, compassion, and good and evil, arise naturally in the context of mystery fiction, so in that sense it’s an ideal situation in which to explore those concepts.
Join MysteryPeople on Sunday, November 6, 4p when we welcome John Connolly to BookPeople to speak and sign The Infernals, The Burning Soul, and all of his novels.
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