Since the release of his short story collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead in 2006, Alan DeNiro has been known for his mind-splicing short fiction. His novel debut, Total Oblivion, More or Less was released late last fall, a fantastical apocalyptic novel told from the point of view of sixteen-year-old Macy, who flees St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family when the city becomes overrun by rampaging bands of Scythian warriors. Filled with unpredictable characters and sly, tongue-in-cheek moments, Total Oblivion, More or Less is equal parts surreal adventure story and unflinching family drama. Much to the glee of the PLC, Alan was willing to sit down with us over the ansible and answer a few of our questions about his writing in general and Total Oblivion, More or Less in particular.
PLC: What was the genesis idea for Total Oblivion, More or Less? Was there a specific genre convention you wanted to play with or subvert? You previously touched on the idea of an ancient empire taking over the modern-day US in your short story Our Byzantium- are the stories related?
AD: The novel isn’t related specifically to “Our Byzantium,” except maybe as a similar foray into that kind of fabulist set-up. But the aims of that short story and the novel are completely different–”Our Byzantium” is a kind of mapping of an interior landscape, while in Total Oblivion, it’s a mapping, in a way, of everything that the protagonist happens to be around and moves through, if that makes sense. It’s about the story she moves through.
The genesis itself of the novel is a little murky, but the voice of Macy really started things up and started spooling the thread of the narrative. Also, I really wanted to explore family dynamics in a really dystopian setting–to explore “normal” life events in the midst of crisis. I had put the novel aside for a year and a half when I had gotten about halfway through, but when Hurricane Katrina hit, it suddenly hit me that all of the latent issues that were there in the book were coming to life (not that those problems of ecological and social disaster weren’t bubbling under the surface for a long long time). The premise of the novel seemed less fabulist and more “real.” So that’s what pushed me to finish the book, to explore that.
PLC: One of our favorite things about TOMOL is that there are no explanations for what happens. No technobabble about the origins of the plague wasps, for example. We found it refreshing, but it may frustrate certain types of reader. What made you decide to leave all that out?
AD: Pretty much to be authentic to the P.O.V., and by extension, Macy. Or maybe the other way around. It was a deliberate choice, for sure–I wanted the immediacy when crazy events impacted her and her family, to keep it moving briskly, and not to have a kind of world-building guessing game where it would be like the reader could puzzle out what was happening to her. Macy doesn’t know–and in much of the novel I don’t have explanations for what happens either. Also I wanted to embed as a theme in the book the idea of oblivion, forgetfulness. At times Macy really does want the answers, but no one seems particularly interested in giving them to her. I guess that’s the purpose of having the novel start the way it does, with a very elliptical story.
By the way, for sure, some people have loved this and some people have been really livid about this choice of storytelling.
PLC: That does seem like a more authentic, ‘real world’ approach to us- especially, as you mentioned, in the wake of Katrina, where answers were not forthcoming from those best suited to supply them.
PLC: OK, we have to ask this- There are no quotation marks in TOMOL. What was your intention there?
AD: Somewhat of the same deal–to create a kind of narrative flow where one event slid into the other, with a narrative that has a gamboling, “rivery” feel.
I thought a LOT more readers would have complained about this, but from what I’ve seen it hasn’t been too bad, so you never know.
PLC: It only took us a line or two to accept it. We suppose quotation marks can push the reader out, rather than pulling them in, as they are part of the artificial construct of novel formatting.
PLC: So, who is your favorite character in TOMOL? Why?
AD: The obvious answer would have to be Macy…if I wasn’t struck by her character (in various senses of that word) it would have been hard for me to write about her. A close second would have to be Em. She is a bad-ass but I wanted to make her genuinely scary, even if she was theoretically on Macy’s side.
PLC: You’ve said on your blog that the label “slipstream” can make you uneasy. How do you classify your work?
AD:I tend to think of myself as a writer. It’s taken me a long time for me to reach this point.
PLC: Good answer! Who/what are your biggest writing influences?
AD: These fluctuate daily or weekly, but I would have to say: Borges, Dungeons & Dragons, abandoned buildings, The Bible, Herodotus, 17th century Dutch art, and my wife.
PLC: What is your next project?
AD: I’m working on a new novel which is a kind of alternate history or historical fantasy (though, again: writer, not historical fantasist) about the painter Vermeer. It’s going to be longer than Total Oblivion, and so far so good.
PLC: We can’t wait to see how that works out- It’d be nice to see a historical fantasy that doesn’t center around a military or political figure.
PLC: Our last question, and by far the most important: Death by watermelon? Or death by dik-dik?
I think I would rather die by cuteness, any day, so the dik dik for sure.
Liked Alan? Of course you did. He’s a great guy. His blog is here. You can buy Total Oblivion, More or Less here, and while you are at it, grab a copy of Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead here. And to whet your appetite while you’re waiting for your packages of booky goodness, you can even read a “fun size” chunk of SKDITLOTD for completely gratis over here at Scribd.
