Interviews

An Interview with Elizabeth Hand by Nick Gevers

INTRODUCTION

Elizabeth Hand is one of American literature's finest prose poets of the fantastic. Her novels are powerfully lyrical, suffused with visionary agony and dreamlike eroticism; in her hands, myth reattains the nightmare energy of its origins, staining the present and the future with atavistic hues of blood. Dionysus and Apollo clash in manners utterly strange yet deeply contemporary; if the sensibilities of Gene Wolfe and Angela Carter could ever achieve fusion, they do so in the works of Elizabeth Hand.

Hand began her career as a published author in the late 1980s, with a number of well-regarded short stories in a dark supernatural vein; her short fiction was eventually collected in Last Summer at Mars Hill (1998), the title novella of which won a Nebula Award. Her first three novels, Winterlong (1990), Aestival Tide (1992), and Icarus Descending (1993), together constitute an extended entropic romance, a panorama of a far-future America decayed into baroque savagery, rendered with a fraught ornate emotionalism. The same orgiastic romanticism informs two major novels concerning the centuries-long supernatural intrigues of the secret order of the Benandanti, Waking the Moon (1994) and Black Light (1999); Glimmering (1997) is an intense and haunting depiction of the Millennium as a fateful gathering point for the energies of the Dead. Hand's novels are superb: fevered and opulent.

I interviewed Liz Hand by e-mail from July to September 2001.

THE INTERVIEW

NG: Your works quite consistently feature decadence and apocalypse; your contemporary and future settings are invariably haunted by ghosts human and divine. What factors, autobiographically speaking, would you say have lent your oeuvre this particular set of flavours?

EH: I grew up the oldest child in a large Irish Catholic family (my mother was a Presbyterian convert, baptized around the time of my first communion). Belief-wise, I fell away from the Church when I was about fifteen, but I went to a Catholic high school and graduated from a Catholic University. All of which, I think, left me with a sort of template for belief, though I'm not a believer. Certainly I grew up thinking a lot about the intervention in human affairs of various supernatural or divine agencies. There's probably a degree of wish fulfillment there -- like, if Jesus isn't going to save, maybe Elvis will! But I have to say (regretfully) that I've seen very little in my real life to indicate the presence of either the supernatural or the divine.

As for apocalypse, I was imprinted at an early age with the idea of The End of the World (this also courtesy of the Catholic Church). I can
remember being terrified of thunderstorms -- I'd think, Uh oh, THIS IS IT. I was born in 1957, and grew up in the metropolitan New York area with the Cold War as a backdrop. In kindergarten and first and second grade we had constant air raid drills, sirens going off and that whole "Duck 'n Cover" drill when you cower under your desk or else hide in the classroom cloak closet, waiting for the Atomic Bomb to drop. I had nightmares about that well into my twenties. For a while in the 1970s I lived near a fire station in D.C., and when the fire sirens would go off at night I'd wake up terrified -- again -- that THIS WAS IT.

Of course it never was, but it was good practice at being scared and thinking about scary stuff.

The preoccupation with decadence came later, when I was a teenager. I loved the English Decadents and Aesthetes, writers and painters alike -- Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers; the English Pre-Raphaelites and the French Symbolists. I read Rimbaud at an impressionable age, and Rimbaud makes it seem as though anything is possible through Art. And then of course I was a teenager in the 1970s, growing up around New York City, when anything WAS possible, or seemed to be. Some of my friends were the people in Black Light, children of artists or writers or actors, privileged children with Bohemian aspirations and not a lot of adult supervision. Whereas I came from a different background, a very conservative, close-knit family of overachievers, but respectable Republican overachievers -- lawyers, doctors, social workers -- and not artists. So I was completely fascinated by kids who could quote "The Cenci" while shooting up heroin. I could never do either; probably for the best...

NG: Another recurrent thread in your novels is theatricality, running from the players in Winterlong to the Dionysian acting community in Black Light. Your characters are generally fond of poetic recitation. Why this attraction to the stage and its gestures?

EH: Well, I grew up in a small town where a lot of Broadway people lived, about sixty miles north of the city; more theater types lived in the area around us. It was sort of in the water there. Down the road from us lived a wonderful old woman named Jane Widdecombe and her husband, Wallace Widdecombe. They had been actors on stage and in radio, and when Mr. Widdecombe died at the age of 101, he was the oldest living member of Actors Equity. My parents helped care for Mrs. Widdecombe after her husband's death, and from her I absorbed a sense of what the theater had been like in this country, from touring companies in the 1920s through her later radio career and her husband¹s Broadway career.

Then, when I was about fourteen, my mother started taking us to the
American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut, which was a wonderful experience, seeing four or five plays every summer, Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and Restoration comedy. And of course we went to the city and saw stuff on Broadway. By the time I was in high school, that was just something I'd do with my friends -- I ran with a crowd that was stagestruck, like the kids in Black Light. We'd do stuff like skip school and take the train down to the city for the opening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and get coconuts from Terry Jones and Michael Palin. That was an important educational experience. Everyone was active in summer theater groups and high school theater, we loved old movies, new movies, B movies -- but this was before the dawn of cable TV or VCRs or cheap videocams, so we were probably much more into live theater than we would be, say, if we were kids today.

For a while I thought I'd be an actor, or at least a director. My role model (believe it or not) was Noel Coward. In high school I acted, and directed Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. I also started writing plays for a local drama group called The Hamlet Players. And that was a wonderful experience, to write something and see it produced, to hear actors saying lines I'd written. Then I went to college to study drama, and absolutely BOMBED on my first audition -- one of those great, life-changing failures of ambition.

Still, I must have absorbed some raw nerve from Noel Coward, because after delivering my last line I stood on the stage and announced to all the directors and professors in the audience that I was available immediately to do tech work. And so right off the bat I got to that. I did do some undergraduate acting at university, as well as directing and playwriting, but I kind of burned out on it. I realized that I loved the milieu of the theater, but I didn't have the talent or ambition to succeed at it. I also realized that it is much, much harder to write a good play than it is to write a good book. I'd been writing all this time, not plays but stories, my first faltering attempts at a novel. I decided to lower my ambitions: if I couldn't be Noel Coward, I'd be Henry James.

Actually, what I really, really wanted to be was Lou Reed.

NG: You have a notable prose style, sensuous and genuinely heady, perfectly matched to your typical subject matter. How did you develop this, and to what, in particular, would you ascribe your extraordinary
skill at the verbal evocation of the supernatural?

EH: My prose style evolved from what I'd read as a kid. I was a precocious reader who read in a fairly ass-backwards manner, especially anything I perceived as being an adult book. When I was eight, I came across a copy of C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce in our house, and read it over and over again, and a year or two later I read Perelandra; but I didn't get to the Narnia books till I was thirteen. I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me -- especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them -- I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.

Lord of the Flies haunted me for years, maybe because when I was in fifth grade I went to a birthday party where the movie was shown in a little home screening room -- the parents were the casting directors for the film. So here's all these little girls, who were mostly bored; and me, who was terrified and fascinated. That still gives me nightmares, too.

I loved ghost stories, especially the classic Victorian antiquarian stories of people like M.R. James and Sheridan Lefanu. I devoured The Lord of the Rings when I was about nine, I read that over and over and over again. And I loved Lord Dunsany, and E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, Hope Mirlees' Lud-In-The-Mist; the classic fantasies that were pretty much all that existed back in the late 1960s, before the genre had reinvented itself for a mass market.

But probably my biggest single adult influence was Angela Carter. I first read The War of Dreams when I was eighteen, and I thought, That's it -- this is what I want to do as a writer. That combination of creating new myths and retelling old ones, in a very heightened prose style. I was absolutely entranced by her work.

NG: In the context of SF and Fantasy, you seem to belong to a cluster of writers who rework myth with great eloquence--Tim Powers, John Crowley, and Gene Wolfe leap to mind; but you have also been associated with the school of the "New England ethical romance". How would you contextualise yourself, in terms of contemporary literature and the arts generally?

EH: It's interesting that all of the writers you cite are Catholic -- Crowley and myself are not practicing Catholics, but Tim Powers and Gene Wolfe are. Catholicism presents you with an immense mythological template to draw on, from the most basic tenets of Christ's suffering and death and resurrection, which parallels the more ancient Dionysian and Anatolian mysteries, to the individual stories of all those saints, and the Virgin Mary -- it just goes on forever. In my case, when the element of belief was removed, I was left with a real fascination for why people believe, especially in an era like ours which would seem to leave little room for the numinous. I think that you take a dangerously reductionist stance, though, if you start examining writers simply in terms of religion, or sexual orientation, or anything else. Probably what's more to the point is that we may have read some of the same books when we were growing up and then coming of age as writers. Maybe not Gene Wolfe, who I think is sui generis as a contemporary writer, but I know that many of my contemporaries -- Paul Park, Jim Kelly, Richard Grant -- have the same literary touchstones, not just the great fantasists but 20th century writers like Nabokov, Pynchon, the Beats, M. John Harrison. Mike Harrison and Robert Stone are probably the two writers whose work I admire most -- I think Harrison is simply brilliant.

But I honestly can't say where I fit in. It's a problem: bookstore people tell me all the time how they don't know where to put me on the shelves, since I'm all over the map as far as genre goes - I've written fantasy and science fiction and horror -- but my later writing is more mainstream.

As for The New England School of Ethical Romance, John Clute invented that as a sort of joke in a review years ago; but it's a pretty apt grouping of writers -- Crowley, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Richard Grant, Paul Park, myself (I hope I'm not forgetting anyone) -- whose work shares a certain lyricism and a concern with metaphysical matters.

NG: Your first novel, Winterlong, was a striking debut, rich and terrifyingly intense, set quite far in the future; yet its main locale, the City of Trees, is actually Washington D.C., where you worked for a time in a museum. What stimulated your opulent re-imagining of the capital?

EH: Again, childhood forces loom large. I was four or five when I first went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and was enthralled. There was something about the physical space, that vast Victorian architecture filled with bones and dioramas and cases of stuffed birds and bats and beetles ... I just loved it. I wanted to be a biologist of some sort, mostly so I could work in a place like that.

There's an American kids' book called From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about two children who run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- that made a big impression on me. Years later, when I was actually working at the Smithsonian Institution, I'd wander around the museums there on my lunch hour and daydream about what it would be like to live inside them. It was a small jump from that to tribes of Curators squatting in the ruins of the Smithsonian.

I moved to D.C. in 1975 to attend college, and -- just like Sweeney in Waking the Moon -- I fell in love with the city. To me it was a sultry, romantic, labyrinthine place, all those Greek and Romanesque public buildings, and all sorts of exotic (to my eyes) architecture in the various embassies. People forget what an international city D.C. is, and how vividly multicultural -- when I lived there, the white minority was about 25% of the city's population. And of course D.C. really was called The City of Trees -- trees from all over the world had been planted there, and in the semi-tropical climate a lot of exotic plants throve. To an imaginative person with a stultifying day job (me), it was an escape to wander the streets and imagine that I was in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria, or Samuel Delany's Bellona. And D.C. is a small city, physically -- you could walk everywhere (and I did), from the burned-out riot corridor to the C & O Canal in Georgetown, along the Potomac or Embassy Row, through these tiny ethnic neighborhoods, or Rock Creek Park, or over the bridge to Crystal City.

Durrell's Alexandria Quartet was one of my favorites when I was young -- books best read when one is fourteen or fifteen. When I wrote Winterlong, and later Waking the Moon, I very consciously tried to make the city itself a character in the novel -- conscious, of course, that my imagined city was far more exotic than the real one. But all the places in those books are real, and in the right sort of light, at the right age, I think Washington is a magical place. I lived there for thirteen years, and until the day I left I never wanted to live anywhere else. I went back for the first time two years ago, after over a decade's absence; it was like seeing an old lover and discovering -- with great relief -- that the flame is still there.

Gore Vidal famously remarked of walking through the city with his grandfather, a senator, and the old man telling him, "Someday all this will make marvelous ruins."

NG: Winterlong's sequel, Aestival Tide, posits an even more remarkable city, pyramidal Araboth. What inspired this extravagant confection?

EH: I never read a lot of science fiction growing up, but I loved old sci fi movies, the trashier the better. The first science fiction book I did read was Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, when I was ten, and obviously Winterlong owes a huge debt to that.

Aestival Tide was sort of a lark for me. I'd recently discovered M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, and I wanted to write something in that ironic, elevated style, while at he same time paying homage to all those old movies full of robots and domed cities and evil rulers. Just about everything in Aestival Tide is a deliberate reference to something else in another sci-fi book or movie -- the fembot in Metropolis, Darth Vader, Viriconium, Gorgo, Atlantis ... I could create a science fiction concordance out of that one novel. It's the only one of my books that I can stand to reread (just little bits of it), maybe because it didn't have a lot of my own emotional life invested in it -- it was just fun to write and kind of goofy. The design of the city itself was a throwback to stuff like the old movie City Beneath the Sea, or A. Merritt's lost worlds -- improbable but entertaining to create and then inhabit, as a writer.

The setting of Araboth is real, though -- in south Texas, there's a lost city called Indianola that was destroyed twice within eleven years by massive hurricanes. The first time was at the end of the nineteenthcentury; they rebuilt the city and then it was wiped out again. We used to go visit it when I was growing up (my mother is from south Texas). I was very impressed by the ruins you could glimpse beneath the calm blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and then in the 1980s people began to build there again, and I thought, Uh oh, just a matter of time ....

I'm still waiting for Ucalegon to blow it all away again.

NG: Two recurrent -- mythical -- figures underlie the Winterlong books: Dionysus and the Magdalene. Why are you so preoccupied with these archetypes? What do they signify for you personally?

EH: I'd honestly have to say that the Magdalene is more of a throwaway referent for me, though obviously I grew up with all the Catholic Marian mythos. I had intended to do a lot more with the Magdalene in Winterlong than I actually did, one reason why the novel sort of stumbles to its conclusion.

The Dionsyian mythos, though, has haunted me since childhood. I've always had numinous dreams, and a lot of them feature a Dionysian character I named The Boy in the Tree. He first came to me when I was seventeen: I had a dream that I was on a flat featureless plane, mist everywhere. Then there was a blinding flash of lightning, deafening thunder, and I fell to the ground. Someone reached out to touch the middle of my forehead with a finger: I opened my eyes, the mist was gone, and there he was: the boy in the tree, this beautiful demonic figure with mocking green eyes. After that he would appear in dreams, sitting up in a tree and talking to me, and I'd have this incredible wave of emotion, a feeling I've only ever had in dreams -- the most amazingly intense combination of desire and loss and anticipation. Later I'd think (still dreaming) This is what I will feel when I die. And who knows? Maybe I will.

Then, while researching Winterlong, I found a reference to Dionysios of Boeotia, where the god was called the One in the Tree. So even though I rationally know there's no such thing as a Dionsyian god, or a universal unconscious, it's very, very easy for me to extrapolate them both from my own dream-experience. The roots of these myths of the dying or vegetative god are so ancient and so many that one can wander among them forever, I think, yet never find a single source. And the primary material in Greece is so fascinating and so dark -- The Bacchae, what we know of the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries -- great stuff for writers.

For me personally, of course, Dionysos embodies all the themes that have always preoccupied me: mutable sexual identity, altered states of
consciousness; madness, the theater, ecstacy. As a special bonus you get red wine and human sacrifice.

"Dionysos: the only god you'll ever need."

NG: The Winterlong series, although very impressive overall, seemed to trail off somewhat with its concluding volume, Icarus Descending. Were you satisfied with this outcome? Have you considered returning to or reworking the sequence in some manner?

EH: I hated Icarus Descending. It's the book I like the least of all I've written. The characters felt played out to me, I had no real joy in the writing of it, and I can't even recall now how I came to write it -- I suspect my publisher wanted to continue a series, but I shouldn't blame them. I'm the one who wrote it. There were a few elements of the book I liked -- the navigator, the notion of Margalis Tast'annin becoming more human, emotionally, as he became less so physically.

And there is that great scene of mushrooms growing out of brains in a dank basement: I liked that.

If I ever did return to the sequence, I think I'd play up Tast'annin's role in it. In a lot of ways, he remains the single character I find most interesting. Wendy Wanders became less intriguing as she became more human, but Tast'annin, because he's so flawed, becomes more so -- to me, at least.

I don't know if I ever will write more in that vein. My publisher wants me to create more mainstream books, and I don't know that I really have a great gift for traditional (or non-traditional) science fiction -- lots of people do it better than I do. I suppose if hundreds of thousands of readers stood up and made a great outcry demanding that I rewrite Icarus Descending, I would capitulate. Somehow it seems sort of doubtful that they will.

NG: In your more recent, contemporary, novels, two settings persistently feature: Mars Hill, a spiritualist commune, and Kamensic, a wealthy "village" outside New York. How true to life are these places?

EH: Mars Hill was inspired by a real place near where I live on the coast of Maine, a 100+ year old Spiritualist community called Temple Heights: little carpenter's gothic cottages tumbling down a hillside overlooking the sea, very picturesque and, tragically, very susceptible to the terrible development pressure that's bearing down on the small towns around here.

So far, however, the spiritualists seem to be winning out. After I wrote "Last Summer at Mars Hill", I visited the place formally and had a reading done by a psychic there. The place was exactly as I'd imagined it, as were its (human) inhabitants. I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas.

Kamensic is based on Pound Ridge, the town where I grew up, and Katonah, a neighboring village that I found far more romantic than Pound Ridge, probably because it had a train station. Twenty-five, thirty years ago these were beautiful, somewhat eccentric small towns; now they've been destroyed by developers and are just part of the homogenous American suburban landscape. Jonathan Carroll grew up in a similar part of Westchester, a few years earlier than I did, and I recognize his landscapes as part of that same lost world.

I think both Mars Hill and Kamensic are -- or were -- pretty close to their real-life counterparts. I started writing about Kamensic when I was still in high school, and for me it's frozen in that time -- the mid-1970s -- not culturally so much as physically. It was a far more rural area than it is now, exurban rather than suburban. The tiny town where I live in Maine is much more like Kamensic than Katonah is today.

NG: Two of your later novels, Waking the Moon and Black Light, attribute the shape of all human history to an ancient and continuing struggle between the essentially Apollonian "Benandanti" and the basically Bacchanalian "Malandanti". Fanciful and fictional apparatus aside, would you say this opposition is in fact a vital historical constant?

EH: The benandanti I first came across in the work of the great Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg -- his studies The Night Battles and Ecstasies: Origins of the Witches' Sabbath. The benandanti were people who engaged in mock battles at night in the fields, enacting ritual fights with witches; but they in turn were persecuted as witches during the Inquisition -- among other things, they were accused of being werewolves. Coincidentally, John Crowley also makes use of them in his Aegypt sequence, where they're werewolves, though he doesn't refer to them as benandanti.

I lifted the name and some of the facts of their existence -- their ancient origins, the fact that the "Good Walkers" were supposedly protecting mankind from even more ancient evils, their supernatural powers -- and pretty much made up the rest of it. I love the notion of there being a single group of Apollonian watchdogs down through the aeons, keeping the world safe from the malign (and far more fun-loving) forces of Dionysos. I always thought Anne Rice dropped the ball with her Talamasca, another secret society -- far more interesting than her vampires, to me.

It is a useful construct, in that we do, for good or ill, live in a world culture (in the West, at least) that is predominantly patriarchal in its hierarchies. The basically patriarchal notion that Great Forces -- be they government, religion, entertainment media, manufacturers -- know what's best for us, and provide all these good things to us and for us -- television, films, clothing, social services. And we, like dutiful children, accept these things without questioning them or their
provenance.

Whereas the things embodied by the Dionysian or chthonic ethos -- ecstatic sexual or religious or artistic experiences, sometimes created or heightened by the consumption of drugs or alcohol -- genuinely can be dangerous and very threatening to both individual and social order.

In real life, of course, any single person can have both Dionsyian and Apollonian experiences; and most people today (again in the West) tend to have lives ordered by the more "logical", community-oriented Judaeo-Christian mythos (which itself can be traced back, ad infinitum, to earlier religions). I think a culture modelled on a genuine Dionysian model would probably be a terrifying place to live -- but it's that terror that animates it for me, as a writer and reader.

NG: Some feminist readers seem to have bones to pick with you, for example over your not, um, entirely sympathetic treatment of the Moon Goddess in Waking the Moon. Are you a feminist in a definite sense, if
an unorthodox one?

EH: I'm an utterly orthodox feminist in the political or social sense: I want equal rights for women, period, and I vote that way. I support social programs that help women and children; I'm pro-choice, in favor of anything that makes it easier for women to raise their kids, with or without men, in conventional or unconventional family units.

But do I think the world would be a better place if it were run solely by women? No; not any more than I think a solely patriarchal model is an ideal. A lot of the revisionist thinking by feminist mythologisers -- people who based their projections of ancient "matristic" cultures on work done by folks like Marija Gimbutas -- is based on archaeological and anthropological speculation that in some cases has since been proved wrong. The pretty happy flower children who lived at ancient Knossos, for instance, were the result of wishful thinking by the Victorian explorer Arthur Evans (a man, please note). No one actually knows what these cultures were really like, but it's doubtful that they were free of the same problems of sexual inequality that we have today.

My favorite bit of archaeological reconstruction comes from Catal Huyuk, where Gimbutas examined images of vultures surrounded by piles of skulls (many of them of female children), and somehow managed to extrapolate a benign interpretation. I'm sure one reason that so many Greek myths deal with terrifying, powerful women -- Medea, Electra, the Erinyes, the Bacchae -- is that at some point in the misty past, women held a power that was terrifying -- terrifying not because they were women whom men felt threatened by, but because they wielded that power in terrifying rituals that almost certainly involved human sacrifice.

This would not be a popular platform on which to base a feminist agenda.

NG: Glimmering, your millennial fantasy, is, like Icarus Descending, not precisely optimistic about the future of humanity. Do you see human ravishment of the earth as irretrievable, as a certain prelude to
apocalypse?

EH: I do think it's irretrievable, and inexcusable; and yes, I do think at some point we'll have hell to pay. Actually, we already do have hell to pay, but in cheerful human fashion we ignore the warning signs -- a record-breaking hot rainless summer here in Maine, catastrophic weather changes, outbreaks of weird and unpleasant diseases -- and simply Act Like Nothing's Wrong. So what we're experiencing is a long slow-burning fuse of apocalypse, rather than a sudden exciting explosion of one.

But the result will be the same. I can take some small comfort then in sitting on my bit of scorched earth and saying I TOLD YOU SO while bopping predators on the head with ancient copies of Glimmering.

NG: With this bleakness of outlook in mind, your involvement in the writing of media tie-ins has a certain appropriateness: you've novelised sections of both major Chris Carter series, The X-Files and
Millennium, and the apocalyptic thriller 12 Monkeys, none of them exactly cheerful. How congenial have you found this sort of writing?

EH: It's hack work, pure and simple. But it pays reasonably well for a relatively minor expenditure of effort, it can be fun, and in a few cases -- 12 Monkeys especially, which had a brilliant screenplay by Jan & Dave Peoples, and Anna and the King and The Affair of the Necklace -- I was able to embellish with some writing of my own. The novelizations get my name out there to people who have never heard of me, and sometimes I get crossover readers, which is a nice bonus.

NG: Together with Paul Witcover, you conceived the Anima comic or graphic novel project. How did that come about, and what do you see as the guiding spirit of the enterprise?

EH: Anima was an incredible amount of fun. I had worked with Rob Simpson when he was an editorial assistant at Bantam, my first publisher. Paul and I had collaborated on a few stories there, spun off from Superman and Batman; when Rob ended up at DC Comics, he asked if we'd like to do a series there. We jumped at the chance, and it was great, for fifteen or sixteen issues -- however long it lasted. Paul is much better at writing real comic dialogue than I am, and at "getting" the whole comic ethos. I was good at conceptualizing the series at the outset, and we both just ran with it after that. I loved working with Steve Crespo, our artist for most of the series -- I thought he was just fantastic. The arc of the series sort of followed that of the whole grunge rock scene; Anima flourished and died at about the same time as grunge did.

Paul and I have known each other forever; we had the same artistic and cultural touchstones -- punk, old TV shows, Monty Python, the 3 Stooges; the same literary and musical taste. I think we worked well together, though Paul is a better comic writer than I could ever be. I wish I could do it as well as he did. And we'd love to do it again, even knowing that what we created never had a lot of commercial potential - that's what made it such a riot. We really had free rein with Anima. It was an intoxicating experience, a lot of work but it was just such a rush to see what we'd created turn up on the page, in living color. And we had wonderful audience response -- there were people out there who just loved that series. I was so sorry when it died, but I was glad we were able to give the series closure -- we wrote an ending for it, Paul came up with that great final quote from Lewis Carroll ... it was a great experience.

NG: In the Acknowledgements to your recent books, you mention the critic John Clute as being of especial assistance to you in your writing. How has he influenced your novelistic technique?

EH: I don't think John has really influenced me, certainly not in the way that one novelist influences another. But I've always taken his critical advice to heart, from his first review of Winterlong down to his comments on my work-in-progress. Since we've been partners for the last five+ years, my only regret has been that he can't review me anymore.

NG: Finally: what sort of book are you busy on now? You've made tantalising reference to a "non-genre book with a genre feel", and beyond that, perhaps a further Benandanti novel…

EH: I¹m working on a novel called Walking in Flames (originally titled The Master Stroke), which is about creative and sexual obsession, filtered through the tales of three generations of American artists and their relationship to a Victorian painter inspired by the mad fairy painter Richard Dadd. There's a kind of supernatural subtext there, and a mythological subtext -- the legend of Tristan and Iseult, European fairy lore -- but the novel itself isn't a genre novel. At least it isn't YET -- I won't know for sure until I complete it, which I hope will be in the next few weeks.

I do have a third Benandanti novel I want to write, tentatively titled Crossing the Dream Meridian. So keep your fingers crossed, and keep watching the skies.

This interview originally appeared in Redsine Seven, January 2002.

An interview with Elizabeth Hand.

Elizabeth Hand's gloomy novels of the uncanny have been critically acclaimed ever since her first novel, the post-apocalyptic Winterlong. She talks to Roz Kaveney about films, dead end jobs and the roots of the fantastic.

Amazon.co.uk: Your novels, and particularly Black Light find magic in some unusual places--artists' colonies and the Andy Warhol Factory and in archaeology. Let's talk about the uncanny and where you find it.

Elizabeth Hand: What tilled the field was being brought up Irish Catholic. Even though I stopped believing at about 15 or 16, it programmes you to think about religion and the supernatural all the time as a reflex, even after you have stopped believing.

Amazon.co.uk: Is there a particular Catholic strain in fantasy?

Hand: There certainly is in English fantasy in the Twentieth Century and the critic John Clute has referred to a New England school of ethical romance consisting of me, John Crowley, James Patrick Kelly, Alexander Jablokov, Michael Swanwick and Richard Grant--and all of us have Catholic backgrounds except for Richard, whose background is Episcopalian. You grow up with a sense of imminent transcendence and the element of the divine in everything. And in my case, and probably a lot of others, there was the influence of Hope Mirrlees, who was a convert--and her novel Lud-in-the-Mist with its big theme of the reconciliation of faerie and the mundane ... My friends and I used to use the oath from it: "By the sun, the moon and the stars And the Golden Apples of the West.

Amazon.co.uk: And being Irish?

Hand: My father's father was a professional Irishman and storyteller who made a great impression on me with his stories of Tir Na Nog and the land of Faerie. He always played up the spooky melancholic aspects of the stories. As I grew up, my friends and I talked all the time of an existence beyond the fields we knew. It was the early 70s, and in the 60s there had been this overwhelming expectation of the sort of breakthrough you find in the stories of Arthur Machen--M. John Harrison writes really well about all of this in The Course of the Heart--and we were all young enough really to believe. My friend Katy Kiernan called it "The Door"--this feeling that there was a way to get somewhere else. As I grew older and started writing, I focused on evoking that feeling--the sense of what you get in children's books like the Narnia stories, only involving adult wish-fulfilment like sex and art instead of talking animals. I wanted to find things beyond the wardrobe but I wanted them to be the elements of the uncanny in the everyday, the things that ought to have happened.

Amazon.co.uk: In both Black Light and your short story collection Last Summer at Mars Hill, you write a lot about artists' colonies ...

Hand: I grew up in Pound Ridge, which is now an appalling affluent place where Hollywood stars own second homes that cost them two million. But back then, it was where New York theatre people lived and artists--it was only ten minutes away from a quick train to New York. The cachet of all this made it trendy and spoiled it, eventually. It is a pre-Revolutionary War town, up in the Hudson valley, with all the supernatural connotations you find attached to that area by Washington Irving. It is a physically beautiful place; I grew up surrounded by actors and writers and they were always there so I took it for granted that one would go down to the cafeteria and see Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy doing Becket one-acters as a benefit for the school library. Part of "The Door" is a matter of trying to go back to a childhood and adolescence that were genuinely happy, because I expected life to be like that.

Amazon.co.uk: Black Light is a sort of skewed prequel to Waking the Moon. Have you finished with this material?

Hand: I plan to write another book about it all in a few years.

Amazon.co.uk: Waking the Moon is a book that people either love or hate.

Hand: A [US] book chain that organises readers' groups suggested it to them and found that it created extraordinary rows in the groups.

Amazon.co.uk: It is full of stuff from your reading--the feminist archaeologist Gimbautas, the Italian scholar Ginzburg--stuff that does not usually crop up in ordinary fantastic fiction.

Hand: So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same ... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.

Amazon.co.uk: One of the X-Files slogans is "I want to believe". You are very good on the element in cults and so on of the Will to Power--bad experiences in your past or just a sense of human nature?

Hand: I tend to base my characters on real people; the source for Angelica in Waking the Moon was a woman in my past with whom I had lost touch--and when I contacted her later, she had become a Wiccan High Priestess and did have a son called Dylan. I don't take this too seriously--writing is after all partly about making educated guesses about people and then dazzling the reader with fancy footwork. My family and friends are amused when they recognise bits of themselves--but there have been no lawsuits.

Amazon.co.uk: Glimmering is your gloomiest book, in which there is redemption of a sort, but not survival.

Hand: That, after all, is all we can hope for as individuals--moments of transcendence--because we are all going to die. It is the book closest to my world view--the other books are more like wish fulfilment; I suppose it is also a matter of my mood at the time--I have cheered up a bit. Partly because of protease inhibitors--I had lost a lot of friends to AIDS.

Amazon.co.uk: It is your AIDS book; it is also your environmentalist book.

Hand: When people ask me why I don't write about global warming, I point out that I already did.

Amazon.co.uk: You first made your name with a sequence of novels Winterlong, Aestival Tide and Icarus Descending. Unlike Glimmering, they are books about survival--Winterlong quotes Tennyson: "Though much is taken, much remains." They are also books which use Tarot quite a lot ...

Hand: That's because it is a handy shorthand for a lot of mythic material ... Winterlong was the book with which I taught myself to write from the age of 18 onwards and Aestival Tide was my attempt to cram in all the best SF riffs I had found in movies and comic books--it wasn't a book I took entirely seriously. Looking back at them, they have their own loony poetry--my brother likes the stuff in Aestival Tide about the Church of Christ Cadillac, and people wearing hubcaps on their heads ... The reason there is so much dance and masks in them is that I was stage struck in my teens--with all the theatre around me in Pound Ridge and the Shakespeare Festival nearby--and I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing ... I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.

Amazon.co.uk: Waking the Moon is in large part your campus novel ...

Hand: The Catholic University in Washington is a magical place in the NE quadrant of the city, full of seminaries and monasteries and parks and fields all owned by the church--it's a huge Byzantine edifice, appallingly tasteless, but wonderful. I only exaggerated it a bit.

Amazon.co.uk: You have done quite a lot of work for hire ...

Hand: I loved novelising Twelve Monkeys--a wonderful elegant melancholy screenplay not all of which makes it onto the screen because Terry Gilliam got involved in the macho struggle of making Bruce Willis suffer so he would act ... Work on the Millennium novelisations and the X-Files movie was less fun--they wanted to retain creative control and so they exercised it by taking out all my adjectives.

Amazon.co.uk: What is your work in progress?

Hand: It is called The Master Stroke after the Richard Dadd painting--"The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke". It is about his work and a family of American painters. It is set partly in Victorian London and partly on an island off the coast of Maine, and that is all I am going to say about it...