Multiple award-winning* author CODY GOODFELLOW has written three novels, RADIANT DAWN, RAVENOUS DUSK, and (forthcoming) PERFECT UNION. His fiction and journalism has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Third Alternative, Dark Wisdom, Dark Discoveries, Dark Recesses and Ranch & Coast, and recent anthologies A Dark & Deadly Valley, Hot Blood 13 and Vault Of Punk Horror. When not writing, he enjoys complaining about being kept from writing.

Go to: PERILOUS PRESS or Cody’s MYSPACE PAGE
for more abuse.

*– 1st AND 2nd place for “Superior Achievement in a Magazine or Newsletter: Real Estate,” San Diego Press Club Awards, 2007. And it came with free salisbury steak… sorry, haters.

DBJ: Your fiction has a sort of modern, Lovecraftian feel to it. Rather than ask if Lovecraft is a big influence, or who IS an influence, (though you are certainly encouraged to ramble on about that) - I’ll ask this…what is it about this stlye of fiction that appeals to you? How does it draw you in and convince you it’s the right medium for your words?

CG: Lovecraft was indeed a traumatic formative experience, and still lies at the root of a lot of my best and worst impulses. What struck me so totally about his worldview, was that he seemed to be penetrating to the heart of secrets that made other supernatural horror seem like comfort food. As shuttered and prosaic as his upbringing was, he was driven to pull back the curtain to see what the natural world was doing behind our backs. In that context, his impenetrable style and sparse characterization seemed less like flaws, and more like a fascinating defense, a reaction formation… the more he protested that the horrors he unearthed were utterly alien, the more he came to reflect on how unacceptably familiar his Others were… The mind-blasting Old Ones wink at us from every fishermen’s net, and from between our own legs. As much as I’ve tried to outgrow Mythos stories, some thread of cosmic horror, of a root chord of malign intellect behind all natural processes, informs everything I write. I haven’t tried to add more consonant-clogged gods to the mix, but in trying to pay back on my influences, I have tried to peel away some of that defensiveness that blinkered Lovecraft’s view of his own universe, and make it as scary for others, as it once was for me.

DBJ: You compose music, as well as writing. I visited your Myspace page and saw that you do so under a variety of names. How does music play into your creative “persona” - is it the focus, and writing secondary - a parallel path - or are they symbiotic in nature? Do you think that the technology now available allowing composers and musicians across the world to share their work with relative ease has improved the music scene, or just tangled it? (That’s a trick question containing many).

CG: I’ve been playing music for as long as I’ve been writing, but it’s always been a secondary pursuit… a hobby that serves as a relief from writing. Because it’s so much more intuitive and mysterious (at least in my perpetually naive state), it’s the perfect antidote to long hours of linear, rational writing…and it also refreshes my appetite for accidents and subconscious eruptions as innovation ( as in Dali’s “paranoia critical” method), which I try to bring back into my fiction. Good writing has to be rooted in powerful subconscious stirrings, but when you have to pull it out through the left brain one word at a time, it diminishes the experience. Music allows huge, undigested hunks of id to float to the surface. And electronic music, in particular, somehow sounds like pure thought; the sense of music as a pure conceptual product untouched by human hands, not a played expression, is a feature, not a bug, to me. I often compose music to distill an idea that I can’t quite spin out into words, or to try to make a sonic pill to induce an altered state of consciousness, without having to go into a hole and chew peyote buttons. And the fluidity of collaborative music exchanges is
absolutely a step in the right direction. Some of my favorite artists growing up––Coil, Skinny Puppy, This Mortal Coil–– collaborated via “tape swaps” from all over the globe, and the results were often amazing. I mostly compose using Reason, which makes it easy to “play” with a couple of friends via e-mail. Sure, it’s a cold substitute for all-night jam freakouts in the studio, but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.

DBJ: From reading your posts at Storytellers Unplugged, I get the sense that you are an author prone to deep introspection. Does your non-fiction style infect your fiction? How much “Cody” do you inject into the characters, and the themes…and how much is purely made up for the tale? In other words, what is your process for fleshing an idea into art..?

CG: I used to worry that my writing voice was too generic, but quickly learned that my “style” was the biggest obstacle to getting a point across. As a result of this and other factors, my process is glacially slow. My mind runs in looping, uneven circles, and I can never completely trust it. Sometimes, it delivers the goods extemporaneously, but I commonly go over a story in my head for weeks or months before starting to write it, and do cascades of revisions on each piece before it balances what I want to say with how’d I’d like to say it. So the essays I bomb Storyteller’s with are the rawest ore, while my fiction tends to be, if not diamonds, then at least shiny, compressed coprolites. If this sounds laborious, it really isn’t… I let the twin muses of my laziness and my obsessiveness engage in relentless all-night foxy-boxing matches in my head, to hammer out something that will drive the reader crazy, instead of just advertising my own problems.

DBJ: How do you see yourself evolving as a writer? Do you consciously work the next project into the back of your mind and let them follow smoothly, or are you a spur-of-the-moment inspiration guy? Where would you like to be with your work creatively in say, five years? Ten?

CG: I still haven’t figured out what to do with half of these new limbs! I’ve been working for years to conceive, execute and place projects much faster, but I have a huge commonplace book of ideas, that I’ll never clean out, if I never add another idea to it. I brood forever about how best to say something, chiefly because I only get about one day and night a week, to write. Over the long haul, I’ve been aiming always for stranger stories, told more succinctly, and to make my own hand invisible, while making the word-picture more like a window. I’ve always tried to cram big ideas into small spaces, and it’s starting to yield dividends. My rule of thumb for short stories is to do what another guy might pad into a novel, and for novels, to do what another guy might try to pad into a whole career. They’re hell to sell, but in five/ten years, I hope to have a sure enough hand that I can do these things at a professional pace, until I have a large enough fan base to start my own religion.

DBJ: Standard question: You have one day to come up with the inspiration for a new book. You can have the run of a library of all the world’s books, or a studio with all the world’s music - or a ride to anyplace in the world and the day to spend there. Which do you choose, and why? If you choose the last - the ride to anywhere, it would be nice to know where before you tell us why …

CG: Hmmmmm… If it was for the dream book in the back of my mind right now, I’d skydive into the Amazon and receive the ayahuasca sacrament… but if I was going
to be thorough about it, I’d have to spend the balance of the afternoon in a concentration camp. Bad trip. On the other hand, if I had the run of the world to whip up a dream project, I’d go to the restricted collections of the Vatican. Not for the from-hunger Da Vinci code nonsense, but to check out the enormous body of forbidden lore, from Greek and Roman sacred pornography through the last traditions of occult science suppressed by the Inquisition. It’s amazing how churches act as an artificial superego,
imprisoning the products of the subconscious, yet stuffing them into one vault, where they must needs ferment and fester. It’d be a treat, to let all the animals out, at once…

** Note from the interviewee…Cody REALLY wanted this second photo included…and I hate to argue with creative genius…