… feel more confident after selling their first novel. I wrote the stories in the short story collection between Anna and Zod Wallop, and I got a lot more comfortable with my particular brand of craziness. If a writer is having fun when he is writing, that joy is communicated (even if the resulting novel is as grim as Celine). I don't know if the work is more mature, but it is more relaxed, more self-assured, and that improves it. 

Crescent Blues: Have you ever modeled your characters around people you know? 

Spencer: Every now and then I will use a detail from someone I know. Fiction is about character, so it is inevitable that the author's sense of people winds up in his fiction. But whenever I have tried to stick a whole person from "real life" into a book, that person refuses to do things the fictional work would have him do. His realness keeps getting in the way. I keep thinking, He wouldn't do that, so I have to ask him to leave. 

Crescent Blues: Have you ever modeled a character on yourself? 

Spencer: Always and never. It is impossible not to be there on some level, since the story is coming from my head, but I don't believe all the things my heroes espouse. My characters tend to be a more ardent, more feverish group. My friends might disagree. 

Crescent Blues: The portrayal of mental illness in your work is very accurate. How do you obtain this realism? 

Spencer: A lot of my friends are nuts. And, in my wilder youth, I was in a mental ward or two. I am more alert these days, so it is harder to get me into a nuthouse by simply saying, "Come on, Bill, let's just go talk to this guy." It's a cliche that there is a thin line between insanity and creativity. Money is in there somewhere too. A lot of mental illness seems to be the direct result of poverty. 

Crescent Blues: Can you tell our readers a bit about the turtle collection you used to have when you were a child? 

Spencer: When I was a kid, I had a friend, Greg Fisk, and we both collected turtles. There was this guy in Tampa, Fla., I think his name was Ray Singleton, and he would sell you almost any sort of turtle or other exotic creature. You could buy a gaboon viper if you signed a letter saying you were twenty-one. I always imagine some kid, running toward his mother as she greets the postman, shouting, "Mom! I'll get it. It's for me!" You wouldn't want your mother to open the package containing your gaboon viper -- not if you had my mother, anyway. 

Turtles are wonderful, fabulous creatures. My favorites were two small spiny softshell turtles. These creatures swooped around the aquarium like otters and were hell on crayfish and tadpoles. 

I finally gave my collection to a local aquarium and went off to college where women, as exotic as any reptile, captured my attention. 

Crescent Blues: Has your interest in reptiles influenced the style of monster/fantastical creatures that you create for your novels? 

Spencer: I don't know if reptiles have influenced the style of my monsters, but I know that writers on reptiles have influenced me. I've often thought of writing a novel about some fictional naturalist heading off into the wilderness in search of some rare, perhaps legendary beast. I loved those books when I was a kid. I still think Gerald Durrell is a more entertaining writer than his much-respected older brother Lawrence. 

My father, who taught biology before going off to work for the government, had a book called Animal Wonder World by Frank W. Lane. I loved that book. It had chapters on things like animal accidents (birds colliding with golf balls, sharks stuck in tires, a flock of pigeons killed by eating dried peas and then drinking water) and strange uses for animals (ants used to close wounds, fish used as candles, bees used to smuggle honey). I can attribute a lot of the strangeness in my writing to the strangeness communicated by naturalists whose books were my first love. 

Crescent Blues: Your last book, Irrational Fears is based around alcoholism and how Lovecraftian monsters are spreading rumors of alcoholism as an ancient curse. How did you first develop this idea? 

Spencer: I wanted to write an AA/alcoholism novel, but I didn't want to write another one of those novels that is a didactic presentation. Those novels always go like this: plucky hero/heroine just can't stop drinking and doing drugs, so he/she goes to AA, meets lots of zany folks, tells, in passing, all about AA. There are enough of those novels out there, with more to come.

AA has been around long enough to create an industry of recovery gurus and twelve step spinoffs, and I wanted to satirize that New Age aspect. I decided that one way to do that would be by creating a violent, anti-AA contingent, hallucinations that bite; a cheesy, carnival Whole Addiction Expo and a goofy love story in which our hero has to save his girl from an evil cult. Elizabeth Hand, writing in The Washington Post, said the book was "so funny that when visitors to this reviewer's house saw it and opened it at random, they began to laugh out loud." So I accomplished what I set out to do. And most reviewers understood that the book was pro-AA, and that its main target was the opportunistic gurus and self-help industry AA had inadvertently spawned. 

Crescent Blues: Can you tell our readers about your current projects? 

Spencer: I'm writing a novel called The Never After. It's a suspense thriller, and it doesn't contain any surrealism or alternate worlds. It has some SF stuff and some mental illness stuff (a girl with genetic memory, a young man with a curious dissociative disorder). Since my novels are hard to categorize, they are sometimes hard to market, and I'm hoping that won't be the case with the new one.  

Crescent Blues: Your last three books have finished with a kind of did-it-really-happen-but-it-must-have-happened type ending. Did you intend this when you first started writing? 

Spencer: Oh, that old ambiguity issue. I have a SF/fantasy/horror background, and I read the entire manuscript of Résumé With Monsters in a writing group (The Slugtribe) that I used to attend here in Austin. No one asked, "Did it really happen?" They all knew that it had; they were used to reading literally. I've found that mainstream reviewers often assume that the protagonist in my work is having a psychotic break ("Harry has a psychotic break at the funeral and..."), but genre readers understand that a person can slip into a time warp or alter the world by psycho-kinetic means.  

So, the simple answer: The events in my books do indeed happen; they are not hallucinations or the fabrications of a delusional mental state. 

I have never approved of the sort of ending that suggests it was all a dream. There have to be rules; there have to be consequences. Without this, there would be no dramatic tension, no reason to care or root for the hero, no reason to fear the villain. 

The test comes in what finally matters to the reader. I think it is very clear that, had Harry acted differently in the last few pages of Zod Wallop, the world would have been different. There are real forces in motion. In this case, the world itself is at stake. And yes, I mean that literally. 

Crescent Blues: What did you find was the hardest part in writing your novels? Were there parts that you felt were difficult to complete? 

Spencer: I often get stuck while writing a novel. I remember, in writing Zod Wallop, ending a chapter with the hero and his companions having come to the end of a road. There they were, in a car, stopped at the end of a road that has turned into weeds, a forest in front of them. That was it. I didn't know anymore about the story myself, and I just stopped for awhile, drifted around for weeks doing nothing. Then, disgusted with myself, I decided just to write something, anything, and keep going. And once I was going, momentum returned. But that's not an unusual thing with me. Self-doubt and dread are my constant companions. 

Crescent Blues: Which work did you find the most exciting to produce? 

Spencer: I think I enjoyed writing Résumé With Monsters the most. I was rereading Lovecraft as I wrote it, so the book bounced along on a course parallel to my reading. I wrote it in four months, having a great time with the employment rants. Like many of my friends, I have had my share of menial, dreadful jobs, and that material just came naturally (for instance, the motivational pamphlets that Philip gets with his paycheck are outrageous but, in several cases, actual pamphlets I got with my paycheck). 

Crescent Blues: What are your plans for the future? Any particular short- and long-term goals? 

Spencer: I don't know about other writers, but I'm in trouble if I look into the future. The future says, rather sternly, "You have no one to blame but yourself for living on the streets. You had plenty of time to repent and learn a trade." 

Stephen Smith