Nick Antosca

Nick Antosca (b. 1983) is the author of the novel Midnight Picnic, out this month from Word Riot Press. His first novel was Fires (Impetus Press, 2007) and he runs the blog Brothercyst. Tao Lin interviewed him for MobyLives via email:

Tao Lin: I enjoyed the tone of Midnight Picnic, it felt calm, and calming, despite the “not calm” things that happened in it. What kind of tone do you experience real life as having, do you think?

Nick Antosca: Midnight Picnic feels weirdly calm because that’s the mood of the afterlife in the book. All these people are already dead and they’re just drifting and going through the motions of being alive and some living people have just kind of drifted into the afterlife without realizing it just by being bored and miserable. The mood of Midnight Picnic is a conscious choice and it’s not like the mood I experience as I go through life. The mood of real life as I experience it on a day to day basis though is more anxious and angry and unsteady. I get impatient, very impatient–impatience might be the default emotion of my experience of life.

How would you describe the tone of some of your favorite books?

Jesus’ Son is calm and sad and mellow and cryptic and apologetic and mysteriously wise-feeling. The Magus is hedonistic and arrogant and resentful. American Psycho is feverish and anxious and sniveling. Towelhead is guilty and ashamed but defiant. A Sport and a Pastime is calm and sad and knowing and wistful.

I’ve read things by you — that apocalypse story — that I thought were funny (not in a “humor writing” way, not forced at all), what non “humor writing” novels or stories do you think are funny?

I think the funniest books I’ve ever read are Lolita and American Psycho, neither of which is generally considered humor writing. I reread American Psycho a lot, but I just skip over the murder scenes. The dinner scenes make me laugh all the time. So do most of the dialogue scenes, so do Bateman’s descriptions of just walking down the street, so do the chapter titles. Lolita makes me laugh in a similar way–both novels are funny in part because their narrators suffer from acute anxieties that are at humorous odds with their incredible arrogance. Humbert’s self-pity is funny.

Can you say one sentence about each of your books, published or unpublished, from most recently written to earliest written?

Strangelets – I’m in the process of writing it and I don’t know how I feel about it although I did like writing the part where the fat people attack and the part where the children explode.

Midnight Picnic – I wrote it only at night and I used “feeling” judgment, not “critical” judgment to decide what to include and what to cut, because the book is based on dreams and takes place in the afterlife, so if I felt like a child should throw up a dog, I made a child throw up a dog.

The Phantom Limbs – This novel, about a love triangle and hangings and sexual obsession, is something I wrote in college and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written, and I want to rewrite it and try to get it published (it’s been rejected all over the place in what feels like an arbitrary fashion).

Fires – This one, which I also wrote in college, is my most linear, most “real world”-based novel and a lot of readers seem to like it the most because it’s accessible and direct and (I think) “lean and mean.”

Untitled – Before I wrote the ghost story called Midnight Picnic , I wrote a ghost story about a girl whose lesbian lover dies and then comes back as several different people–some bad, some good–the conceit being that the soul doesn’t stay solid after death, it splits apart like quicksilver so that, for example, the BAD part of you can come back separate from the good part, and the bad part may take the form of a creepy little girl with a long spindly arm, which is what happened in this book, which I’ve never shown to anyone or tried to get published.

Friends and Rapists – A novel I wrote in eleven days when I was eighteen, and which got me an agent and was submitted all over New York, but got turned down for its general nastiness.

The Pumpkin Eaters – This shitty horror novel, which I wrote between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, does contain a few good ideas, like the “stray cats” released into bad neighborhoods by an evil corporation, stray cats which are actually bombs.