Daryl Gregory’s novel, The Devil’s Alphabet, has been nominated for the 2010 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. Following his nomination, we posed a few questions to the author and the result is the interview below.
You’re nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award–do you have a favorite story of his?
I love his novels Time Out of Joint, Ubik, and The Man in the High Castle, but my favorite has to be Valis. (This will come as no surprise to people who read my first book, Pandemonium, in which the characters of Valis and PK Dick have a cameo.)
That book blew me away the first time I read it, and every time I go back to it I’m struck again by its strangeness. Dick’s characters (one of whom is Dick himself, and another is his alternate personality, Horselover Fat) keep trying to make sense of reality, and reality keeps slipping away from them. The tone is desperate, but it’s also a very funny book.
How would you describe The Devil’s Alphabet?
If I only have five seconds, I tell people it’s a Hard-SF Southern Gothic Murder Mystery (but with heart!). If I have ten seconds, I tell people it’s a story about a young man coming back to his hometown to reconcile with his father and try to understand his childhood–a childhood that included a disease that killed half the town and turned most of the survivors into three alternate versions of humanity.
You can see why I sometimes stop with the five-second version.
Where’d you get the idea for The Devil’s Alphabet?
It began with a random image that popped into my head one day: I saw a ten-foot tall man with chalk white skin, skinny as a ladder, standing by the side of a road. I somehow knew that he wasn’t an alien, but a transformed person. Then the questions began, such as, What the hell is that about, Daryl?
Eventually I worked out what had happened to him, and where he lived. The town of Switchcreek in the novel is a transformed version of the small town my parents grew up in in East Tennessee. I spent many weeks there over the summers, and I was accepted there, but I never quite fit in. These were my people, but I was still a Yankee. In the book I wanted to talk about that “inside-outsider” experience, and about small town life. There was something about this tiny mountain town going through huge changes that attracted me.
When not writing award-nominated sci-fi, what authors/books are you reading?
I’m getting ready for a trip to Medellin, Colombia for a science fiction convention called Fractal 10, where I’m going to talk about Dick’s influence on my writing. So I’ve been re-reading my favorite PK Dick books (see above), as well as reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitutde, which I’d never gotten to before. Why did I put this off so long?
What’s your next book?
The working title is Raising Stony Mayhall, and it’s scheduled to come out in 2011. All I can say about it is that it’s definitely not a zombie novel. However, it just may be an anti-zombie-novel zombie novel.
About The Devil’s Alphabet by Daryl Gregory
From Daryl Gregory, whose Pandemonium was one of the most exciting debut novels in memory, comes an astonishing work of soaring imaginative power that breaks new ground in contemporary fantasy.
Switchcreek was a normal town in eastern Tennessee until a mysterious disease killed a third of its residents and mutated most of the rest into monstrous oddities. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as it had struck, the disease-dubbed Transcription Divergence Syndrome (TDS)-vanished, leaving behind a population divided into three new branches of humanity: giant gray-skinned argos, hairless seal-like betas, and grotesquely obese charlies.
Paxton Abel Martin was fourteen when TDS struck, killing his mother, transforming his preacher father into a charlie, and changing one of his best friends, Jo Lynn, into a beta. But Pax was one of the few who didn’t change. He remained as normal as ever. At least on the outside.
Having fled shortly after the pandemic, Pax now returns to Switchcreek fifteen years later, following the suicide of Jo Lynn. What he finds is a town seething with secrets, among which murder may well be numbered. But there are even darker-and far weirder-mysteries hiding below the surface that will threaten not only Pax’s future but the future of the whole human race.
