BY THE FEET OF MEN: A FIVE MINUTES WITH INTERVIEW WITH GRANT PRICE

Grant Price is a British-German author currently living in Berlin, Germany. After spending too many years translating and writing copy, he started writing fiction full time in 2015. His first novel, Static Age, appeared dead on arrival on Kindle in 2016. His second novel, By the Feet of Men, is a dystopian road novel due to be published by Cosmic Egg Books in September 2019. His work has appeared in The Daily Telegraph and a number of magazines and journals. He has taught writing at the University of Giessen.
 
Website: https://www.grantrhysprice.com
Twitter: @MekongLights
Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grant-Price/e/B0753K4ZNL/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?
You see in my profile where it says I started writing fiction full time in 2015? That’s kind of a lie. I still do translations and write copy. There’s no money in fiction. I just consider ‘full time’ in this sense to mean three hours a day, every day.

What do you like to do when you're not writing?
A few months ago I started boxing and I’m nice and mediocre at it. I tried being a ‘professional’ photographer for a while, but I didn’t like doing what customers told me to do and I started to fall out of love with it, so now I keep it strictly as a hobby (and maintain a little website for the shots). Other than that, I’m in a band that just signed with Assault Records in the US. I get to chill out on the bass and make as many mistakes as I want.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?
Too many white males, I’d say. In terms of authors, the big three are Hubert Selby, Jr., Jack Kerouac and Tom Wolfe, though Lucia Berlin is knocking at the door. A few lovely reviewers have said I write in a ‘cinematic’ way, which I would attribute to directors like Walter Hill, John Carpenter and William Friedkin, all of whom explore simple ideas while cranking the imagery up to outlandish.
 
The term horror, especially when applied to fiction, always carries such heavy connotations.  What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?
It’s a wonderful term because you can pair it with so many other concepts and ideas. Body horror. Psychological horror. Gory horror. Paranormal horror. Apocalyptic horror. Zombie horror. Even climate horror. It’s an infinitely malleable supergenre, albeit one whose properties are so intangible that it can creep up on you without you even realizing that you’re reading a horror novel or watching a horror movie. Horror has been confounding and resetting peoples’ expectations for centuries (all the way back to The Castle of Otranto), and it will continue to do so until we all perish in The Climate Wars.

A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate. Considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years?
Leaving aside politics because it’s just too depressing to get into, I think we’re seeing a strong shift toward climate-themed novels (The Wall, American War, Station Eleven, Blackfish City, etc.) and Black Mirror-esque narratives (Recursion, Famous Men Who Never Lived, The Malaise). The environment and AI are the two things we can all be terrified about, so horror writers have a goldmine to work with over the next few years.

What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author?
This could be the only question and I’d manage to fill ten pages. I’ll do 3+3. For novels: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo (the most horrific book I’ve ever read), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich. Films…Rumble Fish, The Thing and The Warriors.

What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of?
I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard that Ration by Cody Luff is a grim piece of work. And I will give a shout out to The Malaise by David Turton (who is on the same imprint as me), because people can snap his book up on the cheap right now.

How would you describe your writing style?
For By the Feet of Men, I’d call it economical staccato (ah, this pretentious guy). It worked for the subject matter, but I don’t know if I can write like that again. I prefer to be more expository in general. Spending time painting a picture rather than making a pencil sketch, you know.

Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you?
Getting a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly was pretty much one of the best days of my life. You spend two years writing and revising a novel, sign with the world’s smallest publisher out of desperation, and wait nearly a year for it to come out. Then one of the most prestigious trade magazines in the business says that you “employ clever, precise writing that’s evocative and atmospheric without venturing into gory horror”. That alone has made those years totally worth the effort.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?
I’m still trying to find the balance between CASH and ART. In the beginning, I was so wide-eyed and full of Belief in the Artistic Process that I turned down most paying jobs so I could work on my magnum opus (spoiler: it turned out not to be my magnum opus). Now, though, I’ve calmed down a bit – maybe too much – and I’ve come to understand that the Starving Writer is a trope that doesn’t work too well in real life.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?
The city of Braunschweig. It’s like a high-yield interest bomb was detonated there and destroyed anything remotely entertaining. Forever.

How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning?
Always the meaning. I christened the protagonist in my first novel Clark because he was a menial worker whose general office duties pushed him to adopt a destructive live-for-the-weekend mentality. In By the Feet of Men, the most obvious one is Ghazi, whose name is the active participle of gaza in Arabic, which means “to strive for” or “one who struggles” (he’s looking for meaning out on that big old road). But there’s also Brandt (middle high German for ‘to burn’), Hearst (named after Patty Hearst), Cassady (stolen from On the Road), Katharina (‘pure’), Hideki (‘excellent’), Wyler (‘farmstead’ – he lived from a farm) and Victor (you know….as in victory).
 
Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?
I think I’ve changed from being the guy who desperately wishes people would see him as a writer to the writer who kind of wishes people wouldn’t keep bringing it up any time there’s a lull in conversation. I’m no longer in love with the idea of writing something; I just sit down and write because I have to. The romance surrounding it is dead, but the passion is definitely alive.
 
What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?
A thorough understanding of the minutiae of the language they are writing in. It isn’t enough to just be able to speak and write it; you have to be able to weigh up every single word and tell if it’s too light, too heavy or just right for the phrase, sentence, paragraph and so on. Patience is also essential – unless you’re Brett Easton Ellis, Françoise Sagan or S. E. Hinton, your work isn’t going to be picked up overnight. It takes years of dedication. And while patience is a difficult thing to master in our instant gratification society, it makes the process of rejection/revision/resubmission much easier to handle.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?
Storyboard each scene in your mind. See it happening before you start to write it. There’s a great word in German for this: Kopfkino. Pay for a ticket to the cinema in your head, take a seat and allow your imagination to work its magic so that you can work yours on the page.

Getting your worked noticed is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve. How have you tried to approach this subject?
By contacting literally anyone and everyone online who I think might be interested in reading my novel. It’s nice and soul-destroying for the most part.

To many writers, the characters they write become like children. Who is your favorite child, and who is your least favorite to write for and why?
Clark from Static Age is both my favorite child and my least favorite. The poor sucker was so self-absorbed and a vessel for toxic masculinity, but there was potential in him to change. He just needed to be around people who would encourage rather than intimidate him.

What piece of your own work are you most proud of?
Maybe a short story called Diamonds on Jupiter, which was published in The Nabu Review. It was the first time I managed to properly use a metaphor to explain the meaning behind the story I was telling, which I’d been trying to do for years.
 
And are there any that you would like to forget about?
I guess not. They have all helped me advance and become better at what I’m doing. I mean, I’m not super keen on the short story I had printed in The Daily Telegraph, but I have to look at it every time I visit my parents because they had it framed.

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?
I only have two, and By the Feet of Men is the one that matters. The climate crisis. Existentialism. Survival. The preservation of the world by embracing wildness. All the things that keep me up at night.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
“We sacrifice the old for the new. Always chasing after the future, always convinced we can push on and think our way out of a jam. When we butt our heads against the trunk of the tree to knock it down, we blunt our ability to understand what the tree actually means.”
 
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?
My next novel is called Mekong Lights and it’s a political satire (I think) that desperately wishes it was Pynchon, but is more like Eric Ambler after getting drunk on two strawberry daiquiris.
 
If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?
The whole “Based on a true story” thing. I think The Amityville Horror used it first, but the only time it had any artistic value was in Fargo.

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?
The last great book was The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. What a horrific trip. The last one that disappointed me was Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowrie, and that’s because two guys came up to me in a bar a year apart from one another and both recommended it to me, and I thought it was a cosmic sign that it’d be the best book ever. But it wasn’t.

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do?  And what would be the answer?
“Grant, I’m the editor of The New Yorker. Will you write a story for us?” “Yes.”

BY THE FEET OF MEN BY GRANT PRICE