 I was honoured to interview Louis Greenberg as part of a panel at the fabulous Cymera Festival, and Louis has kindly answered some of the questions I posed to them on the panel. Louis Greenberg is a freelance editor and writer. He was born in Johannesburg. He has edited mostly fiction for publishers including Random House Struik, Penguin and NB Publishers and some academic work for journals and institutions, and was an online tutor at the South African Writers’ College. His published work includes a handful of photos, poems and short stories. His first novel, The Beggars’ Signwriters (Umuzi, 2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the 2007 University of Johannesburg Debut Prize. He compiled and edited Home Away(Zebra Press, 2010), a collaboration by 24 writers set in a single, global day. His second novel, Dark Windows, was published by Umuzi in 2014. Under the name S.L. Grey, he co-writes horror-thrillers with Sarah Lotz, zombie queen of the south. His latest novel Green Valley has just been published by Titan Books As an icebreaker here is a light-hearted question to get the ball rolling, with modern horror being more than things that go bump in the night, if we were to look under your bed what monster would we find lurking there? Ever since we moved into our house, there’s been a black bin bag of *something* under there that I’ve been afraid to inspect. It’s heavy and bulky and sort of tacky and somewhat yielding to the touch. I don’t think it’s body parts because they would have decomposed by now. It’s gathering dust. Up to now, I’ve been vacuuming around it. Horror has always been a genre that has reflected the world we live in, how do you see the horror genre developing with regards to the current state of the world? Horror’s an excellent way of exploring our fear of the present and the future with license to exaggerate and fear-monger. Fear is a legitimate warning that hopefully can get people to change their ways before it’s too late – whether it’s avoiding fascism or environmental catastrophe or surviving during an alien takeover, or simply feeling prepared if you’re ever mugged on the street or attacked in your home. But sometimes, no matter how much horror you read, you won’t be prepared for the real thing, whether it’s a hostile alien presence colonising you or an intimate attack. Horror like many other genres always seems to have a foot firmly stuck in the past with regards to style and inspiration, why do you think authors such as Lovecraft, Poe, Shelly and Hill still have such an influence on modern writers, and who do you think of the more recent writers will become the inspirations for style and themes for future generations of writers? I’m not sure who will be influential in years to come. We seem to be at an odd phase, still dominated by an old guard of familiar writers, with newer voices struggling to break out in quite a normative phase of mainstream publishing. But please let me wax lyrical on Poe for a bit: he was a huge influence for me. When I was ten or so, I took his stories out of the library and wrote doppelganger stories at school. Then at university, a course in nineteenth century horror was a major key to unlocking all my desire to study and read and write. Before then, studying English had been a bit of a dull chore, but now we were suddenly talking about death and sex and perversity. Poe was writing psychodynamics well before Freud was even born. And he worked in science fiction and detective fiction before they were things. How do you deal with this relatively new phenomenon of instant feedback and how do you deal with any negative feedback you have received? While I internalise negative comments more than they should, and they come to bite during the gloomiest parts of the first draft and the rewrite, I’ve gradually learned a bit of perspective about them. I still think it’s amazing that complete strangers in places I’ve never been have had my words in their minds and that they bother to spend the time to share their opinions about them. I don’t like the tyranny of the star rating, though. It traps readers and viewers as much as writers and producers. Netflix happily has dropped star ratings and now I feel like I can try shows that sound interesting to me, when before I may have skipped them because they got a bad review. I’m watching and reading more interesting things now that may not have been universally liked but really hit my spot. Another aspect that the modern day horror author has to deal with is the murky waters of fandom, the uproar over the final season of game of Thrones is a prime example of this, and one of the most basic forms of advice for a writer is write about what you know and love, how do you ensure that you get as close to staying true to your writing while at the same time ensuring that the final product is as accessible to your fans as possible? I’m gladly/sadly not in the position to be worried by mass responses to my work. There’s not really a clamour when my books come out! The modern world is scary place, as a horror author do you feel horror is in danger of losing its power to scare when your readership is bombarded with images and stories from real life that are way more scary than anything that you have committed to paper? I think the function of horror is not to add more fear into the world but to help us order, manage and understand our fear. So we can use all that material we see, and help society process it. We’re not short of fear at the moment. Louis your latest novel Green Valley , is set in a world that has rejected modern surveillance and tracking technology, but follows a small group that still lives within the virtual reality of Green Valley. Do you feel that the modern world is developing to fast for the average human, and how do you think we can deal with the ever-increasing impact of such things? I try hard not to be a Luddite and a kneejerk technophobe, but I do worry intensely about government and corporate abuse of modern technology and the way it will control and normalise populations and stifle dissent. By buying so merrily into the digital economy, we have signed away our individual autonomy. Fredric Jameson wrote that “It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” Like a lot of writers I struggle to imagine a progressive change happening that doesn’t first involve some systemic breakdown. I’d like to hope otherwise and I use my fiction to imagine what alternatives might look like – the negative and positive. In my previous novel, Dark Windows, I looked at the real-world challenges of a peace-loving hippie government of South Africa, and in Green Valley, I consider what it might mean if we had to turn away from digital tyranny. To wrap things up before we open up to the questions to the audience, can you tell us about your latest book and what you are working on next? Green Valley is a cybernoir thriller set in a city that’s banned the internet and gone back to a version of the 1970s. But there’s an enclave across town – like the remnants of an Apple or Google campus – where everyone lives in permanent virtual reality. But dead children are coming from Green Valley, and not everything is what it seems. Next up, I’m working on a Berlin-based thriller based on cryptogeographic puzzles. GREEN VALLEY Chilling near-future SF for fans of Black Mirror and True Detective. When Lucie Sterling's niece is abducted, she knows it won't be easy to find answers. Stanton is no ordinary city: invasive digital technology has been banned, by public vote. No surveillance state, no shadowy companies holding databases of information on private citizens, no phones tracking their every move. Only one place stays firmly anchored in the bad old ways, in a huge bunker across town: Green Valley, where the inhabitants have retreated into the comfort of full-time virtual reality - personae non gratae to the outside world. And it's inside Green Valley, beyond the ideal virtual world it presents, that Lucie will have to go to find her missing niece.   Comments are closed.
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