9-18-08, 9:25 am
Editor's note: Karin Coddon is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs. Her latest novel is entitled, The Shadow Man, and is now available.
PA: Your latest work of fiction is a novel called The Shadow Man. The subtitle describes it as a horror novel. What attracts you to the genre, and what is horrific about The Shadow Man?
KARIN CODDON: I’ve been drawn to themes of the extra-rational and supernatural throughout my scholarly as well as my creative writing. I wrote about madness and death in Renaissance culture and theater for my doctoral dissertation, and it became sort of a natural transition, because it represents to me a kind of excess that can’t be easily contained by our narrow, bourgeois paradigm of reason – what’s reasonable, what makes sense. Also, as I said, I learned from two great influences on my own writing, Rod Serling and Stephen King, that using horror and the supernatural can serve as a vehicle for interrogating the everyday in extraordinary ways. In a way that is productive for social criticism as well. That is one of the reasons I am very much drawn to the genre, as a reader as well as a writer.
The Shadow Man is a kind of classic haunted house story, but one very much driven by contemporary and edgy characters, which is what I think makes it fresh and different. My female protagonist, Maggie, is a Latina. She is a single working mother who inherits this strange toxic house and seizes the opportunity to get away from her emotional as well as her physical proximity to her ex-husband, who is the male protagonist, Tim. He is a former college all-American from a picture-perfect Pasadena upper-middle-class family. He was a major league baseball prospect who became a downward-spiralling meth addict. He even served in prison, and I deal to some extent with his prison experience. He is the novel’s most complex character, and in a sense he is every bit as much the titular shadow man as the actual menacing apparition in the house. In the first half of the narrative, the ex-husband Tim kind of flits around the edge of the narrative. Although we see him briefly in the first chapter in a state of absolute wreckage, his presence is not really there. So, like the Shadow Man who is half-glimpsed at the beginning of the story at the bottom of the stairs, becoming more and more manifest as he toxifies the house and those living in it, Tim also flits around the edges of the narrative until the second part, when he becomes the co-protagonist with my heroine, Maggie.
It’s his long-held family secrets of dysfunction and violence that are the key to the haunting, to its poisonous nature – and by poisonous I mean that it has a destructive nature in a very real sense for Maggie as well. They realize they have somehow got to destroy this malignant force in the house before it destroys them, and that means a lot of digging, a lot of investigative work, when they are both in some ways very fragile people, because they have already been damaged by their exposure to the toxic atmosphere of this house, which is polluted by this past violence, not just by the shadows of the past violence, but by shadows that become very real in their effects.
PA: You mentioned your academic work. What is the story of your journey away from academic work, from that more abstract kind of work to writing a novel?
CODDON: Well, it’s funny, because it was drummed into my head as a graduate teaching assistant that there is no difference between expository and creative writing, and we taught that to our students, but I completely disagree. Even though I do see commonalities. As I said, I explored the irrational in my academic writing and the problematics of death – the plays I wrote about all have ghosts in them. Probably my most published and republished piece is my study of Hamlet, which is very much a play about madness, ghosts, the afterlife, and the unknowable – that there are “more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in your philosophy.”
When I came back from academia for my sabbatical, I had already decided after a couple of years that that was not the career path I wanted. I had this great feeling that my creativity was stifled, and now instead it was very much freed. I find that in my non-fiction writing, such as the contributions I have made to Political Affairs, I can deal argumentatively, although in a very different voice, with many of the same issues that concerned me as a Marxist-trained academician. But in the creative process, when you are actually engaged in the process, you are freed from the careerist aspects of it. “Publish or perish” is the motto of academia, and you are always asking in the back of your mind, “Can I publish this, can I publish this in a refereed journal?” But when you are in the process of writing creative fiction, that comes after. That’s usually where I get stymied, but it is much more of a, to use a rather vague term, holistic experience, involving your own experience, because the kind of evidence you put forward is suggestive, rather than demonstrative like it is in academic writing. And, as I said, a lot of my own life experience, although I do not write autobiographically in my fiction, invariably finds its way into my work.
The role horses play in the novel is also a part of my experience. My protagonist is a freelance writer and editor, as I am, working to make a living. The old axiom says “write about what you know,” well, in my case, that’s drugs, haunted houses, and horses. The stables serve as a place to expand the narrative. Haunted house stories have a tendency to become very claustrophobic, especially if, as is often the case in haunted house stories, the protagonist works at home. In the novel, the stables, which are five minutes from the house, just as they are literally five minutes from where I live, offer a way of opening up the narrative, although they do not serve simply as a pastoral point of contrast. It is a place where my female protagonist, Maggie, explores new relationships, but also finds herself in the middle of this very white, well-heeled equestrian community, where she confronts some of the class and racial tensions that are very much operative out here in California, especially in terms of the often denigrating and dismissive treatment of Hispanic workers, who do the real work out there. They feed our horses and muck out the stables, and I have myself been very much annoyed by the dismissive way in which people say, “Oh go get one of the Mexicans to do this for you.” As a Latina in this very white-bread, well-heeled community, Maggie is directly confronted by these conflicts. So the stables aren't simply a pastoral refuge away from the haunted house.
PA: You’ve drawn a number of parallels between your personal life and what you are writing about. Is there some element of autobiography in the novel that you'd like to talk about, or do you want to leave us guessing?
CODDON: Well, I generally prefer to leave people guessing, but people who have read the book have asked me about this, and tell them there is a little bit of me in both protagonists. For instance, I lived in a very strange house when I was growing up. I tend, when I am not writing creative fiction, to look for more scientific explanations for strange things to happen, but there were some very strange things that happened in the house I grew up in – who knows if they were electromagnetic waves or not? I have researched the scientific bases and arguments that explain paranormal phenomena, because I believe paranormal phenomena exist – I have experienced paranormal phenomena myself. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there are really spiritual entities.
Also, in terms of autobiographical elements, when I returned to California from the very confining realm of academia, it was a very exhilarating time for me, and that was important for the genesis of the novel. I reunited with a bunch of friends, many of whom were former students of mine from UCSD (the University of California, San Diego) when I was a graduate student assistant there. As I said, this was a very exhilarating time, and we would hang out at one fellow’s house. There was a party going on seven nights a week, on any night of the week. This was referenced in the in the novel. Everybody did some drugs and drank some wine and listened to music – this was in the mid-1990s. Ten to 13 years later everybody has moved on. But there was one friend of ours from this period who for some reason did not and ended up losing everything – losing his home, losing his relationship, losing his job. He came very paranoid because of meth, and that also became an important part of the genesis of the idea for writing this novel. Why is it that the rest of us were able to go through those times? I have no regrets. I think they were great, liberating times in my own life, but it fascinated me that here was somebody who somehow could not scratch his way out, whose survival, just the necessity of having to make a living, didn’t take over.
Certainly there are other autobiographical elements in the novel. I put my own horse, of course, in the novel, although at the point I was writing the novel I actually was leasing him, and I don’t think it’s spoiling the ending to say that he is owned by Maggie and Tim at the very end. That was a sort of wish fulfillment that actually did come true. I put him in the novel because he’s such a big ham that he wouldn’t stand for anything less. He is in the picture with me on the novel’s back cover, and certainly many of my relationships at the stables are reflected in the book, but it is not really a roman á clef, except that, as I said, you necessarily draw your materials from your own experiences, and in some cases for dramatic purposes amplify and magnify them. So, yes, there are elements of autobiography, but this is not really my story. I am not a memoirist and couldn’t be. I’m basically a very private person, so I like to allegorize and obfuscate certain things that are maybe more reflective of my own life than I necessarily want to reveal to the reader directly.
PA: In addition to a chapter from The Shadow Man, we have published a story of yours called the “Vegan Vampire,” which is a richly ironic and simultaneously humorous and poignant story. What are the origins of that story?
CODDON: Well, again during this great “extreme” period, the exhilarating and liberatory period when I came back from Brown on my sabbatical, I actually did write a rather tongue-in-cheek vampire novel about the world’s first politically-correct vampire. I acquired a New York literary agent, and she tried for several years to find a publisher, but it’s just very hard to publish fiction by unknown writers. The publishing industry is like much of the print media and the traditional recording industry today – everything is being replaced by the Web.
I was originally very much a fan of that genre of fiction – vampire fiction – until I felt it reached a point of self-parody – overwrought prose and vampires who were more superhero than supernatural, or these tender sympathetic bloodsuckers. “The Vegan Vampire,” as you noted, satirizes that narrative style, the notion of this deep craving. Dennis is my vampire. I deliberately chose a name like Dennis, which doesn’t have any particular glamor to it, as a kind of antithesis to the exalted vampires that dominate the genre. He loves, he craves, but in this very mundane setting of the supermarket he lacks the money, the material resources for his vampiric purchases, which happen to be vegetables. In a way this was my farewell to the genre. It was never intended as a full-length novel, even though I call it “a fragment from an unfinished novel.” That’s a quite deliberately ironic subtitle for it. As I said, it was both my homage and my farewell to the genre, and it was a lot of fun to write. I don’t usually write short fiction, because unfortunately my short fiction generally ends up seeming like the first and last chapter of a novel – I try to cram too much into it. This vignette about Dennis was inspired by someone I knew, a former student of mine – a very serious young man – whom a mutual friend would take grocery shopping, and he would pore over everything for hours. It was a lot of fun to do and probably my only successful foray into short fiction, because although I admire the form tremendously, I just don’t do it well.
