HODGE: Who knows? Nobody sees himself quite as other people see him, anyway. But some general background? I'm still settling into a new home, new area. In February we moved 1000 miles to Boulder, Colorado, at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. I've published six novels, and my seventh and newest one, Wild Horses, sold this past spring at auction for quite a bit of money for the hardcover rights alone. It will be published next March, and the paperback rights will be auctioned at about the same time. I've also published over seventy short stories and novelettes, and two collections that are thematically based. The Convulsion Factory is unified around urban and societal decay, and the brand new one that's just been released, Falling Idols, consists of different explorations into religion and spirituality, although it's rather antagonistic to orthodoxy and dogma. But then, so am I. I'd like to do my part toward seeing a greater restoration of the pagan world, and one way or another that motivates a lot of my work. My own personal path has been evolving into a blend of Celtic and Nordic/Teutonic aspects, since both figure into my ancestry.

DUMAY: Your mental world is very dark, cruel, disturbing, violent. Why?

HODGE: That's only one facet of my outlook, but that facet is there because it's an accurate reflection of the world we live in and the cosmologies we've constructed to explain it. Which isn't to say that's my only view of the world, or my only depiction of it. I've also written things that are lighter, some that are even comedic, it's just that you're less likely to have encountered them. I love to double over in laughter as much as anybody, and I most often regard this world and the cosmos with a sense of awe and wonder. Sure, I have my dour days, they're just not the rule. But what you've described is a perfectly accurate assessment of a lot of what I've written, and it's often the most effective way of getting across certain things that are important to me to convey. When it's time to do that sort of work, I try to explore with both eyes wide open. Peter Straub called me "spectacularly unflinching" and I try to meld that approach with an aesthetic attention to language and nuance and subtext, to render these darker things with a certain level of artistry. In part, it emerges from a process of self-integration. I don't believe in the duality of perfect good and perfect evil, separated by a vast gulf. We have within each of us the capacity for divinity and diabolism, and I'm fully accepting of that in myself. Life, of course, runs more smoothly when we focus on harmony, but we must at least acknowledge that we embody the discordant and chaotic as well. To me, those who seek only light and shun the dark at all costs are just as unhealthy and misguided as these antisocial losers who cling like babies to the Judeo-Christian Satan as a symbol of wasting their lives on nothing but hatred and rejection of love and their failure to accomplish anything or even try. There's a wonderful statement from Aleister Crowley that's never far from my mind - "A single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage point from which to view the world" - and I try to live by it.

DUMAY: Do you think violence can be something very aesthetic?

HODGE: An artistic depiction of violence can definitely have its own aesthetic qualities, but that's a vital distinction to make, because in real life, violence is generally quick, nasty, brutish, and sometimes irrevocable. And I'm speaking as one who's had two friends murdered. But that doesn't invalidate, for example, a stylized cinematic representation presenting imagery that is exhilarating. Think of the end of John Woo's film, The Killer, where it achieves the level of opera. At the other extreme is something like Steven Spielberg's new film, Saving Private Ryan, where it's totally chaotic and terrifying. But probably the most effective juxtaposition, at least for my tastes, is exemplified by the approach that Kenneth Branagh took in his version of Henry V, at the Battle of Agincourt. Prior to the battle, of course, you have Shakespeare's magnificent speech that sweeps you up into this frenzy of glory and exhilaration, and then these illusions are totally demolished by what follows: guys stumbling around in the rain and gracelessly flailing at each other with swords, or wallowing in the mud sticking daggers into one another. And finally the aftermath . piles of filthy corpses and slaughtered young boys, which is the absolute and ugly reality. Yet the more stylized spectacles of convulsive beauty can be entirely appropriate, because we are without question a supremely violent species and such sequences not only reflect our fascination with violence, but serve to sustain our illusions and preserve our individual capacity for it, because realistically the defensive readiness to maim or kill is an essential survival skill.

DUMAY: Your world is very close to Poppy Z. Brite's world. Do you consider her like a little sister?

HODGE: Calling her a little sister might imply a certain condescension or mentorship that doesn't apply, but certainly there's a kinship between us that goes back a long time. We grew up as writers in public at about the same period. We noticed one another's very early work in a magazine called The Horror Show, that was the first place to start publishing us, and developed a mutual admiration. We first met face-to-face about ten years ago, and have been friends ever since. I sent the manuscript of her first novel, Lost Souls, to my editor at Dell, who ended up publishing it here in the U.S., but I'm not about to suggest that that was any great deed on her behalf. It may have helped speed the process along, but the novel was so good it's inconceivable it wouldn't have been published soon anyway. As far as our fictional worlds are concerned, I'd say we share a certain overlap of sensibilities, but then there are a lot of differences, as well. For example, she often approaches things from a homoerotic perspective. As for myself, I like women too much not to explore them as main characters.

DUMAY: We know some strange photos of yourself, taken by Doli Nickel. It is important for you to work on the image you give to the public? To control this image?

HODGE: I'm not obsessive about controlling it, and in truth I don't even regard the collective sum of the photos that Doli shoots as an image in the strictest sense, which might imply that I strive to fabricate something that isn't really my true nature. In fact, it is, or at least aspects of it. But our main reason for doing it this way is simply because we both get so bored by standard head-and-shoulders photos. Any halfway competent photographer can do that, but if your capabilities exceed it, then it's laziness to settle for the mundane. Just as it's laziness to use the same picture year after year, for every single purpose, as though your life is stagnant. Doli's a very good photographic artist, and I tend to think in gestalts, so if a publisher or a magazine needs a picture, why not use our imaginations and make the effort to furnish something that will be a symbolic reflection of the material, or the pertinent emotional and psychological landscapes that led to it being written? It's just more interesting that way, certainly for us, and I hope for readers, too.

DUMAY: I have heard you sold a script for the cinema. What kind?

HODGE: This must be a rumor, because I haven't. Not yet, at least. I've had a few works optioned and have adapted a couple of my own novels into screenplays, but nothing definite so far. But it feels like this is getting closer to happening.

DUMAY: I know Prototype is a significant novel in your career. Why, what is the story?

HODGE: It's about a guy who just can't seem to get by in society, who learns he's one of an extremely rare, tiny group of people with a heretofore unseen chromosomal abnormality that seems to predispose them toward violence and isolation. They've only been identified in the past few years, and it appears to be a recent mutation. With the help of a psychologist and her anthropologist girlfriend, he tries to find out more about what's wrong with him and what it all means, and why this older man with the same syndrome wants to exploit him, and he gets all his answers, but it's not enough to save him from his own worst impulses. I've heard people call it the grimmest novel ever written, and unbearably depressing, all of which I take as compliments. It's very significant to me because I was able to use one story to deal with some deeply personal feelings of being at odds with the world, while at the same time addressing concerns about industrialized society as a whole and the pressures it exerts on human beings who are structurally no different than they were forty thousand years ago, and what it makes of us. Writing this novel helped purge me of a few demons, and was something I'd been working up to throughout a few novels that I was finding progressively more harrowing to write, digging deeper and deeper into my head, to the point that I was able to imagine there was probably a novel I wouldn't survive, if I really wanted to go that far.

DUMAY: You're a fan of gothic music, I think. What do you listen to?

HODGE: Yes, I'm a fan of gothic, and goth's harsher cousin, industrial, but they're only a part of a much broader spectrum of what I like. Just in the past month or so, counting review discs and tape trades and purchases, my collection's grown by close to two dozen titles, and that's on the high end of typical, so I'm into a lot. My favorite label has to be Cold Meat Industry, in Sweden. I love their whole output, and that led me into some of the Nordic black metal, of which Emperor is probably the best. Fields of the Nephilim is a long-time favorite; I'm overjoyed they're back together. I like a lot of the darkwave stuff such as what comes from Projekt. Pagan-inspired music like Sol Invictus, Ordo Equitum Solis, Algiz, Hagalaz Runedance. Faith and the Muse are amazing. Steve Roach's tribal work. David Hudson and Adam Plack, both are incredible didgeridoo players. A lot of Celtic music, both traditional and neo, like Loreena McKennitt. Mazzy Star. The Cramps, nobody's more fun than the Cramps. Chris Whitley. Steve Earle. Tom Waits. Tori Amos. Medieval revivalists like Sequentia and Sonus. Classical and baroque. Old delta blues. Electronic stuff like Tangerine Dream and Vangelis. Older progressive rock. Name it, I've probably got something that's qualifies.

DUMAY: Music is important for you? Do you work in music?

HODGE: Yes, music is absolutely vital to me. I've never worked at it professionally, but ever since I was a child, I've played different instruments. At the moment, I have four didgeridoos and my girlfriend and I both have a few percussion instruments lying about, and I have a mandolin I pick up now and again. I tried a bowed psaltery this weekend and liked it, so will probably get one of those someday. I play keyboards, and recently got two new ones to replace some bulky old outdated gear. I got a digital piano with several other sounds programmed into it, and also a polyphonic synthesizer that combines digital technology and stability with an older, analogue-style interface, so it's a very intuitive machine to use and incredible in its diversity. Now that reliable, professional-quality recording technology is finally cheap enough to be within reach of the individual musician, I'd like to get into that and add a hard-disk desktop studio by early next year, and if I feel I've reached a certain degree of proficiency, try to release that work too.

DUMAY: What do you like to read?

HODGE: The problem with making a list like this is that no matter how long it gets, I always think of more later on that should've been added to it. I try to keep my reading list fairly well-rounded. These days I'm probably reading as much or more nonfiction than ever: science, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, esoterica. Computer magazines. As for fiction, within the general areas I'm working in, I'm usually most eager to read new stuff from Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlín Kiernan, David Schow, Phil Rickman, James Lee Burke, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall. Going beyond that, John Steinbeck, Charles Bukowski, the decadent poets, particularly Baudelaire. It's a severely abbreviated list, but you get the idea. I try to sample quite a bit, past as well as contemporary. And in comics, I'm hooked on Garth Ennis' Preacher and the whole Hellblazer saga.

DUMAY: Some of your stories remind me of Cormac McCarthy novels about incest, serial killers, etc. Do you know this author, do you read him?

HODGE: I'm very familiar with him, and have several of his novels. It's funny you should mention a comparison. He was a definite influence on my newest novel, Wild Horses, although not so much in the ways you describe. He has this mythic sense of the American landscape, and that's really what resonated for me, trying to capture a similar sense of the land but from my own perspective and how it relates to the characters and the story. Come to think of it, incest is an integral component of the novel's background, in one character's past, although the novelette it grew out of had it as well, and predates the first time I read McCarthy.

DUMAY: Some of your stories are homages - "Naked Lunchmeat," for example. Do you like this kind of game with the references?

HODGE: As a diversion every now and then, it can be a lot of fun, adapting myself to a pre-established style and viewpoint, but it's certainly not meant to take the place of what I consider my truest work. A few months ago I wrote a brief comedic sequel to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, almost exclusively in dialogue, with the narrative in metered rhyme, so that it's really a play in prose form, with the narrative itself taking the role of a chorus. It lends itself much better to being performed aloud than read on the page. I've performed it and had people howling with laughter, and that's all it's supposed to do, really. But the most personal work that anyone does always comes from a place deep inside that doesn't mimic and strives to speak with its own unique voice.

DUMAY: I got the impression you write always on the cutting edge of the rules, as though you were in a sort of personal interzone where sexuality is above the concept of masculinity or feminity, where moral code is above the concept of good and evil. It's something like this?

HODGE: Yes, that's a very accurate assessment. I greatly resent belief systems and so on that seek to impose their own structures of right and wrong on everyone, as though I'm unable to determine my own path and live according to it. Still, I acknowledge that large portions of the population fail to develop a strong sense of self and personal will, and instinctively seek out ready-made molds that they can fit into, where these kinds of decisions are made for them and so their identities are taken on by default. Actually, there's nothing wrong with this, and it's even necessary to keep a society going. We obviously see it in the insect kingdom, with the workers and drones, but fortunately there are ways around this fate for human beings who put their hearts and minds to the task. It's never an easy route, but it still offers an opportunity to generate as much mastery over your life as possible, and achieve that state of being in which you truly are governed by your own soul and what you're making of it in the process, and never mind what global corporations and fundamentalists tell you you should be doing with your life. So it's natural that these philosophies creep into my writing and become embodied by some of my characters, but I don't mean to put them forth as a simple license to indulge every whim and to hell with everybody else. There are certain absolutes of behavior, particularly where children are concerned, and I think any sensible person knows what those are. Knows that the moment you make someone else an unwilling victim, you've abused your own freedom. Personally, I try to treat everyone with respect and decency, and if someone then proves to be without honor, I prefer to have as little to do with him or her as possible. Beyond that, in whatever people do with other consenting adults, or in pursuit of their own mental and spiritual development, let them be the authors of their own morality. We're ultimately richer for it.