HODGE: Time management. Just finding the time to fit everything in during the course of a day. There's fiction, of course, and there's nonfiction - awhile back, to even out the feast-or-famine irregularities of cash flow from doing fiction, I started doing freelance work for a computer magazine, which is lucrative and has some sweet perks. There's also music. I have a $15,000+ home studio that I've pieced together in recent years. So it's like having one full-time job and two part-time jobs, although I'm never really sure which is which. Probably it fluctuates. Even so, I fondly remember the early days when I was so unilaterally focused, and the days seemed so looooong.

A.B.: Have you found that success in writing demands any amount of compromise in your work?

HODGE: I've never encountered a situation like that. I try not to do things gratuitously, though. If something's there, no matter how not-for-the-faint-of-heart, it's there for a reason, and I tend to think that comes through in the work, as a kind of unspoken agreement between myself and the reader. A good example of that is Lies & Ugliness, my newest collection that came out a few months ago. It runs the gamut, all kinds of different stories and approaches, but there's some very strong stuff in there. Yet it's gotten raves from what you might consider rather staid review sources, who'd be the first to cry foul if they had a problem with it: Publisher's Weekly, Booklist (from the American Library Association), even the local paper here in Boulder devoted 30 column inches to it this past weekend and had nothing but good to say about it. Really, the best I can do is bring as much intelligence and heart as I can to a piece, and hope people get it.

A.B.: Have you had any formal training or is it all natural storytelling ability?

HODGE: I took a couple of writing classes in college, one as a freshman and the other as a senior. And I did derive some benefit from them, particularly the latter, but still, it was just shaping what was naturally there. I always felt compelled to write, I'd been doing it since second or third grade. Actually, oddly enough, the compulsion was there as a preschooler, before I even knew the alphabet, and it was very powerful. I used to scribble on scraps of wood and nail them to trees.

A.B.: What made you choose to write in the horror genre?

HODGE: It's what excited me most at the time I got really serious about writing, although no doubt the roots lie deeper, earlier. From childhood on, I always had these interests and fascinations in what some might call morbid areas. I just saw a great deal of leeway in horror, because it doesn't necessarily come with any preconceived trappings. I've tried to exploit that by telling the broadest range of stories that I can. At its best, horror is concerned with mortality, awe, one's place in the cosmos and the awful fear that can come from brushing up against that. These are things that every generation, every individual, must come to terms with on their own, because any wisdom accrued by previous generations doesn't really count. It's not like the wisdom of science, in which we build on a foundation of discovery, discard outmoded theories, and rationally move on. Instead, we each go through our lives grappling with these intangibles, earning our wounds and our triumphs, and being forced to acknowledge that the world can be a hideously nasty place, as well as one of great wonder . and each of us experiences this fresh and new. I've just looked for ways to reflect that, sometimes directly, sometimes symbolically, and in the process that's often helped me to walk my own path, exploring and dealing with some of the same things that my characters are.

But still, it's just one avenue of expression. I have music. I've written plenty of other things that have nothing to do with the H-word. It's marketing departments that adore labels, not writers. Whoever wrote Gilgamesh and Beowulf didn't have a label in mind; they just wanted to communicate things about the world around them.

A.B.: Was your novel Wild Horses a deliberate move away from the horror genre and into more mainstream fiction or did the story just present itself that way?

HODGE: It just occurred to me to write it, that's all. It grew out of a longish short story I'd done about the two central characters, Allison and Tom. In time I started to realize that there was a lot more to their story, and a lot of other people in their lives. Everybody started showing up, things started happening, and I mostly just kept up with it all.

That said, the timing was spot on. It came on the heels of this string of four novels I'd done with Bantam Doubleday Dell, each of which was bleaker than the one before it, and by the last one, Prototype, there was really no light anywhere at all. Psychologically it was such an oppressive thing to have gone through, I see that now, but it seemed to also put something to rest inside. At that point, it was sort of like, "Well, I can't go any deeper and darker than this one, so where do I go now? Okay, sideways." It really was of enormous benefit to do something so different from what I'd done before, and spend as much time in the comic as the tragic. And I really did enjoy the response it got. It definitely opened new doors.

A.B.: Your characters are extremely human - complete with human complexities and flaws - how do you manage to create such fleshed-out characters? Do they make their beginning as people you know or does a character just pop into your head and say "Hello, Brian, you're going to write about me now"?

HODGE: There's a quote by Francois de la Rochefoucauld that ranks among the truest things ever written: "Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person's heart." Even before I ran across this, I was always trying to keep my work informed by that exact outlook. Always looking at the characters from different angles. In a practical application, it means getting to know them well enough to see different sides to them, then giving them room to breathe and be themselves. Do that, and pretty soon they end up becoming collaborators instead of puppets.

As for where they come from, well, it could be anywhere. Sure, I've drawn from people I know, although out of respect it's never a complete transplantation, more like taking a pinch here and there. Unless it's someone I have no respect for whatsoever, in which case anything goes, and it's usually unpleasant. Characters can also be a side of myself that I'm giving vent to, maybe exploring a path not taken. Or somebody else I've seen somewhere, without any interaction, it's just that something about their look or their behavior intrigued me. I've lifted people out of documentaries and newspaper stories, even extracted characters from photographs - I see the right stranger caught at the right angle, the right moment, with the right lighting, and I start filling in gaps. And then, other times, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any real-world antecedents for some characters. I'll just live with an idea and a setting for a while and wait to see who shows up.

A.B.: Is it the recurring "sacrifice" theme that makes them so alive?

HODGE: Hmm, I never thought about that, at least in direct cause-and-effect terms, but that could be. I've always gone after an emotional effect in my work, and there's a tremendous poignancy in sacrifice. It lays you bare right down to the core, and shines a spotlight on what you hold dearest and what you regard as expendable. It can be very redemptive, too. Take Boyd, from Wild Horses. Boyd's the two-year-old in all of us, and while he's not cruel, he is selfish, and people get hurt as a consequence of that. Yet by the end he's done a very selfless thing. Actually, I suppose I regard sacrifice more as the culmination of a dramatic arc rather than a tool of characterization, but then, everything's so inextricably tied together anyway, you can't tweeze things apart and put them in separate piles.

A.B.: In particular I am curious about one of my favorites, Hieronymous Beadle, from your story "Little Holocausts." Did he find his origins in reality? And how did you come up with such a wonderful name?

HODGE: To be honest, I have almost no recollection of where he came from. The real-world triggers for that story - the AIDS death of a friend's mate, and going into their kitchen for a Heineken during the wake after the visitation and seeing a box of unused adult diapers ready to go out to the trash - those are clearly impressed in memory, but not Hieronymous Beadle. Most of the time, it's as though I eventually regard these characters as being so real I'm completely divorced from the notion of myself having anything to do with their origins. Like they've always been around and I just happened to encounter them.

But . to try piecing it together? I imagine I wanted a character who would feel very anachronistic in the decayed modern urban setting, who would seem completely out of place and time, yet not totally alien. So I started thinking about a fellow who might look at home on a decayed street in Dickensian London. As for the name, again, not much recollection, but it clearly has an antiquated feel, and of course Hieronymous comes with associations of Bosch and his phantasmagoric landscapes, some of which are urban, at least by late-15th century standards. Beadle? It sounds comical, almost bumbling. It just felt right, it wanted to be attached to the weightier, more ponderous name. Really, when you get into the magic of a story and trust the process, these things just happen.

A.B.: Who (or what) have been your greatest influences?

HODGE: I've answered this question more times than I know, and it's not that I'm tired of answering it, it's just that I've never felt that I've answered it adequately. I doubt that it can be. There are just too many influences, they should be changing over time as you bring more things into frame of reference, and you aren't even always aware of them at the time. So, for this one, I think I'll just have to bow out gracefully.

At this point, for reasons forgotten, I sent Anne the file for a recently completed story, "With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu," and this prompted a few follow-up questions. The poetry volume referred to at the end is The Devil's Wine, edited by Tom Piccirilli for CD Publications.

A.B.: There has been (and is) so much going on right now in the media with Afghanistan and Iraq, and I was wondering if that is where "With Acknowledgements to Sun Tzu" was born? Or was it inspired by the idea of war in general?

HODGE: More the latter, really. I was thinking of the title of Sun Tzu's book, The Art of War, and how it's been appropriated for fare like that Wesley Snipes movie a couple of years back, stuff like that. And I thought, "Well, suppose you took it literally?" Looking at war as an aesthetic construct, and who or what would be the appreciative audience? My imagination has always been fired by the idea of these vast undercurrents of consciousness that run though our cities, our species. Very Jungian notion, that. And I've long been fascinated by the idea of beauty in violence. Say, some of John Woo's earlier movies, his Hong Kong gangster films, particularly something like The Killer, in which you get the most god-awful mayhem, but it's depicted in this manner that's quite balletic. That's a really peculiar juxtaposition, if you think about it, and it's not true in a literal sense, but perhaps in some metaphorical sense . who knows? So, it was that sort of thing that fed into the story, but scaled up and even given a historical continuum, although still told quite intimately. The current strife only figured in peripherally. For the narrator, as a war correspondent, it only made sense that he'd been to Iraq in 1991, to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, places like that. And other aspects . when he was reflecting back, that kid he was was really me, in junior high with the books on World War II, staring at those black-and-white photos, like the one of the German boy, in a helmet too big for him, next to this obvious veteran who'd been through hell. Just the blatant difference in their faces . I'd stare and stare, although at the time couldn't have said why.

A.B.: I've been wondering if you do any research - historical or otherwise - to bring more reality to the story?

HODGE: If it's necessary, sure, that's something I never shy away from. I often research more than what I actually need, just because I like to feel as comfortable with what I'm leaving out as putting in. Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous. Like, in this one story called "Cenotaph," I was writing about pagan and ecclesiastical carvings from medieval England. Just to do this one story, I had a stack of material about a foot high. But, whatever it takes. I'll talk to people with expertise in a subject, I'll take trips. I spent seven or eight days in New Orleans while doing a novel that was partially set there; went down scouting locations and soaking up atmosphere. I tape tons of stuff off cable, documentaries and segments of things on The Discovery Channel, like that, and keep them all logged into a database so I can find them if I ever need them.

A.B.: Finally, after reading Sun Tzu I have to ask, what's the worst thing you've ever seen?

HODGE: Ah, you're giving me a chance to pull a Whitley Strieber here? Do you know about that? From early on, part of Whitley's mythos - and this began even well before the claims of alien abduction - was that he was on that Texas campus when Charles Whitman opened fire with a rifle from the clock tower. He'd go into detail about someone who was shot and mortally wounded just a few feet away from him. For years, that was accepted at face value, but then awhile back someone actually did the research and debunked the hell out of that claim. Whitley's comeback was that, okay, so maybe he wasn't there physically, but that he was there in spirit.

So anyway, when I was living in Beirut.

No, really, the murders of friends, things like that, I wasn't anywhere near them at the time, so there was no witnessing those. And I've seen some awfully heinous film footage and photographs of crime scenes and the like, images that take awhile to get out of your head, but again, that doesn't count because I wasn't there.

So I think I'd have to go with something a lot more everyday. Almost three years ago, I went back to be with my grandmother during the last week of her life, and after that experience I remain astonished and appalled by the degree of degeneration that can claim a human body while the person remains alive. I cannot fathom how she lingered as long as she did in her final condition. During her last seven weeks or so, at which point her stomach had somehow become detached, something like that, the amount of food she ate would've fit into two cupped hands. I fed part of that to her myself. An early decision was made to withhold intravenous nourishment as well, yet she just hung in there, week after week. She couldn't really drink, either, so I imagine her mouth and airway felt like leather. It certainly wasn't an act of will keeping her going, because for years she'd been ready to die. In the end, she was so withered she looked like someone stacked like cordwood with other someones at a concentration camp. Even worse, until those final hours when she never regained consciousness, she'd kept her mind about her. As long she was awake, she was aware. The whole ordeal seemed extraordinarily cruel to me. I was holding her right hand when she finally died of congestive heart failure, and I don't think I've ever been quite so glad to hear anything as her final breath. And even that seemed to take forever in coming. You could see the life leaving her, from the extremities inward. There's a line from "A Child's Christmas in Wales" when Dylan Thomas recalls finding a bird that's nearly dead: ".all but one of his fires out." It was exactly like that, this fading ember fanned by these struggles for breath that grew more and more shallow, until she let go with this final exhalation that went on for so long, I couldn't believe she still had that much air in her.

It's funny this should be coming up now, because recently I've been working on my part of a volume of poetry, and I did a piece drawn from that experience. It explains the same thing in a different way:

Sunrise, Dressed For Dusk

So at long last comes
the moment you wept for
the moment you prayed for
the moment you begged for
and that everyone has dreaded
except for you and I.

There are worse things than
wishing someone dead.

For today it is a kindness
and how hateful to find myself the only one
who welcomes it with you.

So what do you think now
behind those blinded eyes
between those deafened ears
above that parched throat
and amid the indignities and ruin
in which you've lain so long.

There are worse things than
wishing someone dead.

For today I look at you and see one
who's been granted far less mercy
than she always has deserved.

So is He still as kind today,
the One of greatest love
the One of greatest wrath
the One on whom you called
or was the line between you
just busy all those times?

There are worse things than
wishing someone dead.