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Universal's 13th Street

Conducted by Thomas Roche

PART 1: DARK SENSIBILITIES

Brian Hodge is primarily known to horror fans as a writer of some of the most well-written novels and short stories around. Mingled with humor and pop-culture sensibilities, his frights are more than just scary; they explore the darkest corridors of the human soul.

Hodge's last novel, Wild Horses, was a well-received desert noir, a black-comic tarantella through Elmore Leonard territory, but with an undercurrent of introspection. It follows such vagabonds as a casino dealer on the take, a mob hit man, a travelling leather dealer, and a crystal-wielding new age hooker through a cross-country chase for stolen computer data and a young woman's past.

Having come from the horror world, in a sense, Hodge acknowledges that fear was the primary result he was seeking with his early work. But he's quick to point out that the kind of fear he wanted to evoke was, at its best, subconscious. "It's usually done from such an instinctual gut level. Trying to analyze it, I mean, that's like taking a medical school cadaver and asking yourself what makes up a human being. So you start cutting and peeling and separating, and pretty soon what you have doesn't much resemble a person anymore. But fairly early on I started to think of a real distinction between scares, which seems to me more akin to pop-ups in movies - the ubiquitous cat that jumps in out of the edge of the frame - and work that probes deeper and leaves you with a disturbing feeling that lingers. The latter, it's really more of a cumulative effect, rather than any particular jolt . this piling-on of challenges to preconceptions and varied assaults on the senses. It gradually takes its toll on your psyche rather than making you piss your knickers and then laugh about it."

PART 2: EARLY INFLUENCE

Still, Hodge does acknowledge the influence of at least one grand master in his early books. "Both of those first two novels, Oasis and Dark Advent, showed a ton of Stephen King influence, although they were very well received and I'm not aware of anyone criticizing that. King throws such a huge shadow that it seems implicitly understood that anyone writing a horror novel is going to have a tough time entirely getting out from underneath it. And I'd done enough short stories preceding them that my own voice at that time was still starting to emerge. Regardless, my third novel, Nightlife, felt like a breakthrough, the first one that felt like it was all mine, and every book since has pretty much had my stamp all over it."

But whether or not his work falls into the horror genre, Hodge was always interested in exploring bigger things. His first novel, Oasis, "was obviously a coming-of-age story, something common to first novels, and about all you're qualified to write at age 22. Since then, I've tended to write about the things that keep life interesting: love, hate, betrayal, spirituality, familial and social bugaboos. Deathgrip was my first major foray into the realm of the gods. The Darker Saints had a strong racial component in its big-business-versus-third-world aspects. Prototype was the grimmest possible broadside against the machinelike soullessness of the modern western world and the difficulty of the individual in carving out one's place in it."

PART 3: SHORT FICTION

In addition to his upcoming novel, Hodge has a collection of short fiction coming out from Night Shade Books in late 2001 - his third collection. Asked whether he prefers novels or short stories, he says: "Actually, I'm a great fan of those middle-ground lengths of the novelette and novella. You can really capitalize on the strengths of the other two: retain the punch of a story, but luxuriate in room enough to stretch out and draw the reader in with a deepening sense of atmosphere and situation."

When Hodge made the switch, with Wild Horses, to crime-noir, he found that the fear in his work took on a more immediate sense. "Any sense of fear becomes less existential in form, and more strictly situational, hinging directly on your relationship with the characters. Although in the new novel, Mad Dogs, through the main character, an actor named Jamey Sheppard, I still got to play around with the idea of 'I never knew this was inside me waiting to come out,' so there's still that existential aspect. Overall, I've definitely started making a lot more room for humor. I like that contrast: these really gut-wrenching things slammed side-by-side with dialogue and incidents that, if reactions to Wild Horses are any indication, can have you howling with laughter. It's a much more balanced view of modern life that I'm presenting now . which, if you take a step back for a good objective look, has no shortage of absurdities, so laughter is a very credible response."