Edinburgh based author, Simon Logan (above), is a writer to watch. Katja From The Punk Band is his most recent novel, and only his second novel. And it is one of the most impressive books I’ve read in a long time. It’s a stripped-down neo-noir thriller set in and on a dystopian Eastern-Bloc-esque ‘worker’ island, and follows the titular Katja as she makes a move to break free from the shackles of drug dealers and parole officers. It’s published by ChiZine in paperback and you should be able to pick it up for a decent price. Click on the link at the bottom of this article to read my review. Simon took the time to answer some questions for the Geekzine…
Andy Jamieson, Editor
Katja From The Punk Band is set in what seems to be an Eastern Bloc environ. What inspired this decision? It’s really just that the aesthetic of it appeals to me and seems to sit well with what I’m writing about and the ideas which I have. William Gibson often set his novels in Japan because it’s a very futuristic place but also very strange and slightly off-kilter and that suited the sort of stories which he was telling. For whatever reason it’s people and places which are at the opposite end of the spectrum to that cutting edge which interests me – places which may have once been great but are now neglected and falling to pieces. I think part of my interest is in looking in amongst all of this tragedy and entropy and still finding a ray of light in amongst it all. That goes for my characters as well as the setting so the two end up reflecting one another.
How did the idea come around for the novel? I’d finished writing my first full-length novel, Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void, and it came out at just under 100K so I wanted to write something shorter, punchier and more stripped down. I also wanted to write something which intermingled multiple storylines and characters, to have them crashing against and tripping over one another because I loved films which do this (the obvious example being Jackie Brown but also Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and even Wild Things and One Night At McCool’s ). I started with the Katja character then came up with others around her and then basically spent a couple of afternoons lying on the floor with pieces of paper with scenes scribbled on them, arranging and re-arranging them to see how they could overlap and merge. The interesting thing I found was that it was incredibly easy to come up with these connections, to the point where I had to really hold back or I could have risked making it overly complicated.
On your website you discuss the possibility of a sequel. Is it a real possibility, and what is it you like about Katja that would inspire you to write a sequel? Yeah I’m definitely going to write it anyway and am a good chunk of the way into it (though I had to put it to one side for a month or so to rewrite another novel, lovejunky, so that we could start sending it out to see if anyone was interested in it). I’d never intended to write a sequel until I’d finished the first draft of lovejunky and passed it to my agent then realised I didn’t have anything immediately lined up to work on next. Since Katja had gotten such good feedback I thought why not build on that and give folks a little more. I started thinking about it in early summer and within 3 or 4 weeks had sketched out the entire plot so it’s just a case of finding the time to actually write the damned thing now. My aim is to finish the first draft by the end of November.
Katja is a very ‘cinematic’ reading experience – has there been any interest in a film adaptation? Nothing solid, no, though my agent has been sending it out to people he think would be interested. We’ll see if it goes anywhere but I know how unlikely it would be that anything like that would actually happen and so my main focus, my only focus, is just on writing more books.
What are you working on at the moment? As mentioned I’ve just finished the final draft of another book, lovejunky, which I’m describing as part dystopic crime thriller, part brooding noir romance. In brief it’s based around the idea of being able to fuse a drug into a person’s bloodstream in order to act as a supply to another person addicted to that drug. The one I’m currently writing is Katja From The Punk Band 2 and then after that I may come back to another one called Blue Light which I had put to one side to write lovejunky about a year ago. That one is a David Lynch-style mystery but I won’t say any more about it than that. Other than that I have a couple of other ideas which are both at very early stages, one of them a possible follow-up or companion piece of lovejunky. But one thing at a time!
What can you reveal about your next novel, Guerra? Guerra is slightly more science fiction-y than Katja, closer to my first novel Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void. It’s about a city in which media battles are waged by guerrilla broadcasters and after the body of an ex-girlfriend turns up burned to a crisp, one of those broadcasters, Alex Guerra, starts to look into what happened to her. The story follows the meme war which is then ignited by his actions and the story deals a lot with how propaganda is not only external but internal, how we often lie to ourselves about the world and our memories in the same way a government might lie to us. I’ve always been interested in the real people behind revolutionary idols such as Che Guevara and so I always wanted to look at how these people’s identity is taken from them and crafted by those who adore them, ultimately and inevitably breaking any connection with the real person.
How did you start out as a writer? Seems like I was a bit of a late bloomer in that I don’t have any stories of hand-making little novels written for my parents at aged six like most other writers do. I didn’t really start until I was about seventeen or so and initially wrote in the UK/US horror small presses magazines. They pretty much all folded under the weight of the electronic/internet boom but not before I’d racked up a good 80 or 90 publication credits and that gave me enough experience to hone my craft a little to the point where I was writing something a little more decent than when I started. I quickly grew tired of what I saw as the self-imposed limitations of most horror fiction and so turned to other sources for my inspiration and to try and come up with something a little fresher and more representative of me as a person and a writer.
What influences you as a writer? For the most part, not other writers or books. I’m far more influenced by music and film and my first forays away from horror fiction used industrial music as their primary source. I wanted to write something that was imbued with the grimy, oppressive atmosphere of the music I was listening to at the time and over a series of stories I sort of figured out exactly where I wanted to go with the style – the resulting book was my first collection of short stories, I-O. Only one story nailed it on the head for me, called Ignition, and I then took that and drew on ever more influences – dark and alternative subcultures, fetishes, the punk ethic, politics and ideas relating to the media – and brought it all to the next level. I love anything that is to do with subcultures and things which are in opposition to the mainstream. My stories almost without exception feature characters who are on the sidelines, who aren’t the best in their field and who aren’t part of any official system. Perhaps because of my own fairly mediocre academic achievements I find it hard to relate to people who are the elite, the smartest and toughest, but in addition I find there is less interest there in terms of story. I just don’t see what is interesting about a character who is the best of the best because where is the struggle for them? I have a fairly child-like fascination with the world and just love learning in general. I love quantum theory, psychology, just science in general, and will read anything relating to any of those. It’s all input.
Favourite book? As for my favourite book, that’s a toughie and it varies based on my mood. Chuck Palanuik’s Invisible Monsters, Vonnegut’s Timequake, JG Ballard’s Crash or High Rise or even Slavenka Drakulic’s As If I Were Not There would certainly be contenders. Clive Barker’s The Books Of Blood have a special place because of the time I was reading them was at a very influential point in my life. To me, however, books aren’t like movies in that I will rewatch movies over and over but I’ve never re-read a book and don’t really ever have the inclination to!
Interview conducted by Andy Jamieson, Editor
To read Andy’s review of Katja From The Punk Band, click here.
Check out Simon’s website: www.coldandalone.com
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