Interview by Harry Shannon

ene O'Neill has not exactly rocketed into literary prominence, despite having long deserved it. In fact his probable "over-night" success (with the intense, dazzling new dark fantasy novel The Burden of Indigo) has taken about twenty years to come to fruition. Since 1979, Mr. O'Neill has published more than 80 stories in prestige magazines like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Twilight Zone Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Tomorrow, Dragon and anthologies such as Dead End: City Limit, Cemetery Sonata II, Unnatural Selection, Best of Horrorfind 2000 and Men and Women of Letters. He has recently been accepted into The Night Has Teeth and Decadence 2. Gene's fiction has received numerous Stoker and Nebula recommendations. He lives in the Napa Valley with Kay, his wife of thirty-seven years, who is a teacher. They have two grown children.

Click image to buy or for more information on The Burden of Indigo.

HARRY SHANNON: Congratulations on the terrific reception you've gotten for The Burden of Indigo. I think the novel is a truly remarkable achievement.

GENE O'Neill: Thank you.

HS: Tell the readers a little bit about the story.

GO: It is really the story of a man's inner and outer search for redemption, and also kind of an episodic discovery of self.

HS: What served as the original inspiration?

GO: I read that many years ago criminals were branded in the UK then cast out to wander as pariahs. I thought that was a neat place to start; then during the writing I got involved with racism, class distinctions, and other themes in addition to the crime and punishment thing.

HS: Please elaborate on your personal feelings about some of these themes, okay? And maybe tell us how you chose to deal with them in the structuring of this story.

GO: I was raised in a federal housing ghetto near Mare Island Naval Shipyard, exposed to all the problems of the working/lower class. I am fairly liberal on most social issues. I believe that one of our greatest heros is a black woman struggling to raise her kids in the inner city with limited resources; I believe people of color are treated differently by most of our institutions, including the legal system; I believe there is widening division between the upper and lower class today; I believe it is extremely difficult to completre parole in the State of California especially if you are a person of color; I don't believe in the death penalty; I believe it is easy to dismiss others's problems too easily. Indigo tells a story but perhaps it indirectly addresses some of these issues, too. I know it says something about tolerance.

HS: I really enjoyed the book. Let's learn a bit about the man who wrote it. You've worked a lot of different jobs in your day. Tell us about some of them.

The morning after a signing event in San Francisco. From left to right Mike Oliveri, Gak, Gene O'Neill, Brian Keene, and Mikey Huyck.

GO: I worked my way through college on seismic crews, doing most of the jobs on a crew -- assisting the observer (recording), shooter (handling explosives -- I had been trained for this in the Marines), driller, and I even hustled jugs, i.e. planted geophones.

I also worked on mapping the earth's crust of the western states (refraction work as opposed to reflection, when looking for oil). It was a good job for a young guy. I was nomadic, worked hard during the day, played hard at night and did it all on per diem. I also worked with disadvantaged/disabled young people as an adaptive P.E. teacher -- that appealed to my sense of doing things for those who are not able to shout loudly for themselves. As an ex-jock I loved the Wheel Chair games and Special Olympics.

HS: When did you realize you wanted to write?

GO: Late, I think compared to most writers, who start scribbling stories with color crayons. My experience similar to James Michener, who started around 40, I think.

HS: Is Michener an author you would relate to otherwise? For example, he was known for extensive research. I get the feeling you love to read and explore new ideas.

GO: I appreciate Michener's research, but he is tone deaf. Compare the same subject matter in Space with The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.

HS: Amongst authors, who would you say have been your greatest influences?

GO: I admire the work of Shirley Jackson and Roald Dahl a lot.

HS: Why is that?

GO: They both have an understated style, developing themes slowly, doing a little more than just tell a story. I think both have something to say. both adress the darker side of man.

HS: Who else?

GO: But two books (novellas really) that I often reread when I am grumpy or down are Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Desnisovich. I think I like them because of the attraction of the theme of the common man attempting to transcend his circumstances, rise above his immediate situation. Maybe I like this theme because it may be an obsession in my own work.

HS: I remember reading those as a young man, and being knocked out by the perseverance and endurance of the characters.

GO: Yes.

HS: After so many years of writing short fiction, why novels now? Just because you have more time?

GO: If you are going to go full time writing you must write novels -- no one makes a living writing short fiction.

HS: Understood.

GO: 10 years ago I had planned on going full time. But my daughter decided on med school. So I waited until three plus years ago. I have been productive working mostly on novels since then.

HS: I'm always curious about how people approach the novel. Did you outline extensively, somewhat, or just jump in?

GO: I outline the beginning and the end, but work things out in the middle as I go along.

HS: How has completing and releasing this first novel changed you as a writer, if at all?

GO: I'm too old to change now. I keep trying to extend, experiment--both of the next two novels have an interesting experiments with point-of-view, things I had never seen done before. I know it works, because I did it in a short story and no one said, yuck!

HS: Before this novel, you released a collection, also from Prime Books, called Ghosts, Spirits, Computers and World Machines. Tell us about that. Wasn't the intro written by Kim Stanley Robinson?

GO: Stan Robinson and I go back to the beginning of our careers. We were Clarion grads from different years, and used to make weekend journeys from Northern California to Eugene Oregon, invited to workshops by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. On those journeys Stan and I rapped for eight hours up and eight hours back.

HS: What did you talk about?

GO: Everything! I heard the outlines for all three Mars books years before the research. He discusses those trips in the intro to that collection. The eight stories are signposts along my 20 year career, points where I made a technical leap somehow in a story (or so I thought).

HS: I remember that in that collection (besides the shorter form of The Burden of Indigo) I especially liked a little tale called The Beautiful Stranger. Tell us about that one (for those who have yet to buy this collection, spoiler ahead!)

GO: Everyone has read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. But it is atypical of her work. She is much less graphic, more subtle usually. One of my favorites of hers is The Beautiful Stranger. So I turn the story around from the female to male viewpoint, with my own twist on M/F relationships. The title is a tip of the hat to her.

HS: Where do you get your ideas? Do they come to you full blown, in pieces, how do you generally brainstorm?

GO: Damon Knight says that ideas are like seashells at the seashore. When you are looking for seashells you find them. Ideas are the same -- everywhere in life around us, when you are keyed into seeing them. I read odd things for fun and ideas come from that reading.

HS: Odd things like what? Tell us some of the eclectic things that have caught your intellectual fancy lately.

GO: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene explains String Theory reconciling Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics. Ofc I understand very little of the science/math -- how the hell can anyone visualize 11 dimensions. But the chapters on speculative physics merging with stuff covered years ago in sf--all the black hole speculations including the parallel universe stuff. Fascinating. I have also recently read all of Edward Bunker's work including No Beast So Fierce, Animal Factory, Little Boy Blue, and Dog Eat Dog (hard stuff to get even from the library). He has spent much of his life in prison, but unlike Jack Henry Abbott (a prison writer the NYC establishment loves), Bunker has more to say about larger issues with less shitty attitude than Abbott (Bunker is Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs).

HS: Okay, back to the subject at hand, in other words The Burden of Indigo. I just gave away that it was originally a short story. I see it has a multi-themed tale of redemption and a plea for tolerance and forgiveness. How would you describe it?

GO: Yeah, I think a key to the tale is tolerance. A trait I don't have in abundance but greatly admire. And it is also about struggle -- like the old fisherman in Hemingway's story and the Siberian convict, Ivan Denisovich. Struggle is something I greatly admire, even when it is not successful. I like the Hebrew word that is an epigram in the last section -- tzedek: it means both justice and mercy.

HS: Indigo is not exactly science fiction, or dark fantasy, or horror, but perhaps all of the above. You have another couple of other genre-bending novels in the works too, right? Tell us a bit about Shadow of the Dark Angel.

GO: I guess I have been mixing genres since early in my career--not a wise thing to do by the way, makes it difficult to market your stuff. But anyhow, Shadow is not quite dark fantasy, not quite horror, not quite thriller/suspense and maybe parts of all of these, the sum hopefully being greater than said parts. Perhaps it is akin to Silence of the Lambs, with a little more fantasy.

HS: Sounds fascinating, then. And then what about Deathflash? What is that novel about?

GO: Here's the idea question again, and a bit more about my strange reading interests.

HS: Good. Go on.

GO: I read some stuff about the Russians photographing the radiation escaping from bodies at the moment of death (not Kurlian photography, but something like that). The odd thing was the flash was 100 times more than expected. What was it they caught? Aha, the soul? Anyway, the book is about a refugee from a religious cult who can see the deathflash, and he then becomes addicted to the experience. Call it a kind of dark fantasy/horror/mystery. This one may fit more easily into the marketing pigeonholes than my other stuff.

HS: Sounds like a fascinating premise. And you have another collection coming soon, In Dark Corners. Tell us a bit about that one, too.

GO: My degrees are in Psychology. So I have always been interested in the darker side of man, and I still prefer to explore that, regardless of the genre. I am not that interested in heroes, but the common man and his struggles, sometimes mostly with himself. I am always peering in the dark corners of the psyche, so to speak.

HS: Did you ever practice as a therapist, or want to?

GO: No, but I combined some of my training with my P.E. training when I taught adaptive P.E.

HS: Back to In Dark Corners, then.

GO: That collection will be almost entirely stories from major magazines and anthologies except for two of my favorites from the small press.

HS: Most of us have another writer act as something of a mentor when we are trying to break in. Anyone do that for you back in the early '80s?

GO: Nope. Other than advice from Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm and Kim Stanley Robinson, no one has helped me publish anything. Most of it I sent totally out cold after going to Clarion.

HS: Damn. Do you have an agent, or do you handle selling things yourself?

GO: I have sold it all alone, at least to date. Algis Budrys thought that after my books came out in the small press he would show them to the NYC mass market publishers -- he felt that the slipstream angle would be easier to overcome by then. But he has been quite ill lately, and we have lost touch. I guess I will handle things myself until something major comes alongÖif it ever does!

HS: Now let's do that hideously obsequious James Lipton thing, just for the hell of it. What is your favorite sound?

GO: The ocean crashing.

HS: What is your least favorite sound?

GO: A child crying.

HS: Your favorite word?

GO: Splendid.

HS: Your least favorite word?

GO: Plastic.

HS: If there is a God, want do you want him to say to you when you arrive upstairs?

GO: You were fair.

HS: Okay, back to work. If you were going to offer advice to a new person just trying to break in these days, what would that advice be?

GO: Write and be brave! Keep ducking during the initial flurry of rejection. Damon Knight told me that of the three, talent, luck and perseverance, that the last was the most important. That is probably still quite true.

HS: Gene O'Neill, you are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks so much for your time.

GO: Thank you, Harry.

A recent booksigning at Boderlands books in San Francisco. From left to right Geoff Cooper, Mikey Huyck, Brian Keene, Mike Oliveri, and Gene O'Neill.