Jasper Bark Interview Part 2: Harmed and Dangerous, Bark Bites Horror, and the Stories That Can Kill
After a career that includes on-air banana incidents, Bonfire Night riots, and a near shooting by Rupert Murdoch’s bodyguard, Jasper Bark has learned to push boundaries. The first half of our conversation covered his river gypsy upbringing, his theatre bans, and the moment his wife nearly grabbed a kitchen knife. Now we move to the work itself. His fiction.
Bark describes his author bio as “infectious, and there’s no known cure.” When asked if he might be a self-aware horror story writing itself, he offers three possibilities. The original Jasper might have been murdered by his own creation. Or the two versions bred to produce an unspeakable offspring who now handles PR. Or maybe neither is writing these answers. The real point emerges from the jokes. Bark treats storytelling as a living threat.
His novel The Final Cut carries a blurb that reads “After reading this, you’ll believe stories can kill.” Most authors would flinch at that kind of claim. Bark leans in. He discusses esoteric philosophies about a barrier of pure fear that sits between the mundane world and enlightenment. Stories that push through that barrier stop being self-conscious. They become self-aware. And self-aware stories, in Bark’s telling, are dangerous in ways most readers haven’t considered.
This second part of our interview examines his creative process, his approach to queer themes in horror, his research into voodoo as a living tradition, and why he believes the zombie genre has always been political. We also discuss Harmed and Dangerous, the novel he needed to get as close to perfect as he could, and the father-daughter relationship that sits at its heart.
We left part one of this amazing interview with the cliffhanger question
Your author bio describes you as “infectious—and there’s no known cure.” Given your career has included Bonfire Night political riots, on-air banana incidents, Erotic Oscar hosting, and nearly being shot by Rupert Murdoch’s bodyguard at a wedding, is it possible that you are simply a horror story that has become self-aware and is now writing itself?
Read on to find out if our worst fears are true!!!!
Jasper Bark Interview Part 2: Horror That Kills
Your author bio describes you as “infectious—and there’s no known cure.” Given your career has included Bonfire Night political riots, on-air banana incidents, Erotic Oscar hosting, and nearly being shot by Rupert Murdoch’s bodyguard at a wedding, is it possible that you are simply a horror story that has become self-aware and is now writing itself?
That kinda sounds like one of my plots.
Of course the big question is, which Jasper is writing the answers to this interview? Is it the flesh and blood Jasper born over five decades ago, or was he replaced years ago by his own fictional creation? Did Jasper-The-Horror-Story murder his progenitor, in a suitably gruesome fashion and bury his blood soaked remains somewhere? Or did the original Jasper simply decide he hated the spotlight and was happy for his hideous creation to draw all the attention away from himself?
Or maybe neither is writing this because they discovered an unspeakable way to breed with each other and give birth to some unholy progeny who they put to work doing their PR and answering interviews for them. Honestly, the things Unspeakable-Offspring-Jasper could tell you if that were the case…
Way of the Barefoot Zombie is one of your earliest horror novels, a book that uses zombie fiction as a vehicle for satire of capitalism and self-help culture. Where did that idea come from, and do you think the zombie genre is uniquely suited to social commentary?
The very earliest zombie movie was an independent black and white film that came out in 1932 called White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi. The movie that defined the current post-apocalyptic zombie genre in 1969 was the black and white independent film, Night of the Living Dead. Both films leaned heavily into social commentary. So I think it has been there, as part of the DNA of the subgenre, since its inception.
When I’m generating new ideas, I start with a question: What’s the last thing you’d expect to happen in this situation/story/genre?
It was early in 2008, the first rumbles of the credit crunch were just being heard and the new world of the Broligarchy was about to be born. I wondered what would happen if a billionaire business person had a private island filled with captive zombies. What if he was using these zombies to train the aspiring super rich to free their inner zombie so that they could learn how to make a real killing on the market.
Sadly, what seemed like outrageous satire back in 2009 seems barely a few steps away from what we’re reading in the headlines today. Even still, the book has remained in print since it was first released. It got me a lot of attention at the time and I get messages and emails about it to this day.
Stuck on You is your free eBook giveaway, clearly a story you’re proud to use as a calling card. What does that story represent to you as a distillation of what Jasper Bark’s horror is?
If the short story, End of the Line, which appeared in the Solaris anthology of the same name, in 2010, was the first time I actually found my voice as a horror writer, then Stuck on You was the novella that helped crystalize it.
It showed me I could write something no one was expecting or had read before. That I could let my imagination go to outrageous places, show unspeakable things and do so with a story shot through with black humor. That I could make my readers, laugh, hurl and get seriously turned on all at the same time.
It was the story that made me realize I’d come to the place where I could really test the limits of what was possible as a writer. Because these limits were no longer imposed on me by a publishing industry or the world at large. I was pushing at the limits within myself and I was growing as a person and an author.
The Final Cut carries the extraordinary blurb: “After reading this, you’ll believe stories can kill.” How do you approach a novel about the dangerous power of storytelling without becoming self-conscious about the artifice of doing exactly that?
Many esoteric philosophies teach that between the mundane world and enlightenment sits a barrier of pure fear. We need to push through that fear to attain enlightenment. The closer we are to the fear, the greater the possibility of enlightenment. This is one of the central themes that animates many of my stories.
I think it’s much the same when dealing with sentient stories. You need to push through the barrier of self-consciousness to get to self-awareness. Self-consciousness is shot through with the fear of being judged. Self-awareness allows the story to consider itself, free from fear or any judgement other than its own. All you have to do is push through it.
I’m not saying I always succeed, but that’s my game plan.
Your long association with Crystal Lake Publishing eventually led to the founding of Bark Bites Horror. How did that partnership develop, and what does having your own dedicated imprint allow you to do that you couldn’t before?
I actually wrote a story for Crystal Lake’s first ever official publication, For The Night Is Dark. A little while later I was visiting South Africa, where my wife spent her formative years. Her parents were political missionaries who worked for peace and reconciliation in the Apartheid era. So her family has a lot of connections there.
We were driving from the north of the country to the south and passing near Bloemfontein, where Joe Mynhardt, the CEO of Crystal Lake lives. So I arranged to meet up with him and his wife Annemie. I was the first (and I think still the only) writer who’s ever made the trek out to visit him and we hit it off right away.
He asked me if I had anything Crystal Lake might publish and I had just written Stuck On You. I’d planned it as a short story for an anthology, but it had grown into a novella and was no longer suitable for that market. Given its subject matter, I was uncertain there was any market for it, so I offered it to Joe who not only bought it but commissioned a collection with Stuck On You as the lead story.
Having a dedicated imprint gives me a banner under which I can house all the disparate works I’ve written for Crystal Lake. It gives them a recognizable brand and it allows people looking for my work to go to one place, especially if they’ve enjoyed one of my books and would like to try another.
You’ve positioned Bark Bites as “Goosebumps for grown-ups” and a “sexed-up Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”—Horror 2.0, as you put it. What do you think is missing from the current horror landscape that Bark Bites is designed to fill?
Every genre is based around ongoing traditions, it often has a number of tropes that its fan base recognizes. This can lead to conservative periods where the same stories and ideas are recycled endlessly. This is changing at the moment, but when horror recently started to sell again, mainstream publishers concentrated heavily on post-apocalyptic storylines and haunted houses to the exclusion of many other ideas.
I like to think of Bark Bites Horror as a laboratory, where the next generation of tropes and archetypes are being created and tested, ready for new stories and new horrors to address the fears and anxieties of tomorrow.
There’s a reason the old tropes and are so popular and why their appeal is so enduring. But everyone’s palate becomes jaded after a while. When that happens, you’ll need something else to scratch that horror itch, to address the cravings horror awakes in you. That’s where Bark Bites Horror comes in.
Your fiction has been praised for its originality and wild imagination. Do you have a deliberate process for generating ideas, or do you distrust anything that arrives too easily?
In his book, Towards A Poor Theater, Jerzy Grotowski talks about the filters we put up between the initial creative impulse and the final execution. The filters, which are often types of learned behavior, can dilute, undermine or disempower that initial impulse, which is the creative drive at its purest and most effective. When I’m generating ideas, I try and remove as many of those filters as I can.
Creativity is often a type of problem solving. After you have the initial germ of an idea and you start to flesh it out, you’re faced with a series of challenges as to how you’re going to do that. How you get your characters into the given situation, for instance. How they overcome or fail to overcome the conflict they find themselves in.
Once you’ve identified the problems, you can come up with a creative solutions. Either by plotting in advance, pantsing on the spot or a combination of these two factors. This, for me, is the nub of idea generation and this is the point at which I apply my imagination and try and supercharge it.
The mental image I have in my mind is of a python opening its mouth to swallow its prey whole. We used to believe it did this by dislocating its jaw, but we now know it has flexible ligaments in its lower mandible. Nevertheless, I picture my imagination as dislocating, or unhinging it’s mental jaw and yawning wider than it should be able to. Imagining things that are outside the boundaries of a normal human consciousness.
I then try and practically apply the results of this to the particular creative problem I’m trying to solve. Effectively I’m asking: ‘what’s the most unexpected and implausible way I can solve this problem, without the whole story falling apart?
You described Harmed and Dangerous as the book you needed to get “as close to perfect as I could.” That’s an unusual thing for any writer to admit publicly. What does “perfect” mean to you in the context of this novel, and how close did you get?
I’m paraphrasing this, but J G Ballard once said that by its nature, the novel is an imperfect form, the longer the novel the more chance of imperfection. Harmed and Dangerous is one of my longer works, so it’s very far from perfect. It’s also the work on which I did the most number of rewrites and drafts. I don’t think I was perfecting it, so much as making a little less terrible every time.
Oscar Wilde also noted that works of art are never finished, only abandoned. That is pretty much my experience of novel writing. You do the very best you can with them in the short space of time before the deadline looms. In this instance, I would hope I did the best I could to make the characters into real people with recognizable motivations and relatable lives, and to make good on the initial concept of the story.
The father-daughter relationship sits at the heart of Harmed and Dangerous, and you’re a father of two daughters yourself. Was there a moment in the writing where that became uncomfortably personal—where you had to decide how much of your own love and fear for your daughters to put on the page?
I think found that the more uncomfortably personal it became the better the novel was. Parenting is a role we take on that has the highest stakes. Because if we get it wrong we let down the people we love most in all the world. Inevitably though, everyone makes mistakes and guilt is a huge part of parenting.
For me, the best writing attempts to tell the unvarnished truth. It’s incredibly important that as parents we tell the truth about raising children. That we don’t shy away from the struggles and regrets, the failures and missteps. Our parents messed up at some point and so did we and it’s crucial that we admit this to each other, to ourselves and most importantly to our kids so that we can make proper reparation. The important thing is how we come back from those mistakes and continue to build a loving and supportive relationship with our children.
This said, raising two amazing human beings to adulthood is the one thing in my life that I’m most proud of. My daughters are amazing human beings, and they’re two of my best friends and most formidable allies.
Reviewers consistently single out Kyra as one of the most vivid protagonists they’ve encountered in recent horror—angry, alienated, complicated, searching. Where did she come from, and how much of her did you know before you started writing?
Kyra appeared very much as her own person right from the outset. I’d wanted to write a novel about father daughter relationships for a while. I’d also had an idea, inspired by The Adverts’ song Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, about a character seeing through the eyes of a serial killer into the past. In one of those synchronous moments, it suddenly occurred to me that they were the same story and that was the catalyst that the novel started.
I knew Kyra would be seventeen years old and that she would run away from home to a small southern town in the US. But that’s about all I knew about her. I worked most of the plot out in advance, but Kyra, in all her complexity, revealed herself to me bit by bit as a I wrote and rewrote the novel. Getting to know Kyra was as much a journey of discovery to me as I hope it was to the reader.
You describe the book as a “Southern Gothic paranormal thriller,” which is quite a generic hybrid. Did you set out to blend those modes deliberately, or did the story demand each element as you wrote it?
The original nub of the idea had supernatural elements, so I knew there was going to be a paranormal element in the story. I’ve had a huge love of Southern Gothic fiction for many decades from Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor to Michael McDowell and Donald Ray Pollock. So, even though I’m from the UK, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at the type of dark, steamy fiction that rises out of the bayou.
I don’t think too much about genre or sub-genre when I write, so as you suggested, the hybrid arose organically as the story grew. It was only later, when I’d completed a few drafts, that I was able to label and, perhaps, understand it better.
Voodoo, the Loa, and the vévés are woven through Harmed and Dangerous. How did you research those traditions, and how did you navigate the responsibility of writing about a living spiritual practice as an outsider?
I started researching voodoo as a religion in 2008 for the novel Way of the Barefoot Zombie that you mentioned earlier. I reached out to lots of practitioners and read widely on the subject. Since then voodoo has cropped up quite significantly in other works like my graphic novel, Bloodfellas and my trilogy of novels, Draw You In.
The research and the interviews I conducted were the beginning of my attempt to navigate the responsibility of writing about a living spiritual practice. However, the more I engaged with the community, the more I was pulled in as a participant.
I’ve actually spoken at length about my personal experience of voodoo and how it relates to Harmed and Dangerous and my other writings in a video which you can watch here.
You’ve mentioned that Harmed and Dangerous addresses LGBTQIA themes. Horror has historically had a complicated relationship with queer identity—sometimes a space of liberation and coded representation, sometimes a site of punishment. How did you approach that in this novel, and was it important to you that it was handled differently?
I think we’re lucky to be living in a golden age of queer horror with amazing authors like Chuck Tingle, Andrew Joseph White, Julia Armfield, Lucy Rose and many others showing us how to use horror as a vehicle for gay voices. I think they’re showing us all how to handle LGBTQIA with more honesty and sensitivity than might have been done before. So, I would like to think I’m following their lead.
Because I’m in a monogamous heterosexual relationship, for many years I wasn’t sure if I could write about my broader sexual experiences. These days, I guess I’d be called Pansexual, though most people would probably have just said I was a whore when I was younger. Despite my hesitancy, it’s always been there as an undercurrent in most things I’ve written.
The queer themes in Harmed and Dangerous crept into the novel, a little to my surprise. To begin with, one of my characters turned out to be a transwoman, which I hadn’t expected. Then a subtle flirtation built up between Kyra and another character, Beatrice, that I hadn’t foreseen, but realized I would have to handle carefully due to their age difference. Finally, toward the end of the novel, Kyra makes an irrevocable realization about her sexuality, that was kind of obvious, but hadn’t dawned on me till that point.
It was at this juncture that I slapped my forehead, as it became apparent I was writing my big-gay-horror book.
If your pregnant wife had, in fact, used that kitchen knife on you when you suggested quitting journalism to write novels full-time, do you think the resulting true crime book about her would have outsold everything you’ve actually written? And who would she have got to write it?
You know, given my flexible relationship with the truth, maybe I lied about that. Maybe she did use the knife.
Plot twist!
Maybe it wasn’t Jasper-The-Horror-Story who killed the original Jasper, maybe it was my/his/their wife who did it. Maybe she and Jasper-The-Horror-Story got it together and raised his kids and forced Unspeakable-Offspring-Jasper to lie all about it on Jasper’s official website bio!
Only Unspeakable-Offspring-Jasper could confirm or deny this scurrilous rumor for you. But if he did, then Mrs. Bark might have to use her kitchen knife on you!
Thank you so much for having me back to Gingernuts for this interview, Jim. I’ve had a blast!
Harmed and Dangerous by Jasper Bark
A Paranormal Thriller for readers of Stephen Graham Jones, Tananarive Due and Grady Hendrix
Put yourself in Kyra’s place.
You’re seventeen years old, lost and alone in a remote town in Louisiana. You’re searching for the birth parents you never knew. The heat is crippling. The river often floods, washing houses away and lifting corpses from the ground.
The locals treat you with suspicion. You don’t belong here. They’re hiding something. All over town, in nooks and hidden alcoves, there’s evidence of a forbidden faith. They keep the old ways here, but no one will tell you what they are.
There’s an intangible presence following you. Hiding in your peripheral vision. You can’t see, hear or touch it, but you know it’s there, waiting for its chance to claim you.
Then the episodes start.
Your vision goes and when it returns you’re seeing the world as it was fifteen years ago. Physically you’re in the present, but everything you see happened a decade and a half ago.
Suddenly you realize.
You’re seeing through the eyes of the serial killer who murdered your birth mother. He takes control of you, forcing you to watch as he stalks and brutally murders her.
And there’s nothing you can do to stop him. Because he died by lethal injection more than a decade ago.
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Where Stories Come Alive!
Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.
