Interview with an Author - William Higgs III
Up next in our INTERVIEW WITH AN AUTHOR SERIES is William Higgs III! William has written one of the bizarrest bizarro tales we've had the pleasure of publishing. SCANLON'S OVERPASS will be out later this year.
Q: What’s your background, what compelled you to start writing?
A: I’ve always loved language. I started reading and writing pretty early on as a kid and never really stopped. As I got older, I gravitated to stuff like Burroughs, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, and a lot of my early experiments in writing came out of that. However, I didn’t get serious about writing until I read Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” in my early 20s. I started writing crime fiction at first, but found that I was drawn to writing strange, bizarre stories. So, my writing became increasingly surreal. I started pulling from authors like Murakami and Borges, as well as sci-fi authors like Dick and Gibson. Philip K. Dick in particular had a strong influence on my approach to building stories.
Q: What are your top three books? Bizarro, or otherwise.
A: “Ubik” by Philip K. Dick, “Antkind” by Charlie Kauffman, and “The Golem” by Gustav Meyrink
Q: If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
A: Don’t be afraid to explore strange ideas. If an idea really is “stupid,” then you won’t be able to make a story out of it. But keep throwing stuff at the wall- something will stick. Experimentation is everything!
Q: What sparked the idea for your latest book?
A: “Scanlon’s Overpass” was born out of my own crushing and frustrating experiences with modern bureaucracy and poor economic conditions. It’s ultimately a story about a man pushed to ridiculous limits, in this case to the limits of reality itself, by forces running so deep they confound themselves. I tried to capture that feeling of powerlessness before the cruelty of shadowy organizations that grind working people down. They make clowns of us all, I believe, and Eugene the clown is meant to be a stand in for everyone who is forced through the gears of the machine.
Q: Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
A: There are a few. One of the characters is obsessed with revolutionary France, and there are some easter egg references to French history tossed in throughout the book.
Q: What’s brewing? What projects are you working on?
A: I’m currently working on a story about a schizophrenic loan shark who is hunting down a fast food franchise owner who borrowed $500,000 from him. The debtor did this to buy sophisticated masks, indistinguishable from a real face, for his twin children, who have no eyes, noses, or ears. Things go downhill when the bookie gets ahold of one of these masks only for it to get ahold of him. It’s only getting weirder from here!
Q: As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot?
A: My rabbit, Oliver. He’s my mascot.
And, lastly;
Q: What advice would you give for any aspiring bizarro authors?
A: Write. Don’t let anyone tell you that your idea is too “out there” to make a good story. Literature is a medium that lends itself to experimentation and high-concept thinking, so if you’ve got an idea for a book, then write it!
