I enjoyed “Primal Slap” quite a bit, and I was particularly fascinated with the depictions of violence, both examined and unexamined. I think that Gillian’s heart is in the right place, but that she is unaware of the irony of leaving her family and finding solace in a group where people slap each other silly. This was particularly poignant in the scene where she raises a fist instead of her hand, where such a minor change transforms acceptable violence into unacceptable violence, just like her father is asking her to accept the sale of weapons as acceptable violence. Is Primal Slap class, hosted in a former slaughterhouse, acceptable violence?
It’s absolutely an acceptable form of violence in the sense that it’s permitted and consensual, but Gillian, in raising her fist to her slap-partner, crosses that line and changes the parameters of their agreement. I started boxing recently and am finding myself drawn to these parallels between combat sports and horror. Both ask for a wild and possibly counterintuitive sort of consent: I give you permission to scare the hell out of me, or I give you permission to hit me in the face. Everyone signs a waiver in Primal Slap class; Thurman and all of the other war-dead civilians cut down by the ammunitions and weapons systems that Gillian’s father traffics in didn’t have that opportunity, you know? There was no permission asked there. And Jeffrey, at the end of the story, certainly isn’t concerned with boundaries. I really wanted to try to explore notions and facets of permissive violence here, and where that notion of permissiveness ends.
The characters in this story really sparkle. I think everyone has known a Jeffrey and a Rachel, but I’d also love to know more about Thurman. Did he also learn how to scream all his anguish out while eavesdropping on the Primal Slap class? Will being seen, heard, and acknowledged be enough for him?
I gotta be honest and say I don’t really know. Thurman is definitely a ghost but is also an abject manifestation of Gillian’s guilt. At the end of the story, he makes some integral leap to realness, to being heard, but how that manifests itself in that apartment over the next thirty seconds past the ending of that story, I got no clue. There’s a lot going on right then! Sometimes it’s hard to figure out when to end a story, but sometimes the ambiguity really insists upon itself, if that makes sense, and the ending of “Primal Slap” was one of those times.
It appears that being a cog in an unethical machine—be it arms manufacturing or even ordering from Amazon—is something that a lot of people have been reckoning with of late all over the world. Is there a specific incident that inspired this story?
Like most of my work, either in novel or story form, I pretty much just take a few disparate elements that interest me personally, smoosh ’em together, and then try to build the scaffolding of a story around it, almost after the fact. In this case, I wanted to write about a weird self-affirming combat sport made up of consensual slapping and scream therapy, and a war-dead ghost kid. Boom. Smoosh ’em together, marinate for a bit, throw in an MC struggling with class issues and the ethical challenges that come with the idea of familial indebtedness, and there you go. But I have to admit, for every story that I finish, I probably have four or five that die on the vine of this weird amalgam of wildly varied interests and plot points. So no, nothing specific!
I’ve been appreciating the small life more in my late thirties and I enjoyed the line where Gillian says she believes that a small life is different than the bad one she left behind in spite of her overbearing troubles. Can Gillian leave her bad life behind for a small one? Can anybody?
Oh gosh, absolutely. There’s a lot of grace and beauty in a small life. Quiet lives aren’t bad by any means. Like I said, I don’t know what happens in that apartment after that story ends, but I wish the best for Gillian. She seems resilient and intrinsically good-hearted. I’m rooting for her. (Her dad and Jeffrey, not so much.)
I see you have a book coming out this year! Can you tell us about that, and anything else you have coming out soon?
Yeaaaah! Fever House is my wild-ass crime/horror novel about a couple of leg-breakers who roll up to an apartment in Portland to collect a drug debt and instead come across the severed hand of a devil, inadvertently managing to kickstart an apocalypse. It’ll be out in August, with a sequel to be published in the summer of 2024. Beyond stoked, and so thrilled I get to do this for a living.
